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Title: The comic history of the United States, from a period prior to the discovery of America to times long subsequent to the present
Author: John D. Sherwood
Illustrator: Harry Scratchly
Release Date: June 16, 2023 [eBook #70987]
Language: English
Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman, KD Weeks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMIC HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, FROM A PERIOD PRIOR TO THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA TO TIMES LONG SUBSEQUENT TO THE PRESENT ***
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Transcriber’s Note:
This version of the text cannot represent certain typographical effects. Italics are delimited with the ‘’ character as italic.
Full page illustrations were paginated, but most times occurred in mid-paragraph. These have been moved to the closest paragraph break, and the page number included parenthetically in the caption.
Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation.
[Illustration:
CON-FRONT-US PIECE.
THE COMPANY OF DISTINGUISHED COMEDIANS EXPRESSLY ENGAGED FOR THIS PERFORMANCE. ]
THE COMIC HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES,
FROM A PERIOD PRIOR TO THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA TO TIMES LONG SUBSEQUENT TO THE PRESENT.
BY JOHN D. SHERWOOD.
“Quamquam ridentem dicere verum Quid vetat?” HORACE, Satire I.
“A man may say a Wise thing though he say it with a Laugh.” Old Song.
WITH ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS BY HARRY SCRATCHLY.
BOSTON: FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO. 1870.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by
FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.,
in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO.
UNIVERSITY PRESS. ]
DEDICATION. ——●—— TO MY WIFE.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
——●——
SUBJECTS.
THE COMPANY OF DISTINGUISHED COMEDIANS EXPRESSLY Con-front-us Piece. ENGAGED FOR THIS PERFORMANCE
COLUMBUS DISCOVERS AMERICA Page 39
THE READER SCRAPES ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE AUTHOR 41
EXTERNAL VIEW OF THE AUTHOR’S HEAD 48
INTERNAL VIEW OF THE SAME 49
AMERICA BEFORE ITS DISCOVERY 55
TIME STOCKING AMERICA 59
THE PICTURED ROCKS AT TAUNTON ATTRIBUTED TO THE NORTHMEN, OR 66 SKALDS, OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
LANDING OF COLUMBUS 68
DISCOVERY OF NEWFOUNDLAND 71
SIR WALTER RALEIGH INTRODUCES SMOKING TO THE ENGLISH COURT 74
AN INDIAN RESERVATION 81
THE FIRST YEAR’S CROP IN THE NEW SETTLEMENTS 87
DRAKE WITH HIS FLEET SAILS ROUND THE WORLD 94
MAP OF MARYLAND 105
ORIGINAL FULL-LENGTH PORTRAIT OF JOHN SMITH 110
LANDING OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS AND MOTHERS 118
THE SPIRITS OF THE AGE LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS OF NEW YORK 128
DUTCH GENTLEMAN TRADING WITH THE INDIANS 134
NEW JERSEY SETTLED 142
FULL-LENGTH PORTRAIT OF PENN 144
THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE IN 1681 AND 1869 147
TEMPTATION; OR, THE FIRST AMERICAN “RING” 153
WOMAN’S RIGHTS IN 1637 158
THE PENALTIES OF WITCHCRAFT IN 1692 AND 1869 171
COTTON MATHER EXORCISING A WITCH 176
EXPRESSING A COLONIAL GOVERNOR FROM LONDON 189
THE SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD 201
JOLIET AND MARQUETTE DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI 216
THE “PETTICOAT INSURRECTION” IN MOBILE IN 1706 221
THE CHAMPIONSHIP FOR THE AMERICAN BELT 227
BRITANNIA FORCES TEA ON HER TROUBLESOME CHILD 236
THE SURPRISE PARTY TO FORT TICONDEROGA 247
WASHINGTON REVIEWS THE TROOPS AT CAMBRIDGE 251
A PURITAN BREAKFAST 259
ENGLISH POOR RELATIONS EATING COLONISTS OUT OF HOUSE AND 276 HOME
PUTNAM’S HOME-STRETCH DOWN HORSE-NECK 293
NEW YORK EVACUATED, NOVEMBER 25, 1783 304
THE STATE TAKES LEAVE OF THE COLONY 314
THE IRREPRESSIBLE NEGRO 323
THE WHISKEY REBELLION IN 1794 338
COURTSHIP IN THE OLDEN TIME 353
SCHOOL-DAYS IN 1769 AND 1869 366
THE AMERICAN JOSS 372
LOOKING FOR A SCOUT 390
THE ROMANCE OF INDIAN WARFARE 407
ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE PRICE OF LIBERTY 421
THE PROGRESS OF FASHION 432
A MORMON FAMILY OUT FOR A WALK 451
THE SKEDADDLE OF JOHN B. FLOYD 461
AN INTELLIGENT JURY 468
COTTON SUPREME 483
THE CORONER’S INQUEST 500
COTTON DOWN 512
MEMBERS OF CONGRESS IN A. D. 1900 520
THE IRISH REPUBLIC IN AMERICA 529
GETTING MUDD OUT OF THE DRY TORTUGAS 533
SCHOOL-TEACHING FROM 1869 ONWARDS 542
THE AMERICAN LAOCOÖN 547
THE END 549
CONTENTS.
--------------
PREFATORY.
PAGE
TREATING THE READER TO AN ACCOUNT OF THE AUTHOR, AND OF THE PLAN, OBJECT, AND PRINCIPLES OF THIS HISTORY 41
The Author, proposing to be intimate with the Reader, deems an Introduction desirable.—Born Early and Poor.—How the Two Facts were managed and overcome.—School Days and Nights.—College Lines, crooked and straight.—Father’s Face against his.—A New American Decalogue.—Into the Married and other States and Territories.—Settling down.—Advantages of a Sub-urban Residence.—Outside and Inside Views of the Author’s Head.—Plans and Purposes of the Work.—Laughing Facts.—Roman Precedents.—Impartiality holding the Shears and Tape.—Sources of our Information.—Acknowledgments to Smith and Brown.—Our Illustrations.
BOOK FIRST.
DISCOVERIES.
B. C. TO 1607 A. D.
CHAP.
I. OF AMERICA BEFORE ITS DISCOVERY IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. B. C. TO 1000 A. D. 55
America older than Europe, Asia, or Africa.—Chronic Errors on the Subject.—Europe presented to America.—Truth vindicated.—Proofs of our Superior Antiquity.—Luxurious Civilization of the Races which stocked this Continent before the Indians.—Amount of Coal left by them unburned.—Large Supplies of Fish packed away safely in our Mountains.—Fish Culture measure of Human Culture.—Fossil Cran-iology.—Laughable Blunders of Former Historians and Ethnologists.—Ancient Nations, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, the Ten Lost Tribes, etc., trickling through, have reappeared on our Side of the Earth.—Instances cited.—Mythologies of Greece and Rome originated here.—Proofs and Reproofs.—American Nests well feathered Ages ago.
II. OF THE DISCOVERIES IN AMERICA DURING THE ELEVENTH, FIFTEENTH, SIXTEENTH, AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES. 1000 TO 1607. 64
America not discovered by Jason.—Lithographic Specimens attributed to the Northmen in the Eleventh Century curious, but executed by Skalds more Modern.—Bishop Berkeley’s Western Star not the First American Constellation.—Columbus offers a Continent at Private Sale; Isabella, a Spanish Lady, takes him up, and the Profits also.—A Fish Story confirmed.—Of Ferdinand’s Necklace.—Price of Eggs advanced in Spain.—England finally sees something.—Discoveries which Columbus did not make.—Ponce de Leon.—Mexico unfortunately discovered.—The Straits of Magellan and other Straits.—De Soto at the Bottom of the Mississippi.—Champlain, a wise man, founds Quebec upon a Rock.—Sir Walter Raleigh and him smoking.—The Mayflower anchored.—Hudson up stream.
III. OF THE INDIAN CHARACTER 76
Survey of Indian Character and Lands.—Our Pacific Intentions towards the Indians.—The Whites better read than the Red Men, and the Effects of Learning.—The Pale Complexion of their Affairs.—Wet Blankets thrown over their other Habits.—Different Traits discovered by School-Girls and through Official Spectacles.—Meaning of Indian Reservations.—Indian Style of Dress and its Conveniences.—Indian Names.—Examples of their Happy Application.
BOOK SECOND.
SETTLEMENTS AND COLONIES.
1607–1775.
I. OF AMERICAN SETTLEMENTS GENERALLY 87
Some American Grounds, like Coffee, unsettled.—Some Settlements pulled up by the Roots; others chilled by Fever and Ague.—Moist Soils objected to except by Doctors.—Unexpected Crops of Tomahawks from Wheat sown.—Settlements in America because of impracticability of making any at Home with Creditors.—Wild Oats sown between 34th and 38th Parallels.—Frequent Settlements make long Friends.—Settlements of Old Tavern Scores in Chalky Districts.—Religious Squalls prostrate some Plantations.—Indian Tempests uproot others.—Growth of Virginia, although Queen Elizabeth a femme sole.—Clergymen’s Settlements.—Brides unsettled.—Drake around the World.
II. THE SETTLEMENTS OF VIRGINIA, DELAWARE, MARYLAND, THE CAROLINAS, AND GEORGIA 95
Colored Views whitened.—Blue Ridges and Black Welts in Virginia.—Virginia, smothered up in Infancy by Charters, survives Royal Nursing.—Her Vigilance against her Suitors.—Cotton introduced.—How the World managed previously.—Charles I. and his numerous Autographs.—Georgia and Oglethorpe.—Charleston set up.—A Point on Old Point Comfort.—Tobacco first piped about.—Unmarried Girls as Articles of Import.—Estimated in, if not by, Pounds.—The Fancy Constitution of John Locke for North Carolina.—Its own Length but Short Life.—South Carolina Rivers do not run up.—Popular Errors corrected.—John Wesley.—Singular Effect of his Preaching on the Indians.—Maryland as a Duck of a Colony canvassed.
III. JOHN SMITH 106
John Smith historically considered.—The Number in Leading Cities stated.—How classified.—Why he is not put in a separate Volume or in an Appendix.—Origin of the Smiths.—American Genealogical Trees.—Smiths up a Stump, in the Sap, and dangling from the Branches.—The Antiquity and Ubiquity of the Smiths.—Variety and Extent of their Occupations and Operations.—Will probably in time own all the World.—Comic Situations of John Smiths in Cities, at Family Dinner-Parties, at Prayer-Meetings, at Balls, in Titles to Real Estate, etc.—Whether he can be sued.—Other Legal Questions in reference to him considered.—John Smith of Pocahontas Fame a Myth.
IV. OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE NEW ENGLAND STATES 115
Views of the New England States and Character determined by one’s Church.—Partial Notions about Clocks, Nutmegs, Pumpkin Pies, etc.—Getting an Historical Coach to one’s self.—Why the Puritans did not hang up their Stockings on their first Christmas Eve.—Their nearest Neighbors.—Indian Points and other Points.—Governor Carver and Want of Meats.—Massasoit, and how he kept his Faith in-violate.—New Hampshire on the Rampage.—Why Boston was begun, and why it is not finished.—Roger Williams and his Providential Ways and Dealings.—Connecticut founded, although its Charter not found.—The Wind against Cromwell.—Harvard College.—Vermont and her Ways and Means.
V. THE SETTLEMENT OF NEW YORK 126
The Spirits of the Age present at its Foundation.—Who they were and how they were affected.—The Wonders of Manhattan in September, 1609.—How the Animal, Vegetable, Ornithological, Maritime, and Human Productions then compared with those now.—What New York Lots were worth two hundred and fifty years ago.—Their Owners.—Hudson’s Trip up the River.—What he saw and didn’t see.—The four Dutch Governors; their Doings and Misdoings.—Sketch of Holland and the Characteristics which she impressed upon New Amsterdam.—Bravery evinced in settling Brooklyn.—How the Van Rensellaers and other Vans were enticed hither.—The Troubles and Sorrows of Wouter Van Twiller and William Kieft.—Of the Surrender of the Dutch, and the Instalment of English Rule in New York.—Petrus Stuyvesant retires from Business.—His Farm and what he raised on it.
VI. THE SETTLEMENT OF NEW JERSEY 142
A spirited Sketch of the Way in which it was done, and the Results.
VII. THE SETTLEMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA 143
Governments in their Action like Pianos.—The Reason; and illustrating Examples.—Varieties in the Make-ups of the different Settlers of the Colonies.—Character of Penn, and why it improves by Age.—His Accomplishments.—His first Visit to America in 1681.—Tall Talk and Peace.—Philadelphia, its Early and Late Characteristics.—Delaware sets up for herself.—Penn in Prison.—Again in Pennsylvania.—Returns to England by the Philadelphia Line.—Pennsylvania leaps into the Eighteenth Century, and what she does there.
VIII. THE COLONIES IN THE UPPER HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 150
The Young Colonies watched by the “Old Folks at Home.”—Required to furnish Inventories of their Property.—Old People particular as to Shops where the Youngsters traded.—Several Articles of Political Housekeeping, as Printing-Presses, Jury-Boxes, etc., not allowed.—Some Favorites among the Children.—The first American Ring.—Cromwell as a Step-Father.—The Atlantic Swimming-Bath.—Political Rights jarred off the Parent Tree; others Fell when Ripe.—Some Proprietors sell out to raise Money for Costs.—General Thaw in High Places.—Legislative Mills with two runs of Stone.—Woman’s Rights in Capsules.—How hard Puritan Wood got softer.—Episcopal Race-Courses enlarged.—A Black Frost curls up the Green Leaves of the Charters.—What Sir Edmund Andros swallowed and the Fit of Indigestion which followed.—Effect of European Housekeeping in setting Colonial Brooms in Motion.—New York swept into the English Pan.—Result of James II.’s over-stay in Paris.—Slaps in the Face of Canada and their Return.—How Public Events tell on Family Matters tolled long and loud.—People occasionally subject to Scarlet Fever and Fourth of July, but can’t live on either.—Kidd at Sea; takes off a few People.—How the Deficiency was supplied.—Number of Colonists at close of Seventeenth Century.—Would have been more had Chicago started.—Colonial Colts at the Bars of the eighteenth Century.
IX. WITCHCRAFT 169
The Witch-Caldron at Salem.—How its Bubbling raised Tea-Pot-Lids and has kept open other Lids ever since.—The Young Female Witches at Salem condemned to the Ties of Matrimony; the Old Ones to harder Knots.—The Sin of being Old considered.—The Scarlet Letter.—Examples of Witchcraft cited.—The Delusion of Adam and Eve at the first Pomological Convention in Eden.—Woman as Man’s familiar Spirit; and her Conjuries.—Cases of David, Samson, and Herod.—Antony dissolved in that Egyptian Drink Pearl Water.—The Maid of Orleans and what an Arc she subtended.—The Philtres of Love, Ambition, Heroism, etc., administered to Men and Nations.—Their Effects.—Delusions, like Measles, catching.—The Frenzies of Fashion fully described.—The Stock Exchange.—Private Witchcrafts at Quiltings, Apple-Parings, etc.—Red Corn and other Red Ears.—Sweet Witches.—A Jury of gushing Girls.—Punishment of Men incapable of being bewitched.
X. OF THE MANNERS, MORALS, HABITS, AND LAWS OF THE COLONISTS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 177
First-class Telescope to see the MANNERS of a Past Age.—Difficulties of Near-sighted and Long-sighted People.—Near Objects more embarrassing to the Observer than Distant.—Why?—The Ghosts of the Past.—The Manners and Dress of Stuyvesant, Eliot, Calvert, Rolfe, etc. described.—Manners of the Mass detailed; in their Work, Play, Diet, Courtship, Fashions, Treatment of Young Ladies and Gentlemen, Children, Servants, etc.—Superior Advantages of Paterfamilias then in making Acquaintance with his Wife and Children.—Fast Girls and Calicoes.—The Isothermal Lines of ETHICS.—Certain Vices, like Eggs, laid secretly and hatched afterwards.—The Fashions of Crime at various Epochs compared.—Jails and Jail-Birds.—The ingenious Crimes of Trade, Corporations, Schools, and Seminaries noted.—How Sects are frozen or thawed by Temperature.—Northern and Southern Sectarianism.—Why Episcopacy flourished in Warm Latitudes.—The early Commercial Morality of New York.—Baptists, Congregationalists, and Independents.—The HABITS of the Century; their Material, Color, Durability, and Wear.—The LAWS mainly imported.—What a Business the Colonists carried on, notwithstanding, in the Domestic Article.—Kindness of the Proprietors in furnishing Ready-made Office-holders not appreciated.—American Itch for Law-making.—Laws against Criminals.—Their Crimson Color.—How the Rains of Mercy fell on hard Enactments, and the Thaw which followed.—Coroners’ Inquests sat upon.—Verdicts under various Lights.—Justices of the Peace, and the Law they peddled.—Administrations of Law then and now contrasted.—How Colors, although imponderable, turned the Judicial Scales.
XI. THE COLONIES IN THE LOWER HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 194
The Colonial Colts in the large open Field of the Eighteenth Century.—The Effects of a Sniff of French Gunpowder.—Queen Anne’s War, 1702–1713; its Cost and Results in Europe and America.—Acadia changes its Name to Nova Scotia.—How the Colonies started a Newspaper in 1704.—Philadelphia in a Sheet in 1719; and how comfortable it was.—The Franklin Bros. furnish Food too condensed even for Boston.—Benjamin quits the Hub; foots it without tiring to New York.—How he got through New Jersey without paying Toll.—Enters Philadelphia with Two Loaves, and sets up an Intellectual Bakery.—Banks built on the Sands of Credit.—Moving Accidents.—John Law’s Scheme to use the Mississippi Valley; how it grew; what it promised, and how it performed.—A French Pasquinade.—The Results of a Bank Panic in the Eighteenth Century.—The Effects on the Manufacture of Children.—Number of Colonists in 1713 and 1743.—The Condition of Delaware, New Hampshire, and Vermont.—The Training of Young America.—Yale College and its Mustard-like Growth.—The American Learned Oak.—The Connection between Slate-Pencil and Gum Chewing and Female Education.—What took Place between 1713 and 1743.—A Negro Plot in New York.—Negroes thrown overboard, and the Bubbles that rose.—How large Historic Doors swing on small Hinges.—Examples from A to W.—What happened because Maria Theresa was a Female.—The English Georges; what Bulls they were, and made.—The Transatlantic Bullocks, and how they rushed into King George’s War in 1744, and what Mischief they did for Four Years.
XII. THE CHAMPIONSHIP FOR THE AMERICAN BELT. 1754 TO 1763 208
No Hopes for the Millennium in American Colonies up to 1754.—More Swords than Ploughshares.—Mars in America.—Sixteen Indian Wars in 147 Years.—How they were fed by French Oil and blown by French Bellows.—The Five Great Continental Wars, and how they reached over and handled the Colonies.—The Treaty Patches, and how they failed to cover the War Breaches.—The Volcanic Character of American Soil.—How the Animosities of France and England grew through Four Centuries, and in what a Hateful Harvest they waved, in 1754, each Side the Sea.—Celebrated Fights between the Rivals in Europe.—How Commercial Competition rubbed in Salt Water, and Religious Differences Brimstone, into the Wounds.—Memorable Cases of Battle Surgery.—The Relative Merits of English and French Claims to America fully stated.—Deeds of Land and of Arms clash.—French Jesuits with Crosses and Traders with Skins encompass the English Plantations from Maine to Minnesota, and thence to Alabama and Texas.—Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, Lallemand, and others.—The Former escaped the Fast Life of Chicago, and La Salle the Hazards of Natchez.—France seeks to fasten a Remarkable Rosary around the Neck of Young America; England to cut it.—Suitors to the same Maiden, they suited not her nor each other.—Their soft Ways to her.—Their Hardness to each other.—Their Long Quarrels over her Person and Purse result at last in a Decisive Fight.—The Championship for the American Belt.—The Champions, the Belt, and the Ring described.—How John Bull and Jean Crapeau stepped into the Latter.—The Nine Rounds from 1754 to 1763.—How Mr. Bull won; what he said, and how Monsieur Crapeau behaved.—A Suitor pleased, and a Suitor non-suited.
XIII. CAUSES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 229
The People as Yeast.—The Fermentation.—Washington, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Rutledge, Franklin, Otis, and others, and their Value in the Colonial Fermenting Pots.—State Courtships in 1754–1765 and 1774, tend to a more Perfect Union.—How Home Confidences operate.—What Effect the English Navigation Acts had on American Swimmers.—Lord North and Charles Townshend.—Colonial Assemblies and Country Dances.—Dislike of Impositions.—That small Boston Tea-Party.—The large Amount of Atlantic Water between the Tea Seller and Tea Purchaser.—When Tea can’t be sweetened.—Be-cause as a Cause.
BOOK THIRD.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.
I. THE FIRST TURN OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WHEEL. GRIEVANCES; THE PREPARATION; THE START 235
The Hard Lot of the Colonists, and what they got from it.—Colonial Governors, like Old Topers at a Free Opening of a Tavern.—The Miseries of a Visit from Relatives poor and proud.—How, like poor Fowls, the Navigation Acts laid many bad Eggs.—Examples cited.—Parliamentary Laws ingeniously floored and roofed.—English Strabismus, or Squint-eyedness, sought to be made fashionable in the Colonies.—Success in Canada.—English Tubs to catch Revenue off American Slopes.—Manufacture of Hats prohibited; how and where the Fur flew.—What a Cute Yankee saw from the Top of the American Roof.—How Four Yards are worth more than Five.—Bull-yism defined, and its Laws stated.—The First Bill to raise Revenue; the large Bird behind it described.—Sent over to America, it was foul-ly treated.—Molasses denied to Colonists.—Effects on Yankee Appetites and on the Increase of Straws in Custom-House Casks.—Stamps and Stampedes.—The Act repealed; the Sting left in.—Another Bill and larger Bird behind it in 1767.—The First Blood.—The Wheel starts; its Hub, Spokes, and Periphery.—English Bees swarm over and settle in Boston and other tender Parts.—The Dis-cord-ant Sounds at Concord.—George Washington; his Appearance and Costume, and what befell him, June, 1775.—Gage falls from a Tree.—Why and Howe?—Washington seizes Boston Neck.—The Spasms.—Bunker Hill gets a Scar and afterwards an Ugly Monumental Patch.—The Boone Colonists in Kentucky.—How they blazed a-way thither from Virginia.—Washington at Cambridge.—Unseasoned Troops seasoned.—General Montgomery earns Laurels at Quebec mixed with Cypress.—The Revolutionary Wheel throws off Dusty Colonial Governors.—How Washington broke up the Hessian Swarm at Boston, and Howe they flew to Halifax.—Washington attends a Lecture in Boston.—General Lee’s Neck-and-Neck Race with Sir Henry Clinton for New York; Lee ahead 120 Minutes. Sir Henry and a Party of Jolly Dogs alight near Charleston, and how the Waspish Lee lit upon and stung them.—Where the Jolly Dogs then went.—The Wheel well started.
II. JULY FOURTH 1776 AND SO FORTH 257
Review of our Historical Journey from the Start up to the Summit of the 4th of July.—Resumé of our Tramp through Pre-Columbian and Post-Columbian Times.—Our March from St. Augustine, via Jamestown and the Manhattan Cabins, to the Temperance Tavern at Plymouth.—Descriptions of Indian Interruptions.—Polite Interference of Gallic Gentlemen at Narrow Parts of the Road in 1689, 1710, 1745, etc.—Banditti on the Highways of History, English, French, and Dutch.—Blazing Description of the Summit, the Flagstaff, Flag, and Eagle.—The Grand Political Pic-Nic there of Fifty-one Wise Men.—The Thunder Storms around them; and their Behavior.—General Account of this Group; and how remarkable and marked.—Special Portraitures of Thirteen of them.—Some Peculiar Heads there, and how much George III. wanted them.—Prayer of John Adams.—A Great Freshet of a Speech and what it carried off.—A Remarkable Declaration made by Jefferson.—An Electrical Battery charged and discharged.—The Peppering George III. got.—How he worked Seven Years against the Declaration.—The Gun-powdery Effect of the first Fourth, and the Fire-Crackers since touched off by it.—Independence originally handled without Gloves; now by Aldermen and very Common Councilmen with a half-dozen pair apiece.—The Fourths up to 1850.—Tar Barrel Eloquence.—Military and Civic Renown snatched on that day.—What Eggs, containing Addling Heroes, pip on that Day.—How Swords embarrass Crooked Legs.—Militia Lines, and what Snarls they get into.—Dissolving Bursts of Golden Glories.—Effects of Sulphur administered to a Rural Population.—Cakes of Gingerbread, and how they stuck in the Teeth, Stomach, and Memory.—Lamentations over the Decay of the Old-time Fourths.
III. SECOND TURN OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WHEEL; ITS ECCENTRIC BUT ONWARD MOVEMENTS. 1776–1780 277
English Hawks gather around New York.—Washington watches them.—About an Esquire.—The Way the Germans took Brooklyn the first Time.—How they returned, not to their Mutton, but to Kalbfleisch.—Difficulty of reaching New York from Brooklyn in 1776.—Washington takes a Trip to Harlem.—The British also.—Red Eyes and Disfigured Faces the Consequence.—Lord Howe attempts to get around the American Squire.—The slight Unpleasantness at White Plains.—The different Uses of the Croton Water in 1776 and now.—The Amount of Whiskey it took in 1869 to qualify the Water in New York.—Washington ventures into New Jersey.—Set-to at Fort Lee.—Washington across Rivers.—Philadelphia covered.—Homesickness of Agricultural Lads.—What befell Lee at a Tavern.—Washington crosses the Delaware and drops Christmas Presents into German Stockings.—The Effects of Yankee Doodle on Lafayette, De Kalb, Kosciusko, Pulaski, and others.—Friends of America in England, Fox, Hume, etc.—Friends of England in America.—The Statue and Statutes of George III. repealed.—Battle of Princeton.—The Germans obtain Cider and Sausages at Danbury.—Colonel Meigs tickles the Feet of Long Island, and makes Congress laugh.—Colonel Prescott is obliged to rise very early one Morning at Newport.—Silas Deane and B. Franklin in France.—What followed.—Burgoyne tries to find a back-stair Passage to New York.—Strong Gates in his Way near Saratoga.—Still-Water runs deep.—Brandy-Wine an unpalatable Drink.—French Treaty with America in 1778.—The Wheel moves in Water and turns out French Names.—Crossing New Jersey, Lord Howe collides with Washington at Monmouth.—Count d’Estaing is prevented by an Injunction off the New York Bar from entering New York.—Coquetting, but no Engagement, near Newport.—Buzzard’s Bay and its Roosts.—Little Egg Harbor and its Nests, and what was laid there.—The Benefits of the Wyoming Massacre.—Guerilla War at the South.—Savannah trounced.—Horse Neck and Putnam’s Home-Stretch down it.—Count d’Estaing’s Yachting.—Spain hankers for Gibraltar.—England as a Pawn-Broker.—Paul Jones and his Whip.
IV. THE LAST TURN OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WHEEL; ACCELERATIONS; SLOWINGS; THE GRIST. 1780–1783 296
The different Opening of 1780 for those who pushed and those who obstructed the Revolutionary Wheel.—The Strain on both Sides.—Hard Spring in Charleston in consequence of Leaden Hail-Storms.—How these Storms spread; and how the Crops were saved from Ruin by Marion, Sumter, and Pickens.—The Carolina Game Cock, and his sharp Spurs in the Sides of Cornwallis and Tarleton.—Gates broken down, and the Presidency lost at Camden.—Greene set up in his Place, proving a good standing Color.—The Village of St. Louis assailed.—André humiliates himself, and is Exalted.—Arnold gets $50,000, a Brigadier’s Commission, and is elected by General Contempt into the Order of Judas Iscariot.—New-Year’s Day among the Pennsylvania Troops at Morristown.—The United States Treasury, made less Celestial, becomes Defiled by filthy Lucre.—The Goring and Tossing of Tarleton by Morgan at the Cow-Pens.—An Irish-like Fight at Eutaw Springs.—Southern Hunters around the British Flock at Charleston and Savannah.—The troublesome Seizure of Virginia Assemblymen.—How the Captors missed burning their Fingers with Jefferson’s red Hair.—Cornwallis enmeshed at Yorktown.—What Lord North said.—What the English George threatened and what the American George did.—“Let there be Peace”; and Peace was.—What England lost and America gained.—The kind of Grist obtained.
V. HOW A POOR CONSTITUTION BROKE DOWN 305
Every Community has its Axis of Growth.—That of the Confederation described.—Causes of the Distrust of Federated Power.—How the States preferred to sew up the Treasury Pocket rather than allow their own Agents to put their Hands in it for necessary Funds.—Facetious Bills of Exchange.—The Shady and Sunny Side of Power.—Similarities and Dissimilarities of the States.—The Committee to draft Confederation Sixteen Months over the Cold Nest.—The curious Knot-ty Grub that issued.—The Spawn of Doubt put to the Nurse of Jealousy.—How it was nursed, starved, and doctored; and what a poor Constitution it got. The Confederate Scheme like a Pine Board.—It could not raise Money, An Army, Credit, Postage, Revenue: in fact, could not raise itself.—The Comic Side of the Franking Privilege.—A desirable Prohibition.—How the Grub became a Caterpillar, and the Caterpillar a Butterfly.—A very Larky Phœnix rises, crowing Yankee Doodle.
BOOK FOURTH.
THE UNITED STATES.
I. THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION. 1777–1787. 313
The Constitution as a Resort for Shoppers in Civil Rights.—Every kind of Article to be found either for Ordinary or Exceptional Use.—The Fringe called Preamble; its Thread, Texture, and Quality.—Counterfeit Patterns and Simulations easily detected.—Piles of heavy Cloths for the Country’s Winter Use in War, Financial Storms, etc.—Executive and Legislative Ready-made Clothing.—Judicial White Goods.—Hosiery for Congressional Understandings, swift or slow.—A variety of Miscellaneous Wares; Contrivances for catching People with Colored Skins; Habeas-Corpus Non-Suspenders; Muzzles for violent or hungry Congressmen; Handsome Checks on the Treasury; Specimens of tender Gold and Silver; Militia Uniforms; Padlocks for securing Houses against Searches; Jury-Boxes, Trial Balances, and other Goods.—The Sumner Patent.—The latest Novelty to prevent Electoral Black-and-White Suits from being stripped off.—State-Rights Dresses, and strong Federal Out-Fits.—Messrs. Calhoun, J. Davis, Webster, Clay, etc. The Manufacture of bright Buttons, called “Coins.”—The Fifteenth Amendment.—Doubtful Packages.—Paper Money as a Substitute for real Money.—Unauthorized Use of the Constitutional Bazaar.—Seekers of Goods never made.—Nicholas Biddle and his Gold Suit.—Everybody suited at the Federal Store.—Of excessively sharp and dense-headed Shoppers.—How Articles are mistaken.—Water-proof Goods for River and Harbor Dredging and for Lighting Coasts.—Of long Selvedges, or Railroad Strips, and their wonderful Elasticity.—Rights and Lefts.
II. CONSTRUCTION; OR, WASHINGTON’S ADMINISTRATION. 1789–1797. 324
How the Thirteen Colonial Children crept into their New Bed.—The Upholstering described.—Why Rhode Island was last in.—Who tucked her up.—Washington as Superintendent, and John Adams as First Assistant.—The Family low in Credit.—Amount of their Indebtedness compared with ours.—Washington’s Inaugural.—His Exemption from Office Beggars, Committees, Pugilistic M. C.s, boring Place-Seekers, enterprising Donors, etc.—Washington as a Spirit.—His Capacity to select a Cabinet.—Who they were.—Of Henry Knox.—The Chief Justice and Attorney-General.—Amendments to a perfect Constitution.—The Supreme Court as a sound, seaworthy Tribunal.—Why States cannot be sued by Individuals.—How Governments get around paying Interest on Principle.—Streaks of the Millennium.—Of the Public Debt.—Discrimination among Creditors.—Misfortune of being a Cisatlantic Holder of American Bonds.—Alexander Hamilton’s Notions.—Washington’s Receptions and Dinner-Parties.—The Political Color of the President’s Silver Spoons and Window Curtains.—The Honeymoon of the new Government disturbed.—Ganderous Long-bills splash Washington.—The French Revolution and its Conundrums.—How answered by Washington and the Federals; how by Jefferson and the Anti-Federals.—The Census Act procures Names without Owners.—The Naturalization Laws and their Pat-riot products.—Polls and Polling-Places.—A Sinking Fund that did not sink.—How Vermont made the Thirteen States old.—An Indian War.—Cincinnati begins.—Kentucky starts.—Mistakes about Bourbon.—Washington’s second Term.—What Genet did, and how he was done for.—Helpful Americans.—The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.—The Year of Treaties; how they enlarged while they tied us.—Tennessee the Sixteenth State.—Nashville gets warm.—Washington’s Farewell, and its cheap Imitations.—The Shades of Office.—Who crept in and who stepped into the Sunshine.
III. OLD FAMILY PORTRAITS 340
Modern Photographic Albums like Ancient Roman Simulacra.—The Pleasure of looking at the Likenesses of Friends.—The Portraits of our Fore-Fathers.—Our dear old Great-Grandfather GEORGE WASHINGTON.—His one hundred and twenty-eight original Portraits.—His unique Character; of the same Size all the Way up.—His Manners and Characteristics.—How the Eighteenth Century, so long mated, refused to survive him.—Our Great-Grand and good Mother MARTHA WASHINGTON.—The Resemblance between her and a Bowl of ripe Strawberries and Cream.—Her Pride.—What Qualities were corseted in her Bosom.—Our favorite Uncle, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.—How the Sky got into his Face and how it stays charged.—Looks like an hereditary Director of all the Estates.—A born Trustee.—What an Idea Burns might have got of him in 1774, and how expressed it.—Of our Aunt, Mrs. JAMES MADISON; and what a fine Lady she was.—Her careful Dress and Manners.—Impressive but patronizing.—How Time forgot her, and the Years ran on un-notched.—The forty Years she acted as Presidentess.—PATRICK HENRY described in Dress, Person, shooting Game, and taking Audiences.—Our dear Visitor, GENERAL LAFAYETTE; his Difficulties in reaching us; his noble Bride; his Embarkation at a Spanish Port; his Labors here; his two subsequent Visits, and how he survived Hand-shaking and Kissing.—About JOHN JAY and his Wife SALLIE LIVINGSTON.—How they lived and what he became.—Glances at ISRAEL PUTNAM and his expressive Face; at NATHANIEL GREENE and his square, Quaker Character; at the Telescopic Eyes of FRANCIS MARION, with a Dash at his soldierly Qualities.—The Effigies of the WISE MEN.—General Sketches of our Heroes and Heroines.—A Heart Delineation of the Mothers, Wives, and Sisters of the Men of the Revolution.
IV. THE STRUGGLE AND FALL OF FEDERALISM; OR, JOHN ADAMS’S ADMINISTRATION. 1797–1801. 354
The Pre-Adamite Epoch: its Upheavals and Disruptions in America, and the red-hot diplomatic Stones, Fauchet and Adet, ejected from France upon us.—The new French Acrostics; and the Attempts by our Commissioners and Congress to solve them.—Gold-mounted Spectacles, offered us by France; and our Inability to see our Interest or Duty through them.—Why and when the Keel of the American Navy was laid.—Of the Alien and Sedition Laws; why passed and how passed by.—General Washington and the Gallic Cock; a Crow never crowed out.—Napoleon’s Tour in Egypt and Palestine described; and its Results on the Treaty of Peace deduced.—Of the Office and Offices of Consul.—A Review and new View of our Difficulties with France from 1790 to 1800.—What a Pitt England fell into.—The City of Washington as a Geographical Study.—About Mississippi, Alabama, and the French Growth of Mobile.—The Territorial Condition illustrated.—The Introduction of Vaccine and other Virus.—Why some Things first break out in Boston.—State of Parties in 1801.—Why the first Adams was banished from the Presidential Eden; and the Flaming Swords which prevented his Return.
V. THE CHIEF AMERICAN PRODUCTIONS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 360
The Cereals and Serials of the last Century.—Hares caught before cooked.—Useless Indians put under Ground.—Human Bones the Phosphates of History.—The Statecraft of Washington, Jefferson, and Others.—The Automatic Workings of Governments exposed.—What small Brains rule.—Description of our Government Machine.—Its Merits and Demerits.—The Disadvantages of frequent Changes of official Workmen.—How the Machine-Oil is stolen.—The Inventions of the Eighteenth Cycle of Time.—An American Noah inebriated by the Cotton-Gin.—How Ham laughed and how Japhet put a Blanket over the Patriarch.—The Growth of Commerce.—The Notions which Importations put in and on the Heads of the Young People.—Paris supplies the Mistakes of Nature.—Of Dress.—Hoops, Head-Gear, Coats, Vests, Tights, etc., descanted upon.—Improvements in Roads and Means of Transit.—The Journey from New York to Boston in 1732.—The Road-Maker and Vehicle-Propeller as Leaders of Civilization.—The great Invention now needed.—The Populations of New York and Boston in 1700.—Description of the Former in that Year by an English Traveller.—Slave-Market in New York in 1711.—Manufactures and their Growth.—The Habits of the Period described.—Improvements in Morals, and wherein.—A general Review of American Literature and Book-Making through the Century.—The first American printed Volume; and how fast and long it ran.—Earliest Original Book of Poems; by a Woman, with a touching Specimen therefrom.—An Account of the leading Writers on Theology, Political Science, Government, Natural Science, Natural History, of Novels, etc.—The American Joss; its Worshippers, and their Treatment.
VI. DEMOCRACY IN POWER; OR, JEFFERSON’S ADMINISTRATION. 1801–1809. 373
Few Removals by Mr. Jefferson from the Ungilt Official Chairs.—Mr. Smith gets into the Navy.—Who started long Messages to Congress; and the Difficulty of finding an End to them.—War with Tripoli; and the Complexion with which the Bey ended it.—Decatur and his Mediterranean Travels.—Ohio in 1802.—The early Danger it ran of being all cut up into City Lots.—How the Exodus of its Population was the Genesis of its Growth.—Of Westering Caravans.—Bonaparte sells Louisiana, and what a Sell it was.—How we were saved an extra Volume of Supreme Court Decisions.—The Murder of Alexander Hamilton.—A Ghost-Story about Aaron Burr.—The public Estimate of his Character unchanged by Biographical varnishing.—A South Carolina Conceit.—The Play of Lear in Tripoli.—Peculiar Mussulman Habits; the Author of Don Quixote.—Michigan escapes the Cuppings of Eastern States.—Her lymphatic Temperament.—Lake Michigan as a Breakwater against Chicago.—Burr tried for Treason, “not proven” guilty, and surrendered—to himself.—Of Bonaparte and other Usurpers.—The Oldest dislike the Youngest.—History of the Attempts of George III. and Bonaparte to blockade without Ships.—Once a Bull always a Bull.—Search of American Ships for Seamen.—The Unwisdom of Half-apologies.—The American Embargo and its Popularity with Unmarried Girls.
VII. THE UNITED STATES AT SEA; OR, MADISON’S CRUISE. 1809–1817. 382
The Captain and Officers of the “Seventeen Sisters” which put to Sea in a Gale.—Diplomatic Talks.—Difference between one’s own Cows gored, and one’s own Bull in a Neighbor’s Field stoned, exemplified.—Cave canem.—Bonaparte improves the Code Napoleon.—Executions before Trials.—Horace Greeley fights benevolently into the World.—Louisiana and her Vivacious Debts taken in; what sweetened them.—Witch-Hazel Rods of Clay, Cheves, etc., dip to the National Mines of Feeling.—Our Second Wrestling-Match with England.—The Hull-sale Surrender of Michigan.—Colonel Cass breaks his Sword, and gets an Anglo-phobia.—Better Hulls on the Water.—America marries the Sea.—A Wasp on a Frolic.—Marine Flirtations and Engagements.—The Constitution, an Old Sea-Flirt; her rapid Winning and Wooing of the Java.—South Carolina loses a Presidential Candidate.—Of the Three Armies afield.—Harrison at Tippecanoe and the Thames.—Colonel R. M. Johnson’s life-long Chase for Tecumseh’s Scalp.—Toronto emptied and filled.—General Brown, a Real Man, in Spite of his Name.—General Wade Hampton.—Court-Martials, and how they touch off Military Charges.—The United States at Sea on Land.—The Hornet on a Peacock.—An Immortal Word wrung from a Mortal Moment.—Commodore Perry.—General Scott improves the Niagara Frontier for Hack-Drivers.—Macdonough charges Lake Champlain with Heroic Ingredients.—English Marine Parades.—Cotton Breastworks at New Orleans.—Their Feminine Adoption.—The Treaty of Peace and its Wonderful Omissions.—Costs and Gains of the War.—The Hartford Convention and its Equestrian Exploits.—Mr. Calhoun and Invisible Ink.
VIII. THE ERA OF GOOD-WILL; OR, MONROE’S NESTING. 1817–1825. 396
Why Byron did not write sometimes.—Application.—Rainbow after the Shower.—The Happy Family.—An Inlaid Cabinet.—Virginia’s Dower Rights in the Presidency.—Five New States.—The Three M’s.—Proof from the Census of 1820 that Chicago had not started.—The Missouri Compromise.—A Good Bridle until used.—Florida bought in 1819.—What we got over the Bargain.—The Florida Keys.—The Dry Tortugas thrown in.—The Dews fortunately left.—A Cracked Cup in the Family Cupboard.—The Monroe Doctrine.
IX. TROUBLES BUBBLE; OR, THE SORROWS OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. 1825–1829. 399
Parallel between Sidney Smith’s Old Razor and J. Q. Adams’s Term.—How several Gentlemen, touched by Age, reached in Vain after Honors too high.—Who they were; and what Acid Grapes the House of Representatives snatched from them.—Pamphleteering and Privateering.—An Italian Saying.—Description of a Good Statesman spoiled in the Mould of a Politician.—An Illustrative Anecdote.—Partisan Scales weighing Public Interests.—The Weights.—The Depravity of Political Blunders.—History vs. Party Judgments.
X. THE AGE OF HICKORY; OR, JACKSON’S EPOCH. 1829–1837. 402
Military Men, domesticated to Civil Life, like tamed Animals.—General Jackson’s Camp Traits in the White Den at Washington.—His Prehensile Habits claw out the Eyes of several Measures.—How he foraged on his Political Enemies, and turned his Troops of Friends into the Public Pastures.—Lord Palmerston’s Remark upon Gladstone; and its American Application.—An Insurrection among the Household Cabinet Troops.—How the vigorous Hickory Club, wielded chivalrously for a Woman, quelled it.—The President moves on the Bank, and captures all its Fortified Points.—Chicago starts in 1830.—Why it did not overtake and annex the United States.—South Carolina threatens Nullification, and is threatened.—Mr. Calhoun violently promised an elevated Position between two Posts. Mr. Clay’s Compromise.—Horace Greeley starts the First Daily Paper.—Its untimely End bewailed in Verse.—Black Hawk caged and shown around.—Georgia, the Cherokees and Supreme Court.—Three Celebrities gained by the Seminole War.—Of Arkansas and its Papal Little Rock.—Prospects for the Pope when flung from the Tarpeian.—An Arkansas Paul preaching in the American Athens and Corinth.—Old Hickory and the Nuts left to be cracked.
XL. THE DUTCH REIGN OF MARTIN VAN BUREN. 1837–1841. 409
A New-Yorker reaches the White House, and has Hard Fare there.—The Disadvantages of Competition.—A Financial Earthquake breaks large Amounts of Crockery.—How much made a Pile in 1837.—The Sub-Treasury.—The Connection between long Messages and Anarchy in Finance.—Defalcations in Office.—Why an Old Man’s House is easily robbed.—The Phantom of Slavery.—Extraits de l’Afrique.—Principles and Goods sold at a Profit.—A Political Trader loses his Capital, and gives up Business.
XII. THE HARRISON-TYLER TROUPE; HOW IT PLAYED. 1841–1845. 412
General Harrison’s Death and Life Insurance Companies.—Whig Bank-Bills with no Tyler Bodies to suit them.—A Good Flint which required a first-rate Gun, Stock, Breech, and Barrel, to suit it.—Definition of Crabs, etc.—The Ashburton Treaty.—The Bankrupt Act, and whom it helped.—Misfortunes and Fortunes.—Mr. Calhoun’s Texas Trick.—Diplomatic Magic-Lanterns exposed.—Roman-like Garments with Carthaginian Spots.—Florida our Stocking-Heel; how darned.—Yarns about it.—Iron Railings as State Corsets.—How the Florida Keys might be usefully employed.
XIII. POLK’S WHIRL; OR, THE AMERICAN POLKA. 1845–1849. 416
The Floor Committee for the coming Polka described.—History of previous Balls, Country Dances, Virginia Reels, Quincy Waltzes, Irish Jigs, South Carolina Shake-ups, etc.—General Taylor, his Advances and Movements at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterey, and Buena Vista.—How his Partner, the Army, was taken away.—General Scott among the Mustangs at Vera Cruz, Natural Bridge, Chepultepec, Mexico, etc.—Of Wool, Kearny, Fremont, and Commodore Sloat.—What New Mexico and California added and subtracted.—The Mustang Liniment, or Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo.—How the Path for the Traditional Sun of Civilization Westward was cut and paved.—Revolvers judicially quoted and applied.—Peculiar Fruit adorning the Pendulous Branches of Trees in New Settlements.—What the Little Trick of the Wizard of the South conjured up.—California in 1848 and now contrasted.—David Wilmot raises a Ghost which disturbs several Party Feasts.—How the Polka Party broke up; and how it pleased some and dissatisfied others.
XIV. OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ON THE AMERICAN HALF-SHELL 424
The contrasted Beginning and End of the Half-Century.—What America brought to the New-Year’s Day of 1850 in the Raw, and what for the Grill of more refined Tastes.—Historical Stews, and their Foreign and Domestic Sauces.—What they were.—Attempts at, and Failures in, Insurrections in America.—Mechanical Inventions of the Half-Century; Steamboats, Telegraphs, Reapers, Sewing-Machines, etc.—Their Advantages.—Vestments and Investments.—Of Ether.—How Populations drifted to Cities.—Chicago bibulous and dropsical.—Public Men and their Versatile Principles.—Newspapers and their unfulfilled Prophecies.—Plutocracy.—Fashions and their Constancy to Change.—The Stormy Petrels of Commercial Disasters.—How Owners turn Wreckers.—Profits out of Losses.—Of Merchant Salvors.—The Effects of Gold Discoveries in California on Labor, Ladies’ Heads and Hearts.—Auriferous Marriages.—The Spite of Midas against Children.—Ecclesiastical Gardens in America.—The new Mormon Shrub of the Genus Polygamous.—Architectural Improvements.—American Houses and their Sites.—Farmsteads; their Better Complexion.—The Crops from the National Farms, the Sea and Land, in 1850.—Of American Literature, Science, Natural History, The Philosophies and other Branches of Knowledge, and their Cultivators, through the Half-Century.—Summary of the Bill of Fare for the Repast on the Half-Shell.—Its Character and Critics.
XV. THE BEGINNING OF STRIFE; OR, THE TAYLOR AND FILLMORE WEBBING. 1849–1853. 439
The Young Polka Dancer becomes Floor Manager.—The large Apples of Discord emptied on the Floor of Congress.—What they were; and the Pacific Trees from which they fell.—Of California, New Mexico, and Deseret.—General Taylor’s Death, and Mr. Fillmore’s suave Manners and smooth Appeals.—Wendell Phillips and J. Davis.—Political Nurses and Anodynes.—Kossuth and his Short Catechism.—How it did not take, and how he did.—A large Piece of Japanned Ware.—Deaths of Clay and Webster.—The Autumn Glory which they shed on a Stormy Season.
XVI. THE UNION PIERCED; OR, PIERCE’S TURN. 1853–1857. 443
Reference, by Believers in the Transmigration of Souls, to Mr. Pierce for its Proof.—His real and apparent Age.—The Slave Colossal Figure bestrides the Presidential Harbor.—How the New President rode in between its Legs, and cast out a curious Anchor.—An Antediluvian Cabinet.—Still Times expected.—Sudden Freshet.—Douglas breaks the Missouri Dike.—Bitter Waters over the Land.—Alarm among the Elderly Gentlemen, and how quieted by J. Davis.—Alarm North and South not quieted.—The African Outlook towards the North Pole.—The Power of Douglas illustrated from his Scotch Namesake and Proverb.—What Warriors rushed to our Flanders.—The Blow on the Head of Sumner and Slavery from Brooks’s Cane.—The Dred Scott Essays.—American Africanization.—An Exploring Party in the Interior.—Discovery of an Extinct Race, and of Fremont.—Undiked Waters not strong enough to float Douglas into a Nomination.—Buchanan in the Dock.—The Know-Nothings make a neat little Present to a Polite Gentleman.
XVII. COTTON-SEEDS SPROUT; OR, BUCHANAN’S ADMINISTRATION. 1857–1861. 449
The new Missionary Party and its Growth.—Character of Mr. Buchanan and his Want of Same.—Description of curious Drawers in his Cabinet.—The Uses of Isaac Toucey.—The Lecompton Constitution and how it fell together.—African Order of the Woolly Fleece.—The Mormon Magic-Lantern, and its Shows.—What Minnesota brought into the Union; and how a Long-fellow raised a Fall.—The War of the Illinois Giants.—Abraham Lincoln described.—Self-made Men; their Self-ishness and Unsymmetrical Characters.—Mr. Lincoln’s Growth and Character Illustrated.—Mr. Douglas delineated.—Presidential Bonfires, Tar-Barrels, and Oratory.—A Spectre in Virginia; his Body swinging, his Soul marching on.—A live Coal on the Southern Heart.—What the Democratic Convention was asked to solve, and what it re-solved. Heads I win, Tails I don’t lose.—Breckenridge as a rare Prize-Taker.—The Missionary Party makes a Nomination.—New Lights and Shadows.—An original Recipe for threatened Political Apoplexy.—A sudden Convention in South Carolina.—Its mysterious Origin and Dark Ways.—A Chaotic Message.—Of different Secession Ordinances; and Want of Federal Ordnance.—Political Strikers described.—General Cass and a Broken Heart.—John B. Floyd skedaddles, chased by an Indictment.—General Anderson.—Fort Sumter breaks the Cabinet.—The Confederate Government and Flag made.—Their Composition.—History and Character of J. Davis.—Where Mr. Buchanan went March 4, 1861.
XVIII. OUR NEWER NATIONAL ALBUM 464
The Second Generation of our Great Men nearer in Time but not in Affection.—Several sufficient Reasons therefor.—Ingenious Biographers confusing our Verdicts over old Offenders.—A Latin Quotation to prove an Original Remark.—Why we should not stick to old Opinions.—Sketches of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster.—Parallels do not always run at equal Distances.—Three Fates.—Original Anecdote of Webster.—Of Lewis Cass and Thomas H. Benton.—Why double-chinned Persons are satisfactory.—The Plutocrats Girard and Astor; how they made Fortunes, and how much.—John Marshall as a Judge, and John Trumbull as a Painter.—Albert Gallatin skims American Cream.—Rembrandt Peale and Washington Allston described.—Why Felix Grundy, S. S. Prentiss, J. J. Crittenden, Samuel Houston, D. D. Tompkins, and Others, were like Shoots grafted upon hardy Native Stocks.—The Senate illuminated by J. M. Berrian, S. L. Southard, W. C. Preston, etc., Legaré, and Butler.—A full-length Portrait of Winfield Scott.—Irving delineated.—Drake, Halleck, and Paulding.—Fenimore Cooper descanted upon.—Science illustrated by Silliman, Hare, and Rush.—Descriptions of Prescott, Mrs. Sedgwick, Greenough, and Hawthorne.—How well the Second Set persuaded the Eighteenth Century over into the Nineteenth.
XIX. THE WAR OF IDEAS AND MUSKETS; OR, LINCOLN’S ADMINISTRATION. 1861–1865. 480
IN THREE DIVISIONS.
DIVISION FIRST.
COTTON VEILS HIDE THE UNION. MARCH 4, 1861, TO JANUARY 1, 1862.
Striking Historical Contrasts of professed Virtue and cruel Enforcement.—The American Fetich; its strange, passionate Worship and armed Adoration.—The Freshet of Slavery traced from its small Beginnings.—Mr. Lincoln over its Ridges lands in Washington.—A Striking Announcement, and who it struck.—Of Seward, Cameron, and Chase.—A Naval Joke.—A Wry Fort makes Wry Faces.—An American Nightmare.—Watching with the Sleeper.—Sparing the Rod and getting the Ramrod.—Call for Seventy-five Thousand Ramrods.—Massachusetts Boys and Baltimore Hards.—Busses and Blunderbusses.—Few Office-Seekers, but many Gun-Holders in Washington in April, 1861.—The English Telescope and the Wonders it discovered.—A Dual View.—An Official Talk between two Lords.—A Proclamation to restrain Englishmen.—A Parallel.—War Materials, Forts, etc., generously given away by Loose-handed Custodians.—Twiggs inclined as Tree is bent.—Cotton Curtain before Washington; and a near View of it by General Mansfield.—Colonel Ellsworth.—Butler and Bethel.—Lyons in Missouri.—McClellan moves into Virginia; what he found.—A Wise Man flees when a real Man pursueth.—Bull’s Run and General Run.—A Discovery and Noise over it.—Stonewall Jackson and Praying Soldiers.—Piety and Powder.—A Drill-Ground near Washington.—General Lee’s First Kicks against the Pricks.—Du Pont at Port Royal.—Mason, Slidell, and Vigilant Friends.—John C. Breckenridge a striking Sign-Board.—War in the Mississippi Valley.—Kentucky and her Coy Ways.—A Spartan Leonidas and Greek Ulysses.—Christmas Eve, 1861.
DIVISION SECOND.
COTTON MIXED. JANUARY 1, 1862, TO JANUARY 1, 1864.
The Road to Peace.—Distance thither illustrated.—What certain Knights might have learned.—The Difficulties created by losing Battles in Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas detailed.—What Grant, Thomas, Curtis, and others did; and what Crittenden, Zollicoffer, etc., had done unto them.—Whistling in the Woods.—Wonderful Story-telling powers of J. Davis.—How he repeated Tales with charming Variation.—A Sea Story in which Iron enters.—Farragut and Porter up the Mississippi.—Received at New Orleans with Illuminations and Bonfires.—Butler deals with effervescing Materials.—The Peninsular Campaign traced.—Spading and Fighting.—The Glories and Disasters of the Army of the Potomac.—The American Pope fallible.—Lee’s Trip into Maryland.—Accidents at South Mountain and Antietam.—Difficult Questions besiege Mr. Lincoln in Washington.—His New-Year’s Gift to the Slaves.—Getting rich on Paper.—Cotton mixed.—A Depraved Currency.—Hooker gets at Lee’s Rear at Chancellorsville.—What followed.—Lee at Gettysburg; gets the Advertising its Springs want.—The Sorrows of Vicksburg, July 4, 1863.—The Mississippi open.—Mortar-boat Building.—Valor of Colored Regiments at Charleston; and of discolored Irish in New York.—Contrasts.—Grant Transfigured at Missionary Ridge and Look-Out Mountain without Bragging of it.
DIVISION THIRD.
COTTON WORSTED. JANUARY 1, 1864, TO APRIL 14, 1865.
What the Confederate Stool—not of Repentance, but of Mars—stood on, and how braced and steadied.—The Daisies and Corn-blooms beneath it.—The broken Industries, harried Life, and disrupted Ties of Unionists in the Border States.—Tragedies.—Grant Commander-in-Chief.—His Plan to break up the Nightmare.—Work ahead.—Jubal E. Early and his Raids.—The Year of Jubal E.—Sherman at Atlanta.—The Southern Knob seized, and the main Door burst open.—An unprotecting Hood; how it was pounded and cleft.—Sherman’s Swath through Georgia.—A Christmas Gift to Mr. Lincoln of a Sheaf.—The Scorpion Alabama: its Hatching out; its slimy, wriggling Course, and sulphureous End.—The Iron Jaws of Mobile pried open, and its Teeth drawn.—Autumn Brands at the North.—Tokens of the coming Fall.—Andrew Johnson and the Goose.—Grant breaks Things at Petersburg and disturbs J. Davis in Church at Richmond.—Flight of the Latter with corruptible Treasures.—Negro Troops enter Richmond.—Light Suggestions thereupon.—A Meeting at Appomattox Court-House.—Leaving bloody Instructions, Lee goes to College.—J. Davis in Court and his Sentence.—A Thunder-Clap and its Victim.—Death of Abraham Lincoln.
XX. VELOCIPEDAL 516
How mixed Blood effervesces.—Of the Causes and Developments of American Fastness.—Unrest in Prisons and at Home.—Time lost in Sleep, etc.—The distressing Hurry of Brains.—Compressing a Cow in a Milk-Pot.—Of Doctors’ Gigs and Apoplectic Whirligigs.—American Stomachs considered.—A general Stomach; how employed and hired out.—Doctors’ Bills.—Clothes Wringers and State Wringers.—“Speedy Trials” secured.—The Common and Un-common Law of the United States considered at length.—Of Dower, and how taken.—Property administered before Death.—Heirs cheated.—Injunctions used.—Illinois Divorces.—Of Prohibited Degrees of Marriage.—Of Fat People and Servants.—Boarding-Houses and Hotels.—American Trade and its Feats at diminishing Quantities.—Fast Americans in Europe.—How they overcome Distances, History, and Landlords.—The Paris Genus.
XXI. PUZZLES AND CROSS READINGS; OR, JOHNSON’S ENTERTAINMENTS. APRIL 14, 1865, TO MARCH 4, 1869. 526
Puzzles about Hemp and Paper.—Weak Brains at rest.—The Return of the Holders of Sabres and Guns.—Our Dead.—Fighters become Workers.—A Modern Sisyphus rolls a Stone up Hill.—How it rolled back.—The Interpretation by Congress of its own Rights.—Southern Delegates declined.—Puzzles solved.—Vetoing made easy.—The New Orleans Riots.—The Zig-zag Journey of the President to the Tomb of Douglas.—The Fenian Republic in Union Square.—The Sham-rock compared with other Rocks.—The French Moths in Mexico; and how they were singed.—Amnesties and Pardons.—Scripture outdone.—Forgiveness forced upon the Unrepenting.—Results of Congressional Reconstruction.—The President tried and one found wanting.—Value of one Vote.—Alaska and St. Thomas.—Chicago, unalarmed, goes on dis-pairing but not despairing.—The Narrow Escapes of New York.—Fiske-Ville.—Johnson gets Mudd out of the Dry Tortugas.
XXII. TAKEN FOR GRANTED; OR, WHAT IS EXPECTED OF GRANT AND THE AMERICAN FUTURE. MARCH 4, 1869, TO ——. 534
The supposed Difficulties of writing History in advance considered, and the Popular Delusions on the Subject disposed of.—Lively Expectations of what our future Presidents, Cabinet Members, Foreign Ministers, etc., etc., will be and do.—What Citizens will be exempt from Executing and Garroting the Laws.—The Public Debt to disappear.—The Ways considered.—Cut up into Dividends and no more heard of.—What is expected of Common Schools and Sunday Schools in improving Public Men and their Speeches.—Certain Occupations to be dispensed with.—The Uses to which their Pursuers are to be put.—Improvements in Judges, Injunctions, and Court-Houses.—Extension of Efforts of Society for preventing Cruelty to Animals, to Employers, etc.—Woman’s Rights discussed from various Aspects.—Men and Women equal,—especially Women.—How any Differences between them are to be disposed of.—How Children are to be utilized before they get to be Twenty-one and lose their Activities.—The new Arts and Sciences to be taught.—Secretary of the Treasury to regulate the Fashions, and how.—The President and Sunday Schools.—All Mining to be transferred to Wall Street.—Advance Sheets of Reports for 1969.—What our Railway System is to be.—Grumbling and Patriotism.—Of the Future of Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.—A Pax Vobiscum.
THE COMIC HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.
[Illustration: COLUMBUS DISCOVERS AMERICA.]
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TREATING THE READER TO AN ACCOUNT OF THE AUTHOR, AND OF THE PLAN, OBJECT, AND PRINCIPLES OF THIS HISTORY.
The Author, proposing to be intimate with the Reader, deems an Introduction desirable.—Born Early and Poor.—How the Two Facts were managed and overcome.—School Days and Nights.—College Lines, crooked and straight.—Father’s Face against his.—A New American Decalogue.—Into the Married and other States and Territories.—Settling down.—Advantages of a Sub-urban Residence.—Outside and Inside Views of the Author’s Head.—Plans and Purposes of the Work.—Laughing Facts.—Roman Precedents.—Impartiality holding the Shears and Tape.—Sources of our Information.—Acknowledgments to Smith and Brown.—Our Illustrations.
[Illustration: THE READER SCRAPES ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE AUTHOR.]
Due it is alike to the originality and dignity of this work, and to the respectability, comfort, and good understanding of the reader and ourself, that a formal introduction should take place at the very outset.
For although we feel sure that without this we shall, after keeping company together a few evenings, exchange confidences and hearts with each other for life, yet to avoid needless suspicions,—mute and silent though they be,—and to obviate the hazards and discomforts of injurious side-glances, interrogative of my origin, person, parentage, education, and moral character,—which the paterfamilias may, and naturally would, cast upon a new teacher, who offers to take a place in his household, sit in one corner of the family room when the lamps are lit, and to sleep in the spare bedroom when they are turned down,—I propose to state at once who it is that comes with this friendly audacity, what are his intentions, and how he expects to behave himself in a relation at once so familiar and responsible, viz. that of a good-natured, equable, humorous companion and friend, indicating and painting facts in a pleasant, genial, and healthy way.
First, then, as to ourself. I say not myself; for this would be to roll immediately my complex egoism out of the manifold garments which a historian wears of course; but I say Ourself, that gathered, round Impersonation which may be well supposed to be a crystallized something, like a cunning frost-work on the long window-panes of history,—an armless hand writing Mene and other hieroglyphics on the wall, or a Briareus with his hundred hands, heads, and feet, running in a hundred different ways, staring through a hundred telescopes at the calm ages, and writing with a century of hands the doings, undoings, and misdoings of the race. This manifold, dignified mystery I mean to put on and wear after this chapter; but in order to insure the confidence which I now seek, I shall slip, for a few minutes, out of my state gear, and taking your hand,—now no longer withheld nor even hesitatingly given,—look trustingly into your eyes, and mention a few of those particulars of myself, which you have a gracious right to know, in order to judge of my standing in the world, my intellectual competency and fitness, and the plumptitude of my moral proportions.
I was born very early in life; so early, in fact, that although present, and making such an effort as befitted my first appearance, I was so inexpressibly interested in the matter, that I forgot my future office, that of recorder of passing events. The fact of my birth—a fact which is apt to happen to most people—is not perhaps so singular as that, being born in the United States, I contrived to live beyond the first five years, that fatal semi-decade. I ought, perhaps, now to add, in order to quiet any apprehensions after my last alarming remark, that “I still live”; and that, having survived the perils and plums of parental kindness in infancy, I hope to outlive the equally fatal neglect and indifference which marks our treatment of old age.
My parents, at the time I was given to the world, were poor, and, therefore, not respectable. They had been simple enough to marry young, and for love; and although they had mated each other well, they had failed to put a yoke upon the neck of fortune. These early struggles, however, stiffened in them the moral elements, and marbleized, so to speak, the soft woods of their country natures, making a substance very different from that thin, moral veneering which is upholstered from the beechen groves that timber the sunny slopes of life. Both of them were Presbyterians; always attending the Sunday services, sitting in a gallery seat, close to the pulpit, and so taking the brunt of the hard blows which were rightfully felt in, and—I sometimes thought—spent themselves upon, our uncushioned pew.
An offer from my father’s brother, who had become rich in mercantile business, drew my father and the family in my fifth year to the city of Philadelphia. With this change of base came sharper tactics against the army of poverty; and at last, by fighting it on the same line, although it took all the summer of his life, he achieved the victory. I was then sent to the best schools; took lessons at home in some branches from a private teacher; took—I own it now—lessons in other branches privately, out of the house, without my father’s knowledge, although at his expense for the tuition; and at last I went to college.
Hard study, matched by an irrepressible love of pranks at night; a knowledge of Euclid’s lines and clothes line; of belles-lettres and unlettered belles; of geometrical and other squares; of chemistry applied to known uses and to experiments for which there were no precedents in the books; prizes offered by the faculty, and prizes offered by Mrs. Green and Mrs. White in the persons of their handsome daughters,—these all braided together the threads of my university life into a pattern which, if not unusual, was made up principally of figures little admired at home.
My father was not at all pleased with the well-red bill I brought with me, and quite as little with the unsigned ones which followed me, from college; and, concluding that I might run my own face for a while, set his sharply against me.
I took to teaching; sounding over again the shallow depths of old studies, but often striking the lead on the rocky bottom of a temper too long indulged not to be stern when touched by children’s thoughtlessness.
My father’s death cast upon me responsibilities for my mother and the estate, which dropped the curtain upon my dream-life, and lifted it from the long perspective of actual work and business cares. Among my father’s papers I found the following original document, which I reproduce here, as showing his shrewdness of observation, and the character of the parent who helped to form some elements of my own.
“A NEW AMERICAN DECALOGUE.
“Hear, O Jonathan, the commandments which thou hast made,—teaching them to thy infants, thy Freedmen, thy Irishmen, thy office-holders,—the asses within thy gates.
I.
“Thou shalt have no other God but Gain. Trade, and labor, husband-ry and all other brokerage, shall be his profits.
II.
“Graven images and pictures other than greenbacks and fractional currency thou shalt not make.
“These shalt continue to be unlike anything elsewhere, in the heavens above or in the earth beneath; and to them, therefore, thou mayst bow down thyself unto the thirty-third or thirty-fourth generation, using up in their pursuit all thy soles, thy health, and thy neighbor as thyself.
III.
“Thou shalt not mistake any other god for the aforesaid, such as Religion, True Worship, Charity, Virtue, Obedience, Truth; for Gain, being a jealous God, requires all your time, strength, health, soul, and body, and will show no mercy upon those who keep not his day-book, ledger, and cash-books.
IV.
“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it wholly to thyself.
V.
“Honor thy children, bowing down to them and worshipping them, giving them what they least require, that their days may be the shortest, in the United States, of all lands whatsoever.
VI.
“Thou shalt not kill the goose which lays the golden eggs.
VII.
“Thou shalt commit adulterations with almost everything in the earth beneath, and especially by the waters which are throughout the world.
VIII.
“Thou shalt steal whenever an official opportunity offers.
“Making a Cæsar of thyself, thou shalt render unto him all the money that is brought unto thee.
IX.
“Thou shalt forbear all witness against thy neighbor; lest thy time be consumed needlessly in the public service, and he afterwards, also, witness against thee.
X.
“Thou shalt acquire so much by the foregoing commandments, as not to covet thy neighbor’s house and lot, nor any other real or un-real estate of his whatsoever.”
Settling up the property which my father had accumulated, although disregarding this code, and unsettling myself, I roamed abroad long and widely; practically dog-earing in Europe, Asia, and Africa the leaves of that illuminated volume of travel which I had all my life been intent to own.
Then came marriage,—religious convictions,—studying for the ministry,—children in the house,—studying them, and how to feed them,—ordination,—a call to a rus-urban congregation in the vicinity of New York,—only a short hour’s ride on a rail, and well feathered, without tar, by plentiful dust,—preaching to an assemblage, gathered from behind sharp counters on week-days, to measure my discourses critically, and to secure their money’s worth on Sundays,—and all the nameless little experiences that roll over the cog-wheels of a suburban parson’s life. Two bronchial attacks commissioned me to look up a better throat,—once in a journey to South America, and once across the prairies to California.
These experiences, added to their predecessors, have accumulated, with my readings, the materials for a history which the leisure half-hours, paragraphed between the compact duties of my thirty years of ministerial work, have permitted me to put together, and which now, dear reader, I place, as my cor cordium, in your hands.
It is the cream, skimmed from my carefully kept dairy; or rather the condensed milk of my very being, left at your door, to make your tea pleasanter, and your pudding sweeter and richer.
As you may be curious to possess, and I am most happy of an opportunity to get off my latest photogram, I add, as an item serving to assist you in making up the sum of my qualifications, this
[Illustration: EXTERNAL VIEW OF THE AUTHOR’S HEAD,]
bare-ly remarking that as its unfurnished state may disappoint you, I will endeavor to restore your pleasing illusion, by giving you gratuitously
[Illustration: AN INSIDE VIEW,]
flattering myself that, although you may find nothing in it, you will at least confess, that seldom dare an author venture upon such an exposure of his stock in trade.
Having now furnished all the main elements which will enable my pupil readers to outline my intellectual portraiture, having frankly shown four sides of myself,—a lower side and an upper side, an outside and inside,—being the only sides, I trust, that I shall take in this history, I crave leave now to add, secondly, a word as to the plan, object, and principles of this history. They are, in brief, to put facts, veritable and authentic facts, whether agreeable or disagreeable in themselves, in that pleasing dress that will make them welcome visitors to the drawing-room, good chums in the bedchamber, chatty companions in the cars, on steamers and steamboats, jolly physicians to the dyspeptically lean, and pleasantly wise counsellors to the troubled.
I feel so sure that, as not one of the illuminated readers of these chronicles has ever mistaken dulness for wisdom, so not one will need be reminded that the most solid and trusted truths may wear the smiles of joy and hilarity.
The Romans on their solemn festival days were wont to carry in their processions the images of their ancestors, even those long deceased, wreathed with flowers. So carry we the images of the Past, garlanded with the rosy links of fun and jollity.
We shall not be tempted by the lure of originality, nor even by the attractive ambition of gaining credit for profound critical and historical acumen, to follow the late fashion of dressing up stale and unwholesome characters in fine clothes and qualities. We shall neither foist the virtuous regimentals and well-earned epaulettes of Washington upon Benedict Arnold, nor tease history to fling a mantle of false charity over Burr’s treason. We shall not worry the public conscience into any praise, however faint, of the crimson waistcoat of Mr. Jefferson Davis, nor waste any admiration upon the spotted neck-tie, perhaps too loosely drawn, of Jacob Thompson. Impartial justice shall hold our tape and handle our shears.
It is usual for historians to indicate the sources of their information; but as we have refused no means of enriching these annals, using for that purpose whatever materials our multiform reading could supply, from the Ramayana, the great Sanscrit epic, impressed on wax, down to the last published child’s primer, printed on patented wooden paper, we could not name all our authorities without giving a catalogue inconvenient for our publishers, and too long for the abridged lives of our readers. We cannot, however, refrain from acknowledging our obligations to John Smith, Esq., for original information, novel ideas, and new turns of thought around old notions, running through every page of this history; to Mr. Jones, for valuable public documents; and to Mr. Brown, the well-known sexton of Grace Church, New York, who in the course of his lifelong diggings, has exhumed several pieces of Americans, whom we have reconstructed and preserved in our historical cases.
As to the illustrations which flash upon and light up our pages, they will speak for themselves; if they do not, any word of ours would be, Vox et preterea nihil.
DISCOVERIES. B. C. TO 1607 A. D.
“Through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.” TENNYSON.
“Here are old trees, tall oaks and gnarled pines That stream with gray, green mosses; here the ground Was never touched by spade, and flowers spring up Unsown and die ungathered. It is sweet To linger here among the flitting birds And leaping squirrels, wandering brooks, and winds That shake the leaves and scatter as they pass A fragrance from the cedars thickly set With pale blue berries. In their peaceful shades, Peaceful, unpruned, immeasurably old, My thoughts go up the long, dim path of years Back to the earliest days.” BRYANT.
“That would be wooed and not unsought be won.” SHAKESPEARE.
CHAPTER I.
OF AMERICA BEFORE ITS DISCOVERY IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
B. C.-1000 A. D.
America older than Europe, Asia, or Africa.—Chronic Errors on the Subject.—Europe presented to America.—Truth vindicated.—Proofs of our Superior Antiquity.—Luxurious Civilization of the Races who stocked this Continent before the Indians.—Amount of Coal left by them unburned.—Large supplies of Fish packed away safely in our Mountains.—Fish Culture Measure of Human Culture.—Fossil Cran-iology.—Laughable Blunders of Former Historians and Ethnologists.—Ancient Nations, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Ten Lost Tribes, etc., trickling through, appearing on this Side of the Earth.—Instances cited.—Mythologies of Greece and Rome originated here.—Proofs and Reproofs.—American Nests well feathered Ages ago.—Large Stocks for Future Use.
[Illustration: AMERICA BEFORE ITS DISCOVERY.]
Hitherto not only foreign writers, but even our own people, have ignored the existence of America prior to what is popularly called its discovery, a phenomenon which might be more appropriately denominated a return of the descendants of the old stock to the haunts of their forefathers. That event—reserved until the close of the fifteenth century of the Christian era, after the invention of gunpowder had exploded numerous obstructions in the path of progress, and just before the Lutheran Reformation came in with its fresh needs for more room—turned up an Old World for new uses.
Of course the newly ventilated space thus rediscovered excited much talk at the time, and created a sensation in that unsensational age. The first Europeans who were presented to America were as much elated, as Americans now at their presentation to European courts; as if America, like those courts, had not existed and had not had its shows, jewels, follies, history, and fêtes, centuries before they were shown up to it. Has not this sensation lasted quite long enough? Is it not time—now that nearly four hundred years have allowed the first ardor and surprise to cool off—to vindicate the claim of the Western Continent against the long-suffered error of mistaking what they were new to for what was itself new?
The arrogant pretensions of what is pleased to call itself the Old World have quite long enough kept back our bashful and blushing claims.
Indeed, in our chronic modesty, we are allowing our country to get somewhat mature in speaking of itself as new; while even children now know that ours is, in fact, the elder continent. Agassiz is not gassing us when he picks our ancient Alleghany flints and tells us, that the camp-fires in the Lackawanna, Schuylkill, and Lehigh valleys blazed away long before those at Newcastle and in the English Black Country were lit up. The Rocky Mountains got up their vertebrated backs ages before Mont Blanc put on such cool airs and carried its head so loftily over the more modest chignon of our Orizaba and Long’s Peak. The Mississippi got down to its delta long before the Rhone or Rhine reached even their alpha. Let us then henceforth assert the dignity of our superior antiquity; and commiserate the other half of the globe in being so long unknown to our older America.
What was the precise height, the fashionable color of hair and eyes, the modish vices, the sartorial virtues, of the races which stocked our prairies, and hunted plesiosauria, and megalosauria, and other tall game along our wide valleys, and across the granite peaks of our long mountain ranges, we have not now at hand any plates or photographs to show; but well do we know that we are very much obliged to them for leaving unburned such lots of good coal, snugly stowed away in dry, ample cellars; and that those cellars were placed in such a peaceable Quaker State as Pennsylvania, where we can go and help ourselves by the cart-load without getting into a stew. How beautifully, too, they—those young Americans—packed away their fish; so well that they—the fish—are now just as fresh as when Noah performed his maritime adventure, Moses was fished up by the banks of the Nile, or Jonah became cargo in the deeply laden whale.
What large provisions those jolly dwellers on this hemisphere, long ages ago, must have made, when we find such abundance of funny finny things, so carefully stowed away in layers, all over the continent, from the icy plains around the North Pole, down through the Isthmus belt, and along the saw-shaped ridges of South America, to the farthermost cape. Now, if we had no other proof of the high civilization, we may truthfully say, the dainty and luxurious refinement, of those pre-Columbian inhabitants of this hemisphere, the existence of these fish, so beautifully canned,—better disposed, in fact, than if they had been arranged in layers by the accomplished herring-packers of Scotland or Holland,—we might safely rest there the well-digested argument; knowing well, as all our readers do, that the love of fish was one of the peculiar features that marked the highest point of Assyrian, Egyptian, and Persian civilization; remembering that in the time of Pericles, the polished Athenian left the charming music of his flowing speech, when he heard the bell in the Agora announce that the fish auction had begun; and further recalling the fact that the fish-ponds of Lucullus, Pompey, Crassus, and the millionnaire Romans, gauged, like yard-sticks, the intellectual culture of Rome.
Fossil cranes have also been found ingeniously tucked away in appropriate crusts,—a cran-iological development not to be overlooked; although upon this head we forbear to enlarge. The Hadrosaurus—now restored to us by strangely unsubstantial Water-house Hawkins—shows that in his (i. e. the former H.’s) production what countless ages must have been exhausted and for his sustenance what numberless lives consumed, which, if unslaughtered, might have gone on, and after centuries of growth developed to be not only men, but even American voters.
TIME STOCKING AMERICA. (p. 59) ]
“Perhaps in scaly armor, up and down those ancient seas, Roamed he with an appetite that nothing could appease; Crushing shoals and hosts of being, every one of whom that ran Would, in course of time and season, have developed up to man; But fata sic profulgent, and we only may bewail Our dear relations slaughtered when this monster curled his tail.”
From what has already been said it is clear that many of the aboriginal settlers in this half of the world died game to the last.
