Tammany Hall and in that of the Improved Order of Red Men, an
organization with more than 500,000 members. The Red Men, borrowing
from the Indians, thus name the months, in order: /Cold Moon/, /Snow/,
/Worm/, /Plant/, /Flower/, /Hot/, /Buck/, /Sturgeon/, /Corn/,
/Travelers'/, /Beaver/ and /Hunting/. They call their officers
/incohonee/, /sachem/, /wampum-keeper/, etc. But such terms, of
course, are not in general use.
[10] A long list of such obsolete Americanisms is given by Clapin in
his Dictionary.
[11] An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian
Nations....; Phila., 1818.
[12] /Cf./ Hans Brinker, by Mary Maples Dodge; New York, 1891.
[13] (/a/) A chest of drawers, (/b/) a government office. In both
senses the word is rare in English, though its use by the French is
familiar. In the United States its use in (/b/) has been extended,
/e. g./, in /employment-bureau/.
[14] From /Sint-Klaas/--/Saint Nicholas/. /Santa Claus/ has also
become familiar to the English, but the Oxford Dictionary still calls
the name an Americanism.
[15] The spelling is variously /sauerkraut/, /saurkraut/, /sourkraut/
and /sourkrout/.
[16] /Cf./ The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, pp.
14 and 22.
[17] The American origin of this last word has been disputed, but the
weight of evidence seems to show that it was borrowed from the
/rapides/ of the French Canadians. It is familiar in the United States
and Canada, but seldom met with in England.
[18] /Log-cabin/ came in later. Thornton's first quotation is dated
1818. The /Log-Cabin/ campaign was in 1840.
[19] Theo. Roosevelt: Gouverneur Morris; Boston, 1888, p. 104.
[20] William Brown Meloney: The Heritage of Tyre; New York, 1916, p.
15.
[21] /Vide/ his preface to Every-Day English, pp. xxi and xv,
respectively.
[22] /Vide/ Lyell's Travels in North America; London, 1845.
[23] Pref. to the Biglow Papers, 2nd series, 1866.
[24] Reprinted in Helpful Hints in Writing and Reading, comp. by
Grenville Kleiser; New York, 1911, pp. 15-17.
[25] A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England, /Forum/, Oct., 1886.
[26] Edwin S. Gould: Good English, or, Popular Errors in Language: New
York, 1867; pp. 25-27.
[27] /Cf./ Ch. I, § 5, and Ch. V, § 1.
[28] /Lott/ appears in the Connecticut Code of 1650. /Vide/ the
edition of Andrus; Hartford, 1822. On page 35 is "their landes,
/lotts/ and accommodations." On page 46 is "meadow and home /lotts/."
[29] /Vide/ Hutchinson's Diary, vol. i, p. 171; London, 1883-6.
[30] The definitions are from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current
English (1914) and the Standard Dictionary (1906), respectively.
[31] S. Sewall: Diary, April 14, 1712: "I lay'd a /Rock/ in the
North-east corner of the Foundation of the Meeting-house."
[32] The Americana, ... /art./ Americanisms: New York, 1903-6.
[33] Immigration, 2nd ed.; New York, 1913, p. 4. Sir J. R. Seeley
says, in The Expansion of England (2nd ed.; London, 1895, p. 84) that
the emigration from England to New England, after the meeting of the
Long Parliament (1640), was so slight for a full century that it
barely balanced "the counter-movement of colonists quitting the
colony." Richard Hildreth, in his History of the United States, vol.
i, p. 267, says that the departures actually exceeded the arrivals.
[34] Works, ed. by Sparks: vol. ii, p. 319.
[35] /Cf./ Pehr Kalm: Travels into N. America, tr. by J. R. Forster, 3
vols.; London, 1770-71.
[36] Sydney George Fisher: The True Story of the American Revolution;
Phila. and London, 1902, p. 27. See also John T. Morse's Life of
Thomas Jefferson in the American Statesmen series (Boston and New
York, 1898), p. 2. Morse points out that Washington, Jefferson and
Madison belonged to this new aristocracy, not to the old one.
