LIFE OF THE PEOPLE: COMMUNITY ISOLATION
An infant people, spreading themselves through a wilderness
occupied only by savages and wild beasts. (Marshall.)
Of the affairs of Georgia, I know as little as of those of
Kamskatska. (James Madison, 1786.)
"Lean to the right," shouted the driver of a lumbering coach to his
passengers; and all the jostled and bethumped travelers crowded to that
side of the clumsy vehicle. "Left," roared the coachman a little later,
and his fares threw themselves to the opposite side. The ruts and
gullies, now on one side and now on the other, of the highway were so
deep that only by acting as a shifting ballast could the voyagers
maintain the stage's center of gravity and keep it from an upset.[760]
This passageway through the forest, called a "road," was the
thoroughfare between Philadelphia and Baltimore and a part of the trunk
line of communication which connected the little cities of that period.
If the "road" became so bad that the coach could not be pulled through
the sloughs of mud, a new way was opened in the forest; so that, in some
places, there were a dozen of such cuttings all leading to the same spot
and all full of stumps, rocks, and trees.[761]
The passengers often had to abandon this four-wheeled contraption
altogether and walk in the mud; and were now and again called upon to
put their shoulders to the wheels of the stage when the horses, unaided,
were unable to rescue it.[762] Sometimes the combined efforts of horses
and men could not bring the conveyance out of the mire and it would have
to be left all night in the bog until more help could be secured.[763]
Such was a main traveled road at the close of the Revolutionary War and
for a long time after the Constitution was adopted.
The difficulty and danger of communication thus illustrated had a direct
and vital bearing upon the politics and statesmanship of the times. The
conditions of travel were an index to the state of the country which we
are now to examine. Without such a survey we shall find ourselves
floating aimlessly among the clouds of fancy instead of treading, with
sure foothold, the solid ground of fact. At this point, more perhaps
than at any other of our history, a definite, accurate, and
comprehensive inventory of conditions is essential. For not only is this
phase of American development more obscure than any other, but the want
of light upon it has led to vague consideration and sometimes to
erroneous conclusions.
We are about to witness the fierce and dramatic struggle from which
emerged the feeble beginnings of a Nation that, even to-day, is still in
the making; to behold the welter of plan and counterplot, of scheming
and violence, of deal and trade, which finally resulted in the formal
acceptance of the Constitution with a certainty that it would be
modified, and, to some extent, mutilated, by later amendments. We are
to listen to those "debates" which, alone, are supposed to have secured
ratification, but which had no more, and indeed perhaps less effect than
the familiar devices of "practical politics" in bringing about the
adoption of our fundamental law.
Since the victory at Yorktown a serious alteration had taken place in
the views of many who had fought hardest for Independence and popular
government. These men were as strong as ever for the building of a
separate and distinct National entity; but they no longer believed in
the wisdom or virtue of democracy without extensive restrictions. They
had come to think that, at the very best, the crude ore of popular
judgment could be made to enrich sound counsels only when passed through
many screens that would rid it of the crudities of passion,
whimsicality, interest, ignorance, and dishonesty which, they believed,
inhered in it. Such men esteemed less and less a people's government and
valued more and more a good government. And the idea grew that this
meant a government the principal purpose of which was to enforce order,
facilitate business, and safeguard property.
During his early years in the Legislature, as has appeared, Marshall's
opinions were changing. Washington, as we shall see, soon after peace
was declared, lost much of his faith in the people; Madison arrived at
the opinion that the majority were unequal to the weightier tasks of
popular rule; and Marshall also finally came to entertain the melancholy
fear that the people were not capable of self-government. Indeed,
almost all of the foremost men of the period now under review were
brought to doubt the good sense or sound heart of the multitude. The
fires of Jefferson's faith still burned, and, indeed, burned more
brightly; for that great reformer was in France and neither experienced
nor witnessed any of those popular phenomena which fell like a drenching
rain upon the enthusiasm of American statesmen at home for democratic
government.
This revolution in the views of men like Washington, Madison, and
Marshall was caused largely by the conduct of the masses, which, to such
men, seemed to be selfish, violent, capricious, vindictive, and
dangerous. The state of the country explains much of this popular
attitude and disposition. The development of Marshall's public ideas
cannot be entirely understood by considering merely his altered
circumstances and business and social connections. More important is a
review of the people, their environment and condition.
The extreme isolation of communities caused by want of roads and the
difficulties and dangers of communication; the general ignorance of the
masses; their childish credulity, and yet their quick and acute
suspicion springing, largely, from isolation and lack of knowledge;
their savage and narrow individualism, which resisted the establishment
of a central authority and was antagonistic to any but the loosest local
control; their envy and distrust of the prosperous and successful which
their own economic condition strengthened, if, indeed, this
circumstance did not create that sullen and dangerous state of mind--an
understanding of all these elements of American life at that time is
vital if we are to trace the development of Marshall's thinking and
explore the origins of the questions that confronted our early
statesmen.
The majority of the people everywhere were poor; most of them owed
debts; and they were readily influenced against any man who favored
payment, and against any plan of government that might compel it. Also,
the redemption of State and Continental debts, which was a hard and
ever-present problem, was abhorrent to them. Much of the scrip had
passed into the hands of wealthy purchasers. Why, exclaimed the popular
voice, should this expedient of war be recognized? Discharge of such
public obligations meant very definite individual taxes. It was as easy
to inflame a people so situated and inclined as it was hard to get
accurate information to them or to induce them to accept any reasoning
that made for personal inconvenience or for public burdens.
Marshall could not foresee the age of railway and telegraph and
universal education. He had no vision of a period when speedy and
accurate information would reach the great body of our population and
the common hearthstone thus become the place of purest and soundest
judgment. So it is impossible to comprehend or even apprehend his
intellectual metamorphosis during this period unless we survey the
physical, mental, and spiritual state of the country. How the people
lived, their habits, the extent of their education, their tendency of
thought, and, underlying all and vitally affecting all, the means or
rather want of means of communication--a knowledge of these things is
essential to an understanding of the times.[764] The absence of roads
and the condition of the few that did exist were thoroughly
characteristic of the general situation and, indeed, important causes of
it. It becomes indispensable, then, to visualize the highways of the
period and to picture the elements that produced the thinking and acting
of the larger part of the people. Many examples are necessary to bring
all this, adequately and in just proportion, before the eye of the
present.
When Washington, as President, was on his way to meet Congress, his
carriage stuck in the mud, and only after it had been pried up with
poles and pulled out by ropes could the Father of his Country proceed on
his journey;[765] and this, too, over the principal highway of Maryland.