After mention of these higher arguments of our elder civilization, we shall not weaken the proofs by an exhibition of later American antiquities, such as the sculptured temples found in Yucatan and Central America; the time-coated, swallow-tailed fanes of the Peruvians; the exaggerated structures of the dwarfed Aztecs; or the tall earth-mounds which, scattered from Lake Erie through the Mississippi Valley, and forced through the tight-set lips of the Isthmus, are at last swallowed up by Venezuela.
Many doubtless are the swarms that have hived here through the busy centuries which preceded the Egyptian Pharaohs, the comparatively modern empires of Assyria, Persia, and China, and the still later kingdoms of Agamemnon and Priam; empires and kingdoms that stand on the dim frontis-pages of our ordinary histories. These hives, overflowing their quarters, have sent out superfluous swarms across the ice bridge over our northern strait into the plains of Asia, and thence into Africa and Europe.
Laughable indeed is the exhibition which erudite European historians, ethnologists, and others have made of themselves in deducing from Asia, as the mother-swarm, the colonies that have peopled the world; when in truth Asia was only the half-way house, the luncheon-place of our trampers, on their march into their foggy countries and chronicles.
Thus it is now ascertained by late researches that there is a great resemblance between the languages of the Mongols and Japanese, and those of Equador and New Granada. Hopes are entertained that antiquarians may discover some ancient precedents for our Yankee tongues and words derived from sources whose authoritative beginnings now puzzle us.
So, too, no doubt, migrations homeward have taken place from the faded and colorless scenes of these exploring raids.
Hitherward trickled, probably, the ten Israelitish tribes, hitherto supposed to be lost, diffusing themselves wanderingly for the past two thousand five hundred and eighty-nine years, and now collecting in pools in our towns and cities, and around our stock-exchanges.
Here, too, have reappeared, after going in on the other side, the broken pieces of the empire of Nineveh, mixed up with fragments of its gates of brass, which fused in the transmission, have veneered the faces of those who pulled through, forming in their descendants the race of brazen-faced itinerant pedlers, auctioneers, and plumbers among us.
So the ancient empire of Egypt, shivered up by Cæsar, percolating through, at last dripped into that stalagmite, the Tombs of New York, with its newly formed but not reformed Cæsars and Pompeys inside.
In a word, most of the old kingdoms, and even cities, such as Troy, Rome, Syracuse, Alexandria, Macedon, Athens, Sparta, and others, disappearing from sight on the other and newer hemisphere, and straining through into ours, have come out on our side condensed by the pressure in small spots, but with similar names,—spots smaller but just as smart and big-feeling as their larger selves. This, too, accounts for our sudden expansions, whether in crinoline or credit; the compressed and squeezed germ reasserting often its chance for pristine greatness in sudden and unexpected ways.
Now that we have started the train of thought, each of our readers can easily turn engineer and stoker, and by applying a little fuel of his own, can drive it over all the various tracks which run from his metropolitan, central brain.
“No wonder,” each one will exclaim, “that our people are so thin after so much pressing of their ancestors; no wonder at our new-minted words, the old ones having been fused at a red heat in the central fires.”
Here, too, is the secret of our burning eloquence. This is the source of our extraordinary architecture, borrowed, like an actor’s costume at a fancy ball, from huddled heaps of clothing made for others, and brought together in party-colored, but ill-sorted union. Looked at from this angle, we can account, too, for our mythological tendencies,—the invocations to Jove, when surprised; the devotion to Apollo in our magazines; the frequent use of the lyre in our trade; the love for bare shoulders, like Junos, in our divine assemblages; our leanings at night to Bacchus; and other customs and habits that creep out even from under pan-taletes. Greece at first took her Olympus from us; and we in the course of time have, like affectionate parents, borrowed it back again.
From these varied proofs it is manifest that, before Columbus brought over to America specimens of the European stock existing in his time, our hemisphere had been hard at work firing up at Popocatepetl; scooping out harbors on our coasts; creasing our valleys in fluvial grooves for our fast-running craft and boats; feathering the future nests of a later posterity with materials for use; and in general laying in a large stock for a successful business to be taken up and carried on afterwards by those who should come back from their migrations to become large dealers in universal notions, general purveyors, forwarders and advancers on all kinds of property, from continents to a spool of cotton, from polar Alaska ice to West India warming-pans and peppery troches.
How long it took them to flutter back to these old deserted nests, how many were lost before they had fairly got settled in them, and what broods now chirp, sing, and crow, through branches new and old, honest or brittle, these pages are full fledged to show.
CHAPTER II.
OF THE DISCOVERIES IN AMERICA DURING THE ELEVENTH, FIFTEENTH, SIXTEENTH, AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.
1000–1607.
America not discovered by Jason.—Lithographic Specimens attributed to the Northmen in the Eleventh Century curious, but by Skalds more Modern.—Bishop Berkeley’s Western Star not the First American Constellation.—Columbus offers a Continent at Private Sale; Isabella, a Spanish Lady, takes him up, and the Profits also.—Of Ferdinand’s Necklace.—Price of Eggs advanced in Spain.—England finally sees Something.—A Fish Story confirmed.—Discoveries which Columbus did not make.—Ponce de Leon.—Mexico unfortunately discovered.—The Straits of Magellan and other Straits.—De Soto at the Bottom of the Mississippi.—Champlain, a wise Man, founds Quebec upon a Rock.—Sir Walter Raleigh and him smoking.—The Mayflower anchored.—Hudson up Stream.
America was not discovered by Jason while looking up the golden fleece, although the existence of many American habits point to an originator, whose name is lost, but whose Asiatic practices are not. It is supposed by some that the late war crops were the product of certain stray dragon’s teeth, possibly dropped by that wily Greek on our prolific soil. But these hypotheses, although as wise as many others connected with early maritime discoveries, are too learned to be useful. History declines to pull such wool over the eyes of its readers or to encourage traditions which flatter the pride of ancient nations, whose age is the only excuse for their fond, grandfatherly dotings. Nor is it any more true that the Northmen, in the eleventh century, fell upon this out-lying continent, when engaged in general lithography along our coasts,—the pictured rocks near Taunton, although a spirited illustration of one page of our chronicles, being now proved to be sketches by later Scandinavian Skalds, less than eight hundred years old. We also feel obliged to deny the merit accorded by some to Bishop Berkeley, of having made the first discovery of America. This notion of some rests all its weight on the strength of those lines, “Westward the star of empire takes its way.” But those were not the first lines that were carried ashore and made fast to our continent, nor this the earliest star which appeared over our American boards.
Much as we should love, in the interest of modern historical research, to invent a new discoverer for America, candor compels us to award the glory still to Christopher Columbus. Had he lived three hundred and seventy-seven years later, he would have advertised for a partner in some paper of wide circulation; but not having that advantage, he circulated himself, offering a continent at private sale to all European nations that fronted the sunset. But all declined with thanks, until at last, as is well known, one Isabella, a Spanish lady, taken with the speculation, became a silent partner in the business. She not only furnished the capital, and took a high interest in the result, but finally reaped nearly all the profits,—a pleasant example of woman’s rights thoroughly enforced. She even took a necklace from her neck to procure funds for the expedition; and with this example before him, her associate Ferdinand, after trying his hand on several Moors, thought that, after unclasping from the neck of Columbus “the gem of the Antilles,” he could substitute a chain less golden. Posterity, however, indignantly breaking the metallic hasp, has clapped the iron collar back on the neck of the selfish, cunning, and thankless Ferdinando.
THE PICTURED ROCKS AT TAUNTON ATTRIBUTED TO THE NORTHMEN, OR SKALDS, OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY. (p. 66) ]
We must not forget to mention that before the old pilot could get his project to stand, he had raised the price of eggs throughout Spain by placing so many on their own poor broken heads. For this destruction, however, he consoled himself with the maxim, “all’s well that ends well.” He carried his eggs and hopes to England, France, Portugal, and Navarre; but both were kept so long that they became addled.
A heavy fog prevented England at first from seeing the enterprise; but after the discovery of real land was made, she lost no time in procuring the advantages of it, and endeavored to secure them to herself, by allowing several vessels to be outfitted at Bristol.
These vessels were not built by Laird; but, sailing away on the blind side of the island, succeeded at last in boarding the continent, and exchanging some unprinted religious tracks for certain other tracts, afterwards well stamped by royal authority.
On their return, the promoters of this missionary enterprise built a handsome church, where prayers were daily offered for many years, for past success, and intercessions made for the interposition of the same kind Providence for new exchanges of a similar kind. These expeditions, it may be remarked, have been and are the foundation of England’s greatness,—her church and her trade; or rather to name them in juster order and according to her own estimate, her trade and her church. The Cabots, father and son, will ever be remembered by their addition to the world’s wealth by the discovery, in 1497, of Newfoundland. At the time it was thought to be a story somewhat fishy, but it is now swallowed without any bones.
LANDING OF COLUMBUS. (p. 68) ]
The Portuguese were less fortunate, their ships having got somehow entangled in the line in crossing it, they were obliged to cast anchor against a high wind, which as usual was not so ill as not to benefit their English rivals. What became of these ships is not positively known; a glimpse of only one of them having since been obtained in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. The rest may have drifted northwards, and their masts made to serve to splice the north pole, the old one having become somewhat loose from being so much worked about by meddlesome navigators.
Among the discoveries in America which Columbus did not make we may enumerate the following:—
First, a name for the continent; an omission afterwards supplied by a shabby countryman of his, whose own name we will not perpetuate by mentioning in this history.
Second, iron-clads; although he did come across some very hard characters, whose scaly armor history has ever since been mercilessly denting and battering. Columbus himself, although at one time cased in iron, and sent home on a trial trip, while he learned the value and preciousness of metal at the Spanish court, failed to discover its property to float him across seas successfully. Nor do we find any warrant for believing that he was the discoverer of,
Third, balsam of liverwort, the extract of buchu, Peruvian hair-dye, or the sozodont, notwithstanding the strenuous assertions to the contrary of the candid proprietors of those invaluable preparations. The only extract he succeeded in making was a promise of honors, never performed, although highly labelled; and it is well known that the only color he succeeded in obtaining in America, for his own hair, was gray. From the ingredients of this blanching powder he ultimately died himself at Valladolid.
Fourth, nor is there any better foundation for the common error, that he was the discoverer of the Tammany Society, and furnished designs and colored drawings for the wigwam, in which the Democratic braves find so many original and aboriginal voters. Indian polls, from which the hair had been carefully removed, he did see, and even took a few back with him to Spain; but it is needless to say that these polling-places were not the exemplars of those which Tammany so often and so lovingly pats on the head.
Fifth, equally erroneous is the general belief that he discovered “Hail Columbia,” although it is true that he got enough of it, in the sense that some illy educated small boys now use that phrase.
DISCOVERY OF NEWFOUNDLAND. (p. 71) ]
Ponce de Leon, following up the discoveries of Columbus, landed in Florida, in 1512, and endeavored to find there a fountain possessing the properties of giving to the imbiber perpetual youth. Although he did not succeed in this quest, it seems probable that some one else did, for it is well known that several Americans, such as Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and others, have lived quite too long, while other distinguished Americans, as Burr and others, have manifested in a very lively way a green old age, cutting up capers which none but very young people would have thought of. He also discovered the Dry Tortugas,—a temperance station of the first water, famous as the habitation of Dr. Mudd.
A few years later, A. D. 1517, Mexico was unfortunately discovered, and from that time to the present has been the scene of constant embroilments, beginning with the broiling of Montezuma, by Cortez, and ending with the unhappy stew made by Maximilian for himself. Mexico is the American abattoir,—the general slaughter-house of our continent. Ice for the preservation of the quarters of her victims, where no quarter was shown, is obtained from the elevated plains into which the country is as yet insufficiently broken up.
We ought to mention the voyage, in 1520, of a Portuguese, Magellan by name, who touched at the Canaries for yellow birds, coasted along the shores of Brazil in search of other golden products, but finally brought up in a very tight place, on the extreme southern tip of our western globe; calling the spot, under great pressure, the Straits of Magellan.
He became so exhilarated, however, at Cape Horn, that he kept on, like the man with the cork leg, and went all around the world, being its first circumventor, and giving the first proof of the gyrating effects of mixing liquors with water.
De Soto first chanced upon the Mississippi River, and, in 1542, was flung upon it with all his heavy armor on,—“a sink-or-swim” experiment, which resulted in his remaining down at the bottom.
Diving for wrecks has since become for divers and diverse reasons common in that turbulent stream; but he is honored as the great diver; the river not being strong enough to get him up. John Law afterwards tried a Mississippi venture; but, unlike De Soto, he went up, and never came down again. Both De Leon and De Soto showed true American enterprise and energy in the pursuit of gold. Like their countryman Cortez, in Mexico, they were, however, more desirous of discovering metallic placers, and extracting from them sudden riches, than of luring by patient industry from a jealous soil its hoarded secrets of cereal wealth.
On the north, Cartier, in 1534, became the unhappy discoverer of the Canadas, and other out-lying, uncovered, cold regions, afterwards parcelled out, not to ice companies like the Knickerbocker and others, but into viceroyalties. These freezing places, from the continual stirring about in them of such contrary elements for the succeeding century, might well be called the ice-creameries of England and France.
Champlain, in 1603, like a wise man, founded Quebec on a rock; for which he has been illy requited by being called the father of the French settlements in Canada.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH INTRODUCES SMOKING TO THE ENGLISH COURT. (p. 74) ]
Sir Walter Raleigh’s name must always burn brightly in American history, for his discovery of a smoking material on the James River. But his fame needs no puffing here, although his reputation became somewhat blown before his death. Another important event soon after occurred in connection with American discoveries. A Mayflower drifted, in December, across seas, and floating against Plymouth Rock, struck its tiny anchors in it, and, with Yankee enterprise, climbed all over it, covering its rugged clefts and bare surface with a mass of luxuriant flowers, with which also sprang up tangling weed-growths, all of which have since been dried and attracted great attention, much sneezing, some sneering, and great use of handkerchiefs to preserve the odor of, or prevent the smell of, what has penetrated all departments of American history. The last discovery which we shall here mention was that of Hudson, who brought to light the benighted island of Manhattan, then, as since, infested by Woods and other poisonous growths. The natives, as now, were very free in their manners; staring at the newly arrived, and taking them in by the exhibition of trinkets and gilt ornaments. In spite of the sluggish airs from the shores of Westchester and Dutchess, the ships of Hudson succeeded in reaching Rhinebeck; a few of his men even penetrating to the dense regions of Albany.
CHAPTER III.
ON THE INDIAN CHARACTER.
Survey of Indian Character and Lands.—Our Pacific Intentions towards the Indians.—The Whites better read than the Red Men, and the Effects of Learning.—The Pale Complexion of their Affairs.—Wet Blankets thrown over their other Habits.—Different Traits discovered by School-Girls and through official Spectacles.—Meaning of Indian Reservations.—Indian Style of Dress and its Conveniences.—Indian Names.—Examples of their Happy Application.
No history of the United States would be complete without a survey of the character of the Indian; as no State of the Union is acceptable to its inhabitants without a survey and appropriation of his lands.
Various as are the lights in which the former may be regarded, there is but one light, that of an enlight-ened self-interest, with which the latter have been treated. The speed with which we have hurried the brick-colored races towards the sun’s setting is conclusive proof of our Pacific intentions, and of our dislike to unsettled titles. Red as is the color of the Indian, to this complexion do all his tribes come at last,—a pale conviction that the white man is better read than they.
The chapter of our discoveries on this continent opens with the Indian in the foreground; and the historian, like the earliest explorer, is brought immediately face to face with him. Unlike the explorer, however, we will pause long enough to bury the proprietor of the estate which he seized and we occupy.
Blankets, often very wet, have been thrown over the Indian; while as often he has been painted so thickly, and feathered so profusely, as to become a bird of quite another color from that of our North American vulture. Slow in learning the geography of the race that rides him down as on a pale horse evermore, he has acquired the name of but one of our streams, that of the Firewater, a river whose dry banks seem always to divide his retreating from our pursuing frontier boundaries.
Perhaps we cannot give a more variegated notion of the different aspects under which the Indian character is viewed, than by putting it in an American kaleidoscope, and there giving it a few turns, certain that these turns will not be more curious or numerous than their owners’ fortunes.
1. The Indian character as viewed in schools and colleges.
Listen to an average specimen from the pen of Miss Jemima Letitia Youngfancy,—her most pronounced effort before the trustees and patrons of Rising Hill Seminary.
“‘Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind.’ LAMENTATIONS or SHAKESPEARE.
“No subject is of greater importance to the well-being of our race than a proper estimate of the character of the red man. Injustice here is more deplorable, since it involves the historic position of a race once lords of all this continent, now fast dwindling away, not only out of physical existence, but from the realms of discriminating praise. His has been the misfortune to be despoiled, not simply of the bosky inheritance of fair fields and boundless domains, where his ancestors roamed as free as the winds that sweep over the breezy sierras of the Rocky Mountains, but of the justice which pleads before the tribunal of posterity for rights withheld and wrongs inflicted. Not content to pursue his retreating and emaciated footsteps into the tomb, where his poor body is scarcely allowed to moulder away in peace, amid the implements and trophies of the chase, the white man, as voracious as the prairie wolves, which whet their sharp fangs against the rocky bases that prop up the giant Cordilleras of our beloved land, has denied to him those monumental rights with which even savages adorn the last resting-places of their braves,—the trophied inscriptions carved in the enduring language in which Virgil sang and Tully burned, and in which Menander, prophetic of our Transatlantic greatness, babbled to the dull ears of a Roman race, which recked not of that ‘proud stoic of the woods,’ who, in life a victim of wrong, at death folds himself to his solemn sleep, in the language of the greatest of our living poets,
‘Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams,’
but who, also, in the apt words of the same rapt minstrel,
‘Like Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,— The eternal years of God are theirs.’”
While the waves of applause which ripple around this popular and characteristic rhapsody, grow calm against the solid shores of historic truth, we turn to another American view equally characteristic.
2. The Indian character as seen through official spectacles. Extract from the Report of the Secretary of the Interior:—
“The beneficent policy of repression, steadily pursued by our government towards the Indian tribes still surviving, cannot fail to strike every one but themselves. While sentimental Christianity continues to dwell upon the rapid extinguishment of their tribes, the archives of this department bear gratifying witness to the more rapid extinguishment of their titles.
“There now remain in our borders—which were, it must be admitted, for the sake of argument, once theirs—but about three hundred thousand of these nomad wanderers. Our people must feel an especial gratification in the proud reflection, that it is their bounty which, now reaching forth the comforts of our abundance to these remnants of tribes, supplies at the reasonable rate of some $10.15 per caput, the wants of such as are spared by our efficient and active army corps of Indian destructives.
“This bounty is distributed by honest agents, who never fail, while dispensing it, to impress upon the recipients a proper regard for the moral suasion of our well-mounted rifles. The small commissions reserved from these treaty-stipulated funds, by these agents, is too American not to be recognized with patriotic pride; and the especial thanks of Congress are due to these self-denying distributers for the amount which they kindly leave to be disseminated among the intended beneficiaries.
“There is a natural jealousy among our people in those States and Territories where former laws injudiciously, but, as it fortunately proves, unsuccessfully located these Indian remnants, against the continuous occupation of tracts of lands called reservations, to which they have been from time to time removed. I cannot too strongly recommend that this jealousy and acquisitiveness be duly respected, and new reservations somewhere be speedily provided. Both Providence and our need of their territory plainly mark the Indians as the American Ishmaelites, against whom everybody’s hand is raised, and whose shifting tent can only be steadied up permanently against the sunset on the Pacific Ocean.”
Some people seem to think that the Indian was created to keep before us a décolleté style of dress, adapted to the freedom of our institutions,—a traveller’s costume, most convenient for the administration of medical assistance, in case of such railroad divertisements and steamboat pyrotechnic displays as often enliven our journeyings.
AN INDIAN RESERVATION. (p. 81) ]
Others look upon the preservation of these remnants as providential fields for the employment of the patience of domestic missionaries. Young ladies contemplate them as the only living representatives of mythological Loves, the sole heirs to the bow and arrow. Others still admire them as our only legendary and poetic creations; the only ghostly figures that creep weirdly through our sharp-set American quadrilles.
But while such discordant notions rasp the American ear and conscience about their predecessors, there is a mode of hushing up all these family jars; one which seems to have been adopted in all ages, from the time of Joshua the son of Nun, down to the Irish wakes of our time, namely, to drown them all in the jubilant music procured and paid for at the expense of the estate to be divided up.
A few words in regard to Indian names. An affectionate and grateful regard for the painted races, which will soon be seen only in the picture-galleries and books of colored engravings, has sought to sow a crop of Indian names over our lakes, rivers, mountains, and towns. Unfortunately we have succeeded in keeping scarcely enough for seed. But one State has borrowed the name of the Indian himself,—Indian-ah?—she spelling it, however, in an un-English way, without a h, as if she had said,
“O, breathe not his name.”
The application of some of these names has been singularly felicitous, as Sing-Sing, where the State guests attempt no musical flights, but are made to hum quite another tune, if not to hush up altogether; Miss-ouri, whose ill-fated union in our Federal family has been attended with such left-handed rights,—State rights, Fanny Wrights, and, for a long time in Kansas, conflicting rights; Minnehaha, whose ringing laugh is during so long a portion of the year frozen in her soft throat; Kan-sas, suggestive of her capacity for billingsgate and free use of abusive language; Oregon, and yet inviting emigrants to her valuable mines while she laughs a cunning laugh under the protecting cap of Mount Hood; Wy-an-dot River, as if it had come to a sort of rocky comma, or interrupting ledge, over which it was pausing a moment for breath to take a hop-and-skip-and-carry-one overy leap; Pot-to-wat-o-my River, seeming like a whole family council around a skillet steaming over a fire, while the carrotty-headed mother was slightly walloping the youngest of the party for asking some improper question; Pawn-ee Fork, reminding one of those old-clothes shops kept by U. S., where the unsuspecting and improvident Indian, always in want, might be tempted to pledge his wild lands for a little ready cash, or a silver fork, or blue trinket; Man-hat-tan, as if to perpetuate the fact of the great head quality of the white man in dealing with the dusky ones for the purchase of the little island that carries as its name, a cover for the little transaction which transferred twenty-four dollars to the one, for the fourteen miles of real estate sandwiched between the North and East Rivers; Winne-bago, which sets one sneezing a coltish sneeze even at the head-waters of the Missis-sippi, and in her matronly presence; and a thousand other spicy aboriginal condiments, sprinkled, like pepper and salt over a luscious ham, over our continent, to make it more piquant and relishable in the taking.
1607 TO 1775.
“And vaguely here, Through the dim mists that crowd the atmosphere, We draw the outlines of weird figures cast In shadows on the background of the past.” LONGFELLOW’S “New England Tragedies.”
“’Tis pleasant through the loopholes of retreat To peep at such a world.” COWPER.
OF AMERICAN SETTLEMENTS GENERALLY.
Some American Grounds, like Coffee, unsettled.—Some Settlements pulled up by the Roots; others chilled by Fever and Ague.—Moist Soils objected to except by Doctors.—Unexpected Crops of Tomahawks from Wheat sown.—Settlements in America because of the Impracticability of making any at Home with Creditors.—Wild Oats sown between thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth Parallels.—Frequent Settlements make long Friends.—Settlements of Old Tavern Scores in Chalky Districts.—Religious Squalls prostrate some Plantations.—Indian Tempests uproot others.—Growth of Virginia, although Queen Elizabeth a femme sole.—Clergymen’s Settlements.—Brides unsettled.—Drake around the World.
THE FIRST YEAR’S CROP IN THE NEW SETTLEMENTS. ]
Clergymen’s discourses, like grape clusters, usually show two sides,—a positive or sunny one and a negative or shady one.
Desirous of bringing out the native bunches of our history more roundly against the leafy background of its verdant youth, we begin by showing alternating merits and demerits. And first the negative, or shady side.
The first damp observation shows that many parts of America have never been settled at all. In certain districts, grounds are found, as in coffee, unsettled; and good grounds exist for this, and, contradictory as it may seem, these are generally discovered in poor water.
In some cases, like those of Gosnold, Raleigh, De La Roche, and others, attempts were made, and settlements actually planted, which seemed for a time to thrive; but the impatient planters, like curious boys, were so desirous of ascertaining how much their plants had grown, that they pulled them up to look at the roots,—an inspection which the plants resented by sulking and dying out. In other instances, fever and ague was mixed up with the first seed, and this had a chilling effect upon the husbandmen.
Indeed, a hard fight is still going on in many parts of the country with this strong unsettler, the record of whose assaults and charges is found in the apothecary shops and doctors’ offices. These highly colored little stockades and forts with the rosy-hued land-offices for the sale of the most desirable real estate, with water-lots running in front of them, often indeed comprise the entire settlement.
In some instances, the character of the soil interfered seriously with any permanent occupation of the place. People who had no objection to watered silks, or watered paper, entertained, it has been found, well-grounded reasons for not liking an oozy surface, paragraphed between watery curves, and punctuated with bullfrogs and other pointed characters. Some of the early settlers did venture upon these maritime risks; but policy, or no policy, they ended their speculations under weeping willows, with Keat-like epitaphs over them,—
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
Oftentimes, even where the soil was rich, the early settler became discouraged by the unexpected crops he obtained. Planting wheat, he found that it came up a rank growth of Indian corn, tasselled out into tomahawks or sharp-pointed arrows, instead of the silken tufts which he had a right to look for in the order of nature. This result frequently took place in the valleys of the Connecticut and Mohawk, along the banks of the Mystic River, and upon the otherwise pleasant slopes overlooking Narragansett Bay.
In several instances, too, as in the case of the shipped by the council of the Plymouth Company, the seed thus sent was taken from heaps of full-grown vicious specimens, to be found only in London, or other large places, instead of being judiciously selected from healthy young stocks. Such seed, of course, not only became sour and fermented, but this fermentation spoiled whatever good grain was found accidentally mixed with it. This kind of crop was even worse than that of the tomahawks or arrows. Of course, these penal crops were short-lived. The profligate and dissolute soon died in the virtuous solitudes in which they had no previous experience at home to recall and compare; and escaped as soon as possible from settlements whose greatest crime, in their eyes, was that in them they could make no scores long enough to be worth running away from.
Some attempted settlements here, because they could not succeed in making any with their creditors at home. Of this class, many were found in the bounds of the London Company, scraped up under the charter of James I., granted in 1606,—a company which sowed their wild oats between the thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth parallels of latitude, but whose doings, undoings, and misdoings had no parallel whatever. Some of this seed, lying dormant, sprouted up in these regions as late as 1861, and covered the Carolinas and Virginia with a crop worse than teazles or Canada thistles.
The maxim that “frequent settlements make long friends,” was doubly verified along the New England coast, where the security of the settler could only be maintained by short and decisive footings-up of and with the breech-less and treaty-breaking Picts of our history, or by such often-planted gatherings as would prevent their attempts to run up a score.
It is almost needless to say that in all the regions from the Penobscot River to St. Augustine, under all the various charters, and among all classes of colonists, English, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, or Huguenot, settlements were often made on the walls and behind the doors of taverns, where the weekly score was kept,—a geological district mapped out in a chalk formation, the size of which seemed always to astonish the settler whenever his attention was particularly invited to it. Whatever his own fields bore, here the crop was unfailing; or rather its growth was generally in the inverse ratio to that of his wheat or tobacco patch.
In a few instances settlements, fairly and permanently made were suddenly uprooted by sudden squalls or tempests, which, razing the hair from the heads of the colonists, still, as we read of their ferocity and fury, raise our own. Such was the scalping-party that swept over Deerfield, the savage whirlwind down the valley of the Wyoming, and the rapid gust that licked up the little settlement of Cherry Valley.
Now and then also occurred a religious tornado, which prostrated whole patches of plantations, and which, at one time, threatened to become the prevailing winds of our American continent, taking the place even of our strong and steadily blowing trade-winds. Thus a company of French Huguenots, sent out in 1565, by Admiral Coligni, and planted in Florida, were overwhelmed by a party of Spaniards, under Melendez, who, after murdering them all, placed over their mutilated bodies this inscription: “We do this not as unto Frenchmen, but as unto heretics.” Which was the heretical part thus mercilessly dealt with, and which the French portion not intended to be harmed, cotemporary accounts do not furnish us with materials sufficient to enable us to discriminate. They do tell us, however, that this then fashionable mode of treating religious convictions was imitated by the countrymen of the French, acting upon what was then thought to be the proper interpretation of the merciful and benign principles of The Book, viz., “doing unto others, what they do unto you”; for soon after De Gourges, sailing from France with three ships, formed a surprise party to two Spanish forts, and after executing a Spanish dance with the garrison, took them out and hung them up in the trees like dried fruit; and fearing that the specimens might be mistaken, left above them the recipe, as follows: “I do this not as unto Spaniards, or mariners, but as unto traitors, robbers, and murderers.”
Whether the Spaniards thus done for properly appreciated the delicate discrimination, we are not informed.
To the statistician it may be of interest to know that of the abortive attempts at settlements within the present limits of the United States, six were made by the English, one by the Swedes, two by Spaniards, and two by the French. Lovers of that branch of political history will be able to wring out of these figures results more extraordinary than any we can torture them into.
On the whole, however, notwithstanding all drawbacks and misfortunes, the settlements gained steadily on the Indians, fever and ague, the cold and exposure, tomahawks, tavern-keepers, and surprise parties. Some marriages took place, but no settlements were made on the bride, except perhaps, in the course of time, her old father-in-law and mother-in-law, who were fortunate if they brought with them, as addition to her scanty stock, two whole empty trunks, their own. Queen Elizabeth did everything to promote the growth of population in her favorite colony of Virginia, except to furnish them with a personal example; but to make up for this omission, she sent out some Episcopal clergymen, provided with surplice and stole, and with licenses to marry. These obtained settlements for themselves, and zealously stimulated them in others.
As soon as the settlements began fairly to demonstrate that they would succeed, they were of course vigorously patronized, and in fact “encumbered with help.” Plenty of people there were then who at first, at the bare mention of American settlements, had placed their thumbs to their noses, and irreverently given their fingers a quick gyratory motion in the air, but who now came forward and claimed the merit of having always been the especial friends of the colonists, and pointed, like the very lieutenants and aid-de-camps of General Success, to their uniformly entertained convictions, triumphantly exclaiming, “Did we not always tell you so?” As candid historians, we cannot withhold our pencils from sketching the portraits of these burly friends of the early years of America; these large-hearted souls, who, sitting at home over their comfortable cannel-coal fires, piled cheerily up with the dividends from the stock of some of the companies formed for planting these shores, which they would not touch until it got up to par, and who then, fearing that their attachments might not be appreciated, cried out their undeviating devotion in voices that fairly drowned all others.
From these characters, which only shine in the full noonday of prosperity, we gladly turn to Sir Francis Drake, who, as early as 1586, did not hesitate to divide his last crust with the feeble and struggling colony of Roanoke Island, succoring them by timely aid, and not sucking from them the little feeble strength which short crops and long watchings against wary foes had left them. Although born in England, Drake had a soul which compassed the world, around whose waist he passed the second girdle which had ever belted it.
DRAKE WITH HIS FLEET SAILS ROUND THE WORLD. (p. 94) ]
THE SETTLEMENTS OF VIRGINIA, DELAWARE, MARYLAND, THE CAROLINAS, AND GEORGIA.
Colored Views whitened.—Blue Ridges and Black Welts in Virginia.—Virginia, smothered up in Infancy by Charters, survives Royal nursing.—Her Vigilance against her Suitors.—Cotton introduced.—How the World managed previously.—Charles I. and his numerous Autographs.—Georgia and Oglethorpe.—Charleston set up.—A Point on Old Point Comfort.—Tobacco first piped about.—Unmarried Girls as Articles of Import.—Estimated in, if not by, Pounds.—The Fancy Constitution of John Locke for North Carolina.—Its own Length, but Short Life.—South Carolina Rivers do not run up.—Popular Errors corrected.—John Wesley.—Singular Effect of his Preaching on the Indians.—Maryland as a Duck of a Colony canvassed.
Colored views are too apt to be given and taken of these six States, shading down from the dead African black, through every gradation of tint, to a hue almost unimpeach-ably Caucasian.
It is true that Virginia carried on her bosom a Blue Ridge, as in later times some of her progeny have borne on their backs darker ridges; but until 1620 no welts of the latter character stood out on her fair shoulders; and these, be it said to his shame, were raised by the master of a Dutch man-of-war who, on the very day in August that the Pilgrim party embarked in the Mayflower, at Delft-Haven, in his own country, landed twenty negroes for sale on the banks of the James River, leaving a black mark which two hundred and forty-five years have barely succeeded in washing out. In her very cradle, in 1606, Virginia was loaded down and half smothered with that royal blanket, a charter. Not content with this comforter, the royal nurses from London kept piling other blankets of the same kind upon the vigorous infant, and because it was vigorous, until within the short space of fourteen years no less than four were heaped upon her. These were far from being counter-panes, but on the contrary served in that warm climate to distress the child, and eventually to bring out eruptions. Under the second of these, in 1609, Maryland was tucked up in the same bed with Virginia; but in 1621, not finding the company agreeable, she was taken out by Lord Baltimore, and put into a pleasant and comfortable trundle-bed of her own; the chivalrous young lord naming the baby after Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I., and daughter of the gallant Henry of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV. of France. The year 1621 was emphasized in the infant settlement of Virginia by the introduction of cotton and the first written constitution,—two prolific American seeds that have each borne large harvests. Considering the varied uses to which the former is now applied in clothing human bodies and habitations, and the latter in padding political addresses and lawsuits, we are puzzled to conceive how the world got on, and especially how congressmen managed to make speeches, or lawyers to live, prior to those great discoveries,—discoveries more important in some aspects than those of iron, the Reformation, Illinois divorces, gunpowder, steam, the doctrine of legal insanity, Brandreth’s pills, and others, without which of course no well-ordered or well-digesting family can long proceed.
Seven years later Charles I. contracted to take the entire tobacco crop of Virginia; hoping probably by the free use of this narcotic to drug the alarmed political conscience of England.
The ship that took the first Maryland emigrants up the Potomac to their new settlement was called the Ark and the Dove, and carried in its beak the olive-branch of religious toleration.
In 1630, the same liberality in disposing of broad strips of American territory was shown by King Charles I. in granting a deed, embracing North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, to Sir Robert Heath; but in 1663 his son, the second Charles, desirous of improving his own handwriting, which had been somewhat neglected from his eighth year, in consequence of the necessarily active business life Cromwell had obliged him to lead, put his signature, early one foggy morning, to a paper which somebody laid in his way, and which, when brought out to the light, proved to be a grant to Lord Clarendon and several other pleasant, gentlemanly fellows, of this same small North American farm. This select little knot of farmers, after building a few barns on their farm, discovered that it was not large enough for their purposes. Like the Irishman who wanted an additional sixpence to drink the health of the gentleman who had generously given him a five-dollar bill, they desired a back field to dump manure on; and they finally obtained a second autograph from the obliging Charles to a bit of paper, allowing them to use forever the small patch lying westward to the Pacific. The farm was kept together until 1729, when it was divided up by George II. into two parts, called North and South Carolina; the latter half being, three years later, again split into two, and the lower part named, after the burly old landlord, Georgia. Nearly fifty years, however, before this division, upon a tongue of land called Oyster Point, and bivalved between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, Charleston was first set upon its uneasy foundations. Whether affected by the contiguity of Folly Island, by the use of too much pepper—always cheap in warm regions—upon the native oysters, or whether unduly exhilarated by too exclusive a contemplation of the cotton seed, which seems to have enlarged its dilated and dilating pupils, the place, although but seven feet above high tide, has always been given to high notions, and subject to a certain vertigo. An admirable ingredient, the Protestant Huguenot element, tossed out of France by the revoked edict of Nantes, was infused into the young settlement of South Carolina in 1685. The plant of liberty, however, early struck its anchoring roots close by the side of the cotton-plant; and although the governors, sent out by the royal proprietors from England, continually hacked into its smooth trunk, it still grew apace, and its bracing tonic odors filled not only the regions watered by the Santee and Pedee, but were wafted northwards and over the sister Colonies.
Although it is said that “old Virginny never tires,” it must have been because she had a robust constitution, for a busier body never existed. Always resisting the attempts made by the profligate royal governors upon her virginity, she had to watch them, day and night, for fear that they would steal her hard earnings and run away with them. In fact, during the sixty years that succeeded her birth at Jamestown, in 1606, she was constantly on the alert, putting up scarecrows on her cornfields, and notices of spring-guns, to warn away intruders; but these, so far from frightening away, only attracted the curious bills of the Indians. She was also forced to hold fast with might and main to the scanty wardrobe brought out by her from England, and with which those dissolute fellows, the young, titled, rakish, good-for-nothing overseers, were always taking liberties. Fortunately for her, as well as her sisters, the two Carolinas and Georgia, her shoulders were well covered by capes, so securely fastened on that they could not be snatched away, and their charms exposed to the rude stare or prying curiosity of idle visitors from France and England, and even from staid, sober Holland. And we here take the opportunity of repelling the slander so often circulated upon Virginia, that she is “the mother of States,”—an aspersion which, if true, would stain her virgin fame, and leave a bar sinister across the shields of the States thus born out of wedlock.
The first suitor for the budding affections of the youthful Georgia, or Georgiana, although bearing the suspicious name of Ogle-thorpe, proved to be a man of honorable intentions, high-minded, and in every respect faithful to his ardent vows,—a constant mate in all her joys and trials during his residence on the Savannah River, from 1732 to 1743. Virginia’s royal lovers, on the contrary, although always protesting their good intentions, were almost uniformly faithless. The last one bore the ill-omened, but appropriate name of Dun-more. He was very importunate, and in every way attempted to get her to make over her then valuable property to him, but in vain; and at last so mercenary did he become, and so disagreeable did he make himself, that she was obliged to show him the door.
The spirited damsel was always plucky, and soon after this domestic difficulty made up her mind to be wholly independent, and so in fact publicly gave out to the whole world, saying that “she didn’t care who knew it.” Massachusetts gallantly stood by the young girl in her declaration, and so did all her brothers and sisters; even little Rhody tossing up her jaunty sailor’s cap, and shouting out that, under Providence, she was ready to “sail in.”
The name of Sir Walter Raleigh is greenly twined through the earliest settlements of North Carolina. In her coasts he took a constantly augmenting interest, and furnished to the State its capital. His love for the new settlement only ceased to beat with his heart. His verse, which the author of “The Fairy Queen” describes as “sprinkled with nectar,” and “vieing with the notes of the summer nightingale,” was musical with her praises; and his “History of the World” lays at her feet the tribute of his warm, chivalric nature.
The duty which he felt and gave to the two Colonies, Virginia and North Carolina, was very different from the duties which his successors endeavored to draw from them,—duties so onerous as to drain not only the pockets but the hearts of the young communities from which they were pressed out.
But amid all the trials to which Virginia was subjected by the rapacity of her governors and the unsated appetites of councils, named by the home board corporators, there was one point which she could always contemplate with satisfaction, namely, Old Point Comfort,—a grandmotherly place, which her children then, and since, often visited, laying their hot heads lovingly in her lap, until her pleasant breezes cooled their feverish throbbings.
Tobacco was first grown in Virginia in 1616; and we crave leave to add, that although much piped about ever since, has never ceased to create a smoke; its curls hanging thickly and gracefully around the heads of its world-wide admirers from that time down to the present,—an instance of unchanged custom rarely seen.
Virginia, however, did not grow all of her luxuries; for, in 1620, we find her importing ninety respectable unmarried girls, who, on their arrival, and after payment of customary duties, were soon disposed of. This successful invoice was followed, the succeeding year, by a cargo of sixty more, the price for whom increased, after they were landed, from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco. How this advance affected the relations between them and the lower-priced wives of the preceding year, whether it laid the foundation for the difference between the F. F. V.’s and the white trash, the want of newspapers and of well-preserved family bills does not enable us to judge.
Certain it is that this commercial rape was as cordially acquiesced in by the seized damsels, as was the rape of the Sabines by those young ladies; and proved to be as beneficial to the growth of the infant settlement as that novel match-making on the banks of the Tiber.
The descendants of these unions on the James and Potomac would have been more numerous had not their numbers been thinned off by Indian knives, which were very busy in 1622, 1623, and 1644–1646. This last war was followed, three years later, by a petty imitation of the civil strife which had raged for seven years between the Parliament and Charles I. in England, and which ended, in the latter country, by taking off the king’s head, and in Virginia by taking away many of their former constitutional privileges. Cromwell fumigated them thoroughly in their own tobacco-smoke, until all the smell of loyalty was gone. Upon the accession of Charles II., in 1660, arbitrary legislation was sought here, as in England, to stamp out the rights of the people which had silently but steadily grown up into a stiff crop; but resistance followed, and in this struggle between Virginia and the crown the succeeding years were spent, until 1754.
The principal event in the history of the settlement of North Carolina was the fancy constitution furnished for it in 1669, by John Locke, whose understanding about it differed wholly from that of the people, through whose heads it never could be got. Besides having plenty of time on his hands, Locke made his constitution so long, and divided it up into so many parts, that the youngest settler died before he had read it half through, and bequeathed the further perusal of it to his descendants, with all his shares in what it most resembled,—the Dismal Swamp.
A sniff of this vague, shadowy constitution, or bundle of airy rights, by the adjacent settlement of South Carolina, affected her with such a fit of sneezing, that it kept on from that time until 1865, and from which she only found relief now and then in her cotton pocket-handkerchiefs.
We may remark that it is a vulgar error to suppose that the rivers in South Carolina run up hill,—just as it is a common mistake to believe that the Tar River, in North Carolina, originates in a turpentine district, and flows in a thick stream into Pamlico Sound. We may as well, also, correct the almost universal notion, that the inhabitants of Charleston have a particular fondness for fire as a steady, every-day diet.
The chief incident which marked the uneventful record of the Georgia settlement was the advent, in 1736, of John Wesley.
He preached in the Methodist language to the Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees; but those short-lived tribes, attending on a certain occasion one of his camp-meetings, and listening to the benevolent missionary giving out one of his brother Charles’s hymns, became so discouraged that they went back to their own camp and ways.
In addition to what we have already said of Maryland, we would state that its mild climate attracted canvas-back ducks, as its mild principles of religious toleration brought to its borders swarms of emigrants. Both have had a damp residence amid its amphibious shores, where the land seems two thirds water, and the water a little more moist than elsewhere.
MAP OF MARYLAND. (p. 105) ]
JOHN SMITH.
John Smith historically considered.—The Number in Leading Cities stated.—How classified.—Why he is not put in a separate Volume or in an Appendix.—Origin of the Smiths.—American Genealogical Trees.—Smiths up a Stump, in the Sap, and dangling from the Branches.—The Antiquity and Ubiquity of the Smiths.—Variety and Extent of their Occupations and Operations.—Will probably in time own all the World.—Comic Situations of John Smiths in Cities, at Family Dinner-Parties, at Prayer-Meetings, at Balls, in Titles to Real Estate, etc.—Whether he can be sued.—Other Legal Questions in reference to him considered.—John Smith of Pocahontas Fame a Myth.
As a magnet, laid amid a heap of iron-filings, gathers them all to itself in close-fitting unity, so the figure of John Smith crystallizes about it the elements of the early settler’s life in Virginia. Nor upon the banks of the Chickahominy alone does John Smith stalk in romantic proportions; but through all times, in every kingdom, state, city, and village, at all epochs, and in every shade of barbarism or civilization, is he found. New York holds 187; Philadelphia, 231; Boston, 35; Brooklyn, 118; London, 480; and every capital in the world its own appropriate complement.
No railroad can be run that does not touch his farm; no joke that does not skim his peculiarities; no portrait that does not contain his features; no conductor’s stealings that does not comprise his contributions; no miller’s breakfast-bell that does not toll the knell of a portion of his grist.
As dyers classify mankind by the color of their skins, wine-growers belt the world by isothermal vine-lines, and lawyers divide the human race into plaintiffs and defendants, so the historian, straining his telescopic gaze over the centuries and the globe, and discarding the division of the species into “mankind and the Beecher family,”—no longer appropriate since the publication of “Norwood” reduced the latter down to the common level,—justly sweeps all mankind into two great classes, the Smiths and the rest of creation.
And so John Smith finds appropriate place, not only in every history, but a special niche and chapter to himself. We might perhaps have put this select mention of a great public benefactor, an erudite scholar, and universal toiler, into a note, smothered up in an appendix, dimmed by the milky-way of small asterisks, and hazily obscured by countless references and authorities; but this injustice to the merits of an ancient family, whose tombs mound every churchyard, and whose door-plates shine on almost every house in our cities and towns not appropriated to drugs, groceries, or confectioneries, would, we are persuaded, sorely wound the public conscience.
The origin of the Smiths, like that of so many other distinguished families, is involved in distressing doubt. Audacious investigation, with a natural wish to penetrate to the roots, and too fearless of consequences where prudence perhaps might be better satisfied with a limited view of ancestry, has pressed its inquiries up and down genealogical trees until it has unearthed Smiths at the base, Smiths in the sap, Smiths up the stump, and even Smiths dangling at the end of the branches. No nation looks down in theory from such lofty heights of indifference upon ancestral distinctions as the American; none can better afford to cut down their genealogical, as they do their natural, forests; yet none are so fond of looking up to these airy and waving altitudes, and none that more carefully spare the tree which in youth sheltered them, and which waves, like the flag, long and fruity to their eyes. An American book of leading families would be larger than the London Directory, and make the fortune of even the Congressional Printer. True, the family herald would in nearly all these cases, like the chroniclers of ancient states, and the biographer of the Smiths, be obliged to substitute foggy conjecture for well-defined tracings. They would all find that their researches would, if carried back far enough, converge to the same focal point; and if produced at equal distances in the future, diffuse themselves into a common social, monetary, and undistinguishing equality: for families and states are much like boys at the ends of a balanced board, now up, now down, at one time touching the ground, then curving upward through medium spaces to a culminating point, while some one at the other end is noiselessly passing through a reversed career.
And so John Smith balances and pendulates on the same board with a Van Rensselaer, John Brown with a Tozewell, Mr. Snooks with a Winthrop, and John Doe with a Hampton.
There is, we think, but little doubt that the Hebrew Samson, the Greek Hercules, the Spanish Cid, the Scandinavian Thor, and the English Arthur of the Round Table, were each the John Smith of his nation and time, a multiform unity swinging round the circle of varied labor, hard work, and heroic deeds, accomplishing under one name—a family one, possessed at various times by several individuals—the work of all reapers, sewing-machines, cow-milkers, cotton and woollen factories. These national heroes, like the John Smiths, their descendants now, were arrayed in warm climates in a fragmentary style of short dress; in the middle regions in a Highland garb, appropriately frilled or furred; and in the north with a canine material, heroic in quality, and modishly artistical,—a bark.
The most reliable studies trace the smith genealogy back to Vulcan’s workshop, the original Smith being one of those employed on designs for Achilles’s shield,—a claim which experts in coats-of-arms will not readily stamp as a forge-ry.
ORIGINAL FULL-LENGTH PORTRAIT OF JOHN SMITH. (p. 110) ]
As there is no period of history without its John Smith, so there is no profession that does not enroll, no trade that does not contain, no occupation, from an office-holder’s up to that of an honest man’s, that does not embrace his name. Everywhere, on the sea and land; between every parallel of latitude, almost between every pair of sheets; at every pole and at every polling-place; on all rivers and in every strait; at every point, and even at Point-no-point; on the top, at the middle and bottom of every hill, enterprise, company, board of directors, and job; in all churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples; preaching, singing, and listening; talking all tongues, as well as curing, drying, and eating them; in prisons, police-stations, pulpits, grand-jury and other boxes; to-day hung, to-morrow putting on his black cap and sentencing the culprit to the rope’s end, and the day following condemning a pair to a less hempen noose; in the pugilistic ring, or ecclesiastical fight; the actor on the stage, and at the same time the spectator in the box, looking at himself personating his own character,—for every character is his,—everywhere, and in everything, is found this jolly, morose, lazy, active, sleepy, wakeful, fighting, pacific, coarse, refined, fat, lean, tall, short, blue-eyed, black-eyed John Smith.
In truth, when we think of him as ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipresent, doing all things in all places, carrying on all businesses, living on all the real estate, owning at some time or other all the personal property, pocketing all the greenbacks, whistling to all the dogs, riding all the horses, looking after all the little poodle dogs, buying shoes and stockings for all the children agreeable and disagreeable, we get into such a world of John Smiths, such a nightmare of Johns, such a maelstrom of Smiths, such a gurgling, roaring, splitting, spitting, laughing, screeching, titilated, exhilarated, carnival, and Fourth of July of John Smiths, that we seem to be in a room lined with mirrors that reflect only John Smiths from all sides; indeed, we almost fancy ourselves a John Smith, our father and mother a John Smith, and all our aunts, cousins, uncles, nephews, brothers, and sisters, and even their clergymen, grocers, shoemakers, bootblacks, to be John Smiths, and that our last note and the mortgage on our house is owned by John Smith.
But the Smith family do not create all the humor and spend all the jollity upon others. Funny are the scenes which transpire among themselves. At a family party two John Smiths introduced, and each staring at his other self, is a conundrum; three a charade, in which the whole company give it up. A popular young lady, with card in her belt to carry the memory of her numerous engagements, finds herself swimming in doubt as to the identity of her partners, when John Smith claims her in the next dance, then for the following cotillon, then bows over her hand for the succeeding polka, and so confronts her at every turn of the figure and every return of the dance, until she doubts her own individuality, and requests to be baptized over again with a new name to get out of the tangle. Then at a family dinner-party of Smiths, when Mr. Smith asks Mr. John Smith the part of the turkey he prefers, and several voices in different tones and keys indicate as many different portions of the bird, there is a delightful series of warm explanations which enables the meal to become healthily cool, while each of the responders courteously leaves the piece he wants and takes one he did not desire.
Among the comic situations which Mr. Smith unconsciously creates are, that of a conveyancer, in a large city, endeavoring to trace a title through a J. S., or trying to ascertain which of the one hundred in the directory is the rightful defendant in a judgment, or the mortgagor in a mortgage, constituting a lien on the property sought to be transferred; or a country cousin, for the first time in New York or Philadelphia, consulting the directory to find her puzzled way to the forgotten residence of her cousin John Smith, or innocently asking a polite but humorous gentleman, in the street whether he knows John Smith’s house; or a clergyman in a city prayer-meeting asking John Smith to lead in prayer, and finding three or four, with closed eyes, responding to the request; or a notary making up his mind where to leave a notice of protest of a large note on the indorser John Smith, who wittily wrote his name without any address under it. Indeed, it would be one of the causes célèbres for a jury to determine whether a child might not guiltlessly mistake his parent who bore only this undistinguishing name; whether a forgery of the name could be committed; whether an express company be bound to deliver a trunk to this nominis umbræ; or whether a wife, Mrs. John Smith, could be lawfully convicted of eloping with any one.
Then when John Smith comes to die, in the churchyard, and afterwards when the dead arise—but we stagger under the vision of puzzled bones and stop.
We cannot write more lucidly the history of the John Smith of Pocahontas fame. It grows mythical the more we look at it; an abstraction dancing over the coals of the early settlement of Virginia, a face and figure flitting like a twisting flame, up, around, and through the grate; seeming as we try to fix our attention upon him like a dozen different men, one falling in love with the young squaw, another surveying the James and Rappahannock, another mastering the turbulent spirits of a dissolute and discontented settlement; another caught and brought before Powhatan, while a graceful girl of twelve summers gently puts away the descending club; another sailing to England, and peeping out ever and anon among the friendly faces that make the living frame to her young virgin face, yet again dissolving and melting into the gray dimness of the morning light. Of only one thing do we feel certain in regard to John Smith in general, the average John Smith, that the portrait here presented, taken by instantaneous photography, representing his multitudinous character, is the only genuine and original likeness ever published.
CHAPTER IV.
OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE NEW ENGLAND STATES.
Views of the New England States and Character determined by one’s Church.—Partial Notions about Clocks, Nutmegs, Pumpkin Pies, etc.—Getting an Historical Coach to one’s self.—Why the Puritans did not hang up their Stockings on their first Christmas Eve.—Their nearest Neighbors.—Indian Points and other Points.—Governor Carver and Want of Meats.—Massasoit, and how he kept his Faith in-violate.—New Hampshire on the Rampage.—Why Boston was begun, and why it is not finished.—Roger Williams and his Providential Ways and Doings.—Connecticut founded, although its Charter not found.—The Wind against Cromwell.—Harvard College.—Vermont and her Ways and Means.
“Tell me,” says a witty Frenchman, “what time in the morning a man rises, and I will tell you his notions of the character of the Germans.” Tell us the kind of church a man attends, and we will undertake to give you his opinion of the character of the Puritan Pilgrims, and the objects and value of the New England settlements. Not more various are men’s religions than their New England convictions; as checkered and contrary as the black and white squares on a Scotch shawl. Some people, of pious trainings but of an agricultural turn of mind, hold the idea that New England came, like the wonderful coach in the story of Cinderella, from a pumpkin; and hence travel naturally to the conclusion that the principal mission of her people is to keep up Thanksgiving day.
Others run all their lives with the notion that the Yankee States were settled by a race of peripatetic traders,—a revival of the school of Aristotle,—let out in Greece, and taking a play-spell here. Their picture of New England would be a pedler, dipped like a tallow-candle in an economical, tight-fitting suit of tawny homespun, driving a wagon full of tin notions, clocks, and a variety of domestic nutmegs, artistically whittled out of bass-wood, singing Old Hundred, with a pitch-pipe close to his nose to keep it in tune. Others, on the contrary, regard it as a large, full-bearing orchard in autumn, laden with golden fruit, fall-pippins, pearmains, seek-no-furthers, russets, and spitzenbergs, supplying its owners, the neighborhood, and the distant market with their incomparable harvest. Fortunate for the historian, for debating-societies, and the magazines are these variegated opinions. They give a spiciness to New England, as if she were a tropical garden instead of a poor-man’s patch, fenced in with rocks and spiked down with long pegs to prevent the frost in the spring from heaving her up uncomfortably. They serve, like French cookery, to present the same dish simmering in various sauces under different aspects and names, and yet all from the same little market-basket.
Cooke, the comic actor, who hated to be crowded, once so successfully used upon a stage-driver his extraordinary power of changing the expression of his face,—getting in at one door of the coach, slipping out of the one opposite, and again presenting himself with a new style of visage,—that he took all the inside to himself. And so it has been with the New England character. It has so many phases that it requires almost the entire omnibus of American history to itself. One point is quite certain, that the first settlers had a hard place to land on, and a great many sharp Indian points to provide against after they had landed.
St. Augustine was fifty-five, Jamestown fourteen, and the baby Dutch settlement on Manhattan Island ten years of age, when the little English congregation which had passed thirteen years at Leyden in Holland,—stowed away in two small vessels, one of sixty and the other of one hundred and eighty tons,—stepped out of their cold cabins upon the colder rock of Plymouth. It was four days before Christmas; but for want of good fireplaces they did not hang up their stockings. It was as much as they could do to keep from hanging themselves. Their nearest white neighbors were at Port Royal, Nova Scotia, five hundred miles distant,—a trifle too far away to invite New-Year’s calls.
Most of the party were obliged to wade on shore, thus breaking the ice for those who followed; the spray of the sea freezing as it fell upon them, making them quite ice-clad, in fact almost as shaggy and pointed as their inside purposes and character.
They carried on shore one dead body, the only one who had died on the voyage of one hundred and six days; the first planting in that field, which in time, like the rest of the world, was to be claimed as God’s acre.
LANDING OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS AND MOTHERS. (p. 118) ]
The soil upon which they settled bore more charters, Indian arrows, and gravestones than pumpkins or corn; and even two years after the landing, we are told that the stock on hand of the latter was so small that only five kernels were allowed for each private,—an allowance which, since the great Rebellion, seems incredibly small.
There was a Carver among the party, and, being a sharp fellow, he was appointed Governor; but as there was but little meat to be sliced,—deer being scarce and high priced,—and the Indians seldom giving any quarter, he soon pined away and died. Cape Cod was not far distant, but the emigrants being without boats, the fish, especially without potatoes, were poor picking. A few years later, however, and there were large fishing-parties made up, which not only took in fish, but each other, by hook and by crook. The grapes of Martha’s Vineyard, at the time of which we speak, hung so high as to be very sour. Besides the Puritans, it is well known, set their faces against the cup, as they did against kissing. The modern town of Dux-bury, which nudges Plymouth on the east, was then too young to afford much game, even for the long reaches of Miles Standish, who was obliged to content himself with such small shooting as the Narragansetts afforded.
Massasoit, however, was the fast friend of the settlers, and made a treaty which, in the bluest times, he always kept in-violate.
In 1629 a patent was received from that accomplished penman Charles I., incorporating “The Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay, in New England”; which eventually proved to be, what most patents are, not worth the paper it was written on. New Hampshire and a part of Maine, included in this patent, was as early as 1622 sold out to two enterprising young gentlemen, Sir Ferdinand Gorges and Captain John Mason; but after an experiment of nineteen years, these royal speculators resold their state rights to Massachusetts, which held on to them until 1680, when Charles II., in order to make a place for a friend and to encourage lawsuits about titles in the idle courts, erected New Hampshire into a separate Province, independent of Massachusetts, but dependent on himself.
Lying under cold snow-white sheets, with jealous neighbors, the French settlers of Canada and Acadia, ready to put pins in the youngster and keep her crying, and if possible to stunt her growth, Maine was longest in her cradle of any of the infant settlements. As early as 1602 some Frenchmen landed on her coast, but only remained long enough to make a few eyelet-holes in that watery frill which the busy but chill fingers of the Atlantic has wrought upon her eastern hem. It was reserved for the sturdier Saxon race to take the infant in hand, and, by hardier treatment, to bring her up to robuster strength. The first serious effort was made in 1622. That court pet, Gorges, obtained, in 1639, a charter, which not only covered the present State, but lapped over into the borders of Massachusetts. The latter resented this interference with her own by making counter-claims, and in 1652 insisted upon taking the child under its exclusive protection. The contest, carried into the English courts, outlived of course its original promoters, but was at last, in 1677, terminated, to the astonishment of the suitors and the disgust of the lawyers. The custody of the infant, now grown to be a stripling, was awarded to Massachusetts, which, always looking after the Maine chance, got a most obstreperous minor in charge.
In 1630 a band of eight hundred and forty bodies and souls, led by John Winthrop, and tempted by a spring of good water, settled on the peninsula of Shawmut, and began Boston, which, we are glad to say, is not finished yet. May it never be; but, ever growing, may it carry on wagon-making as successfully as in former days, furnishing hubs for those covered transportation carts which trundle westward, and which, if allowed to stand still over night, swarm into a new colony the next morning.
The following year a miniature church and state experiment was made in the Massachusetts settlement, by limiting the eligibility to civil office to church-members, whether civil or not.
The first log-cabin builders, who had themselves fled from the knife of the law, whetted it to a keen edge and turned it upon their fellow-sufferers, who differed from them in their religious or moral sentiments. Profane swearing, tippling, taking interest on loans of money, and wearing expensive jewelry became legal crimes, among those who had suppressed with Spartan rigor their exercise in themselves and their families. The next generation, in 1658, could not tolerate drab coats or drab principles, and sought to put down the new fashions by hanging up several of their owners in them. The wood-colored styles multiplied of course, notwithstanding the crimson mode of dealing with them,—a mode which, whenever mentioned, brings up a flush on every fair New England cheek to this day. The flush is not likely to be left unsummoned so long as the enemies of New England have any ink left, or so long as her own gifted sons preserve in choicest amber the well-embalmed and dramatic specimens.
In 1635 Roger Williams, illuminated by principles of religious toleration, unkindled as yet in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts Bay, Salem, and Boston, carried his softly burning torch out of the reach of the chill breath of the General Court, which sought in vain to blow out the wavering flame.
He pitched his tent on the Blackstone River where it widens into Narragansett Bay, and there grafted such a lovely little bud of religious equality upon the old trunk of settled law, that, swelling under Providence into the State of Rhode Island, it has become one of the finest fruit-trees in our American orchard. Some people, of aquatic notions and learning their geography in the pitching hold of a yacht, have erroneously supposed that Rhode Island was included in the state of Newport. Such notions rest on very sandy foundations, and are no more to be trusted than the speculations of the idly learned about the round tower of that resort for capital sea-bathing.
The settlement of Rhode Island, like the other American plantations, was kept alive and stirring by Indian wars; but, aided by the Narragansetts, she succeeded at last, after attempting to bury their hatchets, in burying the Pequods themselves, leaving not one to perpetuate the seed.
Meanwhile, the valley of the Connecticut, visited by exploring parties from Plymouth Colony under the younger Winthrop, and by heavy flanked Dutchmen from the island of Manhattan, had also attracted attention to its valuable real estate; and its lots of course were mapped out and deeded in that first-class broker’s office, the Court of Charles I., situated in London.
Wethersfield, although it then had no onions to affect their eyes, made the mouths of a party of emigrants, who went there under Hooker in June, 1636, to water pleasantly, as they gaped over its broad meadow-lands, shaded with huge trees, and dipping their heavy grasses into the wide and flowing river.
But these huge trees at Wethersfield and Windsor, under which the infant plantations of Connecticut were made, were less valuable than the large old oak at Hartford, which afterwards became more famous for standing mute, and hiding its secrets, than the talking oak of Tennyson.
Ten years later, in 1638, New Haven was founded, built from the first on the square; its long sand-reaches cooled in the shade of branches that waved frequent welcomes to successive bands of settlers. But a shadier event for Charles I. occurred this year in England, in the detention of John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell, with all their traps and plunder, after it and they had been safely stowed away under hatches on board ship.
How little do we know what’s in the wind? Had it blown that day southwest instead of northeast, Charles I. might have worn his handsome but worthless head many years longer; the Stuart family to-day might perhaps be occupying the state chair of Victoria and the heavy Hanoverians; and the descendants of Messrs. Cromwell and Hampden be keeping store in some of our villages, or even got so low as to become aldermen, members of assembly, or even descended to the House of Representatives.
The same year John Harvard left a donation of three thousand dollars to a select school, founded two years previously at Newtown, which took his money and name. From this small, yet early laid foundation, Harvard College has since got up several Storeys; and although Sparks have been applied to the edifice, it still stands, like a tower set on a hill, diffusing its learned light to Holmes happy and genial, reaching upward to Longfellow, and even illuminating men Whittier than he.
We have now briefly traced the settlements of five of the New England States, bringing down their history to 1643, when, with the exception of spunky Rhode Island, they formed their first union against the witty but out-witted French of Acadia on the northeast, the trading, solid Dutch of Manhattan, and the universally hostile Indian tribes, whose enmity now became in the inverse ratio of their hunting-grounds. The sixth of these States, Vermont, came late and strugglingly among her brothers and sisters. Both New York and New Hampshire pouted and grumbled at the appearance of the new-comer, and threatened to smother her in the cradle. But the child, fed on simple food, and breathing the healthy air of the Green Mountains, grew apace after its birth in 1724, and got such a good Constitution in 1777, that she at length acquired all her rights; and what by fishing in the Connecticut, hunting among her evergreen hills, and keeping to her mutton and her last, she looked as she sat in the old continental schoolhouse as fresh, blooming, and thrifty as any. Vermont early sent away her surplus beef and swine, but she kept plenty of pluck at home.
It is sometimes said that if the Western States had been first discovered, New England would never have been settled at all; but this seeming reproach upon the hard and stern features of New England soil and climate warms into a compliment when we see what fabrics of iron, cotton, and woollen have been conjured from her narrow means, what wealth dangles from her hooks, what oil she gets without blubbering, what a clean white marble face she puts on our houses and stores, and what nutmegs and tropical wonders she picks up from her beeches and haze-le bushes, and what seasoning she distributes to spice our tables with literary condiments.
CHAPTER V.
THE SETTLEMENT OF NEW YORK.
The Spirits of the Age present at its Foundation.—Who they were and how they were affected.—The Wonders of Manhattan in September, 1609.—How the Animal, Vegetable, Ornithological, Maritime, and Human Productions then compared with those now.—What New York Lots were worth two hundred and sixty Years ago.—Their Owners.—Hudson’s Trip up the River.—What he saw and didn’t see.—The four Dutch Governors; their Doings and Misdoings.—Sketch of Holland and the Characteristics which she impressed upon New Amsterdam.—Bravery evinced in settling Brooklyn.—How the Van Rensselaers and other Vans were enticed hither.—The Troubles and Sorrows of Wouter Van Twiller and William Kieft.—Of the Surrender of the Dutch, and the Instalment of English Rule in New York.—Petrus Stuyvesant retires from Business.—His Farm and what he raised on it.
THE SPIRITS OF THE AGE LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS OF NEW YORK. (p. 127) ]
The spirits were not enclosed in a corner-stone, as is customary at these raisings, but were more judiciously used by the sagacious Hendrick Hudson among the bewildered spectators.
“The spirit of the age,” says Bancroft, “was present when the foundations of New York were laid.” More justly might it be said that a good deal of spirits, including a fair amount of Holland schnaps, put up in long gray-colored jugs, was there, carried on shore by order of the honest skipper of the Half-Moon, and duly distributed on the auspicious occasion. The corner-stone of the Western metropolis was laid by a mason employed by the Dutch East India Company, whose wide breeches, glittering knee-buckles, and large slouched hat, set off by a smart feather, seemed to the straight-limbed, wondering Algonquins, as they huddled in friendly curiosity around him, to belong to some well-fed, fat Mercury, fresh from a distant Olympus, taking a pleasant trip to their simple island.
Beautiful were the sights which greeted the eye of the adventurous Dutch navigator, as on the twenty-third day of September, 1609, he cast anchor in the broad bay of New York. On every side the shores were feathered by woods, freshly painted by the liberal hand of an American autumn. The varied trees, the golden willow, the scarlet sumach, the red and white maples, the sassafras, mixing with the oaks and beeches and the birch,—unassociated as yet with schools or discipline,—had begun to blaze in their varied gorgeous hues, and their leaves to cover the ground with carpets of beautiful patterns. Upon the branches climbed vines that fell from tree to tree, draping them in garments whose innocent height rivalled those of the Indians who found shelter beneath them.
Through these woods the mocking-bird trilled its varied song, its original strains almost as liquid and sweet as those of its mimic successor, the unfeathered biped who now lures the modern New-Yorker to greenly arching saloons, and there exchanges notes with him. The humming-bird, too, darted in sparkles through the leafy avenues,—not as now carried upon the top of a lady’s head, but dipping its own bill in the wild flowers that hung through all the Boweries of Manhattan. Pigeons, unplucked, sped unhurt through all the saloons of nature. Doves, not those mellifluous names that invite to restaurants, and there present their dear bills to the stranger, but the gayly plumed and round-necked birds, cooed in the thickets. Coveys of quails occupied the place of those other coveys, which, turned to jail-birds, now flutter behind bars. Here and there troops of wild turkey wheeled in long circles, instead of dangling, as now, by one leg in front of a Broadway market.
In the untroubled waters oysters made their own beds, and tucked themselves in as they saw fit, undisturbed by the injurious names of hard shell which a party of frogs or others might croak out around them. The opossum had not yet lent its name to deceitful concealments, but openly showed its offspring in its domestic pouch.
Turtles, although wearing the green, innocently walked around with their feet upon the honest earth, instead of spreading them upwards in the air, with their backs uneasily indorsing the city’s dirty sidewalks, their office-like fatness attracting the liquorish eye of some gourmand.
Even the bears licked their own cubs with innocent delight, not only in Wall Street, but in all the unwalled places in and about New York. The thrifty otter—the only banker on the whole island—made his deposits in safety; nor was he frightened, as he slowly accumulated the savings of his well-spent life, by the lively sallies of the jackdaw, carrying ever with him the burglarious instruments of his trade; nor heeded the harmless slanders of the woodpecker, as he gratified his strange taste in finding out and exploring the tender or rotten character of the neighboring trees.
In keeping with these sylvan and rustic scenes were the native owners. They disdained the waste of time involved in the frequent change of dress; appearing in the same costume, morning and evening. Nothing could be in greater contrast than the simple toilets of these proprietors of the island of Manhattan and their painted successors of our own day. The few men who owned the 141,486 lots into which the surface of New York City is now triturated, seemed, in the plainness of their attire and manners, to be only squatters upon a territory not their own, nor carried their feathered heads half as high as the modern trader in tape and calico, squeezed into a space often only sixteen feet and eight inches wide by one hundred deep. Children were kept in due subordination. Instead of attending parties or clubs, they were quietly hung upon a nail at the door of the wigwam; the heir of a square mile being suspended in unwhimpering silence, until his grave progenitors took their fill of nuts and sleep. There were no complaints of taxes, dirty streets, very common councils, or cheating at elections.
The uncertainty and tediousness of legal proceedings were unknown. The plaintiff was his own attorney, jury, judge, and sheriff; deciding the case summarily, and doing execution on the defendant between sunset and sunrise.
Lingering only a few days among these primitive inhabitants,—shooting game, doubtless, from the ancient trees occupying the very spot at the corner of Nassau and Wall Streets, where, in less than one hundred and eighty years afterwards, the first Federal Congress met, where, four years after that meeting, Washington was inaugurated President, and where, a few generations later, more money was daily disbursed than would have sufficed to buy all the then settlements of America, Hudson turned his little craft of eighty tons up the river which has since borne his name. Banks, since famous for historic events; or wed to literary matings, happy and dear, attracted for forty leagues his pleased attention. Wealth and taste have since embossed cities, towns, cultured villas, and grounds upon these shores; fringed them with varied foliage native and exotic, and thrown over them all the lace-like illusions of legends, stories, poetic fancies, and fairy-tales; but to the simple, honest eyes of Hudson nothing had ever presented itself more wonderful than that ever unrolling panorama of wood and wave, dripping with the intense and varied colors with which nature saturates and transfigures our autumnal woods.
The bosky reaches of Hoboken; the Palisades with their high, massive walls propping up the sky, which leans as lovingly as heaven can upon New Jersey without being taken for railroad purposes; the placid waters, since named Spuyten Duyvil, which parted Manhattan from the main-land, and sent back from its well-framed looking-glass, promontory and foliaged steeps, laced with scarlet vines; the gentle slopes of Westchester, sliding into the sea-like river, unwounded by rails, and innocent of the foul-mouthed smoke of candle-factories; the long-curving bays of Rockland, adorned with crimson capes, pinned with rocky points, yet so as advantageously to show off their bare shoulders; the native site of Sunnyside, where after dwelt the gentle, lamb-like Irving, as true and loyal a soul as was ever lent to men to draw them up where late he went back himself; the grand, majestic Highlands, with their muster-roll of glories, pennoned with crimson banners hung out from every rock-anchored fort of nature, among them Cro’ Nest, the home of that Culprit Fay, whose love treason has been pardoned before so many domestic tribunals; the lake-like bay of New-Burgh, so well sentinelled by its double sentry of shores, which challenge sharply every passer-by; and the dentating, curved shores that stretch in slow haste northwards; often channelled by playful brooks that lay their kissful obedience into the loving lap of the mother river, or were clasped by bracelets of burning maples, whose clustered garnets shone on her rounded arms,—all these varied charms quite intoxicated the sober Hudson, keeping him constantly on deck, and causing heavy draughts on the ship’s supply of Schiedam.
He brought to the Half-Moon off the present city of Hudson,—then altogether too young to present him with its freedom in a box; and in a small boat was rowed up the fresh waters of the river beyond, as far as Albany,—the Trojans assert as far as Troy; but in this a-bridge-d compendium we cannot pause to lay our hands on the necessary documents to settle this question.
DUTCH GENTLEMAN TRADING WITH THE INDIANS. (p. 134) ]
Suffice it to say that there being no legislature in session at Albany, he got away without being fleeced, or even being obliged to listen to a speech from the speaker. He was also spared a sight of the collection in the Agricultural Hall, and thus kept his favorable opinion of the soil and its capacity. His report to his employers, on his return in November following, was such as to stimulate the company to send another vessel the next year to trade with the natives; a trade which was conducted too much on the “heads I win, tails you lose” system to be other than advantageous to the Batavian pedlers. A few of the traders remained, opening stores in the slow settlement of New Amsterdam; putting up a windmill in what is now Pearl Street, raising the wind very easily, and taking as generous a toll from the Indian grists, as the natives now take from the strangers who frequent the island in search of bargains. The settlement grew then, as now, by importation; for although its trade increased, it was not until 1625 that the first white child was born within the present limits of the State. The growth of the place, however, was such, that in 1613, Samuel Argal, returning from an expedition against the French settlement of Port Royal, was attracted into the harbor of New Amsterdam, where, finding several huts and the windmill, he compelled an allegiance, during his two days stay, to England. The arbitrary principles of James I., however, were too repulsive to the sturdy Dutch to make them adhere to this allegiance longer than the existence of the force which compelled it. The Republic of the United Netherlands, twisted together of the two strands, furnished the one by the religious freedom generated by the Reformation under Luther, and the other drawn out by the mailed hand of William of Orange from the hard clutch of Philip II. of Spain, held by its strong yet soft cord the early emigrants from it to New Netherlands to an affectionate loyalty and love for itself. In no country is patriotism stronger than in Holland. Small in dimensions, struggling against the whole force of the sea on the north, from whose overwhelming devastation it is only saved by dikes, anchored by gigantic stones brought from Norway, and built up from thirty to fifty feet higher than the land they guard; its flat meadow surface, ever moist with water, divided by canals which serve the purposes both of fences and roads in other lands, and through which the water is kept flowing by a wonderful and hourly worked system of pumping,—this little state, conquered from the sea by industry, from Spain and the Inquisition by bravery unmatched, from a moneyed aristocracy by incessant vigilance, stood a peer among the largest and proudest monarchies of Europe. Her traders carried their square-rigged, heavy sterned ships in every port from the Cape of Good Hope to Lapland; and Amsterdam drew bills of exchange against shipments of linen and woollen goods, manufactured by herself, and of spices imported from her East India possessions, upon every commercial city in the world. The sea-fowl that drifted across her bright, sparkling meadows daily from the ocean, which she held at arm’s-length,—although rolling its white surf higher than the chimneys of her houses,—could take a bird’s-eye view of a population the thriftiest, of cities the most prosperous, of homes the most comfortable, in Europe. While Dutch enterprise thus built up a happy state at home, and sent thriving colonies abroad, her scholars were advancing the republic of letters, and giving international law to the world. Grotius at this time defined the rights and duties of war, and helped to bridle its atrocities by bits hammered from the sickles and reaping-hooks of peace. No wonder, then, that the thick-set burghers of Utrecht, Haarlaem, Leyden, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, although transferred to a newer Amsterdam, clung with pride to their native land, damp though it was in every pore; and that the square vrouw gratefully preserved her family recollections along with her thickly quilted petticoats, her oleycooks, krulers, and her own dark, well-aired complexion.
The government of the settlement was, although commercial in its aims and purposes, very maternal, whether under the East India Company, which lasted until 1623, or under the West India Company, which then succeeded it with larger powers and authority. Under the last company Peter Minuit was sent out as the first governor, in 1625.
The same year some enterprising Hollanders courageously passed the East River, and bravely encountered the perils of a residence in Brooklyn, from whose Heights so many now look down upon the parent city of New York,—an unhappy type of our civilization in private life.
As yet all was serene in the infant colony of New Amsterdam, as if the lunar influence of the Half-Moon still shone upon its peaceful trade and growing profits. Invitations were sent to the people of Massachusetts Bay and their children in the valley of the Connecticut to come and take tea; and they in turn courteously asked the Amsterdamers to eat clam-chowder and pumpkin-pie, adding, however, at the bottom of the note, that they hoped, for reasons which they gave, that their guests would not bring with them any beaver-skins to swap with the Indians around Narragansett Bay.
The next year, 1626, Governor Minuit made a large real estate transaction, purchasing the whole island of Manhattan from the Indians for twenty-four dollars,—a deed without a name in the annals of American settlements. As the purchase embraced fourteen thousand square acres, we leave it to the millions of advanced juvenile readers who, we expect, will use this history in schools, to cipher out the price per acre; while a still more forward class might determine the amount of land which such a sum would now procure in Wall or Nassau Streets. In 1629 the Dutch West India Company, in order to entice the Van Rensselaers, Van Vechtens, Van Warts, Van Wycks, Brinkerhoofs, and other brown-colored dwellers at home, away from their tulip-beds, canals, and storks, to the growing young colony, promised to any fifty persons who would settle upon it a tract of land upon the Hudson River sixteen miles in length, annexing only two conditions,—that the settlers should purchase the lands of the Indians, and make due provision for the minister and school-teacher.
Under this promise four companies, headed each by a leader, or patroon, settled the southern half of the present State of Delaware; for the Dutch claim extended from Cape Henlopen on the south to Cape Cod.
The next year an agent of the Van Rensselaers purchased a tract twelve miles square below Albany, paying for it in goods,—a tract which had many blank pages, over which contentious pens have been scribbling, sometimes with red ink, within the living memory of our readers.