[37] /Cf./ the Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, p.
119. Francis Jeffrey, writing on Franklin in the /Edinburgh Review/
for July, 1806, hailed him as a prodigy who had arisen "in a society
where there was no relish and no encouragement for literature."
[38] Examples of its use in the American sense, considered vulgar and
even indecent in England, are to be found in Gen. xlviii, 1; II Kings
viii, 7; John xi, 1, and Acts ix, 37.
[39] J. O. Halliwell (Phillips): A Dictionary of Archaisms and
Provincialisms, Containing Words now Obsolete in England All of Which
are Familiar and in Common Use in America, 2nd ed.; London, 1850.
[40] An interesting discussion of this verb appeared in the /New York
Sun/, Nov. 27, 1914.
[41] /Cf./ J. H. Combs: Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the
Southern Mountains, /Dialect Notes/, vol. iv, pt. iv, pp. 283-97.
[42] Henry Sweet: A History of English Sounds; London, 1876; Oxford,
1888.
[43] P. 124.
[44] /Cf./ /Art./ Changes in the Language Since Shakespeare's Time, by
W. Murison, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv,
p. 485.
[45] English Spelling and Spelling Reform; New York, 1909.
[46] C. H. Grandgent: Fashion and the Broad /A/, /Nation/, Jan. 7,
1915.
[47] Thomas Sheridan: A Complete Dictionary of the English Language;
London, 1780.
[48] It first appeared in Robert Nares' Elements of Orthography;
London, 1784. In 1791 it received full approbation in John Walker's
Critical Pronouncing Dictionary.
[49] Robert J. Menner; The Pronunciation of English in America,
/Atlantic Monthly/, March, 1915.
[50] The Question of Our Speech; Boston and New York, 1906, pp. 27-29.
[51] Elizabeth H. Hancock: Southern Speech, /Neale's Monthly/, Nov.,
1913, pp. 606-7.
[52] /Vide/ his remarks on /balance/ in his Vocabulary. See also
Marsh, p. 671.
[Pg063]
III
The Period of Growth
§ 1
/The New Nation/--The American language thus began to be recognizably
differentiated from English in both vocabulary and pronunciation by
the opening of the nineteenth century, but as yet its growth was
hampered by two factors, the first being the lack of a national
literature of any pretentions and the second being an internal
political disharmony which greatly conditioned and enfeebled the
national consciousness. During the actual Revolution common aims and
common dangers forced the Americans to show a united front, but once
they had achieved political independence they developed conflicting
interests, and out of those conflicting interests came suspicions and
hatreds which came near wrecking the new confederation more than once.
Politically, their worst weakness, perhaps, was an inability to detach
themselves wholly from the struggle for domination still going on in
Europe. The surviving Loyalists of the revolutionary era--estimated by
some authorities to have constituted fully a third of the total
population in 1776--were ardently in favor of England, and such
patriots as Jefferson were as ardently in favor of France. This
engrossment in the quarrels of foreign nations was what Washington
warned against in his Farewell Address. It was at the bottom of such
bitter animosities as that between Jefferson and Hamilton. It inspired
and perhaps excused the pessimism of such men as Burr. Its net effect
was to make it difficult for the people of the new nation to think of
themselves, politically, as Americans. Their state of mind,
vacillating, uncertain, alternately timorous and [Pg064] pugnacious,
has been well described by Henry Cabot Lodge in his essay on
"Colonialism in America."[1] Soon after the Treaty of Paris was
signed, someone referred to the late struggle, in Franklin's hearing,
as the War for Independence. "Say, rather, the War of the Revolution,"
said Franklin. "The War for Independence is yet to be fought."