"My nerves have not yet quite recovered the shock of the _wagon_," wrote
Samuel Johnston of a stage trip from Baltimore to New York two years
after our present Government was established.[766] Richard Henry Lee
objected to the Constitution, because, among other things, "many
citizens will be more than three hundred miles from the seat of this
[National] government";[767] and "as many assessors and collectors of
federal taxes will be above three hundred miles from the seat of the
federal government as will be less."[768]
The best road throughout its course, in the entire country, was the one
between Boston and New York; yet the public conveyance which made
regular trips with relays of horses in the most favorable season of the
year usually took an entire week for the journey.[769] The stage was
"shackling"; the horses' harness "made of ropes"; one team hauled the
stage only eighteen miles; the stop for the night was made at ten
o'clock, the start next morning at half-past two; the passengers often
had to "help the coachman lift the coach out of the quagmire."[770]
Over parts even of this, the finest long highway in the United States,
the stage had to struggle against rocks and to escape precipices. "I
knew not which to admire the most in the driver, his intrepidity or
dexterity. I cannot conceive how he avoided twenty times dashing the
carriage to pieces,"[771] testifies a traveler. In central
Massachusetts, the roads "were intolerable" even to a New Englander; and
"the country was sparsely inhabited by a rude population."[772] In
Rhode Island not far from Providence the traveler was forced to keep
mounting and dismounting from his horse in order to get along at
all.[773] Dr. Taylor, in the Massachusetts Convention of 1788, arguing
for frequent elections, said that it would take less than three weeks
for Massachusetts members of Congress to go from Boston to
Philadelphia.[774]
Farmers only a short distance from New York could not bring their
produce to the city in the winter because the roads were
impassable.[775] Up State, in Cooper's Otsego settlement, "not one in
twenty of the settlers had a horse and the way lay through rapid
streams, across swamps or over bogs.... If the father of a family went
abroad to labour for bread, it cost him three times its value before he
could bring it home."[776] As late as 1790, after forty thousand acres
in this region had been taken up "by the poorest order of men ... there
were neither roads nor bridges"; and about Otsego itself there was not
even "any trace of a road."[777] Where Utica now stands, the opening
through the wilderness, which went by the name of a road, was so nearly
impassable that a horseback traveler could make no more than two miles
an hour over it. Rocks, stumps, and muddy holes in which the horse sank,
made progress not only slow and toilsome, but dangerous.[778]
Twenty days was not an unusual time for ordinary wagons, carrying
adventurous settlers to the wilderness west of the Alleghanies, to cross
Pennsylvania from Philadelphia to Pittsburg;[779] and it cost a hundred
and twenty dollars a ton to haul freight between these points.[780]
Three years after our present Government was established, twenty out of
twenty-six lawsuits pending in Philadelphia were settled out of court
"rather than go ninety miles from Phil^a for trial."[781]
Talleyrand, journeying inland from the Quaker City about 1795, was
"struck with astonishment" at what he beheld: "At less than a hundred
and fifty miles distance from the Capital," he writes, "all trace of
men's presence disappeared; nature in all her primeval vigor confronted
us. Forests old as the world itself; decayed plants and trees covering
the very ground where they once grew in luxuriance." And Talleyrand
testifies that the fields, only a few miles' walk out of the "cities,"
had been "mere wildernesses of forest" at the time the Constitution was
adopted.[782]
"The length and badness of the roads from hence [Mount Vernon] to
Philadelphia" made Washington grumble with vexation and disgust;[783]
and Jefferson wrote of the President's Southern tour in 1791: "I shall
be happy to hear that no accident has happened to you in the bad
roads ... that you are better prepared for those to come by lowering
the hang [body] of your carriage and exchanging the coachman for two
postilions ... which [are] ... essential to your safety."[784]
No more comfortable or expeditious, if less dangerous, was travel by
boat on the rivers. "Having lain all night in my Great Coat and Boots in
a berth not long enough for me," chronicles Washington of this same
Presidential journey, "we found ourselves in the morning still fast
aground."[785]
So difficult were the New Jersey roads that the stout and well-kept
harness with which Washington always equipped his horses was badly
broken going through New Jersey in 1789.[786] "The roads [from Richmond
to New York] thro' the whole were so bad that we could never go more
than three miles an hour, some times not more than two, and in the
night, but one," wrote Jefferson[787] in March, 1790.
A traveler starting from Alexandria, Virginia, to visit Mount Vernon,
nine miles distant, was all day on the road, having become lost, in the
"very thick woods." So confusing was the way through this forest that
part of this time he was within three miles of his destination.[788]
Twelve years after our present Government was established James A.
Bayard records of his journey to the Capital: "Tho' traveling in the
mail stage ... we were unable to move at more than the rate of two or
three miles an hour."[789]
Throughout Virginia the roads were execrable and scarcely deserved the
name. The few bridges usually were broken.[790] The best road in the
State was from Williamsburg, the old Capital, to Richmond, the new, a
distance of only sixty-three miles; yet, going at highest speed, it
required two days to make the trip.[791] Traveling in Virginia was
almost exclusively by horseback; only negroes walked.[792] According to
Grigsby, the familiar vision in our minds of the picturesque coach
comfortably rolling over attractive highways, with postilions and
outriders, which we now picture when we think of traveling in old
Virginia, is mostly an historical mirage; for, says Grigsby, "coaches
were rarely seen. There were thousands of respectable men in the
Commonwealth who had never seen any other four-wheeled vehicle than a
wagon and there were thousands who had never seen a wagon" at the time
when the Constitution was ratified.[793]
If horseback journeys were sore trials to the rider, they were
desperately hard and sometimes fatal to the poor brute that carried
him. In crossing unfordable rivers on the rude ferryboats, the horses'
legs frequently were broken or the animals themselves often killed or
drowned.[794] From Fredericksburg to Alexandria the roads were
"frightfully bad."[795] As late as 1801 the wilderness was so dense just
above where the City of Washington now stands that Davis called it "the
wilds of the Potomac." In most parts of Virginia a person unacquainted
with the locality often became lost in the forests.[796] South of
Jamestown the crude and hazardous highways led through "eternal
woods."[797]
A short time before the Revolution, General Wilkinson's father bought
five hundred acres on the present site of the National Capital,
including the spot where the White House now stands; but his wife
refused to go there from a little hamlet near Baltimore where her family
then lived, because it was so far away from the settlements in the
backwoods of Maryland.[798] A valuable horse was stolen from a Virginia
planter who lived one hundred and forty miles from Richmond; but,
although the thief was known, the expense of going to the Capital with
witnesses was double the value of the horse, and so the planter pocketed
his loss.[799] It cost more to transport tobacco from Augusta County,
Virginia, to market than the tobacco was worth, so difficult and
expensive was the carriage.[800]
A sergeant in a Virginia regiment during the Revolutionary War, living
in a part of the State which at present is not two hours' ride from the
Capital, petitioned the House of Delegates in 1790 for payment of his
arrears because he lived so far away from Richmond that he had found it
impossible to apply within the time allowed for the settlement of his
accounts in the regular way.[801] In 1785 the price of tobacco on the
James River or the Rappahannock, and in Philadelphia varied from twenty
to ninety-five per cent, although each of these places was "the same
distance from its ultimate market,"[802] so seriously did want of
transportation affect commerce. "The trade of this Country is in a
deplorable Condition ... the loss direct on our produce & indirect on
our imports is not less than 50 per ct.," testifies Madison.[803]
Only in the immediate neighborhood of Philadelphia, Boston,[804] or New
York, neither of which "cities" was as large as a moderate-sized inland
town of to-day, were highways good, even from the point of view of the
eighteenth century. In all other parts of America the roads in the
present-day sense did not exist at all. Very often such trails as had
been made were hard to find and harder to keep after they had been
found. Near the close of the Revolution, Chastellux became tangled up in
the woods on his way to visit Jefferson at Monticello "and travelled a
long time without seeing any habitation."[805]
Whoever dared to take in North Carolina what, at present, would be a
brief and pleasant jaunt, then had to go through scores of miles of
"dreary pines" in which the traveler often lost his way and became
bewildered in the maze of the forest.[806] Again, the wanderer would
find himself in a desolation of swamp and wood without the hint of a
highway to follow out of it; and sleeping on the ground beneath the
trees of this wilderness, with only wild animals about him, was, for the
ordinary traveler, not an uncommon experience.[807]
Even when the road could be traced, bears would follow it, so much was
it still a part of their savage domain.[808] The little traveling
possible when the weather was good was sometimes entirely suspended for
days after a rain or snowfall, even out of a "city" like Baltimore.[809]
Six years after the Constitution was adopted, Talleyrand found the
buildings of that ambitious town "disput[ing] the ground with trees
whose stumps have not yet been removed."[810]
Such were the means of communication of a people scattered over a
territory of almost half a million square miles. The total population of
the United States was about three and a quarter millions; the same part
of the country to-day has a population of not far from fifty-five
millions. Including cities, and adding to these the more thickly settled
portions adjoining them, there were not in the original States seven
men, women, and children, all told, to the square mile. If we add
Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, into which the
restless settlers already were moving, the people then living in the
United States were fewer than five persons to the square mile.