With prosperity came, as usual, care and trouble. Complaints were made of Minuit. The Yankees on the east, and the Swedes on the Delaware, were jealous of Dutch rule, and stickled for their own institutions, political and social. The fort, established by Minuit at Hartford, was like a piano-forte in an inconvenient place, strongly objected to, and its airs raised a brisk breeze around it.
Finally, in 1633, Peter was requested to give up his stewardship; and Wouter van Twiller, or the Doubter, took the seals of office and all the other seals he could lay hands on. Minuit could not, however, remain quiet. Office, as usual, had produced a restlessness which office medicine only could cure. He went to Europe, and brought out a company of Swedes, and settled with them at Christiana, near Wilmington, naming the place after the girlish Queen of Sweden. The prolific Swedes spread northwards, and gratefully named their territory New Sweden,—a territory stretching, defiant of New Netherlands, and planting its northern line as near as Trenton. The Doubter was too undecided to face their decided advances; and was replaced, in 1638, by William Kieft, the third overseer of the Dutch plantations.
One of Kieft’s first acts was to protest against the Minuit, or Swedish jig, which Peter was dancing with his lively company on the Delaware. The protest was, like so many others since issued from New York, only made a note of, but left unheeded. Sharper protests, backed by bayonets and knapsacks provisioned with good long sausages, were, two years later, made against the Indians of Long Island, who, egged on by the Swedes of the south, and the sleek Pilgrims on the Connecticut, kindled their fires on Staten Island, and threatened to eat their omelets in New Amsterdam itself. For five long years were those Indian eggs and the colony over the fire. At last the Iroquois called away the coppery cooks, and the boiling waters simmered down again. The colony enlarged itself. Broom-corn waved along the Mohawk River; Dutch pigs were made into head-cheese in Schenectady; and Dutch cabbages, sweltered in large hogs-heads, came out sour-kraut for purple-colored families all up the valley, still so plentifully sprinkled with Dutch hamlets, baptized with genuine Holland names. The warm hearts of the colonists blunted Indian hostilities, as their thick heads, almost impenetrable to anything but three meals a day, defied their tomahawks.
In 1647 Kieft was recalled, and Peter Stuyvesant reigned in his stead. His combustible temper was kept constantly crackling, like a bunch of fire-crackers, during the sixteen years he headed the Dutch settlements in America. His wooden leg, like Santa Anna’s in our own day, seemed ever stirring up the fires to renewed blazes. On all sides he was scorched. The wood, long seasoning, piled up by the colonists in Connecticut, and in the territory since divided up into Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, was kindled into a hot flame. Permission to the former, in 1650, to extend their settlements up to Oyster Bay on Long Island, and to Greenwich on the main-land, only whet their appetites for other kinds of oysters and new beds. Five years later, and the fiery Stuyvesant led a regiment of six hundred men against Christiana, and, reducing it to silence, brought his victorious troops back again; the colony now having a liberal supply of candidates for all its offices for that generation. Whether the burgomaster of New Amsterdam and the five scheppens took occasion of the return of these troops to vote themselves suppers, medals, and free rides around the island, is very doubtful, as contemporary accounts are mute on the subject.
At last even Dutch patience became weary of wars with the Indians and disputes with all the neighboring colonies. The growing political privileges, won by the vigilant perseverance of those colonies,—the right of representation in assemblies,—the larger immunities from home taxation, attracted their attention, so that in 1664, when Charles II. granted, however unjustly, to his brother, the Duke of York, the whole country, from the Connecticut River to the Delaware,—including, of course, the Dutch settlements,—and Nichols, the duke’s lieutenant, in September of that year, anchoring before New Amsterdam, asked the peppery Stuyvesant to hand over, the wishes of the inhabitants for change was so great, that the governor, although disposed to resist, found no backers; and so, after stumping around for several hours among his councillors, was obliged to cut his stick into a pen, and sign a document, transferring the American Empire of their High Mightinesses, the States General, to the royal English Duke. So ended the political dominion of Holland in America. The iron feet of the statue were, however, firmly planted on the soil of New York, although the upper parts of the figure have been cast in other metals, and moulded by Saxon, Celtic, Teutonic, and Gallic hands.
The last Dutch governor, let us add, gracefully submitted to the English sway, living in his ample house in the Bowery until his death, happy in his farm, which then grew chestnuts instead of men, and was tracked by cows and calves, sheep and lambs, instead of the iron tracks which now spike New York to its rocky bed, whose sheets are balance sheets, and whose covering is the dirty blankets which its unconscientious Mrs. Gamps throw over her.
CHAPTER VI.
THE SETTLEMENT OF NEW JERSEY.
A spirited Sketch of the Way in which it was done, and the Results.
NEW JERSEY SETTLED. ]
CHAPTER VII.
THE SETTLEMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA.
Governments in their Action like Pianos.—The Reason; and illustrating Examples.—Varieties in the Make-ups of the different Settlers in the Colonies.—Character of Penn, and why it improves by Age.—His Accomplishments.—His first Visit to America in 1681.—Tall Talk and Peace.—Philadelphia, its early and late Characteristics.—Delaware sets up for herself.—Penn in Prison.—Again in Pennsylvania.—Returns to England by the Philadelphia Line.—Pennsylvania leaps into the Eighteenth Century, and what she does there.
Governments and states, like pianos, go according to the works originally put into them. Unlike the grand-action instruments of the Carolinas, manufactured in the princely factory of Lord Shaftesbury and John Locke, dissimilar to the violin movement of the New England States, the banjo airs of Virginia, or “the harp with a thousand strings” set up in New York, the government of Pennsylvania combined the sweetness of the æolian harp and the free harmonious breathings of the accordion. And the music which Penn drew from it was such as “soothed the savage breast”; for Pennsylvania was the only American settlement which never heard the whirr of the Indian arrow through her woods, or the sullen blow of the death-dealing tomahawk in the settler’s hut.
PORTRAIT OF PENN. (p. 144) ]
To complete the mosaic pavement of our American house, all kinds of materials seemed necessary. In South Carolina, French Huguenots; in Georgia, Oglethorpe the loyalist, with loyal settlers; in North Carolina, English yeomanry; in Virginia, supporters of the Episcopal Establishment and the partisans of the Stuarts; in Maryland, Roman Catholics, imbued with the largest spirit of toleration; in Delaware and New Jersey, the countrymen of Gustavus Adolphus, alive with Protestantism and mechanical invention; in New England, the representatives of Presbyterianism, Independency, and Anabaptists, in church intolerantly tolerant of those who differed from them, and jealous liberals in state matters,—an epitome of the various dissenting and freedom-claiming classes in England during the important era of the decade which preceded and succeeded the Commonwealth; in New York, the sturdy burghers of Holland, commercial, Protestant, and free, mixed with Englishmen who believed in kingly prerogative as they did in the Thirty-nine Articles; and now the drab peaceful Quakers, cherishing the inner light, simple in speech and garb, wise in their worldly wisdom, yet harmless as doves, firm, yet not defiant, keeping on their hats in presence of dignitaries, yet servants to the lowliest in the bonds of truth and love.
William Penn is one of the few characters, which, wine-like, improves by age. His cask was filled with pure juices of the grape, grown in honest soils, and ripened by the natural sun. Tested in every way, it shows no adulterations.
Descended from a father at once gifted by nature and ennobled by services to the state, which it could not requite; himself favored with large wealth; bred at Oxford University; a law student of Lincoln’s Inn; a sagacious and observing traveller over all Europe; skilled in all manly accomplishments, including swimming and the use of the broadsword; the friend of Sir Isaac Newton, of Algernon Sidney, and Lord William Russell,—he exhibited that rare union, a moral courage that dared to live out his convictions, although counter to those with whom he associated and although leading him to prison and severe persecution, and a gentleness of speech and manner that persuaded all whom he met, not only of his own personal honesty, but of the truth of his principles.
In 1681 he obtained from Charles II. a grant of all the lands embraced in the present limits of Pennsylvania; and in the following autumn he came out to prospect his large unfenced farm. Sailing up the Delaware, over fins whose ancestors had preceded him by centuries, and between banks colonized sparsely by Finns and Swedes thirty-nine years before, he landed at New Castle.
His open, sunny face, then browned with thirty-eight summers, warmed even the Indians toward him, in the frosty month of November; and thus trickled their confidence and trust: “You are our brothers. We will leave a broad path for you and us to walk in. If an Englishman falls asleep in the path, the Indian shall pass him by and say: ‘He is an Englishman; he is asleep; let him alone.’ The path shall be plain; there shall not be in it a stump to hurt the feet.”
[Illustration: 1681.]
[Illustration: 1869.]
THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE.
At the junction of the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers,—a triangle since often worked at by people who, wanting his simplicity, have tried so to draw their lines as to prove that an acute angle is larger than the other two, even if those two be very obtuse,—at this place he halted to work out the problem of a city to be governed by brotherly love. He found clumps of pine, chestnut, and walnut trees,—names which grew to the streets which displaced them. Disliking crowded towns, which he had found to be but nurseries of vice, he desired his city to be planted with gardens round each house, so as to form “a greene countrie towne.” The jealous rivals of the Quaker Emporium assert that he succeeded in carrying out his plan.
He was not pen-urious; but paid the natives for their lands. Peace, Penn, and plenty prevailed through all the borders of the baby settlement. In two years, twenty-five hundred wood-colored bonnets and broad-brims could be counted of a Sunday in the loving city. Unlike most of the other young settlements, the neck of land between the two rivers on which Penn’s pet stood was not wrung by famine or by the hand of political oppression. In March, 1683, Penn granted to the assembly, held in the growing town, an ample charter of liberty. The next year he made a trip to Europe, taking the “Philadelphia line,” which, fortunately for him, did not break before he reached shore.
In 1691 the three counties, now forming the State of Delaware, and of which Penn had procured a conveyance, took it in their heads to try their own luck at housekeeping, and set up a separate kitchen of their own. Penn wished them pot-luck; and off they went in high glee, cultivating their own Pea Patch and sowing their own oats to their heart’s content.
The next year Penn was deprived of his government and shut up in prison for two years. For some time William and Mary, it was supposed, had a taste for his head served up à la John the Baptist; but this dish was at last thought to be too expensive for the English constitution, and so the ruffles around Penn’s neck were untroubled.
In 1699 Penn again visited his North American estate, took an account of stock, gave presents of all the political privileges they asked for, and went home again, for the last time, in high feather.
Meanwhile the young colony leaped vigorously over into the eighteenth century, found its supply of anthracile coal sufficient for a good house-warming, invited over Dutch, Germans, Norwegians, and Swedes, with their large horses, heavily tired wagons, and never-tiring heavy wives, who settled down on the whole territory so solidly that neither they nor it could ever be moved from that day to this.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE COLONIES IN THE UPPER HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
The Young Colonies watched by the “Old Folks at Home.”—Required to furnish Inventories of their Property.—Old People particular as to Shops where the Youngsters traded.—Several Articles of Political Housekeeping, as Printing-Presses, Jury-Boxes, etc., not allowed.—Some Favorites among the Children.—The first American Ring.—Cromwell as a Step-Father.—The Atlantic Swimming-Bath.—Political Rights jarred off the Parent Tree; others fell when ripe.—Some Proprietors sell out to raise Money for Costs.—General Thaw in High Places.—Legislative Mills with two Runs of Stone.—Woman’s Rights in Capsules.—How hard Puritan Wood got softer.—Episcopal Race-Courses enlarged.—A Black Frost curls up the Green Leaves of the Charters.—What Sir Edmund Andros swallowed and the Fit of Indigestion which followed.—Effect of European Housecleaning in setting Colonial Brooms in Motion.—New York swept into the English Pan.—Result of James II.’s Over-stay in Paris.—Slaps in the Face of Canada and their Return.—How Public Events tell on Family Matters tolled long and loud.—People occasionally subject to Scarlet Fever and Fourth of July, but can’t live on either.—Kidd at Sea; takes off a few People.—How the Deficiency was supplied.—Number of Colonists at close of Seventeenth Century.—Would have been more had Chicago started.—Colonial Colts at the Bars of the Eighteenth Century.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the young colonial damsels from England, Holland, Sweden, and Germany had, in the main, obtained comfortable and satisfactory settlements along the Atlantic slopes. The jealous “old folks at home” kept a strict watch on their doings, and sent servants to look after their ways. Here and there some stolen interviews with that very disreputable acquaintance, Legislative Liberty, had been detected; and the servants were especially charged to keep both eyes upon any renewal of such improprieties. Frequent inventories of property were insisted on. All the household stuff was required to be bought at the home shops; and, what hurt the feelings and interests of the young people more than anything else, they were forbidden even to send back what they did not want to use themselves, unless in ships built and despatched from England for them. There were some articles, as printing-presses, jury-boxes, etc., which were deemed by the anxious parents as particularly unnecessary and even improper. Two whims there were, which the youngsters had of late got into their heads, that they were repeatedly enjoined to banish, once for all: namely, the notion of electing somebody to go and meet somebody else and have a talk over that foolish and altogether unsatisfactory subject the taxes; and that other equally absurd fancy of counting over occasionally the loose change collected for public purposes. They told them that such things were above their years, and that, in fact, they knew nothing about them; and moreover, that such whimsies had made a great deal of trouble even among the wiser heads on the old island, and, if indulged in, would be sure to bring their progeny into bad habits and to worse ends. These injunctions and warnings of course only increased curiosity, led to talks across the dinner-table and in the evenings after the day’s work was over. The more they talked it over, the more, of course, they set their hearts upon having the forbidden fruit. It was found that Virginia had enjoyed the dangerous luxuries of sending two men from every one of her eleven boroughs to do both these improper things, ever since she was twelve years old. She, too, had been permitted to have a jury-box, and liked the music of it right well, although some of the twelve strings sometimes got out of order, and the instrument occasionally played too long when badly wound up. Favoritism in a family is never pleasant for the unfavored ones. The others could not see why they should not have what Virginia was allowed. The subject became at last a sore one, and several times ended in angry flushes and muttered adjectives that went off without any nouns to touch them; some into the air, and some—we are forced to say—right into the faces of the old people.
Cromwell, that brusk English step-father, who, after the sudden taking off of his predecessor, Charles I., vigorously seized the cold hand of Albion, had his favorites among the step-children, the New-Englanders. Yet he did not hesitate to trounce them as soundly as he did Virginia and the two Carolinas, whenever they set up their wills against his. It was he who, in 1651, tied up all the colonies by those leading-strings, the Navigation Acts. When Charles II. came into the family, these colonial cords were not cut, but multiplied and tied into knots, not at all sailor fashion. In fact, whoever ruled the house, Commonwealth, Stuart, or Orange, strengthened and doubled these vexatious marine strings, until finally father and children were threatened with the fate of Laocoön.
TEMPTATION; OR, THE FIRST AMERICAN “RING.” (p. 153) ]
The large swimming-bath of the Atlantic, so near their doors, sorely tempted the young swimmers; but the old people insisted upon nothing so much as the maxim, not to go into the waters of commerce until they had learned to swim, and never to begin to learn an art so perilous to—themselves. In fact, the entire maritime policy of England towards the colonies was very dry nursing on very wet principles.
At one time, Virginia was the pet, and got several sugar-plums from royal bounty. Then Connecticut came in for some caressing. The younger Winthrop presented to Charles II., in 1662, a petition for a new toy,—a charter. He would have been refused, but that he slipped in, at the same time, a ring given to his own grandfather by the father of Charles, which so pleased the dress-loving king, that he gave to Connecticut one of the best charter hobby-horses ever seen at that time in America. This, it may be remarked, is the earliest example in our history of what “a ring” can effect.
We cannot record in detail the successive struggles of the Colonies to free themselves from political and commercial restrictive rules,—for rights of representation in assemblies of their own, for the privilege of taxing themselves, and spending their own assessments, and for the many solid and large freedoms which we now enjoy without question or fear. The story of the way in which the cellar was dug, through obstructions of root and stone, the walls sunk, the beams of the lower floor, hewn out amid discouragements and opposition, laid and primed, ought not to be otherwise than pleasant, even when rehearsed to those who have long and securely revelled in all the comforts and luxuries of the completed building; in its hot and cold water baths of free discussion; the numerous call-pipes through the wall, for public servants; the cedar closets for the best clothes of liberty; the iron safe for the family silver or greenbacks; the gas-pipes of illuminating knowledge; and the varied upholstery to soothe labor-aching limbs, or to gratify luxurious and even extravagant tastes. But space, like nobility, obliges; and although, like those experts who write the Lord’s Prayer on a sixpence, we can condense Genesis on the smallest historic disk, we cannot crowd all creation on the rim of the same piece. Speaking in a general way, however, we may affirm that for forty years preceding the accession of James II. in 1685, the Colonies, on the whole, steadily gained from jealous political privilege and chartered monopoly some of the rights enjoyed at home. As these rights fell, one after another, upon colonial soil, they were carefully secured by strong hands. Sometimes they were jarred suddenly from the parent tree by the iron hand of war. Sometimes they fell carelessly, like great, golden pippins, over the royal enclosure into the king’s highway, ripe and well flavored. Sometimes they matured naturally under the very eyes of those keepers of the royal Transatlantic preserves,—the colonial governors,—and when mellow, were seized and hurried out of reach until it was safe to give them to the hungry people.
Thus, in various ways, by different hands and from different parts of the colonial orchard, the precious fruit was gathered for present or future use.
In some of the plantations the proprietors, those
“Gentlemen of England, who sat at home in ease,”
expecting their stone ships to come in, filled with promised colonial stuff for presents to their children, became tired of waiting, and sold out their large airy bills of lading for very small earthly crowns sterling. In other Colonies the heirs of the original grantees, after spending all their ready means in lawsuits with the hard-working settlers, videlicet, “squatters,” guilty in complainants’ eyes, not only of “disturbing the peace of our lord the King,” but of attempting to appropriate unlawfully a piece of his colonial kingdom, compromised, as other parties have before done, for sums barely sufficient to cover the costs of litigation. In a few instances, suitors to the affections of the coy colonial heiresses, thinking by courtly ways to acquire their landed possessions and the common-law right to govern their persons, were dismissed with good-natured assurances that they should continue to look upon them as friends, but declined any more intimate relationships. In a few other cases still—like those of William Penn, Roger Williams, and Cecil Calvert—the tenants were freely and generously left to manage their civil and political affairs, without suit, let, or hindrance, while individual conscience was erected into a high court of equity, with supreme jurisdiction in things spiritual.
Representative government took at first different forms. In some of the settlements legislative grists were put into a mortar and pounded out into a simple, healthy, easily digested, coarse meal. Maryland and Massachusetts set up more luxurious mills, provided with double runs of stone,—an upper and lower one, which was supposed to grind out a finer kind of legislative flour. The brand, we need scarcely add, is now the popular American one, and is being, in limited amounts, exported for foreign use.
In some of these establishments “bolts” were now and then introduced, by some bran-new representative miller, and expectations were immediately held out to the anxious customers of better flour, and of a whiter color,—expectations, we regret to add, that rarely came to anything except increased fatness to the miller’s live stock, always grunting and grubbing around the mill doors.
Woman’s rights, too, thus early took root, sprouting out like young shoots from the old rotting stumps of a decaying civilization. Anne Hutchinson,—not Dickinson,—grieved in soul by the exclusion of her sex from the right to discuss and criticise, at the weekly meeting of the congregation, the last Sunday’s discourse,—a right now practised all over the world,—created by her fiery eloquence such a blaze in Massachusetts, that she soon made the Colony too hot for her. Sir Harry Vane, strange to say, did not turn the way that the wind blew; but, although a governor and a baronet, veered against the current of hot air. Let reformers pluck from these pages a fragrant leaf pressed and preserved for their reading when faint. It was from this little seed capsule, enwrapping a precious life, warmed by the heat of a woman’s mind, there sprang up in a few years that beautiful flower of spiritual liberty that now sends its rippling odor from sea to sea.
WOMAN’S RIGHTS IN 1637. (p. 158) ]
Thus in all high places of political power there was a general thaw of royal prerogative and proprietarial claim; and popular rights trickled down upon the plain below. Galileo, in 1633, was condemned for asserting that the earth was a confirmed revolutionist; yet even fifty years after there might have been wafted back over his tomb on the Arno, from the shores of the James, the Susquehanna, and even from the Merrimack, a wind-gram, iterating his own protesting words, “E pur il se muove.”
Yes, the world did move! Even that hard part of it, crusted over with stern though earnest religious dogmas, began to stir. The austerity of Puritan faith, conscientious yet severe, which had worn the russet grimness which its own persecution in England had gathered around it—as hard woods, lying in damp, imprisoning places, become clothed with fungus growths—began to feel some of the sunny effects of the Hutchinson illumination. In Virginia time and free discussion were wearing away the granite barriers within which its legislation and loyalty had always sought to hem into a single channel, the Episcopal, the diverging streams of religious convictions.
The narrow bigotries of the times, showing themselves under different aspects, sprang naturally out of the various soils in which the seeds had taken root. The early colonists of New England, escaping like the Jews from Egyptian bondage, and lit by flaming torches and cloudy providences to their promised land, compelled every one, Canaanite and Quaker, independent Philistine and non-conforming Episcopalian, to bring offerings to their cherished altar, under pain of banishment to the wilderness beyond. Those of Virginia, on the contrary, bringing with them their own lares and penates from their father’s house, and fearing the introduction of strange deities, fenced in the sacred images with sharp picket-palings set by legal enactment. Over both, however, the new Evangel of toleration began to break, and voices of those “crying in the wilderness,” divinely sent, cleaving with gentle strokes the consciences of thoughtful men, and heard around the altar and inside the guarded pickets, heralded the coming Emanuel.
We have said that, up to the time of the accession of James II. in 1685, the fruits of civil liberty were gradually maturing in the growing settlements.
Immediately after that event, however, a chilling black frost fell upon them, rolling up the green leaves of the charters and threatening to kill outright all the chance-sown trees, as well as the more promising cultivated grafts. During the three and a half years that this blight continued, the greater part of the popular governments were stunted or destroyed. The Connecticut rocking horse, conjured from King Charles II. by Winthrop’s ring, was hid away in a hollow oak at Hartford. Sir Edmund Andros, a man of narrow spirit and keen temper, was sent out with instructions so large that he swallowed up the governments of all the New England Colonies and New York. A severe fit of indigestion followed, acidulating and fermenting, taking away the general appetite, and causing painful memories of the time when there were no heart-burnings and dangerous blood-rushings headward. And so, when in 1688 the Revolution brought in the Orange Prince, health bloomed again on the colonial cheek, and the constitution seemed to acquire a more vigorous tone than ever.
The colonists had early learned the strength which comes from union. From 1643 onwards for forty years the New England settlements joined hands with each other against the French of New France and Acadia, the French Indian allies, and the Dutch of New York; and while, like man and wife, they had their own healthy troubles, curtain lectures, poutings and make-ups, they stoutly defended the common home against all neighboring invasion. Persons once married are not apt to forget it, nor cease to sigh, after the tie is dissolved, for the benefits which accrued from it. The colonial widowers found it easier afterwards to contract a new union than the bachelor communities to form their first match. Eight years after the death of the first union the bereaved New-Englanders went out on a second courtship,—the trysting place being New York,—and there agreed upon a sort of runaway match to Canada. The honeymoon journey was not as pleasant as bridal trips through the Thousand Isles to Montreal and Quebec now are. In fact, although bound for Quebec, and even reaching it, they were not suffered by the French to enter it. They returned not over well pleased with each other, but particularly out of temper with the armed discourtesy of the French.
This little trip away from home was not the first nor the last which the Colonies were led to make. In fact, our people from the very beginning seem to have been curiously addicted to foreign missionary efforts. They acquired the passion at the outset from European suggestions. Whenever the state skeins there got into a tangle, some of the outside threads were sure to run into a dreadful kink here. No sooner was there a scrubbing and house-cleaning among the old folks on the Thames, Seine, Scheldt, or Rhine, than the brooms were got out on the Hudson, the James, and Connecticut, and up they all went at that standing bother of our colonial housewives, the nest of lively French flies in our northeast corner, or at those old yellow-legged Dutch hornets that had settled down on Manhattan and Long Island. The war between the English and Dutch Commonwealths in 1652, which sent Van Tromp’s broom over the seas, brushing down the red spots of St. George, set the colonial sweepers at work. The big and little brooms were, however, put aside after two years; but in 1663 they were all seized again, and by a single dash New York was swept into the English pan.
Amid all this dust and refuse matter of war one can pick out now and then some stray grains of shining value. Such was Mary’s and William’s College, established in Virginia in 1693, making the second bright college speck in America. Such were the gold and silver ores of thought found by George Fox, Increase Mather, and others, mixed with brown earth or imbedded in quartz, but valuable in any collection. Such, too, the loving messages sent from Friends in England to their brethren here, which we can now pick from that colonial dust-heap where they shine like plates of mica.
The Orange William could not of course long bloom in peace in his new royal bed. His father-in-law, James II., had fled across the channel to Louis XIV., and was selfishly entertained by him at Paris. William objected—as some people do nowadays—to his relative’s prolonged stay in that fascinating capital. This little unpleasantness resulted in a war which lasted until 1697. Of course the Colonies were highly offended too; and as soon as the two rather elderly gentlemen at Versailles and St. James had taken snuff, there was a general sneeze from Passamaquoddy Bay to the Altamaha River. Getting thus very red in the face, the colonists flung out their hands, which of course hit Canada right in the face. The French resented the slap, and pommelled away at New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, scratching off many scalps at Dover, Schenectady, and along the Penobscot. A regular settler was aimed back by the Colonies at the very nob of the French settlements, Quebec. An arm-ament, directed by Sir William Phipps, was flung out towards the St. Lawrence, but a skilful fence by the alert French warded off the blow. To heat the pokers in these fires, kindled in Europe, blown over to this side and fed here by wood furnished by the colonists, and often hauled from a great distance, was laborious and expensive. But this was a small care for England who coolly took out the irons when well aglow.
Little, however, did she then imagine that the young arms thus smiting the irons on these French and Indian anvils were making and hardening muscle that would one day resist her own heavy and long-reaching blows. Slowly, slowly, but surely. Wheat left in Egyptian cases for quite other purposes, three thousand years ago, patiently sleeping, sprouts at the call of the sun in after centuries. The colonial seeds carelessly or selfishly cast by royal hands into furrows, seeming like very rugged and ugly blotches on the wide wintry-looking fields of North America, quickened in less than a hundred years by the rain-patters, were to wave in ridges as green and blossoming, as English hedges in June.
None of our illuminated readers will fall down into that exalted, but still very common mistake, of supposing that the great mass of the men, women, and children, living here in the latter half of that seventeenth century, were all the while, or indeed to any great extent, occupied by, interested in, or even measurably affected by, these large public events. The old man who thought it strange that all the millions of people in the Roman Empire, who he naturally supposed, from his reading of history, were present at the killing of Cæsar, did not rise against Brutus, Cassius, and the rest and prevent it, is now dead, but he has left successors to his historical notions. Most people are just as apt to think that everybody at Jerusalem knew King David as certainly as the Skibbareen Irishman that every American whom he meets in Ireland must be acquainted with his cousin whose going off from Skibbareen was so well understood there. Louis Napoleon, in his Life of Cæsar, may magnify the importance and influence over his times of his self-reflecting hero; but we all know that, in fact, as soon as the large imperial microscope is taken off from the single spot, Cæsar goes back again into a speck on the broad Roman sheet. To the ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine Romans in one hundred thousand, it was practically of less consequence whether Cæsar, Antony, or Julius Scipio Smith ruled Rome, than whether the season was wet or dry, or whether their wives and children kept well and healthy. To the few around the court, to the mammas with eligible daughters just in the city of Rome, to a few vestimentary Jenkins who retailed to the dozen families of their set the latest scandals on the Palatine, it was a matter of some moment; to the farmers, mechanics, working-people paving the wide empire with their labor and patient, endless industries, of comparatively little consequence whatever. Doubtless great numbers of these hard-working Romans, in those unfortunate towns where there were no presses or telegraphs, lived forty, fifty, or sixty years after “great Cæsar had turned to clay,” without suspecting that he was not decorated china still at Rome; without dreaming that, while they themselves had been raising pulse and sour wine for their own little house sovereigns in Gaul or Germania, Augustus had succeeded to Cæsar’s power at the capitol, and had set those scribblers, Virgil, Livy, and Horace, to writing, and had made much history for Bohemians since. Little did they know that Tiberius had meanwhile succeeded Augustus and crucified more men at that Roman New York than he had hairs on his hard pate, and so kept on the imperial pastime with a keen appetite, until he was served with the same sauce that he had dished out so freely; nor had they ever heard tell that during the same interval, so uneventful for them in their far-off silent occupations, Caligula had crawled up to the place vacated by Tiberius, and from its slimy top had pitched victims to wild beasts and voracious fish, and amused the bloody pauses in his grim, mad humors by feeding his favorite horse with gilded oats, and would have made him consul had not the least inhuman brute died before his quadripedal instalment into the office which Cicero sought so long and praised so loudly.
The great events, especially if at a distance, fill large spaces in our histories; but, like a marriage or death in the family, they occupy but a comparatively brief part of the life of any of its members. There is a great deal of water, even in rivers that are famous for large fish, that holds no fish at all,—waters whose onflow gladdens and refreshes large districts. A nation or a community must at some time have marked events to stir its blood and create noble memories; but it cannot live on Fourth of July or the remembrance of Waterloo. The life of the greater part of the colonists passed, as that of most people in all times and countries is spent, in quiet, steady work during the day, eating three meals if they had them, and two if they had not, and in sleeping as well nights as the hot or cold weather, wives or children, or other disturbers of the peace, would permit. We read of some red-letter event, like Kidd’s piracies in 1696–1698, that tossed from the deck possibly twenty people; and fancy that this Semmes must have borne an important part in those closing years of the century, without reflecting that almost every week in the year records more victims on our rivers and railroads,—victims despatched by us between the mouthfuls of our toast at breakfast. Such events bear the same relation to the volume of life as the capital letters, which head the chapters of a book, to its solid contents. They are the daubs of paint on the card of gingerbread; the small pinholes pricked in the large family loaf. We eat one thousand and ninety-four meals in the year without any recollection of them; we remember only the one Thanksgiving dinner which did us no more good than the others, and which probably, like Kidd’s piracies, stuck in our crops very distressingly. No doubt many of the colonists never heard of Robert Kidd; and others, who had listened to Mary Jane singing the song which told “how he sailed,” fancied that, like Bluebeard, he was only invented for songs and red-covered primers. In fine, these notable events are, in general, but the froth-bubbles on the river’s surface. The solid on-pressing mass does not feel the puffy little globes, iridescent though they be, and swells though they may appear to the few fish just around them. There was only one Kidd on the wide seas. Of the many other craft, carefully managed, sailing slowly and wearily, earning patient wages, and making port at the same time, we hear nothing.
So the race drifts, scuds, tacks, works, or runs towards the great harbor. So was it in the seventeenth century. Old people, as now, took to tea, dozy armchairs, tedious gossip, and mumbling recollections of the golden days of youth,—golden even if actually passed amid steel points, arrow-heads, or among the rude ploughshares of ever-recurring, never-ending toil. Grief and gladness pendulated with regular swings and carried the hour-hands of family life evenly and surely on through the uneventful spaces, until at last the solemn bell struck. Then a new mound was sodded under the willow-trees in the rude churchyard, whose slate-stones notched the advance of the Colonies. Among the young people love crept in, too, under shaggy vests and calico bodices. Soft words passed into earnest vows, and clergymen or country squires welded the glowing pieces into instruments of uncomplaining labor and life-long use. Then came new voices into the house, and,—well, at the winding-up of the century there were two hundred and thirty-five thousand people in the settlements. There would have been more, but—Chicago had not yet started.
And now, tying our coltish Colonies to the bars of the eighteenth century, we leave them for a short time while we run down a few stray subjects, skittishly grazing in the back pastures. We shall soon return to drive them all into the ranker grass of the opening plantations.
CHAPTER IX.
WITCHCRAFT.
The Witch-Caldron at Salem.—How its Bubbling raised Teapot Lids and has kept open other Lids ever since.—The Young Female Witches at Salem condemned to the Ties of Matrimony; the Old Ones to harder Knots.—The Sin of being Old considered.—The Scarlet Letter.—Examples of Witchcraft cited.—The Delusion of Adam and Eve at the first Pomological Convention in Eden.—Woman as Man’s Familiar Spirit; and her Conjuries.—Cases of David, Samson, and Herod.—Antony dissolved in that Egyptian Drink, Pearl Water.—The Maid of Orleans and what an Arc she subtended.—The Philters of Love, Ambition, Heroism, etc., administered to Men and Nations.—Their Effects.—Delusions, like Measles, catching.—The Frenzies of Fashion fully described.—The Stock Exchange.—Private Witchcrafts at Quiltings, Apple-Parings, etc.—Red Corn and other Red Ears.—Sweet Witches.—A Jury of Gushing Girls.—Punishment of Men incapable of being bewitched.
Just as the last sands were dropping at once out of the hour-glasses of the seventeenth century and of a few old women at Salem, a strange trouble bubbled up in that little teapot of a place, which not only raised its lid at the time, but has kept a great many wide-open eyes fixed on it ever since, to see how it happened, and whether it would not, perhaps, do it again. Do it again! of course not; and very sorry that it ever did it at all. Let us distill from it first-proof historical stimulation, while we wait for the colts to cool off.
Young women had often at Salem, as elsewhere, troubled men, and for the misdemeanor had been condemned to the stocks—of marriage. But what to do with the ill-favored, old ladies who, in 1692, were accused of breaking the rest of both old and young,—of disturbing two organs, the spleen and gall, lying near that excitable old offender, the heart, and of stopping judicial digestion,—puzzled the brain of the wisest, yea, even the solid, well-set cerebrum of Cotton Mather. Much pondering was there, much exorcising, much studying of the twenty-eighth chapter of 1 Samuel, and diligent rummaging of chronicles, Jewish, Egyptian, French, and English, to find descriptions of the vice, and the punishments therefor. The sin of being old is, in a new country where young activities are alone valuable, always great. At quaint, gable-ended Salem it became a swinging crime.
How the knot was eventually not cut, but tied, all the world knows. Everybody remembers how those aged agitators were taken around the neck, not by future spouses, as the young Salemites were, but by cords most unsilken. The delusion of course soon vanished with the twenty victims; but the Scarlet Letter, written at the time, which tells the affecting story, is still handed around unsealed, and will ever be read with witching interest.
[Illustration: 1692.]
THE PENALTIES OF WITCHCRAFT.
’Tis the old tale, with new characters and scenery to adapt it to the time and place. The Bible opens with it. In that earliest recorded pomological convention, attended by only three delegates, Adam, Eve, and Satan, the deception by one of them—a model trickster, whose plan has since been often followed in other conventions—of the female delegate, who then brought over the third, led to a very wicked delusion, which has got a great many people in a very sad scrape. If woman was a witch in Paradise, what has she not been out? She has been “man’s familiar spirit” ever since, conjuring up visions before the eyes of young men, as stately as the sheeted form at Endor, or as pleasing as the walking figure of Bathsheba to the enamored eye of the Chief Singer. Samson could pull down the pillars of Gaza, but could not muster strength enough to open his eyes to Delilah’s illusions, or to raise his shorn head from her delightful pillow. Then there was that very fast woman, Herodias, who got a-head of John the Baptist on a charger. How she bewitched Herod by a pair of nimble heels!—a feat by which so many dancers have whirled reason from her throne, and men from theirs.
What a splendid necromancer was Cleopatra, dissolving poor Antony, rich pearls, and the Roman Empire in the drugged cup of her beauty. We see the Duumvir now in that Alexandrian palace, under her wildering magic. The air without twinkles with the clash of impatient Roman shields, and the earnest gleamings of battle-axes, hungry to hew for him a way through living Romans up to the Capitoline hill; but he, at the feet of the sorceress, swearing oaths falser than Abigail Williams’s, in Salem court-house, tosses away from him the round globe of empire as carelessly as the ragged Egyptian harlequin in the next square flings up his cup and balls for the passing amusement of the idle crowd.
Then, too, the Maid of Orleans, who subtends such a brilliant Arc in the annals of France;—but why iterate history, which is but a biographical dictionary of characters who, by the impact of enthusiasms, genius, delusive heroism, or passion-working frenzies, have given to others, individuals, communities, armies, or nations, philters of delirious patriotism, love-potions, noble discontents under real or fancied wrongs, which have whirled them on to glory, to sudden graves, to state coronations, or have lifted them up to Calvaries of glorious self-sacrifices higher than themselves, and loftier than the ages which have grown upwards as they gazed?
Delusions, whether in Salem, Chicago, New York, or any other place afflicted with common councils and their accompanying symptoms, municipal debts, are as catching as measles, and lead often to eruptions just as disagreeable. The semiannual frenzies which, year after year, seize whole communities, men, women, and children, persons tall or short, fat or lean, blond or brunette, making them rush simultaneously and with hot celerity to throw away or alter their last six months’ garments, bonnets, hats, or foot-clothings, because Madame Folie in Good-for-nothing Street, Paris, thinks it for her interest that they should, and to betake themselves all to other garments, bonnets, hats, and foot-clothing of another cut and color,—cuts and colors uniform for all ages, sizes, and complexions,—are quite as unaccountable to people at a distance, and even to themselves a year after, as the Salem delusion now, when we take it up in our long historic fingers, and measure it by the rule of good, cool, common sense. The panics of the stock exchange, starting out of a rumor in some obscure corner, and swelling into tense statements and positive beliefs, which grasp even cool business brains and well-filled purses, and shake both empty on the winds, find their strange echoes back from the study of wise but momentarily deluded Cotton Mathers and the disordered judgment-seats of Salem magistrates.
But the public and published examples of witchcraft are few compared with countless cases always going on in every community, urban or rural, unrecognized by any tribunals judicial or historic. At every apple-paring in New England,—in the husking-parties throughout the West, where the finding of the red ear of corn suddenly makes every kissful girl the personal owner of two redder ears,—in the quilting frolics at the South, where the young gentlemen of the place come in, after the sewing is done, and sow roses on cheeks white before,—by story-telling brooks that keep sacred the secrets of lovers, while babbling their own,—along the roadside, in quiet nooks, in village parlors, in crowded cities where mammon tries in vain to cheat the sweet witches out of their devotees,—everywhere, in fine, where hearts are not utterly trade-mailed, office-clad, or ossified, the tender delirium which early entered our great, glorious mad-house of a world, produces effects which are never understood by some, which confound the wise unwisdom of old judicial heads, and sometimes get inwrought into fine tragedies, before which even those of New England, although told by a good fellow or transfigured by a Longfellow, pale away faded and colorless.
The man who is incapable of being bewitched by somebody or something, may make a good bargain, and live on unlovingly a long time,—like an air-plant, never touching his mother earth, or feeling its inspiriting magics; but he will never get much out of life except meat, drink, and cold-sheeted sleeps, nor add much to the happiness or greatness of his kind. He who lives in the United States beyond a fair age, without getting inextricably tangled in the witching meshes of some good mate, should be tried by a jury of gushing girls, and condemned for life to the pillow-ry with some of the modern witches of New England or the sorceresses of the South.
Whosoever, then, accuses the witchcrafts of other times and ages, let him, ere he casts the first stone, look into his own heart, or around among his own household or community, and, borrowing a charity from his thoughts, say, if he can, “Go in—pieces.”
COTTON MATHER EXORCISING A WITCH. (p. 176) ]
CHAPTER X.
OF THE MANNERS, MORALS, HABITS, AND LAWS OF THE COLONISTS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
First-class Telescope to see the MANNERS of a Past Age.—Difficulties of Near-sighted and Long-sighted People.—Near Objects more embarrassing to the Observer than Distant.—Why?—The Ghosts of the past.—The Manners and Dress of Stuyvesant, Eliot, Calvert, Rolfe, etc. described.—Manners of the Mass detailed; in their Work, Play, Diet, Courtship, Fashions, Treatment of Young Ladies and Gentlemen, Children, Servants, etc.—Superior Advantages of Paterfamilias then in making Acquaintance with his Wife and Children.—Fast Girls and Calicoes.—The Isothermal Lines of ETHICS.—Certain Vices, like Eggs, laid secretly and hatched afterwards.—The Fashions of Crime at various Epochs compared.—Jails and Jail-Birds.—The ingenious Crimes of Trade, Corporations, Schools, and Seminaries noted.—How Sects are frozen or thawed by Temperature.—Northern and Southern Sectarianisms.—Why Episcopacy flourished in Warm Latitudes.—The Early Commercial Morality of New York.—Baptists, Congregationalists, and Independents.—The HABITS of the Century; their Material, Color, Durability, and Wear.—The LAWS mainly imported.—What a Business the Colonists carried on, notwithstanding, in the Domestic Article.—Kindness of the Proprietors in furnishing Ready-made Office-holders not appreciated.—American Itch for Law-making.—Laws against Criminals.—Their Crimson Color.—How the Rains of Mercy fell on hard Enactments, and the Thaw which followed.—Coroners’ Inquests sat upon.—Verdicts under various Lights.—Justices of the Peace, and the Law they peddled.—Administrations of Law then and now contrasted.—How Colors, although imponderable, turned the Judicial Scales.
Firstly, MANNERS.—Historians, especially in modern times, are accustomed to entertain their readers with varied and variegated descriptions of the manners of the people, period, or century under their telescopes; and as we have a first-rate historical Dollond, adjusted for day and night observations, and can bring down a past age so near as to enable our readers to see not only the cut of their great-great-great-grandfather’s coats, the quality of their metal buttons on the outside, and of the metal within their pockets, but can note and enjoy even the shape of their mouths, the character of the good things going in, and the better things coming out of them; nay, can catch and fix the evanescent and subtle flavor of their humor and wit, as they exhale in rosy nimbi, we shall not withhold some of the latest and most valuable discoveries we have been thus enabled to make. Some near-sighted people find a difficulty, as they look about upon their contemporaries, in arriving at results which they can crystallize around class nodules. They see only individual specimens, and wonder how the photographic historian can bring out by his machine picturesque groups, clothed in appropriate costume, artistically arranged. But this difficulty arises from the unhappy fact that the objects observed lie directly under their eye. The others lie without. Besides such obtuse-eyed watchers of their own times, who experience an embarrassment in getting fitting words to express their ideas of an average man, age, habits, or morals,—a process much like that of producing our current Sherry wines by boiling down and simmering off a variety of ingredients,—lose sight of the precipitating, coagulating, forming mass, in their anxiety to note the frisky bubbles that come up to the agitated surface. Besides, long-sighted chroniclers can see and describe the habits and manners of the distant past with more clearness, and certainly with more telling effect, than the troublesome present, with its distressing individualities and exceptions, lying, amid the disturbing cross-lights of actual, hard, well-known facts. If, in bringing up the ghost of a period long buried, we get the wrong dress on it, or chance to summon back a spectre, invested with habits that fitted another epoch as well or better, we are not teased or contradicted by any foolish survivor, pushed by children-like questions, or worried into redness of face by puzzling inquiries or an awkward silence.
And so reasoning, we feel sure that, if our inspection of the accoutrements, manœuvres, and drill of the companies that march before us in the seventeenth century, is not absolutely accurate, the fault will not lie in the distance, nor in the atmosphere, nor yet in the instrument, but in one of these two causes, either that they have sent up the wrong squads or else that the originals had not, after all, much manners to be inspected.
It is generally believed that Lord Chesterfield invented manners: but as he was not born until 1694, just as the seventeenth century was getting staggeringly infirm and indifferent to its externals, and as he did not procure the publication of his Letters until the characters on the blue slate-stones over the bones of the deceased age had become blurred and weather-dimmed, the question of the comparison of their manners with his patent methods and rules did not, we may well believe, much vex those earnest old toilers of the sea and on the land.
Single figures stand out in sharp and pleasing picturesqueness against the distant horizon of those Colonial days; in Virginia, John Rolfe; in New York, Petrus Stuyvesant; in Massachusetts, John Eliot; George Calvert, in Maryland; Theophilus Eaton, in Connecticut; Sir John Yeomans, in North Carolina; Roger Williams, in Rhode Island; and many others, who seem in their granite integrity to be poised, like calm sculpture, in ruff and wrist-frill, broad-lapelled coats, short-clothes, silk stockings, and real, unplated silver knee and sleeve buckles.—These figures, tall and stately, with high-bred, courtly manners, bland faces lit up by purposes and convictions, with large, generous waistcoats, made capacious for the pendulations of their big, loving hearts beneath, still arrest our admiring eyes. The great mass of the Colonists, however, were resolute workers, living on a spare diet, sleeping on hard beds, with shake-downs for their friendly, and shake-ups for their unfriendly, guests. Their tastes were simple and confined to a few objects. Those modern houses in which we dwell, more appropriately called museums, the best parts kept for show, and having not one, but several mermaids, a What-is-it, and an assortment of woolly animals with tails for heads, and heads omitted, would have paralyzed and shocked the most advanced Colonists. Their manners were taking, but they were mainly exhibited in taking grain from the fields, fish from the sea, and scant returns from their store sales. The graces were shown mainly by husbands in lifting their spouses on and off pillions, to and from church, and by young men in those sweetly rough compliments that love contrives in all times, and among all classes, to shape out from a scanty, lingual stock in exchange for sheep’s-eyes and assenting blushes.
As it took vessels at that period several months to come from France, the settlers were somewhat late in their knowledge of the foreign modes; but as the styles were the latest known, it was all the same in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Boston. That rotatory machine which now turns out fashions semiannually, now clipping a yard or so from the top of a dress and adding it to the bottom, here expanding a bonnet to the size of a parasol, then contracting it to dimensions less than the milliner’s bill for it; at one time running a flat iron down in front, and at another tacking a donkey’s load on behind, had not yet been invented. Paterfamilias recognized his own children, day after day, and even year after year, in the same modes and garments; the serviceable gray or serge, during week-days, and the decent, plain, unarresting, and unstunning habiliments, reverently donned for Sunday. The girls were not fast, although the colors of their calicoes were. Their bright carnations they wore all the time, only a little more so on Sunday evenings when the sparks lit them up, especially if a match was near.
In general a homespun candor quaintly marked family and neighborhood intercourse, and homespun honesty, integrity, and good sense, public and private actions. Of course all ages have common types of roguery. Each, too, has its own special representatives who commit crimes according to a prevailing mode, and who might easily be put into the fashion-plates of the Old Bailey or Sing-Sing. In these respects the times whereof we speak kept company, to some extent, with their predecessors. But among the sparse settlements, the appropriators and spoilers of others’ property and rights had such a hard time to do a thriving business, and found that honest work laid up so much more at the year’s end, that after a little while they learned to prefer the ways of the virtuous, not from principle, but from interest, and left off courses that led to the poor-house, if they missed the jail.
There were here and there dandies who imported their manners with their clothes; but as the girls then had the good sense to believe that these, so far from being superior to those of domestic growth, did not wear so long or well, and had a way of changing so often as to be worth less than the duty imposed to bring them in, such foreign importations gradually fell off.
Young ladies at home then sewed the tares, instead of the wicked old Sower. The “help” was only looked for, and always found in, the house; which was kept up for the sake of the family, and not for the servants. People worked all the hours in which they did not sleep, and thus kept their minds from being agitated by the operation of “eight-hour laws,” the tortures of party squeezes, and the bore of concerts and lectures. Children were put to bed before midnight, were satisfied with their simple toys, and remained children nature’s full term. Parents ruled, and not the baby, which crowed as much as it pleased, except over its begettors.
It must be said, however, that elderly people even then bewailed the decay of the times, and often, over their pipes or knitting, conjured up visions of more virtuous days, when they were young, amid the green fields of old England, the emerald meadows of Holland, or on the hardy plains of Sweden.
Secondly, MORALS.—Ethics have no isothermal lines, fencing in the moral qualities, as nature girdles the earth with wavy zones for fruits, arctic, temperate, and tropical. And yet certain vices and virtues prevail, as trade-winds, more at one period, or over one tract at a given time than at or over another. It would almost seem as if certain moral or immoral ovarian eggs had been early and secretly laid in some wide districts, or among certain nations, where they were afterwards washed over by the impregnating milt of peculiar influences, and then broke into ready and abundant life.
There were jails in all the Colonies, and very early. The variety of the jail-bird never wanted specimens. The crimes against the person were more frequent at first than those against property, for the obvious reason that there were more of the former than the latter; as property multiplied, however, it was, as usual, viciously coveted.
The vices of an early age are more vigorous but rarer. Mean crimes; ambidextrous, cunning contrivances under the forms but against the spirit of law; ingenious larcenies by railway companies, by chartered corporations, by trust companies, by commercial partnerships, by seminaries and academies, where the pupils provide their own furniture, silver, and a great part of the instruction, and pay twice—ordinary and extraordinary—for everything they ought to get and do not; sharp, unscrupulous trade, slicing down realities so thin that they hardly serve to veneer our wants, and diluting truth so much that the millionth part of a grain will supply a whole store for twenty-four hours; the brokerage of office; the thousand deceits, infiltrated through the spongy textures of doubtful natures, and sprouting out, like rice, when the water of gain is poured upon it;—these all are the luxuries of a higher civilization. They have nothing to feed on in a simple state of society. They drift in upon an older one like barnacles and foul creepers on the copper fastenings of noble, well-freighted ships. Like blood in super-refined sugar, subtle vices look so white in the mixture that we almost fail to see their crimsoning hues. We speak of the crimes and misdemeanors of the Colonial times as indications of the prevailing morality, just as flies in open pans of cream tell its quality and richness.
Morality, we have said, is not bounded by isothermal lines; and yet climate and soil do seriously affect the prevailing moral tones and hues, just as earthly lakes take on the passing colors of the heavens above.
The Puritan sternness of New England convictions—as iron-like as the firs and larches on her own hills—swept in as gray gustiness across her early history as her northeasters over her wide fields. The latter pinched her children physically till they became of the same blue tint as their church regulations. The rigidity of even Huguenot faith could not stand the continual sun of South Carolina, which, at length, so relaxed its sharp lines that they ceased to cut at all across that compressed globe of iniquity, human slavery. The moral qualities of Virginia were like its own soil, at first stiff and deep, but gradually deteriorating until they got down into such a narcotic, stony poverty, that the plough of vigorous truth seldom turned up.
Forms of church worship, rites, and ceremonies usually flourish best in warm latitudes, where the passive swing on ecclesiastical ropes, suspended between time-crusted pillars, requires less exertion than climbing the tree, Zaccheus-like for one’s self. The vines which, all along down the well-sunned slopes, from the Chesapeake Bay southwards, lean lovingly upon the magnolia and cottonwood, shaping themselves often into verdant gothic arches, grasped with no tighter fingers the supports which safely steadied their trusting confidence, than did their sunny-hearted cultivators curl securely the tendrils of their religious faith around the Episcopal oaks, whose acorns, dropped from rook-nested boughs in England, and gathered and planted here, soon sprang up and spread their cool shades for an easy, luxurious faith.
The dominant morality of New York early borrowed its ingredients, as its capital, from whomsoever would lend it anything. Although all these contributions came to it through the Narrows, they soon broadened, on being landed. Thither came the sturdy, broad-breeched, meadow-bottomed Dutch, bringing the well-pounded creed of Dort, hardened and tempered, like blistered steel, upon the anvil of war, through the preceding century. The mace of iron-glaived Alva had again and again struck it; but the sturdy strokes had sent more fire into than they had ever brought from it. There, too, came Protestants from the Rhine, who had gone through the flames of St. Bartholomew’s day, and escaping first from France to Old Netherlands, and thence to New Netherlands, had carried with them, more carefully than their old delft, the sharp Articles of Calvinism. From Bohemia came the scholars of Huss; from Piedmont, the hunted Waldenses; from France, the men who turned their faces to centripetal Rome as their Mecca,—their religious creeds mixing and mingling in the wide-armed Bay of New York, which ever welcomed all religions that built houses on its shores or belted its waist with commercial girdles. The Baptists were early washed over to our coasts, and finding ample rivers for their aquatic rite, spread with every new wave of emigration. Congregational and Independent churches grew like young bullocks in almost every New England valley,—even putting their stiff necks through the Connecticut natural Ox-Bow at Hadley,—the only yoke they ever would submit to. We speak of churches and sects as propagators of morality, and as the yardsticks which measured the colonial morals; for as yet wicked men had not learned to use the church as covers, whence to spread nets for simpletons that lighted, like pigeons, on or near the adjacent grounds. In general, it may be said, that in spite of Puritan rites in New England showing the forbidding and cold side of the warm-hearted Gospel, in spite of the hedged Episcopal orchards of Virginia, where the blossoming odors were sought to be kept wholly inside the very high walls, in spite of the fermenting influences in New York, and the discouragements from various local causes in the other Colonies, Rhode Island and Maryland excepted, the colonists were healthily moral.
The schoolmaster got early abroad; and, generally boarding around in the school district, and making himself miscellaneously useful, wedged some educating notions into the heads of all,—in the younger by day, and in the older during the evenings. And thus the church, the school-house, industry, which pushed back idleness and its brood of vices, simple agricultural ways, the absence of city sores, and the rugged, conscientious pursuit of wholesome livelihoods in largely ventilated spaces, all concurred to hand up the Colonies along the unplanked roads of the age, to the outstretched hand of the eighteenth century.
Thirdly, THE HABITS of the period were few and simple; generally made of conscientious, native materials, coarse but strong; and were exceedingly well preserved.
They were of a mixed color, but on the whole good.
Fourthly, THE LAWS were at first and usually imported. Most of them were designed and upholstered in those second-class shops in London, the proprietors’ manufactories, which were owned by certain royal joint-stock subscribers, whose object was to make as much money as possible out of their articles. With this supreme object in view, their enactments were mainly framed to secure to themselves as much as could be of the proceeds of colonial labor, and leave the colonial purchasers to pay their own expenses and run the risks from the weather, poor crops, and Indian interruptions. To accomplish this, the proprietors sought to have the colonists devote as much of their time as possible to work. They endeavored to relieve them from the necessity of wasting precious moments in disposing of their products or in supplying themselves with materials, or in gossiping in assemblies about foolish rights, or in squandering their days in electing officers, or gadding about the townships in electioneering for themselves or others.
Did the Colonies want materials, wheat to sow the first year, crockery, furniture, store goods?
The companies could so easily send over a ship with them.
Did the prosperous colonist wish to dispose of his surplus crop?
The companies would take it for him, and sell it in England.
Was a governor, a judge, an office-holder of any kind, such as collector, portwarden, etc., needed?
Why, the companies kept them already made at their manufactory in London, and would express one through by their fast-sailing line in ample time, even if it took three months, and would deliver them wherever desired, at Plymouth, Hartford, Charleston, or Jamestown.
EXPRESSING A COLONIAL GOVERNOR FROM LONDON. (p. 189) ]
The colonists very early felt the inconvenience of this little arrangement; and, being a sharp set, soon perceived the loss in thus buying and selling exclusively in a foreign market, stuff which they could suit themselves better with at home, even if the articles did not have the companies’ trade-mark or shine with their patented varnish. Gradually they tried their hands at law-making and officer-making, and, finding how easy it was, took a great liking to the business; and at length, dropping the foreign-made articles one after another, came to carry on a considerable manufacture of their own. The Yankee colonists were particularly handy at making church regulations, and so multiplied them that we doubt whether any churches then existing had such a large and full collection. In fact, in some parts of New England, church-members had a difficulty often in knowing what to do, not having sufficient time to read the long codes, and yet conscientiously fearing lest they might offend against some of their minute provisions prescribing or proscribing action. It may be remarked, in passing, that this cacœthes faciendi leges is an itch highly American, no ointment having yet been found strong enough to cure it. The colonists early insisted on acquiring their lands in fee, not liking any leases but releases. The old fable of Anteus was again vivified. The man who stands on the soil gets the strength of the earth; and forthwith wrestles down his opponents, want or idleness, be they never so herculean. And so the simple land-owners of the Colonies, touching constantly their own acres, sucked up law-making power from their pores, and even imbibed a certain resisting faculty to cannons bored by any one but themselves.
They had an aversion to roads not made with their own hands; to laws of entail or inheritance, disposing of their lands which they had chopped out of the raw side of a continent; and, in fine, became so resolutely resistant to all resolutions moved on the far Atlantic side, unless seconded on this by themselves through their own representatives, that we are compelled by authentic documents to believe, if the ten commandments had been enacted by the royal law-makers without Colonial ratification, the sturdy settlers would have practically expunged all the “nots” from the suspected decalogue.
In those early times nothing was more criminal than the laws against criminals. Like the medical practitioners, the legal doctors believed in blood-letting for all ailments. Misdemeanors, now disposed of at quarter sessions and by police magistrates with small fines or petty imprisonment, then dangled at the hideous cross-bars.
The soft, April-like rains of clemency, now and then, however, began to fall upon these hard enactments. Quakers mildly doubted whether these scarecrows really frightened other offenders off the fields of crime. Silent tears, shed in secret household places over brothers and sons hung up on high hills for stealing or trespass, began to gather, like the waters of fountains hidden away in the depths of valleys, and to create that large American river, Public Sentiment,—larger than the Hudson, the Ohio, or the Mississippi,—which, rising and rising, has swept so many abuses and errors into the gulfs of time.
That solemn Saxon joke, a coroner’s inquest, as gloomy in its dissections, and as funny in its illogical conclusions, as in the land of the heptarchy, was not denied to those deodand colonists whose hearts suddenly stopped beating, and whose mortal wrecks, thrown up on that very weary shore “Crow’ners Law” were always prizes for small bunglers. For live men, habeas corpus, that great opener of illegally locked doors, began at the close of the century to be provided.
If colonial judges sometimes wrote to England to know how to decide cases politically edged, for fear they might cut a royal prerogative or sharpen popular rights; or if justices of the peace—those small pedlers of very common law, and uncommon specimens of judicial wares—dribbled out decisions for plaintiff or defendant, not knowing which was which, the puzzled magistrate giving opinions about the off ox, without knowing which was the “off” or which the “near” ox; or if sometimes in extreme cases the obfuscated and doubting arbiter of law consulted his wife and retailed her caudle lecture to the astonished suitor, as his well-considered judgment in the case,—in the main it may be averred that justice was as well tolled from the mills, as in these latter days when the judicial miller takes from the bag before the grist goes in, and sees to it that his private gutter taps the hopper before it shakes itself into the customer’s heap. Color is supposed to lurk just under the outer skin, and, if placed on the scales, to be imponderable; but it was always found that positive colors, when put on the judicial Fair banks, were very light; the white, which is no color at all, invariably weighing down that side of the balance, when a cinnamon-colored Indian or a black-berried African was found in the other. The black man always lost at the checker-board, even when the moves were claimed to be on the square. In fact, until a few years past, when the military game called “drafts” began, luck never favored that color at the little game of law, at which two can play and one pay, or in fact at any of the larger games of life in America. The bleaching-powders that whiten even the ermine were slow in coming into use. The seventeenth century, like so many of its ancestors, while working its double team, one white and the other black, to draw its loads, took better care at baiting-places and at the taverns over night of the white horse than of the other.
CHAPTER XI.
THE COLONIES IN THE LOWER HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
The Colonial Colts in the large, open Field of the Eighteenth Century.—The Effects of a Sniff of French Gunpowder.—Queen Anne’s War, 1702–1713; its Cost and Results in Europe and America.—Acadia changes its Name to Nova Scotia.—How the Colonies started a Newspaper in 1704.—Philadelphia in a Sheet in 1719; and how comfortable it was.—The Franklin Bros. furnish Food too condensed even for Boston.—Benjamin quits the Hub; foots it, without tiring, to New York.—How he got through New Jersey without paying Toll.—Enters Philadelphia with Two Loaves, and sets up an Intellectual Bakery.—Banks built on the Sands of Credit.—Moving Accidents.—John Law’s Scheme to use the Mississippi Valley; how it grew; what it promised, and how it performed.—A French Pasquinade.—The Results of a Bank Panic in the Eighteenth Century.—The Effects on the Manufacture of Children.—Number of Colonists in 1713 and 1743.—The Condition of Delaware, New Hampshire, and Vermont.—The Training of Young America.—Yale College and its Mustard-like Growth.—The American Learned Oak.—The Connection between Slate-Pencil and Gum Chewing and Female Education.—What took Place between 1713 and 1743.—A Negro Plot in New York.—Negroes thrown overboard, and the Bubbles that rose.—How large Historic Doors swing on small Hinges.—Examples from A to W.—What happened because Maria Theresa was a Female.—The English Georges; what Bulls they were, and made.—The Transatlantic Bullocks; how they rushed into King George’s War in 1744, and what Mischief they did for Four Years.
The colonial colts which we left tied up to the bars of the eighteenth century could not, with their American blood, stand there for any length of time without chafing to be let into “fresh fields and pastures new.” The bars down, off they scampered, dashing up their heels and tossing their heads in the fresh air.
Scarcely, however, had they gone a stone’s throw in the great unfenced field, before they snuffed a sulphurous smell from the adjacent lot, the French settlements of Acadia. Queen Anne, the second daughter of James II., who, in 1702 had succeeded her sister Mary, which aforesaid Mary, with her husband, the Orange William, had, as we have already seen, found England too small for them and the aforementioned James, also took a fancy that France was being made too comfortable for her migratory parent, and, in order to keep him travelling, bombarded that country. This little experiment, called in the large-bore histories, Queen Anne’s War, lasted eleven years, and cost England about one sixteenth of her entire value. She obtained, however, as compensation for this outlay, these results in Europe: several fresh monuments in Westminster Abbey, a staggering back-load of debt, a crowd of one-sleeved men, many young women in becoming widow’s caps, Marlborough and wife with salaries amounting yearly to three hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars besides the snug little box at Blenheim Palace, the glorious though empty victories of Ramillies, Malplaquet, Oudenarde, and Blenheim, and that very big elephant, the rock of Gibraltar.
Of course our colts became intensely excited by the gunpowdery air, tore away into the northern French lot, and fell to kicking most lustily. The French fillies there naturally bit back and let fly their gallic-shod heels freely; but the New England ponies so worried and wounded them in the flanks and hips as to drive them clean out of the field. Port Royal was reduced and became Ann-apolis; and Acadia, battered by colonial guns to a wreck, and turning up in her distress under the name of Nova Scotia, grasped one of those long humane lines which the Marine Society, or government located at London, threw out at that time continually for distressed communities. To this sea line the blue-nosed, fish-shaped peninsula has since held with the bite of a codfish, trolled and played by the Izaak Walton of nations, until the fish shows signs of letting go the hook.
Amid the Alpine glaciers of war, however, there bloomed, as travellers find high up among the ice-fields, the graceful and tender flowers of gentler life.
The Colonies started the century with a newspaper. The Boston “News-Letter,” printed on a foolscap sheet, and issued once a week, in 1704, only twenty-eight years after the first newspaper was started, and in the very year the first editor, Roger l’Estrange, died, was the parent of that large family of children of all sizes and with such varied characters, which are now disseminated through almost every village of the land, and has acquired such a wide influence, interest, and large real estates among us. Meet it was that this prolific stock should have originated on the spot where, as is now pretty well proved, the first white men who visited our continent made their first landing within our borders, seven hundred years before. It must not, however, be supposed, that the pioneers in newspapers were Danes. From all that can now be ascertained, they were Bohemians. We may add that the “News-Letter” was never merged in the New York “Herald.” As it never issued but a single edition on any one day, and had no contemporaries at first to cull from, it did not become the New York “Express.” It is also a common mistake to suppose that it was afterwards expanded into the “North American Review,” or became by cultivation that large, flowering double monthly rose, “The Atlantic.” The “News-Letter” offered no premiums to multiply subscribers or to divide the claims of competitors; for it had no rival for fifteen years. Then Philadelphia, always emulous, got up a second sheet, a warm, gray worsted one, which wrapped up comfortably her growing youth, and displayed most acceptably her comely proportions. Two years later, in 1721, James Franklin established at Boston “The New England Courant,” the fourth American newspaper, full of audacious thinking and independent notions, some of which were furnished by his brother Benjamin, then a stripling of fifteen years. The criticisms were too strong, even for Boston; and after trying in vain for two years to nurse the place up to the wholesome diet, Benjamin left it. After a perilous journey to New York, whence he footed it across New Jersey without being policed or tolled,—for the Camden and Amboy Railroad had not yet subjected that Province to its sway,—he entered Philadelphia with two loaves of bread for himself. He soon set up a good intellectual oven of his own, and distributed, not Boston brown bread, but well-baked, healthy, family loaves, made of the best white flour to be had, to the world and—Philadelphia.
In 1740 there were eleven newspapers in America, one in each of the Colonies of New York, Virginia, and South Carolina, three in Pennsylvania, and five in Boston, which thus early began to gather Massachusetts to a head.
But these were not the only papers issued. The Bank of England had been established in 1694; and eighteen years later, paper credits were issued by South Carolina to the amount of £48,000. Massachusetts with her presses could of course print more promises, and in 1714 she beat South Carolina by £2,000. Other Colonies followed, even Rhode Island, distrusting Providence, built a paper-house on the sands of credit. The floods soon came upon all these unstable edifices, and there were many “moving accidents by flood” to the washed banks. The slight silver foundations were undermined, and the banking-houses fell, and “great was the fall thereof.” Twenty-five years after the first bank was established, few of the credits were worth over twenty cents on the promised dollar. Those of North Carolina descended to seven,—almost as low as Confederate paper in 1865.
But the scheme most American in size and promises was started in France by a Scotchman in 1716. He proposed to the French Regent and established upon the boundless trust in the untold, because not unfolded, mining wealth of the valley of the Mississippi, a company, spawning 200,000 shares of stock, aggregating at the par value one thousand millions of livres, which, on the iron strength of human faith, six millions only of silver in its own vaults, and the handsome certificates that hinted at more figures than ordinary arithmetic can compute, agreed to pay the vast public debt of France, swollen under Louis XIV. higher than a Mississippi freshet, and to distribute forty per cent annually to the stockholders. Omne ignotum pro magnifico. It seemed as if the steel armor of De Soto, buried in the oozy bottom of the Mississippi River, touched by John Law’s paper wand, had dissolved, and by a wonderful alchemy had been turned into liquid gold, whose exuberant floods were to make of France an auriferous Delta. The prophets of a rise were many, the real profits very few; and in four years the principal had gone where De Soto’s armor was rusting. The golden Armada of France was snagged, and dispersed beyond the reach of diver or bell. The speed with which shares, swollen from one thousand to ten thousand, were suddenly pricked and vanished, and the rapid changes in the fortunes of their holders, are well expressed by a French pasquinade of the period:—
“Lundi, j’achetais des actions; Mardi, je gagnai des millions; Mercredi, j’ornai mon menage; Jeudi, je pris un equipage; Vendredi, je m’en fis au bal; Et Samedi, a l’hopital.”[A]
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Footnote A:
Which may be turned out of its native bed into an inferior English one thus:—
Monday, some shares I obtained; Tuesday, thereby millions I gained; Wednesday, my establishment grew; Thursday, to an equipage I flew; Friday, at the ball I long tarried; And Saturday to the poor-house was carried.
MORAL.—Paper Laws are not as trustworthy as, although more shiny than, specie.
The experiments of the colonists thus early in engraved promises showed how adventurous and hopeful they had become. The unfavorable results did not indent their faith. There was always a side-pocket for American losses. In this they clapped their broken bank-bills, and John Law’s handsome certificates with the wonderful figures that had “cut so many shines,” and went on. The building of a few rice-machines, sugar-mills, or school-houses were checked for a few months; the clearing of some lots was less rapid; the purchase of a new gown for Prudence, or a new waistcoat for John Smith’s great-great-grandson, postponed; but the subscriptions to the Boston “News-Letter” did not fall off, nor the Franklin loaf diminish in weight.
There was one important branch of American industry and wealth which actually increased most during the severest periods of financial losses, the manufacturing of children. At the close of Queen Anne’s war, in 1713, the Colonies had a population of four hundred thousand,—an increase of one hundred and sixty-five thousand since the bars were let down. This population doubled during the next thirty years.
So many new boys coming forward required of course more training. A long-sighted governor of the East Indies, Elihu Yale by name, reached a hand across the seas, and placed some books and a little money at the feet of a few wise-hearted men in Connecticut, who took them up, and planted them for a few years at Saybrook. The gits thriving well, they were transplanted to New Haven. Everybody knows how these mustard shoots have grown; how their sturdy arms ever keep touching the westering borders, dropping schoolmistresses on Southern soils, ministers on Western prairies, spicy editors for city sandwiches; even their dead branches enriching the deep soils of scientific and theologic thought.
THE SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD. (p. 201) ]
The planting of schools increased. It was always a favorite branch of American husbandry. The schoolhouse was frequently the first seedling put in. Now more carefully fenced about, it became the quercus giganteus Americanus,—to our plantations what the British oak is on an English estate, the glorious spike that rivets it to the wave-rocked island. Birch-trees could hardly supply the colonial demand upon them. School-girls opened the slate-quarries for chewing-pencils, and stripped the spruce-trees for gum. Knowest thou not, O reader, what a close connection there is between pencil and gum chewing and female education? If not, thou hast not been blessed with sisters between the liquid ages of fourteen and seventeen, and must hasten to study female geology, which embeds between its slaty folds the beautiful ferns and flora of knowledge. Thou must betake thyself to the nearest seminary, and observe the sudden and deep openings down through slate-lined shafts into the mines of earthly learning.
The treaty of Utrecht in 1713 closed and sealed Queen Anne’s war. There was a repose through the Colonies for thirty-one years. During this period the Colonies stretched themselves, took in new ideas, and let out the strait bandages which still swathed them. Delaware, dandled on the knee of Pennsylvania until 1708, having cut her first teeth, was set down to crow like a young cock among the blue hen’s chickens. Vermont, as we have before seen, undergoing pretty rugged nursing through her vigorous babyhood, was at last plumped upon the floor by New York, in 1724, with a smart cuff on the ears, and the ungracious and thankless advice, “Now go, if you must, and take care of yourself.” The youngster, who had found out for some time that she could not only run alone, but could even climb up to her own Saddle-Back, immediately started off, and was soon seen setting up education factories, saw-mills, meeting-houses, and nut-shellers, and running a variety of very transporting businesses between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River. It was a long time before she got her lines with New York out of tangle and settled; but as Vermonters never felt any practical difficulty in crossing lines whenever they saw pleasanter ones in better places, this uncertainty as to the exact limits of her colonial cords rather facilitated than impeded her circulation and growth. New Hampshire—well out at length from the leading-strings of Massachusetts, in 1741—toddled slowly up into hardy strength. From her whitened hills she was obliged to keep a sharp lookout northwards upon the saucy French and tricky Indians, and, in spite of all her sentries and vigilant scouts, suffered more than her share from them both. The Indians took off many of her scalps; but, notwithstanding all their sharp knives, she kept her Profile safe and unscarred, and was even Keene enough to outlive the neighboring tomahawks and the more distant and swooping night-hawks from the St. Lawrence.
New York was stunted in her growth for a short time, in 1741, by the report of a negro plot. It turned out, however, to be “a great cry and little wool.” Yet on the bare suspicion of a design to burn the city, more than thirty slaves were judicially massacred. The golden waves of commerce, however, soon closed over the momentary plunge of the sable coffins, and the delusion, like that at Salem half a century before, rippled away from the spot in widening circles until it broke upon the historic shore. Some events, insignificant at the time, grow larger as they approach the higher land of civilization; others, magnified by local passion, soon sink forever out of sight. The former are buoyed up by the life-floats of principle; the latter, unworthy of salvage, break and vanish.
Thus the contests of the colonists with the proprietors, slowly marking the advancing tide of civil freedom, are hardened on the shore line of our past history. Although they themselves were too busy in making to study the results when accomplished, their descendants, from more cultivated heights, ponder carefully the wave-tracks, as geologists mark and measure the traces of ancient sea-marks in coal-beds, overlaid to-day with the weighty accumulations of ages. On the other hand, the petty struggles in Virginia, Massachusetts, and South Carolina to establish ecclesiastical supremacy, and in other Colonies to set up sumptuary laws prescribing the number, cost, or cut of garments, although at the time tossing up great masses of foam, like foam speedily dissolved into nothingness.
Great doors swing on small hinges. The Colonies, towards the close of the first half of the century, were destined to add another example to the many notable proofs which the history of nations before them had furnished of this fact historically observed. The Macedonian Empire burst over the little excess of wine poured one day into Alexander’s cup. The chance meeting of Henry VIII. with Anna Boleyn altered the dynastic current and the religious faith of England, changed the European Atlas, and affected forever the settlement, civilization, and characters of the American Colonies. The acid temper of Tetzel precipitated into Luther’s cup, raised the Reformation into sudden effervescence. The evenly grooved disposition of William the Silent was a pivotal point around which the liberties of the Dutch Republic safely turned. An accident might have easily changed the character or shifted that individual centre, and sent the unbalanced periphery of the state into disastrous confusion or ruin. And so the accidental birth of a daughter, instead of a son, to Charles VI. of Austria, was an unfortunate windfall, which in 1744 raised a tempest of war that enveloped all Europe, and swept with fury over their Transatlantic Colonies. The entire Continent was marshalled into two hostile camps for eight years; England, France, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Holland, and nearly all the minor states, let out their best blood,—the heart’s,—or crippled the best limbs of their young and middle-aged men, spent all their available cash, and mortgaged the future; summer fields of grain were trampled out and remanured by the bone-dust of poor soldiers; Fontenoy, Bergen-op-Zoom, and other places were made, by their horrors, resorts ever since of idle tourists; and all Europe, in fact, begirt with war-fires which burnt up the accumulated wealth of generations,—and all because of that little windfall on the lot of Charles VI. Of all the multitudes maimed, butchered, or consigned to costly pension lists, only two individuals had the slightest interest in the wild carnival,—Maria Theresa, the windfall, the Pomona apple of discord, and one Charles Albert, Elector of Bavaria. France and England were of course on opposite sides, and the Colonial clocks marked Greenwich or Paris time as the master hands set them. The great iron pendulums on each side the sea swung together. The hour-hands constantly set off bells that tolled to funerals. The Colonies followed the hearses in mourning purchased by themselves. Genuine Americans already, they disdained to mention the expense, or to complain that it was beyond their means. In spite of funerals, however, and though the bells toll never so sadly, boys will grow.
The first George had come to the English throne in 1714. The second, third, and fourth of the same name successively covered it with their persons until 1830,—a century of English Georgics, full enough of bucolic stupidity and ox-like lolling down in rich clover, so far as the sovereigns were concerned, but bristling with short-horned and long-horned wars that pushed and gored in all directions. The second George, imported, like his sire, from Hanover, had been rolling in the rich English pastures for thirteen years, when the war of which we are now speaking commenced impaling so many victims,—a war which passes in our American chronicles under the name of “King George’s war,” but in European history is known as “the war of the Austrian succession.” As might be expected, after the old stiff-necked leader of the English herd commenced pushing the continental cows, the American young bulls—possessing all the red fire and knotted thews of the home stock—sprung over into the French lot, and after goring and receiving thrusts from the Gallic steers, at length, in 1745, made a dash at Louisburg in the island of Cape Breton, and ripped it out of the side of French America, leaving a sore gash that festered for six years.
It will be our duty hereafter to note the results of these wounds in mortifying French pride, and ultimately destroying the carefully nursed French colonial stock in North America.
CHAPTER XII.
THE CHAMPIONSHIP FOR THE AMERICAN BELT. 1754 TO 1763.
No Hopes for the Millennium in American Colonies up to 1754.—More Swords than Ploughshares.—Mars in America.—Sixteen Indian Wars in 147 Years.—How they were fed by French Oil and blown by French Bellows.—The Five Great Continental Wars, and how they reached over and handled the Colonies.—The Treaty Patches, and how they failed to cover the War Breaches.—The Volcanic Character of American Soil.—How the Animosities of France and England grew through Four Centuries, and in what a Hateful Harvest they waved, in 1754, each Side the Sea.—Celebrated Fights between the Rivals in Europe.—How Commercial Competition rubbed in Salt Water, and Religious Differences Brimstone, into the Wounds.—Memorable Cases of Battle Surgery.—The Relative Merits of English and French Claims to America fully stated.—Deeds of Land and of Arms clash.—French Jesuits with Crosses and Traders with Skins encompass the English Plantations from Maine to Minnesota, and thence to Alabama and Texas.—Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, Lallemand and others.—The Former escaped the Fast Life of Chicago, and La Salle the Hazards of Natchez.—France seeks to fasten a Remarkable Rosary around the Neck of Young America; England to cut it.—Suitors to the same Maiden, they suited not her nor each other.—Their soft Ways to her.—Their Hardness to each other.—Their Long Quarrels over her Person and Purse result at last in a Decisive Fight.—The Championship for the American Belt.—The Champions, the Belt, and the Ring described.—How John Bull and Jean Crapeau stepped into the Latter.—The Nine Rounds from 1754 to 1763.—How Mr. Bull won; what he said, and how Monsieur Crapeau behaved.—A Suitor pleased, and a Suitor non-suited.
