AMERICAN CULTURE
Four fifths of the people of the United States of 1860 lived in the
country, and it is perhaps fair to say that half of these dwelt in log
houses of one or two rooms. Comforts such as most of us enjoy daily were
as good as unknown. Even in the cities baths were exceedingly rare,
while in the country the very decencies of life were neglected.
Mosquitoes, flies, and other germ-harboring pests were regarded with
equanimity, screens and disinfectants being used only in the best of
hospitals. Malaria, typhoid, and other diseases claimed a large toll
upon life each year. Physicians were less numerous than now and their
art was only in its infancy. Trained nurses were just coming into their
present rôle. Men regarded sickness as a visitation of Providence, and
when the yellow fever epidemics seized the lower Southern cities, the
losses and suffering were such as the present generation cannot
appreciate.
Improvements in the matter of dress since 1830 were evident, but for the
workaday world shirtsleeves, heavy brogan boots and shoes, and rough
wool hats were, of course, the rule. Salt bacon and "greens," with corn
bread and thin coffee, composed the common diet, though milk and butter
relieved the monotonous fare for the farmers. "Hog-killing time" was
always a happy season, for fresh meats were then abundant. Only in the
larger towns did the people have fresh meats throughout the year. An
explanation of the enthusiasm of _ante-bellum_ people for political
speaking is found in the fact that barbecues either preceded or followed
the oratory; and to a man who had lived for months on fat bacon and corn
bread a fresh roast pig was a delight which would enable him to endure
long hours of poor speaking. But in the cities and towns there was, of
course, a better life. Frame houses, two stories high, painted white and
adorned with green window blinds, were everywhere in good form, except
where men were able to build brick or stone mansions or maintain the
establishments of wealthy ancestors. In the South it was still the
custom to guard the entrances to great plantation houses with chiseled
lions or crouching greyhounds; in the East more attention was paid to
flowers and shrubbery. Wealthy families of the East sometimes maintained
more than one house servant, but the greater number counted themselves
eminently respectable with cook, maid, and house girl all in one, and
the pay was one or two dollars a week. Liveries and silver plate
persisted mainly in the very exclusive circles of Philadelphia and New
York, in Washington, and on the great plantations.
Factory hands and common laborers worked twelve hours a day under
circumstances and conditions hardly better than those of 1830, for labor
unions had only begun their agitation, and foreign immigrants were
always ready to accept work without asking any questions. One or two
States had passed laws regulating hours of labor; but none had thought
of the cost to the race of hard toil and long hours for women and
children, and most men regarded the builder of a mill as a public
benefactor because he furnished employment to just this element of the
population. A man who had steady work on a farm was paid from ten to
fifteen dollars a month with board; a day-laborer received a dollar a
day without perquisites. Skilled laborers were paid two dollars a day in
the South and slightly less in the East. The industrial belt continued
to draw upon the country districts of the East, which, with the
continued migration to the West, greatly impoverished the rural life and
resulted in many abandoned farms. In the city housing conditions of the
poor were worse if anything than they had been thirty years before.
Crowded tenements, filthy streets, flies, and vermin abounded. Under the
English common law accidents in the mills were matters of concern only
to the employees, and the human toll of the railways was enormous. Years
of toil, a worn-out frame, a dependent old age, and finally the potter's
field was the weary round of life to the millions of dependent people
who swarmed about the industrial centers.
Under the pressure of outside criticism and the influence of religion,
the lot of the slave was mending, though there was room enough for
improvement. From sun to sun was always the plantation day, and the
weekly ration was a peck of meal and four pounds of meat--salted "side
meat" packed in Cincinnati or Chicago. Each negro family had a
single-room cabin, where man, wife, and a dozen children were tucked
away in the loft or slept on the floor, though there was usually a bed
for the parents. There was, however, always plenty of fresh air, a big
open fireplace, and generally shade trees about the negro quarters,
which conditions probably account for the lower mortality rate in the
South than in the East. Of clothing the slave had only what was
absolutely necessary, children being limited to a single garment which
reached slightly below the knees. Against accidents and disease more
precautions were taken by masters of plantations than by masters of
mills, for the life of a negro man or child-bearing woman was equal to
twelve hundred dollars. Heavy ditching in malarial swamps was therefore
done by Irishmen, whose lives were less important to the planter.
Physicians were promptly called for the slaves, and women in labor were
generally cared for, because a negro baby was worth one hundred dollars.
If there was some public concern for the slaves in the fields and some
beginnings of legislation on the conditions of employment in the
industrial States, there was no thought for the isolated, lean,
heavy-fisted farmer of the Southern up-country or the Western prairies.