The various little clusters of this scanty and widely separated
population were almost entirely out of touch one with another.
Inhabitants were scattered through those far-flung stretches called the
United States, but they were not a people. Scarcely any communication
existed between them; while such a thing as mail service was unknown to
all but a comparatively few thousands. It required six days and
sometimes nine to carry mail between Boston and New York. As late as
1794 a letter of Jefferson, then in Charlottesville, Virginia, to
Madison at Philadelphia, reached the latter nine days after it was
sent; and another letter between the same correspondents was eight days
on the journey.[811]
Yet this was unusually expeditious. One month later, on January 26,
1795, Madison wrote Jefferson that "I have received your favor of Dec^r.
28, but [not] till three weeks after the date of it."[812] Summer, when
the post-riders made better time, seemed not greatly to increase the
dispatch of mail; for it took more than a month for a letter posted in
New York in that season of the year to reach an accessible Virginia
county seat.[813] Letters from Richmond, Virginia, to New York often did
not arrive until two months after they were sent.[814] But better time
was frequently made and a letter between these points was, commonly,
hurried through in a month.[815]
Many weeks would go by before one could send a letter from an interior
town in Pennsylvania. "This Uniontown is the most obscure spot on the
face of the globe.... I have been here seven or eight weeks without one
opportunity of writing to the land of the living," complains a disgusted
visitor.[816] A letter posted by Rufus King in Boston, February 6, 1788,
to Madison in New York was received February 15;[817] and although
anxiously awaiting news, Madison had not, on February 11, heard that
Massachusetts had ratified the Constitution, although that momentous
event had occurred five days before.[818] New York first learned of that
historic action eight days after it was taken.[819] But for the
snail-like slowness of the post, the Constitution would certainly have
been defeated in the Virginia Convention of 1788.[820]
Transatlantic mail service was far more expeditious considering the
distance; a letter from Jay in London reached Wolcott at Philadelphia in
less than eight weeks.[821] But it sometimes required five months to
carry mail across the ocean;[822] even this was very much faster than
one could travel by land in America. Four weeks from Cowes, England, to
Lynnhaven Bay, Virginia, was a record-breaking voyage.[823]
Such letters as went through the post-offices were opened by the
postmasters as a matter of course, if these officials imagined that the
missives contained information, or especially if they revealed the
secret or familiar correspondence of well-known public men.[824] "By
passing through the post-office they [letters] should become known to
all" men, Washington cautioned Lafayette in 1788.[825] In 1791, the
first year of the Post-Office under our present Government, there were
only eighty-nine post-offices in the entire country.[826] "As late as
1791 there were only six post-offices in New Jersey and none south of
Trenton."[827]
Yet letters were the principal means by which accounts of what was
happening in one part of the country were made known to the people who
lived in other sections; and this personal correspondence was by far the
most trustworthy source of information, although tinctured as it
naturally was by the prejudice of the writer and often nothing but
report of mere rumor.
Newspapers were few in number and scanty in news. When the Constitution
was adopted, not many regularly issued newspapers were printed in the
whole country. Most of these were published in Philadelphia, Boston, New
York, and in two or three of the other larger towns. Only ten papers
were printed in Connecticut, one of the best informed and best served of
all the States, and of these several soon expired;[828] in Ridgefield,
with twelve hundred inhabitants, there were but four newspaper
subscribers.[829] In 1784, Virginia had only one newspaper, published at
Richmond twice a week.[830]
These papers carried scarcely any news and the little they published was
often weeks and sometimes months old, and as uncertain as it was stale.
"It is but seldom that I have an opportunity of peeping into a
newspaper," wrote "Agricola" to the Salem (Massachusetts) "Gazette,"
September 13, 1791, "and when it happens it is commonly a stale one of 2
or 3 weeks back; but I lately met with your fresh Gazette of August
30th--may be I shan't see another for months to come."[831] "Newspaper
paragraphs, unsupported by other testimony, are often contradictory and
bewildering," wrote Washington of so big, important, and exciting news
as the progress of Shays's Rebellion.[832] On the same day Washington
complained to General Knox that he was "bewildered with those vague and
contradictory reports which are presented in the newspapers."[833]
But what this pygmy press lacked in information it made up in personal
abuse. Denunciation of public men was the rule, scandal the fashion.
Even the mild and patient Franklin was driven to bitter though witty
protest. He called the press "THE SUPREMEST COURT OF JUDICATURE," which
"may judge, sentence, and condemn to infamy, not only private
individuals, but public bodies, &c. with or without inquiry or hearing,
_at the court's discretion_." This "Spanish Court of Inquisition,"
asserts Franklin, works "in the dark" and so rapidly that "an honest,
good Citizen may find himself suddenly and unexpectedly accus'd, and in
the same Morning judg'd and condemn'd, and sentence pronounced against
him, that he is a _Rogue_ and a _Villian_."
"The liberty of the press," writes Franklin, operates on citizens
"somewhat like the _Liberty of the Press_ that Felons have, by the
Common Law of England, before Conviction, that is, to be _press'd_ to
death or hanged." "Any Man," says he, "who can procure Pen, Ink, and
Paper, with a Press, and a huge pair of BLACKING BALLS, may
commissionate himself" as a court over everybody else, and nobody has
any redress. "For, if you make the least complaint of the _judge's_
[editor's] conduct, he daubs his blacking balls in your face wherever he
meets you, and, besides tearing your private character to flitters marks
you out for the odium of the public, as an _enemy to the liberty of the
press_." Franklin declared that the press of that day was supported by
human depravity.
