The great flood of civilisation, which has poured over the vast
regions of the West, in the south and the north, from the great lakes
to the Cape of Florida, has flowed on with a wonderful power and an
admirable regularity. Emigration has taken place, along the whole
line of march, from east to west. The inhabitants of New England,[S]
after having first spread themselves over their original territory,
and founded the States of Maine and Vermont, have thrown themselves
into the State of New York; thence, keeping as much as possible along
the northern frontier of the United States, they have extended all
along the coasts of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, and overrun the vast
delta comprised between the Ohio and the Upper Mississippi, which
now contains the States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and the
Territory of Michigan. The New York and Pennsylvania emigrants have
spread themselves comparatively little beyond the limits of their own
territory, which are very extensive, and were thinly peopled in 1783.
They have, however, furnished a small contingent to the great army of
emigration from New England, and have helped to occupy the vast tract
above-mentioned. Virginia, after having settled her western part with
her own sons, has given birth to Kentucky, and then, acting the same
part in the south as New England in the north, has sent forth to the
Gulf of Mexico those numerous swarms that have invaded the southwest.
North Carolina has taken part in this task, and has beside a child of
her own in Tennessee. Georgia and South Carolina have contributed to
create Alabama and Mississippi, and Tennessee and Kentucky have in turn
furnished offsets for Missouri and Arkansas.
Thus the States in which there are no slaves, have brought forth
a family of truly democratic republics, that is to say, with an
essentially farming population, holding no slaves, and, excepting the
vine, cultivating all the productions of temperate Europe. These young
States are founded on equality and the subdivision of property, for
most of the farms do not exceed 80 to 160 acres. The Southern States,
on the other hand, have created aristocratical republics, based on
slavery and the accumulation of property in a few hands, still more
exclusively agricultural than the north-western States, and chiefly
occupied in cultivating cotton, a precious commodity, which now
furnishes for exportation, inclusive of what is consumed in the North,
an annual value of 40 or 50 million dollars.[T] Thus amongst all the
columns of emigration, two particularly attract attention, and form of
themselves the main body of the army, the others are only auxiliaries;
these two great masses are the New England and the Virginia columns.
That part of Virginia which was most peopled during the war of
Independence has a low and nearly level surface, and a sandy, and in
general, very poor soil. Along the rivers there are tracts formerly
productive, but even these have been exhausted by the cultivation of
tobacco. The proprietors of these estates must have been early led to
think of quitting their plantations for the fertile lands of Kentucky,
then occupied, or rather overrun, by warlike savages, of whom they were
the favourite hunting-ground. Some bold and hardy pioneers, at the
head of whom was Boon, first ventured across the mountains with their
rifles, and bravely sustained a bloody contest with the Indians. After
many desperate fights, in which more than one unknown hero fell under
the bullet or the tomahawk of some red-skinned Hector, after numerous
assaults, in which more than one matron enacted the part of our Jeanne
Hachette,[U] after many alarms and much suffering, the genius of
civilisation carried it. At the call of the pioneers, roused by the
fame of their exploits, the planters of the coast set out on their
pilgrimage; arriving with their slaves, they cleared and cultivated
large tracts, in the midst of which they led a patriarchal life,
surrounded by their servants and flocks, following with ardour the
chase of wild beasts, and sometimes of Indians, and too often spending
the proceeds of their crop in betting on the speed of their horses, of
which they are very proud, and whose pedigree is better known to them
than their own. More lately, when the demand for cotton had increased,
in consequence of the improvements in machinery, and the steamboat had
opened the way into the heart of the Mississippi Valley, they have
removed southwards, always taking their slaves with them; a prospect of
future wealth and prosperity was thus opened for the south.
The industrious sons of New England likewise bade farewell to the
rocky and ungrateful soil of their birthplace; loading a wagon with a
plough, a bed, a barrel of salt meat, the indispensable supply of tea
and molasses, a Bible and a wife, and with his axe on his shoulder, the
Yankee sets out for the West, without a servant, without an assistant,
often without a companion, to build himself a log hut, six hundred
miles from his father's roof, and clear away a spot for a farm in the
midst of the boundless forest. The first of these wanderers went from
Connecticut, _the land of steady habits_, of Puritans among Puritans.