"That struggle," adds Lossing, "occurred, and that independence was
won, by the Americans in the War of 1812."[2] In the interval the new
republic had passed through a period of /Sturm und Drang/ whose
gigantic perils and passions we have begun to forget--a period in
which disaster ever menaced, and the foes within were no less bold and
pertinacious than the foes without. Jefferson, perhaps, carried his
fear of "monocrats" to the point of monomania, but under it there was
undoubtedly a body of sound fact. The poor debtor class (including
probably a majority of the veterans of the Revolution) had been fired
by the facile doctrines of the French Revolution to demands which
threatened the country with bankruptcy and anarchy, and the class of
property-owners, in reaction, went far to the other extreme. On all
sides, indeed, there flourished a strong British party, and
particularly in New England, where the so-called codfish aristocracy
(by no means extinct, even today) exhibited an undisguised Anglomania,
and looked forward confidently to a /rapprochement/ with the mother
country.[3] This Anglomania showed itself, not only in ceaseless
political agitation, but also in an elaborate imitation of English
manners. We have already seen, on Noah Webster's authority, how it
even extended to the pronunciation of the language.
The first sign of the dawn of a new national order came with the
election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency in 1800. The issue in
the campaign was a highly complex one, but under it lay a plain
conflict between democratic independence and the [Pg065] old doctrine
of dependence and authority; and with the Alien and Sedition Laws
about his neck, so vividly reminiscent of the issues of the Revolution
itself, Adams went down to defeat. Jefferson was violently
anti-British and pro-French; he saw all the schemes of his political
opponents, indeed, as English plots; he was the man who introduced the
bugaboo into American politics. His first acts after his inauguration
were to abolish all ceremonial at the court of the republic, and to
abandon spoken discourses to Congress for written messages. That
ceremonial, which grew up under Washington, was an imitation, he
believed, of the formality of the abhorrent Court of St. James; as for
the speeches to Congress, they were palpably modelled upon the
speeches from the throne of the English kings. Both reforms met with
wide approval; the exactions of the English, particularly on the high
seas, were beginning to break up the British party. But confidence in
the solidarity and security of the new nation was still anything but
universal. The surviving doubts, indeed, were strong enough to delay
the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution,
providing for more direct elections of President and Vice-President,
until the end of 1804, and even then three of the five New England
states rejected it,[4] and have never ratified it, in fact, to this
day. Democracy was still experimental, doubtful, full of gunpowder. In
so far as it had actually come into being, it had come as a boon
conferred from above. Jefferson, its protagonist, was the hero of the
populace, but he was not of the populace himself, nor did he ever
quite trust it.
It was reserved for Andrew Jackson, a man genuinely of the people, to
lead and visualize the rise of the lower orders. Jackson, in his way,
was the archetype of the new American--ignorant, pushful, impatient of
restraint and precedent, an iconoclast, a Philistine, an Anglophobe in
every fibre. He came from the extreme backwoods and his youth was
passed amid surroundings but little removed from downright
savagery.[5] [Pg066] Thousands of other young Americans like him were
growing up at the same time--youngsters filled with a vast impatience
of all precedent and authority, revilers of all that had come down
from an elder day, incorrigible libertarians. They swarmed across the
mountains and down the great rivers, wrestling with the naked
wilderness and setting up a casual, impromptu sort of civilization
where the Indian still menaced. Schools were few and rudimentary;
there was not the remotest approach to a cultivated society; any
effort to mimic the amenities of the East, or of the mother country,
in manner or even in speech, met with instant derision. It was in
these surroundings and at this time that the thorough-going American
of tradition was born: blatant, illogical, elate, "greeting the
embarrassed gods" uproariously and matching "with Destiny for beers."
Jackson was unmistakably of that company in his every instinct and
idea, and it was his fate to give a new and unshakable confidence to
its aspiration at the Battle of New Orleans. Thereafter all doubts
began to die out; the new republic was turning out a success. And with
success came a vast increase in the national egoism. The hordes of
pioneers rolled down the western valleys and on to the great
plains.[6] America began to stand for something quite new in the
world--in government, in law, in public and private morals, in customs
and habits of mind, in the minutia of social intercourse. And
simultaneously the voice of America began to take on its
characteristic twang, and the speech of America began to differentiate
itself boldly and unmistakably from the speech of England. The average
Philadelphian or Bostonian of 1790 had not the slightest difficulty in
making himself understood by a visiting Englishman. But the average
Ohio boatman of 1810 or plainsman of 1815 was already speaking a
dialect that the Englishman would have shrunk from as barbarous and
unintelligible, and before long it began to leave [Pg067] its mark
upon and to get direction and support from a distinctively national
literature.