Searching for a remedy which would destroy the abuse but preserve the
true liberty of the press, Franklin finally concludes that he has found
it in what he calls "the _liberty of the cudgel_." The great philosopher
advised the insulted citizen to give the editor "a good drubbing"; but
if the public should feel itself outraged, it should restrain itself
and, says Franklin, "in moderation content ourselves with tarring and
feathering, and tossing them [editors] in a blanket."[834]
Even Jefferson was sometimes disgusted with the press. "What do the
foolish printers of America mean by retailing all this stuff in our
papers?--As if it were not enough to be slandered by one's enemies
without circulating the slanders among his friends also."[835] An
examination of the newspapers of that period shows that most of the
"news" published were accounts of foreign events; and these, of course,
had happened weeks and even months before.
Poor, small, and bad as the newspapers of the time were, however, they
had no general circulation many miles from the place where they were
published. Yet, tiny driblets trickled through by the belated posts to
the larger towns and were hastily read at villages where the post-riders
stopped along the way. By 1790 an occasional country newspaper appeared,
whose only source of news from the outside world was a fugitive copy of
some journal published in the city and such tales as the country editor
could get travelers to tell him: whether these were true or false made
not the slightest difference--everything was fish that came to his
net.[836]
Common schools in the present-day understanding of the term did not
exist. "There was not a grammar, a geography, or a history of any kind
in the school," testifies Samuel G. Goodrich[837] (Peter Parley) of
Ridgefield, Connecticut; and this at a time when the Constitution had
been adopted and our present Government was in operation. "Slates &
pencils were unknown, paper was imported, scarce and costly"; most
pupils in New England "cyphered on birch bark"; and a teacher who could
compute interest was considered "great in figures."[838] "The teacher
was not infrequently a person with barely education enough to satisfy
the critical requirements of some illiterate committeemen.... The pay
was only from three to five dollars a month, and two months during the
winter season was the usual term."[839] The half-dozen small but
excellent colleges and the few embryonic academies surrounded by
forests, where educated and devout men strove to plant the seeds of
institutions of learning, could not, altogether, reach more than a few
hundred pupils.
"_Anthony McDonald_ teaches boys and girls their grammar tongue; also
Geography terrestrial and celestial--Old hats made as good as new." So
read the sign above the door of McDonald's "school" in Virginia, a dozen
years after Washington was elected President.[840] For the most part
children went untaught, except in "the three R's," which, in some
mysterious manner, had been handed down from father to son. Yet in the
back settlements it was common to find men of considerable property who
could not read or write; and some of those who could make out to read
did not know whether the earth was round or flat.[841] There were but
thirty students at Virginia's historic college in 1795. Weld dined with
President Madison, of William and Mary's, and several of the students
were at the table. Some of these young seekers after culture were
without shoes, some without coats; and each of them rose and helped
himself to the food whenever he liked.[842]
Parts of the country, like the Mohawk Valley in New York, were fairly
settled and well cultivated.[843] In the more thickly inhabited parts of
New England there were order, thrift, and industry.[844] The houses of
the most prosperous farmers in Massachusetts, though "frequently but one
story and a garret," had "their walls papered"; tea and coffee were on
their tables when guests appeared; the women were clad in calicoes and
the men were both farmers and artisans.[845] Yet on the road from Boston
to Providence houses were seen already falling into decay; "women and
children covered with rags."[846] In Newport, Rhode Island, idle men
loafed on the street corners, houses were tumbling down from negligence,
grass grew in the public square, and rags were stuffed into the
windows.[847]
In Connecticut the people were unusually prosperous; and one
enthusiastic Frenchman, judging that State from the appearance of the
country around Hartford, exclaimed: "It is really the Paradise of the
United States."[848] Weld found that, while the "southeast part of ...
Pennsylvania is better cultivated than any other part of America, yet
the style of farming is ... very slovenly.... The farmer ... in
England ... who rents fifty acres ... lives far more comfortably in
every respect than the farmer in Pennsylvania, or any other of the
middle states, who owns two hundred acres."[849]
In the homes of Quaker farmers near Philadelphia, however, the furniture
was of black walnut, the beds and linen white and clean, the food varied
and excellent.[850] Yet a settler's house in the interior of
Pennsylvania was precisely the reverse, as the settler himself was the
opposite of the industrious and methodical Quaker husbandman. A log
cabin lighted only by the open door, and with the bare earth for a
floor, housed this pioneer and his numerous family. Often he was a man
who had lost both fortune and credit and therefore sought regions where
neither was necessary. When neighbors began to come in such numbers that
society (which to him meant government, order, and taxes) was formed, he
moved on to a newer, more desolate, and more congenial spot. Mostly
hunter and very little of a farmer, he with his nomad brood lived "in
the filth of his little cabin," the rifle or rod, and corn from the
meager clearing, supplying all his wants except that of whiskey, which
he always made shift to get.
One idea and one alone possessed this type--the idea of independence,
freedom from restraint. He was the high priest of the religion of
do-as-you-like. He was the supreme individualist, the ultimate democrat
whose non-social doctrine has so cursed modern America. "He will not
consent to sacrifice a single natural right for all the benefits of
government,"[851] chronicles a sympathetic observer of these men.