The Virginian and the Yankee have planted themselves in the wilderness,
each in a manner conformable to his nature and condition. The part they
have taken in founding the new States of the West, explains the fact so
often mentioned of fifty or sixty members of Congress being natives of
Virginia or Connecticut. In this conquest over nature, Europe has not
remained an idle spectator; she has sent forth vigourous labourers, who
have co-operated with the sons of New England, for slavery drives them
from the men of the South. Many Irish and Scotch, a number of Germans,
Swiss, and some French, are now settled in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana,
and Illinois. The traveller who descends the Ohio, passes on the way
Gallipolis, a French settlement, Vevay, a Swiss village, and Marietta,
so called in honour of Marie Antoinette.[V] The terminations in _burg_
are scattered amongst Indian names, Jacksonvilles, Washingtons, and
Columbias. But the co-operation of Europeans does not deprive the
Yankees of the principal share in the honour of the work; they began
it, they have borne and still bear the burden and heat of the day. In
comparison with them, the European has been only the eleventh-hour-man,
the apprentice, the hireling. The fusion of the European with the
Yankee takes place but slowly, even on the new soil of the West; for
the Yankee is not a man of promiscuous society; he believes that Adam's
oldest son was a Yankee. Enough, however, of foreign blood has been
mingled with the Yankee blood to modify the primitive character of the
New England race, and to form a third American type, that of the West,
whose features are not yet sharply defined, but are daily assuming more
distinctness; this type is characterised by its athletic forms and
ambitious pretensions, and seems destined ultimately to become superior
to the others.
The Yankee and the Virginian are very unlike each other; they have
no great love for each other, and are often at variance. They are
the same men who cut each other's throats in England, under the name
of Roundheads and Cavaliers. In England, they patched up a peace by
the interposition of a third dynasty, which was neither Stuart nor
Cromwell. In America, where there was no power to mediate between
them, they would have devoured each other as they did in England, had
not Providence thrown them wide apart, one party at the south, the
other at the north, leaving between them the territory now occupied by
the _justes-milieux_ States of New York and Pennsylvania, with their
satellites, New Jersey and Delaware.
The Virginian of pure race is frank, hearty, open, cordial in his
manners, noble in his sentiments, elevated in his notions, he is a
worthy descendant of the English gentleman. Surrounded, from infancy,
by his slaves, who relieve him from all personal exertion, he is rather
indisposed to activity, and is even indolent. He is generous and
profuse; around him, but rather in the new States than in impoverished
Virginia, abundance reigns. When the cotton crop has been good and the
price is high, he invites everybody, excepting only the slaves that
cultivate his fields, to partake in his wealth, without much thought
of next year's produce. To him, the practice of hospitality is at once
a duty, a pleasure, and a happiness. Like the Eastern patriarchs or
Homer's heroes, he spits an ox to regale the guest whom Providence
sends him and an old friend recommends to his attention, and to moisten
this solid repast, he offers Madeira, of which he is as proud as of his
horses, which has been twice to the East Indies, and has been ripening
full twenty years. He loves the institutions of his country, yet he
shows with pride his family plate, the arms on which, half effaced by
time, attest his descent from the first colonists, and prove that his
ancestors were of a good family in England. When his mind has been
cultivated by study, and a tour in Europe has polished his manners and
refined his imagination, there is no place in the world in which he
would not appear to advantage, no destiny too high for him to reach;
he is one of those, whom a man is glad to have as a companion, and
desires as a friend. Ardent and warm-hearted, he is of the block from
which great orators are made. He is better able to command men, than to
conquer nature and subdue the soil. When he has a certain degree of the
spirit of method, and, I will not say of will, (for he has enough of
that), but of that active perseverance so common among his brethren of
the North, he has all the qualities needful to form a great statesman.
The Yankee, on the contrary, is reserved, cautious, distrustful; he is
thoughtful and pensive, but equable; his manners are without grace,
modest but dignified, cold, and often unprepossessing; he is narrow
in his ideas, but practical, and possessing the idea of the proper,
he never rises to the grand. He has nothing chivalric about him, and
yet he is adventurous, and he loves a roving life. His imagination is
active and original, producing, however, not poetry, but drollery.