That literature, however, was very slow in coming to a dignified,
confident and autonomous estate. Down to Jefferson's day it was almost
wholly polemical, and hence lacking in the finer values; he himself,
an insatiable propagandist and controversialist, was one of its chief
ornaments. "The novelists and the historians, the essayists and the
poets, whose names come to mind when American literature is
mentioned," says a recent literary historian, "have all flourished
since 1800."[7] Pickering, so late as 1816, said that "in this country
we can hardly be said to have any authors by profession." It was a
true saying, though the new day was about to dawn; Bryant had already
written "Thanatopsis" and was destined to publish it the year
following. Difficulties of communication hampered the circulation of
the few native books that were written; it was easier for a man in the
South to get books from London than to get them from Boston or New
York, and the lack of a copyright treaty with England flooded the
country with cheap English editions. "It is much to be regretted,"
wrote Dr. David Ramsay, of Charleston, S. C., to Noah Webster in 1806,
"that there is so little intercourse in a literary way between the
states. As soon as a book of general utility comes out in any state it
should be for sale in all of them." Ramsay asked for little; the most
he could imagine was a sale of 2,000 copies for an American work in
America. But even that was far beyond the possibilities of the time.
An external influence of great potency helped to keep the national
literature scant and timorous during those early and perilous days. It
was the extraordinary animosity of the English critics, then at the
zenith of their pontifical authority, to all books of American origin
or flavor. This animosity, culminating in Sydney Smith's famous
sneer,[8] was but part of a [Pg068] larger hostility to all things
American, from political theories to table manners. The American,
after the war of 1812, became the pet abomination of the English, and
the chief butt of the incomparable English talent for moral
indignation. There was scarcely an issue of the /Quarterly Review/,
the /Edinburgh/, the /Foreign Quarterly/, the /British Review/ or
/Blackwood's/, for a generation following 1814, in which he was not
stupendously assaulted. Gifford, Sydney Smith and the poet Southey
became specialists in this business; it took on the character of a
holy war; even such mild men as Wordsworth were recruited for it. It
was argued that the Americans were rogues and swindlers, that they
lived in filth and squalor, that they were boors in social
intercourse, that they were poltroons and savages in war, that they
were depraved and criminal, that they were wholly devoid of the
remotest notion of decency or honor. The /Foreign Quarterly/, summing
up in January, 1844, pronounced them "horn-handed and pig-headed,
hard, persevering, unscrupulous, carnivorous, with a genius for
lying." Various Americans went to the defense of their countrymen,
among them, Irving, Cooper, Timothy Dwight, J. K. Paulding, John Neal,
Edward Everett and Robert Walsh. Paulding, in "John Bull in America,
or, the New Munchausen," published in 1825, attempted satire. Even an
Englishman, James Sterling, warned his fellow-Britons that, if they
continued their intolerant abuse, they would "turn into bitterness the
last drops of good-will toward England that exist in the United
States." But the avalanche of denunciation kept up, and even down to a
few years ago it was very uncommon for an Englishman to write of
American politics, or manners, or literature without betraying his
dislike. Not, indeed, until the Prussian began monopolizing the whole
British talent for horror and invective did the Yankee escape the
lash.[9]
This gigantic pummelling, in the long run, was destined to encourage
an independent spirit in the national literature, if [Pg069] only by
a process of mingled resentment and despair, but for some time its
chief effect was to make American writers of a more delicate
aspiration extremely self-conscious and diffident. The educated
classes, even against their will, were influenced by the torrent of
abuse; they could not help finding in it an occasional reasonableness,
an accidental true hit. The result, despite the efforts of Channing,
Knapp and other such valiant defenders of the native author, was
uncertainty and skepticism in native criticism. "The first step of an
American entering upon a literary career," says Lodge, writing of the
first quarter of the century, "was to pretend to be an Englishman in
order that he might win the approval, not of Englishmen, but of his
own countrymen." Cooper, in his first novel, "Precaution," chose an