The American colonists up to 1754 could not well entertain, from their own experience, any well-founded hopes of the speedy advent of the millennium, when meek-eyed Peace is to hold the good reapers—McCormicks or others—beaten out from ugly swords, and when war is to be banished somewhere, probably to that red-faced Mars, whose vulgar manners, bricky hair, and swaggering gait have not unfrequently brought him into disgrace with his neighbors, particularly with the touchy Venus, and sometimes put him into an eclipse with that steady-going old tramper, the Earth. But somehow, in spite of his disreputable antecedents, Mars had contrived to acquire a very strong influence over that part of our planet occupied by the thirteen Colonies, from the time of the very first settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, throughout all the century and a half which followed. Over that tract of time, their march along the highway of life was like an Irish landlord’s visit to his own estate,—armed, grim, and hostilely interrogative of all who approached. Like his, their advance, too, was
“Per ignes Suppositos cineri doloso.”
During the one hundred and forty-seven years of which we speak, sixteen distinct wars with various Indian tribes or confederacies, averaging one every nine years, had been carried on at various points, from the extreme northeast to the farthest southern border. In these wars, formal expeditions were organized, bodies of troops, large for the populations, raised, equipped, and sent out amid the sighs of young ladies and the fears of their mothers, punishing old massacres, and wasting, like prairie fires, whole districts, and of course kindling other Indian resentments that swept back over the settlements.
Over nearly all of these combustible war piles it was found that French oil was poured to make the fire take readily, and French bellows were at work to blow the savage flames into a disastrous conflagration. Between these more formidable expeditions were interjected petty skirmishes, midnight attacks, sorties, and reprisals, as numerous and as little regarded by the colonists in general as railroad killings or corporation massacres with us. Guns and swords were as common in farmers’ houses, as spades and hoes to-day. Arrows to the right, left, and in front of them, pointed many colonial morals, and adorned many a sad tale of border life. Bloody Brooks were christened with red water in three different settlements; and poor, indeed, are the annals of that town—whose records reach back beyond the half-way mile-stone of the eighteenth century—that cannot show the garnishments of the bow and arrow. Few, indeed, were the families of New England that could keep the Passover, commemorative of exemptions from the terrible visitations of the Indian smiter.
Besides these chronic and almost ceaseless domestic troubles, the great continental wars—those of 1651 and 1664 between England and Holland, in 1656 between England and Spain, King William’s war from 1688 to 1697, Queen Anne’s from 1702 to 1713, and that free European fight for the Austrian succession which closed the half-century, covering in all twenty-nine years on this side the sea—drew between their mailed hands the tender Colonies, wrenched their young and growing interests from them, and hurled their protectors sometimes against the French of Acadia and New France, sometimes against the ever-hostile Indian tribes. The patched-up peaces which followed these great wars, and which covered the European breaches, left the colonial combatants battered and bruised, ragged in clothes, in debt for expenses, and in mourning for the lost, with Frenchmen and Indians irritated by the conflict, and goaded into hot revenges, which even the snows of New France could not cool.
In a word, the entire belt of land northwards and westward of the plantations was highly volcanic, some peak almost continually in eruption, while always throughout its whole extent mutterings under the cindered heat threatened wide-shaking action and crimsoned tidal waves.
The animosity between the French and English races in Europe, in 1754, almost surpasses our belief. For four centuries, from the days of Edward I. and the black-mailed Prince, who, with their armies, overran France, almost as numerously, and wrought as violently on her pride and taste as the irruptions of green-backed Americans to-day, French and English armies in the field, navies on the sea, wit, caricature, heavy-folioed bombs, light artillery, pasquinades, and exploding mines of sarcasm and raillery, not only mounded new graves on either side the Channel, and gashed ever-reminding physical wounds, but fretted and frayed Saxon self-complacency and Gallic egotism. Cressy, in 1346; Agincourt, in 1415; the battle of the Spurs, in 1513; the war in aid of the Huguenots, in 1627; Blenheim and Malplaquet, in 1706 and 1709,—planted bitter memories that waved continually in vigorous harvests of rancorous hatred. Jealous rivals stood by to remind each of her supposed disgraces, and thus to profit by new quarrels. Commercial competition rubbed salt water into the raw places. Differences of religious faith chafed them with brimstone. Squibs, tossed backwards and forwards, lit on inflamed parts, and raised national sores. Spanish-fly several times drew angry blisters, and proud flesh often set in around the edges. Plasters were of course put on by diplomatic surgeons; but the trouble was deeper than their patches could reach. The knife and steel scissors were then brought in again, and the national vivisections began anew. These surgical operations were almost constantly going on, and their description in Hume, Robertson, and other historians, might be appropriately called Memoirs of Celebrated Cases in Surgery.
It must be remembered that, at the period to which we are drawing the reader’s attention, railroads and swift steamers had not yet ironed out the stiff mastiff-like ruffles around the necks of these high-spirited, full-blooded nations. International expositions had not spread their cloths over the Field of Gold, on which rapiers should only be used to cut English roast beef and French pudding, and helmets be turned up into drinking-cups, to quaff, in cool Bordeaux, toasts to the entente cordial of solid peace. On the contrary, at the middle of the eighteenth century the mutual hatred of the two nations saturated everything. National drinks, popular on one side of the twenty-mile strait which parted the imbibers, were poisons on the other. Clothes, worn by one race, were not only shunned, but caricatured with pen and pencil by the other. The paintings, the plastic arts, the literature, and legislation of the period have preserved in enduring forms the widely felt antipathy. Their mutual rancor dissolved the obligations of courtesy, dripped through diplomatic despatches, and left the green mould of jealousy on all the relations of the two governments, and even the business transactions of their people.
This envenomed home feeling had early crossed the Atlantic, and lost none of its acridity on the passage. In point of time the English were before the French in their American discoveries, but in settlement the French preceded the English. While the Cabots, the first Englishmen who ran down our country, touching in 1498 at Newfoundland, and thence coasting along our shores as far as Florida, without leaving any colonists behind them, anticipated Verizzanni, the first French discoverer in America, by twenty-five years, the French under Cartier in 1534, Roberval in 1542, and Ribault in 1562, landed and made fugitive settlements at various points, from the Huguenot plantation in South Carolina northwards around the present Provinces of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, and up the St. Lawrence as far westward as Montreal. Over this entire broad strip they had affixed the label “New France.” The English made no further discoveries of, nor any settlements in, America, after Cabot’s expedition, until 1583, when Sir Humphrey Gilbert, freighted with a charter from Queen Elizabeth, sailed for Virginia with a company of settlers. This was rapidly followed up, with little permanent result, however, by Raleigh, Granville, and Gosnold. The French settlement of Port Royal, on the Bay of Fundy, antedated that of the English at Jamestown five years.
England and France now vied with each other in granting large deeds of American territory, most of which conflicted with each other, as their martial deeds had done at home. The English Henry VII. granted to Mr. John Cabot all the lands which he might discover, reserving to his royal self a small commission of twenty per cent. Five years later the French Henry IV., without employing any lawyer to search the title, gave to De Monts so much of the same North American lot as now embraces Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, the New England States, and the confederated Dominion of Canada. Other unwarrantable warranty deeds were subsequently made and done by the rival grantors, involving the titles in distressing doubt and confusion. Military actions of ejectment followed. As early as 1629, Champlain and his French colony were driven from Quebec, like squatters on the property of another, and the French would then have been all ejected from New France but for an unwise and ignorant settlement between the two large European landlords, called the Treaty of 1630. Subsequently the French were dispossessed, as we have elsewhere recorded, of patches of the large estate given to De Monts,—Nova Scotia in 1710, and Cape Breton in 1745,—mere strips, it is true, compared with that broad-sweeping tract around which they had carried chain and compass, and planted the boundary stakes of stockades and forts, but which touched their national pride at its very heart centre.
JOLIET AND MARQUETTE DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI. (p. 216) ]
The French growth in America was as steady as it was early in starting. Five years before the Pilgrim fathers and mothers landed at Plymouth, French missionaries had erected bark chapels in Maine, and consigned by devout rites the Pine State to the Virgin’s protection. While the Calvinists of Massachusetts Bay, the Plymouth Colony, and Connecticut were sturdily settling, by wordy argument, the grounds of their religious belief, Fathers Brebeuf, Lallemand, and other Gallic Jesuits were steadily and stealthily acquiring new grounds for the Pope and the French king. Barefooted emissaries, in serge, and girded, like the Baptist in the Judæan wilderness, with girdles about their loins, patiently and slowly travelling twelve hundred miles westward, foot-weary yet sustained by spiritual zeal, skirted those inland seas, Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Michigan, crossed the head-waters of the Hudson, the Ohio, and Wisconsin, hauled their birch canoes over regions now boiling with oil-wells, hissing with steam-driven factories, or lit up by the passing splendors of palace rail-cars, and had thus, as early as 1650, planted the Roman cross and the French lily side by side, as far west as Fond du Lac, and the cool head-fountains of Lake Superior. Fur-traders followed the Jesuit missionaries. These sought to clothe the Indians with a warm belief in the teachings of the Society of Jesus, and in the supremacy of his Catholic Majesty of France; those hastened after to unclothe the otter, the beaver, and other living fur-dealers of the small packs which they carried on their own backs, and to obtain possession of those which their fellows had yielded up to the sharp persuasions of the cinnamon-stained hunters and trappers. Religious zeal, inflaming French blood, and glowing through a patriotic national emulation with the English settlements along the Atlantic slope, within the next twenty-five years, launched canoes upon and traversed the great lakes pushed down the principal rivers running southward from Quebec to St. Paul, gathered proselytes by preaching, and skins by trading, and encompassing the needs, instincts, and revenges of the various Indian tribes scattered through this vast region,—excepting always the Five Nations, which uniformly adhered to the English,—established a cordon of French alliances and influences, which in time of peace stretched its protecting line between them and their English rivals, and in war vibrated to their touch, and twanged quivers full of arrows on their hereditary foes. These unwearying teachers and traders were now to take possession, in the name of France and Rome, of the valley of the Mississippi, and to scatter the seeds of Gallic civilization all down its prolific breadth, and over its wide deltas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. In 1673, the Jesuit, James Marquette, having previously penetrated from Quebec through the intervening wilderness to Sault St. Marie, and there established the first white settlement in the present State of Michigan, set out, with Joliet and two tawny interpreters, to trace the mysteries of the Great River of America. Sailing down the Wisconsin River, and reaching in a few days that wide-rolling flood which we now call the Mississippi River, and floating on its rough but kindly bosom for one hundred and eighty miles, they landed on its western bank, and, crossing a narrow portage, struck, without hurting, the Des Moines River. They were the first white men in Iowa, and next to De Soto, one hundred and thirty-one years before them, the only pale children that had ever looked into the wrinkled face of the Father of Waters. Here they were met by four red men, who, in answer to their inquiries, loftily proclaimed themselves to be “Illinois” or “Men.” The spirit of Chicago, thus filtrated, antedated its own settlement over one hundred and fifty years. Re-embarking, these Gallic adventurers swept on down the rapidly rushing river unsnagged; passed in safety the large open mouth of the Missouri; overlooked the future site of St. Louis; refused to listen to the temptation which beckoned them to ascend the Ohio to the future metropolis of bacon; floated along over the rusting armor of De Soto, without diving for it, keeping a good lookout on the dangerous territory of Arkansas on their right, and Mississippi on their left, until they at last reached the point where the Arkansas River hastens to throw its burden of earth and water upon the back of the giant stream. Here they found Indians with European weapons of steel; and they returned back, retracing their courageous steps homeward. Marquette, let us add, preached for two years to the wild men in and around the future Chicago, and finally died upon the borders of a little stream in Michigan, which gratefully perpetuates his name in its own.
Brave Marquette! He escaped the perils of Chicago to yield up his spirit amid the innocencies of Michigan.
In 1682 La Salle, the French fur-trader, ventured down the Mississippi to the Gulf, without stopping to take the bluff outposts that sentinelled the future Vicksburg, and without halting over night at Natchez, and encountering the loss of all his earnings in that hazardous, porous, and absorbing place. Two years later he formed one of a colony sent out from Rochelle, in France, by the minister Colbert, and was wrecked in the Bay of Metagorda, the first of that large series of castaways in that peculiarly enterprising empire called Texas.
France thus added the lone star to her American constellation.
Although the entire French population in America, in 1688, was, by their own count, only eleven thousand two hundred and forty-nine, against more than ten times that number of English-speaking colonists, they had ere the close of that century erected mission-houses and trading-posts from the mouth of the Kennebec, in Maine, westward and northward to the Falls of Minnehaha, and southward down the Mississippi, through Louisiana, Texas, and Southern Mississippi. French forts and stockades showed defiant guns at Niagara, Crown Point, Detroit, St. Louis, and along the mud-bearing delta of the river, that La Salle had, first of white men, overcome with a birch canoe.
Eastward the adventurous French next advanced along the sinuous shores of the Gulf. In 1702, on the western bank of the Mobile River, and upon the thirsty sand-plain which comes down to drink its waters, Mobile was founded by Bienville. Two years following, an invoice of twenty young French girls was sent out to help the census-taker. The lot suiting well, a second consignment of twenty-three was despatched the next year. These vivacious goods, however, it may be incidentally remarked, rose the following year, in price and self-estimation, and formed what is called “The Petticoat Insurrection,” a rebellion against the limited amount of Indian corn served out during a season of scarcity. But more corn coming out they acknowledged it, and went down in pleased submission and quiet.
THE “PETTICOAT INSURRECTION” IN MOBILE IN 1706. (p. 221) ]
Lively Frenchmen now multiplied along the yeasty Gulf. In 1718 Bienville, then the French governor of Louisiana, courageously braving the alligators and swamp snakes, whose crescent attitude might have terrified a son of St. Patrick, began the city of New Orleans, of which, four years afterwards, Charlevoix, the historian and traveller, who visited it, gives this description: “The place has a population of about two hundred. I find it to consist of one hundred cabins disposed with little regularity; a large wooden warehouse; two or three dwellings that would be no ornament to a French village, and the half of a sorry storehouse, which they were pleased to lend to the Lord, but of which he had scarcely taken possession when it was proposed to turn him out to lodge in a tent.” These kind of loans, some maliciously aver, have continued fashionable in the Crescent City from that time to the present. However that may be, certain it is that the French settlements in America—a succinct narrative of which we had purposely deferred to give in connection with their last desperate struggle for power—had at the close of King George’s war, in 1748, reached their greatest extension. Imperial, too, was their stretch. Beginning at St. John’s, New Brunswick, and dotting the wide area that fills seventeen hundred miles between that point and the Mississippi River, at the present spunky little city of St. Paul, and stretching down that river fourteen hundred miles to its outlet, and so spreading westward into Texas, and eastward through Mississippi and Alabama, until they confronted the old Spanish plantation in Florida, these settlements zoned on three sides with a spiked belt the thirteen English Colonies on the Atlantic.
Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the accumulations of hatred through the preceding four had gathered to a festering head the hostile memories of the French race of English assumption, victories, and national contempt; and so through all this wide circuit of settlement, under cassock and surplice, under the coat of the soldier and the bear-skin of the trader, beat zealous French hearts, ready to assert the claims of a king deemed by them rightfully in possession, and to earn the absolution of a spiritual sovereign at Rome, ready, since the schism of Henry VIII., to be given to any one who would despoil or destroy the heretic English.
Young America, now at the budding period of her sweet sixteen, was, with her personal charms, her ample landed dower, and her ampler future expectations, a damsel well worth the keenest and best efforts of the two European rivals. France, besides being fired with the desire of getting possession of the large commissions likely to accrue from the handling her handsome estate, was anxious to make her Roman Catholic. For one hundred years she had been endeavoring to persuade the young girl to take from herself and place around her fair neck a rosary, among whose beads, at regular intervals, were interspersed some larger than the others wrought into shapes of cannon, swivels, little forts, and stockades.
England, ever looking after rich wards in chancery, with solid, landed cares, requiring a guardian, had as assiduously sought to gain the custody, and even to win the hand of the fresh and rosy American. She had not failed to observe the long and carefully made rosary, and had sought several times angrily to tear it off her neck with a glaived hand, and had more than once instigated the Iroquois to cut the shining chain at Lakes Champlain and Erie and on the Monongahela, and to scatter the metallic beads. She had also sent emissaries from the seaboard westward, bearing Protestant school-houses and churches, mission-houses, traders’ articles, and Saxon notions, to barter and exchange for the coveted rosary.
Each of the suitors, it was evident, was more intent upon the maiden’s fortune than her affections, more concerned about her lots than her lot. It was also abundantly manifest that the long-standing feuds and contentions over her possession and custody must at last and forever be decided.
The fight for the championship for the belt of America could no longer be postponed.
John Bull, bluff, beef-fed, plucky, and long-winded, weighing forty stone, stepped into the ring, tossed his tarpaulin to the centre, and having tipped off a bottle of Bass’s double XX, challenged Johnny Crapeau to fight it out for the lass. The Frenchman stripped at once for the fight, and with a nimble courtesy, thinly concealing his disdain, glided within the ropes which now surrounded the champions of Europe. Into the middle of the ring the belt was thrown. It was embroidered with Indian bead-work at one end and with beautifully wrought and valuable cotton fringes at the other, while picturesque figures of forest, lake, and plain set off the centre, and precious jewels and costly stones glittered all along either edge.
For nine years that great and deadly boxing-match lasted.
Why should we dwell upon it in detail? The world’s reporters were there, and have given full and accurate accounts, which have been read everywhere, except in France, with animated interest.
Most briefly, however, we may summarize the contest.
At the first call, each competitor came promptly forward, each eying the other warily, but with ill-suppressed dislike and jealousy. Some feints followed. A few passes were cautiously made, as if each was measuring his adversary and feeling for his strong and weak points. At length a rapid and dexterous touch of Mr. Bull’s stomach sent him uneasily back to his corner. Time was called for the second round in 1755, and, leaping forward, the alert Gaul struck his heavy, blundering antagonist in a weak spot in front, called Fort du Quesne, from which he reeled back to his place, and was held up for a time in a fainting condition by one George Washington, a young man of twenty-two, then a friend of Mr. Bull, and invited to be present. Recovering after a little time, Mr. Bull suddenly sprang up in intense suffering and mortification, and made across the ring in fury; but scarcely had he got within reach of the Frenchman, when he received a stunning blow on his very Crown Point. Time being up, the stout Briton again advanced towards his adversary with a most menacing manner, and struck out full from the shoulder, as if he intended to leave an awkward scar in the face, but missing his footing, he fell forward in a pool of water, named Ontario, the angry Gaul rolling over him, and punishing him when down in a manner deemed almost foul by the spectators. On the fourth round, in 1757, the Saxon pugilist rushed confidently forward, and aimed a direct thrust at a very ugly pimple on the Frenchman’s face, called Louisburg; but the Celt skilfully parried the home thrust, and, while his adversary was gathering himself to a second onset, delivered a regular Montcalm settler at Ticonderoga, a very tender British point, which drew blood in profusion.
Thus far the heavy Englishman had been worsted in every encounter; but on the next round he advanced from his wintry corner with great caution, set his teeth together firmly, and, making a feint, struck his antagonist, ere he had recovered, two quick, telling blows, one on his face, completely crushing that ugly pimple, and the other on that spot in the chest still sore, Fort du Quesne; but while the Englishman was all too intent upon these, his antagonist got in another Montcalm settler on that English mouth, Lake Champlain, which brought out blood and water quite distressing for innocent spectators to witness.
Both parties now retired to their corners, the Frenchman pretty well exhausted, Mr. Bull just getting warmed up to the fight, and both, if possible, more infuriated than ever. Each was thoroughly sponged, and on time being called for the sixth round, in 1759, John Bull strode completely across the ring to the spot which his adversary had chosen, glaring like a very Wolfe. He had tasted blood, his own was up, and his leonine nature was roused for a crushing spring. Quickly and rapidly he planted a blow between the Gaul’s blue eyes, breaking the bridge of his nose at Point Levi. To evade this blow, the Gaul leaped back and attempted to parry it, and at the same time to inflict upon his enemy another Montcalm settler; but quick as thought Mr. Bull, heavy as he was, sprang upon a small mound called the Plains of Abraham, and there, swinging his sinewy arm high in the air, brought down his ponderous fist full upon the Frenchman’s head. Staggering backwards to the ropes, the Celt fell headlong, bloody and cruelly hurt.
THE CHAMPIONSHIP FOR THE AMERICAN BELT. (p. 227) ]
To the on-lookers it was manifest that the hot contest was virtually decided; but a resentment that pulsed through every vein urged the Frenchman to a few more unsuccessful efforts. Coming up slowly to the summons in the three last rounds, in 1760, 1761, and 1762, just making time and saving himself from the confession of defeat, he sank down at the end of the ninth round, spent in spirits and strength, but vexed and angry with his adverse fortune. A herald, advancing in the centre of the ring, proclaimed that Johnny Crapeau withdrew his claim to the belt, only stipulating, in consideration of the past, that he might keep a bit of the fringe off its western end.
John Bull, picking up the coveted prize, announced in a bluff, resolute voice to the by-standers that the young lady, with the belt, dower, and expectations, all now passed to him forever.
Future chapters will show how little he knew of the maiden whom he claimed to have won.
Meanwhile Jean Crapeau signed and delivered to his English victor a release of all his claims to the damsel’s lands lying east of the Mississippi.
CHAPTER XIII.
CAUSES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.
The People as Yeast.—The Fermentation.—Washington, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Rutledge, Franklin, Otis, and others, and their Value in the Colonial Fermenting-Pots.—State Courtships in 1754, 1765, and 1774, tend to a more Perfect Union.—How Home Confidences operate.—What Effect the English Navigation Acts had on American Swimmers.—Lord North and Charles Townshend.—Colonial Assemblies and Country Dances.—Dislike of Impositions.—That small Boston Tea-Party.—The large Amount of Atlantic Water between the Tea Seller and Tea Purchaser.—When Tea can’t be sweetened.—Be-cause as a Cause.
Whole reams of good, white paper might be consumed, as they have often before been used, and greatly to the advantage of the manufacturer thereof, in spreading before our readers the various causes of the American Revolution.
We might collect from dairies North, South, East, and West enough milk and water to float entire cargoes of reasons and explanations for that separation which “in the course of human events” is apt to take place between mothers, even good ones, and daughters, and which is not usually retarded by the fact, that the mother is selfish, looks to her own interest exclusively, finds fault with the grown-up girl, and seems determined to get all the work out of, and to bestow as little as possible upon, her; and when the girl, on the other hand, is pretty high-spirited, has plenty of beaux, friends, and good health, and a nice, comfortable property of her own. We might, we repeat, collect all this ocean of milk and water together; but upon taking counsel of our own experience, we have concluded to condense this troublesome mass into a few panfuls of cream, which will, we feel sure, contain all the substance, richness, and compressed value of the entire sea. Skimming over the wide surface, we obtain, then, these creamy globules, the round causes of the American Revolution.
1st Cause.—The people,—the causa causas,—the yeast, whose fermentation in the pots, placed in various American chimney-corners, raised off their lids and opened their owners’, to see their own rights and interests.
2d Cause.—George Washington, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Warren, John Rutledge, James Otis, Henry Laurens, and a few others, without whom the fermenting-pots might have “run to emptyings.”
3d Cause.—The duties vainly sought to be raised by George III. from the colonists, and which unexpectedly raised duties in them, that fitted them, not with, but to, a T.
4th Cause.—The glimpses obtained during those stolen colonial courtships, in 1754, 1765, and 1774,—those sly unions at Albany, New York, and Philadelphia,—of the fuller blessings and happiness of “a more perfect Union.”
5th Cause.—The identities of language, interests, love of liberty, capacities for legislation and home control throughout the various Colonies, and the felt unwisdom of looking three thousand miles for what they could better find at home.
6th Cause.—George III., Lord North, and Charles Townshend.
7th Cause.—The British Navigation Acts, which prevented American navigation and dried up the Atlantic for American bottoms.
By these heavy machines the seas were made all up hill to American, and easy down hill for English ships.
8th Cause.—The colonial assemblies, where Americans learned their own country dances, and unlearned the court quadrilles.
9th Cause.—The strong Saxon dislike of impositions which had accompanied the emigrants hither as a principle, and was always kept here, both principal and interest.
10th Cause.—That little Boston tea-party, and the small unpleasantness at Lexington.
11th Cause.—The large amount of Atlantic water which prevented the English tea seller from observing the rights of the American tea purchaser. After this discovery of English near-sightedness, the expense of sweetening the tea to make it acceptable to American palates, even when the cost was reduced to three-pence per pound, was found to be intolerable.
Last Cause.—Be-cause.
1775 TO 1789.
“L’Histoire c’est La Revolution.” MONTESQUIEU, De l’esprit des Lois.
THE FIRST TURN OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WHEEL. GRIEVANCES; THE PREPARATION; THE START.
The Express Train of the American Revolution.—The Hard Lot of the Colonists, and what they got from it.—Colonial Governors, like Old Topers at a Free Opening of a Tavern.—The Miseries of a Visit from Relatives poor and proud.—How, like poor Fowls, the Navigation Acts laid many bad Eggs.—Examples cited.—Parliamentary Laws ingeniously floored and roofed.—English Strabismus, or Squint-eyedness, sought to be made Fashionable in the Colonies.—Success in Canada.—English Tubs to catch Revenue off American Slopes.—Manufacture of Hats prohibited; how and where the Fur flew.—What a Cute Yankee saw from the Top of the American Roof.—How Four Yards are worth more than Five.—Bull-yism defined, and its Laws stated.—The First Bill to raise Revenue; the large Bird behind it described.—Sent over to America, it was foul-ly treated.—Molasses denied to Colonists.—Effects on Yankee Appetites and on the Increase of Straws in Custom-House Casks.—Stamps and Stampedes.—The Act repealed; the Sting left in.—Another Bill and larger Bird behind it in 1767.—The First Blood.—The Wheel starts; its Hub, Spokes, and Periphery.—English Bees swarm over and settle in Boston and other tender Parts.—The Dis-cordant Sounds at Concord.—George Washington; his Appearance and Costume, and what befell him, June, 1775.—Gage falls from a Tree.—Why and Howe?—Washington seizes Boston Neck.—The Spasms.—Bunker Hill gets a Scar and afterwards an Ugly Monumental Patch.—The Boone Colonists in Kentucky.—How they blazed a-way thither from Virginia.—Washington at Cambridge.—Unseasoned Troops seasoned.—General Montgomery earns Laurels at Quebec mixed with Cypress.—The Revolutionary Wheel throws off Dusty Colonial Governors.—How Washington broke up the Hessian Swarm at Boston, and Howe they flew to Halifax.—Washington attends a Lecture in Boston.—General Lee’s Neck-and-Neck Race with Sir Henry Clinton for New York; Lee ahead 120 Minutes.—Sir Henry and a Party of Jolly Dogs alight near Charleston, and how the Waspish Lee lit upon and stung them.—Where the Jolly Dogs then went.—The Wheel well started.
[Illustration: BRITANNIA FORCES TEA ON HER TROUBLESOME CHILD.]
There is always a strange curiosity to see an express-train go by. Everybody crowds up to witness the great red eye glare and scowl, as if it resented the safe inspection which those on the platform give it, as it rushes past. Every one, young and old, watches, with concentrated interest, the momentarily visible heads of the passengers, dusty, dishevelled, and hot, seen through the passing windows, as the train pants, hurrying around a curve, into the darkness. Not a little of the interest is enhanced by the feeling that it will bring up safely far away in a metropolitan depot, and there decant its well-shaken, effervescing freight.
So stand we, surrounded by our readers, on the platform of history, to see the American Revolution rush along upon its own way, grim, earnest, resolute, tracking its onward march towards the great end for which it set out.
“Le genie,” says Buffon, “c’est la patience.” If the naturalist’s definition be true, the colonial patience constituted a most remarkable exhibition of genius.
In 1763 the greater part of the colonists were the descendants of men who had escaped from hard civil and ecclesiastical exactions in their home lands, and had set up for themselves in an unappropriated field. From this new lot they sought to extract, by the difficult labor of one hand, its reluctant yield for subsistence, and by the other to keep off from it enemies ready to take and cut their crops. Uninvited pensioners, called Governors, were soon sent out, in showy tinsel, to tithe their laboriously earned products, and to fence in by golden bars wrought by the settlers the royal prerogatives and pretensions, from which those settlers had endeavored to rid themselves by self-exile. In some of the Colonies mint and cummin were extracted for a church, between whose ecclesiastical detectives and themselves they had essayed to put three thousand miles of disagreeable pickle, with rods enough in it to terrify even lean curates with little to throw up. The English civil list, portioned off upon the young emigrants in the shape of office-holders, sucked up—like an old toper in a newly established tavern—the very best that the place afforded. These officials thus suffered at first to partake of the generous, open-house entertainment, soon cast around them to effect a permanent claim for free commons, where they had been only tolerated by an unselfish hospitality. As no one likes to be eaten out or evicted from his own house and home, even by assumed and softly spoken friends, these self-imposed guests were naturally regarded as poor, proud relatives, who came unbidden at first, put on company airs, insisted on company fare, needed extra waiting on, bred disaffection among the servants, and set up the children to fancies beyond the parental means or authority.
The Navigation Acts, to which we have already adverted, which sought, contrary to all equity, right, or decency, to compel the poor fugitives from plenty and power to send away their scanty surplus of corn, and to get what few things they needed and could afford with difficulty to procure, oceanwise, and in vessels exclusively owned, built, manned, and officered in England, were standing grievances. They were so hard and stiff, that every one ran against them, and after picking himself up, looked back at them in very bad humor and with adjectives which in such moments some utter, but which types refuse to immortalize.
Poor fowls breed rapidly. The Navigation Acts soon laid other vicious eggs. On the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II., in 1660, the colonists were still further tied up by an act which restricted them in the disposition of their salable products to England alone,—a very desirable thing for English purchasers, but deemed by the pinched colonists rather rough upon them. The affectionate step-children, however, overlooked this selfishness of the cross-grained old step-mother, and clung with romantic attachment to the dear old homestead, from which they got nothing but cheap messages of cunning endearment, in return for the substantial contributions which were taken back in the Thames-built clippers.
These acts of Parliament were of course floored with thick, wide planking of well-jointed terms, and roofed in with a royal signature, which in English, and especially in colonial eyes until opened, made even thin shingles shine like stars; but for all this parliamentary carpentering the gales and storms of real life soughed and swept in through the clapboarding, sometimes chilling, and sometimes wetting, the colonial tenants.
Colonial lands, too, were given away as loosely and as liberally as by Congress now; then to royal, as now to railroad, favorites. A commercial strabismus, or English squint-eyedness, was sought to be made fashionable in the North American communities, just as now prevails in Canada,—an apparent look at their own interests in one direction, while in fact by this crooked optical inversion, the eye is all the time looking intently in quite another quarter. That direction was of course northeastwardly towards those little specks of islands, that were left, in the miscellaneous creation of things, near the outer rim of Europe, and so diminutive, that the very strain to discover them behind piles of parliamentary selfishness and supports, huge stacks of manufactured iron, steel, cotton, wool, and puffy conceits, was sure to injure the sight and at last to produce qualms and nausea.
A single tub will catch all the rain that falls over a very wide roofed house, if the gutters are rightly adjusted. The little tub of England caught all the waters that ran from the wide American slopes. Then she had them all around her. She has many still; an East India tub, a West India tub, an Australian tub, etc. The bore of the tubes which lead to these are not, perhaps, as great now as formerly; but now the waters are distilled before they are sent through, and so run a much more profitable stream. Of course she labels them all with very fine names, “Philanthropy,” “Free Trade,” “Justice,” etc. It matters little, however, what the name is: the stuff in the tub is of the same color, a buff yellow, and of the same metallic ingredients.
Her little North American tub, at the period of which we speak, was continually changing,—a larger one being substituted every few years, as new gutters were laid down, and new ways found to enlarge the water-sheds. In 1732, for example, the colonists were forbidden to sell hats to each other,—a felt grievance which made the fur fly for a time; but, as usual, it only flew from, although for, England. The next year, another gutter was put down by the parliamentary tin-man. Hatters were only allowed two apprentices,—a provision which, although very merciful now, considering the short work and manners and very long pay of employees,—was then English disinterestedness. A few years later, the spirits and sweetening of the colonists were taxed, of course not to raise the former or increase the latter, but all for the benefit of that little Anglo-American tub. Manufactories of various kinds were prohibited to be set up, the profits arising from the sales in America of the articles manufactured in England dripping through the philanthropic tubes into the tight English vat. At last some patriotic and far-seeing colonist, getting out through the scuttle-way upon the wide American roof, discovered not only pipes leading in all directions over it, but, on looking sharply around with a half-prying Yankee curiosity, also remarked some curiously contrived parliamentary ladders of rope, hemp, leather, and other material, placed on the rear of the house, and cunningly attached to the pipes by patented clasps, stamped “Revenue”; so that, by an arrangement peculiarly English, and invented by some benevolent gentleman over there, an official friend inside could, for example, cut off a yard from every piece five yards long, or take out two quarts from a bushel of wheat, or a pint from a gallon of molasses or sack, and pass these clippings down the back ladders and so off home to England, while the colonists were meanwhile entertained by an argument, solidly supported by figures, and looking as convincing as a six-barrelled revolver pointed at you, to prove that there was no loss incurred, but that, on the contrary, it was the very way to make the remainder more valuable.
As long as France stayed in the American schoolhouse there were two big, full-grown bullies, whose mutual jealousy and antagonism were the best protection of the children from either; but after the overthrow of M. Jean Crapeau in 1763, Mr. Bull thought that he could have things just as he pleased, could sit down where he liked, in such gear as he chose to make himself comfortable in,—shirt-sleeves or hunting-coat, muddy or indecently short,—could eat up any one’s lunch if he fancied, and munch the choicest fruit that the youngsters were keeping for their own use at play-time. And so, by a law of bullyism,—which is human nature ossified by success,—the moment of the triumph over the one standing champion, was the moment when the intoxication of fancied supreme power, producing a vertigo of insolence, brought out around the object of the championship rivals never before suspected.
In a word, by slow and painful training, the Colonies had become their own champions.
The very year that saw the treaty of peace signed between France and England, by which the former gave up all her American possessions east of the Mississippi, and resigned the belt of North America to the latter, George Grenville, the English minister, gave notice that he should introduce into Parliament a bill to oblige every colonist, who used in any way receipts, notes, drafts, leases, deeds, mortgages, or any such crafty documents, to buy from the British government and put upon them stamps, the proceeds of which sale was to be spent, of course, not among the colonists themselves, but in England, in paying the national debt or in some other facetious way. Of course, Americans did not object to stamps in themselves, provided they helped to make or to hold the die which printed them, and had a hand in grooving and directing the channels in which the pay for them should flow. But they did object—and as the event proved most sanguinarily—to the slicing of their family loaf by a parliamentary knife called a stamp act, sharpened on a London stone, and whittling off their living even with the sparing charity of the Bull family. They did not think it either safe or right for any Taurian, or Teutonic, or Gallic chap, however gentlemanly in manners or benevolent in professions, to be trusted in the pantry, there to use to any extent what he might find, whether articles of luxury, as pies or other poisons, or necessities, as bread, butter, cider, or other field distillations.
The bill of Mr. Grenville was a little one,—very small and very timid,—but there was a bird behind it, as large as all the English crows and jackdaws put together. The bird was not introduced until the next year, 1764, when it was tricked off with some bright beads and spangles around its neck, to disguise its genus. But many in England discovered immediately that it belonged to the family Falco Britannicus, the genuine old-fashioned British falcon, with strong, sharp claws and curved short bill to seize, and long, powerful wings to bear away across seas, the colonial prey. It is a bird now shot at by every philosophic, well-charged English muzzle whenever it makes its appearance; but at the time of which we speak there were public game-keepers of the Grenville kind, not only in England but in other countries, who believed in training and keeping up the breed of parliamentary or royal falcons for colonial and also for home service. These well-fed keepers stoutly maintained that it was right for these fowls, deigning to leave their royal perches in Hesse or Hanover, to alight for their royal pleasure upon private barn-yards and in granaries, and that the people were proper game and profitable sport, and should even feel honored by the eagle-like visits.
It was thought best, however, by the English huntsman of state to send across the Atlantic and exhibit here specimens of the fowl. Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, James Otis, Richard Henry Lee, and others, well acquainted with the game and domestic birds of North America, at once pointed out and denounced the cruel spurs which this short-billed, sharp-clawed British falcon wore. Others, if possible more outspoken, declared their opinion that this bird never could be domesticated on this side the water, but would get its spurs cut away and perhaps its well-feathered neck wrung, whenever it was sent over for real use among the colonists.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bull declared that the colonists should not have any molasses to lick, unless he himself brought it and sold it to them. Of course from that time forward New England people got to love molasses with patriotic obstinacy, and above all things liked to tickle it with a straw out of those very solemn-looking and otherwise forsaken casks, lying in the neglected custom-houses at Boston, Salem, Newport, and New Haven.
In 1765, the new bird was brought over full-fledged, guarded by numerous fowl-fanciers, who watched it vigilantly on both sides, as the lion and unicorn are represented watching the British crown. But as usual, American quickness to its own interests was quite equal to British selfishness, and, ere the heavy guardians could turn around to see who of the many spectators was teasing and worrying the bird, his feathers were dreadfully plucked, and the poor thing left with exposed claws and crooked bill to the keen ridicule of the by-standers.
On the 1st of November, when the Stamp Act was to go into effect, most of the bales of stamped paper, kindly sent out to emblazon colonial writings, had either been destroyed or shipped back to their parliamentary manufacturers. Colonial pluck went further. It agreed upon total abstinence from everything foreign-made, until the Stamp Act should be repealed. In 1766, after hot debate, the Stamp Act was repealed by the British Parliament; but not before its offensive sting was pulled out and pettishly thrown across the water in the form of a resolution, declaring the right of the London law manufactory to tax the Colonies whenever they wanted any money.
The old circumlocution office had neither learned how to do it, nor how graciously or gracefully to leave off attempts which had resulted in not doing it.
During the year following, 1767, came another bill, with a still larger fowl behind it, a curious, sleepy-eyed, dove-colored bird, with prehensile claws admirably sheathed when not taking hold, but very strong when its real strength was tested.
This bill was to tax glass, paper, painters’ colors, and tea. More colonial pluck,—more total abstinence,—more brisk talk between governors and colonial legislatures,—more effervescing revolutions produced by patriotic acids and alkalies stirred by newly cut sticks,—more courteous shows of loyalty and equally firm, resolute, belligerent acts.
The colonial grievances were gathering into preparations and generating motive-power to start the revolutionary wheel.
At Boston, in March, 1770, the first blood was shed. The ink of the Boston “News-Letter,” which was still published, seemed to have turned red, and was beginning to be let out. All duties were now repealed, except those on tea. The old sting was thus again left, and the colonial face, into which it thrust its tiny hornet spear, began to swell and inflame.
Preparations were now made to drive back the English bees which were now seen to come over in swarms, and to settle down around Boston and other tender spots. Congress—that academy of celebrated American state doctors—was called for in September, 1774, to apply poultices and such other remedies as they deemed best to the inflamed parts. After much consultation together, feeling the patient’s pulse and testing his vitality, they became convinced that they had to deal with one of those surgical cases which are quoted often afterwards as leading, and for the successful operation in which careful preparations must be made.
The military revolutionary wheel was at length set in motion. It had thirteen spokes, made of various kinds of wood, all unseasoned; but they were, after a little patient effort, compactly and well fitted into the hub. A patriotic band, put around its periphery, held the wheel together, and enabled it to work successfully many years, and to endure the strains and jars of colonial revolutionary wagoning.
THE SURPRISE PARTY TO FORT TICONDEROGA. (p. 247) ]
It is noteworthy that the first formal demonstration in the war, was the despatch by the British commander, Gage, April 18, 1775, of eight hundred men to destroy some colonial stores at Concord,—an irruption into the very temple of peace itself. At Lexington, half-way to their destination, this detachment was met by some seventy provincial volunteers, who entered a bayonet protest against this breach of the peace; but this mild protestation was answered by a sharp, crackling retort, which was heard all through the Colonies. It was the mot de resistance. The protesters retired, and the detachment, riding eight miles further, to the Emerson-ian city, scattered the ammunition and food there, and rode back again to Boston, being quickened on the way by fowling-pieces and duck-guns, discharged at the red-breasted coveys. On hearing the news of the battle of Lexington, Ethan Allen, gathering together a party of Green Mountain boys, presented himself on the evening of May 10, 1775, before the sleepy, dozy doors of Fort Ticonderoga, which were knocked open, and its commandant, De La Plaine, knocked up by a summons to surrender in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress. The success of this little surprise party was much talked of, and raised more spirits than the revenue acts.
Within Boston all of Gage’s forces, numbering three thousand English, Scotch, and Irish regulars, with many hired Hessians and Waldeckers, now retired; while twenty thousand very irregulars, farmers’ boys, and mechanics, with John Stark in his bear-skin coat, Israel Putnam in leather apron, and other leaders, drawn by centripetal patriotism from their ill-supplied homes, and in such accoutrements as old family chests yielded up, assembled in a tumultuous crowd at the American camp, and formed a weak line around the land side of the city. While this cord was thus stretched on the weak side of Boston,—if, indeed, she ever had a weak side,—George Washington, then forty-three years old, hitherto pursuing the double business of farmer and surveyor, overlaying both ever with the cultured ease and polish of a high-bred gentleman, already known to military men on both sides the sea by his practical capacity in their science, evinced in Braddock’s march and defeat, confessedly a large-headed, well-balanced, wise man, and of intense personal courage and patriotism, was, on the 17th June, 1775, appointed Commander-in-Chief. No statelier figure than his—over six feet in height as it was, and cased ordinarily in large, roomy buckskin trousers, a handsomely fitting blue coat and buff vest—was seen at any time in the American camp for the next eight years.
About the same time the British troops under Gage were reinforced, until they counted twelve thousand veterans. Gage, however, did not long swing on the military tree, or remain to be shaken from the Boston bough by the Yankee farmers and mechanics. He was superseded by Sir William Howe, who, in a few days after Washington’s appointment, landed at Boston, accompanied by Sir Henry Clinton and General Burgoyne.
Believing that what cometh out of the mouth is more hurtful than what enters it, the American army now seized Boston Neck tightly. This contraction produced some spasms in the apoplectic-looking, newly arrived Englishmen, who moved galvanically towards Bunker’s Hill, on the opposite side of the city. To this point Colonel Prescott, with one thousand men,—including some negroes,—was despatched; and here, as is well known, he and Warren and their little party-colored regiment did such things, June 17, 1775, to General Howe and his three thousand attacking men, reinforced by Clinton during the day, as have been deemed worthy of much speaking about ever since.
The brow of Bunker Hill received that day, where Warren and others fell, a scar which not even the hard monumental patch since imposed upon it can make us wish to forget. Higher praise of that scar we cannot accumulate.
While these patriotic doings were going on around Boston, movements equally patriotic were pushed forward in an entirely new quarter,—movements, in fact, which resulted in hiring the coachman of the Sun to drive for the future an American emigrant wagon-train, in company with the old Western solar line. Daniel Boone, then in his forty-fifth year, having four years before blazed a-way with his rifle through the woods from North Carolina across the Cumberland Mountains to the river of the same name, led out in May, 1775, a boon company, founding a Colony on the Kentucky River, at first called Transylvania, but which subsequently threw off, with its hunting-shirt, this long Latinized cognomen, and stood at the dewy font to receive the dear old name of Kentucky. The little Colony started on good wholesome diet,—religious toleration; representatives elected by the people, from the people, for the people; and taxation only by their own representatives. Sheltered by its seclusion from the now daily swelling insurrection on the Atlantic coasts, the riflemen’s settlement grew apace, picking up its flints from the primeval rocks which propped up the neighboring Alleghany range, but pecking them for use only upon abundant game that hovered over its dinner-pots and sauce-pans, ready to drop into them at proper signals.
WASHINGTON REVIEWS THE TROOPS AT CAMBRIDGE. (p. 251) ]
In July, 1775, Washington went on to Cambridge and took charge of the Continental forces. These forces were, it is well known, about as unmanageable as those at work in volcanic mountains, sometimes making an ominous rumbling, sometimes erupting awkwardly for the peace of others near them, and occasionally discharging themselves most inconveniently for those whose duty it was to watch them. The hot patriotic principles, however, of these raw, unscored militia materials helped essentially the warm endeavors of Washington, Gates, Ward, and Lee to season them into tough disciplined, serviceable timber, and so to support loads and resist strains. In a few months even the most unpromising sticks were dry enough to be piled up around Boston, and thus to burn out General Howe.
Following the old colonial habit of casting sheep’s-eyes upon Canada whenever the dogs of war were unkennelled, that shepherd dog, Ethan Allen, scented game at Crown Point, on the western side of Lake Champlain. Bounding away in long leaps, without a whine or a howl to indicate his purpose or direction, he suddenly sprang upon the British flocks quietly feeding there, and effectually penned and secured them. Hardly stopping to be petted for this exploit, the brave colly tore off, with only a small pack of eighty, to Montreal; but the British keepers there, apprised of his approach, managed, as he came up near the folds, to seize him, put a collar around his neck, and to send him to England, where, however, he never would hunt with the royal pack.
General Montgomery was more fortunate; for within a month after, having taken St. John’s and Fort Chambly, he followed the footprints of Allen, and captured Montreal. Leaving about two hundred troops in that island city,—now the crowning jewel in the Anglo-American stomacher,—he pushed down the St. Lawrence, and at a point twenty miles above Quebec, absorbing the detachment of six hundred men led by the bold, dashing, unprincipled Arnold, he advanced upon the citadel of English America. Here in front of Quebec, after battling the cold for four weeks, the gallant Irishman, on the last day of 1775, amidst a storm of snow and of pelting iron hail, led on a vigorous assault against the place where, sixteen years before, in company with the brave Wolfe, he had gathered the bright laurels of victory, unmixed, as was not his commander’s,—with the gloomy cypress. Now the cypress was all that he was destined to grasp from the grim rock which resented a second capture by the same mortal.
He fell, however, as those fall who do more than achieve success,—deserving it. Under the portico of St. Paul’s Church, in the city of New York, at the confluence of those pulsing streams of life which surge down Broadway and the Bowery,—gathering a volume sufficiently strong to overcome the heavy whirlpools of Wall Street,—lie what of Richard Montgomery was mortal, borne thither sixty-three years after his death by his grateful fellow-citizens, who have laid on the island of Manhattan, now glittering with superb edifices, no corner-stone nobler or more imperishable than that which they then deposited.
The Revolutionary wheel had now fairly started, and one of the first results of its motion was the shaking off those dusty particles, the royal governors,—Dunmore, in Virginia; Lord William Campbell, in South Carolina; Sir Joseph Wright, in Georgia; and others,—each of whom, measuring his own weight on his own scales, fancied—as we now can read in their despatches to the Colonial Office—that he was himself a stone large enough, if dropped in front of the wheel, to stop forever its further advance.
The Hessian bees, shaken off the home twigs by their owners, the fussy, poverty-ridden dukes, princes, landgraves, and margraves, swarmed over and settled at Boston on the oaken boughs planted there by Lord Howe. George Washington was determined to make a vigorous effort to break up the hive and to get its military honey. In March, 1776, he drew near to Boston, sitting down on Dorchester Heights with an earth curtain before him, to guard against the stings of any vagrants that might stray away from the main swarm. Scarcely, however, had our general, in his buckskin breeches, begun to feel around the nest, before, to his great surprise, and to the infinite wonderment of George III., and his minister, Lord North, the entire swarm with a peculiar buzz, rose at four o’clock in the morning from their new-made hive and flew away in a bee-line for Halifax. Much honey, then particularly dear to Americans, was gathered after they left; as much as two hundred and fifty combs, in the shape of cannon, and not a little of that bee dust, so very scarce in March, 1776, called powder. Washington was much concerned lest the pesky swarm might turn their flight and settle down in New York. So, after attending a lecture the night following his entrance into Boston, in order not to excite by his absence any hubbub in that literary and then religious place, he set in motion the great body of his troops towards the island of Manhattan.
Major-General Charles Lee, a Welshman by birth, and a soldier of fortune, who had fought in Portugal and Poland, mettlesome and waspish in temper, was despatched in April with other troops to New York, where, after a neck-and-neck race with Sir Henry Clinton, accompanied by a large British force from England, he arrived only two hours before his competitor. Sir Henry, although anxiously expected on shore by several British friends, at length concluded that it was too early in the season to alight so far north, and so cruised southward for a milder climate and reception. Sailing leisurely down our wave-dented shores, he joined the squadron of his old boon companions in arms, Admiral Sir Peter Parker and Earl Cornwallis, with some two thousand five hundred jolly dogs, hired at fourpence a day to come out and inspect our country. Strolling on together pleasantly in a warm latitude, with flying-fish to amuse them on the outside, and broiled fish inside the ships, they touched land at last near Charleston. The restless, waspish Lee, who had been also flying down southwards over the land, hovering on quick wing and watching the jolly dogs to see where they would come ashore, no sooner found that they thought of landing at Sullivan’s Island, and visiting a military summer-house there, built of palmetto wood, and called Fort Moultrie, than he lit upon them, stung two hundred of them more or less uncomfortably, and compelled them all to go off wholly from that place, the pleasure of reaching which depends so much upon the feelings of those to whom the visit is proposed.
New England and the South were now alike freed from British tourists and German musket-holders.
Where Sir Henry and his jolly dogs, constituting one party, and Lord Howe with his lively squad, still enjoying themselves at Halifax after their rapid journey from Boston, making up the other British set, would next prospect, much concerned the Continental Congress, George Washington, Charles Lee, and the colonial people generally. The uncertainty was soon ended. Lord Howe, sailing from Halifax, June 11th, reached Sandy Hook on the 25th of the same month, and dropping anchor off Staten Island, July 2d, was soon joined by Sir Henry and his jolly dogs, feeling a little uneasy of stomach, and somewhat less merry than when they left England nearly three months before, and vowing, ’pon honor, that Sir Henry had somewhat taken them in at Charleston, although, in fact, the real trouble was that he had not taken them in at all there.
Truly the Revolutionary wheel was now well started, and began to get in earnest motion.
JULY FOURTH, 1776, AND SO FORTH.
Review of our Historical Journey from the Start up to the Summit of the 4th of July.—Résumé of our Tramp through Pre-Columbian and Post-Columbian Times.—Our March from St. Augustine, via Jamestown and the Manhattan Cabins, to the Temperance Tavern at Plymouth.—Descriptions of Indian Interruptions.—Polite Interferences of Gallic Gentlemen at Narrow Parts of the Road in 1689, 1710, 1745, etc.—Banditti on the Highways of History, English, French, and Dutch.—Blazing Description of the Summit, the Flagstaff, Flag, and Eagle.—The Grand Political Picnic there of Fifty-one Wise Men.—The Thunder-Storms around them; and their Behavior.—General Account of this Group; and how remarkable and marked.—Special Portraitures of Thirteen of them.—Some Peculiar Heads there, and how much George III. wanted them.—Prayer of John Adams.—A Great Freshet of a Speech and what it carried off.—A Remarkable Declaration made by Jefferson.—An Electrical Battery charged and discharged.—The Peppering George III. got.—How he worked Seven Years against the Declaration.—The Gunpowdery Effect of the first Fourth, and the Fire-Crackers since touched off by it.—Independence originally handled without Gloves; now by Aldermen and very Common Councilmen with a half-dozen Pair apiece.—The Fourths up to 1850.—Tar-Barrel Eloquence.—Military and Civic Renown snatched on that Day.—What Eggs, containing Addling Heroes, pip on that Day.—How Swords embarrass Crooked Legs.—Militia Lines, and what Snarls they get into.—Dissolving Bursts of Golden Glories.—Effects of Sulphur administered to a Rural Population.—Cakes of Gingerbread, and how they stuck in the Teeth, Stomach, and Memory.—Lamentations over the Decay of the Old-time Fourths.
Long time have we been climbing together up the political eminence, until we have at last reached its high summit,—the Fourth of July. Cold and bleak was the weather, and wholly new and uncleared the path on which we set out, thousands of years ago, among the hitherto unknown, pre-Columbian regions of America. The way was beset with obstructions,—heaps of coal and fossil remains,—and strewn with bones of races, human and animal, as strange even to our museums as they were novel to ourselves. Among these freshly discovered relics of our great ancestors, we trode carefully, and lingered with pleased wonder among ruins, which shamed by their age and size the usurping glories of Egyptian, Chinese, and Assyrian antiquities. At last, however, having traversed those broad plains, over which hung the gray, uncertain twilight of chronicle and geological fiction, we emerged, by a sudden turn in the road, into the clearer light and more solid undebatable ground rediscovered and retouched by more modern nations; convinced by our large inspection and survey, that those who landed on our shores long before Columbus—the Cabots, Cortereals, Verrazannis, Vespuccis, etc.—had, like provident patres familias, packed carefully away large stores of carbonized fuel and bone manure for the use of those who should come behind and after them, and had left well-feathered nests for the more helpless brood which might flock here in times long subsequent to their own.
Refreshed from the fatigues of this long wandering tramp, we then took a fresh start 304 years ago from Sainte Augustine, plodded on northwards forty-eight years to Jamestown, in six years more passed the little group of Dutch cabins on Manhattan island, and so, trending off eastward, followed the wavy coast for eight years more, until we brought up, in 1620, at the newly erected temperance inn at Plymouth, where we halted, glad even of its scant and unpromising cheer. Very early after leaving the James, we were accosted by that well-known wag, John Smith, who turned up in high feather with Pocahontas,—the future mother of Virginia,—and who keeps turning up and down everywhere in all humors, moods, and tenses,—active, passive, transitive, and intransitive,—to suit and amuse every taste.
A PURITAN BREAKFAST. (p. 259) ]
Mile-stone after mile-stone has been left behind us. We have been hindered by Indian ambushes along the wayside, and have been obliged often to pick out arrows shot into our covered emigrant-wagon, as we have toiled up and over the New England hills, through the Mohawk Valley, and along the broad bottom-lands of Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas. French gentlemen with pleasant manners have often stopped us at cross-roads, and attempted by very sharp arguments to convince us that we were on the wrong track. Several large parties of these Gallic gentlemen, at various narrow parts of the way, especially in 1689, 1710, 1745, and notably for nine consecutive years from 1754 to 1763, have warned us back, and indeed endeavored to turn us entirely off the road, claiming that it was a private one of their own. But past all these have we succeeded in pushing our historic journey, shunning the miry places left open by colonial negligence, the shaky bridges full of witch holes, the badly mended ruts of religious bigotry, and the rough patches of corduroy posts, laid crosswise over trembling, low-lying swamps of political scheming and financial speculation. Here and there we have found bits of plank road, laboriously and ambitiously placed over the public highway in front of colleges, school-houses, churches, and occasionally through pleasant thrifty villages.
Now and then we have ascended, after much patient up-hill work, to large, noble summits of civil or religious freedom, commanding wide horizons and broad views; but often, too, have we felt a sinking of spirits, a saddening depression, as we have been compelled to descend to lower levels and to jog along again over wearisome flats.
We have been detained occasionally by civil-spoken English governors and royal councillors, who have persuaded us to alight and partake of their cheer, which, it must be admitted, was much better than that which we obtained along the common road; but well knowing that it had never been honestly paid for or justly earned, we should have found it more palatable had it been thus properly seasoned. Landed proprietors, with smooth, royal manners, have, also, sometimes stopped us to state little points of difference between themselves and their North American tenants.
Several times have we crossed the Atlantic together for the purpose of obtaining certain information about the colonial ways, rights, manners, customs, and costumes, which could only be cleared up by papers which had been either accidentally or carelessly left behind, when the first emigrants packed their chests with the prime necessaries for subsistence on their briny journey. As we returned and again resumed our land travels, we had only proceeded a short distance before we were stopped by unceremonious and hard-visaged European highwaymen, French, Dutch, and English, with whom we have had stout fights, to prevent the party which we were convoying from being captured, plundered, and carried off to foreign lands. But, thanks to a kind Providence and the strong arms and plucky vigor of the brave chaps inside the wagon, we have been able to disperse these banditti. Two of them, however, as we have just noted, escaping from those lesser encounters, entered formally into a set contest with each other for the championship and custody of our historical party,—a contest which came off a few rods from the top of the hill, and which we halted to witness.
At last, however, we have reached the summit of the great pass,—the high beacon-point of American history,—where the sleepless, vigilant eagle sits screaming, while his strong, horny claws grasp the flag-staff, from whose top the flag of the married empires is anxiously ready, day and night, to slap in its saucy, quarrelsome face every wind that whispers a provocation. Here, on this elevated plateau, we come suddenly upon a very nice party of picturesquely dressed, intelligent, earnest, and thoughtful gentlemen, looking like a large gathering of state midwives, called together to consider a most important, impending family event.
Let us take breath for a few moments after our long ascent, and look more carefully at this noteworthy group. It is the 4th of July,—always a very hot day; and yet, although the weather is characteristic, and there is very warm work ahead, all the party—numbering that day fifty-one persons—seem, with few exceptions, to be very cool and unheated. They are quite unconcerned about the thunder-storm, signalled by white caps fringing the black heads which crowd the eastern horizon beyond the Atlantic, and which has shaken from its heavy locks leaden powder, which has sprinkled the exposed plantations, Breed’s Hill, Concord, Lexington, Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and Long Island, and even shaken its disastrous dust upon Quebec and Montreal.
This notable group is sometimes called the Second Continental Congress. Remarkable in looks and marked men are nearly all of the persons there gathered,—remarkable for their average youth, as most of the members became equally famous for great age,—remarkable, too, in a majority of the whole number, for handsome features and intellectual presence, for their aptitude for, and ready proficiency in, the then very mysterious and royal business of statecraft, law-making, and army-raising,—for their thoughtful air and high-bred bearing, and their readiness in argument, logic, and knowledge of human rights and human nature; marked by the heavy Hanoverian displeasure of George III., of the aristocratic Frederic, Lord North, his minister, and of Sir William Howe, his military generalissimo in the Colonies. Many of them, too, were marked by heads so peculiar that the three English gentlemen just named became very desirous of having them to put into the English State Museum, and even went so far as to offer heavy sterling rewards for any one who would secure them.
One of these heads immediately arrests our attention. It is very handsome, and is set upon a fine, tall, gentlemanly figure,—both owned by one John Hancock from Boston, only thirty-nine years of age, of large wealth for those simple days honorably acquired by trade, of manners conspicuously high-bred, and with a soul that, like a lamp burning inside an alabaster vase, illuminates the beautiful characters which the highest culture has traced and wrought. Two years ago, when Boston was patiently biding the expected period of English justice, triumphing over a short-sighted selfishness, and was carrying, as best she might, meanwhile, the cruel burdens of the Boston Port Bill, and when General Gage was sent out to see that she did not cut the straps, shift the load, or escape its grievous weight, John Hancock,—who the evening before had rallied with soul-lifting eloquence his fellow-sufferers at Faneuil Hall to the unjustly imposed duty of throwing off the crushing load,—rode at the head of his Boston Cadets, to bear with restrained courtesy from the Long Wharf to the State House this hard plum from the royal enclosure,—a Gage that he was careful not to pluck, but to preserve until it was fully ripe. Among this group he sits on a raised seat, and acts as president.
A few gentlemen, more advanced in years than the rest, are sprinkled through the company. One, an old acquaintance of ours, the boy who in 1721 furnished through the “New England Courant” such strong food for even Boston, and afterwards set up an intellectual bakery at Philadelphia, now seventy years old, rests his massive benevolent figure in a chair made comfortable by his presence,—his broad mild face, so largely serene, framed in by flowing soft locks, and beaming with a placid composure, as if the ploughshare of hard work had not turned a furrow there. He looks as if he could forgive George III. for his narrow notions, wedged inextricably fast in his narrow brain, and even his sallow, bilious, meadow-bottomed, Hanoverian dulness, dripping in pestilent, unhealthy oozings through his slow liver into his slower understanding. Well does the serenely fronted old sage know all the importance and the character of the business in hand. His clear, philosophic mind has weighed in its calm well-adjusted balances the questions now to be decided. He has but lately escaped from England, where, as agent for the Colonies, he was watched and treated by the government with incised and rigorous dislike; yet, as a man and thinker, he was there welcomed by the best men and most advanced statesmen. With Pitt, Camden, Burke, Charles James Fox, and even Lord North, he met, and with calm, compact, sensible, logical eloquence discussed the nature of the principles, alike dangerous in England as in the Colonies, which the Ministry, in the name of the former, were seeking to fasten, as the shirt of Nessus, upon the latter. While on his ungracious mission, he had, also, encountered that ponderous, fact-clad, political Goliath, Samuel Johnson, who had lately stepped forth in front of the ministerial Philistines, and defied any one to prove that taxation of a people unrepresented was tyranny. In that encounter, the American, armed only with a simple Quaker sling, planted in the giant’s head a stone harder even than itself, and very uncomfortable therein. Few now were Franklin’s words; but each one weighed ten pounds, and though perhaps homely in shape and unrounded at the angles, when hurled out by an honest heart-force, they crashed resistlessly through all the fences and thickets of sophistry or learned show.
Having to manage those two difficult problems in the political economy which then crowded up for solution, namely, how to raise a revenue out of 2,800,000 poor colonists, which, in weight, should put it in equipoise with the heavy stacks of English pounds sterling; and how to make 7,754 soldiers, constituting, as Washington had that very morning reported from head-quarters, the entire colonial army, successfully oppose 28,000 English and 17,000 Hessian troops, this American Witenagemote had conscious need of all poor Richard’s solid, homespun sense and wise-headed prudence and resource. But the grand old man, who by virtuous kiting had obtained naturally lightning out of heaven by an easy discount, was equal to the task of drawing credit out of the well-soiled banks of his country. On a ring, circling his forefinger, and given him by an ardent friend, one may—by a near inspection, when the large head leans against his right hand—see carved that motto, which is his condensed biography,
“Eripuit cœlo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis.”
A little way off stands a tall, scholarly figure, carefully dressed in the gentlemanly costume of that time, a blue coat faced with yellow, a scarlet waistcoat paragraphing an elaborate shirt-frill, and black broadcloth tights, clasped at the knee, and, like his own round periods, closed by polished silver-tongued buckles. He is thirty-one years old. His brick-colored hair and sanguine complexion betoken his ardent temperament. His faultless dress and stainless linen betray a delicacy and refinement of culture and taste, in which he had few peers in his time on either side the Atlantic. This is Thomas Jefferson. Chairman of a committee to report on the question of the right of the Colonies to be hereafter independent of Great Britain, he holds in his womanly-shaped hands a large manuscript written in neat, careful characters.
Close to him stands the short, firm, square, condensed-looking figure of John Adams, coaxed into a well-ripened fulness. He is ten years older than Jefferson; destined to be his generous rival through an eventful life, and to die only a few hours after him, just fifty years from that time, and on the semi-centennial anniversary of that very day. There is a good-natured frankness in his round, generously blooded face, and full-veined forehead; great firmness in his well-pressed lips; and about his massive head a solid, intellectual strength that have already well earned for him the appellation of “the column of Congress.” A hot purpose shows in his pink-heightening complexion, flushing it with an auroral light which plays and flashes up to the very zenith of his head. Faults he has, like his rival, grievous and many; but among them is not that of being indifferent to his country or her freedom.
A little way off sits one of the most accomplished orators in all that gifted group; a genial companion you may see he is at a glance. He is a ripe scholar, educated in an English university, and yet warm with a loving nature that glows on his face and through his graceful discourse. Wielding a ready pen, whose vigorous strokes have already, in the Memorial of Congress to British America, cleft the unwilling hearts of Canadians, and, in The Address of Congress to the People of Great Britain, have imbedded forever in the English Constitution the principles of representation as the basis of taxation, Richard Henry Lee, from South Carolina, three years older than Adams, sits there in cultured ease and thoughtful dignity, a model legislator. In the preceding month of June he had moved a resolution, asserting the rights of the Colonies to be free, and to dissolve in brine the ligaments which wickedly tied them to the money-making law manufactory at home. This resolution, having of course been well debated when it came up for consideration three days ago,—for American Congresses were never deaf or dumb asylums,—had been adopted, and upon it a committee raised, whose report, drawn by Jefferson, and revised by Franklin and Adams, is to be read in to-day’s session.
A few feet away are Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, who, although only in his twenty-third summer, is laden with the sheaves of a rich harvest of oratorical fame; Charles Carroll of Maryland, who, annexing to the Declaration his address, so that he might not be passed by the state executioner for his treason, was spared by death to be the last of that memorable party on earth; Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who lived to fill acceptably every honorable office known to our system of government, except that of President; and Robert R. Livingston of New York, who survived the recordership of the city of New York, and became eminent, not only in many fields, but notably on the Hudson River, in connection with Robert Fulton’s efforts to subject water to steam,—not one of them, except Carroll, yet thirty-three years of age.
Leaning forward and near this last group stands the bulky figure of one who was for the first twenty-two years of his life a shoemaker; but who, disregarding the maxim of Horace “to stick to the last,” left the lapstone to attend to the understandings of his suffering countrymen. This, all know, is Roger Sherman of Connecticut, true to independence and well-grounded freedom—to the last.
Across the room stand talking together George Wythe of Virginia, sweet-tempered, frolicsome as a boy, yet resolute of purpose, able in debate, and capable of deep research; Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, born in England, an emigrant to Philadelphia in his thirteenth year, whose nature of sterling British oak, seasoned in the counting-house of Charles Willing, and whose solid aptitudes, hardened into financial wisdom, were now so much needed in the new political partnership of States; and Joseph Reed from the same State, whose sturdy, honest face seems to light up a large space all around him, and whose rebuke two years later to the commissioner of Lord North, who sought to bribe him, that “poor as he was, the king of Great Britain was not rich enough to buy him,” raised American securities as high in Europe as the practical answers of some of his congressional successors to similar attempts on their financial virtue by North or South, East or West, have depressed them.
Others there are among those twoscore and eleven whom we should be glad to delineate, as we dearly love to look at them gathered in the morning light of that first Fourth of July; but there is such a serious, thoughtful air, such a felt pressure weighting all brows and hearts, that the loaded hour presses down and hushes all such light thoughts. A prayer so simple, earnest, child-like, and trusting,—uttered amid impressive silence by John Adams,—that it seems to bear the great question up to the Great Heart, hushes the assembly to a balanced calm, and opens the business.
Large sealed packages from Washington, brought on horseback all the way from New York, are then read. They speak of his few men,—most of them without arms, clothing, or food,—in presence of 45,000 fresh and well-supplied English and German troops, under the command of Lord Howe, of his brother the Admiral, and of Sir Henry Clinton. Other letters were read from South Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, and New York, urging the wise men to declare the old, unequal partnership with England at an end,—a partnership to which, they felt, that the colonial partners had furnished the capital and labor, and from which the English associates drew all the profits.
In the name of the Profit, they virtually said, war. Then followed a pause in the proceedings, which at length the full, firm voice of John Adams broke. His speech, rising and rising like a freshet over that tall occasion, swept away by its resistless logical momentum the forces of sophism, carried in its strong hurry all the impediments to its march, brimmed over with its swelling forces the whole territory of debate, until at last, the gathered mass, hurled full against the barriers of prejudice, conservatism, doubt, and fear, prostrated forever the props and supports of British usurpation in the Colonies. It is a singular fact that no reporters were present to take down or even outline this speech. Gathered up, however, from tradition and memory by Daniel Webster, about half a century afterwards, it has floated and collected in almost every school-house and college, and there formed eddies, whirlpools, and geysers, which have sucked in and spouted out much gyrating declamation.
Other speakers followed the fiery Adams, most urging, a few deprecating, immediate action. We need not note here their range, fire, or effect.
At last the patriotic battle abates; and the committee of five,—Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston,—forming around the tall, dignified, picturesque figure of their chairman, advance in front of the president’s seat. There is an expectant, oppressive hush, a sudden settling back into seats; and all eyes, like sunflowers, turn towards the scarlet-waistcoated son of the Revolution. The neatly written paper is slowly unrolled, and its weighty truths, crowding up to its very rim, begin at once to discharge themselves.
That large electrical battery has been ever since at work, charging nationalities and peoples, galvanizing the feeble to effort, producing sparks whenever the current has been interrupted, recovering back to vital action sick communities, and arousing to better health from that hopeless despair which a long course of royal quack doctoring had produced, constitutions, systems, or states originally strong, energetic, and vigorous. Without analyzing or dwelling upon the full, electrical streams then and there evolved by that American independence machine, we will only record here that two principal jets, namely, that of the equality of all in their creation, and the other, that all governments rest solely upon the consent of the governed, have poured upon paralyzed and crippled humanity such a current of blessings, that the old Asiatic, African, and European practices of blood-letting for liberal plethora, drugs for congested rights, anodynes for consciences politically discontented, and cathartics for purging away healthy food necessary for civil nutrition, are fast becoming unpopular.
George III. got a terrible peppering from that machine; but as he lived forty-four years afterwards, it is fair to presume that his royal, burly Hanoverian person, rolling over and over in bucolic clover, repaired without difficulty dents and shocks caused by applications administered at such a distance. For seven years following he was in a great state of irritation, and worked hard to prevent the results with which that Declaration concluded, namely, a determination to cut all connection with him and his little island ways.
How this great struggle, thus earnestly begun, was carried on, and its final issue, must be the office of future chapters to tell.
That first Fourth caused a very gunpowdery smell throughout the Colonies for seven succeeding years, and has touched off more fire-crackers since than would fence in China with a wall higher than its present one.
The lever then thrust beneath the corner-stone of civil right, to pry it out of its undisturbed imbedment into its appropriate place, was handled by ungloved hands; but the anniversary of the event itself cannot be now handled by the municipal jollifiers in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans, and even Chicago, with less than six pairs of gloves each, while the very common councilmen sometimes get twelve pairs apiece for the occasion.
Blessings on all the Fourth of Julys up to 1850! What occasions for tar-barrel eloquence, going off into flaming tropes and figures, have they not been! That has not only been “the birthday of freedom,” but the natal initiation into civic or military renown of many a village tyro. The shoemaker, blacksmith, or carpenter, smothered for three hundred and sixty-four days under his own waxed ends, cindery veneering, or plane modesties, has suddenly, on that prolific day, been so brought out on a prancing horse, or caught such a gleam from his well-scoured sword, resting on his trusty thigh, or left to play loose between his crooked legs, as to aspire to be road-master, town-reeve, supervisor of the county, assemblyman, representative in Congress, and even United States senator.
The civic honor of presiding at the old-time traditional public dinner, which crowned, at the principal tavern, the militia morning cantering and inexplicable twistings of crooked military lines,—lines that snarled up until they broke past all sewing by waxed ends, welding by cindered hands, or splicing by plane people,—has again and again pipped the egg, else ingloriously addling, which enclosed the rudimentary germ of a railroad president, it may be even, of a conductor with diamond pin, gold finger-ring, largely accumulating real estate, and all the other incidents. These glorious dinners have been, also, the nurseries of the legal profession, whose young members have thence sent up whizzing sky-rockets, which, mounting and mounting on the straining enthusiastic eye, have burst into such dissolving showers of golden glory, that, by the unexpected explosion, the national horizon and their own have been widened on all sides, and new stars been stuck into its astonished vault.
We pity the American who has been born into our degenerating times, which neglect those primitive occasions of cheap yet great renown, when a little sulphur, administered to a rural population, went further to cure all the scarlet fever of the neighborhood than all the colic-producing iron pills of actual war. We commiserate the condition of the young American, grown so apoplectic ere he arrives of age, by the prodigal display of bunting, fire-works, and red-faced oratory at our frequent elections, that he disdains the frugal but satisfying cakes of gingerbread, then bought with a well-pressed sixpence from the calico-roofed booth on the side of the bars, through which those undulating militia lines managed to unwind without hanging on the fence or getting into puzzling knots.
Gone now are those molasses-plated cards of cake, pleasant to the taste on the Fourth, and sticking to the teeth, stomach, and memory of the patriotic eater for at least one fifty-second part of a year. Gone now are the pranks of horses bestridden by the colonel or major of the regiment,—his first equestrian performance freely exhibited, and in which he showed feats, entirely his own, which could not, or at least would not, be displayed by first-class circuses or turf-bred racers, who, skimmed over in blue, yellow, or green, glide so stunningly through the admiring and opening air. Vanished now, alas! are the groups of innocent children waiting for the show of animals, not those on parade, but the lively monkeys, the pie-colored horses, and the wonderful clown, whose photographs, loading down the staggering fences, blacksmith-shop, horse-shed, and post-office for a whole long fortnight, were all so well known to them before the originals striped the village with their many-colored glories.
Gone glimmering away from this green-backed epoch are the sable groups that danced on the greensward, away from the tangling military lines apparently just as happy as if the American Wittenagemote, led on by Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston, had not solemnly declared, and thereto pledged all that they had, “that all men are created free and equal.”
ENGLISH POOR RELATIONS EATING COLONISTS OUT OF HOUSE AND HOME. (p. 276) ]
SECOND TURN OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WHEEL; ITS ECCENTRIC BUT ONWARD MOVEMENTS. 1776–1780.
English Hawks gather around New York.—Washington watches them.—About an Esquire.—The Way the Germans took Brooklyn the first Time.—How they returned, not to their Mutton, but to Kalbfleisch.—Difficulty of reaching New York from Brooklyn in 1776.—Washington takes a Trip to Harlem.—The British also.—Red Eyes and Disfigured Faces the Consequence.—Lord Howe attempts to get around the American Squire.—The slight Unpleasantness at White Plains.—The different Uses of the Croton Water in 1776 and now.—The Amount of Whiskey it took in 1869 to qualify the Water in New York.—Washington ventures into New Jersey.—Set-to at Fort Lee.—Washington across Rivers.—Philadelphia covered.—Homesickness of Agricultural Lads.—What befell Lee at a Tavern.—Washington crosses the Delaware and drops Christmas Presents into German Stockings.—The Effects of Yankee Doodle on Lafayette, De Kalb, Kosciusko, Pulaski, and others.—Friends of America in England, Fox, Hume, etc.—Friends of England in America.—The Statue and Statutes of George III. repealed.—Battle of Princeton.—The Germans obtain Cider and Sausages at Danbury.—Colonel Meigs tickles the Feet of Long Island, and makes Congress laugh.—Colonel Prescott is obliged to rise very early one Morning at Newport.—Silas Deane and B. Franklin in France.—What followed.—Burgoyne tries to find a back-stair Passage to New York.—Strong Gates in his Way near Saratoga.—Still-Water runs deep.—Brandy-Wine an unpalatable Drink.—French Treaty with America in 1778.—The Wheel moves in Water and turns out French Names.—Crossing New Jersey, Lord Howe collides with Washington at Monmouth.—Count d’Estaing is prevented by an Injunction off the New York Bar from entering New York.—Coquetting, but no Engagement, near Newport.—Buzzard’s Bay and its Roosts.—Little Egg Harbor and its Nests,—what was laid there.—The Benefits of the Wyoming Massacre.—Guerilla War in the South.—Savannah trounced.—Horse-Neck and Putnam’s Home-Stretch down it.—Count d’Estaing’s Yachting.—Spain hankers for Gibraltar.—England as a Pawnbroker.—Paul Jones and his Whip.
While the wise men at Philadelphia were making the Fourth of July a precedent for the future by their very readable and taking Declaration of Independence, the English kites were gathering from the north, south, and east around New York. Lord Howe, from Halifax; Sir Henry Clinton, from Charleston; and Admiral Howe, from England, drawn together by focalizing orders, settled down with their separate flocks on Staten Island,—one of the lintels of the gateway to the metropolis,—numbering together twenty-four thousand old hawks which had often whetted their beaks before in Spanish, German, and Dutch blood.
Washington had about seventeen thousand agricultural lads, armed with every possible and impossible accoutrement, contrivance, and weapon, to watch the well-trained brood. Lord Howe, being a royal commissioner as well as a general, understood letter-writing well; and his first care was to pen an epistle to the American commander. Upon its composition he bestowed as much care as a young man upon his first letter to the coy damsel whom he would conciliate; but upon the address he spent far greater pains. As despatched, it read “George Washington, Esquire.” Carried to the General, he declined to receive it. Not that he was not an “Esq.,” for all Americans are born such of course; but being a Squire in a military court whose proceedings were likely to be recorded, he conceived himself to be entitled to different honors.
Defeated in his pen addresses, the British general tried another stroke. On the 22d of August, 1776, landing on Long Island, he commenced a march by three separate detachments towards Brooklyn, which, after a severe battle on the 27th of August, he took. It was the first invasion by the Germans of that quiet, pleasant, New York dormitory. Then the inhabitants took it very hard. Now, however, they have become so much accustomed to the German irruptions, that they have ceased to be astonished at their own frequent captures. We may add that the Hessians did not at that time elect Herr Martin Kalbfleisch mayor of Brooklyn. They waited nearly ninety years, and then returned, not to their mutton, but to their veal.
The gathering in of one thousand dead and wounded from the Long Island hills was not the kind of harvesting that the agricultural lads expected; and as they had only engaged for a short job, many of them went back on the 28th to their own farms. Washington not liking to be sandwiched with the rest of his forces, numbering some fourteen thousand, between Howe’s Germans and the East River, contrived during the misty night of the 29th of August to get over the river to New York,—an exploit much vaunted then among military men, but rendered very easy in our time by the Union Ferry Company’s boats. The country recruits who are now transported every Sunday across the same river to Beecher’s church, when there again transported, and after the service transported back again, show what changes have occurred in the facilities for moving large bodies of men over the East River since the battle of Long Island.