The Yankee is the laborious ant; he is industrious and sober, frugal,
and, on the sterile soil of New England, niggardly; transplanted to
the promised land in the West, he continues moderate in his habits,
but less inclined to count the cents. In New England he has a large
share of prudence, but once thrown into the midst of the treasures of
the West, he becomes a speculator, a gambler even, although he has
a great horror of cards, dice, and all games of hazard and even of
skill, except the innocent game at bowls. He is crafty, sly, always
calculating, boasting even of the tricks which he plays upon the
careless or trusting buyer, because he looks upon them as marks of his
superior sagacity, and well provided with mental reservations to lull
his conscience. With all his nice subtleties, he is, nevertheless,
expeditious in business, because he knows the value of time. His house
is a sanctuary, which he does not open to the profane; he is little
given to hospitality, or rather he displays it only on rare occasions,
and then he does so on a great scale. He is a ready speaker, and a
close reasoner, but not a brilliant orator. For a statesman, he wants
that greatness of mind and soul which enables a man to enter into
and love another's nature, and leads him naturally to consult his
neighbour's good, in consulting his own. He is individualism incarnate;
in him the spirit of locality and division is carried to the utmost.[W]
But if he is not a great statesman, he is an able administrator, an
unrivalled man of business. If he is not suited to command men, he has
no equal in acting upon things, in combining, arranging, and giving
them a value. There are nowhere merchants of more consummate ability
than those of Boston.
But it is particularly as the colonist of the wilderness, that the
Yankee is admirable; fatigue has no hold on him. He has not, like the
Spaniard, the capacity to bear hunger and thirst, but he has the much
superior faculty of finding, at all times and in all places, something
to eat and to drink, and of being always able to contrive a shelter
from the cold, first for his wife and children, and afterward for
himself. He grapples with nature in close fight, and more unyielding
than she, subdues her at last, obliging her to surrender at discretion,
to yield whatever he wills, and to take the shape he chooses. Like
Hercules, he conquers the hydra of the pestilential morass, and chains
the rivers; more daring than Hercules, he extends his dominion not only
over the land, but over the sea; he is the best sailor in the world,
the ocean is his tributary, and enriches him with the oil of her whales
and with all her lesser fry. More wise than the hero of the twelve
labours, he knows no Omphale that is able to seduce, no Dejanira,
whose poisoned gifts can balk his searching glance. In this respect
he is rather a Ulysses, who has his Penelope, counts upon her faith,
and remains steadfastly true to her. He does not even need to stop his
ears, when he passes near the Sirens, for in him the tenderest passions
are deadened by religious austerity and devotion to his business. Like
Ulysses in another point, he has a bag full of shifts; overtaken at
night by a storm in the woods, in a half hour, with no other resource
than his knife, he will have made a shelter for himself and his horse.
In winter, caught in one of those snow-storms, which are unknown among
us, he will construct a sled in the twinkling of an eye, and keep on
his way, like an Indian, by watching the bark of the trees. Thus to
the genius of business, by means of which he turns to profit whatever
the earth yields him, he joins the genius of industry, which makes her
prolific, and that of mechanical skill, which fashions her produce to
his wants. He is incomparable as a pioneer, unequalled as a settler of
the wilderness.
The Yankee has set his mark on the United States during the last
half century. He has been eclipsed by Virginia in the counsels of
the nation;[X] but he has in turn had the upper hand throughout the
country, and eclipsed her on her own soil; for in order to arouse
the Virginian from his southern indolence, it has been necessary
that the Yankee should come to set him an example of activity and
enterprise at his own door. But for the Yankee, the vast cotton
plantations of the South would still be an uncultivated waste. It
was a Yankee, Ely Whitney, who, toward the end of the last century,
invented the cotton-gin, which has made the fortune of the South. To
give a speculation success in the South, some Yankee must have come a
thousand miles to suggest the idea to the natives, and carry off the
profit before their eyes. New England has given only two Presidents to
the Union, both popular on the eve of their election, both unpopular
on the morrow, both rejected at the end of their first term, while
all the others have been natives of Virginia or South Carolina, and
have been rechosen for a second term. But then what a revenge has she
taken in business matters, at the North and the South, in the East as
well as the West! Here the Yankee is a true Marquis of Carabas. At
Baltimore as well as at Boston, in New Orleans as well as at Salem, in
New York as well as at Portland, if a merchant is mentioned who has
made and kept a large fortune by sagacity and forecast, you will find
that he is a Yankee. If you pass a plantation in the South in better
order than the others, with finer avenues, with the negroes' cabins
better arranged and more comfortable, you will be told, "Oh! that is
a Yankee's; he is a _smart man_!" In a village in Missouri, by the
side of a house with broken windows, dirty in its outward appearance,
around the door of which a parcel of ragged children are quarrelling
and fighting, you may see another, freshly painted, surrounded by
a simple, but neat and nicely white-washed fence, with a dozen of
carefully trimmed trees about it, and through the windows in a small
room shining with cleanliness, you may espy some nicely combed little
boys, and some young girls dressed in almost the last Paris fashion.
