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.
[Illustration:
THE AMERICAN JOSS.
(p. 372)
]