Howe’s Hessians threatening to emigrate en masse to New York, General Washington, on the 10th of September, made room for them by taking his young army to the upper part of Manhattan Island, giving them an opportunity to see the rustic beauties of Harlem and the country around the present High Bridge. As it sometimes happens in war, as well as in peace, that different gentlemen take a fancy to the same piece of ground, whose possession and value are enhanced thereby, General Howe’s desire to become possessed of the same real estate in the actual occupation of Washington, reached such a pitch that he sent a large party of military friends to seize it, even if by so doing they were obliged to dispossess its occupant. The friends of the Squire, however, resented this violent attempt so spiritedly that, as it has often fallen out since, the visitors to Harlem went back to New York with very red eyes and faces unkindly disfigured.
Lord Howe next attempted to get around the Squire by sending a part of his force, now increased to thirty-five thousand men, into the lower district of Westchester to see how Harlem and the Continentals looked from the rear, and the other part on a lively picnic up the Hudson River; but the wary leader of the Americans had seen, when surveying or hunting in Virginia and Ohio, too many traps set by Indians and white trappers to be caught between the steel jaws of this English one. So he pulled his men away from the cautiously planted contrivance and took them several miles to the northeast, on the Bronx River. He allowed several of them, however, to go up to White Plains, where, to his chagrin, they were set upon by a large British party and very disagreeably handled.
General Washington now scattered his force all along the Hudson River from the city of New York up as high as Peekskill, his camp soups giving off a flavor into Anthony’s nose. Some of the water used in cooking and drinking was dipped from the Croton River. Thus early was the Croton put into American service. At that time, we may add, the fluid was employed to qualify and reduce the whiskey; now the whiskey is thought to be weak enough to qualify and reduce the water. Ninety-three years have thus united to furnish the same number of reasons as the composing elements, contrary as they may seem to each other, for mixing the fire and water. One may judge of the extent to which the Croton is now used from the fact that during 1868, the amount of liquors retailed at the opening throat of the aqueduct cost over $150,000,000. We need not add how, during all this period, fusil-oil went down.
General Washington in November following ventured over into New Jersey, and, like so many from the New York side since, was having a good time at Fort Lee, when a body of Englishmen and Handeckers came down towards them in a very rough way, and the excursionists thought it prudent to retire, leaving their provender behind them. But for these little surprises, war would lose some of its briskest features. Washington was now compelled to retreat, with numbers daily diminishing, before foes superior in numbers and constantly augmenting as they pursued. In fact, he was obliged to bridge or ford the principal rivers or streams in Northern New Jersey; thus furnishing the best precedent which the Camden and Amboy Railroad engineers have ever had for carrying people across New Jersey soil and waters in a bad temper. Newark, New Brunswick, and Princeton fell into the hands of the enemy. Some people assert that they are in them still.
December 8, 1776, Washington passed over the Delaware River to cover Philadelphia, which now had much need of a lid, for it was in a terrible stew. The country lads, as these reverses pressed upon them, took a homesickness which nothing but their mothers and their own homes could cure. Only about three thousand remained, shivering and tentless, and lying near the inhospitable track of the New York and Philadelphia Railroad. Lord Cornwallis but waited for a cold night to bridge over the Delaware to enable him to take the Squire and his dwindling posse of men.
Trenton was the knife-balance of American fate. Upon a nicely poised point it swung tremblingly for a weary, anxious fortnight.
General Sullivan, having succeeded the waspish Lee, who was one night captured at a tavern in Baskingridge by a party more spirit-ed than his own, led, through the gloomy days of mid-December, a force of four thousand men, provided with ammunition, across the country to Washington. Timely indeed was the reinforcement; for Washington, although just made by a Congressional decree supreme manager of the war, had more need of powder than power.
Christmas eve, 1776, was a very jolly one in the British camp. The commander, officers, and men, all thought that the American fiddle was broken and about to be hung up forever; and so, in their Saxon and Teutonic joy, they hung up their stockings. The shrewd American Squire, borrowing old Santa Claus’s coach and horses, and filling the former with bullets and powder, crossed the Delaware about midnight and suddenly dropped his presents through the camp of his foreign visitors. Never were the Hessians so taken by Christmas gifts. In fact, fourteen hundred of them were so overcome by the novel presence of Washington, that they gave themselves up to American hospitality and followed their new friends across the river to their now merry quarters.
The American fiddle was mended again; and its strains of Yankee Doodle were heard across the Atlantic by a young French marquis, only nineteen years of age, of a very old family, with a very young wife, and an income of $40,000 a year,—an income in those pre-Erie and pre-petroleum times highly respectable. Other Frenchmen also listened to, and, like Lafayette, were moved by, the touching airs of freedom, which passed the Rhine also, and were drunk in with his hock by the Prussian Steuben, a military martinet and schoolmaster, much needed in our militia schoolhouse. The Baron was then generalissimo of his serene, discomposable highness, the Prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen, whose magnificent titles would, if printed on a straight strip of paper, have easily reached across his principality; but sounding as they were, they did not fill the ear of Steuben like the notes from that repaired fiddle. The lively adagio airs also struck upon the sensitive vibrating soul of De Kalb, a noble of Alsace, lifting it to highest impulses, which carried him through four years of patriotic service, and even bore him in lofty triumph across the death channel in 1780, when at the battle of Camden he was carried away from the daring front, loaded with eleven bullets in various parts of his body.
These same free airs fell upon those straight, upright Poles, Kosciusko and Pulaski, and so vivifying them by warming heats, that through the whole war they bore most fragrant fruit, until at last they stood as that vintage so ripely planted in Mrs. Browning’s verse,
“Where the sun with a golden mouth doth blow Blue bubbles of grapes down a vineyard row,”—
the blue grapes of blistered steel.
Even in England thousands of hearts warmed to the American cause. In Parliament, Charles James Fox, Earl Chatham, Edmund Burke, the virtuous Lord Camden, and others; out of it, David Hume the historian, Edward Gibbon, whose studies of the rise as well as the fall of Rome had led him down into the crypt of history, and countless able, learned, and good, others as true to state as to individual freedom, gave vent and weighty shape to the well-considered convictions of the injustice of the attempt to compel the Colonies to submit to impositions unassented to by themselves. But while in England there were advocates of colonial freedom, in the Colonies there were friends of Parliamentary oppression. These last were infiltrated more or less through all the United settlements; but they gathered in notable volume in and about the then considerable village of New York,—numbering about 26,000 inhabitants,—where all the vigilant zeal of Alexander Hamilton, an ardent, eloquent young lawyer, recently arrived from his native West Indies, the equally vigorous but cooler patriotism of John Jay, and the alert wisdom of other Sons of Liberty were needed, to make head against the Tory current whose momentum and velocity, quickened by wealth, social position, and official experience, swept with force and volumed power through the island city. Rude indeed was the shock given to the Manhattan loyalists by the overthrow in the Bowling Green of the leaden statue of George III., and the conversion of its characteristically heavy metal into lively Continental bullets. The popular repeal of this loyal statue was soon followed in Congress by the repeal of more important representatives of royalty,—leaden-typed statutes.
The year 1777 opened with the battle of Princeton, fought under the leadership of Washington and Cornwallis, whereby two hundred English and Germans were put under sodded trenches, to furnish in after times, in addition to their use in well-rounded school-boys’ periods, a special resort for the students of Nassau Hall, accompanied by such persuadable female companions—Dutch, American, English, or German—as might relish history studied under the advantageous lights of a pair of admiring eyes.
In a few days after this battle, all New Jersey was cleared of British and Hessians, who dispersed in various directions, and sought to keep up their courage for several succeeding months by raids upon those peaceful, drowsy villages, Danbury in Connecticut, and Peekskill on the Hudson, and harrying off some of the delights of a German stomach,—winter apples, cider, and sausages. On the other hand, Colonel Meigs tickled the feet of Long Island one night in May, and touched up some British corns on its Sag Harbor toe, making even the grave Congress to laugh outright in a broad vote of thanks; while Colonel Barton, early one morning in July, took, in spite of his guards, the British Major-General Prescott out of his bed, where he was cuddling up to escape the Rhode Island fogs, and bore him off through his own troops, and even through a large British fleet lying off the main-land,—a little surprise party highly relished by the visitors and their colonial friends.
The arrival in France, in the autumn of 1776, of Silas Deane, a Connecticut delegate to Congress, and of Benjamin Franklin, as commissioners, soon raised the gates which had barred French supplies of men and means from flowing into the service of the Colonies. Louis XVI. and Vergennes, his Foreign Minister, had neither forgotten the great fight for the American belt, nor the wrench which French pride had suffered by the tossing of the prize, but fifteen years ago, into the eager hands of its uncivil rival. They were, therefore, more than ready to help the ward escape from her self-constituted guardian, and to send her secretly such instruments as would file off her bolts, cut away the prison-like fences around her suspiciously guarded dwelling-place, and enlarge her straitening liberties. They had even, in the spring of 1777, secretly encouraged, while pretending to prevent, the armed emigration of Lafayette and others to America.
Just about the time that these French gentlemen, with Baron De Kalb, touched foot on American soil at Georgetown, South Carolina, an Englishman named Burgoyne, whose acquaintance we made at Bunker Hill, two years ago, came on shore at Quebec. Entering the Colonies by that favorite back-stairs, Lake Champlain, he turned the well-known and well-worn knob, Ticonderoga, and got himself and his attendants fairly inside the American door-yard. Advancing, he came to a small place called Stillwater, where he tripped his toe over a little hillock, called a breastwork, raised by Kosciusko, aided by that crack rifleman, Morgan, and pitched forward faint and weak from this unexpected accident. Still, his English robustness of strength and pluck was such as to make him quite confident of being able to reach, without difficulty, the wing of the house, called Albany, and thence gaining access to its centre, New York, where he expected to meet Sir William Howe, and with him to succeed in bringing back once more the spirited young American heiress to the selfish love of her late champion. But quite to his surprise he discovered before him, near Saratoga Springs, Gates through which he must pass in order to make any progress,—Gates so strong that, unless he could force their Polish locks, their American hinges, and solid, iron-riveted timbers, he must perish for want of food. The Gates were not passed; and October 17, 1777, he gave himself up, with 5,791 officers and men, and forty-six hundred muskets. Forty-two pieces of brass cannon also passed at that time to the Americans,—brass which gave them thenceforward more confidence and cheek. Much need, too, of it had they; for in the preceding two months, Washington, with thirteen thousand men, following Howe and Cornwallis southward, with a body of eighteen thousand men under their command, met them a few miles south of Philadelphia, on a little, dispirited stream called the Brandywine, and there drank the disagreeable dregs of a defeat, made even more distasteful by the fact that it was the first American drink which Lafayette and Pulaski had an opportunity of sipping in this country. Exceedingly nauseated by this drink, they all took another draught October 4th at Germantown; but this decoction proved equally unpalatable. It required all the beneficial effects of the Saratoga water to correct the disturbed action produced by the Brandywine and the Germantown potion.
The fury of George III. at the close of the campaign of 1777 was perfectly Hanoverian. He had been led to expect the speedy submission of the Colonies; but he had reluctantly discovered that early disasters had only stiffened the gristle of discontent into the bone of unconquerable resistance. His obstinacy, however, in prosecuting the war was met by equal firmness on the part of the Colonies in defending their rights. If, like one of his predecessors, who, irritated by the resistance of Scotland to his royal wishes, threatened to make that country a royal hunting-ground, George III. threatened to make a shooting-park of North America, the colonists, in the spirit of the Scottish nobleman who, in reply to the menace, answered, “In that case, may it please your Majesty, I must be home to uncouple the hounds,” were fully determined to muzzle the royal pack, and to increase their own war-dogs.
Parliament, however, curbed by the strong arm of popular sentiment, found it best to hold in check the royal passion and resentment. It even slipped from the leash, not the savage bloodhounds of strife, but three very sleek-looking house-pets, called Peace Commissioners, who came with nice little dainty titbits in their mouths, pardons and promises, to drop around the American door-yard.
Too late!—these royal poodles and King Charles spaniels. America had outgrown pets, petting, and even pantalettes. She had come of age, and deliberately made up her mind to leave the uncomfortable homestead and to do for herself. She had a good friend in France, who encouraged her independent notions, and who, on the 6th of February, 1778, told everybody—England, America, and the other nations—that she was ready to stand by the plucky Colonies. This declaration, usually termed a treaty of alliance and commerce, was received with great joy by America, and with keen resentment by England. Russia, always our friend from the first, clapped France on the back for her conduct, and the people of Europe, out of dislike to England, sided with the Colonies, and applauded their new friend.
The old rivals, England and France, again scowled, flushed up, and clinched.
During the rest of our Revolution French names are turned up by the wheel, which had so far run entirely on land, side by side with American. It was now at times to be put into water, and to dip its blades into an element which, troubled by navigation acts, had separated us from England, but which now, blessed by a treaty of amity, was to unite us to the country of Lafayette.
At the opening of the crocuses, in the spring of 1778, Lord Howe and his brother, the Admiral, were in the Quaker City, a city which, though mainly made up of the disciples of peace, wielded both pen and musket in favor of war for peace. A French fleet, commanded by Count d’Estaing, sailed from France to pen up in the Delaware the English brothers with their fleet and army; but these some Howe getting at once wind of this intention and into their own sails, contrived to escape to New York. Part of the British forces took the land route to New York, courageously braving the dangers incident to New Jersey travelling. A little accident befell them on the route, June 28th, about eighteen miles south of Philadelphia, at a small place then called Monmouth, where, colliding with Washington and the artillery train of which he was conductor, they lost three hundred men. The American loss was only seventy,—very trifling for a genuine American collision. It was in this battle that General Charles Lee became insubordinate, lost his reason, and was cast on the lee shore of patriotic duty,—a misfortune which, eighty-three years later, happened to another general of the same name.
The French fleet, finding on its arrival at Philadelphia, that the Howes had gone to New York, followed suit thitherward; but on reaching Sandy Hook, it was defeated in its intended action against them by an injunction raised by the New York bar, and so proceeded to that fashionable watering-place, Newport. Admiral Howe soon after took a notion to go to the same place, and, being reinforced by several ships, set out with his squadron. D’Estaing, intermitting his study of the “Round Tower,” “The Spouting Rock,” and “The Dumplings,” sailed out like a generous foe, to meet him half-way. The fleets, long in ogling sight, and loath to leave each other, were yet kept apart by those adverse winds and rough seas which sometimes in naval war, as in love, neither blow nor run smooth, and which, at least in this case,—as sometimes happens with lovers,—prevented an engagement.
In September, General Clinton, who had superseded Lord Howe, sent out two marauding expeditions, one to Buzzard’s Bay, which burnt seventy American ships roosting there on their anchors; the other against Little Egg Harbor, which took a considerable amount of stores laid there, over which much British cackling was had.
The massacre at Wyoming by Colonel John Butler and his Indian allies—only palliated by the plea that, while it cruelly put out of existence some three hundred settlers, it called into being the beautiful “Gertrude of Wyoming”—and the barbarities committed by another band of Tories and savages at Cherry Valley, raised the hair on the head of many in Europe as well as in America.
Towards the South the war now turns. The French and English fleets, having sailed for the West Indies, thus relieving Sir Henry Clinton of a natural anxiety about New York, he despatched thence, in November of the same year, a force of two thousand men against Georgia. Savannah, just then preparing to receive her first bran-new city charter, and feeling like a boy who is promised his first pair of long pantaloons to cover his lengthening proportions, was taken in hand by Clinton’s military schoolmaster and humiliated by a gentle spanking. Her sandy bottom, however, stood the trouncing well. She had the hardihood even to look right pleased and content when it was soon after told her that an expedition sent out against Port Royal, South Carolina, had been soundly ferruled.
The year 1779 opened with, and shut upon, a lively guerrila war, carried on through Georgia and South Carolina by small bodies of troops, so light as almost to seem feathered, led by Moultrie, Pickens, and other partisan officers, who teased and worried the enemy by incessant scratches and irritating stings, especially annoying in the summer-time and amid a warm climate.
PUTNAM’S HOME-STRETCH DOWN HORSE-NECK. (p. 293) ]
At the North the British forces spent themselves on small excursions out of New York, very much as many people still do, and with the same result,—exhausting their own means and boring the people up the Sound and Hudson River. On one of these excursions under Governor Tryon, an attack by fifteen hundred men was made in March, 1779, upon Horse-Neck, one of Putnam’s outposts, a high, steep hill defended by one hundred and fifty men and two old rusty field-pieces. The powder failing, these loud-talking mouthpieces of the little party were almost silenced, when a cavalry charge was ordered upon the small band at the top of the hill. Putnam’s troops were directed to withdraw behind a morass inaccessible to cavalry, when Putnam himself, staying behind to serve the hard old swivels with the few grains of powder freshly discovered, and, finding himself closely pressed by assailants, leaped upon his horse and launched himself down the precipitous ledge amid a tempest of bullets and stones. It was neck or nothing; and he won by a neck,—his own,—which, had the horse given out, would probably have been stretched.
In September of this year Count d’Estaing returned from the West Indies with his fleet; and having in vain tried to recapture Savannah, took French leave of it and of America, having had a yachting trip in American waters with the usual yachting experience,—a good deal of getting up, a deal of getting down, large consumption of provisions and liquors, high hopes in idle state-rooms, and low performances on deck.
Spain, now conceiving a violent taste for Gibraltar, Jamaica, and the two Floridas,—for the taking of which by England aforetime she was of course very critical upon Albion,—seized the opportunity of Britain’s multiplying engagements with America and France, to let her know that she desired an immediate return of these forced loans. England of course insisted that, if she was an international pawnbroker, she was not obliged to surrender articles taken in until she chose to give them up, or until payment was made with shot and shell. She resented and resisted the demand; resisted it when Spain stepped up to her coast with a large fleet, resisted it successfully for three years at the Gibraltar Rock itself, and resisted it wherever Spanish gentlemen appeared to assert it, either on sea or land.
Meanwhile, on the 23d of September, 1779, Paul Jones, a Scotchman by birth, and who, like his apostolic namesake, had been “in shipwrecks often” and “in perils in the sea,” the first who ever displayed the American flag, now sailing the good ship “Bon Homme Richard,”—an old Indiaman converted into a war vessel,—after capturing with this old lugger twenty-three merchantmen, at last fell in with two heavy English frigates. Lashing his own ship to the larger one, he so laid on other strings that at the end of two hours he had thoroughly whipped both,—a whipping whose stinging recollections brought the color for a long time into even the ruddy cheek of Mr. Bull.
THE LAST TURN OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WHEEL; ACCELERATIONS; SLOWINGS; THE GRIST.
1780–1783.
The different Opening of 1780 for those who pushed and those who obstructed the Revolutionary Wheel.—The Strain on both Sides.—Hard Spring in Charleston in Consequence of Leaden Hail Storms.—How these Storms spread; and how the Crops were saved from Ruin by Marion, Sumter, and Pickens.—The Carolina Game-Cock, and his sharp Spurs in the Sides of Cornwallis and Tarleton.—Gates broken down, and the Presidency lost at Camden.—Greene set up in his Place, proving a good standing Color.—The Village of St. Louis assailed.—André humiliates himself, and is exalted.—Arnold gets $50,000, a Brigadier’s Commission, and is elected by General Contempt into the Order of Judas Iscariot.—New Year’s Day among the Pennsylvania Troops at Morristown.—The United States Treasury, made less Celestial, becomes defiled by filthy Lucre.—The Goring and Tossing of Tarleton by Morgan at the Cow-Pens.—An Irish-like Fight at Eutaw Springs.—Southern Hunters around the British Flock at Charleston and Savannah.—The troublesome Seizure of Virginia Assemblymen.—How the Captors missed burning their Fingers with Jefferson’s red Hair.—Cornwallis enmeshed at Yorktown.—What Lord North said.—What the English George threatened and what the American George did.—“Let there be Peace”; and Peace was.—What England lost and America gained.—The kind of Grist obtained.
The military revolutionary wheel had now been revolving nearly five years. Seventeen Hundred and Eighty began with very different prospects for the promoters and opposers of its operations. The former were poor, their workmen wretchedly clothed, badly fed, discontented with the small pay promised, and often threatening to strike because that pay was only irregularly and partially paid, and, when given, only afforded in depreciated and depreciating new paper promises. The latter, on the contrary, with that obstinacy which sinks deeper and rises higher with the rising tide of opposition, and possessed of resources to match this dogged pride, made larger preparations to open the coming campaign. Parliament voted to add to its colonial army one hundred and twenty thousand men, and wrought up the sinews to carry this then enormous live weight to twenty million sterling pounds.
It was a hard spring in Charleston; for it hailed heavy iron hail-stones from Sir Henry Clinton’s batteries, from April 1 to May 12, 1780; when the city became so riddled that it gave up. The storm soon spread, bursting over the entire States of North and South Carolina, and beating down for a time, as with iron flails, the growing harvest of patriotism. A good part of the crop was, however, finally saved during the late summer, by Marion, Pickens, and Sumter, who, with their sturdy little bands of reapers, toiled all through the blinding storms with high spirits, and without pay. Sumter was well called “The Carolina Game-cock”; for he often drove his sharp spurs into Corwallis and Tarleton, and roused a very cheery feeling by his crows through those gray mornings of liberty.
Gates, who had so successfully administered Saratoga water to Burgoyne and his men three years before, was despatched in haste to look after the obstinate and severe cases of Clinton, Rawdon, and Cornwallis in South Carolina; but, as it often happens, the remedies successfully applied to one patient often fail with another. At Camden—a name which should have been propitious to American arms—the army of Gates was seized by that frightful epidemic, a panic; and ran away, carrying off with them their general’s sole chance for the next Presidency.
Nathaniel Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker,—the ungloved right hand of Washington, who had served in the army with brilliant and yet solid success since June, 1775,—succeeded the unsuccessful Gates in August, 1780; but the heats of summer melted out all serious campaign attempts on either side, through the South, during that season.
St. Louis, then a village sixteen years old with nine hundred and sixty inhabitants, exalted above the dirty Mississippi on two terraces, or a double platform of earth, was assailed by some Englishmen and Indians from Michilimackinac,—as it has often been since, by people of all nations; but on this first invasion the invaders were as glad to get away as their successors have been to stay.
Meanwhile General Greene was detailed to act as president of the court of inquiry upon Major André, that historical romance of our war, as Mary Queen of Scots is the sentiment of the tough annals of Scotland. This handsome, romantic, cultivated, and high-bred Englishman, then in his twenty-ninth year, who had unsuccessfully courted in Ireland the future mother of Maria Edgeworth, the novelist, and then won a better fortune from the golden hands of trade, had afterwards flung himself into the stern arms of war. Lowering himself to the mean business of carrying dangerous, sealed secrets in his boots, outside the mails, contrary to all laws, and caught in the act by three militiamen, who, after playing cards with each other, played a sharper and more patriotic game with him, he was most disagreeably elevated to the rank of a spy, and sent in consequence to find out the great secret on a very lonesome journey.
His principal, Benedict Arnold,—who had suffered the canker of excessive extravagance to eat through his brave and well-shredded military coat,—escaping from our dangling line into the English straighter ones, received fifty thousand dollars and a brigadier-general’s commission. He was subsequently elected by General Contempt into the celebrated order of Judas Iscariot.
The campaign of 1781 was inaugurated New-Year’s day by a good-natured and semi-patriotic insurrection among the Pennsylvanian troops stationed at Morristown, New Jersey; not on account of the Jersey ways, usually deemed so hostile to foreigners, but by reason of the scant fare, clothing, and pocket-money to which they were reduced. Marching to Princeton, they were met by emissaries from General Clinton, with large offers of bounty-money to enlist for King George; but the noble-minded troops, spurning these attempts upon their virtue, delivered up these agents, as spies, to General Wayne. A committee from Congress relieved the just needs of the insurgents, and offered them rewards for their patriotic treatment of the spies; but they refused to accept pay for what, they truly asserted, was but their duty.
With such metal were the new moulds of American life filling up. By such iron bands was the Revolutionary wheel made strong and irreversible.
The attention of Congress was now seriously and effectively drawn to the condition of the army,—the crank of the wheel. Robert Morris was appointed Superintendent of the Treasury; and the treasury—till then a very celestial affair, undefiled by filthy lucre, and having out-goes in the place of in-gots—was tolerably supplied by taxation at home and loans abroad.
Again the scenes of the war lie south of Baltimore. At the Cowpens, in South Carolina, Colonel Tarleton was caught on the horns of Morgan, three hundred of his men tossed fatally, and the rest, with their leader, severely gored and gashed. Cornwallis soon found that the Southern commander was not a Greenehorn. At Guilford Court-House, the English leader, with a superior force, met the American general, with 4,500 men, and after a severe grapple, fell back with the air and conviction of a man disagreeably undeceived. The Americans now seemed to have received an ally in general success; for in April, May, and June they retook, one after another, all the forts, outposts, cities, and military points occupied by Lord Rawdon. On the Catawba, Morgan gave to Tarleton a little more grape, which sent his lines reeling backwards in awkward confusion towards the main body.
As soon as September began to cool the air and make travelling tolerable in a warm climate, General Greene, with an American party, and Colonel Stewart, with an English company, took it into their heads mutually to visit Eutaw Springs, about fifty miles west of Charleston. The meeting was unusually lively; in fact, quite an Irish gathering. Like most Irish fights, too, it was impossible to say, which had the worst of it. Both sides held a funeral wake over about three hundred killed, and claimed the fewest graves and victory.
After this affair, the British flock, which had been scattered more or less over the two Carolinas and Georgia, gathered back and alighted for a long time on two favorite spots, Charleston and Savannah. Near them gradually collected ready American hunters and fowlers, fond of foreign game, vigilant in watching and very desirous of bagging the entire lot.
Meanwhile, Cornwallis had advanced northward through North Carolina into Virginia, where the young French marquis—more fortunate than the almost useless French fleets, first under D’Estaing, and afterwards under Admiral De Ternay—was doing good service. The route of Cornwallis was nearly along the present track of the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, which fortunately for him was not then in existence, to invite him to use its delaying time-tables and dangerous rails. As it was, he reached Petersburg in the course of time, and in safety.
A detachment sent to Charlottesville, where the Legislature of Virginia was in session, seized several of those most unmanageable specimens of the human race, members of assembly, troublesome enough when let alone, but as prisoners wholly incapable of definition, exchange, or valuation. The squad came near burning their fingers by taking the red-haired and red-vested Jefferson, whose term as Governor had expired only two days before, but around whose head there yet lingered enough of the aureola of official dignity to make him worth several cart-loads of assemblymen.
For Cornwallis himself the three military fates—Washington, Rochambeau, and Lafayette—were securely and steadily spinning lines for his entanglement. At last they enmeshed him at Yorktown. Nine thousand Americans and seven thousand Frenchmen held the netting which, gathered in fold after fold, finally, October 19, 1781, caught the whole shoal,—Cornwallis, that voracious old pike which had devoured scores of American armored fish, and 7,000 others. In this splendid haul were found 235 cannon, 8,000 small arms, and regimental colors enough to supply all the state-houses for the next sixty-five years.
When Lord George Germain hastened with the disagreeable and accelerating news to Lord North, the premier raised his hands wildly in the air, and exclaimed, with an oath too big to fit our Comic History, “It is all over.”
For the first time, during the last six years, Lord North was right.
George III. stormed loudly, and, at a hint that American independence must follow, threatened to freight a large boat with his ponderous heaviness, and be transported to Hanover; but he soon concluded to take another bucolic roll in the rich English clover, and to postpone turning himself out into the thin grazing lands along the Weser.
The American George rejoiced with temperate joy, thanked God for the crowning mercy, ordered divine service to be performed throughout the camps, and thanksgiving turkeys to be rendered to, and thanksgiving by, the troops. And so ended 1781, as all years should end, with thanksgiving and turkey.
Christmas dinners, or something else in America, had the effect of turning the English stomach against the war ministry of Lord North. “Let us have peace,” piped the English House of Commons to the watch on the deck of the still fine, but somewhat battered, Royal George. “Ay! ay!” responded the first mate. So the ship was hove to, and a gentleman stepped down the ladder let down her sides, was rowed to the French shore, and at Paris met four American ex-rebels,—Adams, Franklin, Jay, and Henry Laurens.
These five gentlemen, on the 30th of November, 1782, sitting at a round table covered with green baize, signed a preliminary agreement for peace, which was joyfully attested by many millions of witnesses.
This agreement was dressed up with new ribbons ten months after, and then became a fixed, resolute treaty,—a gay, laughing, sunny break in our history,—but in the English chronicles a flinty, hard, jagged fact, against which the waves of national pride long broke sullenly and hoarsely. England had sent one hundred and twelve thousand five hundred and eighty four soldiers and twenty-two thousand seamen to this unjust, successless war; had lost many thousands out of their ranks; had lost much solid, precious money; lost credit and honor, more precious still; and now at last lost the colonial empires themselves.
She had thus millions of reasons for not being jolly.
NEW YORK EVACUATED, NOVEMBER 25, 1783. (p. 304) ]
The Revolutionary wheel, which had begun to slow after the battle of Yorktown, now of course wholly stopped. The grist was ground. In it, it is true, were some hard colonels, some badly ground, dyspeptical grains, some dark specks; but, on the whole, the yield was good, unbolted American family flour. Of course the miller took toll. This came out in the shape of debts for soldiers’ wages, for money borrowed, for stores used, powder exploded, and pensions in the near distance; but still there was a broad country to gather it from, reaching westward to the Mississippi, northward to the Lakes, southward to the Gulf and Florida, and eastward to the Atlantic. There were independence achieved by obstinate bravery, right of government right to tax one’s self, and, above all, the right to spend one’s own taxes, even on useless officials and handsomely printed laws. And so, on the whole, the customer was well satisfied with his large, healthy, unbolted grist.
HOW A POOR CONSTITUTION BROKE DOWN.
Every Community has its Axis of Growth.—That of the Confederation described.—Causes of the Distrust of Federated Power.—How the States preferred to sew up the Treasury Pocket rather than allow their own Agents to put their Hands in it for necessary Funds.—Facetious Bills of Exchange.—The Shady and Sunny Side of Power.—Similarities and Dissimilarities of the States.—The Committee to draft Confederation Sixteen Months over the Cold Nest.—The curious Knot-ty Grub that issued.—The Spawn of Doubt put to the Nurse of Jealousy.—How it was nursed, starved, and doctored; and what a poor Constitution it got.—The Confederate Scheme like a Pine Board.—It could not raise Money, an Army, Credit, Postage, Revenue: in fact, could not raise itself.—The Comic Side of the Franking Privilege.—A desirable Prohibition.—How the Grub became a Caterpillar, and the Caterpillar a Butterfly.—A very Larky Phœnix rises, crowing Yankee Doodle.
Every community, like every individual, has its axis of growth. Sometimes this axis is in the line of large, generous expansion, loving, trustful, and unselfish; sometimes on the crooked wire of involved, self-stunting contradictions, of twisting jealousies, and of resolutely resistant forces, which project crabwise on all sides, and propel with counteracting momentum in all directions, and so sprawl out either in balancing rest or in a slight gain rearward.
Of these latter stationary or retrograde and always negative qualities, the Confederation largely partook. The committee, appointed by Congress, June 11, 1776, to draft a plan for governing the thirteen Colonies, shared in the feeling, indulged by the people at large, of apprehension as to the natural driftage of central power athwart popular rights. They, like their constituents, were very subject, to that political fever and ague, a shivering, chilly dread that an American parliament might grasp and abuse the power of taxation as the English congress had done, and a heated, burning fever whenever the possibility of legislation in matters of religious faith was started in any vein. Denying the power of King George, George Grenville, or any other George, to put his hand in their pockets, they thought it logical—and it was the natural logic of distrust—to refuse permission even to their own agents, although frequently elected and called to account by themselves, to agree upon any plan of mutual contribution for the common good. Smarting under wrongs inflicted in the name of government, our confederated progenitors were never able to gain political faith and strength enough to crawl out from under the shady side of authority around to its sunny, cheery, beneficent face.
The needs for a Union were yet unfelt. All the thirteen Colonies held slaves, all sloped to the Atlantic, and all, except Pennsylvania, touched the sea. Their substantial agreements created as yet no wants; their broad areas made them independent; their slight diversities were not so strong as to require the firm hand of central power to bind them within a well-hooped circle, within which aggressive rights might be so restrained as not to become antagonistically hostile, and which might yet continue so free that their forces might work together and onward in large and enlarging action.
The Committee sat for sixteen months; and in November, 1777, the lumpish, inert grub of Confederation saw the light. A poor, weak grub it was, without developed legs to go on, without eyes to see with, filmed over with a gelatinous, swathing membrane, squirming in feeble inanition, and feeling as cold as a tax-bill, or the shake of a cashier’s hand with a doubtful bank customer on discount day.
The scheme of Confederation was the child of Doubt, put out to the nurse of Jealousy.
It was watched to death by the members of the State family, each taking its turn, and each well provided with the cold-gruel theory, that what the child cried for was not good for it, and that what it really and always wanted was a sound course of starvation. And so starvation it got, with an occasional blue-pill administered by those little teasing children, Maryland, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, whose jealous pretensions were of course inversely to their size. No wonder that the brat grew pale.
In a word, the States were everything, the Confederation nothing. The powers of the latter were, like poor pine boards, filled with nots. The Confederation could not, of itself, levy taxes; it could only cipher up what each State ought to pay, and then advise it to pay the sum stated. It could not raise an army; and, amid the extra jealousy against a military force, it was hardly suffered to figure out the quotas of the various States which might, if they saw fit, follow the advice, or might, if they chose, disregard it. Of course the States generally treated these debiting bills as any customer would a draft upon him, when accompanied by an intimation that, although payment was desirable to the writer, he, the correspondent, might pay or not, as and when he found it convenient. Without trembling as Felix did, they adopted the Roman governor’s mode of dealing with unpalatable advice,—thoughts and suggestions of a judgment to come being postponed to a time which, rainbow-like, never touched them. The Confederation had no power over exports or imports, or the revenue therefrom; the States sitting along the sea-shore, keeping each its own straw to suck its private fill from the large maritime bowl in front of it. It had no authority to punish treason, as the States considered it no crime to hurt or maltreat the poor manikin which they had set up.
It could not even collect more postage on letters than was barely necessary to defray the expenses of carrying the mails. As for the franking privilege, that curious Congressional levy on the public treasury, comically supposed to be repaid to the people by heavy speeches, very uncurrent and untransportable, which require all the government levers to lift them up to the unwilling hands of their constituents, this privilege was as yet undiscovered.
There was one prohibition which might, in our time, with great advantage to the public interests, be even extended; the interdict upon men going to Congress more than three years out of six. Even the three years might be profitably prohibited,—an economy of bad laws, bad speeches, bad manners, and of $1,635,000 annually paid for salaries.
It is noteworthy, however, that among the stark cold negations of the Confederation act, there were two warm affirmative provisions, one securing to persons of every color equal rights in all the States, the other making each man’s conscience the teacher and judge of his religious belief. These were the two red currents, the arterial blood, which kept alive the lumpish, footless, armless, and eyeless grub, and preserved it during the Revolution, and through the caterpillar, chrysalis condition from 1783 to 1787, until at last, in the latter year, it burst forth into the glad, beautiful, perfected butterfly, the Constitution, vital with sustaining power, bright with yellow promises, and rising joyously into the large air of healthy freedom.
The phœnix of the Confederation, that arose out of its ashy bed very larky and lustily crowing Yankee Doodle, was our present Constitution.
1789 TO 1869 AND ONWARDS.
“Virtutes ibi esse debebunt, ubi consensus Atque Unitas erit.” Sen. de Vit. Beat. c. 8.
“He stood With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear The weight of mightiest monarchies.” MILTON.
“Whose genius was such We scarcely can praise it or blame it too much.” GOLDSMITH.
THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION. 1777–1787.
The Constitution as a Resort for Shoppers in Civil Rights.—Every Kind of Article to be found either for Ordinary or Exceptional Use.—The Fringe called Preamble; its Thread, Texture, and Quality.—Counterfeit Patterns and Simulations easily detected.—Piles of heavy Cloths for the Country’s Winter Use in War, Financial Storms, etc.—Executive and Legislative Ready-made Clothing.—Judicial White Goods.—Hosiery for Congressional Understandings, swift or slow.—A Variety of Miscellaneous Wares; Contrivances for catching People with Colored Skins; Habeas Corpus Non-Suspenders; Muzzles for violent or hungry Congressmen; Handsome Checks on the Treasury; Specimens of tender Gold and Silver; Militia Uniforms; Padlocks for securing Houses against Searches; Jury-Boxes, Trial Balances, and other Goods.—The Sumner Patent.—The latest Novelty to prevent Electoral Black-and-White Suits from being stripped off.—State-Rights Dresses, and strong Federal Out-Fits.—Messrs. Calhoun, J. Davis, Webster, Clay, etc.—The Manufacture of bright Buttons, called “Coins.”—The Fifteenth Amendment.—Doubtful Packages.—Paper Money as a Substitute for real Money.—Unauthorized Use of the Constitutional Bazaar.—Seekers of Goods never made.—Nicholas Biddle and his Gold Suit.—Everybody suited at the Federal Store.—Of excessively sharp and dense-headed Shoppers.—How Articles are mistaken.—Water-proof Goods for River and Harbor Dredging and for Lighting Coasts.—Of long Selvedges, or Railroad Strips, and their wonderful Elasticity.—Rights and Lefts.
What Stewart’s New York emporium is to shoppers for goods, the Constitution of the United States is to shoppers for civil and political rights. There one may find whatever he is in quest of, and may very often see things, beautiful in texture, color, and quality, which he would never require, even if he lived as long as his long-winded ancestor Methuselah. On his very first entrance, he will stop to look at that very handsome fringe, “the preamble,” woven together in such exquisite tissue-work. As he examines it, he will note the quality of the material, the even strands “more perfect union,” “justice,” “domestic tranquillity,” “common defence,” “general welfare,” “blessings of liberty,” braided together by the deft, expert, and strong fingers of the people of the United States “for themselves” and “their posterity,”—a bit of domestic hand-weaving which has now lasted over fourscore years, and is still bright in color, and, although much handled and tumbled about, just as good as new. Patterns have been taken from it, and cheap imitations attempted; but these latter are just as easy of detection as cottonized linen, dyed hair, or carminized blushes.
THE STATE TAKES LEAVE OF THE COLONY. (p. 314) ]
There, too, one finds readily and in abundance heavy cloths for the country’s wear through the wintry storms of financial distress, foreign wars, or domestic insurrection; ready-made clothing for legislative and executive use; white linen goods for the judges, as stainless as snow, although not quite as cheap; a great variety of under-garments to fit the powers of Congress, and a large assortment of hosiery to encase with restrictive woof its rapid understandings.
As one advances, he finds a miscellaneous collection of rights; patent contrivances to give people in one State the same expansion, weight, and solidity as in another; admirably adjusted devices for catching persons with colored skins, when attempting to run off with them over boundary lines,—a device ingeniously stamped “labor-saving machines,”—an article in great demand between 1850 and 1861 in the southern portion of the Union. On the same counter lie habeas corpus non-suspenders, a strap occasionally called for by passionate judges and choleric magistrates; tacks, which can only be driven in all over the surface of America up to the same point; muzzles over legislative bills and hungry congressmen, to prevent them from pecking at the estates of people politically decapitated, and from whetting up the keen edge of ex post facto laws; handsome checks on the treasury; good bills of lading, current in all the ports of the Union, if at any time introduced in any one of them; specimens of gold and silver, made very tender in all the States, especially during a time of plenty, and before a war; and a large variety of odd gear, to prevent people from getting into, or, if in, out of, trouble.
Proceeding to the rear of our Constitutional bazaar, the shopper will find the very latest styles and modes of civil rights; pieces adapted to dress and re-dress pulpits and printing-presses; militia uniforms; arms without quarterings; padlocks to secure houses from being entered and searched; devices to keep property from being taken for public use without proper payment; jury-boxes and trial balances.
But the very latest article added to this great emporium is a curious contrivance, said to have been invented by a Down-Easter named Sumner, for preventing one man, even if he be draped in a mourning skin, from being owned by another man. Of course it would strike any one but an American as a very needless article, especially out of place among staple goods, and one which ought never to be called for in a country which takes such pains and pride to claim and proclaim that other invention of a man down South, called Jefferson, whereby one man is made equal to every other man. Still, it is well known that the Sumner unclasping machine is a very useful one, and well supplies a need long felt.
Attempts are now made, as we write, to introduce into public use another article, called the Fifteenth Amendment, and to put upon it the Constitutional patent-mark, an article which is calculated to hinder any evilly disposed person from stripping off from another at election time,—a period when a certain strange rabies seizes Americans and makes them inclined to tear each other and their clothing,—their electoral vestments, or voting suits, especially if they do not suit them. The new pattern is black and white, and although it has had as yet a checkered fate,—some preferring it all white, some all black, others white with a leaden-colored border,—it is thought by shrewd buyers that the novelty will soon come into general use. These last-named goods are far from being fashionable at the South.
One of the most surprising characteristics of our fashionable Constitutional shopping-place is, that everybody finds here just the article to suit his taste, judgment, and even his fancy, whimsical as it may be. If Mr. J. C. Calhoun or Mr. J. Davis wants a complete outfit for States rights, he walks in, and has no difficulty in finding it just to his liking, and in a considerable variety of shades and materials. He puts his hand on one of the new styles marked “Article X,” and is confirmed in his choice by reading upon the label the manufacturer’s description: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” He turns around, and, traversing other departments, discovers sundry other articles of like style to match these. He also lights upon more gauzy, thin, or fine-spun, fleecier goods to throw around the exposed shoulders of the States.
On the other hand, if Mr. D. Webster or Mr. H. Clay desires a thorough suit for the central Federal figure of Uncle Samuel, he is shown directly to the sections where he can procure quantities of them; hats to cover banking brains; coats and vests to put over the inner works, to aid digestion and promote internal improvement; pants, hosiery, and boots to keep up our Uncle’s advancing strides over mountains, plains, and rivers. Such customers are, of course, walked up directly to section eight, and there are shown in a large box ample and well-made garments of the desired description. On the top of this box the fabricators have put this explanation: “To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers.”
It was supposed by many of the original members of the firm, who got up this grand Constitutional bazaar, that Uncle Sam’s concern had the exclusive right to make those bright, popular buttons called “coin,” or “money”; but it was discovered in a very short time that there was an elastic provision in the articles of copartnership, which allowed the individual members of the firm to manufacture, each on his own account, these shining disks, and even to invent and put forth for sale paper substitutes, which at length became so much in vogue as to drive the metallic article, at times, wholly out of the market. Paper collars have not had a livelier run, nor damper shrinkages than these.
Statements are often put forth by people sitting on benches and having a grave, sometimes a grave-clothes air, doubting the right of the Federal store to stamp exclusively and to put out for its own particular profit, a variety of things, kept there in well-locked sections; it being claimed that the composing members have a concurrent power to make, stamp, and vend the same goods. On some of these points the discussion is still going on, and as the partners are a jealous, sharp set, it is not likely soon to terminate.
Much trouble has arisen in regard to a large number of bills of credit which have been issued by, and are still outstanding against, the large Federal concern. Some have questioned their power to manufacture this kind of paper and make it equal to hard coin. Others have doubted the legality of the step which the firm took in making this paper good for certain purposes, and not receivable as pay for certain kinds of debts due to the house, arguing that if coin was better than paper, then the paper could not justly be made an equivalent; and if no better, then that paper ought in all cases to be received as well by the firm as by others. After much argument before them, however, that popular court, the ballot, gave a verdict against those who so reasoned, and rendered a decree that, if there were no other good reasons, the arguments pro interesse suo and ad necessitatem, especially when impelled by the motor of war, were too convincing to be set aside, and so legalized the discrimination.
Very many people make an unauthorized use of the bazaar. They go in for articles so absurd, so trifling, or so unusual, that all the clerks laugh outright, as soon as the inquiries are made. Some people, especially members of Congress, candidates for office, small lawyers, raised by short hand-levers up towards a large occasion, which they find it difficult to reach, when talking of the things themselves, their own pockets, or their chances of offices and places, assert, when told that such things do not exist, that they can find them in the old Constitutional store.
Accordingly, they post thither, and make themselves ridiculous or disagreeable, by tumbling over and soiling the goods that lie there in honest piles, to find their peculiar article. Some of these shoppers last mentioned are very keen-eyed, gifted with those optics spoken of by Hudibras, which see
“Things which are not to be seen,”
and fancy that they see, in their mind’s eye, patterns of what they are after, when in truth the patterns are not at all similar. If the goods found are speckled, checked, spotted, or figured, and the sample which they have brought has any specks, checks, spots, or figures in it, bearing the most general resemblance, but readily distinguishable from the goods inspected by any the most careless observer, if disinterested, they hasten away and proclaim very loudly that the same goods, of precisely the same material, color, make, and style, are found in heaps in the Constitutional shop. There is nothing so sharp as such eyes, except the single eye to the public good.
So, on the other hand, obtuse, dense-headed observers, unaccustomed to make distinctions, rush to the Constitutional with confused or ill-defined recollections of the patterns or styles they want, and buy and bring away packages of goods which, when exposed to a clear light, are at once seen to be wholly dissimilar. As in large stores, some people become confused by the variety, and select at random, or in a perplexed glamour, articles to match pieces at home either in color, texture, or quality, and assent with a mixed mind to the adroit suggestions of the salesman; so in the various sections into which our Constitutional store is divided up, many good people, even deacons, vestry-men, the annual subscriber to missionary papers, and systematic charity bestowers, become, in the shifting cross-lights of commentaries, and remarks of story-tellers and others, as confused and astray in their notions, and lose their own not over-strong heads as completely as congressmen at an evening session, or the President during the closing hours of the last night of the congressional barbecue.
There is no store so much talked about all over the United States as this Constitutional one; and there are no goods so generally used or so popular as those which are either actually obtained there, or fancied to be in it for sale. Nicholas Biddle once got a gold-colored suit there which he wore in and around the vaults of the United States Bank, in Philadelphia, from 1816 to 1836; but General Jackson, for various reasons, some of which were very peculiar and of a hickory color, others as sound as oak, took such a dislike to it, that he finally persuaded the people that it was a very poor suit, and, in fact, never came from the Constitutional store, but was a deceptive imitation of goods there.
Many persons have gone to the Federal store, to procure water-proof constitutional goods, to wear in dredging rivers and harbors, in laying down watery ways across States, and when at work on the coast, or exposed to the chilling winds from State capitols. Others insist upon purchasing there, also, long selvedges, or narrow, iron-colored strips, which some declare to be very excellent material for binding States; while others assert that it is only calculated for hemming them in uncomfortably. Some of these strips have a very elastic element in them, and can be made to stretch in parallel lines from Washington to the farthest border of the Union. The bands, or bindings, which they use, are also wonderfully elastic, and can be multiplied like stars to the bewildering gaze of an enthusiastic drinker.
On the whole, it may be said, that while this great American store contains piles of invaluable goods, it is supposed by intelligent persons to hold more rights than were ever left to men.
THE IRREPRESSIBLE NEGRO. (p. 322) ]
CONSTRUCTION; OR, WASHINGTON’S ADMINISTRATION. 1789–1797.
How the Thirteen Colonial Children crept into their New Bed.—The Upholstering described.—Why Rhode Island was last in.—Who tucked her up.—Washington as Superintendent, and John Adams as First Assistant.—The Family low in Credit.—Amount of their Indebtedness compared with ours.—Washington’s Inaugural.—His Exemption, from Office Beggars, Committees, Pugilistic M. C.’s, boring Place-Seekers, enterprising Donors, etc.—Washington as a Spirit.—His Capacity to select a Cabinet.—Who they were.—Of Henry Knox.—The Chief Justice and Attorney-General.—Amendments to a perfect Constitution.—The Supreme Court as a Sound, Seaworthy Tribunal.—Why States cannot be sued by Individuals.—How Governments get around paying Interest on Principle.—Streaks of the Millennium.—Of the Public Debt.—Discrimination among Creditors.—Misfortune of being a Cisatlantic Holder of American Bonds.—Alexander Hamilton’s Notions.—Washington’s Receptions and Dinner-Parties.—The Political Color of the President’s Silver Spoons and Window Curtains.—The Honeymoon of the new Government disturbed.—Ganderous Long-bills splash Washington.—The French Revolution and its Conundrums.—How answered by Washington and the Federals; how by Jefferson and the Anti-Federals.—The Census Act procures names without Owners.—The Naturalization Laws and their Pat-riot Products.—Polls and Polling-Places.—A Sinking Fund that did not sink.—How Vermont made the Thirteen States old.—An Indian War.—Cincinnati begins.—Kentucky starts.—Mistakes about Bourbon.—Washington’s second Term.—What Genet did, and how he was done for.—Helpful Americans.—The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.—The Year of Treaties; how they enlarged while they tied us.—Tennessee the Sixteenth State.—Nashville gets warm.—Washington’s Farewell, and its cheap Imitations.—The Shades of Office.—Who crept in and who stepped into the Sunshine.
The thirteen colonial children, emancipated from parental mis-government in 1783, tired of sleeping together in the same old, rickety confederate bed, which had been hastily put together in 1777, and whose cords they found so small and hard as to cut through the thin mattress above, and so weak as to creak and threaten to go down under them, whenever they stirred or even spoke above a whisper, at last, in 1789, obtained a new first-class constitutional bedstead. It was wide and roomy, with even, strong springs, and was easy to get in and out of, as well as very comely in shape, and well polished externally.
This new article was, however, not decided upon by all the thirteen immediately. It was spoken for in 1787, and, during that and the next year, eleven signified their preference for it over the old tumble-down rumbly. Little Rhody was the baby in the old family, and, fearing to be overlaid and perhaps smothered by her larger bedfellows, did not crawl under the sheets of the newly upholstered bed until 1790; and not until New York and Virginia had agreed to be content with a fixed amount of bedclothing, instead of claiming, for themselves, that large Western comforter, those earth-colored strips, of the empire pattern, extending to the Pacific side of the bed, and large enough to cut up into a dozen good-sized State counterpanes.
It was not necessary that this youngster,—nor yet North Carolina, who got in the year before,—should consent, in order to complete the change of arrangements from the old Confederate to the new Constitutional system; but as it was an affectionate and generous-hearted family, there was a general desire to conciliate all the members. And so when little Rhody got in and curled up, she was joyfully tucked in by that good old faithful American “help,” Washington, a great favorite, who had been so long in the family that he was loved by every one, and so generous and right-minded that, although several of the other domestics, such as Major John Armstrong and others, who had worked on very low wages with him through the war, proposed to him to take the house himself as proprietor, he indignantly refused so to use or abuse the affectionate trust of the household.
Washington was, however, unanimously chosen Chief Superintendent, and our short, stout, resolute acquaintance, John Adams, whom we met at the top of the hill, July 4, 1776, was made his first assistant.
The family now set up housekeeping. Like most families in the United States, they were at the outset poor. They were especially low in credit; for in consequence of the issue by the Continental Congresses, during the war, of about $300,000,000 of paper money, its value had so depreciated that it became of little use except to line trunks or to patch up chambers as ruinous as itself. They were also greatly in debt, owing at home and abroad $79,463,476,—a debt which, instead of being paid off or even reduced, grew, in spite of every economy, good judgment, and excellent management, for the next seventeen years, and was not fully discharged until 1824. This debt amounted to about nineteen dollars per head for every man, woman, and child of all colors in the United States at that period. Still, they were not in circumstances as discouraging as are we, their descendants, eighty years later; for, estimating our population now at thirty-eight millions, each man, woman and child now owns a right to pay as his share of the national debt, sixty-eight dollars, besides a large, comfortable sum for State, county, city, and town indebtedness, which never figured themselves upon the purses or imaginations of our golden-aged ancestors. This latter ownership is so much the more wonderful as it represents shares in obligations, not wrought from outlays of blood or money in the country’s service, but blood and money sucked by corporate and private straws from our ever-troubled and ever-bubbling public treasuries.
Washington, after a laborious journey, reached New York, and, on the 30th of April, 1789, took the oath of office as President, on the spot now covered by the United States Treasury in Wall Street. The bulls and bears of that day,—mere calves and cubs,—not strengthened by the pushing horns and large squeezing powers which have added such force to their descendants, might have heard, in the intervals of their rough play, the solid, honest, heart-felt words of his Inaugural, in which, among other things, he uttered those now strange, old-fashioned wishes and expectations, that “all employed in the administration of the Government would execute faithfully and with success the functions allotted to their charge.”
No crowds of patriotic office-seekers stepped over the sills of the new President. Quires and tons of papers, now quadrienially rolled into the Presidential warehouse, containing uncounted autographic testimonials to the transcendent abilities and spotless purity of at least one man in thirty of our entire population for suffering places, were then left to the innocent uses of book-keepers and book-makers. We search in vain for any records of enterprising committees, State or county, pressing upon the uninformed intelligence of the first office appointer the names of persons, otherwise left in native obscurity, for Cabinet seats and responsible missions, which might possibly in thoughtless liberality turn the drippings of their high eaves into their own hungry pails. So far as our examination has discovered, there were no old battered political hulks, their rigging split by the gales of speculation or the contrary winds of local indignation, which put into the Presidential port in stress of weather.
Gentlemen waited to be sent for, and did not bore through Washington’s bedroom wall to present handsome reminders of services to be yet gratefully performed, or to leave their photographs and a solar microscope, in order that he might by the latter descry something in the former and in their originals.
Could that modest, slow-minded chief be now permitted, through the conjury of a medium, to sit by the side of his successors, during the honeymoon of their official marriages to the state, and see the procession of great men for whom offices wait pass by with their directories of certificates to high intellectual power and eminent fitness for—everything official, he would certainly divide his surprise between two great convictions,—the scandalous waste to which unclaimed virtue runs in this prodigal land, and the terrible contrasts between all the past performances of the ins and the easy, liberal promises of the outs.
President Washington had no difficulty, even unaided by pugilistic M. C.’s or other metallic “rings,” in selecting gentlemen to fill the three newly created executive departments of Foreign Affairs, Treasury, and War. Thomas Jefferson, forty-six years old, was requested to assist in managing our foreign relations and friends. Alexander Hamilton, in his thirty-second year, was solicited to pump something into that very dry cistern, the treasury. To the red-leaved portfolio of war was summoned General Henry Knox,—the Sherman of the Revolution. It was thought that the man who had, in times of Revolutionary discontent, wisely allayed the complaints of an army whose courage in the field he could nobly stimulate, and who had stroked the right way the rising fur of a disbanded soldiery, could deal justly with the approaching pension lists, and would fairly adjust the burdens of the seven lean years of war, to and through the many rank and good years which now appeared in the visions of our American Pharaohs. The new Secretary felt, in taking his place on the war bench, that he was summoned to a sort of military coroner’s inquest on the dead body of the late Revolution, which had served well in active duty, but which, like every such thing in our hurrying country,—old people, worn-out utensils, and other ex-useful machines,—was considered a respectable encumbrance.
To the post of chief justice of the newly created Supreme Court President Washington nominated John Jay, and for Attorney-General, Edmund Randolph of Virginia. It is to be noted that the President, Secretary of State, and Attorney-General were all from the same State,—the greatest Cabinet-making, State-bureau manufactory in the Union. If Connecticut, Pennsylvania, or North Carolina sent any delegates to the President to remonstrate against the appointment of two gentlemen from the same State, the reporters of that time have shunned the bare mention of it.
Nothing on earth, not even in the United States, is perfect; and in the United States especially things most perfect are always in order to be amended. Within the very first year of the ratification of the Constitution, ten amendments were proposed and carried, making it an old knife with new blades, and finishing it up into what some people, with great novelty, proclaim it to be, the most perfect instrument ever invented.
The keel of the Supreme Court was laid in 1789; and the vessel, launched, well officered, and manned, provided with new spars, anchors, and compass, was despatched from port to ride the turbulent seas of maritime strife and constitutional conflict, and to override laws and treaties which drift athwart the path of the Constitution. By and in it States could originally be pursued; but after submitting for about fifty years to the chase of individual plaintiffs, the States, headed by Georgia, roused to a sovereign indignation and ruffled pride by being compelled to answer for grievances inflicted by themselves on Indians, negroes, white persons, and such trash, procured the passage of a jealous amendment, relieving them from such embarrassments. Beautiful is the theory that States can do no wrong to their own citizens. Millennarian is the assumption that they are so ready to spring to their loads of duty, that no judicial whip, with a snapper of judgment and execution, is necessary to quicken their slackening consciences. As a beautiful corollary from these delightful premises, is the most comfortable practice of governments not to pay interest on claims against themselves, however hoar with age; for the government assumes to itself the virtue of being always ready, as the fons et origo justitæ, to pay, and is presumably always pressing its offers to pay upon its creditors.
At certain points we now touch the millennium.
At the next session of Congress, in 1790, Hamilton presented a report on that subject which, like the poor, is always with us,—the public debt. Of course every one thought that it was right to pay the creditors who were fortunate enough to live in Europe, who had, at whatever discount, taken our promises; but a great many people with caoutchouc principles doubted whether men silly enough to be born on this side the Atlantic had as good a right to be paid; just as some discriminate between their autographs affixed to notes held by their friends,—leaving such to the mercy of blood,—and those held by strangers, which they despatch from unpleasant remembrances by payment. Hamilton recognized no such thin, veneering logic over parts of the public chest; and he was honestly supported by Congress and their makers.
Philadelphia was made the national capital for the rest of the century; and here, for the coming seven years, Washington’s weekly receptions on Tuesdays, and his dinner-parties on Thursdays, created a stir among the disciples of Penn, and caused much green-looking ink to be shed from cavilling pens all through the country. Like congregations which look with a keen-edged criticism upon the social movements of their clergymen, the people thus early began to peer into the green-room of the President’s mansion, to count the silver spoons, to feel of the window-curtains, and to compare their silken qualities favorably with their own hangings, and the qualities of the Presidential tenant, as thereby affected, unfavorably with their own. A democratic people prefer to occupy the green-room themselves.
The honeymoon of our newly wedded constitutional government was not all roseate. Through the press a wonderful amount of good advice and double-tongued compliment as already given to the old gentleman, who was not likely to forget all the peccadillos he had, and to wonder why he had been restrained from the easy commission of others which he had not committed.
The French Revolution had now begun its series of bloody conundrums; and, not content with posing its European circle of listeners with perplexing questions, crossed the Atlantic, and thrust upon the administration and demanded immediate answers to some very bothering acrostics and puzzles. The grand riddle which they prided themselves upon, and required to be first answered, might be stated in the rule-of-three form thus: If France, with a population of seventeen millions, assisted America to gain her independence from 1778 to 1783, what aid should America, with a population of 3,927,827, give, in 1790, to the Constituent Assembly, assuming to act for France, against the monarchical adherents of Louis XVI. and the turbulent guillotining mob, struggling up into fierce, resentful power under Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins? This riddle was differently guessed by the leading members of our government. Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Jay, now recognized as the leaders of a party for the first time called the Federal, put in the ready, safe, and wise answer, “None”; while Jefferson and Randolph, in the government, and Madison, Gallatin, and young Edward Livingston, out of it,—now the heads of the anti-Federal party,—spelled out from their general love of liberty and sympathy for those struggling against monarchical power, without regard to international rights or home duties, the response, “All that we can.”
Of course much could be said on each side, and of course much was said; for the Boston “News-Letter” had now a very vivacious following all over the thirteen States, many of which barked in chorus, even at the majestic figure of Washington. Very hard names, too, and even imputations of felonious attempts upon the person of Liberty herself, facetiously assumed by party zeal to be impersonated in the last uppermost French faction, were hissed out against the grand old chief of the nation by those long-billed, ganderous persons, who, in the warm days of politics, paddle around in dirty pools and splash, with noisy uproar, the black ooze upon the cleanest and purest who pass by.
Thus even the golden age had ugly quartz and soiling dirt interspecking it.
Congress, during the same session of 1790, passed the first act for counting the people of the United States,—an enumeration which, being paid for in certain years by the number of names taken, has sometimes resulted in “counting one’s chickens before they were hatched,”—the census-paper containing more names than owners of them.
A law was also passed setting in motion that large machine for manufacturing voters, commonly called a Naturalization Act, whereby a singular pat-riot paving is turned out, by which our polling-places are McIrishized with some very curious bricks, and our polls sometimes are made to suffer by brickbats.
A fund was likewise established for sinking the national debt; but like the Irishman’s cork contrivance, put on to enable him to drown himself, the sinking fund, in practice under the statute device, became so buoyant that for several years the debt floated upwards instead of downwards.
The year 1791 was signalized by the birth of Vermont, as a State, into the Union,—a family event which at once added many venerable years and an historic solidity to the original members, who thenceforward became “The Old Thirteen.” A national bank was also ushered into existence, and was carefully wet-nursed by Hamilton, the government lending it $2,000,000, or one fifth of its capital,—a very comfortable christening present.
An Indian war which had broken out the preceding year within the present limits of Ohio,—as if to remind the country of its old irritating eruptions,—raged with some violence through 1791, reddening in spots into a rash and producing some congestion of officers at military head-quarters. General St. Clair, marching northwards with two thousand men, from Fort Washington, the future Cincinnati, then consisting of a rude stockade surrounded by a few wattled huts, and containing not exceeding thirty white settlers, the oldest not having been there three years, penetrated a district then obscure, but now even called Dark County, where he was disagreeably surprised by a party of Indians, and lost nearly three fourths of his troops. The war of course became chronic, lingering along until 1795, when it was finally got under by General Anthony Wayne, the old stormer of Stony Point.
Kentucky, wrought out of a small Boone settlement, in 1769, came forward in 1792, and was welcomed as the fifteenth State. Some wavy-notioned people imagine that her Bourbon, reinforcing her courage and spirits, emboldened her to make this early application; but this is a mistake which sober history is glad to correct.
Washington, although annoyed by the ganderous long-bills for his steady adherence to the neutrality of his country between the raging factions that were now quarrelling over the sanguinary conundrums, put forth by the civil war in France, finally consented, against his own wishes, to become a candidate for re-election as President. His consent was unanimously decreed to be the popular wish by the electoral colleges. John Adams, less fortunate than his chief, was content, however, with seventy-seven votes out of one hundred and twenty-seven, the other fifty being given to the Democratic candidate, George Clinton of New York.
About a month after the second inauguration of Washington, in 1793, that lively little Frenchman, Edmond Charles Genet, somewhat excited by the revolutionary dance about the scaffold of Louis XVI., and the rather wild scenes around the revolutionary tribunal in Paris, capered over on a visit to the people of this country, and landed at Charleston, South Carolina. Although commissioned by the French Convention, now the subject of its bloody master Robespierre, as a Minister to our government, Monsieur Genet took upon his arrival a sudden fancy to aquatic sports, and despatched on his own hook several cruisers to fish in the troubled waters of the Atlantic for any English, Spanish, or Dutch flying-fish that could be caught. The old American Squire did not at all relish this international fishing-party, which proposed to use American lines, hooks, sinkers, and bait for the benefit of French packers. Kindly but firmly he requested M. Genet’s forwarders to order him back again. There have always been Americans, born with magnifying spectacles fastened firmly on their noses, by which every form of freedom, individual or national, spelt out to them a clear license to help any party, fraction, or entirety of a people fighting, or claiming to fight, against the old governing power. “Wherever you see a crown, hit it,” is their one motto. In April, 1793, this class had many representatives, who thought that the French gentleman and his fishing-parties were all right.
In 1794 a Whiskey Rebellion arose, not in Kentucky nor among the Bourbonites, but in Pennsylvania. This insurrection defied for some time the cautionary, expostulating, and well-sealed proclamations of the President; but when the sharp military drum-beat, backed by fifteen thousand militia, with well-set bayonets, was heard in the western part of the State, its leaders and their weak followers reeled back into quiet and submission. Nothing so much shows the simplicity of that golden age of the Republic as this resistance to a whiskey tax. In our more debased but keener times, people distil much comfort from a heavy tax—far heavier than that of 1794—through taps and tubes placed in the obnoxious article, which is led off and around so circuitously and ingeniously as hardly to know where it is going, until all of a sudden it falls plump in large coin within the well-adjusted pockets of the non-complaining manufacturer. Instead of getting up insurrections in Pennsylvania against the high excise, he now forms combinations at Washington to raise it higher.
THE WHISKEY REBELLION IN 1794. (p. 338) ]
The year 1795 was the era of treaties,—establishing diplomatic lines to England,—which ever since the peace of 1783 had been uneasily bobbing up and down, neither fishing nor cutting bait; to Spain, whose American possessions of Florida and Louisiana were thereby staked and roped off from our greedy boundaries; to the dark Dey of Algiers, whose corsairs were thus enmeshed in the silken nets; and, finally, to the Northwestern Indian tribes, who, as usual, gave us a large piece of territory for a little piping peace with hot embers on the top. Through the Spanish treaty flowed, and ever since has continued to flow for us, the wide-elbowed Mississippi. The exertion of signing it exhausted the power of Spain in North America; for five years later she had not vitality enough to hold either of these possessions against Napoleon, and the orange and sugar States fell out of her ever-relaxing hand into the clutching and restless fingers of France. In 1796, Tennessee, making the sixteenth State, was welcomed into the household. Its capital, Nashville, settled in 1779, contained only a few cabins; but the folds of the Cumberland warmed them rapidly into life.
Washington, then sixty-four years of age, announced in September, 1796, his intention to retire to the sunshine of private life. His farewell was the blessing of a ripe sage upon a sorrowing people. It was none the less genuine, rich, and good, because comically imitated by a few of his successors. Even Andrew Johnson’s did not belittle it.
Several gentlemen, it was discovered, had a fancy to try the official shades which the great American was so glad to quit. Of course Virginia supposed that the rotation in the office should, like charity, begin at home. Such, too, was the opinion of sixty-eight electors; but as seventy-one disagreed with them, the short, stout, well-grained “column of Congress” was transferred, for the four following years, into the executive post.
OLD FAMILY PORTRAITS.
Modern Photographic Albums like Ancient Roman Simulacra.—The Pleasure of looking at the Likenesses of Friends.—The Portraits of our Fore-Fathers.—Our dear old Great-Grandfather GEORGE WASHINGTON.—His one hundred and twenty-eight Original Portraits.—His unique Character; of the same Size all the Way up.—His Manners and Characteristics.—How the Eighteenth Century, so long mated, refused to survive him.—Our Great-Grand and good Mother MARTHA WASHINGTON.—The Resemblance between her and a Bowl of ripe Strawberries and Cream.—Her Pride.—What Qualities were corseted in her Bosom.—Our favorite Uncle, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.—How the Sky got into his Face and how it stays charged.—Looks like an hereditary Director of all the Estates.—A born Trustee.—What an idea Burns might have got of him in 1774, and how expressed it.—Of our Aunt, MRS. JAMES MADISON; and what a fine Lady she was.—Her careful Dress and Manners.—Impressive but patronizing.—How Time forgot her, and the Years ran on un-notched.—The forty Years she acted as Presidentess.—PATRICK HENRY described in Dress, Person, shooting Game, and taking Audiences.—Our dear Visitor, GENERAL LAFAYETTE; his Difficulties in reaching us; his noble Bride; his Embarkation at a Spanish Port; his Labors here; his two subsequent Visits, and how he survived Hand-shaking and Kissing.—About JOHN JAY and his Wife SALLIE LIVINGSTON.—How they lived and what he became.—Glances at ISRAEL PUTNAM and his expressive Face; at NATHANIEL GREENE and his square, Quaker Character; at the Telescopic Eyes of FRANCIS MARION, with a Dash at his soldierly Qualities.—The Effigies of the WISE MEN—General Sketches of our Heroes and Heroines.—A Heart Delineation of the Mothers, Wives, and Sisters of the Men of the Revolution.
Cold indeed must be the heart, colder than any which pendulates in the readers of this History, that does not warm up pleasantly when carried by its owner into what is wisely called in the country “the living-room,” and there obeying the electrical summons of the eye, wanders with it lovingly through the pages of a family photographic album.
The elder Romans had a chamber, placed in the innermost part of the house, devoted to the images of the departed members of the family; images named after, but not always likenesses of, those who had led the way in the family history. So great was their reverence for these, so intimate the relation maintained with them, that, on the departure or return of any of the household, these silent figures were saluted with the same affection as the living.
The family photographic album is the modern chamber in which are kept our simulacra. Enter it as often as we may, scan as often as we choose its portraitures, we never survey with indifference, and rarely without better and tenderer feelings, these mute, dear faces.
Just as dear, just as touching to our national feelings, sensibilities, and emulous gratitude, just as instructive to head and heart, are the cherished and beloved features of our national forefathers. Turn we then a few leaves with interest, perchance with profit.
An instinctive delicacy places the elders at the head of the procession.
Of course the very first in the book, as in our hearts, is the dear, good face of our great-great-great-grandfather, GEORGE WASHINGTON. How well we all know it. One hundred and twenty-eight original portraits were taken of him, between 1770, when he was thirty-eight years old, and 1796, when he was sixty-four, by various painters, from the elder Peale to Sharpless. The statue of Houdon, ordered by Virginia in 1785, and finished in 1788, perpetuates in marble, to its visitors at Richmond, as its engraved copies have made familiar to all, the full-length majestic figure and port of the wise, thoughtful, and careful General. Yet numerous as are the likenesses, multiplied by various art processes, and scattered through parlors, bedrooms, sheds, cabins, and books, we instantly recognize and instinctively love the noble features of our dear old grandfather. Very grave he is, very sedate, as if he was thinking how it was best to settle in life some of his large household. His thoughts seem so earnest and weighty that we cannot interrupt them. Good and humane as is the face, we cannot bounce in, leap upon his high knees, pull lovingly his long hair, and then scamper away with a sense of unspoken forgiveness in our thumping hearts. O no! There is an awe in his presence, benevolent as it is, a width of responsibility in his thought-beaming face, which stills and hushes us. Very reserved and calm, seldom volunteering a remark, never a laugh, for mere entertainment, he makes ordinary conversation appear like empty chattering. Yet ever gracious is he, ever gentle, well-bred, and self-contained. His reticence is not sour, but thoughtful, his silence the waiting upon a large utterance. Intent and earnest after something he always seems. Even in his relaxation from formal work, and when least occupied, he seems like a good fisherman sitting on the bank, carefully watching the float, and fixed upon securing the nibbles.
A noble face! just the frontispiece to a great History, the preface to an Encyclopædia of Moral Philosophy and Political Rights, the trunk of a large genealogical tree, the grandfather of a large, proud family.
Stories we have of his boyhood; but they do not strike or stick to us as accounts of a boy. Even when cutting down the cherry-tree, and then scorning the boy’s ordinary deception in regard to the author of the deed; when mastering the blooded horse, at the expense of the animal’s life, and then hastening to avow to his stern but just mother his exclusive agency in the fatal conquest,—he seems the same calm, staid, mature impersonation of heroic Truth, as when he stalks with longer strides through a nation’s history.
Some naturalists tell us that the trunk of the tree does not lose its bulk as it grows upward; but that, if we measure the tapering trunk and its outspreading branches, we shall find that together they form the same size and weight throughout. So Washington, if viewed in sections, appears of equal size, dimensions, and compacted force in each. As a boy wise, grave, and truthful; large in frame, of unusual strength, but gentle in its use; from books learning little, from men much, from out-door life its large, fresh, wholesome, healthy activity, and wide breadths of suggestion. As a young man unweariedly industrious, unmistakably honest, impressing all with his oak-like qualities; carefully and perfectly accomplishing whatever he undertook, whether engaged in surveying a farm, keeping a journal, or supplying by study and observation deficiencies in education which his own good, well-balanced sense had discovered; loving honestly, and honestly describing in verse his heart affection for his “lowland beauty.” As an officer, at twenty-three, self-reliant because consciously well disciplined, vigilant, careful, yet as personally brave as the impulsive and unrestrained; confided with missions to the hostile French settlements on the Ohio, and saving, by his knowledge of savage life and habits, by his sagacity, self-command, and tact, the remnants of Braddock’s army.
As a statesman well rounded in intelligence, well poised in judgment, who so well comprehended, weighed, and settled the new questions of colonial rights as to draw from Patrick Henry the eulogy “that for solid information and sound judgment he was the greatest man on the floor” of the Continental Congress, and from that Congress itself its emphatic practical indorsement by his election as commander-in-chief.
As a general, managing small resources and means so as to secure the best results and completest ends; sparing of the lives of his soldiers as of the members of his family, yet venturing his own when an emergency made his great figure in front the pledge of success; refusing all pay and emoluments; keeping a minute and conscientious account of his expenses, and hastening at the close of the war to place his regimentals at the opening door of Peace. As a President marching abreast of new duties and obligations, thoroughly comprehending, and, by a wise forbearance and clear-hearted charity, mastering the struggling, passionate forces of new-born and grand ambitions, State rivalries, and material competitions, and so calming, adjusting, regulating, yet re-enforcing them by healthy elements,—not by compromise of principle, but by high conscientious impartiality, and just, equiposed authority,—as to receive the converging approval and accordant praise of good men of all shades of opinion.
Dear, good old grandfather! no wonder that the eighteenth century hastened to follow thee; no wonder that, wedded to thee so long and lovingly, it cared not to survive the separation, and within a fortnight gathered itself into the same tomb, more loved for the presence than life divided from thee.
On the next page of our album is our great-great-grand and good mother MRS. MARTHA WASHINGTON. We love so much to look at her sweet, handsome face, full of a large, generous, grandmotherly nature as a wide and deep bowl heaped with ripe strawberries laughing through unstinted masses of rich yellow, unwatered cream. We feel at once that there is amply enough to go round the largest old-fashioned family, and no fear, if visitors come in, of its not holding out, or of a scarcity for the kitchen. She was called Lady Washington, because they could not help it; for she was a lady.
Of course our grandmother was proud; not vain, nor boastful, but with pride of character, the pride that stiffens virtue into well-doing, makes life gracious, and fences in goodness from stray gossips, and self-constituted censors who stray from their own disordered homes into their neighbor’s well-regulated households.
Never were higher, truer, more valuable qualities, principles, and habits corseted in a female bosom than lived in hers.
The next page is thumb-worn and greased by frequent handling; for Uncle BENJAMIN FRANKLIN is a deserved favorite with the family. We should have liked to live with him, or if the house, as was natural, was too full for that, to have made long visits at his mansion. His is a right royal, good face, is it not? He looks as if he was always in love with a whole school of well-behaved, sweet-mannered children, and was about to take out from his capacious pockets, with a sly, benevolent surprise, a large assorted lot of presents. His face beams with a broad, heavenly tranced-ness, as if it had taken toll from his sky-tapping kite, and had become charged with positive celestial electricity. He looks as if he might have been chosen the executor of all the estates in the Union; and as if half the pangs of death were abstracted from those who were to leave their children and property to his honest, wise, and efficient care. He seems like a born trustee for schools, an hereditary director of charities,—one nominated in every village and town to every responsible place, and elected unanimously.
In his broadly balanced characteristics there is, too, a latent, reserved force, which makes us fancy that he might, when commissioner to England, in 1774, have paid a visit to Burns in Scotland and suggested to him, as advice to others, those shrewd lines:—
“Ay free, aff han’ your story tell, When wi’ a bosom crony; But still keep something to yoursel Ye scarcely tell to ony.”
In fact, it is upon this felt reserve of uncommunicated goodness that we anchor our loving trust, feeling that the flukes cannot be uplifted nor our confidence drag. Among the few historical characters that red-mark the past 5873 years of the accepted chronology of our race, Franklin stands among the first half-dozen who reconcile us to public greatness, whose individuality is not obscured, whose virtues are not hazed, whose purity is not flecked anywhere by any soil from the public highways.
A very fine lady was our aunt, MRS. JAMES MADISON. That is very manifest by even a casual glance at her carefully arranged head-gear, her elaborately disposed hair, her effectively adjusted shawl, her well-studied laces and thoughtfully selected jewelry, collars, cuffs, and gloves. A little too fine, perhaps, to be cordially loved. A young modest person would, in spite of her assuring ease of manner, feel respectfully uneasy in her presence; but so respectable, so highly respectable she was, and still shows in her portrait, that we are all very proud of her. If she was exacting, she gave in return and to all equal measures of refined courtesy and attention. She was very elegant in her manners, but she was patronizing. Very impressive with her grand airs, but still patronizing. She lit up the White House with the radiance of cultivated beauty, the refinements of courtly ease and high-bred manner, but still was she patronizing.
She had gone through a third of a century of years when the eighteenth century died. She afterwards so cajoled and pleasantly imposed upon Time, that he forgot to score several notches against her, and she reached her eighty-second year, about six months before the next half-century was complete, before it occurred to him that the handsome old lady, with the smooth rosy face, had actually gained twelve lustres on the allotted human term. While her husband was not President until 1809, and continued so only eight years, our Aunt Madison acted like a President’s wife before she went into the Federal mansion, and carried her high head-dress and head under it, like a Presidentess, thirty-two years after he left the Executive residence.