Both houses belong to farmers, but one of them is from North Carolina,
and the other from New England. On the western rivers, you will hear
a boat mentioned which never meets with an accident, and in which all
travellers and merchants are eager to take their passage; the master is
a Yankee. Along side of the _levée_ at New Orleans, you may be struck
with the fine appearance of a ship, which all the passers-by stop to
admire; the master is also a Yankee.
The preëminence of the Yankee in the colonisation of the country, has
made him the arbiter of manners and customs. It is from him that the
country has taken a general hue of austere severity, that is religious
and even bigoted; it is through him that all sorts of amusements, which
among us are considered as innocent relaxations, are here proscribed
as immoral pleasures. It is he that has introduced the Prison Reform,
multiplied schools, founded Temperance Societies (See _Note_ 13).
It is through his agency, with his money, that the Missionaries are
endeavouring silently to found colonies in the South Seas, for the
benefit of the Union. If we wished to form a single type, representing
the American character of the present moment as a single whole, it
would be necessary to take at least three-fourths of the Yankee race,
and to mix with it hardly one fourth of the Virginian. The physical
labour of colonisation is now nearly brought to an end; the physical
basis of society is laid. On this base it becomes necessary to raise a
social structure of yet unknown form, but which, I am fully convinced,
will be on a new plan, for all the materials are new; and besides,
neither humanity nor Providence ever repeats itself. Which of the two
races is best suited to execute this new task? I cannot tell; but it
seems to me that the Virginian is now about to take his turn, and that
in the phase which the United States are now on the point of entering,
the social qualities of the Virginian will obtain the superiority, that
naturally belonged to the laborious Yankee in the period of settling
the forest. In a word, I believe, that, if the Union lasts, and the
West continues to form a united mass from the falls of Niagara to New
Orleans, this third type of the west, which is now forming and already
aspires to rule over the others, will take a great deal from the
Virginian and very little from the Yankee.
It is no small advantage to a people to combine within itself two
types with different characteristics, when they unite harmoniously
in composing a common national character. A people of which all the
individual members are referrible to a single type, is among nations
what an unmarried man is among individuals; it is a sort of hermit, its
life is monotonous; the strongest and sweetest feelings of human nature
are dormant in it; it continues stationary; there is nothing to spur
it forward. Such was ancient Egypt. A people consisting of two types,
on the contrary, when neither has an oppressive superiority over the
other, enjoys a complete existence; its life is a perpetual interchange
of ideas and sensations, like that of a married pair. It has the
power of reproducing and regenerating itself. Each of the two natures
alternately acts and reposes itself, without ever being inactive. By
turns each gains the superiority and yields to the other; and thus
according to circumstances, different qualities come into play. The two
natures mutually support and relieve each other, they stimulate each
other, and through this wholesome rivalry, the nation that combines
them in itself, reaches high destinies.
History shows that the progress of humanity has been constantly
promoted by the reciprocal action and reaction of two natures, or two
races, sometimes friends, oftener enemies or rivals. The most general
fact in the history of our civilisation is the struggle between the
East and the West, from the expedition of the Argonauts and the war of
Troy, to the battle of Lepanto and the siege of Vienna by the Turks.
In this great drama, it was not merely to shed rivers of blood, that
Providence has dashed against each other Europeans and Asiatics, Greeks
and Persians, Romans, Carthaginians, and Parthians, Saracens and
Franks, Venitians, Turks, and Poles; blows have not been the only thing
exchanged between Europe and the Orient. If you wish to know what the
West has gained from contact with the East, even when they met sword in
hand, look around you; most of the fruit trees that enrich your fields,
the vine which gladdens the heart, the silk and cotton that adorn your
houses and your persons, these are the spoils of your Eastern wars;
sugar and coffee, the cultivation of which has changed the political
balance of the world, were brought into Europe from the East, the
one by yourselves, the other by the Arabs, when they made themselves
masters of Spain. The mariner's compass, which has given a new
continent to civilisation, and established the dominion of man over the
before unconquered deep, was the gift of the East. Your arts and your
sciences are of Oriental origin; the secrets of Algebra were stolen
from the Moors of Spain by a monk; your system of numeration, the basis
of all your financial improvements, bears the name of the Arabs; your
chivalry was brought from Asia by the Crusaders. Christianity, the
mother of modern Europe, would not have existed in the West, had not
the Roman legions conquered Judea which contained its germ, had not
the Roman empire contained the school of Alexandria in which that germ
could put forth, and had not the Rome of the Cæsars been raised as a
pedestal for the successors of St. Peter, from which they might rule
over the East and the West.