Freneau, a fervent admirer of this shiftless and dissolute type, thus
describes him and his home:--
/*
"Far in the west, a paltry spot of land,
That no man envied, and that no man owned,
A woody hill, beside a dismal bog--
This was your choice; nor were you much to blame;
And here, responsive to the croaking frog,
You grubbed, and stubbed,
And feared no landlord's claim."[852]
*/
Nor was hostility to orderly society confined to this class. Knox wrote
Washington that, in Massachusetts, those who opposed the Constitution
acted "from deadly principle levelled at the existence of all government
whatever."[853]
The better class of settlers who took up the "farms" abandoned by the
first shunners of civilization, while a decided improvement, were,
nevertheless, also improvident and dissipated. In a poor and slip-shod
fashion, they ploughed the clearings which had now grown to fields,
never fertilizing them and gathering but beggarly crops. Of these a part
was always rye or corn, from which whiskey was made. The favorite
occupation of this type was drinking to excess, arguing politics,
denouncing government, and contracting debts.[854] Not until debts and
taxes had forced onward this second line of pioneer advance did the
third appear with better notions of industry and order and less hatred
of government and its obligations.[855]
In New England the out-push of the needy to make homes in the forests
differed from the class just described only in that the settler remained
on his clearing until it grew to a farm. After a few years his ground
would be entirely cleared and by the aid of distant neighbors, cheered
to their work by plenty of rum, he would build a larger house.[856] But
meanwhile there was little time for reading, small opportunity for
information, scanty means of getting it; and mouth-to-mouth rumor was
the settler's chief informant of what was happening in the outside
world. In the part of Massachusetts west of the Connecticut Valley, at
the time the Constitution was adopted, a rough and primitive people were
scattered in lonesome families along the thick woods.[857]
In Virginia the contrast between the well-to-do and the masses of the
people was still greater.[858] The social and economic distinctions of
colonial Virginia persisted in spite of the vociferousness of democracy
which the Revolution had released. The small group of Virginia gentry
were, as has been said, well educated, some of them highly so,
instructed in the ways of the world, and distinguished in manners.[859]
Their houses were large; their table service was of plate; they kept
their studs of racing and carriage horses.[860] Sometimes, however, they
displayed a grotesque luxury. The windows of the mansions, when broken,
were occasionally replaced with rags; servants sometimes appeared in
livery with silk stockings thrust into boots;[861] and again dinner
would be served by naked negroes.[862]
The second class of Virginia people were not so well educated, and the
observer found them "rude, ferocious, and haughty; much attached to
gaming and dissipation, particularly horse-racing and cock-fighting";
and yet, "hospitable, generous, and friendly." These people, although by
nature of excellent minds, mingled in their characters some of the
finest qualities of the first estate, and some of the worst habits of
the lower social stratum. They "possessed elegant accomplishments and
savage brutality."[863] The third class of Virginia people were lazy,
hard-drinking, and savage; yet kind and generous.[864] "Whenever these
people come to blows," Weld testifies, "they fight just like wild
beasts, biting, kicking, and endeavoring to tear each other's eyes out
with their nails"; and he says that men with eyes thus gouged out were a
common sight.[865]
The generation between the birth of Marshall and the adoption of the
Constitution had not modified the several strata of Virginia society
except as to apparel and manners, both of which had become worse than in
colonial times.
Schoepf found shiftlessness[866] a common characteristic; and described
the gentry as displaying the baronial qualities of haughtiness, vanity,
and idleness.[867] Jefferson divides the people into two sections as
regards characteristics, which were not entirely creditable to either.
But in his comparative estimate Jefferson is far harsher to the Southern
population of that time than he is to the inhabitants of other States;
and he emphasizes his discrimination by putting his summary in parallel
columns.
"While I am on this subject," writes Jefferson to Chastellux, "I will
give you my idea of the characters of the several States.
In the North they are In the South they are
cool fiery
sober voluptuary
laborious indolent
persevering unsteady
independent independent
jealous of their own liberties, zealous for their own liberties, but
and just to those of others trampling on those of others
interested generous
chicaning candid
superstitious and hypocritical without attachment or pretensions to
in their religion any religion but that of the
heart.
"These characteristics," continues Jefferson, "grow weaker and weaker by
graduation from North to South and South to North, insomuch that an
observing traveller, without the aid of the quadrant may always know his
latitude by the character of the people among whom he finds himself."
"It is in Pennsylvania," Jefferson proceeds in his careful analysis,
"that the two characters seem to meet and blend, and form a people free
from the extremes both of vice and virtue. Peculiar circumstances have
given to New York the character which climate would have given had she
been placed on the South instead of the north side of Pennsylvania.
Perhaps too other circumstances may have occasioned in Virginia a
transplantation of a particular vice foreign to its climate." Jefferson
finally concludes: "I think it for their good that the vices of their
character should be pointed out to them that they may amend them; for a
malady of either body or mind once known is half cured."[868]
A plantation house northwest of Richmond grumblingly admitted a lost
traveler, who found his sleeping-room with "filthy beds, swarming with
bugs" and cracks in the walls through which the sun shone.[869] The most
bizarre contrasts startled the observer--mean cabins, broken windows, no
bread, and yet women clad in silk with plumes in their hair.[870] Eight
years after our present National Government was established, the food of
the people living in the Shenandoah Valley was salt fish, pork, and
greens; and the wayfarer could not get fresh meat except at Staunton or
Lynchburg,[871] notwithstanding the surrounding forests filled with game
or the domestic animals which fed on the fields where the forests had
been cleared away.
Most of the houses in which the majority of Virginians then lived were
wretched;[872] Jefferson tells us, speaking of the better class of
dwellings, that "it is impossible to devise things more ugly,
uncomfortable, and happily more perishable." "The poorest people,"
continues Jefferson, "build huts of logs, laid horizontally in pens,
stopping the interstices with mud.... The wealthy are attentive to the
raising of vegetables, but very little so to fruits.... The poorer
people attend to neither, living principally on ... animal diet."[873]
In general the population subsisted on worse fare than that of the
inhabitants of the Valley.[874] Even in that favored region, where
religion and morals were more vital than elsewhere in the Commonwealth,
each house had a peach brandy still of its own; and it was a man of
notable abstemiousness who did not consume daily a large quantity of
this spirit. "It is scarcely possible," writes Weld, "to meet with a man
who does not begin the day with taking one, two, or more drams as soon
as he rises."[875]
Indeed, at this period, heavy drinking appears to have been universal
and continuous among all classes throughout the whole country[876] quite
as much as in Virginia. It was a habit that had come down from their
forefathers and was so conspicuous, ever-present and peculiar, that
every traveler through America, whether native or foreign, mentions it
time and again. "The most common vice of the inferior class of the
American people is drunkenness," writes La Rochefoucauld in 1797.[877]
And Washington eight years earlier denounced "drink which is the source
of all evil--and the ruin of half the workmen in this country."[878]
Talleyrand, at a farmer's house in the heart of Connecticut, found the
daily food to consist of "smoked fish, ham, potatoes, strong beer and
brandy."[879]
Court-houses built in the center of a county and often standing entirely
alone, without other buildings near them, nevertheless always had
attached to them a shanty where liquor was sold.[880] At country taverns
which, with a few exceptions, were poor and sometimes vile,[881]
whiskey mixed with water was the common drink.[882] About Germantown,
Pennsylvania, workingmen received from employers a pint of rum each day
as a part of their fare;[883] and in good society men drank an
astonishing number of "full bumpers" after dinner, where, already, they
had imbibed generously.[884] The incredible quantity of liquor, wine,
and beer consumed everywhere and by all classes is the most striking and
conspicuous feature of early American life. In addition to the very
heavy domestic productions of spirits,[885] there were imported in 1787,
according to De Warville, four million gallons of rum, brandy, and other
spirits; one million gallons of wine; three million gallons of molasses
(principally for the manufacture of rum); as against only one hundred
and twenty-five thousand pounds of tea.[886]
Everybody, it appears, was more interested in sport and spending than in
work and saving. As in colonial days, the popular amusements continued
to be horse-racing and cock-fighting; the first the peculiar diversion
of the quality; the second that of the baser sort, although men of all
conditions of society attended and delighted in both.[887] But the
horse-racing and the cock-fighting served the good purpose of bringing
the people together; for these and the court days were the only
occasions on which they met and exchanged views. The holding of court
was an event never neglected by the people; but they assembled then to
learn what gossip said and to drink together rather than separately, far
more than they came to listen to the oracles from the bench or even the
oratory at the bar; and seldom did the care-free company break up
without fights, sometimes with the most serious results.[888]
Thus, scattered from Maine to Florida and from the Atlantic to the
Alleghanies, with a skirmish line thrown forward almost to the
Mississippi, these three and a quarter millions of men, women, and
children, did not, for the most part, take kindly to government of any
kind. Indeed, only a fraction of them had anything to do with
government, for there were no more than seven hundred thousand adult
males among them,[889] and of these, in most States, only
property-holders had the ballot. The great majority of the people seldom
saw a letter or even a newspaper; and the best informed did not know
what was going on in a neighboring State, although anxious for the
information.