On the next page of our album is an awkward, tall, ungainly, raw-boned figure, slightly stooping in the shoulders. How it was got together it is difficult to conjecture, how kept together still more puzzling. With a sallow complexion, iron-bound brow, stern lines running down and apparently holding immovably a large, rigid mouth, with a face like a large, well-filled, cheerful barn, with the door open, our good-hearted, noble-souled cousin, PATRICK HENRY, looks out at us as if he had been stared at before. Fortunately, our Aunt Madison is on the other side of the leaf, and cannot be disturbed by his slovenly dress. The features show an uneducated man, yet one of strong individuality, a capacity for great endurance, a fearlessness of personal consequences, and a will which would, even if the traces were cut, draw the load by the bit. Of course he loved a fishing-rod and gun, and told stories all day long. Much pith there was in his daily gathered anecdotes, which he extracted from all passing things, and put into the indolent, good-for-nothing crowd that hung around the tavern, or which crystallized around the stove in his too readily neglected law office. Up to his twenty-fourth year he had been a farmer and country store-keeper; but as his only interest in the farm was the fish which ran through its liquid ways, and as his account of stock stopped at the fish-hooks, powder, and ball, which he speedily borrowed of himself without charge, he naturally failed to acquire anything but sport out of either. He and Henry Clay were born near each other. Neither of them makes a good portrait; both were careless of their personal appearance, and each was as generous as an apple-tree in full bearing, or a shower in June, which slakes the thirst of lazy meadows lying on their backs with their mouths wide open.
But what a treat it must have been to hear Patrick Henry speak. The small dishonesties of rhetoric he scorned. To its greatest opportunities, however, he strode with a master’s step and might. His long, sallow features then glowed, the stern lines melted into an illuminating intellectual beauty, his crooked figure, a moment before like a telescope placed on end and sliding by sections into itself, then stretched out and up into manliest exaltation, and erect, grandiose dignity. His keen words, like the battle-axe of the Douglas, cleaved the subject from head to chine. His large natural thoughts rushed up the summits of argument, as the free winds sweep the hills, without labor or effort, and shook all brains, wise or unwise, dull or quick, cultured or untutored, bending their tops before his resistless march, and shaking all their obstinate roots by his relentless grasp. No grander storm of logic, invective, irony, wit, humor, sharp demonstration, soul-rousing appeal, or tender pathos ever passed over an audience and stirred them from the deep depths of their nature than that which he awoke. No class interests, like those of the Virginia parsons for their tobacco tithes, no selfish isolations, like the petty claims of neighborhood squires, no encroachments on popular rights, like the Stamp Act or tea duties, could withstand the noble sweep of his eloquence. The tribune of the people, he was regarded, ere he had reached his thirty-fifth year, as without exception the greatest orator in America, if not in the world.
On the opposite page is the photograph of a dear visitor to our family, GENERAL LAFAYETTE. We never cared to inquire whether he was a relation or not. He was just as good to us as an own brother. He first came to see us when we were poor and needed friends. He had great difficulty in reaching us, as his own government gave orders to stop him. His young bride, equally noble in her nature, encouraged his coming. He was obliged to escape from France into Spain, and in a Spanish port to take passage in a Spanish ship, the only cargo of any value, except that made up of Columbus and his one hundred and twenty men from Palos in 1492, that ever came to us from the land of the Cid. The spirited young marquis remained with us from 1777 to 1781, fighting among our bravest, suffering privations with the most patriotic, confided in and beloved by Washington and the best of the Revolution. He made us two visits after the war, once in 1784, and the second time just forty years later, upon a special invitation of the nation. Proud and glad were we all to see him. The most wonderful part of the story is, that, after enduring vigorous hand-shaking through each of our then twenty-four States, and kissing all the children from two years old and upwards, he survived the job ten years.
We must now turn over the leaves rapidly, catching quick, pleasant glances at the fine, pale scholarly features of the pure-minded JOHN JAY, and, on the opposite side, of the handsome face and form of his accomplished wife SALLIE LIVINGSTON, who mated him when he was only nineteen, and consoled his heart and invigorated his head for twenty-eight eventful years, during which his inflexible patriotism, solid judgment, and weighty learning placed him by the side of Washington and John Adams in the estimation of the American household.
Then come the bluff face of hearty old ISRAEL PUTNAM, whose expression bears the clearly read inscription carved on his tombstone, “He dared to lead where any dared to follow”; the massed, trustworthy head of NATHANIEL GREENE, with its square, Quaker characteristics; FRANCIS MARION’S calm, lucid, telescopic eyes, and his farmer-like breadth of front, animated by the dash which egged him, when in the saddle, to plucky marches; and a long procession of valiant men and noble women,—family portraits in our national home gallery,—which gem and illuminate our collection and summon fresh pride to our patriotism, and new pleasures, on each review, to our hearts.
It is quite needless to suggest that here, too, are the well-preserved effigies of those WISE MEN whom we saw together on the summit of July 4, 1776, and whose remembered figures flitted often through the varied scenes of the Revolution and alighted in the green boughs, of our memories.
Some of these faces are singularly handsome, illuminated with the beauty of great purposes. Some, however, are rugged as hillocks, rich in mould but unsubdued by the plough of culture or the spade of refining taste. Some few hide mean purposes behind great, rotund cheekiness; others tell a mixed story of joy and suffering; a few ache with ambitions unsatisfied; still fewer awe us by a Titanic distress; but most are firm with earnest, resolute convictions spiked with will and riveted to the wide aims of continental purposes.
Here and there come in faces of great softness, sweetness, and delicacy, in which feminine grace and dignity are blent so holily; the mothers, wives, or sisters of the men of the Revolution and who kept alive in their own loving hearts faith in God, their kinsmen, and themselves; faces which plainly say,
“This is a haunted world. It hath no breeze But is the echo of some voice beloved; Its pines have human tones; its billows wear The color and the sparkle of dear eyes. Its flowers are sweet with touch of tender hands That once clasped ours. All things are beautiful Because of something lovelier than themselves, Which breathes within them and will never die;— Haunted, but not with any spectral gloom, Earth is suffused, inhabited by Heaven.”
COURTSHIP IN THE OLDEN TIME. (p. 353) ]
THE STRUGGLE AND FALL OF FEDERALISM; OR, JOHN ADAMS’S ADMINISTRATION. 1797–1801.
The Pre-Adamite Epoch: its Upheavals and Disruptions in America, and the red-hot diplomatic Stones, Fauchet and Adet, ejected from France upon us.—The new French Acrostics; and the Attempts by our Commissioners and Congress to solve them.—Gold-mounted Spectacles offered us by France; and our Inability to see our Interests or Duty through them.—Why and when the Keel of the American Navy was laid.—Of the Alien and Sedition Laws; why passed and how passed by.—General Washington and the Gallic Cock; a Crow never crowed out.—Napoleon’s Tour in Egypt and Palestine described; and its Results on the Treaty of Peace deduced.—Of the Office and Offices of Consul.—A Review and new View of our Difficulties with France from 1790 to 1800.—What a Pitt England fell into.—The City of Washington as a Geographical Study.—About Mississippi, Alabama, and the French Growth of Mobile.—The Territorial Condition illustrated.—The Introduction of Vaccine and other Virus.—Why some Things first break out in Boston.—State of Parties in 1801.—Why the first Adams was banished from the Presidential Eden; and the Flaming Swords which prevented his Return.
The elder pre-Adamite epoch in our history was past. New, more fiery, and eruptive elements, anti-Federal or Republican, upheaving and disrupting the old strata below, broke the settled upper crust of our political world.
In France, the Directory of Five, succeeding to the Convention, and its powerful national forces,—now welded to Napoleon by the fusing heats of Monte Notte, Arcoli, and Rivoli,—ejected out upon us those red-hot diplomatic stones, Fauchet and Adet. The French conundrums thickened. Genet’s successors out-geneted Genet. They not only equipped cruisers from American ports, but—displeased with a treaty which our government had seen fit to make with England, stipulating for the neutrality of America in the pending war between France on the one side, and England, Holland, Spain, and Rome on the other—authorized the capture and confiscation of American ships. In fact, the French envoys seemed determined to show the absurdity of the old-fashioned rule, that it took two to make a bargain.
Mr. Pinckney, the American minister to France, was obliged to leave that American paradise, Paris, without a fig-leaf of excuse to cover the naked results of his mission.
That comic body, Congress, was convened to look into the French conundrums. Of course they talked so much that they forgot what they came together for; and no one was any wiser when the speaker’s gavel fell and sent them home. The puzzled President despatched three commissioners to get a new statement of the riddle. The Directory told these gentlemen—as legislative bodies now reply to applicants for relief—that they could only see them through gold-mounted spectacles. Such a spectacle the American people were not prepared to become. Knowing the sympathy of the anti-Federal party in America with their principles, the French Directory slammed the door abruptly in the face of the two commissioners with Federal leanings, and held the envoy with Republican tendencies, like another Joseph, by his skirts.
In spite of party feeling, however, American indignation now rose to the gorge. A small standing army was raised. The keel of our navy was laid, and a Navy Department created, over which was placed Benjamin Stodart. The alien law, authorizing the President to elbow out of the country disagreeable foreigners, and the sedition act, to fine and imprison any one writing too freely against the government,—measures which marked the distance of Americans of that day from the political millennium,—were first passed by Congress, and afterwards passed, without any fear, by everybody else. The wise old General at Mount Vernon was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the army; and there was a fair chance that the American Captain might yet be obliged to cut the comb of that strutting French cock, which had lately scratched and crowed on so many Italian dung-hills that he fancied himself a full-fledged eagle.
Peace commissioners, however, settled the difficulties, as old ladies do tea, by a long chat around a covered table. Bonaparte, who had made a flying military trip to Egypt, had got the Pyramids to look down on him from their stony, century-crusted tops, while he slaughtered the Mamelukes at their feet, had pushed across the desert with the mirage of empire ever rising upon his unslaked sight, had made a disagreeable tour of the Holy Land, and had attempted twenty-three times in vain to take St. Jean D’Acre, came back to Paris to be made First Consul in December, 1799,—a Roman office, which he filled like a Roman, by subjugating all Europe by arms and insolence. The gristle of the Corsican had at last stiffened into the bone of a ruler of a large, consolidated empire; and the concentration of power in his hands enabled him to concede to the justice of America what the shifting authority of constituted assemblies, conventions, legislative assemblies, and directories were too weak to dare. Bonaparte met the American commissioners around the round table, himself as round in power as it in shape, and in September, 1800, gave his autograph to a treaty of peace which shielded American independence of action from the insults of the envoys of a nation hitherto friendly,—a nation which had in a timely and efficient way, mainly to help itself against an old rival, helped us, but which, for the preceding ten years, had claimed, and offensively insisted in return, not from our gratitude, but as a right, that we should give our assistance to their ever-shifting schemes, with many of which we had no sympathy, and at a time when to furnish aid was almost to ruin our young strength.
While the Frenchman was thus bestriding Europe, putting England to her straits, and in fact even to such despair as to find relief in the Pitt, our American Colossus fell before the only foe which was ever permitted to be his conqueror.
Washington died December 14, 1799.
The year following the seat of government was removed to the District of Columbia, where, by frequent patching since, it has been made to stand much wear and tear. The city named after Washington is still the greatest atlas in the United States, its large geography requiring the most patient study to find out what one is looking for. Many die without accomplishing it, some by it. The wheel-shaped city has rotated off from its periphery so many different officials, that, although like a velocipede it is very hard riding, it cannot well be stopped without considerable injury to its Federal rider.
The wide region called Mississippi, embracing the present State of that name and also Alabama,—the latter no longer apprehending any new petticoat insurrection in Mobile from the descendants of the insurgents of 1706, which with French slowness in swelling the census had only in ninety-five years become two hundred and fifty, and these balanced by an equal number of blacks,—this Mississippi region, now separated from Georgia, was put into that pantaleted territorial condition in which a community finds itself, like a young girl-lady at sixteen, who goes to school, lives at home, is governed partly by herself and partly by her parents, acquires pocket-money from the old people, and notions from circumstances, and drifts vigorously on through an unsettled perplexity into an early and settled independence. Such in this year of grace 1869 are Arizona, Dakota, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Washington, whose quickly doubling populations are rapidly pursuing their education through a university where sharp, practical studies are urged with bullet speed; mining silver, gold, and lead by day, and spending most of it in gambling saloons by night; rolling their residences on wheels from one ranch to another; practising high gymnastics with the Indians, by a method better than Dio Lewis’s; taking frequent lessons in bar-rooms, and pretty sure to make and be a mark for some one in every quarter.
It may not be beneath the dignity of history to state that, while the new century was inoculated with virus taken from various sources, pure and impure, political, monetary, and social, its first year witnessed the earliest introduction of vaccination for small-pox in this country, to which it worked its way four years after its first discovery by Edward Jenner in England.
Of course it first took near Boston, where it has since continued to break out in various eruptions, whose vesicles, always surrounded by a rose-hued areola in the eyes of home nurses, it never allowed any one but itself to puncture.
Meanwhile, however, the political crust, broken and cracked in 1797, again heaved anew; muttered thunder rolled off from the press; party lava reddened the sides of the political Vesuvius, over whose cindered lips soon poured the hot melted streams of rage, which left, as they cooled, nothing of the late Federal party but scoria and ashes.
The first Adams was banished from his much-loved Presidential Eden, and a flaming sword with many blades—alien law, sedition act, personal desire for office, supposed sympathy with England, and suspected antipathy to France—was set at the door, turning every way, and prohibiting his return any way.
THE CHIEF AMERICAN PRODUCTIONS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
The Cereals and Serials of the last Century.—Hares caught before cooked.—Useless Indians put under Ground.—Human Bones the Phosphates of History.—The Statecraft of Washington, Jefferson, and Others.—The Automatic Workings of Governments exposed.—What small Brains rule.—Description of our Government Machine.—Its Merits and Demerits.—The Disadvantages of frequent Changes of official Workmen.—How the Machine-Oil is stolen.—The Inventions of the Eighteenth Cycle of Time.—An American Noah inebriated by the Cotton-Gin.—How Ham laughed and how Japhet put a Blanket over the Patriarch.—The Growth of Commerce.—The Notions which Importations put in and on the Heads of the Young People.—Paris supplies the Mistakes of Nature.—Of Dress.—Hoops, Head-Gear, Coats, Vests, Tights, etc., descanted upon.—Improvements in Roads and Means of Transit.—The Journey from New York to Boston in 1732.—The Road-Maker and Vehicle-Propeller as Leaders of Civilization.—The great Invention now needed.—The Populations of New York and Boston in 1700.—Description of the Former in that Year by an English Traveller.—Slave-Market in New York in 1711.—Manufactures and their Growth.—The Habits of the Period described.—Improvements in Morals, and wherein.—A general Review of American Literature and Book-Making through the Century.—The first American printed Volume; and how fast and long it ran.—Earliest Original Book of Poems; by a Woman, with a touching Specimen therefrom.—An Account of the leading Writers on Theology, Political Science, Government, Natural Science, Natural History, of Novels, etc.—The American Joss; its Worshippers, and their Treatment.
Before turning our backs upon the eighteenth and leaping upon the engine-driven nineteenth century, to be borne swiftly through its rapidly changing scenes, it is well to take a hurried glance backward over the path we have traversed and to pick up a few waifs strewn along the wayside.
The largest American products of the last century were material. Cereals were common and abundant; serials uncommonly few. The Western lobe or half of the world’s brain did not work so actively as the Eastern. Our forefathers were occupied with the earnest business of first catching their hare before preparing to cook him. They improved the breeds of useless Indians by putting them thoroughly under ground. They disposed also of not a few Englishmen and Hessians during the last quarter of the century by converting them at Saratoga, Princeton, Eutaw Springs, Yorktown, and elsewhere into good compost, making our soil historically fruitful.
Human bones are the phosphates of history. They quicken a rich heroic growth over sterile soils. Our ancestors enriched many American fields in this way. It is not Quaker husbandry, and Quaker phosphates are few; but for all that, the seeds which they raise and sell never do as well as when sown in these phosphated furrows.
A large crop of political principles was gathered in by such laborers as Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Jay, Patrick Henry, and others, unpractised in other fields, but yet found to be efficient and skilful. They learned the old art and mystery of government so readily, and showed its workings with such unreserve, that statecraft,—which theretofore had been, in spite of its pretentious parade, mainly a system of mutual imposition and overreaching,—saw itself suddenly exposed to popular inspection, and made a subject of vulgar, every-day comment. Like the automatic chess-player, which seemed such a mystery in its curious, systematic, intelligent work, these old automatic, governmental machines were found to be contrivances, very common when taken apart; in fact, like the wonderful chess-player, kept slyly in motion, by a very ordinary chap, boxed up inside and moving from his hidden quarters, springs invented by a person whose name was concealed, and which kept the pieces going just as well as if the operator had a brain to work with. The machine which our forefathers finished in 1789,—scorning to take out a patent for it, or in any way to make it exclusively their own,—apparently complex but really simple, and open to inspection in all its parts, consisted of a stiff popular main-spring, distributing its propelling forces through primary wheels and political chain-work, which runs from the main wheel to smaller state wheels, and so back and through governors and assemblies of ingenious cogged and racket motions, securing thus a free yet regulated movement to all the parts. It is a good machine, although operated at a great disadvantage by reason of the frequent changes in the hands employed, who have scarcely time to learn their business before they are required to give another set a chance. It is inexpensive, notwithstanding that some of the workmen are learning the kingly trick of considering as their own a good share of the oil which, in fact, belongs exclusively to its owners, and is intended only to keep the machine running. Of course foreigners found not a little fault with this American product, alleging defects which seem very great when viewed under European lights. At first they expressed as many objections to it as the cotton-planters to Whitney’s gin; but it is now very manifest that, while taking exceptions to the political machine, these foreign gentlemen have copied the planters’ example of getting up, as soon as they conveniently could, very palpable imitations of the deprecated plan.
Among the mechanical inventions, the gin for cleaning cotton-seeds out of the white tangle, combing the shock head of the old king, and thus making him at once a power and a presentable personage among other self-constituted sovereigns,—an invention wrought out in 1793 by a cute Yankee,—was one which, in its results directly on the material, and indirectly on the moral, condition of the United States stands eminently foremost. By the old hand-picking process, the slave had his hands full to separate the seeds from a single pound of cotton a day. The new mechanical picker cleaned six thousand six hundred pounds within the same time. The gin so intoxicated the planter, that he committed all sorts of political extravagances and uttered many maudlin ejaculations, until finally, in 1861, he threw himself down upon a bed of 3,400,000 bales in the condition of Noah when, after the flood, he became very hilarious in the presence of his children. Ham laughed exceedingly at the spectacle of the American Noah; but Japhet, after allowing the drunkenness four years to cool, at last put over the offensive nakedness a large patch-work blanket, reconstructed at a quilting-match in Washington. It is expected that hereafter his majesty will wear colors of a faster moral hue than before he so abused the gin.
Commerce, no longer tied up to the shore by the English navigation acts, began, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, to creep out from the commodious bays and harbors of our long, wavy coast; and soon, not content with these timorous tentatives, put on waistbands, top-gallant manners, and flaunting gear, and went boldly courting among the wine-cheeked nations, the silk-growing empires, and spicy-tongued kingdoms of the earth. Importations, of course, not only put many new things on, but in, the heads of the emancipated Americans, who showed their independence, then as now, by buying abroad liberally the things which they did not make or need here. In spite of sumptuary laws, which in some of the new States imposed fines for owning more than one silk gown in a family, and which banished jewelry from homes still innocent of aught but trinkets that cost less money than taste, the beaux and belles of the period whereof we speak began to put on hairs where nature had forgotten to furnish them, and supplied from Paris, in amounts limited it is true, appliances to remedy defects which fashion insisted had been left by the Creator, in making up woman from a sleepy man. Hoops every few years girdled the larger or smaller conceits of Madam Mode’s improved figures. Of course Paris was always finding mistakes in the original Eden pattern; and her customers were ever ready to try her suggestions as to the newest mode of correcting them. Top-gears naturally varied like the crescendo et diminuendo notes in music, or the equally flexible bars of the gold market, whose undulating lines draw such different tunes from its performers, and sometimes run so high as to take away all their breath. Tights, now unwhisperable except in veracious histories, held their own with elderly gentlemen to the very close of the century, and were clasped with silver enough to bring a smile, in our day, all over the wrinkling face of the Secretary of the Treasury. The wide-tailed coats and broad-lapelled vests of the respectable citizens of the Washington and Adams periods would, if worn now upon the platform of an equal rights convention, make the fame of their wearers, and insure full-length portraitures of their inner selves by conversation-drawing correspondents.
[Illustration: 1769. SCHOOL DAYS. 1869.]
Another production of the eighteenth century was better material ways for translation over the surface of our rapidly augmenting areas. In 1732 enterprising stages took fourteen days from New York to Boston; but ere the cycle had rounded up to 1800, the time, by reason of better roads, was reduced one half. The hard earnings, trickling from the little heaps that labor had gathered up, began to flow out into turnpikes; and milestones chronicled spaces and pointed the fingers of Time to measures for ascertaining and so accelerating speed. The road-maker and the vehicle-propeller are the two Dioscuri of modern civilization. Whoever subtracts portions of the earth’s surface, be it solid or aqueous, from between separated States, communities, or individuals, multiplies the well-being and happiness of the human race. Could the tea raiser in China be placed alongside of the tea consumer in America, or the cotton manufacturer of Lowell within a half-hour’s delivery of his fabrics from their purchaser, the expenses of handling at either end, the long, costly, tedious voyages that now waste so much labor, time, and money, and the accumulated taxes upon the articles sold added by intermediate commissions, would be saved. The costs of translation are a necessary but onerous assessment upon productive industry. The greatest invention now needed is one which would so condense the earth’s bulk by improved and rapid communication, as to squeeze out the distances that separate nations and chill their natural outflow from themselves into others.
In 1700 the population of Boston was 7,000; that of New York 5,250, of which latter one in seven was colored; a proportion which was augmented in 1711 in favor of the blacks, by the establishment of a regular and public slave-market. An English traveller describes Boston in 1700 as a place whose “buildings are, like its women, neat and pretty; the streets of pebble, like the hearts of the men.” From such flinty masculines no wonder that the population only reached to 24,937 in the next one hundred years.
Among the leading productions of this century the establishment and growth of manufactures must be reckoned. Even before the Revolution, iron-mills at Salisbury, Connecticut, at Cold Spring, on the Hudson, at Valley Forge and Durham, Pennsylvania, had lifted their ponderous hammers to weld the fused ores, dragged out of our slightly tumbled beds by cars, and had commenced to fabricate instruments of husbandry, kitchen utensils, and other tripods on which sat, then as now, the Pythonesses of life, who not only interpret, but are themselves the oracles of fate. Our running streams soon coaxed cotton to take a turn around the spindles which Arkwright, in 1768, had so taught to whirl with their mechanical iron fingers, that one man could work a stubborn iron mule up to a capacity equal to one hundred and thirty of the human species. The cotton-gin, ere the century closed accounts with its busy customers, had handed over such clean cotton to the coquettish jennies, that very pretty yarns began to be spun along many gliding streams.
The habits prevailing through the eighteenth century were still transitional. It was the chrysalis film, covering the flitting worm which had succeeded the inert and slow-moving grub of the seventeenth, and which was soon to burst into the gayer, full-winged butterfly of the nineteenth cycle of time. What habits they had were of solid silver. The platings, spread over and hiding darker substances with polished surfaces, were not yet invented.
Morals, too, triturated by the ever-restless surges of time, like the pebbles on a shore which the industrious ocean ever scrubs and washes, became rounder and smoother, and lost something of those angular asperities which added nothing to their usefulness or strength.
If we take an account of the purely intellectual and literary stock on hand in America at the close of the century, we shall find that, while the one hundred years had been run on a slender and mainly upon borrowed capital, there were results in fabricated stuffs by no means discreditable, and in raw material a mass very pleasant to contemplate. To a large extent our literary manufactures were still imitations of English styles, with an increasing tendency to introduce American figures in the patterns. The first literary effort was in hymn and psalm books. The very first volume printed in this country was “The Bay Psalm-Book,” published, of course, near Boston (at Cambridge) in 1640; rather slow in metres, but which, before 1750, had run through seventy editions,—run in fact so well and fast that, like certain plays now, it forgot how or where to stop. Singing-books, as an intellectual circulation, thus went to the American head, and, without blowing the matter too much, we may reasonably assume that this tendency set up the American nose as an instrument of psalmody.
The first book of original poems was by a woman, Mrs. Anne Bradstreet. The third edition came out in Boston in 1758. Besides this intellectual progeny, she had eight children; and to these latter she thus alludes in the printed issue:—
“I had eight birds hatch’t in the nest; Four cocks there were and hens the rest; I nurst them up with pains and care, Nor cost nor labor did I spare, Till at last they felt their wing, Mounted the trees and learned to sing.”
During the first half of the century, ecclesiastical and religious writings in all departments naturally took the lead, as in these American mind was left free. In this field roamed the two Mathers, father and son,—Increase, the first, but unfortunately not the last, who was created a D. D.; and Cotton, who committed nearly three hundred and eighty-three sins in as many books, with which he loaded down the world, the greatest like its title, Magnalia. He made a partial atonement in a few good treatises. In the same department wrought largely, and with a “Freedom of the Will,” Jonathan Edwards, of whom Dugald Stewart said, “that in logical acuteness and subtilty he did not yield to any disputant bred in the universities of Europe”; Samuel Johnson, the first president of Columbia College, and the father of that highly respectable family, the American Protestant Episcopal Church; Ezra Stiles, who delivered orations in good Latin, and found audiences to listen to them; Timothy Dwight, his successor as president of Yale College, whose “System of Theology” still claims attention, even among the acute researches of the bibliologists of our time, and whose four volumes of “Travels in New England and New York” give rare reading on express trains; Samuel Hopkins, Joseph Bellamy, William White, the first American bishop of the Episcopal Church, and whose sweet spirit perfumed even his controversial writings; Edward Payson, Joseph S. Buckminster, and many others;—of but few of whom it could be said, “that their works do follow them”—to silence; for the churches still hold them in living honor.
Political writings divided with the theological the public mind as soon as government became domesticated. In books like “The Federalist,” “Notes on Virginia,” “Discourses on Davila”; in speeches embedding constitutional argument; in treatises, tracts, and in all forms and ways known to type, many of the wise men of the Revolution, with James Otis, Josiah Quincy, Jeremy Belknap, David Ramsey, and others, spake out in varied logic, historical research, wit, satire, and in captivating dialogue, discussing principles of government, political ethics, and social economy.
In the natural sciences, Benjamin Franklin, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Rush, Samuel L. Mitchell, and Count Rumford; in natural history, Cadwallader Golden, Paul Dudley, John Bartram, and Alexander Wilson; in history, William Stith, Abiel Holmes; among the singing birds, in the same tree with Anne Bradstreet but on higher branches, Philip Freneau, John Trumbull, the author of “McFingal,” Joel Barlow, who got up “Hasty Pudding,” and survived “The Columbiad,” and Joseph Hopkinson, who salutes us evermore in “Hail Columbia”; and finally, in fiction, standing by himself, Charles Brockden Brown, whose nine novels in paper covers delighted our great-grandmothers;—all these were quite equal to the instruction of their various audiences, and might, had they lived long enough, written something—perhaps several novels each—for the “New York Ledger.”
The last production, whereof we shall speak, was that great American Joss, money, which was set up as an idol in many households, but which had not yet been installed in municipal halls, fashionable churches, and State capitals. Beautiful to the sight at first were its golden hands and feet, and almost kissable the wand which it drew before the glistering eyes of its frantic worshippers. Of course no one was believed then, any more than now, who called attention to the cruel steel knives which it hid in its dollar-embossed breast, and against whose sharp points he pressed those who yielded to his fatal embrace.
THE AMERICAN JOSS. (p. 372) ]
DEMOCRACY IN POWER; OR, JEFFERSON’S ADMINISTRATION.
1801–1809.
Few Removals by Mr. Jefferson from the Ungilt, Official Chairs.—Mr. Smith gets into the Navy.—Who started long Messages to Congress; and the Difficulty of finding an End to them.—War with Tripoli; and the Complexion with which the Bey ended it.—Decatur and his Mediterranean Travels.—Ohio in 1802.—The early Danger it ran of being all cut up into City Lots.—How the Exodus of its Population was the Genesis of its Growth.—Of Westering Caravans.—Bonaparte sells Louisiana, and what a Sell it was.—How we were saved an extra Volume of Supreme Court Decisions.—The Murder of Alexander Hamilton.—A Ghost-Story about Aaron Burr.—The public Estimate of his Character unchanged by Biographical varnishing.—A South Carolina Conceit.—The Play of Lear in Tripoli.—Peculiar Mussulman Habits; the Author of Don Quixote.—Michigan escapes the Cuppings of Eastern States.—Her lymphatic Temperament.—Lake Michigan as a Breakwater against Chicago.—Burr tried for Treason, “not proven” guilty, and surrendered—to himself.—Of Bonaparte and other Usurpers.—The Oldest dislike the Youngest.—History of the Attempts of George III. and Bonaparte to blockade without Ships.—Once a Bull always a Bull.—Search of American Ships for Seamen.—The Unwisdom of Half-Apologies.—The American Embargo and its Popularity with Unmarried Girls.
The advent of the first Democratic brave to the dispensing patronage and to the right of taking official scalps, was not followed by a general emptying of official chairs and the massacre of official enemies. The thirty-five ballotings in the House of Representatives between Mr. Jefferson and Aaron Burr made men anxious, not hungry and thirsty. The fair-minded Madison was appointed to the State Department; Albert Gallatin, the golden-mouthed, to the Treasury; and Robert, not John Smith, to the Navy. Few changes were made in the ungilt places; although the innocent public of that day were not a little excited, at the bare suspicion that a few dozen Federalists were removed for their political opinions. The guilt of differing politically from the administration was not considered by the President so flagrant as to be adequately punished only by exile from office.
Upon Mr. Jefferson must, however, be laid the crime of beginning the practice of sending to Congress messages in writing,—a beginning which, like the messages themselves, seems to have no end. Since the flood human life is far too short for these Presidential essays, even without the accompanying documents.
A war with that dusky corsair, the Bey of Tripoli, clouded the very commencement of the new administration, breaking finally, after lasting three years, into a heavy shower, February 9, 1804, from the cannonading guns of young Decatur’s ship, the “Intrepid”,—a shower followed by blue-skied peace. Commodore Preble, who with his fleet had been dealing with Morocco, assisted in tanning, by some of Bellona’s bleaching-powders, the sable-peltried Tripolitan. The result was that the Bey turned to another complexion in his treatment of Christian captives.
In 1802 Ohio doffed the pantalets and appeared around the Union board as a full-grown State. Some of her settlements had grown so fast, and so threatened to absorb the land into building-lots, that it was feared for a time that the surface would be insufficient for farming purposes. The exodus of population farther westward, however, relieved the anxieties of its genesis, and marked the first chapter of its growth. The bivouac that had encamped on her grandly rolling rivers began soon to join the westering caravan which pitched their tents across the Mississippi against the sunsettings. A Hoosier who borrows money at two per cent a month to buy land with may be trusted to pay it back in a short time. Two to nothing that he will add from his generosity a bonus with the return of the loan.
Bonaparte, now Consul for life, and in sore need of money, sold to us, for $15,000,000, that tract of country stretching undefinedly towards the Pacific, and called Louisiana. Some of the wits of that day raised the question whether the purchase lawfully included alligators of such length that they stretched over the boundary lines. Neither this great question, nor the secondary one of the right of our government to buy foreign territory, was mooted in the Supreme Court, and thus we were spared an extra volume of majority essays and longer dissenting opinions. The foreign pill was too sugar-coated to cause any wry faces. It was a very big sell—for France.
In July, 1804, Aaron Burr, Vice-President, murdered Alexander Hamilton at Hoboken. Some biographers have attempted, since the death of the future exile and fugitive from justice, to lighten the heavy burden which he carried for thirty-three years afterwards, but in vain. The public rarely reverses its first verdict. They can seldom be made to believe that its first look at the piece was on the wrong side, and no new napping or glossing will convince it that the other is the right side.
The Presidency took such a fancy to Mr. Jefferson that, at his re-election, in 1804, he received 162 out of 176 votes cast; C. C. Pinckney, Esquire, of South Carolina getting the other 14. South Carolina then had the pleasant little conceit of voting for herself,—a harmless pastime that kept up her peculiar idea of resistance to Federal subjugation, and made a variety for the tellers in counting the contents of the electoral urn.
During 1805 Mr. Eaton, the American consul at Tunis, made an agreeable arrangement with Hamet Caramelli, the legitimate but exiled Bashaw of Tripoli, for his restoration to his seat, badly filled by his brother; and to carry out the plan, he started from Alexandria, in Egypt, in company with the sable Hamet, seventy American seamen and four hundred and thirty Arabs. After traversing a thousand miles of desert sands, he fought two severe battles, took Derne, the capital city of the chief province of Tripoli, and would have deposed the cruel reigning Bashaw, and opened the prison doors shut on hundreds of innocent Christian captives,—Eaton’s principal object in the romantic expedition,—but for a hasty, jealous, and disreputable treaty got up between Tobias Lear, Consul-General of the United States, and the Bey, whereby we agreed to pay the crowned bandit $60,000 in silver, instead of in leaden pieces, for the ransom of our sailors enmeshed, like flies, in the old spider’s web.
The nation never liked that play of Lear. They always thought of this its principal act, with the Earl of Kent:—
“There is division, Although as yet the face of it be covered With mutual cunning ’twixt Albany and Cornwall.”
Had these successive and armed protests by America against the Barbary habit of enslaving white Christian captives, taken in war, been properly seconded by the European powers, the dusk Mussulman of Northern Africa would have been then converted from the old Roman practices to which they willingly succeeded,—practices which the author of Don Quixote, himself an Algerine captive for five years, had punctured with his sharp quill over two centuries before, and which Lord Exmouth, with a British fleet, so riddled with shotted logic, in 1816, as to silence forever.
While the play of Lear was so badly acted on the shores of the Mediterranean, Michigan, toddling up from between the lake coasts that bordered her double peninsula, left her ancient name of Wayne County and the protecting hand of Indiana, and assumed an independent territorial status. Her lymphatic temperament enabled her to suck up through her many aquatic ducts an arterial circulation which helped her to stand pretty successfully the dry-cuppings of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. In straits often she has worked her way with moderate success through her Superior Lakes and water-courses to the open paths of seaboard trade. The pictured rocks of her great northern lake illustrate in lithography, rarely copied, some traits which she shares with no others. Fortunately for her future independence, the intervention of Lake Michigan prevents her territory from being laid out in city lots by Chicago.
The American Cain, restless and uneasy, haunted by the pale ghost of Hoboken, set on foot in 1806 an expedition designed either to slice off a piece of American territory west of the Alleghanies, and to give it as a morceau to Aaron the First, to be crowned at New Orleans, his future capital; or to rid Mexico of a part of her troublesome northern possessions and to establish over it the dynasty of the Burrs. Tried at Richmond, Virginia, in 1807, before Chief Justice Marshall, he had the honor of being enclosed in the superb amber vase of Wirt’s rhetoric for immortal preservation, but the misfortune to be dismissed on insufficient proof to the chained companionship of the dreaded ghost.
Bonaparte, tired of his consulate for life, and anointed Emperor December 2, 1804, by a priest whom he called from Rome to Paris for that purpose, known as Pope Pius VII., had raised against himself and his family pretensions the more ancient usurpers of Europe, whose equally bold seizure of the right to govern people, and to take their money whereon to live in ease, was veiled and historically disguised by a few score years of unrighteous possession. Of course the ancient usurpers despised and made faces at the newest. Armies composed of thousands of common people—farmers, mechanics, and poor laborers—padded in bright-colored clothes out of moneys borrowed on their credit and to be repaid by their children, were hurled by these usurpers at each other at Ulm, Austerlitz, and Jena; and after the smoke of the shocks rolled off, it was found that all the crowned graspers were badly shaken up and shattered, and had limped away exceedingly hurt in pride and limb, excepting England only, which, mistress of the water by the victory of Nelson at Trafalgar, in 1805, thrust her hated trident into the face of the master of the land. The sea-tossings of the combatants became profitable to our neutral commerce, which picked up out of the ports of each the articles needed by the other, and laid them down on the rival wharves. England had become too much of a trader and shopkeeper to see such results with complacency, even if, as a belligerent, she could not participate in the dividends. And so, in May, 1806, she attempted to inaugurate against France—in addition to actual hostilities—a paper blockade, by declaring, in a well-sealed and highly respectable looking document, about two thirds of the Continent of Europe, including the French territory and its dependencies, in a state of blockade. Without a blockading squadron to deliver this document and to enforce the blockade, this declaration was an empty bravado, and a fraud on the rights of neutrals. This dog-in-the-manger device to stop the trade it could not supply provoked the newest usurper to a like policy. Napoleon, equally blinded by his resentments, and equally unconscientious in his handling of international law, issued from Berlin a counter document, also well sealed and incapable of delivery, declaring the British Isles in a state of blockade. Without ships—those marine constables—to serve papers and bring offenders within maritime jurisdiction, these orders and decrees became mischievous threats, making lawful trade piracy, and subjecting neutral merchant vessels to arrest, detention, search, and condemnation. England now put forth another pretension. As by the feudal law it was held that “once a subject always a subject,” of course a fortunate Bull remained a Bull, even when seeking work or protection on an American vessel. American ships were thus required to stop on the high seas and be searched for truant English stock. Such a bull England might make of herself; but she was so angry as not to see that neutrals would not become such silly calves as to be driven off by these big-looking shouts.
The question was sharply stated by the Leopard, a British man-of-war, to the Chesapeake, an American frigate, on board of which it was claimed were four British seamen. The refusal to permit the ship’s hold to be looked into not pleasing the Leopard, she fell unexpectedly upon the little frigate and tore the supposed bulls with horny claws out of the grasp of the American. The sight offended all America, especially as it turned out that three of the four seamen were American citizens.
President Jefferson expressed the national resentment in a proclamation interdicting all British ships entering our ports. Great Britain made another bull by half apologizing and delivering up two of the four seamen. The lesson of the stamp duties had not illuminated the density of George III. He had not learned that half-apologies are confessions of wrong, but no atonement.
Further experiments were mutually made by the two enraged fighters on neutral rights and international decencies. In November Great Britain forbade any one trading with France; and France, equally enterprising, ordered the stoppage of all trade with England. Our government replied to these illegal proceedings by an embargo on all vessels in our ports, foreign and domestic. From December, 1807, until March, 1809, marine beaux were abundant, and young ladies joyous. When the embargo was raised the hopes of the latter sank. They became more desponding still when the government forbade all commercial correspondence with France and England.
THE UNITED STATES AT SEA; OR, MADISON’S CRUISE. 1809–1817.
The Captain and Officers of the “Seventeen Sisters” which put to Sea in a Gale.—Diplomatic Talks.—Difference between one’s own Cows gored, and one’s own Bull in a Neighbor’s Field stoned, exemplified.—Cave canem.—Bonaparte improves the Code Napoleon.—Executions before Trials.—Horace Greeley fights benevolently into the World.—Louisiana and her Vivacious Debts taken in; what sweetened them.—Witch-Hazel Rods of Clay, Cheves, etc., dip to the National Mines of Feeling.—Our Second Wrestling-Match with England.—The Hull-sale Surrender of Michigan.—Colonel Cass breaks his Sword, and gets an Anglo-phobia.—Better Hulls on the Water.—America marries the Sea.—A Wasp on a Frolic.—Marine Flirtations and Engagements.—The Constitution, an Old Sea-Flirt; her rapid Winning and Wooing of the Java.—South Carolina loses a Presidential Candidate.—Of the Three Armies afield.—Harrison at Tippecanoe and the Thames.—Colonel R. M. Johnson’s life-long Chase for Tecumseh’s Scalp.—Toronto emptied and filled.—General Brown, a Real Man, in Spite of his Name.—General Wade Hampton.—Court-Martials, and how they touch off Military Charges.—The United States at Sea on Land.—The Hornet on a Peacock.—An Immortal Word wrung from a Mortal Moment.—Commodore Perry.—General Scott improves the Niagara Frontier for Hack-Drivers.—Macdonough charges Lake Champlain with Heroic Ingredients.—English Marine Parades.—Cotton Breastworks at New Orleans.—Their Feminine Adoption.—The Treaty of Peace and its Wonderful Omissions.—Costs and Gains of the War.—The Hartford Convention and its Equestrian Exploits.—Mr. Calhoun and Invisible Ink.
James Madison, who for eight years past had been first mate on our national craft, was in 1809 promoted by its owners, the people, to be Captain,—Mr. C. C. Pinckney, of South Carolina, receiving a complimentary vote, as a Palmetto fillup. The captain’s principal officers were: first mate, or Secretary of State, Robert Smith; second mate, or Secretary of War, William Eustis; purser, or Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin; boatswain, or Secretary of the Navy, Paul Hamilton; and Cæsar A. Rodney, piper, or Attorney-General. Much need was there of a judicious set of officers on the quarter-deck, as well as of a good crew in the forecastle; for the Seventeen Sisters were about to put to sea, with high storms blowing off and on the coast.
Much talk was there, as soon as Mr. Madison entered upon his duties, between British envoys, Mr. Erskine first and Mr. Jackson afterwards, on the one side, and our Mr. Smith on the other, about our Non-intercourse Act. Of course the Britons did not like to have their own commercial cows gored by our bulls; although they had enjoyed immensely the sight of their own unmuzzled Durhams pushing wildly among our young cattle. The British government—or, rather, their accredited agent, Mr. Erskine—promised to repeal the obnoxious orders in council. Taking the principals at their agent’s word, our government good-naturedly proclaimed the renewal of commercial intercourse with England. Thereupon, George III.—now entering the fiftieth year of king-craft, without any improvement of his crass German notions by a cross with British principles of shop-keeping—repudiated the acts of his agent. The friendly hand we had offered we now took back, giving a perceptible contraction to its muscles as we drew it in. For three years we pocketed our fists and indignities.
In 1809 England had stationed cruisers off our coast to seize our merchantmen, and send them in as prizes to her ports. Every American ship-owner saw mosaicked at the outlet of every American harbor the warning, cave canem, without being at liberty to stone the dog which flew at him. Bonaparte, blood red with Spanish and Portuguese victories, turning in cold, dynastic selfishness from the heart-faithful but childless Josephine, and drawing to her place the reluctant, refrigerating Maria Louise, undismayed by the fear of our junction with the fifth coalition formed against him by England, Austria, Spain, and Portugal, imitated for a time the swaggering injustice of England towards us. In March, 1810, improving upon the Code Napoleon, by execution before suit, he decreed the seizure and summary condemnation of all American vessels entering French ports. This boyish, pouting, and self-extinguishing policy he gave up in November following. England was left alone in keeping unneighborly mastiffs.
Meanwhile, in the midst of the effervescence of national sediment thus foaming up in yeasty ebullition, Horace Greeley, February 3, 1811, fought into life. Ever since that successful contest, the world has advanced with quickened forces. Benevolence felt reinforced by combative intellect, which borrowed the club of logic and strong adjectives to persuade error to keep the ways of tribunitial thought. Soon after Mr. Greeley’s birth, Mr. Smith gave up the State Department to James Monroe, who, for the three years following, found ample employment for his executive abilities, in the double duties of this branch added to those of the War bureau.
In April, 1812, our French sister, Louisiana, brought her vivacity, gayety, and debts into the family. Her high spirits were needed to stimulate the action, and her sugar to sweeten the waters of strife, now effectually stirred between America and England, whose bottomless pretensions had become intolerable. Our public debt had become reduced to about $45,000,000, and our population augmented to seven and a half millions. It needed not the witch-hazel rods of the eloquent Clay, Calhoun, Langdon, Cheves, and others, to dip to and find the mines of national wealth and national feeling. Both were ready. At last, June 4, 1812, after the lapse of twenty-nine years, we found ourselves in a second wrestling-match with Great Britain. Our first grapple was near Detroit, and on the Canadian frontier, where a defeat, under Colonel Van Horne, and a success, under Colonel Miller, equalized losses and gains, through July and August. But the base Hull-sale surrender, without a blow, of Detroit, of an army of two thousand men, and the entire Territory of Michigan, by its cowardly or treacherous governor, caused our captain, officers, and entire crew to explode in very indignant terms. Colonel Lewis Cass, then commanding one of the regiments, snapped his sword in two pieces, rather than surrender it whole to the British General Brock. He took such an Anglo-phobia at this time, that the next fifty years could not cure it.
Fortunately we had better hulls on the water than on the land.
August 19, 1812, Captain Isaac Hull, in the frigate Constitution, fought the British Guerriere, and after knocking down every mast and spar and one third of her crew, compelled her to throw up the sponge. The mourning put on three days before for the loss, by General William Hull, of Michigan, and the army of the Northwest, was now put off for the bridal-wreath presented by Captain Isaac Hull to America, on her marriage to the sea. Like her spouse, the Ocean, the bride hastened to cast her weeds. The pallor of defeat gave place to the summoned roses of joy. Upon the crimson flushes the British bees now sought to light and to extract their carnation.
In October, the British tars, in a Frolic, set out to tease the delighted groom, but a Wasp, hovering near, made for the frolicsome bee, and in three quarters of an hour so stung it, that its shattered wings were only fit for microscopical studies. All the officers and crew of the Frolic, four only excepted, were killed or wounded; while the Wasp, although carrying fewer guns, had only ten killed or injured. A few days afterwards the frigate United States, commanded by Decatur,—whom we left eight years since before Tripoli, clearing out its wretched Bey,—engaged the British Macedonian, and took such a fancy to her that, after some violent flirtation, she completely won her. This engagement went hard with the proud, stiff old people in England, but a repetition of this sort of match-making did much to reconcile them to the first. The second engagement took place on Pacific ground, off the coast of Brazil, between that old sea-flirt, the Constitution, looking out, not for coffee or sparrows, but for a marine flirtation, and the Java, a buxom frigate, long-waisted and well padded with materials, adorned with heavy war jewelry, constituting very attractive charms, at her waist. In less than two hours after their acquaintance, these ardent strangers became so entangled in each other’s fortunes, that the Java gave up, like a true mistress, all her future to her fond and persistent lover. When the news of this wooing reached the stuffy old parents at home, they were frantic with rage. The family pride was alarmed and wounded. They immediately sent out a large fleet to watch that new and fashionable American promenade, the sea, to prevent any more flirtations and engagements like poor Guerriere’s and the unfortunate Java’s.
Meanwhile Mr. Madison was re-elected Captain by one hundred and twenty-eight votes; De Witt Clinton receiving eighty-nine. Mr. C. C. Pinckney, now sixty-six years old, and convinced that his capital was too small, abandoned the business; and as Mr. Calhoun was yet only thirty, and constitutionally ineligible, South Carolina was reduced to the humiliation of voting either for a Virginian or a New-Yorker.
Notwithstanding her successes on the water, America by no means abandoned the land.
She raised and set on foot, although some of course, as usual, got on horseback, three armies. The first of these was the Army of the West, under General William Henry Harrison, whose business it was made to chastise back into submissive quiet the Indian tribes, which England had enticed out to the pillage and harrying of our frontier settlers; a business which he successfully prosecuted at Fort Meigs, at Tippecanoe, and again, in October, 1813, at the Thames. At this last engagement somebody killed Tecumseh, and thus gave Colonel R. M. Johnson employment for the rest of his life in vindicating his right to the Shawnee’s scalp. The red chief thus, like Homer and others, caused after his death more contention than during his life. Soon after the Thames battle, General Harrison repaired to Buffalo, where, in consequence of some unexplained reason,—perhaps overcome by its vigorous Board of Trade, or seized by its enterprising forwarders,—he was transported into a resignation, and to Ohio.
The second army was that of the Centre, under General Dearborn, Jefferson’s Secretary of War, and now Commander-in-Chief of all the forces deployed along the southern shore of Lake Ontario and the Niagara frontier. A portion of this army, in April, 1813, left Sackett’s Harbor, and landing at York, now Toronto, took hold of it, and, shaking it empty of British and Indians, left it so dry, that vigorous drinking since has scarcely sufficed to absorb back any considerable numbers of the brick-colored originals, although something has succeeded in getting up very successful exhibitions of English red and white skins. While General Dearborn was absent from Sackett’s Harbor, Sir George Prevost thought it a good time to sail in. He landed with one thousand men; but General Brown,—a real, actual man, although disguised by this mythical name,—rallied the local militia, and, setting on the baronet and his thousand, took a large number of them, and held them as mutilated specimens of soldiers at leisure. General Dearborn soon after resigned, and General Wilkinson—who had been tried and acquitted for his too great intimacy, while in command at the Southwest, with the American Cain and his schemes—succeeded him; the only success that he ever had, as he always had the ill-assorted habit of never agreeing or co-operating with any one, especially on critical occasions. Like a rocking-chair in moving time, he took up more room than could be spared, and was pretty sure to be broken when required for use.
The third army was that of the North, placed under General Wade Hampton, grandfather of that leader of the Confederate black cavalry in the late Rebellion, who waded to his horse’s bits in the blood of his loyal countrymen, in order to keep the black bipeds in the South bridled and saddled to carry the unwading Hamptons. The army of the North, twelve thousand strong, was stationed on Lake Champlain, and was destined to co-operate with Wilkinson’s for the reduction of Montreal, then holding only a small garrison of six hundred; but the mutual enmity of the generals, growing out of old quarrels at New Orleans, frustrated all co-operation. Each drew himself into warm winter quarters, nursing his private grievances, as Mrs. Gamp did her special infirmities, while the poor unnursed, suffering patient, the campaign, took care of itself. Of course Montreal was not reduced, except to a satisfactory smile over the military pouting of the unco-operating commanders. The Secretary of War preferred charges against Wilkinson. The charges, as usual when touched by court-martials, went off in flashes in the pan. The campaign of 1813, rammed down with the double loads, the armies of the Centre and the North, went off in the same way.
The United States were now more at sea on land than on the sea itself.
LOOKING FOR A SCOUT. (p. 390) ]
Early in the year 1813, the sloop Hornet, roaming at will over the green fields of water, pricked on by Captain James Lawrence, lit on the British Peacock, and so worried her, that in fifteen minutes she fluttered down, down into the opening green gulfs below, with all her bright, well-spread colors. Promoted to the Chesapeake, manned or rather unmanned by an undrilled, miscellaneous crew which had drifted on her decks, the brave Lawrence, counselled more by a chivalric honor than by a cool prudence, accepted the murderous, Burr-like challenge of the well-practised Shannon, carrying a picked and veteran crew and corps of marines. The ill-handled, entangled, and disabled Chesapeake was boarded, and the intrepid commander, carried below with a mortal wound, stammered out that immortal order which hurtles hotly through histories and navies, “Don’t give up the ship.”
On Lake Erie, Commodore Perry, in September, 1813, with a small squadron embraced and took a superior British fleet, announcing his resisted possession in another lively, well-planted message, which floats like a buoy in the crowded harbor of historical anchorage,—“We have met the enemy and they are ours.”
During this year, as in the preceding, American privateers swept from the wavy floor of the ocean hundreds of merchantmen. Forthwith English courts, English premiers, and English writers on international law bristled with freshly sharpened horror at the sin of privateering,—a most un-Christian practice they averred, as it tended violently to abridge the marine wealth of England.
In 1814 a varied war business was transacted between the United States and Great Britain. In July—that month for excursions to Niagara Falls—Generals Scott and Ripley crossed the hurrying river near the cataract, and took Fort Erie, which, fortunately for the hackmen, they left like a toll-gate, to entice yearly from travellers its original cost. As if to increase the wonders of this taking neighborhood, two days after the capture of Fort Erie, the battle of Chippewa was fought, in which bayonets were actually crossed,—a rare checker-work, although often talked of in those select romances, the despatches of raw militia generals, who, in their first sight of glancing steel and first smell of villainous saltpetre, see many things crosswise and crooked. Fifteen days later, Winfield Scott made a ghostly spectacle, at Lundy’s Lane, of great numbers of well-seasoned British Regulars.
Fortunate Niagara! in owning so many wonders,
“The moving accidents of flood and field.”
Human phosphates are here most advantageously diluted with large parts of uncounted water.
Meanwhile, the veteran English squadrons which had served under Wellington, in Spain and Portugal, glorified by victories over Ney, Massena, Marmont, Soult, and Joseph Bonaparte,—their bullet-slitted flags inscribed “Torres Vedras,” “Talavera,” “Ciudad Rodrigo,” “Almeida,” “Salamanca,” “Madrid,” and “Vittoria,”—mustering fourteen thousand men, and led by Sir George Prevost, pushed down from Canada upon Plattsburg, where General Macomb had assembled fifteen hundred men. Crossing the little river Saranac, on one side of which Plattsburg stood, in modest, village quiet, Macomb posted his men. Like cedar posts, these unseasoned troops stood rooted to the soil, stubbornly refusing to bend before the furious storm of grape and canister which swept through them for four days. While this heroic endurance was maintained on the land side, in front of the village and on the vitreous surface of Lake Champlain, Commandant Thomas Macdonough, on the morning of September 11, with a squadron of fourteen small vessels, carrying 86 guns and 850 officers and men, anchoring in the bay and awaiting the approach of a British fleet of sixteen ships, with 95 guns and 1,000 men, so charged the common trading waters of the lake with soul-lifting influences, that even commerce seems to bear there its pennons more stiffly ever since, and ordinary smacks to kiss the wind with a lover’s trancing relish.
Worsted in square fighting, squadron to squadron, and vessel to vessel, the enemy—not having the fear of this History before their eyes, and finding it easier to harass unarmed merchantmen and to pillage unprotected coasts—ravaged the Chesapeake, burned the Capitol at Washington,—whose corner-stone had been laid by the great American himself in 1793,—and laid in ashes the President’s house. Unfortunately, the Washington Monument was not yet begun; and thus by its escape made the destruction as unpardonable by taste as it was by the code of nations. Baltimore pluck defended Baltimore beauty from attacks by land and water; but the dry goods and shipping of Alexandria were bravely captured and taken prisoners. Weary of the marine parades before New York, Newport, and Stonington, at the North, and Mobile, at the South, a descent upon the city of New Orleans was finally planned by the British military commander, with fifteen thousand hardy and well-seasoned veterans, led by Sir E. Pakenham. To two thousand of them it was a sudden descent to Avernus. Their shades, on every recurring 8th of January, have since been vexed by the sad rites of oratory, poured out on every American stump and platform. Cotton for the first time was here invested with belligerent rights, from its use by General Jackson and his six thousand troops as breastworks. It has ever since been roundly employed by American ladies in the same way against their ardent admirers. The result in the latter case, however, has usually been, not to repel but to heighten the vivacity of the attack; and, unlike that at New Orleans, to procure the surrender of the party with the cotton-works.
The battle of New Orleans was fought in ignorance of the treaty of peace between the United States and Great Britain, signed twenty-five days previously, December 14, 1814, at Ghent,—an agreement which, like frequent make-ups of other quarrels, was wholly silent upon the questions which had caused the long and harassing contention.
On these questions the United States were left at sea.
The war had cost thirty thousand lives and over $100,000,000; but we gained flags, fame, self-confidence, a fine crop of candidates, and subjects for speeches. Through the annealing flames we came out blue steel.
During the December descent on New Orleans, delegates from five of the New England States took Hartford and used it to pass some resolutions against the mode in which, as they asserted, those States had been left out in the cold, bare and unprotected by the government. Many conventions have been since held at the same place and gathered up denunciations with characteristic American fervor; but this one has got somehow astride of history, and ridden it without bridle or stirrups.
In 1816 the second national bank was chartered, with a capital of $35,000,000, lifting the country from suspension to specie payments. Mr. Calhoun, its projector and the supporter of a high tariff, lived to denounce both. Mr. Clay and Mr. Webster, his triangulating rivals, also survived to balance with changing faces the changed front of their Presidential competitor. The strong heats of party, in all times and countries, bring out characters and lines invisible before.
In December, 1816, Indiana, the nineteenth State, came to Washington bearing in her hands a-maize-ing reasons for her admission.
THE ERA OF GOOD-WILL; OR, MONROE’S NESTING.
1817–1825.
Why Byron did not write sometimes.—Application.—Rainbow after the Shower.—The Happy Family.—An Inlaid Cabinet.—Virginia’s Dower Rights in the Presidency.—Five New States.—The Three M’s.—Proof from the Census of 1820 that Chicago had not started.—The Missouri Compromise.—A Good Bridle until used.—Florida bought in 1819.—What we got over the Bargain.—The Florida Keys.—The Dry Tortugas thrown in.—The Dews fortunately left.—A Cracked Cup in the Family Cupboard.—The Monroe Doctrine.
“Why do you not write now?” inquired a friend of Byron in one of the fitful pauses of his galloping author life.
“Because I am happy now.”
So reply the uneventful, unproductive felicities of Monroe’s term to the distressed hunter after historical sensations.
After the showery storm of Madison’s aquatic epoch, rainbows came out in millennial blendings. Warm sunshine lay upon all the land. Under it the happy family dwelt in peace. Federal and Republican inlaid the Cabinet. Virginia was satisfied with the fourth President. She had got her thirds. The humble eighteen others believed in Virginia Presidents. They were content. It was Solomon’s reign of peace paragraphed between David’s wars and Rehoboam’s troubles. Five Territories took advantage of the open doors to step into family relations. Among the five were the three leading M’s, Maine, Mississippi, and Missouri. Chicago—we mean Illinois—took the year 1818 to enter. Of course Chicago had not yet begun, for in 1820 the census only showed 9,638,191.
The keeper of the happy family was re-elected in 1820. There was only one vote against him,—a little mistake or eccentricity not worth inquiring into. There was a little shimmering over the calm surface for two years, caused by the application of Missouri to bring slaves with her into the family. Of course Mr. Clay produced a compromise as a settlement in 1820. Missouri was allowed slaves; but thereafter slavery was banned from all territory north of 36° 30´. The bridle looked strong when there was no horse. When the black charger was brought out and the bridle put on, it was found, however, that he leaped unchecked over the line.
In 1819 Florida was bought from Spain for $5,000,000, and delivered to us in 1821. We got with it more than our bargain,—a lot of very sharp Indian tomahawks. To blunt them soon cost $30,000,000. The Dry Tortugas were thrown in. So were the Florida Keys. So were the alligators. Fortunately the night dews were left to prevent the peninsula from cracking off. Our Union is for better or worse. We took Florida in the era of good-will; we keep it for nothing. Among the crockery in the family cupboard an occasional cup comes with a cracked handle or broken edge. Having little to do at home, our statesmen turned their attention to Venezuela and New Granada, then fighting under Bolivar for their independence of Spain. Bravely they spoke up for the under cur in the fight; but more courageous still, the President, in his annual message for 1823, declared, as a principle, in spite of the crowds of colonists to our own ports, that no European nation had any right to colonize any territory on the Western continent,—a Monroe doctrine which, like the laws, is very loud-spoken in peace, but very silent in war.
TROUBLES BUBBLE; OR, THE SORROWS OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.
1825–1829.
Parallel between Sidney Smith’s Old Razor and J. Q. Adams’s Term.—How several Gentlemen, touched by Age, reached in Vain after Honors too high.—Who they were; and what Acid Grapes the House of Representatives snatched from them.—Pamphleteering and Privateering.—An Italian Saying.—Description of a Good Statesman spoiled in the Mould of a Politician.—An Illustrative Anecdote.—Partisan Scales weighing Public Interests.—The Weights.—The Depravity of Political Blunders.—History vs. Party Judgments.
Sidney Smith once said “that he was like an old razor,—always in hot water or in a scrape.” The term of the second Adams had similar agreeable occupation. The water was very hot when this political blade was first thrust into it. Mr. Monroe’s double term was so quiet, dozy, and apparently so long, that several gentlemen, outside of Virginia, felt that they were growing old, and might, unless they improved the chance, easily slip out of it. Besides Mr. Adams, there were, as candidates, General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, William H. Crawford of Georgia, and Henry Clay of Kentucky; among whom General Jackson received the highest popular vote, and Mr. Adams the next. In the House of Representatives, the ballot taken by States gave Mr. Adams 13, General Jackson 7, and Mr. Crawford 4 votes. Each of these was a dragon’s tooth, which was carefully sown, and produced rank growths of sulphur-colored partisans, whose drifting seeds grew into poisonous crops all along the public roads. Pamphleteering became privateering on private reputation. Industrious falsehoods supplied for many years the warp of history.
“Si non è vero è ben trovato” was the maxim of ingenious and disingenuous fraud.
Nursed and reared a statesman, Mr. Adams made a very poor politician. He could no more run his ever-cooling intellect and scholarly attainments into the curious moulds of party than he could make Q fit the place of A. Worse far, he had such a small organ for a heart, that it sent no blood to his cold fingers for hand-shaking. He had too much conscience to be popular with office-beggars, and not manners enough to go around in the country at large. He never stirred out of Washington, that he did not tread on some one’s foot.
“James,” said a father to his malapropos son, “you have only two faults; one is, that you are good for nothing before breakfast, and the other is, that you are not a whit better after breakfast.” So said of the unpartisan President his political fathers, the heads of committees; and their opinion outbalanced in the scale the petty weights of general prosperity, peace at home and abroad, a careful, scrupulous economy, that kept the entire expenses of the government below thirteen millions annually, and a steady payment on the national debt of seven and a half millions a year. The friendly blunder of appointing Mr. Clay Secretary of State was a political crime; the retention of those already in office, political unrighteousness; the refusal to appoint clamorous partisans to paying places, exaggerated political depravity. History at last inscribes over the gateway of his term “Arabia Felix,” over the place where popular misconception and partisan disappointment had hastily chiselled “Arabia Petrea.”
THE AGE OF HICKORY; OR, JACKSON’S EPOCH.
1829–1837.
Military Men, domesticated to Civil Life, like tamed Animals.—General Jackson’s Camp Traits in the White Den at Washington.—His Prehensile Habits claw out the Eyes of several Measures.—How he foraged on his Political Enemies, and turned his Troops of Friends into the Public Pastures.—Lord Palmerston’s Remark upon Gladstone; and its American Application.—An Insurrection among the Household Cabinet Troops.—How the vigorous Hickory Club, wielded chivalrously for a Woman, quelled it.—The President moves on the Bank and captures all its Fortified Points.—Chicago starts in 1830.—Why it did not overtake and annex the United States.—South Carolina threatens Nullification, and is threatened.—Mr. Calhoun violently promised an elevated Position between two Posts. Mr. Clay’s Compromise.—Horace Greeley starts the First Daily Paper.—Its untimely End bewailed in Verse.—Black Hawk caged and shown around.—Georgia, the Cherokees and the Supreme Court.—Three Celebrities gained by the Seminole War.—Of Arkansas and its Papal Little Rock.—Prospects for the Pope when flung from the Tarpeian.—An Arkansas Paul preaching in the American Athens and Corinth.—Old Hickory and the Nuts left to be cracked.
Naturalists tell us that certain animals, domesticated from a wild state, retain some primeval habits so tenaciously as never to shed them; that these animals, for example, never lie down on their new and softer beds without turning around and beating about as in their forest lairs. So military men, tamed down from the independence of camp into the regulated routine of civil life, never lose their unrest in attempting to adjust themselves to their new condition. General Jackson carried the defiant bravery of his campaigns against the Indians into the white den at Washington. He disdained to cover the prehensile claws of new measures with the velvet sheath of official prudence.
Over the eyes of schemes or institutions which he designed to scratch out he cast no glamour.
During his eight years of civil campaigning, he stormed several forts that had become mossed by age through preceding administrations. His first care was to live off the enemy, the Adamites, whose Federal offices he took as forage for his own troops of friends; an example from the military code which every successor, civil or uncivil, has unfortunately hastened to follow. Lord Palmerston once declared “that Mr. Gladstone had not a command of language, but that language commanded him.” So it has resulted from this tough, hickory precedent, that the offices now command the government.
This campaign over, his next exploit was to quell an insurrection among the household troops led by Vice-President Calhoun, Mr. Ingham, Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Branch, Secretary of the Navy, and Mr. Berrien, Attorney-General. These officers were soon cashiered and their places filled by Mr. McLane, Mr. Woodbury, and Mr. Taney. The lily-white arm of a lady, whose social exclusion from the Calhoun set the vigorous old warrior resented, moved the iron sinews of the hickory club which cleaned out the Secretarys’ stables.
The General next moved on the United States Bank, up whose slopes, although jagged with ores and hoary with legislative fortifications, he rushed, carrying them at all points with a coup de main.
His first term, however, was made illustrious, not so much by these destructions as by the first appearance of Chicago. This was in 1830. At this time, fortunately, the population of the United States had reached 12,866,020, and were thus saved from being overtaken and immediately annexed to that rapid and rapidly pushing place. This Northern cosmical event attracted less attention, however, because the public mind was at last and about this time fixed upon the State of Mr. C. C. Pinckney, which, under the guidance of Mr. Calhoun, threatened to exclude the Federal hickory government from its plantation, unless the Tariff Act was repealed.
The old military chief issued a public proclamation, asserting his determination to execute the laws over South Carolina, and private threats to raise the main nullifier to a lofty post under the government. Indeed, he promised to some of his close personal friends, with ejaculations truly Jacksonian, to put him between two posts for the rest of his life.
This was the first sprouting of the carefully engrafted scion of slavery upon the stock of State rights.
Again, the Kentucky compromiser was ready with a harmonizing remedy, which scaled the tariff rates for the next ten years, and then planed them all down to the horizontal level of twenty per cent. South Carolina, lying, like Achilles, near her ships, professed to be appeased. Mr. Calhoun was saved his hempen elevation.
The year following, 1833, Horace Greeley started in New York “The Morning Post,” the first daily paper ever projected, which lived only three weeks, and wondered why it ever lived at all;
“Whose all of life, a morning ray, Blushed into dawn then passed away.”
The Sacs, Foxes, and Winnebagoes, with tomahawks in their talons, and led by Black Hawk, swooped in hovering circles around the white chickens of Illinois; but were brought down by those practised marksmen, Generals Scott and Atkinson. The old Hawk was captured and shown through the United States in his drooping feathers. In Georgia, on the other hand, the whites were the aggressors, seeking to push the Creeks and Cherokees from their coveted possessions. The Indians fled to the Supreme Court of the United States, which bade Georgia restore the poor Naboths to their vineyards. The Ahab sovereignty of that State resisted. The President refused to interfere. The nullification by Georgia of a decree of the Supreme Court, restoring Indians to their rights, was, in the eyes of the old Indian fighter, quite a different matter from the nullification by Calhoun-led South Carolina of an act of Congress. So far from being a hair-splitter, the General could not even see whole shocks, if the poll was long, straight, and black. In 1835 arose another Seminole war in Florida, caused by an attempt on the part of the government to remove that powerful tribe, under a mock treaty, somewhere, nowhere, anywhere, so that it was west of the Mississippi, and away from present cupidity. On the public debt, now dwarfed to $291,089, this war was like an April shower. Florida had the satisfaction, for the third time in sixteen years, of increasing the obligations of the United States for, if not to, her. In this peninsular campaign, we obtained three celebrities to knob the flat surface of our history,—Generals Zachariah Taylor, Jessup, and Gaines,—gains compared with which the loss of life and lucre are not to be mentioned, except to stiffen our virtues by reproaching their suggestion.
The red tribes began sensibly to experience the truth of that sad tradition, which depicts their fate under the figure of a spirited bull, Manitou, which, chased from Cordillera to higher peak, across plain and river, ever westward, stands frequently on his reluctant retreat at bay, and tosses in vain from his frontlet the burning spears whose arrowy flames the waters of the Pacific only can quench.
After a pause of sixteen years, Arkansas, in 1836, strode, bowie-knife in belt, into the American camp. With Little Rock for its capital, it bids fair for the honor of sheltering the Pope when flung off from the Tarpeian at Rome. Its Saul-like Legarès, having been struck down by miraculous lights since 1861, we shall probably see, becoming zealous Pauls, mending apostolic nets on the Red River, and preaching to the ignorant worshippers of unknown gods, in the Athens of New England and the Corinth of New York.
At threescore and ten, Old Hickory was transplanted to the Hermitage. The merits and demerits of his administration, his political principles and his personal character, constitute still the Flanders of American parties, over which much hard swearing and fighting are still vigorously carried on. The rough-nutted tree has been well shaken by friend and foe; and its shaggy fruit we leave to be cracked, at family firesides, to season insipid pauses and to flavor uneffervescing drowsiness.
THE ROMANCE OF INDIAN WARFARE. (p. 407) ]
THE DUTCH REIGN OF MARTIN VAN BUREN.
1837–1841.
A New-Yorker reaches the White House, and has Hard Fare there.—The Disadvantages of Competition.—A Financial Earthquake breaks large Amounts of Crockery.—How much made a Pile in 1837.—The Sub-Treasury.—The Connection between long Messages and Anarchy in Finance.—Defalcations in Office.—Why an Old Man’s House is easily robbed.—The Phantom of Slavery.—Extraits de l’Afrique.—Principles and Goods sold at a Profit.—A Political Trader loses his Capital, and gives up Business.
At last New York saw one of her citizens reach the White House. Several other gentlemen, General William Henry Harrison of Ohio, Judge Hugh L. White of Tennessee, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, and Willie P. Mangum of North Carolina, were each desirous of getting to this favorite inn before the others, and of securing exclusive possession of it. For four years the Dutch guest had a very hard time of it. All of his disappointed competitors watched him, as hounds the fox in his hole, ready for hot pursuit as soon as the brush showed from cover.
A financial earthquake broke through the commercial crust the first year of Mr. Van Buren’s term, shattering most of the crockery in the great cities, and sputtering red menaces of ruin through almost every village and country store. In New York alone merchants toppled down amid heaps of indebtedness piled up to $100,000,000,—a respectable pile then, now scarcely worth failing for. To help up the departing credit, the President recommended the sub-treasury scheme, or separate chests for guarding the public moneys. Of course this expedient, like all financial measures, was Dutch to the people generally, who became more hopelessly anarchical by the interminably long messages, which aggravated their want of ideas, and somehow fretfully tangled their losing tempers and accounts.
A few defalcations among public officers chafed the popular mind to an illogical but natural irritation. They looked upon the guard-houses of the national moneys, like an old man’s residence, insecure from his broken gait and few locks. The dark phantom of slavery again flitted over the land, its dusky shadow disturbing the vision of commercial and political traders. The President had, in his boresome in-augur-al, promised to his Southern supporters, in advance of Congressional action, to veto any bill forbidding slavery in the District of Columbia. Petitions against slavery were laid under the table, while speeches in its favor were extremely fashionable. Mails at the South were opened for the discovery of antislavery papers. Politicians perfumed their handkerchiefs with extraits de l’Afrique, and Northern merchants on the seaboard sold to the South their principles and goods at a profit. Still the great trader in the White House kept losing his capital. The new war with the Seminoles created bad debts. A proposition for a standing army mined his credit. The sub-treasury scheme drained specie from the people into Federal pools. To Lindenwald he retired, enriched by experience, but with his political ballot-paper at a heavy discount.
THE HARRISON-TYLER TROUPE; HOW IT PLAYED.
1841–1845.
General Harrison’s Death and Life-Insurance Companies.—Whig Bank-Bills with no Tyler Bodies to suit them.—A Good Flint which required a first-rate Gun, Stock, Breech, and Barrel, to suit it.—Definition of Crabs, etc.—The Ashburton Treaty.—The Bankrupt Act, and whom it helped.—Misfortunes and Fortunes.—Mr. Calhoun’s Texas Trick.—Diplomatic Magic-Lanterns exposed.—Roman-like Garments with Carthaginian Spots.—Florida our Stocking Heel; how darned.—Yarns about it.—Iron Railings as State Corsets.—How the Florida Keys might be usefully employed.
At the time General Harrison was called from the clerkship of the County Court of Hamilton County, Ohio, to preside at the People’s High Assizes at Washington, he lived at North Bend, a very different crook from that of his predecessor. He was sixty-eight years of age, and in feeble health; yet so seldom do people die in desirable offices, that any life-insurance company would have taken his life in a policy at the lowest premium.
April 4, 1841, however, he died. Of course John Tyler, the Vice-President, did not. To the subsequent regret of his party he lived on—a plane of his own, quite apart from the platform upon which he was placed by them, and bisected by a Virginia ecliptic so oblique that it rarely touched anything or anybody. Mr. Clay and the Whigs tried hard and long to shape a bank bill to his amphibious tastes; but as they could not find a body, neck, or feet to suit the bill, they abandoned the study of natural history as illustrated by Mr. Tyler. A bank—some bank—he seemed desirous to have; because he entertained a profound conviction that a bank was a good place to put a counter in. Like the gentleman who possessed a first-rate flint, and wished a gunsmith just to fit a good breech, lock, stock, and barrel to it, the acting President seemed anxious, in his interviews with the Congressional banksmiths, to have them fit a good bank, vaults, specie, and circulation, to his admirable counter.
As Cuvier objected to the definition of a crab given by the French Academy, namely, “that it was a small red fish which walks backwards,” as “wanting three things to make it correct: first, that the crab was not a fish; second, that it was not red; and third, that it did not walk backwards”: so the leaders of the party which elected him found equal fault with Mr. Tyler as defining in his own person the name of Whig on three grounds: first, that he was not a Whig in principle; second, nor in theory; third, nor in practice.
The original Cabinet members all resigned, except Mr. Webster, Secretary of State, who remained to complete in July, 1842, with Lord Ashburton, a treaty to disentangle our northeastern boundary lines and fish lines from the hard knots into which they were running.
A Bankrupt Act was thrown out by Congress in 1841, as planks for traders shipwrecked by the tidal waves which followed the earthquake of 1837; but the principal benefit of the act resulted in throwing the stranded fortunes to the official wreckers, called assignees in bankruptcy, who secured most of the stuff cast upon the shore. In two years this barbarous wrecking business was stopped by the repeal of the law.
The principal event of Mr. Tyler’s term was the successful trick, shown off in 1845 to the American people, by Mr. Calhoun, the new Secretary of State, by which they were led into the belief that Texas was about to pass under an English protectorate. Stimulating the national antipathies and cupidities, he asked Congress, through Mr. Tyler, to secure the slave empire on the Rio Grande. The dark-lantern exhibition was successful. Congress passed alternate resolutions, one opening negotiations with Mexico for the impracticable cession of Texas, the other providing for its practical annexation. These little State deceits, covered at the time with solemn diplomatic care, seem very pitiful when historically exposed in their pasteboard cheapness and tinselled falsity. The Roman-like virtue of Mr. Calhoun was picked out with Carthaginian spots, and his white state toga shot with colored figures, that will not stand the sun. While he would have scorned with his whole nature any individual fraud for the personal gain of a fortune, he was, like so many other politicians, neither above nor below being more than sharp at a party bargain.
The day before Mr. Tyler went out, Florida came into the Union. She is the heel of the American stocking,—very much darned and always in need of mending. Yarns orange-colored, lemon-hued, and palm-tinted show in the abundant patching. She has been thus far like certain small country places, which scorn fences and paint, ready to borrow money on any security required, and are always foreclosed at some point by mortgages which hurt no one in the neighborhood. Iron railing may stimulate her pride and corset up her untidy ways. She wears the keys at her girdle, but as yet has forgotten to lock up her small politicians and let out her too closely kept products.
POLK’S WHIRL; OR, THE AMERICAN POLKA.
1845–1849.
The Floor Committee for the coming Polka described.—History of previous Balls, Country Dances, Virginia Reels, Quincy Waltzes, Irish Jigs, South Carolina Shake-ups, etc.—General Taylor, his Advances and Movements at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterey, and Buena Vista.—How his Partner, the Army, was taken away.—General Scott among the Mustangs at Vera Cruz, Natural Bridge, Chapultepec, Mexico, etc.—Of Wool, Kearny, Fremont, and Commodore Sloat.—What New Mexico and California added and subtracted.—The Mustang Liniment, or Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo.—How the Path for the Traditional Sun of Civilization Westward was cut and paved.—Revolvers judicially quoted and applied.—Peculiar Fruit adorning the Pendulous Branches of Trees in New Settlements.—What the Little Trick of the Wizard of the South conjured up.—California in 1848 and now contrasted.—David Wilmot raises a Ghost which disturbs several Party Feasts.—How the Polka Party broke up; and how it pleased some and dissatisfied others.
The committee of the American people, in November, 1844, designated new floor-managers for the coming season of four years.