Behold the Roman people; its noble career was a continual succession of
wars, followed by as many incorporations of the conquered, alliances,
real marriages, which; always give it a new vigour. It begins with
the double figure of Romulus and Remus; then follow the Romans and
Sabines, then Rome and Alba, next Rome and the Latins, and next Rome
and Carthage. It might be called a young sultan, who carries off a
captive at the point of the sword, and makes her his favourite until he
grows tired of her, or until he finds another more worthy of his love.
It goes on in this way, changing, and daily rising in the successive
subjects of its choice, until it meets with Greece, which becomes not
an object of a passing caprice, but a favorite sultana. This Union
of the Greek and Roman natures gave its splendour to imperial Rome,
and rest to the world. Its destiny once entwined with that of Greece,
the Roman people paused to enjoy; and with this purpose, substituted
the rule of the Cæsars for the republican constitution, and Greek
rhetoricians and players, and emperors, voluptuous like the disciples
of Epicurus, or philosophers, like Pericles, for the stern and severe
aristocracy of earlier days. What is the history of Greece, but a
continual oscillation between the austere Lacedæmon and the brilliant
Athens, between the country of Lycurgus and Leonidas, and that of
Solon, Aspasia, and Alcibiades. United, they acquired an indomitable
energy, and supported the shock of all Asia. Unfortunately they had too
little feeling of a common nationality, and too much of local jealousy;
almost perpetually divided, they never completely extended their sway
over Greece itself, and when the Greek race was about to reach its
zenith, neither was destined to lead it thither, but Providence raised
up a man in the North, before whom _the earth was silent_.
Whilst a nation comprises an indefinite number of types mixed together
without order and without rank, it resembles a body not yet in a state
of consistency; it has no definable character, no fixed destination;
it is incapable of achieving any thing great. Thus from the time of
the war of the old German electors against the Holy Empire, and of the
treaty of Westphalia, which sanctioned their independence and broke
in pieces the former unity of the nation, Germany continued under an
eclipse, until the period of the rise of the house of Brandenburg from
the midst of the anarchy of the little German States, when a rival was
given to the house of Austria and a strong dualism established. Dualism
is not, however, the only mode in which a society can be constituted,
at once solid and elastic. When a third type, whose superiority is
admitted by the others, or which partakes sufficiently of the nature of
each to serve as a bond and a mediator between them, exists, the social
organisation is then in a high degree vigourous; for then, the harmony
between the two primitive types has ceased to be an abstraction, it has
become a substance. In some cases this third personage of the drama
becomes so indispensable to the action, that it must be supplied at any
rate, and its great prerogatives devolve on a transient actor; thus
in Greece, Thebes played this part during a short period. Sometimes
it has been filled by an aristocracy, which has served as a check to
both parties in turn; an aristocracy worthy of the name is eminently
qualified for this task, because it combines the two natures in itself,
feels the reaction of their passions influencing itself, and has the
energy necessary either to curb or spur them on, as the exigency
of the case requires. There is no country in which dualism is more
admirably developed than in the United States; each of the two natures
has an open field, each a distinct career of industry; each possesses
in the highest degree the qualities necessary for its peculiar
position. Considered in respect to a triple type, the United States are
not less favorably situated; the young giant that is growing up in the
West, seems destined to fulfil the prophecy _the last shall be first_,
and bind together the North and the South in his vigourous gripe.
In France we have two distinct types, that of the North and that of
the South; but instead of employing the principle of centralisation as
a means of developing the nature of both, and giving them a free and
harmonious action, we have endeavoured to confound them in a narrow
and sterile unity. We have especially thwarted the most reasonable
and legitimate wishes of the South, which has been overborne and
crushed by the North. It takes its revenge, indeed, in furnishing us
with most of our statesmen, very much as Ireland has the privilege of
giving _premiers_ to England; but like Irish ministers in England,
our Southern statesmen, ungrateful sons of a neglected mother, govern
wholly in the interest of the North, as if France contained towns only,
and had no rural population, as if we were chiefly a manufacturing, and
but partially an agricultural people, and, what is worse, as if we were
a school of philosophers, and not a nation longing for religious faith
and political love.