"Of the affairs of Georgia, I know as little as of those of
Kamskatska," wrote Madison to Jefferson in 1786.[890] But everybody did
know that government meant law and regulation, order and mutual
obligation, the fulfillment of contracts and the payment of debts. Above
all, everybody knew that government meant taxes. And none of these
things aroused what one would call frantic enthusiasm when brought home
to the individual. Bloated and monstrous individualism grew out of the
dank soil of these conditions. The social ideal had hardly begun to
sprout; and nourishment for its feeble and languishing seed was sucked
by its overgrown rival.
Community consciousness showed itself only in the more thickly peopled
districts, and even there it was feeble. Generally speaking and aside
from statesmen, merchants, and the veterans of the Revolution, the idea
of a National Government had not penetrated the minds of the people.
They managed to tolerate State Governments, because they always had
lived under some such thing; but a National Government was too far away
and fearsome, too alien and forbidding for them to view it with
friendliness or understanding. The common man saw little difference
between such an enthroned central power and the Royal British Government
which had been driven from American shores.
To be sure, not a large part of the half-million men able for the
field[891] had taken much of any militant part in expelling British
tyranny; but these "chimney-corner patriots," as Washington stingingly
described them, were the hottest foes of British despotism--after it had
been overthrown. And they were the most savage opponents to setting up
any strong government, even though it should be exclusively American.
Such were the economic, social, and educational conditions of the masses
and such were their physical surroundings, conveniences, and
opportunities between the close of the War for Independence and the
setting-up of the present Government. All these facts profoundly
affected the thought, conduct, and character of the people; and what the
people thought, said, and did, decisively influenced John Marshall's
opinion of them and of the government and laws which were best for the
country.
During these critical years, Jefferson was in France witnessing
government by a decaying, inefficient, and corrupt monarchy and
nobility, and considering the state of a people who were without that
political liberty enjoyed in America.[892] But the vagaries, the
changeableness, the turbulence, the envy toward those who had property,
the tendency to repudiate debts, the readiness to credit the grossest
slander or to respond to the most fantastic promises, which the newly
liberated people in America were then displaying, did not come within
Jefferson's vision or experience.
Thus, Marshall and Jefferson, at a time destined to be so important in
determining the settled opinions of both, were looking upon opposite
sides of the shield. It was a curious and fateful circumstance and it
was repeated later under reversed conditions.
FOOTNOTES:
[760] Weld, i, 37-38; also, Morris, ii, 393-94.
[761] Weld, i, 38.
[762] Baily's _Journal_ (1796-97), 108.
[763] _Ib._, 109-10.
[764] Professor Beard, in his exposition of the economic origins of the
Constitution, shows that nearly all of the men who framed it were
wealthy or allied with property interests and that many of them turned
up as holders of Government securities. (Beard: _Econ. I. C._, chap. V.)
As a matter of fact, none but such men could have gone to the Federal
Convention at Philadelphia, so great were the difficulties and so heavy
the expenses of travel, even if the people had been minded to choose
poorer and humbler persons to represent them; at any rate, they did not
elect representatives of their own class until the Constitution was to
be ratified and then, of course, only to State Conventions which were
accessible.
[765] Weld, i, 47-48.
[766] Johnston to Iredell, Jan. 30, 1790; McRee, ii, 279.
[767] "Letters of a Federal Farmer," no. 2; Ford: _P. on C._, 292.
[768] _Ib._, no. 3, 302.
[769] De Warville made a record trip from Boston to New York in less
than five days. (De Warville, 122.) But such speed was infrequent.
[770] Josiah Quincy's description of his journey from Boston to New York
in 1794. (Quincy: _Figures of the Past_, 47-48.)
[771] De Warville, 138-39.
[772] Watson, 266.
[773] "The road is execrable; one is perpetually mounting and descending
and always on the most rugged roads." (Chastellux, 20.)
[774] Elliott, ii, 21-22.
[775] "In December last, the roads were so intollerably bad that the
country people could not bring their forage to market, though _actually
offered the cash on delivery_." (Pickering to Hodgdon; _Pickering_:
Pickering, i, 392.)
[776] Cooper, 1875-86, as quoted in Hart, iii, 98.
[777] _Ib._
[778] Watson, 270. Along one of the principal roads of New York, as late
as 1804, President Dwight discovered only "a few lonely plantations" and
he "occasionally found a cottage and heard a distant sound of an axe and
of a human voice. All else was grandeur, gloom, and solitude." (Halsey:
_Old New York Frontier_, 384.)
[779] Hart, iii, 116.
[780] _Mag. Western Hist._, i, 530.
[781] Justice Cushing to Chief Justice Jay, Oct. 23, 1792; _Jay_:
Johnston, iii, 450.
[782] _Memoirs of Talleyrand_: Broglie's ed., i, 176-77.
[783] Washington to Jay, Nov. 19, 1790; _Jay_: Johnston, iii, 409.
[784] Jefferson to Washington, March 27, 1791; _Cor. Rev._: Sparks, iv,
366.
[785] Washington's _Diary_: Lossing, Feb. 25, 1791.
[786] Washington to Jay, Dec. 13, 1789; _Jay_: Johnston, iii, 381.
[787] Jefferson to T. M. Randolph, March 28, 1790; _Works_: Ford, vi,
36.
[788] Weld, i, 91.
[789] Bayard to Rodney, Jan. 5, 1801; _Bayard Papers_: Donnan, ii, 118.
[790] Schoepf, ii, 46.
[791] _Ib._, 78.
[792] _Ib._, 45.
[793] Grigsby, i, 26.
[794] Weld, i, 170.
[795] Watson, 60.
[796] Davis, 372.
[797] Schoepf, ii, 95.
[798] Wilkinson: _Memoirs_, i, 9-10. The distance which General
Wilkinson's mother thought "so far away" was only forty miles.
[799] Schoepf, ii, 53.
[800] Zachariah Johnson, in Elliott, iii, 647.
[801] Journal, H.D. (1790), 13.
[802] Madison to Lee, July 7, 1785; _Writings_: Hunt, ii, 149-51.
[803] _Ib._
[804] Boston was not a "city" in the legal interpretation until 1822.