With Washington and John Adams the nation had had the old-fashioned, respectable country dance; the up and down, square, staid figures, moving through the rhythmic performances and retiring with marked dignity. Then came the Virginia reel, led by Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, with the same partners throughout. The Quincy waltz followed, ending in a dishevelled gallop, when the heated dancers were led off to chilling ice-creams and whipped syllabubs. This was succeeded by a long puzzling Irish jig, under Jackson, with a lively and frequent change of partners and a passionate mixture of feet, heads, and ball-room dresses. A Dutch hornpipe led a select party through the mazy solemnities, and intermixed fandango advances and retreats which characterized the Van Buren schottishe. Then came the quick-footed cachuca, performed by the Harrison-Tyler troupe, ending in a South Carolina shake-up, where the darkies were the principal performers, although Calhouned white men promoted the dance and took the profits of the abundantly patronized bar. The floor was now cleared for the polka, an extremely spirited, gyrating series of figures, in which the main object was to balance, by rapid dodges and double-shuffling whirls, the forcibly acquired colored partner, named Texas, with the new incoming free State arrivals. The sets were soon formed. President Polk was of course head manager, having able assistants in James Buchanan, carrying a stately variegated black and white rose; Robert J. Walker, his button-hole adorned with a gold-colored treasury ribbon; William L. Marcy, resplendent with a broad crimson war-sash across his broad chest; George Bancroft, in a navy-blue uniform, open in front for the ready exit of his never-ceasing orders; Cave Johnson, in mail attire; and John Y. Mason with his narrow cranium transfigured by a straitened cross-barred attorney’s cap. Southern men, North and South, stepped eagerly forward to join in the popular dance.
General Taylor, a modest young man of sixty-one, was directed by the managers to make an advance, with a party clothed in the United States military dress, to a place on the large floor, chalked out between the Neuces and Rio Grande, with a hint not to be offensive in his attitudes, but to look as disagreeable as he chose; and that if anybody, especially the blanketed Mexicans, who insisted on having that part of the large ball-room exclusively to themselves, should give him any chance, however small, to fall foul of them, ball or no ball. When one is desirous of a quarrel he is not usually, especially at the Southwest, long kept out of the enjoyment. In April, 1846, General Ampudia and General Taylor chanced to touch each other, and off went the chip from the American shoulder. Of course everybody who at the North sold goods to the South, and every one at the South who possessed a colored brother in fee-simple, was indignant about the chip, which for the time conveniently represented American honor.
The national gorge and the price of negroes rose simultaneously. Fifty thousand men and $10,000,000 were voted by Congress to iron out the creases made in our flag. Of course the young man of sixty-one soon got into the adobe-colored tumble which was impatiently expected. May 8, 1846, with the aid of 2,300 men, he tripped up General Arista with 6,000 men, at Palo Alto, and the next day fell violently against him at Resaca de la Palma. The chopfallen Mustangs, picking up themselves and their dirtier blankets, made all haste to get out of reach of the rough-and-ready treatment, and sped across the Rio Grande to Monterey. But the young man, excited by the jerking mazourka step into which the dance now broke, grasped his partner, the army, around the waist, and flung across the opening spaces against the frightened Mustangs at Monterey. It was a hard shock, and, of course, the sorry-visaged Mexicans were hurled against the wall.
The floor managers for some reason—some uncharitably thought from envy at seeing the modest young man attracting so much admiration—took away his partner, and sent it off with a younger man, General Scott, then only sixty, to another part of the room. The figures which he cut with his set of twenty thousand at Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo, National Bridge, Churubusco, Contreras, Chapultepec, and city of Mexico, were waltzed with unflagging energy.
Meanwhile, the young man Taylor, left with only 4,759 raw troops, was set upon in February, 1847, at Buena Vista, by Santa Anna and 22,000 well-baked Mexicans. The South American Warwick left 1,500 men, his carriage, travelling equipage, and the best part of himself—his wooden leg—upon the field, and with the fragments escaped southwards. Almost simultaneously new-comers were seen flying, in movements more or less effective, across the room,—General Wool, with 2,900 men, at San Antonio; General Kearny, at Sante Fé, New Mexico; Captain John C. Fremont and Commodore Sloat, in California; all performing feats which brought murmurs of applause even from trans-sea critics.
At last the Mexicans gave out, tired and glad to apply to their wounds that Mustang liniment, the treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo, mixed up March 2, 1848.
New Mexico and California were, by this treaty, added, with eight hundred thousand square miles, to our westering borders. Henceforth the Rio Grande babbled a bi-lingual story to the Saxon Americans on its right, and the mezzo-tinted, mezzo-clad Mexicans on its left. The path of civilization, whose sun-leaning course through the centuries, from Assyria to America, is not unfamiliar to Americans, was now securely macadamized by Yankee pavers to the Pacific. The Atlantic slopes, of course, were easily turned westward, and their readily manufactured fruits rolled down into the Mississippi basin, and over its heaping rim beyond. Revolvers were boxed and transported in increased quantities to the Southwest, to supply the judicial demand; as every man who takes up government land is liable to sudden litigations, where the trials revolve quickly, and cast with fatal speed one of the litigants. The wonderful vegetation of this newly opened region, gorgeous in tropical luxuriance, was for a few years made more remarkable by the human fruitage, which not unfrequently hung suspended with impressive weight from the pendulous branches. Fortunately these productions are short-lived. They are but the morning mists that hide for an hour the mammoth sierras and wide-armed plains, that nurse continents and centuries to manly vigor.
ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE PRICE OF LIBERTY. (p. 421) ]
The little Calhoun trick had, quite unexpectedly to the wizard of the South, conjured up,—not a few paltry African patches grinning with ghastly spectres, chained in the linked dance of death,—but broad empires brimming soon with stalwart men and women. Calhoun proposes, but conscience disposes.
The yellow-fever broke out, soon after the treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo, in our new Californian possession, carrying off people, not thence, but thither. By the side of palace hotels, now gleaming along golden bays; solid warehouses, through whose opened doors show the well-stored sheaves of Continental harvests; settled industries that spike the land with stacks, vineyards, mills, and spired villages; palace cars which in a week have blazoned their luxurious splendors through solitudes threaded only a few years ago by the dangerous blazed track; and giant steamers wading the Pacific Sea, and carrying to the Mongolian empires of the Orient a staggering back-load of American products,—by the side of these actual marvels, even a score of years has made the contrasted early life of the gold adventurer, gambling in revolver-furnished tents, dangerous night brawls, and rude visits of vigilance committees, a theme for romance and its twin ally, history. It had taken nearly three centuries since Sir Thomas Drake proclaimed California the ward of Elizabeth, for the North American boy to acquire sufficient courage to touch her virgin lips, and claim her in happy wedlock.
Our New Mexico brought immediate and national disturbance. Slavery there was considered objectionable by many; and as soon as Territories were proposed to be carved out of those wide limits, the Wilmot proviso, to exclude slavery from it, arose at the expected Calhoun feast like Banquo’s ghost, and, disturbing the revel, followed with reproachful look almost every American statesman. It strode into the Democratic Convention at Baltimore, which nominated Lewis Cass, and sat alongside of the shivering president and secretaries. It stalked into the Whig assemblage at Philadelphia, which took the young man for its candidate, and troubled its peace. Finally, it flitted to Buffalo, and made its appearance at a mixed gathering which presented Martin Van Buren,—now the political friend of the ghost,—with just the ghost’s chance for the Presidency.
And so the ball and polka party turned out very much as other balls. Those who had expected a great deal from it did not enjoy it much; while those who had no hand in getting it up had a good time, ate the most supper, had the least headache the next morning, and often spoke of it afterwards with pleasurable recollections. Among the former were Mr. Calhoun, Mr. Polk, and the floor committee; among the latter the modest young man, now sixty-five years of age, John C. Fremont, several people who did not part their hair in the middle, and a growing set who were friends of those who could not divide their crinkled hair as yet either way or any way.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ON THE AMERICAN HALF-SHELL.
The contrasted Beginning and End of the Half-Century.—What America brought to the New-Year’s Day of 1850 in the Raw, and what for the Grill of more refined Tastes.—Historical Stews, and their Foreign and Domestic Sauces.—What they were.—Attempts at, and Failures in, Insurrections in America.—Mechanical Inventions of the Half-Century; Steamboats, Telegraphs, Reapers, Sewing-Machines, etc.—Their Advantages.—Vestments and Investments.—Of Ether.—How Populations drifted to Cities.—Chicago bibulous and dropsical.—Public Men and their Versatile Principles.—Newspapers and their unfulfilled Prophecies.—Plutocracy.—Fashions and their Constancy to Change.—The Stormy Petrels of Commercial Disasters.—How Owners turn Wreckers.—Profits out of Losses.—Of Merchant Salvors.—The Effects of Gold Discoveries in California on Labor, Ladies’ Heads and Hearts.—Auriferous Marriages.—The Spite of Midas against Children.—Ecclesiastical Gardens in America.—The new Mormon Shrub of the Genus Polygamous.—Architectural Improvements.—American Houses and their Sites.—Farmsteads; their Better Complexion.—The Crops from the National Farms, the Sea and Land, in 1850.—Of American Literature, Science, Natural History, The Philosophies and other Branches of Knowledge, and their Cultivators, through the Half-Century.—Summary of the Bill of Fare for the Repast on the Half-Shell.—Its Character and Critics.
The nineteenth century began in America comparatively lean and unfattened, with but sixteen States, and a population of 5,305,939. When, on New Year’s day, 1850, it was taken up from its native beds, it had grown to thirty States, and a population of 23,191,876. It had gathered American history enough to be served up in every style to its hungry, impatiently waiting crowds of customers.
There was still plenty of it in the raw; heaps of materials swimming in abundant liquor; common work at rough, resisting nature, bivalved between the ordinary shells of laborious days and unwaking, sonorous nights; good honest-minded rough-handed labor, swinging the axe among Western settlements, and pricking gold, silver, and lead veins, and draining off their arterial currents into Atlantic bowls; shaggy-jacketed enterprise, brave in work, in patience, and cheerful endurance, quelling the rebellions of empty stomachs,—those quickly rising, wrathful, and speedily armed revolutionists,—and subjecting them to serve while the wheat ripened, and to wait upon a nourishing hope; and ploughmen planting broad and newly claimed fields with tasselled banners, and marching with their sheaved battalions to take growing towns and marts of business.
“A mighty maize, but not without a plan.”
Others there were drawing fresh, healthy milk, from the breasts of buxom mother Earths; pioneer, shaggy-coated energy, East as well as West, South as well as North, creating, organizing, and crystallizing around nuclei, snatching newly created words, as woman, from the ribs of necessities, and planting them amid the needs of freshly staked Edens; new-laid towns, from whose hasty nests speculators run cackling; mining villages, planted at sunset out of hand, watered by hot whiskeys, stimulated by the guano of revolvers, faro, monte, and warmly stirred politics, and growing over night into rough-timbered climbers up and up the mountain-side, to look over into the canyon beyond; hastily lit oil and other speculations, around whose flame the idle moths of the pulpit, the bar, and the counter fly and singe themselves until they fall helpless upon the table of others; struggling schools, churches, seminaries, and charities, reaching upwards to the sunlight, growing more graceful as they straighten away from their earthy roots, but still raw; and all the many-visaged, polysided life of fresh energy, struggling for the mastery over the down-wrestled but ever-rising work of new soils, wants, and needs, and destined, in spite of its great, rude, sinewy strength, to exhaust itself upon what time, patience, and long-applied skill shall shape into greater symmetry and proportion, and then to vanish away into the tomb of all ex-workmen.
There, too, were heaped up and ready for the grill, and for tastes more refined, capital, massing itself into centripetal, compacting, aggregated wealth, touching large levers that swing inflowing products from port to port, across wide-reaching inland spaces, or over high mountains; multiform industries, translating and exchanging, without parallel, the growths of every parallel; and associated earnings of diligent thrift, extracting the best notions from hard, quartz-headed mountains. There was vivid and intelligent joint enterprise, which plunges beneath the waves, and places the sensitive nerves of thought below the gambols of the leviathan, for the especial benefit of gamblers in bonds, cotton, gold, and stocks; pries open the shut gates of science, and entices her occult learning to minister to the enlarging demands of commerce, agriculture, manufactures, and trade; sets in motion the steel fingers which pick, cull, card, spin, and weave the cotton, flax, silk, and wool, whose fabrics clothe us through all seasons; quickens the spindles, machines, and contrivances—busy everywhere—which create our necessaries and our luxurious comforts; drags our fuel from the tight clutches of the mine; adulterates our food and drinks; sews up our vestments and sometimes our investments, and supplies our dwellings with furniture, our stores with goods, our fields with mowers, reapers, steam-ploughs, and steam-impelling implements, and our grave-yards with monuments, hewn by machinery and chiselled by the nimble fingers of patented tools.
Historical stews, too, those fifty years had, of course, produced in abundance; some flavored with British, others with French sauces. Domestic ones, too, had simmered and sputtered; but, stirred by bayonet-shaped spoons, they had so far gone off in smoke as to leave only an insipid taste on the homely palate of our peace-loving household. Of these were the Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania, and Dorr’s Suffrage Rebellion in Rhode Island in 1842, made of very poor materials, and smothered with a rude domestic bread sauce, which, more like a poultice for the outside than a relishable compound for the inside, soon took away the vicious appetite. Indeed, since the Great Rebellion which severed the long threads that tied us to Great Britain, no insurrections have ever had any success in America. Sharp newspaper émeutes, looking like imminent war, yes; sectional animosities threatening, like the South Carolina chattering of 1832, to embroil a piece of us, yes; State grievances, bubbling up with heated convention resolves, until the steam of revolution almost arose from the agitated surface, yes, and often; and, to quote an example since 1850, even a land-wasting war of four years, reducing large plantations to cinders, and leaving in funereal gloom many hopes and households,—even this, yes; but a genuine, earnest, well-founded, and just revolt, rising from wrongs and oppressions, and appealing to armed manly protest, and resulting in deserved success, never, never!
Upon the half-shell were served some remarkable mechanical inventions. Water raised into steam was, in 1806, applied by Fulton to propel the first steamboat over water; an application never contemplated by the Constitution, but which, in spite of the many private constitutions suddenly broken up by it, the appalling increase in American biographies, and the wreck of matter thrown upon life-insurance reserves, must be kindly remembered as one of the great benefactions of genius to humanity. In 1832 Samuel F. B. Morse discovered the mode of electro-magnetizing thought, and of ticking down words at places where thoughts were seldom spontaneously produced. The wiry telegraph is daily bringing to light other incidental discoveries, which show how great benefits sometimes pendulate with petty remorses. There are developed at most stations a class of people, formerly unknown, and called “operators,” who believe that small accidents, in places unrewarded by the notice of geographers, are national; that the births, deaths, or marriages of owners of petroleum, fast horses, or other rapid stock, concern all readers of newspapers; that the time, age, and pedigree of quadrupeds, kept for jumping long spaces in a short time, and the weights of bipeds, sent to college to acquire an increase of their intellectual strength, but who punish instead an ash stick some four hours a day, by sweeping with it some frog-pond in the vicinity, are vital statistics; and that the election of constables, supervisors, aldermen, mayors, and members of Congress are matters which every intelligent patriot, instead of banishing from all recollection as speedily as possible, desires to have forced upon his journalistic readings. If Morse started, re-morse has often followed after, the telegraph.
In 1833, one Hussey, from Cincinnati, improving upon hints glinting out through agricultural books and poems from the time of the Romans, perfected somewhat a mower and reaper, which, as since bettered by Manny, Ketchum, and McCormick, has made such quick work with our meadows and grain-fields, as to break up all the delicious reveries into which picturesque men in them, and sentimentalists over books representing them, formerly indulged. Gone is the mower’s scythe, now nicked into the quick-sliding saw which eats in a day through acres of grass and golden-bloomed wheat. Gone, Ruth-lessly, the maidens in broad hats, turning with a fork the low-lying clover, and with their eyes the uncut young Timothy, ever near at hand. Vanished from American harvest-fields the whistling grain-gatherers, driven from sight and pictorial illustrations by a single hussy.
During the half-century, too, was set up that useful American music-box, the sewing-machine,—a box that now sings joyful songs of shirts, frills, pantaloons, and vests, in all airs, flights, and stories. In 1846 the application of ether to lure pain into insensibility was first discovered. The honor is contested between three Americans, an honor large enough to be divided up, and a third given to each; but as each naturally covets the exclusive claim, the retort-like monument to perpetuate the discovery must be inscribed, to ether.
At the middle of the century populations had begun to gather into city centres; 515,547 in New York; 340,045 in Philadelphia; 169,054 in Baltimore; 136,881 in Boston; 116,375 in New Orleans; 115,436 in Cincinnati; 77,860 in St. Louis; and in Brooklyn, un-scared by German invasions, 96,838. Chicago, with just a score of years, had more than a score of thousands; but its frequent doublings since have run up so many scores, that the sum leaps the bars of all arithmetics, save its own. Since it has taken to drinking out of Lake Michigan, and begun to draw upon the Atlantic and Liverpool, our calculations have become so dropsical that nothing but tapping can save them.
With greater wealth had come, of course, into America greater variety of aspirations, tastes, modes of display, versatility of social invention and experiment. Most of our leading public men had lived long enough to have as many principles as they could number decades, as many heads as the hydra, as unlike each other as in cheap weeklies, and yet at one period or another a faithful likeness. Good-natured voters, who could recall twenty years of ballot experience, could remember a vote given for and against almost every Whig and Democratic chief. The country had survived the predictions of its downfall, although, at intervals, the New York “Evening Post” for forty-nine years, the “National Intelligencer” for thirty-seven, the “Boston Post” for nineteen, the “New York Herald” for fifteen, and the New York “Daily Tribune” for nine years, had in startling type assured its readers, with most staccato emphasis and adjectives, of its speedy overthrow, if some measure which it reprehended was adopted, or unless some principle which it advocated was not at once received into the national creed.
Plutocracy, of course, also, got larger Josses and re-gilded their shrines with many fantastic patterns. Fashions enlarged and contracted, through the five decades, with every east wind from Paris; and American men, women, and children hastened to change the boots, hats, and vestments, so lovely and so much admired before the last arrival, with the same alarm after the new mode was out, as they would have doffed a garment that had encased a cholera patient.
Fortunate then as now the feather or flower which formed a whole tri-mestral lodgement among the native, or foreign beds of hair, that are so beautifully upholstered one month to be taken down and ridiculed the next.
THE PROGRESS OF FASHION. (p. 432) ]
The stormy petrels of disaster had frequently appeared over the fluctuating sea of our commercial life, covering it in 1837, and in every few successive epochs since, with its screaming, ill-omened, harpy brood, while fleets and single vessels of mercantile adventure broke up and lined the shore with their shattered wrecks. Then as now the owner sometimes turned wrecker of his own cargo, and often made more from the stranded pieces than he would have netted from the entire cargo had it arrived safely in port; as the expected payment of its purchase price would then have reduced the profits. This species of mercantile salvage, by which the proprietor profits by his losses, although not unknown to the traders of Carthage, has had an extension in modern days, that threatens to put merchandizing among those equivocal ventures, which puzzle casuists in cases of conscience, and often defy even the doctrine of chances as to the payment.
The discovery, in 1848, of gold in California bestowed upon America the Midas-touch it had fervently prayed for. Gold, sweated from the pores of labor, was sprinkled in a dusty shower upon the head of beauty, dropped in bars upon the scales of the vendors of dry goods and wet goods, filmed the eyes of marriageable girls with an aureous ophthalmia which indisposed them to see any desirable wedding unless it was golden, and so veneered the duties and chairs of railway directors, members of the legislature and of Congress, with a yellow smearing, that nearly all bills, resolutions, or orders have refused to dip into or drink from any stream but Pactolus. Many homes, however, through that half-century, we are happy to say, unwatered by the curse of that thirsty stream, had taken root and sent up solid shafts whose numerous branches bloomed with bountiful clusters, while sweet-smelling vines, springing alongside the family trees from the roots of the simple love-knots, spread a protecting shade over many a family roof-tree.
Curiously enough, Midas always had a spite against children, which grow up thickest among heaps of clam-shells and on poor side-hills.
Into our flowering ecclesiastial garden, planted with every known variety, and exhibiting large and vigorous growths, Joseph Smith—a Vermont simple—introduced, in 1827, a new shrub. It bore at first a double Mormon flower-looking tip, distributed in pretty equal numbers on its deep-green, sucker-like shoots; but transplanted first to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1838, and ten years later to the alkaline soil of Utah, it immediately bore the female variety in alarming disproportion. This Salt Lake shrub—of the genus polygamous—has become by cultivation a very rank weed, smelling earthily to heaven. Its numerous Young off-shoots require severe cutting, if not distinct subsoil treatment.
Architecture at last began to raise its tasteful fronts, Elizabethan, Gothic, Italian cottage, or American composite, set in trim yards or on smooth-shaven lawns, netted and webbed by paths and walks. On headlands, fringed with sea-wave ruffles; in valleys gladdened by the smiles of brooks and rallied into happy, healthy, joyousness by the outbursting frolicsome hills that cannot hold in their peculiar humors; on the sloping banks of many rivers seaward running; and on bossed and tufted hillocks where the pines, spruces, and larches hang aloft through all seasons their graceful flags, tasteful residences with clustering out-houses, sheltered thrift, corralled the domestic wealth which Midas cannot buy, and resounded with whoops that brought out other hoops in turn. Farmsteads had steadily added improvements, amplified their breadths, changed their white coats into colors more harmonious, and gathered around them well-adjusted farm buildings, and in their neatly fenced yards better stock, quadrupedal, bipedal, feathered, furred, and scaly.
Under improved cultivation our two national farms—the sea and land—produced, in 1850, crops that weighted the census heavily. The former showed 1,360 new American-built vessels, carrying 272,218 tons; and the latter bore a growth that year of 53,000,000 pounds of wool, 100,000,000 bushels of wheat, 592,000,000 bushels of Indian corn, 813,000,000 pounds of cotton, 14,000,000 tons of hay, grown on farms valued at $3,300,000,000, upon which were used implements costing $153,000,000, and stocked with live animals valued at $544,000,000.
But while American hands were thus busy through the half-century, American heads were not idle or unproductive. Of course in numbers political writings led, as political discussion is the intellectual bread and butter of Americans. Histories of many of the States—of Connecticut, by Benjamin Trumbull; of Pennsylvania, by Robert Proud; of New England, by Hannah Adams; “Annals of America,” by Dr. Abiel Holmes, father of the many-tongued, myriad-sided Oliver Wendell, and others—gathered up the variously colored skeins of the busy-fingered past; while lives of eminent statesmen—Patrick Henry’s, by the accomplished Wirt, laus laudato viro; of Columbus, by Irving, himself a discoverer of new worlds in America; Washington’s, Franklin’s, Adams’s, and others, by Jared Sparks; and a long catalogue of others—presented pictures of rare personal daring, heroism, patriotism, learning, and worth, set in choicely carved and polished frames.
Investigations in, and sketches of, our physical geography and of the natural history of our flora, fauna, reptilia, fishes, and birds, by Professor Barton, Alexander Wilson, John J. Audubon, Samuel L. Mitchell, Timothy Flint, and kindred minds, brought out, in lights as brilliant as our October sunsets, our wide surfaces, and the objects crawling, flitting, or flying upon and over them. In sacred literature, theology, and polemics, Samuel Miller, Edward Robinson, Moses Stuart, William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, Nicholas Murray, the Wares (father and son), Theodore Parker, the Alexanders, George Bush, Edward Beecher, and a marshalled host of others, upheld by logical force and with learned or lively dialectics the cherished views of their various sects. Philosophy, moral, mental, metaphysical, and international, spoke golden-mouthed and eloquent its reasoned rules, principles, and large, grasping deductions through Henry James, Tayler Lewis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Asa Mahan, C. S. Henry, L. P. Hickok, Henry Wheaton, and other diligent minds; while language was enriched and fertilized by the culturing labors of Worcester, Webster, Marsh, Schoolcraft, and Duponceau.
In general literature our hemisphere sparkled with fixed stars, like Irving, Prescott, Story, the Everetts (Alexander and Edward), Cooper, Motley, Ticknor, Bancroft, Paulding, Hawthorne, Hillard, Wilde, Legarè, and uncounted more, which lit it up with beautiful lights, that blent their flames with the soft poetic rays of Bryant, Longfellow, Halleck, Whittier, Saxe, Lowell, Poe, Willis, Hillhouse, the Careys, the Davidson sisters,—scarcely shown ere they were snatched away,
“Ostendent terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra Esse sinent.”
Magazines and Reviews, although first appearing in 1745, began to be cultivated about 1815 by scholarly minds, for refined readers. “The North American Review,” “The American Quarterly,” “Southern Quarterly,” “The Christian Examiner,” “The New York Review,” “The Knickerbocker,” and eager crowds of less note, presented, ere the half-shell was cast aside, such palatable relishes that people wondered how they had ever contrived to make a meal without them.
On the whole, looking over the multiform bill of fare, it presented a healthy and not discreditable array. If the service was not as faultless as a Sybarite luxury of taste might desire, or if absent, might criticise, it was not destitute of refinement, and while consciously susceptible of improvement, was as consciously guiltless of many of the sins so wittily summarized against it by Sidney Smith. There was, doubtless, veal too young for the goggle-eyed epicure, who had haunted the Trois Freres Provencaux, in Paris, for twoscores of years, and the dishonest debaucheries of European courts, with vicious diligence; there was manifestly beef too much done for the dyspeptically over-fed stomach, too critical to enjoy, too weak to digest, anything hearty; there was pork here and there in the place of pheasants’ hearts and nightingales’ tongues; there were plump joints, which stood where foreign-fed stomachs might have preferred to find some rare, unpronounceable dish, some New-found-land estray, smothered in the sudden tides of French sauces, and, there were, also certain culinary anachronisms that had, by an uncalculating liberality—so abundant in America—piled themselves thoughtlessly on the great half-shell,—a blue-pouted oyster, for example, in a month destitute of an r and of ar-oma, or sweetmeats and sweetbreads for breakfast. Still, there was a very lavish spread, out of which a reasonable foreigner or an un-Europeanized native might pick a good deal, before he churlishly finished his meal on vinegar, or pettishly gave himself up to sugared water.
CHAPTER XV.
THE BEGINNING OF STRIFE; OR, THE TAYLOR AND FILLMORE WEBBING.
1849–1853.
The Young Polka Dancer becomes Floor Manager.—The large Apples of Discord emptied on the Floor of Congress.—What they were; and the Pacific Trees from which they fell.—Of California, New Mexico, and Deseret.—General Taylor’s Death, and Mr. Fillmore’s suave Manners and smooth Appeals.—Wendell Phillips and J. Davis.—Political Nurses and Anodynes.—Kossuth and his Short Catechism.—How it did not take, and how he did.—A large Piece of Japanned Ware.—Deaths of Clay and Webster.—The Autumn Glory which they shed on a Stormy Season.
The young man who, in Texas and Mexico, had got through the polka to the delight of the spectators, and the discontent of the floor committee, became himself the general manager for the coming season; Millard Fillmore being first assistant.
Already, however, the apple of discord, or rather a whole barrelful of very red-faced Spitzenbergs, mixed with meal-colored russets, had been emptied into the Union, and rolled over the floor of Congress. The acquisitions, gained from Mexico by arms and the treaty of 1848, including the new gold weights handed up by California, disturbed the adjustments of Mr. Calhoun’s patent balances, which only worked well when a colored State was put on one side at the same moment that an uncolored one was put upon the other,—an operation about as difficult and just as natural, as that which regulates the number of children in a family to the number of bushels of wheat grown in any season, or to the number of windy days in the year. In 1850, three Territories pressed for admission as States, each carrying some of the fatal apples; California, with a Constitution excluding slavery; New Mexico, formed out of Texas, but disputing with her a boundary line; and Utah, then called Deseret, taking in all the women which could be drawn thither, and, by the aid of its dry air, absorbing them into the Smith and Young families. Texas herself, admitted into the Union in December, 1847, always swaggering with a rapier in her belt and a patch over her eye, bullied New Mexico lustily on one side, so as to make lustier claims upon the United States on the other,—a cock-eyed way of shooting that made one barrel with two diverging eyes over the sight do the work of a double-shooter. Petitions from the North for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and from the South for a more stringent fugitive-slave act, rolled very large Spitzenbergs and russets on the floor of Congress.
Looking from the legislative galleries upon the newly arrived heap, a Western stroller might have asked of his comrade, as the freshly landed Irishman demanded of his countrymen, at his first sight of a tortoise walking about, “Be these live snuff-boxes common in these America; be they or be they?” and might have received a like answer, “Be asy, and look on I tell ye, for I dunno’s they be, and I dunno as they be.”
Suddenly, however, Mr. Clay’s old established omnibus, belonging to the compromise line,—which generally took up all the passengers, rejoicing at their good luck, although apt to set them down very discontented at the end of the way,—drove in to carry off in one load all of these fretting, complaining subjects.
Just at this time, July 9, 1850, the large-hearted but short-headed President died, and the polite and urbane Fillmore,
“Washing his hands with invisible soap, In imperceptible water,”
stepped out on the balcony, and, bowing suavely towards the driver and the quarrelsome load, begged Mr. Webster, Mr. Corwin, Mr. Crittenden, and other by-standers, to be good enough to assist in getting the carry-all and the disagreeable objects that kept so many people awake o’ nights, out of Washington. It was not until September, however, before the tightly crammed vehicle was started, carrying California in a State suit, unattended by a colored servant, New Mexico, and Utah as Territorial passengers, with the liberty of having bronzed property or not along with them, slavers taken out of the District of Columbia never to return, a chest containing ten million dollars for the State with a patch on its eye, and messengers to the Northern free States, informing them that hereafter they were to break up all underground railroads, and to send stray Southern baggage, without its owners, back whence it had departed.
Of course everybody was dissatisfied, except Wendell Phillips, J. Davis, and their following,—the ascendentalists and descendentalists,—who, sincere devotees for equality and inequality, found a novel pleasure in having new stand-points, from which they could each look up to or down upon, a grievance large enough for thought, speech, and action.
The political nurses, of course, thought that the paregoric had forever quieted the crying evils; but wiser people foresaw that these attempts to get remedies for wide-awake consciences and interests out of a Congress-water bottle were just as idle as the conjurer’s trick to obtain whiskey, wine cordial, brandy, and milk-punch from the same nozzle.
In 1851 Louis Kossuth, brought over from Turkey, whither he had escaped from Hungary in a national ship, put forth, immediately on his arrival here, a very short catechism, which comprised a single question and answer.
“Q. What is the chief end of Americans?
“A. To fight Austria evermore.”
After spending most eloquent commentaries upon this brief compendium of duty, in which he braided newly spun English words and upbraided American indifference, he abandoned the missionary field, leaving a large Kossuth party, but a very small body of proselytes to Kossuth’s gospel.
In 1852 we obtained an immensely large piece of japanned ware,—a Japanese treaty bargained for by Commodore Perry,—a piece which seems to grow larger the longer we look at it.
The death of Mr. Clay in June, 1852, and of Mr. Webster in October following, left, like the touch of frost in autumn, a dying glory to the troubled and storm-swept season which had just passed over America.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE UNION PIERCED; OR, PIERCE’S TURN.
1853–1857.
Reference, by Believers in the Transmigration of Souls, to Mr. Pierce for its Proof.—His real and apparent Age.—The Slave Colossal Figure bestrides the Presidential Harbor.—How the New President rode in between its Legs, and cast out a curious Anchor.—An Antediluvian Cabinet.—Still Times expected.—Sudden Freshet.—Douglas breaks the Missouri Dike.—Bitter Waters over the Land.—Alarm among the Elderly Gentlemen, and how quieted by J. Davis.—Alarm North and South not quieted.—The African Outlook towards the North Pole.—The Power of Douglas illustrated from his Scotch Namesake and Proverb.—What Warriors rushed to our Flanders.—The Blow on the Head of Sumner and Slavery from Brooks’s Cane.—The Dred Scott Essays.—American Africanization.—An Exploring Party in the Interior.—Discovery of an Extinct Race, and of Fremont.—Undiked Waters not strong enough to float Douglas into a Nomination.—Buchanan in the Dock.—The Know-Nothings make a neat little Present to a Polite Gentleman.
Believers in the doctrine of transmigration of souls point to Franklin Pierce for its triumphant demonstration. Although by ordinary reckoning but forty-nine years old when, in March, 1853, he came out of New Hampshire to be President of the United States, he must have lived—so they assert—somewhere through several previous existences and brought along with him the last time the cherished notions of the first. Certainly he was as much of an anachronism as a two-handled plough, dragged by a yoke of oxen, contrasted with a steam one driving its hot shares through dissolving acres, an undecked Roman trireme rowed against an iron-breasted monitor armed with the heaviest modern gun, or an old-fashioned scythe in comparison with a mower.
His ideas of government were scant for a good-sized town, and of slavery so patriarchal, that a Red River planter might have taken several lessons from him with great profit.
Slavery at that time, like the colossal statue of Apollo at Rhodes, stood with its two feet widely apart. Its right was planted in the commercial cities of the North, covered with a huge stocking of Northern manufacture; its left, spread out like Sambo’s, all over the Gulf States, was carefully enwrapped with raw cotton. Between its wide-spread legs Mr. Pierce, like an ancient mariner, sailed into the harbor, and cast out an anchor, forged at Baltimore, or it may be at Nineveh, with an inscription on its best fluke, “No agitation about slavery.” It might as well have been inscribed, “No more thinking.”
He asked several elderly gentlemen to help him have a good quiet time: William L. Marcy, with the portfolio of State; James Guthrie, incubating the snug little Treasury nest; Jefferson Davis, with the appropriate red-lettered War rifle; Caleb Cushing, holding the Attorney-General’s fool’s-cap brief; Robert McClelland, bringing an oaken inlaid table for the Interior; and James Campbell, an old-fashioned letter-weigher.
They expected to have a good antediluvian time of it, as Mr. Clay’s compromise carry-all had transported into the wilderness the bad-looking lot which had broken into the peace of the gentlemanly Fillmore. Mr. Buchanan was sent away to England, and some restless engineers somewhere toward the Pacific,—a pleasant-sounding place far away out West,—to get up a report on a railroad which might amuse the young people to read in the long winter evenings.
Suddenly, however, all of these serene prospects were clouded. The great shield, constructed by the Democratic Convention to hang in front of the venerable President, and to prevent agitation, was found, in spite of its solid-looking face, to be pierced on the inside by impertinent little teredos, whose ceaseless boring had already begun to weaken its resisting power. Other mariners wished to sail in between the cotton-covered feet. And in January, 1854, one of these Presidential seamen, from Illinois, named Stephen A. Douglas, leaped ashore on a bluff point just outside the harbor, exclaiming with great lung power that “every Territory had a right to do as it chose about slavery.” This declaration from a Democratic friend startled the elderly party not a little; but when that friend rose to a higher pitch and shouted that the Missouri Compromise line of 1821 which kept slavery from all territory north of 36° 30´, was unconstitutional, and leaping upon the solid old dike, with bill and blow, crashed through it, letting out the bitter waters of strife to flood with its pent-up strength all the wide land, the antediluvian party started to their feet in great alarm. When, however, Mr. Davis whispered to the President that this was only undoing a modern wrong, and restoring ancient rights, that venerable gentleman folded his arms and sat down contented.
Looking out upon the freshet, the bewildered Africans seemed to feel that their only refuge was the north pole, now that even the wilds of Kansas and Nebraska furnished only markets for their higher-priced bodies. For a time the “little Douglas” appeared to look as large as the colossus itself. He seemed to be as powerful in American politics as the family of his Scottish namesake, which after intermarrying eleven times with the royal stocks of England and Scotland, became so resistless as to start the proverb, “No man may touch a Douglas, nor a Douglas man, for if he do he is sure to come by the waur” (worse).
But the broad-wasting flood, poured out from the cleft dike, soon sent an alarm throughout the North, and inspired terror among even the conscientious of the South. To protect slavery—however repugnant—where it existed in the old States was felt very universally in the North to be a duty imposed by law, equity, and good neighborhood; but to batter down a barrier which had been erected by both North and South, every timber in which had been paid for by a price given and accepted, shook nearly all consciences into sad action. Wherever the waters swept there were land-slides from Democratic grounds. The shield against agitation now crumbled like the stricken dike.
Kansas became another Flanders, where pikes, knives, and pistols were carried at the plough, into private houses, through villages, and into conventions. They were ever-present adjectives to the noun “man.” As in the tropics, whirlwinds rush in towards the sun’s hot path, so towards Kansas from Missouri swept advocates of slavery with bullets for the settler and brands for his dwelling; from New England long-haired men and short-haired women, ready all, some anxious, to be offered up for the cause of freedom; from the Middle and Western States sharp, bayonet-faced, earnest crusaders to rescue the threatened sacred ground and to throw down the bronze statues and statutes. On the path of these hot streams backward soon lay the scorched and burnt relics of slavery in Kansas.
To slavery in the United States a moral blow was dealt by the cane of Preston S. Brooks, aimed May 22, 1856, at the undefended head of Senator Sumner, which had a few days before opened to express in emphatic words its owner’s ideas about African barbarism in America. This appropriate practical illustration of the argument was visible everywhere, and became more potent than any books from or in behalf of the running Brooks.
The cane given to the chivalrous Carolinian was a poor straw which did not show the way the winds blew.
Still another blow was given by the Dred Scott opinion of a majority of the Supreme Court, which advised the people in choice legal terms that the dike was rightfully cut; that men with dark skins had no rights which those with light ones need pay any attention to; and that uncolored owners might take ebony bipeds along with their quadrupeds into any State in any part of the Union without getting them out of an unpaid state.
This Africanization brought out a new party,—called the Republican,—for keeping the Territories free. Several political missionaries, benevolently inclined towards our continent, started on trips into the interior of America, bent, like Dr. Livingstone, on exploring regions almost surrendered, like Africa, to the descendants of Ham. The result was the discovery of a race, deemed almost extinct, who actually believed that colored men might live unowned, and that Territories, where slavery did not exist, would get along better without than with it.
This party discovered John C. Fremont, and set him up as a candidate. Of course some people thought that his election would fracture the Union, which, they believed, was held together by gum-bo.
The undiked waters would not float Mr. Douglas up to a two-thirds vote for the Presidential nomination. Mr. Buchanan, buoyed up by Southern corks, reached the dock. The Know-Nothings took up the polite Fillmore, and gratified him with a present of the neat but useless eight votes of Maryland.
CHAPTER XVII.
COTTON-SEEDS SPROUT; OR, BUCHANAN’S ADMINISTRATION.
1857–1861.
The new Missionary Party and its Growth.—Character of Mr. Buchanan, and his Want of Same.—Description of curious Drawers in his Cabinet.—The Uses of Isaac Toucey.—The Lecompton Constitution, and how it fell together.—African Order of the Woolly Fleece.—The Mormon Magic-Lantern, and its Shows.—What Minnesota brought into the Union; and how a Long-fellow raised a Fall.—The War of the Illinois Giants.—Abraham Lincoln described.—Self-made Men; their Self-ishness and Unsymmetrical Characters.—Mr. Lincoln’s Growth and Character illustrated.—Mr. Douglas delineated.—Presidential Bonfires, Tar-Barrels, and Oratory.—A Spectre in Virginia; his Body swinging, his Soul marching on.—A live Coal on the Southern Heart.—What the Democratic Convention was asked to solve, and what it re-solved. Heads I win, Tails I don’t lose.—Breckenridge as a rare Prize-Taker.—The Missionary Party makes a Nomination.—New Lights and Shadows.—An original Recipe for threatened Political Apoplexy.—A sudden Convention in South Carolina.—Its mysterious Origin and Dark Ways.—A Chaotic Message.—Of different Secession Ordinances; and Want of Federal Ordnance.—Political Strikers described.—General Cass and a Broken Heart.—John B. Floyd skedaddles, chased by an Indictment.—General Anderson.—Fort Sumter breaks the Cabinet.—The Confederate Government and Flag made.—Their Composition.—History and Character of J. Davis.—Where Mr. Buchanan went March 4, 1861.
The votes for Fremont were 1,341,264, against 1,838,169 for James Buchanan, and showed how successful the missionaries had been, and the rapid growth of the tribe recently discovered and distinctly un-extinct.
Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Buchanan was not so much the representative of a past age, as the gristled type of unboned nothings. He was unorganized chaos, without any personal will to bring it into useful form, swinging through a blind menstruum of thin party air, lit up only by small fire-flies, that left a deeper darkness behind their quickly quenched and shifting sparks. His Cabinet was of course a bureau with no two drawers alike. Its principal one, Lewis Cass, was of rosewood, well seasoned, beautifully grained and polished. The money-drawer, Mr. Cobb, was of bird’s-eye maple, with eyes enough in it to see all ways. Lower down was one of lignum vitæ, hard and tough, John B. Floyd, with a knot-hole in the rear part by which access was had to the drawer above, full of metallic corn shelled off the Treasury cob. Below this was one of soft pine, full of treacherous, punky spots, Jacob Thompson, of and from the Interior. And still lower, Isaac Toucey, brought on from Hartford, Connecticut, looking like a Dismal Swamp cedar, quite unfit for navy purposes, or in fact for aught but the flanges of a dredging-machine, working up stagnant fever-and-ague channels.
The cotton-seeds, so widely planted by Douglas, J. Davis, Brooks, Taney, A. H. Stephens, and others, during the preceding four years, now sprouted up in vigorous shoots. A Constitution, hastily shaken together by self-made delegates, mostly from Missouri, riding in foamy haste to Lecompton, was tied with a very black cord and sent to Washington, to be indorsed as a good thing for Kansas. Mr. Douglas struck it with his dike-cleaver; but Mr. J. Davis, J. M. Mason, John Slidell,—booted Knights of the African Order of the Woolly Fleece,—re-tied the severed strings and lifted it through the halls of Congress.
A MORMON FAMILY OUT FOR A WALK. (p. 451) ]
Meanwhile, the Mormons in Utah, getting up a sort of magic-lantern show of a rebellion,—outlining on the rocky walls of the Salt Lake basin, the shadowy procession of females looking defiantly at United States cannon and canons,—caused a momentary diversion from the new and growing question of a single Union.
The next year, 1858, Minnesota, first penetrated by La Salle in 1680, a year before William Penn stood, for the first time, on the future site of Philadelphia, was brought in as a State, giving us St. Paul as a northwestern Cuba for consumptives, Fort Snelling for gamblers in public lands, and the rather low Falls of Minnehaha to be raised by a Long-fellow into a lofty iridescence, whose rainbow strands have been woven into heavenly fabrics in so many delighted households, American, European, and Asiatic. On paper it is poetically higher by many feet, iambic and trochean, than Niagara, or even the Falls of the Yosemite.
The same year witnessed in Illinois the war of the giants for the vacant Senatorship. The two Anaks were the dike-breaker and one Abraham Lincoln, then forty-nine years old, whose various residences in different States, in Kentucky, his birthplace, in Indiana and Illinois, had taught him the value of the Union; and whose arm, sinewy with labor, and made more vigorous by his largely pumping heart, dealt blows which resounded sharply and broadly beyond the prairie fields which saw the encounter.
A self-made man is too common an object in America to excite or deserve special attention; and most self-made men, so called, are distressingly selfish, unsymmetrical, and one-sided,—poor jobs abandoned by all creators but themselves. Even if they did not proclaim their self-structure to all, every one would at once recognize it by its disjointed architecture. Mr. Lincoln was an exception. More strictly speaking, he was rather a growth than a creation. In his steadily increasing gentle greatness, he reminds one of those slender rills which hesitatingly creep out from some modest, unvisited nook in the Alleghanies, noiselessly finds its way many unnoticed miles, until it begins to glint between cleared farmsteads, and swells slowly into a broad stream, whose brawny shoulders turn with ease mills and factories along its beneficent course. Then gathering volume, depth, and power, it upbears barges, into which whole districts have emptied their rich cornucopias, and pleasure-boats, gay with genial tourists; while along its great triumphal sea-ward march villages, towns, and cities clap their hands with admiring joy. Mr. Douglas is the same low-born rill, which soon, however, swells into the hurrying torrent, clattering over jagged rocks, between bold, mountain-ribbed canyons, jarring the earth with its audacious plunges, shaking defiantly its foamed way through gaps and rent gashes, until it hurls its massed waters over fields which it sweeps with disastrous grandeur.
Although the popular vote in Illinois was in Mr. Lincoln’s favor, the legislative ballots were for his contestant. The new questions now illuminated newspapers, platforms, and domestic hearthstones.
Bonfires, colored lights, and pyrotechnic displays of oratory soon lit up the whole Union, and through the varied flames ever interplayed the figure of the African.
Suddenly, in the autumn of 1859, through the lurid light was thrust a gaunt, resolute, earnest-looking form, with a face calm with long excitement, over whose lines ran the savage history of Kansas murders and house-burnings, fatal shots from border rifles at well-loved sons, midnight escapes from Lecompton riders, and years of hunted violence and wrong. From the close-shut jaws,—seldom opened now except for food, for brief prayer before some new raid, or for an imprecation wrenched out by some cruel recollection,—come no sounds. Across the bridge at Harper’s Ferry, through the scared streets of that little garrisoned place, and next into the jail it stalks. Then it flits into court, calmer than the personated Justice, and then, marched between files of soldiers, to fence off a phantom invasion, it mounts the scaffold. An old man, with a grim smile stranded on the iron rim of his lips, swings in Virginia air, and—John Brown’s soul goes marching on.
On the Southern heart this Quixotic invasion by a mistaken, personally injured father, maddened by the losses of his sons, and unjustifiably wreaking his individual injuries on a community innocent of any wrong to him, laid a live, inflaming coal.
In April, 1860, the Democratic Convention met at Charleston. Some gentlemen asked that body to declare its belief that the Union, having been got up principally to hold Africans in an unpaid condition, any uncolored owner could, by virtue of the laws of his own State, take these bronze-colored bipeds,—always diffusing a bad odor unless to their proprietors,—to any Territory. Not holding such a notion, the Convention declined to make the declaration, but, on the contrary, asserted that each Territory was competent to deal with the matter as it saw fit. The question, thus resolved, was not of course to the minority satisfactorily solved.
Following a convenient practice, deemed by some persons, unschooled in such things, a little uncommon among gentlemen, of getting, if possible, a decision favorable to their views which shall bind the minority, and if unsuccessful repudiating the adverse decision as affecting them, the delegates of six bronze-statued States left the unreasonable party, carrying a banner with a dimly seen inscription, “Heads I win, tails you lose, or, tails I win, heads you lose.” The convention, thus treated to Breckinridge principles, adjourned to meet in June at Baltimore.
Meanwhile, in May, the missionary party, reinforced by numerous converts, assembled and chose the Anak of Illinois as their leader. In June the widowed Democratic Convention reassembled; but only to split up into two family divisions, the one nominating the dike-breaker, the other John C. Breckenridge, then Vice-President, and destined in a few years to take, not the Presidency, but the very first prize for a character which total depravity is occasionally permitted to offer, lest fiction may invent a combination that shall outstrip reality.
Of course the Drummond lights now burned brighter. Tar and oratory illumined corner groceries and open-air meetings. Small men, set to the large honor of presiding over these gatherings, which in an hour or two settled “the most stupendous questions that freemen were ever called to meet,” became apoplectic, and were only saved to their country by an application at the nearest bar-room of a remedy reduced to a prescription in which
Aqua-vitæ 92 parts, Aqua-pura ½ part, Saccharum 7½ parts, ——— restored them to par, or 100 proof.
When in November, 1860, the lights were put out, it appeared that Mr. Lincoln had received 180, Mr. Breckenridge 72, Mr. Bell 39, and the Douglas 12 electoral votes. There were 130,773 more ballots cast even at the South against Mr. Breckenridge than in his favor. His opinion of the Union, for which he had run out of breath to be President, was now, of course, very unfavorable; but as it was balanced by its kindred opinion of him, he was under no obligation to confirm its judgment by taking the first prize soon after offered to him.
South Carolina, which had often been outvoted before, only waited this time four days—not stopping long enough to see if she was hurt, or how the heads-and-tails flag would look—before calling a convention which more Cariolense substantially resolved that the Union had broken the Union, and that the people who voted differently from South Carolina were unconstitutional, and ergo, that she might have her own Constitution and by-laws. She had helped to rule the roast so long that she could not think of taking turns now.
Congress met in December, 1860. Of course John C. Breckenridge was on hand. To him the Union was a good thing so long as he could preside over its representatives. While caucusing nights against it, he could sit in daylight to administer oaths—and even to take them—to support it.
The message was full of unginned cotton-seeds vigorously sprouting. It charged the attempted burglary of the Union safe, not on the burglars, but upon its owners. It chided the people for having done wrong in electing an Anak so absurd as not to agree with South Carolina on the little dark-skinned question; proposed several Africanizing amendments to the Federal Constitution, and then floundered into the author’s chronic chaos; seeming at one moment to believe that a State could not secede, then again that it rather could; then, that if it did, it ought not to; but then if it ought not to, who could prevent it if it did; and if it did not, why the fire-flies did not hold out their little lanterns long enough to light him, or in fact any one else that he knew of, across the miry place.
The old hickory-tree had manifestly been chopped down and a very spongy bass-wood had been substituted in the Federal grounds.
During January, 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana somehow did something, in some way, somewhere, by somebody,—as did Texas in the month of February following,—which was claimed by the head-and-tails party in the South, as indicating the popular conviction that Sambo was the only proper object of care by Uncle Sam; that they fancied from what they suspected that the Anak Abraham would not carry their pet lamb in his bosom as it had been carried; and that therefore the family was played out. These mysterious, inexplicable somethings, by somebody, somewhere and somehow, were gravely labelled “Ordinances of Secession.” Certain it is, that in not one of these States, except in Texas, were the people consulted about or called to ratify these very grave resolves. Having only three months before voted against their incarnation,—the prize-taker,—it is to be presumed that they would hold to the same beliefs still, in the absence of any act or deed on the part of the Anak to induce a change of opinion.
The uncomic truth is, that in this case, as in so many others which have occurred or are occurring in our political history, these overwhelmingly large questions—upon which hang so many lives, so much happiness or suffering, such accumulated stores of hard-earned savings and character—were undertaken to be answered by a few cunning, selfish, dishonest, narrow-headed politicians, audaciously presuming upon what they ignorantly called leadership,—in the absence of men engaged in more honest work, of clearer head and better instincts,—who, idle hands in a country where all just men are busy, too proud to work, too poor to live without the proceeds of others’ labor, ever restless and intriguing for luxurious places and foremost positions, find that, by getting up a strike, they can preside, officer, talk to, and become prominent at assemblages of arrested workmen, and live from their accumulated fund.
Disturbed, as well they might be, by these mysterious ordinances, forged by these mischievous idlers, an assemblage of white-headed and unwisely patriotic gentlemen met at Washington to get rid of them. Ordnance would undoubtedly have affected it, but ordnance was not to be thought of by those who were recommending cotton-sprouts and hopelessly tramping after fire-flies.
Some of the Southern Senators gathered up their dark robes, and loftily chaffing their Northern associates, strode from the chamber.
There was no ordnance in Washington. Of course John C. Breckenridge did not yet follow them; it was more profitable to him and the ordinance parties to stay.
John B. Floyd dispersed our little army of 16,000 men into small squads far away from the ordnance-makers. He knew that the cotton-sprouts would grow better unshaded by bayonets. On land there was no ordnance where it was needed.
General Robert Anderson, of Southern birth, was, in the autumn of 1860, assigned to Charleston Harbor, and there left with only 80 men to the presumed magnetic attractions of that affirmative place. To these his patriotism declined to be drawn. December 26, 1860, he removed from Fort Moultrie to Sumter, two miles farther off from the magnets. For eight months preceding, Mr. Floyd had sent heaps of muskets and ammunition, as desirable compost for the cotton-sprouts. Isaac Toucey, of Hartford, Connecticut, of a cold temperament, and from a cool latitude, thought the health of naval officers might suffer from the heats of Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, St. Augustine, Mobile, and New Orleans, and so ordered our ships to rove in distant seas.
There was, therefore, no ordnance off the seaboard.
The little garrison at Fort Sumter now became the pivot of the Union. Around the question of its reinforcement the Cabinet swung and went to pieces. General Cass, who had broken his sword before surrendering it to those who sought to prevent our Union, now broke his heart over the attempts of those who sought to shiver it in pieces. He was succeeded by Jeremiah S. Black, a gentleman devoted to the black family when enchained, indifferent to them when free. Floyd, one of the ring-leaders in the strike, skedaddled to Virginia, followed in his rapid journey by an indictment for having connived at the withdrawal of $870,000 worth of bonds from Jacob Thompson’s loosely managed Interior. His place was taken by the unbelieving Thomas, of Maryland, who soon became tangled by his want of faith, and was succeeded by General Dix, who had more confidence in guns than in Dixie.
THE SKEDADDLE OF JOHN B. FLOYD. (p. 461) ]
On the 4th of February, 1861, the en-gulfed States and South Carolina sent some delegates—chosen also somehow, somewhere, by somebody, in some way unknown—to Montgomery, Alabama, to a convention, where the leading strikers of course got upon the platform, and had the principal chairs. They proceeded forthwith to concoct that first-class patent medicine for all supposed ills, a constitution. In the composition of this draught radex Africanus largely entered. It was to be poured out by slaves, and taken every waking hour. A separate government, called the Confederate, was set up by these somehow delegates.
A flag was also devised, not in consonance with the avowed object of its bearers, namely,—a colored man saddled and running like an unpaid, tireless velocipede with a white rider in the seat working its shackled, eccentric way,—but with stars and bars,—stars rayless as night, and bars destined to be very sinister to the Southern hopes, and eventually to be leaped and beaten down by spirited Northern trampers.
To be President of this African Commonwealth, the mysteriously elected delegates invited J. Davis, who was as ready to say yes as the old maid who had done the courting for a series of years. Of a metaphysical turn of mind,—a turn around which all State rights arguments wind themselves up,—sharp-visaged, lean of muscle, leaner of conscience, and leanest of veracity, he had, after being educated at the government expense at West Point, tracked office with a faultless scent, shown much pluck during the Black Hawk and Mexican wars, gnawed the bone of repudiation in Mississippi, and was now ready to bay at Federal flocks wherever they appeared. Like John Brown, Stonewall Jackson, and those hard Scotch fighters who prayed before the direst slaughters, he was most devout just before writing those calm-looking, philosophy-streaked messages, which massacred truth with a glaived hand, and shamed fiction by the recital of atrocities which had no foundation, except at Andersonville and in the Libby Prison at Richmond.
While these active heats were raging on the edges of the government, cold chaos brooded at the centre. Through the rank growth of cotton, threatening to overtop everything national, only fire-flies still.
At last the weary days vanished. Fourth of March came, and Mr. B. went away—to his own place.
CHAPTER XVIII.
OUR NEWER NATIONAL ALBUM.
The Second Generation of our Great Men nearer in Time but not in Affection.—Several sufficient Reasons therefor.—Ingenious Biographers confusing our Verdicts over old Offenders.—A Latin Quotation to prove an Original Remark.—Why we should not stick to old Opinions.—Sketches of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster.—Parallels do not always run at equal Distances.—Three Fates.—Original Anecdote of Webster.—Of Lewis Cass and Thomas H. Benton.—Why double-chinned Persons are satisfactory.—The Plutocrats Girard and Astor; how they made Fortunes, and how much.—John Marshall as a Judge, and John Trumbull as a Painter.—Albert Gallatin skims American Cream.—Rembrandt Peale and Washington Allston described.—Why Felix Grundy, S. S. Prentiss, J. J. Crittenden, Samuel Houston, D. D. Tompkins, and Others, were like Shoots grafted upon hardy Native Stocks.—The Senate illuminated by J. M. Berrien, S. L. Southard, W. C. Preston, etc., Legaré, and Butler.—A full-length Portrait of Winfield Scott.—Irving delineated.—Drake, Halleck, and Paulding.—Fenimore Cooper descanted upon.—Science illustrated by Silliman, Hare, and Rush.—Descriptions of Prescott, Mrs. Sedgwick, Greenough, and Hawthorne.—How well the Second Set persuaded the Eighteenth Century over into the Nineteenth.
Between the death of Washington and the middle of the nineteenth century grew up a second and numerous generation of great men. Although nearer to us in time, they are not so near to our affections as the elder set. Most of this younger race some of us have seen; and they have thus lost a certain historic grandeur and magnified proportion, always lent by hazy distance to far-off objects. Most of them have been the subjects of newspaper attack, of conversational controversy, of party assault and defence equally damaging, and so have become doubtfully, perhaps disagreeably, familiar. Many of them have been brought into the jurisdiction of our partisan praises and censures for offences against our political principles or passing tastes. Some have been despatched thence with Arizona justice, others by New York equity. Now we have reluctantly dismissed some with Scotch verdicts of “not proven,” with lurking suspicions more injurious than a positive Saxon condemnation of “guilty”; and anon, we have banished others to the penal settlements of our criminal domain.
Ingenious biographers, taking up characters hitherto surrendered to the public executioner, asking for reviews of judgments alleged to be hasty, and setting forth, in an attractive way, features which even criminals share with the unindicted and facts unstained, perhaps, with the one great crime which slew their reputations, have recently argued for new trials with a convincing sophistry that few can resist after dinner, and which captivates by its audacious novelty. All of us have discovered what Tacitus long ago so tersely expressed,—our readiness to listen to scandal, and our proneness to praise ourselves for our leniency to the maligned:—
“Livor et obtrectatio pronis auribus accipiuntur; quippe adulationi fœdum crimen servitutis, malignitati falsa species libertatis inest.”
If the puzzled are generally unsafe, the censorious are usually unfair judges.
Members of the same family, too, are among each other as likely to do injustice to a fellow-member by their jealous criticisms, as they are apt before strangers to make themselves and their fellows ridiculous by undiscriminating praise.
Over many mounds in our national cemetery the time-stains are growing very dark and the moss thick and undisturbed. As we wander among these with lips less pressed and stern, with perhaps a feeling of repenting forgiveness, slow though it be, towards those from whom politically or otherwise we have differed, and with occasional touches of tenderness, reluctant though at first they may come, for those who nobly erred, if err they did, straining for the right but missing it from the dimness of the light which they carried, let us be sure that in strolling often amid these head-stones, we shall thereby and thereafter be better prepared, by turning out our lower selves, to turn over profitably and pleasantly the pages of our newer National Album which holds a few of their portraits. If on its first leaves we are confronted by the faces of those whose lineaments—like Clay’s, Calhoun’s, Webster’s, Grundy’s, Van Buren’s, Quincy Adams’s, Jackson’s, and others—are associated with watch-words that touch party animosities that were born in us we know not how or when, and survive we know not why, we can, at least, learn to be justly proud of what has floated out from the drift-wood and dirty foam of ephemeral politics, which now no longer conceal their sturdy and solid timber growths.
CLAY, CALHOUN, and WEBSTER! How much good ink was thrown uselessly away in bespattering them with blame or praise for the half-century during which they actively and industriously braided the public history of America through their triple biographies. Of this triumvirate, Mr. Clay was born in 1777, the two others five years later; Mr. Calhoun received the baptism of death in 1850, two years before his life-long competitors. They were the three American Fates, holding the distaff, the thread, and the shears of its history and administration. Utterly dissimilar in the place and circumstances of their births, educations, trainings, cultures, and courses, they yet supplied for each other the only parallels over that wide tract of time through which their prolonged lives reached.
In the House and in the Senate, sometimes on the same side, but oftener congenially opposed, yet ever divided from each other by rival ambitions, they ennobled the scenes in which they spent such large forces. The American Titans, they tossed heavy bars of logic with such ease, wrestled with such matching-power and balanced success, that we, growing up to the gigantic spectacles, almost lose the consciousness of the unwonted masteries that have so grandly played before us. And yet, somehow, for all this, comparatively little love gathers in our hearts as we look at those well-remembered faces; the large, continental visage of Henry Clay, mapping a hemisphere of vast thoughts and generous though partisan currents of action; the lofty sternness of John C. Calhoun, cast in a Cato-like mould, heroic and defiant; and the square-blocked, cubical, almost repulsive mass, outlined into the head of Daniel Webster, which looks, or rather is looked at, as if it had for several centuries capped the pyramid of Cheops, and had been finally taken down with state ceremonies and transplanted by the Pasha to America, as a testimony of his conception of our large exceptional growth.
THE INTELLIGENT JURY. (p. 468) ]
Sadder than a professed comedy or a prepared funeral oration over a rich but bad man is the unsatisfied ambition of such tough athletes in the political arena, who, after a long life of great rough play, break up into common earth, and form the subjects for Commencement day or prize compositions in an open grove, where young ladies in white, bound in blue-belting-ribbons, summon their uneasy ghosts before the dull-eyed umpires. From what a cold well-depth sprang to the curb of Webster’s lips those soliloquizing words which, a few days before his death, overflowed from a disappointed life. Sitting in an open doorway at Marshfield, propped up by pillows, he looked out upon his favorite herd of cattle, which were driven up for the last inspection of their attached owner. As the fine animals passed and turned their large eyes upon him,—some pausing and looking a fond recollection into his scarcely wasted face,—he ejaculated, as his thoughts turned backward over the slights of party and the disappointments of an unsatisfied life: “I love the honest faces of animals. They look what they mean.”
Arriving in the world the same year with Mr. Webster, Mr. Calhoun, and each other, LEWIS CASS, portly in presence as in learning, varied capacity, and many-sided culture, and THOMAS H. BENTON, as solid as the bullion which a dim tradition mentions as formerly found in these United States, meet us with that full-orbed spherical satisfaction which double-chinned persons are fortunate in imparting, if not of feeling themselves. The “Recollections of Thirty Years in the Senate” would, one would think, be enough to reduce any mortal to very attenuated proportions. Fortunate is the memory of any M. C. which is constructed like a mining-sieve, letting through the superabundant dirt and retaining only the loosely silted ore.
ANDREW JACKSON and JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, destined to be rivals for the Presidency in the fifty-seventh and again in the sixty-first years of their lives, were severally born nine years before the Declaration of Independence. Their lives were as unlike as their faces. The former passed his first score of years in the hard struggles for a livelihood, and mostly amid the scenes made memorable by the cavalry swords of Marion and Sumter and the pen of William Gilmore Sims; the latter spent his in the study of what could best round up a capable mind by discipline and learning, and in the equally advantageous culture derived from the society of his accomplished mother and experienced father. While the stormy incidents of an eventful military life in Florida and Georgia, intercalated with court-martials and official censures, scored in Jackson’s face the notches which, until his death in 1845, kept truthful tally with his warm, violent, generous, resentful, and stern history; over the round, uncreased face of Adams ran the smoothing-iron of literary tastes and pursuits, keeping down the ruffling disturbances of a naturally passionate nature, and the ridges which the excitements from 1824 to 1828, and the antislavery agitations in the latter part of his life, would have otherwise left. Jackson’s virtues deserve signal praise, and Adams’s vices emphatic censure; since the former grew up under circumstances as unfavorable to their existence as a young ladies’ seminary for modesty, or a New York sheriff’s office for integrity; and the latter amid forces as unassailing as a prayer-meeting to piety or sleep to pure thoughts.
Types of American character in many respects are the originals of the two thin-faced portraits to which we next turn,—types in their foreign birth, their obscure social belongings, and their shrewd and successful business ventures,—STEPHEN GIRARD, coming into life in 1750, at Bordeaux, France, as acid as the claret of his native city, and commanding, like it, very profitable prices by transportation to this country, a sailor’s son, and until his nineteenth year himself a sailor; and JOHN JACOB ASTOR, his junior by thirteen years, offspring of a poverty-worried peasant, ushered first into a cabin at Waldorf, near Heidelberg, where black bread and small hopped beer were all that incessant labor could procure. The former lived eighty-one, the latter eighty-five years upon our planet; and by faithfully gathering up from its surface, water and land, from its ships, stores, and offices, and from its furred and unfurred animals, the gains which persistent early rising, industry, and ceaseless penny-turning accumulate, left fortunes, the first of nine, the last of twenty millions of dollars.
“Sic itur ad Astra.”
The Astral-lamp Library, obtained by funds bequeathed by a benefaction, like Girard’s College, appreciative of what its donor had himself missed, sheds its genial light on many a poor scholar’s desk. If each legacy has been somewhat diverted from its testamentary direction, perhaps the best excuse may be found in the reason why married women were not allowed to have their wills after death, because they had them so much while living.
JOHN MARSHALL, to whose unmistakably pure-minded face we turn in safe admiration, was one of those types of leadership, one of those representatives of schools, who, violently liked or disliked when living, has by the touch of death been canonized among the white-robed of the nation. An incarnation, when alive, of Federalism, his ermine has become so white under the fulling of time and by contrast with robes since worn, and his grasp of the judicial balances was, as is now seen, so firm, so unimpassioned and unshaken by a nervous partisanship, that he has already passed into the very small list of judges, whose lofty character, stainless purity, large judicial capacities and force, are like solid cool rocks amid the ever-shifting scenes and temperatures of a varied landscape.
An artist’s head sits manifestly on the shoulders of JOHN TRUMBULL, born in 1756, a year after John Marshall, and living eight years beyond him. At his death in 1843, he left but few as aged. His busy pencil dropped in 1775 for the musket, and, resumed in 1777, has perpetuated in fifty-seven historical pictures, with the fidelity and love of personal friendship, the portraitures of most of the leading actors in the first period of our national story. He was President of the Academy of Fine Arts, from its formation, in 1816, until it gave place, in 1825, to the Academy of Design. His dress, it will be observed, was formally and scrupulously in the mode; his address was as dressy as his wristbands and frills. Quick-eyed mothers would at once, as he took his seat, warn the children, always attracted towards clean vestments, “not to dirty the gentleman’s clothes.”
In 1761 ALBERT GALLATIN was born. Related to Neckar, he seems to have borrowed at the same time much of the financial ability of the French minister, and the ready wit, graceful imagination, and forceful word-power of the minister’s brilliant daughter, Madame de Staël. He crammed eighty-eight years full of remarkable activities, as ambassador to Russia, France, Great Britain, and Holland, as member of Congress, and as a weighty yet captivating and vivacious writer on banks, public credit, currency, and those subjects, ever rising, like cream, on the public pans, which are skimmed by the most skilfully handled ladles.
Turning the page, we meet the thought-bearing faces of REMBRANDT PEALE, born in 1778, and below, that of his brother artist, WASHINGTON ALLSTON, the American Paul Veronese, who, Peale’s junior by a year, ceased his earthly work in 1853, seven years before him. The serenity of congenial pursuits gilds their portraitures, and lingers like an aureola around their heads. Upon Allston’s face there seems spread a listening look, as if straining to catch far-off notes, mingled with that gentle hush and composure, as if stilled by that music so subtily described by Wordsworth, which
“Born of murmuring sound, had passed into his face.”
A tree does not show more markedly than man the results of ancestral care, wealth, and leisurely culture. Numerous are the faces and histories scattered all through our national album, which are signalized by a curious mixture of original forest wildness and park growths newly begun, cultivated shoots grafted upon hardy native stocks, and giving off large unsymmetrically shaped fruits,—fruits less sour than the natural, but less genial, plump, mellow, and blooming than the full-nursed growth. Of these were, in oratory, FELIX GRUNDY, whose exposed youth shot up on the wilderness frontier of Kentucky, where “death was in almost every bush, and an ambuscade in every thicket,” and who attained, in Tennessee, a large altitude and breadth; SARGEANT S. PRENTISS, transplanted from among the pines of Maine to the coarse richness of a Mississippi soil, and through whose waving tops swept sometimes the storm of invective, sometimes the æolian strains of tenderest, soul-trembling breathings; JOHN J. CRITTENDEN, a farmer’s boy, born in 1785, whose prickly logic sheathed, like a burr, the smooth-meated chestnut; and, among statesmen, Samuel Houston of Texas, shaggy-barked, yet with much tasselling wealth of flower at the top; DANIEL D. TOMPKINS of New York, and a large number of others, strong saplings, pushing up in brave defiance of adversities, some wrought into bureaus, others inlaying cabinets,—American woods, some still sappy and cross-grained, but making as good state furniture as an untechnical taste has hitherto been content to demand or use.
Glancing through our book,—in which we treasure only the portraits of the departed,—we dwell with satisfaction upon a group of high-toned, conscientious, Christian statesmen, who honored public office in their persons, and shed upon the Senate a light so effulgent, that the many opaque substances, so often thrust into it, have not been able wholly to absorb: JOHN MACPHERSON BERRIEN, born in 1781; THEODORE FRELINGHUYSEN and SAMUEL L. SOUTHARD, in 1787; and WILLIAM C. PRESTON in 1794; with whom are worthily associated HUGH S. LEGARÉ, whose fine face brought its welcome into every company, as his radiant mind sparkled and scintillated over every subject; and BENJAMIN F. BUTLER of New York, whose clear-cut physiognomy, like an antique on a fine stone, shows handsomely in every setting.
WINFIELD SCOTT came into life in 1786, and so crystallized about himself each of the three wars in which he was the principal magnet,—the maritime contest of 1812, the Mexican war in 1847, and the opening of the Rebellion in 1861,—that his calm front and majestic presence would readily single him out as the model figure for our American Mars. Like a great elm in the Berkshire valley he stands, massive in strength of trunk, spreading out in varied branches of learning, special study, and active experience, and dropping his pendulous, wide-circuiting limbs and generous foliage over a broad expanse of rich meadow. Under this vast, wide-reaching, many-dropping banyan-tree history seems to gather in a sleepy, contented calm.
Dearly do we all love to pause over the beautifully bordered page which holds the genial, sunny-faced visage of WASHINGTON IRVING. He was four years old when Washington delivered his first Inaugural. Through all the nineteenth century he shines, like a blessed presence, until his eclipse, in 1859. How our landscapes, the lives of our best and worthiest, the graceful legends of our rivers, mountains, prairies, and historical sites,—barren, voiceless, and dumb before, warm into life, and stretch out their living hands in tender entreaty, instinct and round with charms of persuasive beauty, as, like the prophet over the child, he stretches himself over them!
Of some of his associates and compeers, still happily spared to us, we cannot speak; for the living are too numerous to be enumerated, and too near to be sketched; but of JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE, whose brief twenty-five years of life exhaled such beautiful and deathless creations as the Culprit Fay; of FITZ-GREENE HALLECK, his companion and fellow-laborer, whose rare humor stole into delicious song, as sprites are said to play hide-and-seek in buttercups and honeysuckles; and of JAMES R. PAULDING, linked in literary work as by family ties with Irving, and whose diversified genius gives him a large, if not a choice place in our Walhalla,—of all these kindly faces we delight to keep copies in our album.
Like Irving, fortunate in the enjoyment of a wide European reputation, but less fortunate than he in securing the undivided hearts of his countrymen,—whose early history, aboriginal legends, forest scenery, and naval characters he has so well tapestried in novels, essay, biography, and history,—JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, born in 1789, has, by his sea tales, caused many a mother’s heart to yearn after her runaway boy, and by his land stories, garnered up many of our best sheaves of fiction into a national stack. As we gaze on his large, square, massive forehead, we forget his sharply feathered arrows, aimed at our national faults, which generally, of course, missed the conscience and touched only the liver. Remembering “The Pioneers,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Spy,” “Pilot,” and “Red Rover,” we fall to blessing the creations which stalk over our rough fences, and brush away our raw villages, uproarious with faces of civilized red-men, and so endeavor to get by, as boys do a haunted place at nightfall, the recollection of those twenty-two libel suits, whose damages he found, like most plaintiffs in that species of legal fiction, to end in the payment of the costs out of his own pocket.
Others there are, too, whose physiognomies recall to us pleasantly the explorers in science, workers amid Nature’s secrets, earlier than those who now push their daring way into her very robing-room: BENJAMIN SILLIMAN, the elder, who came in 1779, and through a long life lectured so many into the pleasant idea that they knew something of geology and chemistry, and through his “Journal of Science,” established in 1818, gathered up the mental products of his fellow-harvesters; ROBERT HARE, two years younger, who, at the age of twenty, invented the compound blow-pipe, and up to his death, in 1858, continued his discoveries, until he left, by his spiritual explorations, his scientific brethren behind him; and BENJAMIN RUSH, born in 1780, who by his tasteful style, made boluses less distasteful, and even gave the muses such a draught that they became delirious over his medical pages.
WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT, reserved until nearly the close of the eighteenth century ere he was born, and becoming blind in outward vision at the age of eighteen, so clarified his inner sight and quickened it to the perception of new beauties, and so perfected himself by the grace, gentleness, and cheerful gayety of a happy nature, that Peru, Mexico, the times of Ferdinand, Isabella, and Philip II., filtrated through them, glow in splendor and are inwrought and outwrought in such delicacy of color and such noble boldness as to make him stand out in singularly beautiful proportions to thousands of loving eyes, that have never rested, and will now never rest, upon his fine classic head.
Stop we a moment to admire the intellectual features of CATHERINE M. SEDGWICK, born in 1798, whose wise essays and wiser fictions lie upon so many tables; the calm head of HORATIO GREENOUGH, who produced his first work, the “Chanting Cherubs,” upon a commission from Fenimore Cooper, brought out the earliest American group in marble, and became a very Medusa, turning many Americans into stone; and finally the grand, quaint physiognomy of NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, given to us in 1804, and just withdrawn, whose genial tales and humorous descriptions will keep his memory as odorous as woodbines around the porches of houses seven-gabled, mossed, newly Gothic, or indifferently green-shuttered, and up to their eaves in white paint.
Unwillingly we close the list; for many are worthy to be added, who have laid their aching brains away, and more who are coining from their living thoughts a mintage more national than greenbacks and not half so soiled.
All but two who are named in this our newer album were born in the last century, and drew over its wealth with them and piled it up on our side. Few of them lived less than three, and several more than fourscore years; showing that the possession of intellect often preserves their owners to a longevity as great as office or a life estate.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE WAR OF IDEAS AND MUSKET; OR, LINCOLN’S ADMINISTRATION.
1861–1865.
Striking Historical Contrasts of professed Virtue and cruel Enforcement.—The American Fetich; its strange, passionate Worship and armed Adoration.—The Freshet of Slavery traced from its small Beginnings.—Mr. Lincoln over its Ridges lands in Washington.—A Striking Announcement, and who it struck.—Of Seward, Cameron, and Chase.—A Naval Joke.—A Wry Fort makes Wry Faces.—An American Nightmare.—Watching with the Sleeper.—Sparing the Rod and getting the Ramrod.—Call for Seventy-five Thousand Ramrods.—Massachusetts Boys and Baltimore Hards.—Busses and Blunderbusses.—Few Office-Seekers, but many Gun-Holders in Washington in April, 1861.—The English Telescope and the Wonders it discovered.—A Dual View.—An Official Talk between two Lords.—A Proclamation to restrain Englishmen.—A Parallel.—War Materials, Forts, etc., generously given away by Loose-handed Custodians.—Twiggs inclined as Tree is bent.—Cotton Curtain before Washington; and a near View of it by General Mansfield.—Colonel Ellsworth.—Butler and Bethel.—Lyons in Missouri.—McClellan moves into Virginia; what he found.—A Wise Man flees when a real Man pursueth.—Bull’s Run and General Run.—A Discovery and Noise over it.—Stonewall Jackson and Praying Soldiers.—Piety and Powder.—A Drill-Ground near Washington.—General Lee’s First Kicks against the Pricks.—Du Pont at Port Royal.—Mason, Slidell, and Vigilant Friends.—John C. Breckenridge a striking Sign-Board.—War in the Mississippi Valley.—Kentucky and her coy Ways.—A Spartan Leonidas and Greek Ulysses.—Christmas Eve, 1861.
“Robespierre,” says a terse, sentence-packing essayist, “would slay one half of France to get the other half to follow his principles of virtue.”
The cotton rebellion is another illustration of the same horrible tenderness, the same selfish loveliness, the same unsentimental sentimentalism.
Like the strange histories of Scylla, of Marius, of Simon de Montfort and his helmed soldiery against the Waldenses, of Alva in the Netherlands, of Philip II., and of Claverhouse, in Scotland, it exhibits a courage, endurance, sacrifices, and heroism which exalt, to compass ends which debase and brutalize human nature.
Setting up in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in free, much-reading America, a fetich for worship, brought from Africa, slimy with snakes, foul, cruel, deformed, and misshapen, its singularly enthusiastic votaries, after insisting by books, tracts, primers, by philosophic essay, bound treatise, and unbound poetry, in Congress, conventions, lecture-rooms, prayer-meetings, horse-races, and in all places, seasonable or unseasonable, thirsty or wet, that the fetich, though repudiated by all civilized people, was the true and undoubted patron of government, society, wealth, progress, and human, i. e. white-skinned happiness, at last seized musket and sword to maintain and perpetuate her horrid rites, although this maintenance should overturn and waste all other shrines.
The cotton-gin struck, in 1793, springs all over the slave States, whose multiplying flows so gathered head in 1821 as to require damming back. The Missouri dike was erected. The pent waters, however, were found so profitable for foreign mill-owners, for over-shot feeders to Northern shelves, for commercial pockets, and political ballot-boxes, as well as such wealth-distributing streams over the growing breadths and easy luxuries of their Southern owners, that expedients were devised to swell their volume, area, and back-water power. The dike, cut in 1854, let out the accumulated deluge into new sluice-ways, which promised to some increased profits, but which produced great ravages in many ways, and at last set towards maelstroms, down whose gurgling throats were sucked, not only the passive and floating citizen, and the compromising, timid politician, but much of the life and wealth of the nation at large.