English scene, imitated English models, and obviously hoped to placate
the critics thereby. Irving, too, in his earliest work, showed a
considerable discretion, and his "History of New York," as everyone
knows, was first published anonymously. But this puerile spirit did
not last long. The English onslaughts were altogether too vicious to
be received lying down; their very fury demanded that they be met with
a united and courageous front. Cooper, in his second novel, "The Spy,"
boldly chose an American setting and American characters, and though
the influence of his wife, who came of a Loyalist family, caused him
to avoid any direct attack upon the English, he attacked them
indirectly, and with great effect, by opposing an immediate and
honorable success to their derisions. "The Spy" ran through three
editions in four months; it was followed by his long line of
thoroughly American novels; in 1834 he formally apologized to his
countrymen for his early truancy in "Precaution." Irving, too, soon
adopted a bolder tone, and despite his English predilections, he
refused an offer of a hundred guineas for an article for the
/Quarterly Review/, made by Gifford in 1828, on the ground that "the
/Review/ has been so persistently hostile to our country that I cannot
draw a pen in its service."
The same year saw the publication of the first edition of [Pg070]
Webster's American Dictionary of the English language, and a year
later followed Samuel L. Knapp's "Lectures on American Literature,"
the first history of the national letters ever attempted. Knapp, in
his preface, thought it necessary to prove, first of all, that an
American literature actually existed, and Webster, in his
introduction, was properly apologetic, but there was no real need for
timorousness in either case, for the American attitude toward the
attack of the English was now definitely changing from uneasiness to
defiance. The English critics, in fact, had overdone the thing, and
though their clatter was to keep up for many years more, they no
longer spread terror or had much influence. Of a sudden, as if in
answer to them, doubts turned to confidence, and then into the wildest
sort of optimism, not only in politics and business, but also in what
passed for the arts. Knapp boldly defied the English to produce a
"tuneful sister" surpassing Mrs. Sigourney; more, he argued that the
New World, if only by reason of its superior scenic grandeur, would
eventually hatch a poetry surpassing even that of Greece and Rome.
"What are the Tibers and Scamanders," he demanded, "measured by the
Missouri and the Amazon? Or what the loveliness of Illysus or Avon by
the Connecticut or the Potomack?"
In brief, the national feeling, long delayed at birth, finally leaped
into being in amazing vigor. "One can get an idea of the strength of
that feeling," says R. O. Williams, "by glancing at almost any book
taken at random from the American publications of the period. Belief
in the grand future of the United States is the key-note of everything
said and done. All things American are to be grand--our territory,
population, products, wealth, science, art--but especially our
political institutions and literature. The unbounded confidence in the
material development of the country which now characterizes the
extreme northwest of the United States prevailed as strongly
throughout the eastern part of the Union during the first thirty years
of the century; and over and above a belief in, and concern for,
materialistic progress, there were enthusiastic anticipations of
achievements in all the moral and intellectual fields of national
[Pg071] greatness."[10] Nor was that vast optimism wholly without
warrant. An American literature was actually coming into being, and
with a wall of hatred and contempt shutting in England, the new
American writers were beginning to turn to the Continent for
inspiration and encouragement. Irving had already drunk at Spanish
springs; Emerson and Bayard Taylor were to receive powerful impulses
from Germany, following Ticknor, Bancroft and Everett before them;
Bryant was destined to go back to the classics. Moreover, Cooper and
John P. Kennedy had shown the way to native sources of literary
material, and Longfellow was making ready to follow them; novels in
imitation of English models were no longer heard of; the ground was
preparing for "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Finally, Webster himself, as
Williams demonstrated, worked better than he knew. His American
Dictionary was not only thoroughly American: it was superior to any of
the current dictionaries of the English, so much so that for a good
many years it remained "a sort of mine for British lexicography to
exploit."