[805] Chastellux, 225. "The difficulty of finding the road in many parts
of America is not to be conceived except by those strangers who have
travelled in that country. The roads, which are through the woods, not
being kept in repair, as soon as one is in bad order, another is made in
the same manner, that is, merely by felling trees, and the whole
interior parts are so covered that without a compass it is impossible to
have the least idea of the course you are steering. The distances, too,
are so uncertain as in every county where they are not measured, that no
two accounts resemble each other. In the back parts of Pennsylvania,
Maryland, and Virginia, I have frequently travelled thirty miles for
ten, though frequently set right by passengers and negroes." (_Ib._
Translator's note.)
[806] Smyth, _Tour of the United States_, i, 102-103.
[807] Watson, 40. "Towards the close of the day I found myself entangled
among swamps amid an utter wilderness, and my horse almost exhausted in
my efforts to overtake Harwood. As night closed upon me I was totally
bewildered and without a vestige of a road to guide me. Knowing the
impossibility of retracing my steps in the dark, through the mazes I had
traversed, I felt the necessity of passing the night in this solitary
desert ... in no trifling apprehension of falling a prey to wild beasts
before morning." (_Ib._)
[808] _Ib._
[809] "I waited at Baltimore near a week before I could proceed on my
journey the roads being rendered impassable." (Baily's _Journal_
(1796-97), 107.)
[810] _Memoirs of Talleyrand_: Broglie's ed., i, 177.
[811] Madison to Jefferson, Dec. 21, 1794; _Writings_: Hunt, vi, 227.
[812] Madison to Jefferson, Jan. 26, 1795; _ib._, 230.
[813] "Your favor of July 6 having been address^d to Williamsburg,
instead of _Orange C. Ho[u]se_, did not come to hand till two days ago."
(Madison to Livingston, Aug. 10, 1795; _ib._, vi, 234.)
[814] Lee to Henry, May 28, 1789; Henry, iii, 387.
[815] Lee to Henry, Sept. 27, 1789; Henry, iii, 402.
[816] Ephraim Douglass to Gen. James Irvine, 1784; _Pa. Mag. Hist. and
Biog._, i, 50.
[817] Madison to Washington, Feb. 15, 1788; and King to Madison, Feb. 6,
1788; _Writings_: Hunt, v, footnote to p. 100.
[818] Madison to Washington, Feb. 11, 1788: _Writings_: Hunt, v, 99.
[819] Madison to Washington, Feb. 15, 1788; _ib._, 100.
[820] The Randolph-Clinton Correspondence; see _infra_, chap. x.
[821] Jay to Wolcott, mailed June 23, and received by Wolcott Aug. 16,
1794; Gibbs, i, 157.
[822] _Ib._, 160.
[823] Jefferson to Short, Nov. 21, 1789; _Works_: Ford, vi, 20.
[824] So notorious was this practice that important parts of the
correspondence of the more prominent politicians and statesmen of the
day always were written in cipher. Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe appear
to have been especially careful to take this precaution. (See
Washington's complaint of this tampering with the mails in a letter to
Fairfax, June 25, 1786; _Writings_: Sparks, ix, 175.) Habitual violation
of the mails by postmasters continued into the first decades of the
nineteenth century.
[825] Washington to Lafayette, Feb. 7, 1788; _Writings_: Ford, xi, 218.
[826] Kettell, in _Eighty Years' Progress_, ii, 174.
[827] _Pa. Mag. Hist. and Biog._, ix, 444.
[828] _Am. Ant. Soc. Pubs._, xxiii, Part ii, 254-330.
[829] Goodrich, i, 61.
[830] Schoepf, ii, 61; see note, _ib._ Even this journal died for want
of subscribers.
[831] Salem _Gazette_, Sept. 13, 1791; Hist. Col., Topsfield (Mass.)
Hist. Soc., iii, 10.
[832] Washington to Humphreys, Dec. 26, 1786; _Writings_: Ford, xi,
98-103.
[833] Washington to General Knox, Dec. 26, 1786; _ib._, 103-05.
[834] _Writings_: Smyth, x, 36 _et seq._ This arraignment of the press
by America's first journalist was written when Franklin was eighty-three
years old and when he was the most honored and beloved man in America,
Washington only excepted. It serves not only to illuminate the period of
the beginning of our Government, but to measure the vast progress during
the century and a quarter since that time.
[835] Jefferson to Mrs. Adams, Paris, Sept. 25, 1785; _Works_: Ford, iv,
465.
[836] "Country Printer," in Freneau, iii, 60. Freneau thus describes the
country editor of that day:--
"Three times a week, by nimble geldings drawn,
A stage arrives; but scarcely deigns to stop.
Unless the driver, far in liquor gone,
Has made some business for the black-smith-shop;
Then comes this printer's harvest-time of news,
Welcome alike from Christians, Turks, or Jews.
"Each passenger he eyes with curious glance,
And, if his phiz be mark'd of courteous kind,
To conversation, straight, he makes advance,
Hoping, from thence, some paragraph to find,
Some odd adventure, something new and rare,
To set the town a-gape, and make it stare.
"All is not Truth ('tis said) that travellers tell--
So much the better for this man of news;
For hence the country round, that know him well,
Will, if he prints some lies, his lies excuse.
Earthquakes, and battles, shipwrecks, myriads slain--
If false or true--alike to him are gain.
"Ask you what matter fills his various page?
A mere farrago 'tis, of mingled things;
Whate'er is done on Madam Terra's stage
He to the knowledge of his townsmen brings:
One while, he tells of monarchs run away;
And now, of witches drown'd in Buzzard's bay.
"Some miracles he makes, and some he steals;
Half Nature's works are giants in his eyes;
Much, very much, in wonderment he deals,--
New-Hampshire apples grown to pumpkin size,
Pumpkins almost as large as country inns,
And ladies bearing, each,--three lovely twins."
Freneau was himself a country printer in New Jersey, after editing the
_National Gazette_ in Philadelphia. Thus the above description was from
his personal experience and in a town in a thickly settled part, on the
main road between New York and Philadelphia.
[837] Goodrich, i, 38.
[838] A letter from Salem Town about 1786-87; in _American Journal of
Education_, xiii, 738.
[839] Van Santvoord: _Memoirs of Eliphalet Nott_, 19.
[840] Davis, 333.
[841] "Many cannot read or write, and many that can, know nothing of
geography and other branches. The country is too thinly settled to carry
out a system of common schools." (Howe, 153, speaking of western
Virginia about 1830.)
[842] Weld, i, 168. But President Tyler says that the boys Weld saw were
grammar-school pupils.
[843] Watson, 269.
[844] Chastellux, 319-20.
[845] De Warville, 126-27.
[846] _Ib._, 145 and 450.
[847] _Ib._, 145. All travelers agree as to the wretched condition of
Rhode Island; and that State appears to have acted as badly as it
looked. "The ... infamous [scenes] in Rhode Island have done
inexpressable injury to the Republican character," etc. (Madison to
Pendleton, Feb. 24, 1787; _Writings_: Hunt, ii, 319.)
[848] De Warville, 132.
[849] Weld, i, 113.
[850] De Warville, 186-87.