Over the angry ridges, rapidly rising on the 4th of March, 1861, Mr. Lincoln, uneasy at the white caps crisping the dark swells, and himself in disguise, landed at the national wharf in Washington. Without disguise, however, he at once, in a distinct, calm voice, announced the principles upon which he proposed to meet the menacing flood, namely, not to interfere with its black tides in States where they were legally channelled, nor to create any new courses in Territories in which they had not surged, and steadily to enforce, in spite of all obstructions, the existing rules, regulations, and laws both North and South.
COTTON SUPREME. (p. 483) ]
This announcement struck the knob of the national shield, and its metallic notes quivered through the air. The three commissioners, despatched from the somehow gathered Confederate assemblage at Montgomery, heard the vibrations the morning of their arrival, March 5th, but failed to shout loud enough to be heard themselves, and returned speedily with their cross-barred message.
Attention was immediately directed to the ravelled American stocking rapidly running down. The blue yarn of the navy was taken up stitch by stitch. The threads of the little army were picked up, lying loosely around at a distance from the capital, and, by much knotting and splicing, were put upon the old, rusty, war-needles for work. It was very sad business for the gentle-minded Lincoln, although helped by Mr. Seward in the State Department,—a very vigorous and manifold letter-writer,—by the wide-headed Chase in the Treasury, by the strong-knuckled Cameron in the noisy War Bureau, and by that long-bearded Gideon Welles, whose unthatched upper story became in time, like a naval depot, the receptacle of a great deal of odd material, most of it too old to be serviceable. In truth, with his funny ways, dropping anchor when he should be making steam, bothered with new inventions, gun bores and spiral devices, which he had never seen at Hartford, and quite incomprehensible often by any one, puzzled by stern duties and running about to know where the ship’s waste was, the latter old gentleman was about the only joke which went about for four years.
Notice by the government of its intention to add to the eighty men in Fort Sumter drew upon that little stone pentagon a lively cannonade of thirty-six hours, by General Beauregard, the Confederate military leader, distorting its resolute visage, and causing wry faces everywhere throughout the North, and very many among the strikers at the South.
The first whizzing shot was the first uneasy spasm in that horrible nightmare which crept over America and held it bound for four years.
For the sake of human nature; for the sake of our common past, and our now dawning brighter future, we would fain draw over the face of the disturbed sleeper a veil, which should but dimly delineate, if it did not altogether hide from view, the uncoffined ghastliness. The purposes of history, however, forbid us, nurses as we are in trouble, as boon companions in feasting, to quit the room; and so holding still, as best we can, the hand of genial Humor, we sit down amid the uncomic scenes of a fratricidal struggle.
Through the evening silences which followed the evacuation of Fort Sumter, April 14, 1861, were heard at Montgomery and in other Confederate cities rhetorical voices of gratulation at the humbled pride, flag, and prosperity of the North, and predictions of bold equestrian sallies into Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston; at the North, wails of sorrow, sudden questions of the causeless blows on the tingling national cheek, mixed with remorseful self-accusations at the weak petting, which had so encouraged unrestrained tempers as to invite to this public breaking of the family crockery and this unconcealable family disgrace. “Had not the rod been so long spared,”—was the general feeling,—“we should now be spared the use of the ramrod.” The next morning, however, Mr. Lincoln proclaimed the need of seventy-five thousand ramrods, with good men to accompany them to Washington. At the same time he asked the wise men to meet at the capital in July for consultation. Ere the next daybreak, a thousand Massachusetts lads were on their way towards the Potomac, shining in new-burnished steel and new polished love for that old Union mother, whose goodness had been so steady and uniform as hitherto to excite no manifested return. On the 19th of April they reached Baltimore, and were passing through in the horse-cars, when they were set upon by a bad lot of hards and softs of that city,—as others before and since have frequently been assailed in their transit, by railway and hotel runners. Other regiments soon followed from “the teeming North, through all her unfrozen loins.” Guns were got down from rusted hooks; shoulder-straps straightened; blunderbusses and other busses given and taken; officers beaten up from behind ploughshares to be beaten in first skirmishes into good leaders; and shields from all the free States were clasped around the waist of the capital. Never were there so many gun-holders, nor so few office-seekers, at Washington in the month of April.
The soft velveted hand which caressed was now stiffened into the steel gauntlet to smite.
Meanwhile the English government, employed since 1783 in looking across at us through the large end of its telescope, suddenly got its eye at the other extreme, and discovered the monstrous size of this country, the large population, and unmanifested pluck of the nine somehow seceded States, and, to her, the very obvious absence of any ties or mutual necessity between two such admirably designed single nations. This was the almost unanimous opinion, too, of the well-dressed classes; although some Bright Englishmen, and especially the hard toilers in the manufacturing districts,—although working in smoke,—saw more clearly the object and design as well as the final end of the commencing difficulty than those whose near-sightedness spread a film over all their American observations.
“The Hunited States ’ave too many people,” said Lord John.
“Haltogether, yes,” replied Lord Palmerston.
“Suppose that they should fight?” inquired Lord John.
“Well, two heads are better than one,” replied the facetious Palmerston.
“And so are two customers,” rejoined Lord John, wiping his nose with a cotton pocket-handkerchief.
And forthwith they issued a proclamation of neutrality in the name of the Queen, whose heart was no more in its sentiments than her hand in its composition. It was thought at the time by many people to be very smart; and so it was very smart, altogether too smart. It was a state fiction,—a fancy creation, looking in legal phrase as if all the English were bent on rushing into the prophesied something,—a buffalo-hunt, a Long Island race, or steamboat explosion;—for what the little flurry was about, or would be when the solemn state warning was given, no one knew,—unless they were violently restrained by the British government. It was the unnecessarily vehement declaration of the very disinterested old maid to the unsuspecting, quiet young man, quite innocent of such audacious thoughts as her fears excited and suggested: “Now, if you kiss me I shall resist. I shall. Don’t you try it. Now, there, don’t come towards me. Don’t make such a noise, for everybody will hear you. Hands off. Don’t try it. I shall scream. Quit now. Don’t disturb the neighborhood. Hands off, I tell you. I won’t have anything to do with it.” The warning was as piquant and promotive of the practice deprecated, as the landlord’s to the ostler, never to grease the teeth of traveller’s horses, for if he should they could not eat oats.
The strikers in Arkansas and North Carolina, in May, contrived somehow to get up delegates to meet those from the other Southern States at Richmond, the newly selected gathering-place of Confederated counsellors.
The insurrection commenced to grow. The warned boy began seriously to think of the audacity from which he was so solemnly conjured to desist.
Federal war stores, magazines, and naval materials were handed over to the new State claimants by their loose-wristed custodians, who, although educated by the Federal government, generously gave away her property on the principle of that testator, who requested his own debtors, forthwith after his decease, to pay what they owed to his executors, and nobly forgave his creditors the debts which he owed them. Floydism became as fashionable South as cotton, butternut-colored clothing and long hair. Just as the tree was bent the Twiggs inclined. At Little Rock, Pensacola, Portsmouth, Virginia, and in Texas, large masses of stores, cannon, guns, and naval materials were transferred, like the allegiance of the officers in charge, to the strange African fetich. It looked as if the American people were moving out of the lower story of their large, constitutional bazaar into the upper lofts, and were giving away generously a part of the expensive fixtures to the new incoming tenant.
In May some Confederate cotton curtains, striped with rough military lines, were hung before Washington. They concealed much real weakness and want of furniture behind them, and enabled those, who kept up a confused shouting in the darkened recesses and away from the front, to convey an impression of numbers which did not exist.
Thirteen thousand Federal troops,—part of the seventy-five thousand,—led by General Mansfield, desiring to get a nearer view of the curtain, crossed over the Potomac to Arlington Heights. The Virginia soil, it was found, no more spurned Northern feet than its cultivation was spurned by the hands of its white owners. The next day Colonel Ellsworth, with a Zouave regiment, entered the ancient town of Alexandria. Seeing the new flag swaying in its sluggish air, he tore down, as he supposed, the fetich symbol; but received almost on the instant a fatal shot, and was borne away with slow requiems to the vast Northern cemetery, in which new graves were soon rapidly to be opened. The struck symbol of the Confederacy was not cut down, but only lowered to half-mast, emblem of American hopes and pride.
May 9, Mr. Lincoln made a new call for forty-two thousand men. As quickly as May blossoms come to the expected call of the shower they came in rosy-hearted responses. General Butler hastened with twelve thousand men to Fortress Monroe, whence on the 9th of June he sent a detachment to Big Bethel. No wrestling-match, however, came off there, and no pillar of stone, of course, set up. Meanwhile, Missouri, Maryland, and Kentucky,—resisting the second secession cleavage, started by Virginia, and which had drawn after her Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina,—trembled with the forces contending for ascendency in their several borders. In the first State, General Jackson attempted in vain to mesmerize Lyons. Failing in these passes, he made several upward strokes, destroying railroads, bridges, and telegraph wires. But the Federal commander, pursuing him to Boonesville, disabled his arm from renewing such tricks. Uniting his forces with General Sigel’s,—making from their junction six thousand men,—General Lyons attacked at Wilson’s Creek, near Springfield, Ben McCullough and Sterling Price, with a force of twenty thousand.
The attacking party was repulsed, and its brave leader killed, but the followers of the Ranger were too weary to pursue them.
In Virginia, early in July, General George B. McClellan, then in his thirty-sixth year, and General Rosecrans, in his forty-second, collecting the cream of their little armies, skimmed the Confederate pans at Rich Mountain, while immediately after, the Confederate pails were completely upset or seized by General Morris, assisted by some help from Ohio and Indiana, at Carrick’s Ford. General Rosecrans, flowing towards the Southwest, came down like a mountain torrent in the Kanawha valley, even flooding such water-logged estrays as Henry A. Wise and the indicted Floyd. The salt springs of the valley, towards which they sped, could not preserve them from becoming spoiled, and held ever afterward, even by their friends, in bad odor.
A few days afterwards, the troops near Washington, numbering about 35,000 under General McDowell, were moved in a body towards the curtain,—which was drawn back and back by its supporters to Manassas Junction,—where Beauregard, intrenched with 27,000 men, assisted by General Joseph E. Johnston and 16,000 more close at hand in Winchester, steadied and upheld it. As the 35,000 thousand went forward, the three months’ men, whose time had expired, went backward, seeking the far rear to the sound of the enemy’s cannon, until the Federal inspecting force was reduced to 18,000. As they approached that historic little rill, Bull Run, they met the combined forces of the Confederates, and after holding the field against them and even advancing upon it, until late in the afternoon, they fell into one of those panics, not unfrequent among troops, raw or seasoned, in which the wild run of frightened bulls or the disordered summersaulting and tumbles of a herd of buffaloes is an orderly march. A mass of huddling soldiers, civilians, teamsters, members of Congress, and other muddled material was thrown upon Washington. The puzzled Confederates, unconscious of victory and of course unpursuing, at length got back to their capital. Discovering at last their stupendous victory, they made up for lost time by shouts so loud that every European echo repeated it, like a very Lurlei. In this big scare were many of the leading generals on either side,—among those on the Federal, Sherman, Burnside, and Heintzelman; and on the Confederate, Longstreet, Ewell, Early, Bonham, and that praying soldier, Stonewall Jackson, then thirty-five years old, and whose saintly, fanatical bravery recalls the gallant slaughterers in the civil wars of Scotland, who tempered their prayers with bayonet-pushing amens, and ended their fervid hacking of enemies with hearty thanksgivings to Heaven.
The losses on either side in men were nearly balanced,—the Federal dead amounting to 481, and the Confederate to 378; the Federal wounded to 1011, the Confederate to 1489; but in prestige, self-respect, and that subtle moral force which cannot be weighed even by grains or scruples, the advantage was greatly with the insurrectionists.
Congress immediately voted to raise 500,000 men for the army, two hundred and fifty millions of dollars in money, and to issue fifty millions of treasury-notes. The Confederate gathering determined to set 400,000 men to help the existing 210,000 hold up the cotton veil, now becoming so heavy and thick with dust and clots, that even Mr. Seward began to doubt whether it could be lifted in thirty days.
In August, Forts Hatteras and Clark were pulled by Commodore Stringham into Pamlico Sound.
For many months the country in front of Washington was converted into a vast drill-ground, over which Drill-Sergeant McClellan exercised the weary feet of over one hundred thousand soldiers, and the wearier patience of many millions of citizens. During this time the echoes of Bull Run, as numerous and diversified as an Irishman’s, haunted the consciences and journals of America, and the hollow faith of Europe. If it was all quiet on the Potomac, it was very unquiet elsewhere. General McClellan was always a believer in the Italian proverb,
“Chi va piano. Va sano: Chi va forte, Va alla morte,”
and so he held his ground near Washington.
In September, a series of severe skirmishes, lasting three days, between General Robert E. Lee, now fifty-three years old, and General Reynolds, at Cheat Mountain and Elk Water, Virginia, followed by another October 3d at Greenbrier, disagreeably shook up the Confederate commander. These first attempts to turn against his countrymen the science and skill which he had gained at their expense and in their service, were creditable to his conscience, if not to his head and skill.
The sleeper turned over with a sense of smothering, as in his nightmare horror he saw the drawn sword of his favorite sons pointed at him.
On the 29th of October a fleet under Commodore Du Pont, with General T. W. Sherman and twenty thousand men on board, sailed for Port Royal, and after three elliptical turnings in the harbor, threw out such pills as they passed that Forts Walker and Beauregard, suddenly swallowing them, fell into such a vertigo, that they lost their heads, and tumbled helpless upon the ground. To balance this fatal bill of mortality, however, the Confederate General Evans, defeated with great loss a detachment of two thousand one hundred men under General Stone, at Ball’s Bluff, when Oregon lost one of her best senators and citizens, Colonel E. D. Baker.
The cotton veil was becoming very soiled and flecked. November brought out a variety of colors in American affairs, some light with yellow hues, others as dark as the gusty season loves to whirl over a surface ever freezing and thawing. General Scott retired from the chief command of the army, to which General McClellan succeeded; the lean Davis was made high-priest for six years to the Southern fetich, and Mason and Slidell, Confederate commissioners, hurriedly shunning Mr. Welles and his cruisers, were captured by Captain Wilkes off the Trent. They were of course promptly spied by the large, vigilant English telescope, which, in its rapid shifting for the occasion, read English international law backwards, and spelled out our duty from our own precedents. The alacrity with which their surrender was demanded showed that the still anxious young lady had survived the alarm, caused by the unwilling kiss six months before, and was desirous to escape, in precisely the same way, any further impertinences.
John C. Breckenridge now climbed down to grasp the depraved prize he had at last so well earned. Elected a Senator of the United States at the close of the Vice-Presidency in the preceding March, he readily took a voluntary oath to support the Constitution of an undivided land; played the spy upon the efforts of its government to thwart the attempts to dissever it; and at the close of the session, unable longer to profit by his office and oath, took a brigadier’s commission and a new oath against a country which had loaded his family and himself with its highest honors. Once the cherished type of a chivalrous gentleman, he engrafted upon the abused name of chivalry definitions more reproachful than those which spring from the addled eccentricities of Don Quixote; his old friends, if any such survive, must long have desired to feel that he had only lost an arm in a service which, undistinguished by any advantage brought to it by a man who had deserted everything for it, sunk the remains of a character once high, and an intellect once brilliant, to a depth compared with which history refuses an example. Others may plead some excuse, more or less admissible, for their armed heresies: Davis, that his was a logical sequence to his lifelong convictions of State supremacy; Toombs, Cobb, Stephens, and others, that their States dragged them out; Floyd, the necessity of putting money in his purse; Wise, the loss of a guiding intelligence. But to not one of these can John C. Breckenridge point to mitigate the just severities of that moral verdict which, in cases of such cumulated guilt, can only appease the general uneasiness at the exhibition of depravity so fathomless, by the most exemplary damages. Looking into the dreadful chasms, down which his example cast so many others; the maimed cripples, the hollow-eyed widows, Justice slain by stabs in the back, exiles from poor homes smitten by the bludgeons of secret agents, even humorous History grows stern-featured and allows a saddening pity to cloud her habitual smile, as she flings her knotted whip over the shoulders of high-born guilt.
As the year 1861 drew towards its close, the war, dropping in the old traditional path of empire, trended westward and seated itself in the valley of the Mississippi. Ulysses S. Grant, then thirty-nine years old, newly assigned to the District of Cairo, took Paducah, Kentucky; and settled on Belmont,—not August, the banker, but a small town in Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, opposite Columbus, Kentucky. This latter place was then held by that mitred Spartan warrior, Leonidas Polk, who had left the light of the star which guided wise men to the Babe, for the hazy star of the major-general,—one of the dim twinklers in that milky-way which, after four years’ watering, disappeared from the sight of even telescopic gazers.
Gradually large forces were drawn to the State of Kentucky,—nicely balancing on neutral ground,—while her reluctant hand was coyly withdrawn from any Union by her guardian, Governor Magoffin, and was thereby sought with greater ardor by each suitor. The Confederates offered her a bridal Pillow, but the Federals sent Ulysses, that wise and silent Greek, whose manly deeds soon effectually won her affections.
Christmas eve, 1861, put a million of armed men and two millions of diurnal debt into the long stocking of iron-ridden America.
COTTON MIXED. JANUARY 1,1862, TO JANUARY 1,1864.
The Road to Peace.—Distance thither illustrated.—What certain Knights might have learned.—The Difficulties created by losing Battles in Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas detailed.—What Grant, Thomas, Curtis, and others did; and what Crittenden, Zollicoffer, etc, had done unto them.—Whistling in the Woods.—Wonderful Story-telling Powers of J. Davis.—How he repeated Tales with charming Variation.—A Sea Story in which Iron enters.—Farragut and Porter up the Mississippi.—Received at New Orleans with Illuminations and Bonfires.—Butler deals with effervescing Materials.—The Peninsular Campaign traced.—Spading and Fighting.—The Glories and Disasters of the Army of the Potomac.—The American Pope fallible.—Lee’s Trip into Maryland.—Accidents at South Mountain and Antietam.—Difficult Questions besiege Mr. Lincoln in Washington.—His New-Year’s Gift to the Slaves.—Getting rich on Paper.—Cotton mixed.—A Depraved Currency.—Hooker gets at Lee’s Rear at Chancellorsville.—What followed.—Lee at Gettysburg; gets the Advertising its Springs want.—The Sorrows of Vicksburg, July 4,1863.—The Mississippi open.—Mortar-boat Building.—Valor of Colored Regiments at Charleston; and of discolored Irish in New York.—Contrasts.—Grant Transfigured at Missionary Ridge and Look-Out Mountain without Bragging of it.
“How far is it, my boy, by this road to Drainsville?” asked a mud-spattered traveller of a shrewd lad by the roadside. “If you keep on the way that you are heading,” replied the boy, “and can manage the Atlantic and Pacific on horseback, it is 23,999 miles; if you turn your horse’s head and go right back it is one mile.”
Such were the comparative distances which the Equestrian Knights of the Woolly Order—had they inquired on New-Year’s morning, 1862—would have found parted them from that desirable end of their weary journey, the pleasant village of Peace. Looking, however, only at the delusive finger-boards which cottonized brains had set up along that way; singing jaunty songs of Southern superiority and Northern low-down manners; and listening to a confused distant cheer, occasionally borne to them by certain winds out of the North and by easterly breezes from Europe, they rode on, fancying that they would soon dismount at their journey’s end, give their splashed animals into the accustomed charge of the old faithful, colored ostlers, and set down to the old dishes of glorious hominy and glorifying homily. Instead, however, of this experience, they met interminable difficulties,—Generals Crittenden and Zollicoffer, jostled out of saddle by General Thomas at Mill Spring, and floundering badly through Kentucky into Tennessee; another set captured at and with Fort Henry, February 6th, by Flag-Officer Foote, whose flotilla kept on, as if little conscious of its impertinent doings, up the Tennessee River as far as Florence, with encouraging shouts from loyal throats on either bank; Fort Donelson so surrendered to the silent-lipped Grant, February 16th, and its twelve thousand men and forty pieces of cannon so thoroughly taken up by him as to furnish no stopping-place for the tired party; Missouri, constipated under the empiric treatment of Van Dorn and Price, and evacuated under the drastic prescriptions of General Curtis, too weak to entertain the travellers; Pea Ridge, Arkansas, so shelled out by the Union pickers March 6, 7, and 8, 1862, that Ben McCullough and numerous rangers had gone into dead silences when called upon for help; New Madrid given up with six thousand butternut-colored troops to the constraining faith in the American Pope; Shiloh delivered in April to the armed Emanuel of Union expectations; Island Number Ten, in the Mississippi, with its seven thousand hosts and vast supplies, taken possession of April 7th, so as to afford no shelter to the equestrians; the restoration of all Kentucky and Tennessee back into the soft bands of the Union; the destruction of the Confederate flotilla in Albemarle Sound, and the taking of Roanoke Island, Forts Macon and Pulaski,—these unexpected incidents, as they advanced on the long trip, were rude shocks to the sight, the comfort, and the spirits of the hard-whistling equestrians. Whistle however they did and must, to keep up their courage through the gloomy woods, while to stimulate the flagging tempers of some of the riders, the leading horseman, Davis, told them in a high voice—loud enough to be heard all over Europe—some very exciting stories about Northern atrocities, made-up tales that beat everything in the way of romance since the Scottish Chiefs and Thaddeus of Warsaw. These stories always seemed to entertain the hard-travelling party, who frequently called upon him to repeat them, which he did with some charmingly horrible variations.
Suddenly, however, on the 8th of March, a novel sight greeted the eyes of all in Hampton Roads. The steam-frigate Merrimac, raised from her salty bed near Portsmouth, receiving a new coat of mail, an ugly looking iron rhinoceros-shaped snout, and the soft, new pet name of Virginia, rolled out in ungainly strength into the wide bay; and commenced goring the Federal herd of wooden frigates, fatally ripping up the Cumberland and Congress, and cruelly gashing the St. Lawrence and Roanoke. Unhurt herself, her scaly armor undented, she slunk back gorged to her lair, prepared for a more savage repast on the rest of the frightened gunboats and ships on the following morning; when lo! on the morrow, tumbling out for her cruel pastime, she met the little, pert, saucy Monitor, one fifth her size only, and also clothed in steel, which stepped up close by her side and delivered two unexpected, round messages, each weighing one hundred and sixty-eight pounds. Indignant at this interference with her intended lunch, the masculine Virginia commenced flinging iron bolts and round indignities, but the pert little thing hurled heavier blows back. The Virginia then punched her five times with her indignant snout; but the wee one only laughed at her impotent raillery, and pitched back at her such crashing logic, that she rolled back again with her maw wholly unsated. On the part of the Monitor it was a Word-en-a blow. The well-hammered arguments, taught by the new system of military logic, carried alarming weight wherever maritime questions are chopped.
THE CORONER’S INQUEST. (p. 500) ]
Farragut and Porter soon after got up a yachting party, consisting of forty-five vessels, to cruise through the Gulf and up to New Orleans. Forty miles up from the river’s mouth they encountered Forts Philip and Jackson, great chains, anchored hulks, and batteries, from which came very loud talk, and earnest protestations against any farther proceeding on the part of the yachtsmen. At length, however, by cutting the chain, the entire party, except two, pushed through in a terrible iron hail-storm, and reached the Crescent City, where they were received with terrific demonstrations, bonfires of fifteen thousand bales of cotton, illuminated blockade-runners, shipping, sugar, turpentine, molasses, and other loose-lying combustibles.
Such an incendiary place had to be well secured; and on the 1st of May it was put into the firm charge of the Union Butler, who occasionally uncorked its riotous effervescence, and bottled up some of the more fermenting qualities.
Meanwhile the long waiting public called for the fine drilling party in front of Washington, numbering nearly two hundred thousand, faithfully schooled for eight months, to take the intensely desired trip to Richmond. Early in April, headed by General McClellan, it reached the old Revolutionary camping-ground at Yorktown. Although, in fact, only five thousand Confederates were stationed there, the Federal leader suspected traps ahead, and so went for a month to vigorous spading, road-making, and mining, resuming in this way his early occupations and tastes. These gratified, and no traps found, the army began on the 3d of May to move towards the Chickahominy,—a sluggish, soupy stream, thickened by swamp muds and miasma,—which was reached May 20th and crossed. There was now more spading, and in sight of the Richmond spires.
For six weeks, alas! the spade was busy, not for the living only, through this Golgotha of the war; for now commenced a series of death-dealing combats seldom equalled in our well-mounded planet: May 27th the battle of Hanover Court-House, the Confederates losing; followed by four days of severe skirmishes; succeeded by the gigantic struggle of forty-eight unceasing hours of death-heaping on both sides, at Fair Oaks Station, between the corps of Sumner, Heintzelman, Kearny, and Hooker, on one side, and Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate commander, Longstreet, and the two Hills, on the other; then three weeks of intrenching, sickness, and decimation; and then on the 25th of June, the retreat to the James, crowded with six days of ceaseless combats, embroidering in gloriously ensanguined characters on the shredding flag of the Potomac the well-fought but disastrous battles of Mechanicsville, Gaines’s Mills, Savage’s Station, White-Oak Swamp, and Malvern Hill, in which fifteen thousand Union lives were spent.
General Lee was placed in command of the Confederates in the place of General Johnston, wounded at Fair Oaks; and General Halleck displaced General McClellan, wounded before he left Washington in his military reputation, and, though unhurt bodily, more severely injured by his Peninsular campaign.
General Pope was assigned to the head of the Army of the Potomac, but showed in fifteen days of fighting along the Rappahannock that, like another Pope on the Tiber, he was not at all infallible.
In September General Lee took a trip into Maryland, which he hoped to extend to Philadelphia. He was, however, followed by General McClellan, reinstated to the leadership of his old army. Their meetings at South Mountain and Antietam swept thirty thousand Confederates under ground or into hospitals, largely counterbalancing the Peninsular losses.
Cotton had become very mixed, and its skeins tangled and knotted.
Difficult and dark questions now travelled to Washington, and closely besieged Mr. Lincoln. Calmly, patiently, and good-humoredly he sat down with them in a conference to which his own good sense and large-hearted wisdom were invited. The result was that on New-Year’s day, 1863, free papers were plumped into the lean, slave stockings throughout all the somehow seceded States.
During this period history and paper money were both made in large quantities; and the paper business became very lucrative. We were getting rich very fast after the European fashion. In the midst of the armed clash, however, a very Pacific act was committed,—the passage in July, 1862, of the Pacific Railroad charter, which gave one hundred millions of reasons why the Union could not be broken. So far from giving up the South, Congress provided for making Japan and China American dependencies; reaching out with steel fingers for their teas, silks, and almond-eyed live productions.
The year 1863 dawned cheerfully upon the hitherto sombre whites North, as well as upon the more sombre sable loyalists at the South. Blockades on the coast, a currency as depraved as Breckenridge; railroads undulating as saws, over which phthisicy engines groaned, as they drew the ever-lessening transportation; and a population rapidly sieved by repeated drafts, signalled the ravages to which the Confederacy was subjected, and its lessening means constantly clipped and pared away. The curious stories of Mr. Davis had neither wrought a faith beyond his own equestrian escort, nor drawn any recognition from foreign spectators.
Little was done through the winter in the field.
Early in May, General Hooker, successor to Burnside, and the fifth leader of the Potomac Army, having gained Lee’s rear at Chancellorsville, kicked it severely for three hot days; but was in turn kicked roundly. Each army lost about sixteen thousand men,—losses which, if united, would equal the entire number of the American troops engaged in the four principal battles of the Revolution,—Bunker Hill, Princeton, Saratoga, and Yorktown. While this prolonged fight was going forward, Stoneman and Kilpatrick showed some astounding feats of horsemanship, in swinging around Fredericksburg and Richmond; cutting the Confederate lines with such nimble swords that it delighted an enthusiastic audience.
In June, Lee, masking large designs on Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, crossed the Potomac and showed his own face with uncounted others at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, where, for the first three days in July, he was so handled by Meade, that he left 30,000 dead and wounded, 14,000 prisoners, and 27,000 stand of arms, to add attractions, that need no special advertising to Springs that receive so much.
The next day, July 4, Vicksburg, fruitlessly assailed during 1862, and beleaguered from May 4, 1863, by the reticent, self-contained, ever-pounding, never-compounding Grant,—who had inextricably tangled it by parallels and lines unparalleled,—surrendered its army of 30,000 men, 70,000 small arms, 200 cannon, without reckoning those dangerous edge-tools, for the use of which its desperate gamblers had so long been famous. Fortunately the surrender came too late to be abused by the orators of that patient and long-suffering day.
The Mississippi River once more bore all its pipes in peace. The mortar-boat masons, clearing away the ruins which the strikers had caused, had prepared anew the foundations for the prosperity of that noble valley, whose exuberant wealth is hereafter to be rolled adown it by unshackled hands.
While the troops were absent from New York, repelling Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania, and the black regiments before Charleston were assisting Gilmore to execute the stern Federal judgment upon that place, the anti-war Irish in New York, largely left away from the front by their own consent, gained the peaceful rear of the native-born colored men, women, and children of that city, and took a safe hand in the only kind of contest which they coveted. The valor which for three days they displayed, in destroying property wholly unowned, of course, by themselves, in chasing and hanging colored people, and in robbing all who had watches or purses to furnish lines for their avaricious bravery to attack, was, by a few, almost as much admired as the heroic courage of the regiments before Charleston.
At Chattanooga, Grant, in the latter part of November, by a heaven-touching struggle of three days, drove away the Confederate forces out of the cloud-hidden heights of Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. From this Tabor he himself came down, but not to Bragg of the transfiguration there.
All now admitted that cotton was very mixed and seedy.
What the Confederate Stool—not of Repentance, but of Mars—stood on, and how braced and steadied.—The Daisies and Corn-blooms beneath it.—The broken Industries, harried Life, and disrupted Ties of Unionists in the Border States.—Tragedies.—Grant Commander-in-Chief.—His Plan to break up the Nightmare.—Work ahead.—Jubal E. Early and his Raids.—The Year of Jubal E.—Sherman at Atlanta.—The Southern Knob seized, and the main Door burst open.—An unprotecting Hood; how it was pounded and cleft.—Sherman’s Swath through Georgia.—A Christmas Gift to Mr. Lincoln of a Sheaf.—The Scorpion Alabama; its Hatching out; its slimy, wriggling Course, and sulphureous End.—The Iron Jaws of Mobile pried open, and its Teeth drawn.—Autumn brands at the North.—Tokens of the coming Fall.—Andrew Johnson and the Goose.—Grant breaks Things at Petersburg and disturbs J. Davis in Church at Richmond.—Flight of the Latter with corruptible Treasures.—Negro Troops enter Richmond.—Light Suggestions thereupon.—A Meeting at Appomattox Court-House.—Leaving bloody Instructions, Lee goes to College.—J. Davis in Court and his Sentence.—A Thunder-Clap and its Victim.—Death of Abraham Lincoln.
The Confederate stool—not of repentance, but the iron stool of grim Mars—now stood on three legs. One rested on Southern Arkansas, braced by some eighty thousand regular soldiers; one on Georgia, propped by General Johnston and a large force, drawing their supplies from the corn-cribs of that empire State of the South; and the third and strongest, planted on the Rapidan, and steadied up by the well-sinewed arm of General Lee. Between these rude legs, however, were springing already along the furrows made by the ploughshare of strife the sweet-eyed daisies. Corn gathered its golden blooms out of the dreadful phosphates which had been strewn over so many fields.
Yet while nature’s healings were already anointing the ragged wounds of incisive war, over other and wide districts came ills which almost defied the bungling surgeries and irregular apothecary appliances that were wasted upon or unwisely aggravated them. In these districts predatory bands hovered over and constantly lit upon disorganized and broken industries, as crows cawingly follow a disrupted herd of buffaloes or swoop upon the wounded which fall out of the straggling march. The harryings of cattle; the plunder of farmsteads, of bean-patches,—nursed by the patient labor of suddenly made widows,—and even of houses seemingly secure from their proximity to villages; wayside murders from concealed coverts; midnight shots at men asleep in bed, or treacherously called out on pretended errands of charity, and hewn down, frayed and fretted the lives of those who still clung to the Union throughout the Border States. There were daily tragedies, sadder than the tinselled shows of the stage. There were masqueraders who danced through desultory cruelties at which even the readers of novels, languid over ordinary stories, enkindle into activity and excitement, and family feuds encrimsoning their way into living sorrows and eventually into tales, which in mercy we call fictions.
The winter and spring of 1864 pendulated with balanced successes and reverses to either combatant.
In March, General Grant was made Commander-in-Chief, and immediately set on foot a plan to wake up the uneasy sleeper and free him from the nightmare. This plan was to start simultaneously, and to keep in motion, the various corps of the Federal army; Sherman’s one hundred thousand at Chattanooga against Johnston’s army in Georgia; Banks’s and Farragut’s in conjunction against Mobile; and Grant himself, united with Meade, against Lee and Richmond: thus shredding, at the same time, the still suspended cotton curtain, and preventing its busy stitchers at one point from assisting those making repairs at another. Meade crossed the Rapidan, May 4th, and advanced towards Richmond, giving Lee a very lively hunt through the Wilderness for a month, and at length driving him over the soupy and astonished Chickahominy. At the same time Grant, holding his spirited team well in hand, drove up also towards the Confederate capital, until he halted on the south side of the James.
Soon after, in order to divert attention from that long-coveted spot, Richmond, General Jubal E. Early made into Maryland a raid, which he repeated in July, but from which he was sent whirling back into the Shenandoah valley. He renewed his experiments again in September and October, but was finally chased out by Sheridan and his centaurs, who seemed to mount the wind, and, on their rapid and supperless rides to live off condensed night air.
Along the hyperborean lines rang the warning after the discomfited Confederate:—
“The year of Jubal E. is come, Return, ye wandering sinners, home.”
In the Southeast, Sherman, flanking Johnston at Dalton in Georgia, forced him through May and June southwards, delivering battles and defeats,—which were not ordered,—at Resaca, Dallas, Pine Lost, and Kenesaw Mountains, until at last he shoved him behind the great southern knob, Atlanta, whose converging iron lines held the main door of the Lower Confederacy. Here Johnston disappeared, and the Confederate powers put a Hood over the head of the assailed Southeast; but all in vain. Sherman, pounding about the iron-covered Hood with heavy blows through July and August, cleft the head-piece in two; and on the 2d of September cast him out, and, seizing the great iron knob, opened wide the door.
On the 15th of November Sherman advanced through Georgia to the sea, taking a swath sixty miles wide, rolling up winrows at Milledgeville, cutting down thistles, burdocks, and noxious weeds with his well-whetted scythe, until, on the 21st of December, he reached the farther side of his great hay-field at Savannah. Gathering its crop into one bundle, he despatched it to Mr. Lincoln with this epistle: “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty guns, plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.” Truly cotton now had become very worsted.
In June, that British scorpion, the Alabama,—which had been hatched out at Liverpool in the spring and summer of 1862, while the British telescope was steadily turned in another direction, and which for two years had left its red slime all over the seas, stinging to death, as it wriggled in its venomous course, sixty-four peaceful American vessels,—was, by a single blow from the Kearsarge, sent to a sulphureous grave in the Channel which washed its birthplace. Diplomatic naturalists have ever since been disputing over the species and quality of this reptile; while all agree, that, whether warm blooded or cold, it is not desirable that its kind be perpetuated. Its poisonous carcass is still coiled in offensive knots around the international diplomatic lattice-work of the two nations.
During August, Admiral Farragut pried open the iron-set jaws of Mobile Harbor, drawing its teeth,—Forts Morgan, Gaines, and Powell,—real molars as they were, producing spasms which threatened lockjaw to the obstinate patient.
While the red autumn leaves were falling through the North, Confederate brands were whirled, some out of Canada, others from Northern cities, upon the bank of St. Alban’s, in Vermont, on warehouses in Buffalo, Detroit, and New York, on hotels in Cleveland, and on steamboats on the Lakes. The real sap in the Davis tree was now running down, and the top branches were shedding their crimson colors earthward.
While these paling evidences of the fall were multiplying, Mr. Lincoln was re-elected President, by two hundred and twelve votes out of two hundred and thirty-three. Andrew Johnson, then fifty-six years old, who had both early and late in life handled the goose,—the one kind as acceptably as the other,—and had been himself cruelly plucked through the war by the masked plunderers in Tennessee, was placed in the easy nest of the Vice-Presidency. His first getting in was so awkward, that it was manifest something had turned his head.
Sherman, taking breath at Savannah, again swung his effective scythe through the thin crop, lying between that city and Charleston, which was cut down, like a rank burdock, February 18, 1865. Then turning northwards, he gathered in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina; turned up to the sunlight dank villages, all unused to Northern implements,—cheered as he went by sable faces,—until at last he halted at Fayetteville, March 11, 1865, to take a hearty shake of the hand with his fellow-mowers, General Terry and Admiral Porter. From Wilmington, he again whetted up his keen blade and cleared the Southern field. Johnston, Beauregard, Bragg, and Hardee manifested a disposition to stop him at Bentonville; but a blow sent them reeling from his path, and he went vigorously forward, garnering blessed harvests for his country and himself.
COTTON DOWN. (p. 512) ]
Meanwhile Grant, through the autumn of 1864, was encompassing Petersburg and drawing zigzag lines around it, that were too much like the short epistles that creditors send to unwilling debtors, to be agreeable. The autumn leaves here fell on busy workers; and among the busiest, the Silent Man, who was casting up long accounts in his head, which only opened to let out smoke. In him, however, there was much fire, American and Greek.
On the 24th of March, the Silent Man issued an order for a centripetal movement on Richmond. Lee, in every way tried to break the converging fate. Along the Appomattox River, at Fort Stedman, and at every weak-looking place, he hurled himself against the links of a chain, now slowly drawing around him; but all to no purpose. On the 2d of April Grant broke through Lee’s intrenched lines about Petersburg; and Lee at once disturbed J. Davis, although at church in Richmond, by a sudden notice that Petersburg and Richmond were insecure places, and that he must flee to other refuges, than his old ones. Neither sitting nor lying would now do; and accordingly the head of the Confederacy took to his feet, and fled with the few depraved treasures which had not gone already to corruption. Hurrying through Richmond, he got away as fast as a very un-express train would carry him, over railroads hacked by Sheridan, Stoneman, and Grierson. The next morning General Weitzel entered the capital of the dissolving Confederacy—so long held by brave men—with a body of colored troops,—representatives of that fate which four years before had been ignorantly invoked, and now rapidly fulfilling,—representatives, too, of those one hundred and eighty thousand others, with skins colored like their own, who had given themselves to the service of a Union, whose stripes they had often felt, and whose stars for them had just peeped above the eastern hills and were beginning to sing for joy.
Lee at once commenced a retreat towards the Southwest, hoping to unite his broken forces with Johnston, who, however, was too actively taken up by Sherman to reciprocate his intentions. At Amelia Court-House Sheridan and his centaurs suddenly appeared before the astonished Confederates on the 6th of April, and cut seven thousand away from them. The remainder General Lee dragged forward to Appomattox Court-House, and there delivered them over to the generous justice of his brother-in-arms, the silent-lipped, whose magnanimity was a fit type of the large forbearance of a country, which, wronged by a causeless war,—generated for ends that in other lands would have brought its authors to the place where all ropes terminate,—has to look back on no crosses, but for itself.
A really fine character, a great strategist, and personally brave man, the chief of the Confederate Army, who had delivered such “bloody instructions” to the fathers, became the head of a college, and deals out, it is to be hoped, better lessons to the sons.
This surrender was followed, on the 26th of April by that of Johnston; on the 4th of May, by the remaining Confederate forces under General Dick Taylor; by the miscellaneous taking of Mobile, Selma, Tuscaloosa, and Montgomery, and the unfortunate capture of Mr. J. Davis, whose lean head—made valuable to his captors by a useless expense to the treasury—was, at an additional expense, taken several times to Richmond, and shown to the court in satisfaction of his bail bond, and at last dismissed—to the gibbet of history.
The black cloud, charged with such thunderous bolts, had dissolved, and the blue sky was showing through the rifted masses, when a sudden clap, a hissing sound, a sharp wrenching cry, and there lay the straightened form of Abraham Lincoln.
The victories which he had helped to organize were forgotten; cotton worsted was unheeded; even the terrible struggles with the long, wrestling nightmare, were all lost sight of in the grief for the Great and the Good, whose patriotism had warmed, whose integrity had strengthened, and whose genial humor had kept warm and mellow, the heart and hope of a brave and self-sacrificing nation through the contest just closed,—closed to open upon questions which had need, too, of a Solomon rather than a Jeroboam.
CHAPTER XX.
VELOCIPEDAL.
How mixed Blood effervesces.—Of the Causes and Developments of American Fastness.—Unrest in Prisons and at Home.—Time lost in Sleep, etc.—The distressing Hurry of Brains.—Compressing a Cow in a Milk-Pot.—Of Doctors’ Gigs and Apoplectic Whirligigs.—American Stomachs considered.—A general Stomach; how employed and hired out.—Doctors’ Bills.—Clothes Wringers and State Wringers.—“Speedy Trials” secured.—The Common and Un-common Law of the United States considered at length.—Of Dower, and how taken.—Property administered before Death.—Heirs cheated.—Injunctions used.—Illinois Divorces.—Of Prohibited Degrees of Marriage.—Of Fat People and Servants.—Boarding-Houses and Hotels.—American Trade and its Feats at diminishing Quantities.—Fast Americans in Europe.—How they overcome Distances, History, and Landlords.—The Paris Genus.
If “in the midst of life we are in debt,” so in the midst of debt Americans are always lively. Mixed blood seems to discharge rapidly its effervescing ingredients.
Fastness, except in the colors of our cheeks and chintzes and in the movement of our mails, works its curious ways through all manifestations of American civilization. Over a small, old, long-cultivated territory, like most of the European, life moves respectably slow, careful of its savings, gathered up by centuries of work and put out at low rates of interest; across continental stretches like ours, sweeping in wide districts and materials of unbundled, aching plenty, it hastens with panting speed, and can afford to lose everything except time. Our great areas, therefore, make us lively, their vast opportunities, restless, wide-talking, and manifesting the generous coarseness of a large-grained breadth. Out of these alone would come marked characteristics; but when these are further quickened by accelerating activities of discovery in all departments, and by mechanical inventions of vast power in translating man and his products over the earth, the result is rapid brain-work, stimulating action, quick combinations, eruptive and vivacious speech.
M. Varet, a French savan, has ascertained that a fly caught by him in France made three hundred and thirty movements of his wings in a second. This is rapid work; but a Wall Street bull will toss his horns twice as fast.
The larger trains of thought thus started will run of themselves with time-table exactness. We shall only accompany a few special excursion ideas a short distance from the main depot.
An impatient unrest under discipline and restrictions, while kept below fever heat by the wet bandages of a self-imposed law, makes jails double punishments for American criminals, and homes often houses for the detention of juveniles under sixteen. Confinements, except to a small class of our married population, is an abridgment of enterprising work, which, if continued beyond a natural law that prescribes sleep to all and a longer period of inactivity to the special class just named, would be a grievance, calling at least for a convention, addresses, and agitation to get rid of.
The distress of hurry which vexes the vis inertiæ out of our brains, stirs our intellectual pans continually, so that we do not always get the natural cream of ideas. An American is always working for condensed milk processes; to compress a cow into a milk-pot, or utilize all the herds in his neighborhood on his breakfast-table, in a way unheard of elsewhere. Of course this wide-reaching hurry, which grasps large results and scorns the domestic economies, that occupy the thoughts of people elsewhere, refuses to be concerned for any length of time with the importunities of suffering stomachs.
American stomachs have not time enough to wait on nature. Hence doctors’ gigs and apoplectic whirligigs. A patent stomach that should grind grist for a neighborhood or village, and leave the unstomached worker to avail himself of his accelerating opportunities, would command a high price. It would be hired out around the neighborhood, like a threshing-machine or corn-sheller. In fact, American households might in general be advantageously grouped around or framed into one of these mechanical digesters, with attachments for washing out, ironing, and starching their clothes, and for doing up the wasteful processes of visiting, to economic advantages that would tell on the census. One of the disadvantages would be the discouragement of that branch of American industry, now so largely prosperous, of doctors’ bills, chasing in vain after many of the living and at last only overtaking the administrator of the estate, clean out of breath.
Of course, the benefits of associated wealth and skill have not been overlooked as levers to move enterprises, people’s purses, and sometimes those low-down, coarse adjectives, volcanic in their origin, which, in case of dissatisfaction, erupt over the surface. Universal clothes-wringers are the product of this observation. So other combinations have been and are rapidly forming to wring money out of city, State, and Federal exchequers. It is curious to see how the handles of these joint pumping and pocket-exhausting companies all lie towards the great cities.
Most of the business in the United States, north of Washington, is carried on after an express and accelerated fashion, which is impatient of holidays, and rides over the Fourth of July even, as ruthlessly as an express-train over the human obstruction which thus gets forwarded on his journey out of the United States with a despatch almost enviable to the survivors. Even the Federal Constitution prescribes “speedy trials” as a right, and treats a man as injured who does not go it in a capital way, when on that precipitous road, with a final rush.
The common law of the United States presumes that all are minute-men, and know the quick step; while the uncommon law in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado dispenses with the tedious confinement between the apprehension of the accused and his transporting sentence and uprising. “Delays are dangerous,” is their condensed code.
MEMBERS OF CONGRESS IN A. D. 1900. (p. 520) ]
The law of dower, as practically enforced, is shaped by the same rapidly revolving lathe, which makes so much of our domestic hollow-ware. The wife spends the principal before her husband’s death, and thus shuns the tedious complications of legal proceedings, which admeasures the dower often to the enterpising lawyer, the bailiffs, and the court clerks.
A marked improvement has also been made in the distribution of estates generally. Among the slow nations of Europe the children generally wait for the unfortunate old people to die before taking their property. This tardy habit is now found to be often productive of great injury to children, especially to those who, snatched away by rapid manners before their begettors, are thus defrauded of their shares. “A bird in the hand” is no longer a rara avis, but a domestic fowl cultivated by rapid feeding. Gifts to the living avoid the taxes and discomforts of probate courts, in which it is disagreeable for a family, covered with crape, to sit and see a politician assess the estate upon the heirs.
Fast progress has been made, also, in preventive justice. Injunctions, behind whose shields such old fogies as Lord Eldon, Lord Somers, Lord Thurlow, John Marshall, or William Story were accustomed to hide threatened rights until the danger was over-past, have recently been turned edgewise, and cut down corporations and others obnoxious Fisc-ally or otherwise, or else pressed against them so that they perspired away their adipose stock until they were comfortably ready for a receiver.
The doctrine of divorce, which has puzzled the learned John Miltons in all the sleepy ages that have dozed before us, has been, in many States, simplified, so that he who runs through them may read a decree. Some people have uncharitably supposed that the premiums offered to individual disunions by such States as Illinois and Indiana, were devices to draw speculators thither for a day or so; but these are vagrant suspicions that ought not to be allowed on our trains.
In feudal countries, where purity of blood is carefully guarded,—inasmuch as the descents to property are the rule and not descents from it as in America,—legists declare that a woman may not marry her cousin, her uncle, her grandfather, or even her father,—a wise enough restriction, perhaps, for such benighted folks, and where care in marrying often leaves the female part of the household to the dangerous company of these relations until far on in life. But with us women are not shut up to any such necessities, except in Utah, where they may, in the course of a respectably long life, marry through every genealogical degree without knowing it. In other parts they are as necessary as insurance companies, and so marry very soon; so that silver weddings are often seen at an early age, while golden matrimonies are more frequent than maternities or patrimonies. To every thoughtful man, who moves about our rapidly dissolving surfaces, where the railroad car is the kaleidoscope which turns up the bits of humanity in new combinations, a wife is necessary to put up a monument over him; for moving on is such a fixed law,—the only fixed thing in America, except debt and live corruption,—that while he was turning his majority, all his family relations would have gone to other States.
The two curiosities in the United States are fat people and servants. Both run away in a velocipedal hurry; the former into sharp bargains, and the latter into independent powers which dictate treaties and make alliances like other self-governing communities. An American family is like a South Carolina regiment, all officers and no privates; a boarding-house, a Swiss confederacy, in which the cantons, wedged into neutralizing elements, get forward like a stool braced every-way and equipoised into an aching discomfort; and a hotel, like twenty German Bunds entangled by contrarious independent interests that knot themselves into teasing discontents, and fret into jars which hold a variety of unpreserved, acidulating fruits. The freest joke in all America is one of its large hotels, which fancies Axminster carpets and chandeliers in a large parlor, and numerous discomforts packed in ever-dwindling rooms, to be happiness. But then the “gentlemanly proprietor” makes up for all this in the bills, which convince all the guests, that they must have enjoyed themselves and at an American rate of speed.
Trade has also had its great advances, not only in the figures which stand in merchants’ magazines like pyramids, with bases always widening downwards, but in the dwindling measures, quarts, gallons, pecks, and bushels, and the waning qualities which sharpen upwards to steady apexes. How to make up in the bill what is taken from the body is a critical study, in which most tradesmen have, without any prizes offered by outsiders, become great proficients. If that man is a public benefactor who makes two blades grow in the place of one, surely he may be rewarded with a passing notice, who takes all the steel out of the one sent to him for repairs, and then divides up the instrument into several blades. Making water into wine, chalk into milk, chemicals into as many varieties of drinkables as there are days of the year, and diluting articles deemed too strong when left to their raw native vigor, so as to adapt them to our weakened constitutions, attest the beneficent designs of manufacturers and merchants upon Americans of plethoric habits. Peabodies shelling out to poorbodies furnish examples of abundant charity not so widely touching as these.
To make a small measure go twice as far as a large one is more than a feat; it approaches creation. What may in time be considered a double bed, it is impossible yet to foresee; but certain it is, that while single beds are increasing to an alarmingly wide extent, their narrowness is becoming such as to require a new definition of a line to avoid disagreeable collisions.
Mercantile failures, elsewhere hurtful, are with us hurried on into vivacious benefits, dividing up, before the expiration of the credits given, the accumulated profits which otherwise might accumulate in stagnating dulness in the firm. A steady increase of wages is solving, too, those perplexing theories how to balance capital and labor; a weekly distribution of earnings keeping down injudicious balances in the bank.
The frequent jumps of men from low places into high ones, with a celerity very pleasing to their families and often to their creditors, show that the world is governed too much; for acting on this Jeffersonian maxim, most of these ready leapers leave off the governing part and expend their activities in securing, along with their weak salaries, strong flying benefits, which only light on the vigilant.
While the velocipedal ways of Americans thus cut across their own country, it is in foreign fields that they are most striking and cutting. Crossing the well-worn paths of Europe, scattering high-premium gold on those jolly fellows, landlords and waiters, they ridge its old historic surfaces with little histories which the facetious persons, who catch sight of them as they whiz through histories, which they leave grandly behind them and all unknown, retail with as much glee, as the travellers themselves once did saleratus, fine-cut nails, or bobinet. Their scant intellectual stores and unfurnished stock of knowledge, so far from embarrassing, only enable them to spin on faster. Mythology, paintings, biographies, architecture, are soon wound up on their clean spindles.
Another class, like aeronautic vessels, have gaseous heads and heavy undergearing, which enable them to run over and run down everything abroad by swift-moving slangs. They always float by the bad air of their own heads, and are apt to anchor in vicious soils. These they can-can. The spent money surprises the hotel squeezers; the spent morals astonish themselves by the ease with which they lose their little all.
But of all the fast classes in America, that is the most velocipedal which, having expressed themselves through the modish follies of the largest American cities, are transported to the stronger vices of Paris. Tired of tapping the younger trees of American growth, they spend the rest of their precious lives in pecking assiduously the rotten parts of foreign woods, content with the phosphoric slime of decay and dissolving maturities.
CHAPTER XXI.
PUZZLES AND CROSS-READINGS; OR, JOHNSON’S ENTERTAINMENTS.
APRIL 14, 1865, TO MARCH 4, 1869.
Puzzles about Hemp and Paper.—Weak Brains at rest.—The Return of the Holders of Sabres and Guns.—Our Dead.—Fighters become Workers.—A Modern Sisyphus rolls a Stone up Hill.—How it rolled back.—The Interpretation by Congress of its own Rights.—Southern Delegates declined.—Puzzles solved.—Vetoing made easy.—The New Orleans Riots.—The Zigzag Journey of the President to the Tomb of Douglas.—The Fenian Republic in Union Square.—The Sham-rock compared with other Rocks.—The French Moths in Mexico; and how they were singed.—Amnesties and Pardons.—Scripture outdone.—Forgiveness forced upon the Unrepenting.—Results of Congressional Reconstruction.—The President tried and one found wanting.—Value of one Vote.—Alaska and St. Thomas.—Chicago, unalarmed, goes on dis-pairing but not despairing.—The Narrow Escapes of New York.—Fiske-Ville.—Johnson gets Mudd out of the Dry Tortugas.
Where to find hemp enough to suspend those who had supported the overwhelmed Confederacy was the first puzzle that presented itself to the furious patriotism of the constitutional Substitute. This, however, soon gave place to the still more difficult one, where to find paper enough to pardon them.
Four of the assassins of the good man were effectively deprived of any further earthly abuse of their weak brains, maudlin sentiments, and passions; the others were sent between stone walls or to the dry sands of the Tortugas.
The heroic holders of the sabre and musket,—their stern, sad work now done, bore them back,—draped in sable for the comrades who slept in trenched glory along the furrowed parallel, in the storm-swept field, or on the banks of the Mississippi, the Chickahominy and James,—back to the plough, to the workshop, to the peaceful businesses of life, to reunions with those whose busy fingers and busier hearts had forwarded to them love messages and mindful tokens while absent.
The army of fighters was disbanded into battalions of workers.
On the 29th of May the new President commenced the Sisyphus business of Southern reconstruction; first rolling to the top of the hill the stone of a provisional government for North Carolina, which, of course, rolled back again, covered by the old shells of the Confederacy. By the middle of July he had tugged up the same stone under different names, as Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina, only to find it rolling down speedily, hurting the colored people and Union whites, and creating a butternut-colored atmosphere all around it. The entertainment was too often repeated to be jocose, except to Mr. Johnson, who believed in a detached idea industriously pursued. The delegates to Congress under his scheme, who presented themselves at Washington, in December, 1865, were found to be all of the saffron complexion and hue. They had already forgotten that there had been any war, and only remembered their ancient rights, and were ready to draw back pay, or anything else back, except declarations of not having been in the least wrong in the late little unpleasantness. Congress read their own privileges, rights, and duties in quite a different way; declared their exclusive right, as representatives of the people, to deal with the new puzzles; passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill for the protection of the colored property of the South, the Civil Rights Bill, and the proposed Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment. While they believed in the dead past burying its dead, they did not embrace the idea of its burying the living with them.
Mr. Johnson now studied the Art of Vetoing Made Easy; and from his cross-readings began to add immensely to the American official archives by Xanthippe messages, whose unlovely words have greatly embossed the rich cabinets of vituperative specimens, for a long time accumulating at Washington.
THE IRISH REPUBLIC IN AMERICA. (p. 529) ]
In July, 1866, a riot was created in New Orleans,—the counterpart of the pat-riot disturbances in New York three years before,—in which thirty-four loyal colored and three loyal colorless people were added to the Crescent cemeteries. The citizens who had participated in the bonfires and illuminations, on the arrival of Farragut and Porter in 1862 were mercifully spared. In August following, the acting President, accompanied by Mr. Seward,—whose wonderful pen through the silent diplomatic struggle abroad, which ran parallel with the armed strife at home, cannot be alluded to with scant praise,—set out for Chicago, to lay the corner-stone of a monument to the powerful dike-breaker. Never was a journey so long. The road thither seemed to have got intoxicated and reeled and tumbled all over the West; while the jerky speeches, hiccuping along the wavy ways, endeavored in vain to catch up with and to find the President.
This year was made memorable by the establishment of a wonderful republic for Ireland in Union Square, New York, and the quiet election, without any votes, of Mr. Roberts to be its head; an Irish invention, for the easy solution of that perplexing question of how to get enough votes, most praiseworthy. The novel mode of raising an army, and of replenishing a treasury, whose invisible outflow was so steady and well regulated that it never perplexed Wall Street, were admirable illustrations of the good-nature of the friendly sons and daughters of Saint Patrick.
The sham-rock, on which they touched poured out streams as abundant as the rock which Moses struck. Indeed, it was almost as good a milch cow as Plymouth Rock.
In February, 1867, the French moths,—hatched out in 1862 in a Napoleonic fancy nest, and darting off into Mexico, through whose chronic flames they played with the usual results,—were terribly scorched in a candle sent out by Mr. Seward. The head moth, Maximilian, fascinated by the gilt of an imperial candelabra, was so burnt, that he disappeared like the vagaries of South American empire, which hovered on the wings of that other Gallic moth, that now flits around the gas-jets of the Tuileries.
Mr. Johnson’s amnesties and pardons are too numerous for anything but a calculating-machine. He began May 29, 1865, and only ended March 4, 1869. Tired of cross-reading the Constitution, he betook himself to Scripture, and, with his mode of interpretation, spelt out a duty to forgive all of the unrepentant, including Mr. J. Davis, the prize-taking Breckenridge, and other conspicuous sinners.
In spite of the semi-weekly vetoes, however, which obliged Congress to pass all laws twice, it contrived to reconstruct all of the lately disorganizing and disorganized States except Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas. Some very poor Northern timber and unconstitutional braces were wrought into the hastily constructed and urgently needed fabrics, which, however, it is to be hoped, will be speedily removed. Angry with the solution of the puzzles, the President attempted to read athwart the Tenure of Office Act Mr. Stanton’s war duties, for which, March 5, 1869, he was requested by the House of Representatives to appear before the Senate and make answer. From March 29th to May 16th his trial lasted, interflecked by some fine veins of forensic eloquence, and at last bringing out the value of a single vote,—that which prevented conviction,—for the benefit of future electoral harangues.
The restless, lever pen of Mr. Seward pried up new territory for the screaming eagle to light upon,—the distant and hazy Alas-ka, rich in ices and other cool reasons, and St. Thomas the Danish, whose abundant lemons may, when well mixed, allay, without quenching, our thirst for foreign drinks.
These speculations did not, it is needless to add, discourage Chicago. Always dis-pairing individuals, she never despaired for herself. Her courts granted four hundred and sixty-eight divorces during 1868; but notwithstanding the untoward fact, her unchecked population sang on more loudly consoling lullabies to her well-rocked and increasing cradles of grain. Efforts were made the same year to annex New York to the Erie Railway and to change its name to Fisk-ville. These efforts might have succeeded, but that the attention of the leading proprietor was diverted to the Pacific; and the motion for the expected change was postponed to a later term of the Supremest Court in the city of New York.
The last feat of Mr. Johnson was to get Mudd out of the Dry Tortugas.
GETTING MUDD OUT OF THE DRY TORTUGAS. (p. 533) ]
CHAPTER XXII.
TAKEN FOR GRANTED; OR, WHAT IS EXPECTED OF GRANT AND THE AMERICAN FUTURE.
MARCH 4, 1869, TO ——.
The supposed Difficulties of writing History in advance considered, and the Popular Delusions on the Subject disposed of.—Lively Expectations of what our future Presidents, Cabinet Members, Foreign Ministers, etc., etc., will be and do.—What Citizens will be exempt from Executing and Garroting the Laws.—The Public Debt to disappear.—The Ways considered.—Cut up into Dividends and no more heard of.—What is expected of Common Schools and Sunday Schools in improving Public Men and their Speeches.—Certain Occupations to be dispensed with.—The Uses to which their Pursuers are to be put.—Improvements in Judges, Injunctions, and Court-Houses.—Extension of Efforts of Society for preventing Cruelty to Animals, to Employers, etc.—Woman’s Rights discussed from various Aspects.—Men and Women equal,—especially Women.—How any Differences between them are to be disposed of.—How Children are to be utilized before they get to be Twenty-one and lose their Activities.—The new Arts and Sciences to be taught.—Secretary of the Treasury to regulate the Fashions, and how.—The President and Sunday Schools.—All Mining to be transferred to Wall Street.—Advance Sheets of Reports for 1969.—What our Railway System is to be.—Grumbling and Patriotism.—Of the Future of Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.—A Pax Vobiscum.
Most people suppose that it is difficult to write history in advance. There is no greater delusion. Facts—even when we can get at them and are sure of them, which seldom happens—are great obstructions to a narrative. They involve sudden leaps into unforeseen depths of human action, perplexing struggles through very dynastic uncertainties, or ascents to unexpected developments of character, trying to one’s judgment and patience, and often hurtful to one’s pride of opinion. Our preconceptions, unverified by a set of obstinate facts, are distressed by the unsatisfactory contradictions. We halt dissatisfied on a dusty road, which the tramp of events has worn smooth, and left nothing to novelty or an industrious fancy.
Besides, the great majority of readers are partisans, and have a right to be disappointed at and to blame those unreasoning conclusions, which slide inevitably out of realities. They confront sternly those facts, which affront them, by insisting on happening in a way or order different from their expectations or wishes. Hitherto, we have been obliged to conform to the hard conditions thus inherent in actual chronicles, and have been forced to submit our readers to these annoying certainties.
We can, however, now dismiss these tantalizing fixities of events, which have run before us, and left us the wearisome business of catching up to them; and leaving them to overtake us, if they can, to write up a future history of events, which ought to happen, and which will greatly disappoint the sanguine expectations of Americans if they do not. The excuse for failure will be lessened by the outlined path which we here stretch downward into the wooded future.
We take it for granted, then, that all our future Presidents will be the very best and most competent men in the nation, spontaneously acclamated to the office, and not wrung out by industrious party conventions for political ends. Uncommitted to committees or political sponsors, and unweighted by onerous gratitude to ex-working party canvassers, they will naturally hereafter pensively appoint to Cabinet places and diplomatic posts statesmen of pre-eminent ability, patriotism, and integrity, who will as modestly wait to be invited in, as the same class now, when in, stand as if hopelessly deaf, to be distinctly invited out. That they will reluctantly, if at all, subject weak citizens to the pains and penalties of executing and garroting the laws, or the slow and unpractised, to the heavy tasks of carrying the public burdens.
The public debt will naturally disappear. Perhaps some fortunate speculator in petroleum or Erie stock will pay it off, rather than have it in the way, or see it left to bear the market inopportunely. The secret of making money scarce will lead doubtless to the discovery of making it plenty; and then the public debt, being of no use to anybody, will naturally stand aside, as poor relations in times of plenty. Besides, gentlemen being selected, not for their own interests, but for the public good, will, it is to be expected, donate their salaries to a sinking fund, which will carry it off, as some companies do their stockholders’ dividends, to unfathomed bottoms. In fact, if the debt could be cut up into dividends, nothing more would be heard of it. If the whole truth may be safely told, the difficulty in the extinguishment of the debt will not be so much in its undoubted disappearance, as in settling upon that plan among the numbers presented, which will be permitted to hurry it out of sight.
Of course, when the Federal obligations quit, the State and city debts will not have the face to remain behind.
These subjects out of the way, members of Congress, being then gentlemen, as well as educated, capable, and honest men, dragged unwillingly from and not into business, will deal with the few remaining topics with a wise silence,—and this course we take for grant-ed now; or else will discuss them and not each other, or the encyclopædia of unrelated questions, the publication of which now so enhances the price of paper.
This improvement in our Congressional debates will have a corresponding advantage, also, to those foreigners who, desirous of learning our system, venture upon the speeches made at the Capitol, and, hopelessly misled by the terms employed, and the ferocious adjectives that commit horrible murders on almost every paragraph, confound our geography with that of the Cannibal Islands. We also take it for granted, that our public men will wait for events to justify the crude speculations, which they toss out in conversations with reporters, before cruelly amusing the good-natured public with their vaticinations. Possibly, too, the spread of common schools and Sunday schools, teaching grammar and morality, may lead to the disuse by our print-rushing politicians of styles of speech quite incomprehensible, and of words so raw in outline and so destitute of middle letters as to lead profane people to fancy that they are imitations of their own heedless expressions. Of course, in the better days now dawning, “rings” will only be used to tie quadrupeds to posts, or to restrain vicious bipeds in state prisons. Combinations to do good and increase the general happiness will naturally supplant those curious American circles, whose peripheries are not equidistant from the centre, but which consist in fact only of a centre, and that centre, self.
Happiness, and not wealth, being thus the main pursuit, of course many kinds of occupations, now called business, such as brokers, money-lenders, etc., will cease, and those now engaged in these so-called pursuits—of others, will look after the poor to minister unto them and not to take them in. The superior claims of charity upon the fortunate, who are now living, will naturally be enhanced by the fact that, being at present in the world, they cannot reasonably expect to live much longer than 1970, and may quit much earlier, leaving some selfish heirs not disposed to divide except for an equivalent.
Many judges being released from their present arduous duties of so administering law as to get re-elected—for then no one will value an office so much a sinecure—will have some time, especially in New York, to study law; and some courts of appeal can be repealed. The only injunctions issued will be oral, delivered, not to railroad speculators, but to indiscreet juveniles, unwarily betrayed into their first and last offence. The expense of court-houses being thus partially saved, it is expected, that the small unventilated places in which law is peddled out will be enlarged, and a humane effort be thus made to save the exposed lives of suitors, lawyers, jurors, and judges.
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals will naturally, with larger means, extend its operations, and embrace employers, suffering from servants of independent ways, from domestics who take six evenings in the week out, and allow their mistress one, and who, for certain discreet considerations, not worth mentioning here, permit those, who divide their estates with them, to occupy a portion of the same house, on condition of not interfering with their separate apartments.
We also take it for granted, that woman’s rights will not be wrongfully urged or withheld; but will be so adjusted, that the public will ascertain what some people would ask for, if they did not become incomprehensible through abundant talking, or what—considering the modesty of the applicants—they really ought to have, although they do not clamor for it in a way that makes some suspect, that men are either to be extinguished outright, or else kept for a few hundred years on probation, until they shall have learned to be respectful, just, and unmanlike.
In this coming good time, men and women are to be equal,—especially the women. If any differences are discovered in any way between them, these differences are to be submitted to conventions chosen by the wisest women, and the differences either to be entirely suppressed, or the dissenters all expelled from the United States. Uniformity is to be secured at all hazards. If necessary, ballot-boxes will be attached to cradles; and women, by any cause confined from active canvassing, will be allowed to vote twice at the next election, in order to bring up their rights to a point where nature left them.
We further take it for granted, that children will then be content to be vivacious; will be left to the witching ways, the pulpy and dewy freshness of the morning glory of life, until they shall have gradually come to the ripe maturities of action; that they will not fall from grace into the condemnation of mischievous notice; will not daily burst into astonishing feats of memory or attainment before reluctant, domestic audiences, nor carry on social insurrections against the United States of their begettors until they have achieved their independence, nor hold a Fourth of July every day in the year.
Should reform in this direction not take place as just anticipated, then we shall expect that infantile precocities will be utilized before they shall have evaporated into the insipidities of manhood and womanhood. At present, it is well understood, children are anachronisms, sadly out of place, squandering uselessly their best powers without any corresponding responsibilities; legally treated as minors, when they are in fact majors; denied the legal rights to marry until they reach a period when marriage is tame and idle, and the means to support a wife are exhausted; prohibited from going to Congress and being Presidents, while full of original ideas and administrative ability, and allowed to go when they have oozed away through the leakages of active growths all capacity, and become just—what we see them at Washington; and wasting in pantalets the money which, if suffered, they might earn better than the old heads which are now only figure-heads.
We shall not be surprised to see, if not during Grant’s time, at least before the century runs out, a constitutional amendment relieving aged Americans—those, for example, who have attained the ripe, very ripe age of twenty-one—from the duties and cares of office, and securing to the public the benefit of young vigorous intellects, varying from twelve to seventeen years of age.
The happy results of this change will be apparent—to any infant mind. Short-jacketed M. C.’s will impart new vivacity to Congressional debate; young ministers to foreign courts will be able to acquire, if they do not know, some language beside the American, and be able to converse with those with whom they have business,—an un-speakable luxury now. Active, bustling infants will give a new ardor to journalism, and produce a more enterprising corps of wide-awake, newspaper correspondents, to keep up the stock of telegraph companies by information which, being constantly in advance of the facts, would fairly represent and be fitting types of, the infantile correspondents themselves, and necessitate additional contradictions. As territorial governors, obliged to take hazardous journeys on our railways,—which often intervene and prevent older men from reaching their destination,—they would be nimble enough to get out of the wreck, or perhaps smart enough to keep their deaths secret, and have their ancestors draw their salary,—thus accomplishing, although not present, the principal business of that office. Then, too, how much livelier would things go on in our churches, if, instead of the dull, old elders, deacons, or vestrymen, now seldom elected before they reach the great age of thirty, and who, when they were boys, were smart enough, although not as alert as their own boys now, were allowed to rest their stiffer awkward limbs in their pews, and ecclesiastical affairs were managed by their youngers? The sick would be visited by cheerful, round-faced persons, bright with the health which would be brought as a living fact to the invalid; widows would be comforted by the presence of dark-haired and hopeful youths, and not depressed by the aspect of people encumbered with wives and the chilling experience of at least a score and a half of years; while the poor would receive liberally from those who well know, that the best use for money is to keep it in vigilant circulation.
SCHOOL TEACHING FROM 1869 ONWARDS. (p. 542) ]
Business would also be conducted on youthful principles, in consonance with the other rapid ways of the times; capital would be nimble and alert, creating profits so lively that they would leap back into the common and rapidly running current. Old legislative peculators, bank and trust defaulters, would soon, in the natural course of things, and without the shocks of legal trials,—which generally produce no results,—be displaced; while young iniquity would scarcely acquire the rime and rust which now incrust so many of the old instruments of corruption, making them almost respectable. Biographies, now often running tediously through so many chapters, would be brief; as an American life might be assumed to close up substantially at twenty-five at least, and we should get the rich morning cream, without wearying ourselves with collecting the thin globules that float on the pan of age.
In the better times to which of course everybody looks, we take it for granted, also, that the every-day arts and the familiar sciences, now taught in schools and colleges, will be laid aside; and that Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Irish, and other tongues,—those sad reminders of Babels and other polyglot attempts and results,—will give place to more practical studies. How to cook, so as not to destroy the remnants of stomachs left by candy-eating, hot breads, and other delectable addictions of the old barbarous times which America has passed dyspeptically through; how to get a husband or wife, in every way suited to the expectations and ideas of different members of the family, and on a scale mathematically adjusted to the pecuniary latitude and longitude calculated from the paternal meridian; how to scale a tariff for conductors, which shall not raise the market price of gold rings, studs, and heavy watches, and yet leave something for the directors to operate the stock with; the best methods of acquiring a fortune without the stale process of failure and settling with creditors; the mode of conducting railway collisions and steamboat explosions, without ruining whole families and destroying rising communities at a blow, and without leaving so many facetious questions to funny coroners and irresistibly comic jurors; a method of advertising wares and leaving some praiseful adjectives not used up; a system which should graduate the decrease in weights and measures to the price; and how to make an hour’s work go as far as ten old-fashioned absurd hours,—these will help to furnish out a curriculum of study for institutions high and low.
The fashions will be regulated by the Secretary of the Treasury, who will issue a daily telegraphic bulletin, so that no one shall have any advantage over another.
The President of the United States, by way of keeping his hand in, may practise on a Sunday school every Sunday, addressing them in rotation, and going over those in New Jersey and Texas several times, if a safe pass can be secured. The antique modes of mining will be abolished altogether. A central bureau, located in Wall Street, will so work all kinds of veins and arteries, auriferous, argentiferous, and verdibackish, as to entice out all their values on call.
The traditions about gold are to be wrought up into poetry, and thus forever forgotten.
We have been put in possession of the advance sheets of several reports, to be made to the various State legislatures in 1969, on “The Absence of Legislative Corruption,” from which it is manifest, that nothing with money in it ever reaches the capitals of that day, and that the members are left to the tedious business of practical legislation, their spare time being amused with antiquarian researches into the capital chances for money-making between 1860 and 1870. It is also apparent from these coming reports that great amusement is to be afforded by a study of the severely virtuous styles of examinations, conducted by committees of our time, into alleged briberies of fellow-members; while the hotel bills of the cautious investigators are to be regarded as inimitable specimens of the gastronomic abundance of their predecessors in America.
We also take for granted, that the railway system of the United States will be wonderfully simplified. We now make it a matter of boasting that since the beginning of our railways, in 1829, we have extended them until, in forty years, they have reached a length of 38,500 miles, or a circuit around the earth one and a half times; costing in their construction and equipment $1,700,000,000, or a sum equal to two thirds of the debt of the United States; employing 8,000 engines and 135,000 cars, or enough, if placed side by side, to reach from New York to Chicago, and carrying annually 145,000,000 of passengers, or a number more than four times the whole population, men, women, children, and John Smiths put together. We are jubilant over the completion, in four years, of the Pacific Railroad, 1,900 miles in length, forming a line from New York to San Francisco of 3,353 miles, straining across prairies, chasing off herds of buffalo, spitting Utah with a skewer, climbing the Sierras 8,000 feet high, and levelling the Rocky Mountains with iron maces.
All these performances are, in the absence of anything better, and in our poor beginnings, not disdainful topics of conversation or newspaper comment. But in the near future we take it, that a single consolidation of all lines in the hands of one man,—whose name at present we mercifully withhold,—replacing our wooden depots with stone structures tastefully decorated with waving flags and live eagles, our tressel-work bridges with solid granite buttresses, spanned by iron girders,—the old ones being kept under glass cases for curious exhibition,—will so prolong, carry around, and multiply iron ways, that the entire population of the United States, excepting, perhaps, newspaper reporters and members of Congress, will be invited several times a year to take a pleasure trip, gratuituously, to every town having a thousand inhabitants, and be entertained six months on the suspended dividends, made palatable by watered stock.
THE AMERICAN LAOCOÖN. (p. 547) ]
Grumbling will, also, in those gladsome days, be left to the unnaturalized Englishmen among us, and to those wry-faced observers of the weather and crops, who get up such very unlively stacks of figures, and elongate their rueful faces beneath their cold shadows.
Patriotism will, of course, be merged in a cosmopolitan feeling; for, as our boundaries will naturally take in nearly all the world, what is outside will be the subjects of our pity and commiseration, as those portions of the globe unfortunately left outside of England were, a few years ago, to Englishmen.
Chicago will then have so many elevators, that she will raise not only her surface above Lake Michigan, but her manners to a point where mending can begin. New York will doubtless be ruled by a descendant of the Fisk-al family, who will utilize New Jersey as a railroad depot or a coal-yard. Philadelphia, letting go of New York as a bad job, beneath her satire, will have such a Rush-ing library as to be the book lender of the Union. Boston will be, to her delight, roofed in, and become the Publication Office of Fields, Osgood, & Co., with Faneuil Hall and the Athenæum for press-work and lithographing; while the Southern cities along the coast will serve as light-houses for the dark landscapes which have hitherto glowered behind them.
Cotton will be more than king,—will be a good thrifty farmer, replacing broom-sedgy fields with smiling furrows, razor-backed hogs with blooded stock, and will stand out in round completeness, not isolated by a heritage which kept it aloof from the world, but linked in a rosy chain of productive good with the happy brotherhood of work, prosperity, and well-doing.
We need hardly add, that we shall leave off praising ourselves when we shall most deserve praise, and cease to be sensitive to foreign censure when we shall be hardy enough to laugh at it.
As everybody is naturally expecting to be happy, so we expect that everybody will be, without being seriously hurt or stunted by any of the little taps of this history. Pax vobiscum.
Meanwhile, and until all these blessed times and expectations shall converge into the focalizing future, we trust that our readers, jolly, good, and happy, will get over, as best they can, the intermediate spaces, keeping their eye and faith steadily upon
THE END.
[Illustration]
Transcriber’s Note
Given the humorous intent of the author, and the age of this edition, one must circumspect regarding oddities of spelling and hyphenation. Hyphenation at line breaks is retained only when a word is very clearly unhyphenated everywhere else. Otherwise, hyphens appear as printed.
Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.
22.27 What England lost and America gained[.] Restored.
57.8 and commis[s]erate the other Removed.
126.12 W[o/u]ter Van Twiller Inverted.
149.16 found its supply of [anthracile] coal sic: anthracite?
196.18 is[s]ued once a week Added.
269.28 the king of Great Brit[ia/ai]n Transposed.
339.24 for the four follow[i]ng years Inserted.
355.21 when the speaker’s gav[i/e]l fell Replaced.
367.4 and the ac[c]umulated taxes upon Inserted.
392.12 and first smell of villa[i]nous saltpetre Inserted.
418.22 rose simultaneously[,/.] Replaced.
498.3 and with Fort Henry, Feb[ur/ru]ary 6th Transposed.
498.8 Feb[ur/ru]ary 16th Transposed.
537.8 we take for [grant-ed] now sic
505.12 and beleagu[e]red from May 4, 1863 Inserted.
531.23 The restless, [lever] pen of Mr. Seward sic: clever?
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