[851] De Warville, 186 and 332. See La Rochefoucauld's description of
this same type of settler as it was several years after De Warville
wrote. "The Dwellings of the new settlers ... consist of huts, with
roofs and walls which are made of bark and in which the husband, wife
and children pass the winter wrapped up in blankets.... Salt pork and
beef are the usual food of the new settlers; their drink is water and
whiskey." (La Rochefoucauld, i, 293-96.)
[852] Freneau, iii, 74.
[853] Knox to Washington, Feb. 10, 1788; _Writings_: Ford, xi, footnote
to 229. And see _infra_, chap. VIII.
[854] De Warville, 187. In 1797, La Rochefoucauld speaks of "the
credulity and ignorance of the half-savage sort of people who inhabit
the back settlements." (La Rochefoucauld, i, 293.)
[855] "A relaxation is observable among all orders of society.
Drunkenness is the prevailing vice, and with few exceptions, the source
of all other evils. A spirit, or rather a habit, of equality is diffused
among this people as far as it possibly can go.... The inhabitants
exhibit to strangers striking instances both of the utmost cleanliness
and excessive nastiness," (La Rochefoucauld, i, 125.)
During Washington's second term as President, La Rochefoucauld thus
describes manners in western Pennsylvania: "They are much surprised at a
refusal to sleep with one, two, or more men, in the same bed, or between
dirty sheets, or to drink after ten other persons out of the same dirty
glass.... Whiskey mixed with water is the common drink in the country."
(_Ib._)
[856] _Ib._, i, 293-96. See _infra_, note 4, pp. 281-82.
[857] Watson, 266.
[858] "You see [in Maryland and Virginia] real misery and apparent
luxury insulting each other." (De Warville, 159.)
[859] Chastellux, 279, and translator's note.
[860] Anburey, ii, 331-32.
[861] De Warville, 242.
[862] "Soon after entering Virginia, and at a highly respectable house,
I was shocked ... at seeing for the first time, young negroes of both
sexes, from twelve even to fifteen years old, not only running about the
house but absolutely tending table, as naked as they came into the
world.... Several young women were at the table, who appeared totally
unmoved." (Watson, 33.) Watson's statement may perhaps be questionable;
a livelier description, however, was given with embellishments, some
years later. (See translator's note to Chastellux, 245; and see Schoepf,
ii, 47.)
[863] Anburey, ii, 331-32.
[864] _Ib._, 332-33.
[865] Weld, i, 192. See Weld's description of "gouging." And see
Fithian's interesting account; Fithian, 242-43.
[866] Schoepf, ii, 89.
[867] _Ib._, 91-95.
[868] Jefferson to Chastellux, Sept. 2, 1785; _Thomas Jefferson
Correspondence_, Bixby Collection: Ford, 12; and see Jefferson to
Donald, July 28, 1787; Jefferson's _Writings_: Washington, ii, 193,
where Jefferson says that the qualities of Virginians are "indolence,
extravagance, and infidelity to their engagements."
[869] Weld, i, 199.
[870] Schoepf, ii, 34. This strange phenomenon was witnessed everywhere,
even in a place then so far remote as Maine. "Elegant women come out of
log or deal huts [in Maine] all wearing fashionable hats and head
dresses with feathers, handsome cloaks and the rest of their dress
suitable to this." (La Rochefoucauld, ii, 314.)
[871] _Ib._, 89; and Weld, i, 199, 236. The reports of all travelers as
to the want of fresh meat in the Valley are most curious. That region
was noted, even in those early days, for its abundance of cattle.
[872] _Ib._, 144.
[873] "Notes on Virginia": Jefferson; _Works_: Ford, iv, 69; and see
Weld, i, 114, for similar diet in Pennsylvania.
[874] _Ib._, 183-84.
[875] Weld, i, 206. "Sigars and whiskey satisfy these good people who
thus spend in a quarter of an hour in the evening, the earnings of a
whole day. The landlord of the Inn has also a distillery of whiskey,"
writes La Rochefoucauld, in 1797, of the mountain people of Virginia. He
thus describes the houses and people living in the valley towards
Staunton: "The habitations are in this district more numerous than on
the other side of the Blue Mountains, but the houses are miserable;
mean, small log houses, inhabited by families which swarm with children.
There exists here the same appearance of misery as in the back parts of
Pennsylvania." (La Rochefoucauld, iii, 173-76.)
[876] "It took a good deal of New England rum to launch a 75 ton
schooner ... to raise a barn ... or to ordain a regular minister....
Workingmen in the fields, in the woods, in the mills and handling logs
and lumber on the river were supplied with regular rations of spirits."
(Maine Hist. Soc. Col. (2d Series), vi, 367-68.)
The rich people of Boston loved picnic parties in the near-by country,
at which was served "Punch, warm and cold, before dinner; excellent
beef, Spanish and Bordeaux wines, cover their tables ... Spruce beer,
excellent cyder, and Philadelphia porter precede the wines." (De
Warville, 58.) This inquiring Frenchman called on Hancock, but found
that he had a "marvelous gout which dispenses him from all attentions
and forbids the access to his house." (_Ib._, 66.) As to New England
country stores, "you find in the same shop, hats, nails, liquors."
(_Ib._, 127.)
[877] La Rochefoucauld, iv, 577.
[878] Washington to Green (an employee) March 31, 1789; _Writings_:
Ford, xi, 377.
[879] _Memoirs of Talleyrand_: Broglie's ed., i, footnote to 181; and
see Talleyrand's description of a brandy-drinking bout at this house in
which he participated.
[880] Schoepf, ii, 47.
[881] Watson, 252.
[882] Chastellux, 224; see also 243.
[883] La Rochefoucauld, iv, 119.
[884] _Ib._, 590.
[885] See _infra_, II, chap. II.
[886] De Warville, 262.
[887] Watson, 261-62. "The indolence and dissipation of the middling and
lower classes of white inhabitants in Virginia are such as to give
pain.... Horse-racing, cock-fighting, and boxing-matches are standing
amusements, for which they neglect all business." (_Ib._; and see
Chastellux, 292, translator's note. Also see Chastellux's comments on
the economic conditions of the Virginians, 291-93.) For habits of
Virginians nearly twenty years after Watson wrote, see La Rochefoucauld,
iii, 75-79.
[888] "The session assembles here, besides the neighboring judges,
lawyers, and parties whose causes are to be tried, numbers of idle
people who come less from desire to learn what is going forward than to
drink together," says La Rochefoucauld; and see his picturesque
description of his arrival at the close of court day at Goochland
Court-House. (La Rochefoucauld, iii, 126-29.)
[889] One man to every five men, women, and children, which is a high
estimate.
[890] Madison to Jefferson, Aug. 12, 1786; _Writings_: Hunt, ii, 261.
[891] Randolph in the Virginia Constitutional Convention estimated that
the colonies could have put four hundred thousand soldiers in the field.
(Elliott, iii, 76-77.)
[892] It is a curious fact, however, that in his journey through France
Jefferson observed no bad conditions, but, on the whole, his careful
diary states that he found the people "well clothed and well fed," as
Professor Hazen expresses it. For impartial treatment of this subject
see Hazen, 1-21.