Land was still cheap, crops were increasing in bulk and value every
year. Nor did the farmer desire the attentions of society, provided the
new railroads were laid through his districts and rates were not too
exorbitant. He worked hard for a few months, then rested till harvest
time, after which he hunted and fished. During the long cold winters of
the Northwest he sat in his chimney corner or tended his cattle. Few
thought of fertilizing their land; terracing against rains and floods
was almost unknown, and for most farmers plowing was done up and down
the hills, which only hastened the washing-away process so
characteristic of the Southern agriculture. Very few farmers thought it
worth while to rotate their crops when fresh lands were to be had at a
few dollars an acre. The area of the United States seemed limitless, and
hardly a tenth of its arable land had ever been brought under
cultivation. The inventions of 1840-50 enabled the Western farmer to
grow larger crops, and harvest time was not so burdensome; corn-shellers
and grain-fans shortened the hours of labor for the men. Sewing-machines
and the revolving churns from the factories gave some relief to the
women, whose round of labor, milking, cooking, cleaning, washing, and
attending children, was still almost ceaseless. Even the picnics and
barbecues offered little to them, for they must still prepare the great
baskets of food and serve their lords and masters while they deliberated
on "bleeding Kansas," new railroad schemes, or negro slavery.
Whether the lot of the landless and the less talented had improved since
the day of Jackson would be hard to determine. If it was easier to
purchase land, or if there was an actual increase in wages, the number
of the poorer class of Americans had increased both actually and
relatively, and thus competition operated to prevent improved housing
and a better country life. Still the life of the great majority in the
United States was less grinding than that of Europeans of the same
class, and the opportunity for a poor man to rise in the social and
economic scale was distinctly better. That is what made America the
Mecca of so many thousands during the decade of 1850-60. Yet illiteracy
and dependency, causes and results of poverty, were almost appalling.
Georgia had a population of 43,684 white illiterates, to say nothing of
the 500,000 blacks; Massachusetts had 46,262; Indiana, 60,943;
Pennsylvania, 72,156, and North Carolina, 68,128. There were 101 persons
in the jails of Georgia on June 1, 1860; Virginia had 189;
Massachusetts, 1161, and Illinois, 485. In the open life of the South
and West, where men could easily get to the land, there was little crime
and jails were often empty; in the industrial belt the prisons were
always occupied. In like manner and for the same reasons Southern and
Western hospitals for the insane and homes for the poor often showed
very small percentages of these unfortunates. Perhaps the unrelieved
poverty of the industrial workers and the stress of uncertainty in the
matter of employment made the differences. Certainly the weight of the
old English common law system, adopted in all the States, bore hardly on
the dependent classes of the East; and the courts were not loath to send
undefended men to prison. In the South the worker was punished by his
master on the plantation for all the minor offenses, and it was only
free negroes and the poorer whites who were the subjects of the ordinary
social discipline and punishment.
The abounding wealth and strenuous zest of American life were creating
just those gradations in society and distinctions of caste against which
constitutions and laws inveighed. On the broad basis of African slavery
the enterprising Southerner had built and was now perfecting a social
class hardly inferior to the aristocracies of Europe. Soft hands and
exclusive manners were there as elsewhere in the world the evidences of
a gentle life; sturdy personal independence and rough ways, here as in
England, were the marks of middle-class training, through which recruits
to the privileged order had generally come. Openly and on all proper
occasions the Southerners announced the break-down of democracy and the
benefits of a cultured élite; the few thousand "first families," who
lived upon the incomes of plantations, spent their winters in New
Orleans, their springs in Charleston, and their summers at the Virginia
springs. Among these, tutors were engaged to train children, and every
man had his valet, every lady her maid. Travel in Europe, sojourns at
Newport and Saratoga, and acquaintance with the best hotels of
Philadelphia and New York were common to this group of most attractive
people. When Congress was in session, they dominated the social life of
the capital, gave elaborate balls, and brought effective pressure to
bear upon aspiring Eastern and Western public leaders. Douglas had
married a beautiful North Carolina heiress, the wife of Jefferson Davis
was the granddaughter of a governor of New Jersey, and even William H.
Seward was strongly influenced by the graces of his planter friends.
Senators, representatives, and judges of the federal courts owned
estates in the lower South which yielded incomes ofttimes greater than
their official salaries. The very flower and beauty of the land were
Southern gentlemen like Robert E. Lee and Wade Hampton, or ladies like
the sprightly Mrs. Chestnut or the genial Mrs. Pryor.
Nor did the commercial and industrial life of the East fail to produce a
similar fruit. If the Eastern gentleman were less dependent on his valet
and less averse to work with his hands, he was nevertheless a gentleman,
and the chasm between him and the toiler in the mills was difficult to
bridge. There was nowhere in the United States a more exclusive society
than that in which the Danas and the Winthrops of Boston moved. And the
New England élite were never so happy as when they could run off to
England and frequent the dinners and receptions of the British
aristocracy; both the manners and the ideals of the Eastern upper class
resembled strikingly those of the "best people" of Old England. It was
all in striking contrast to the ideals of the Puritans of old times, but
it was natural. In New England, as in the South, democracy was flouted
and a privileged position greatly prized. The old American "equality"
was only skin deep, as any one would have recognized if he had attempted
familiarities with either the Eastern or the Southern social leaders.
The difference was that the one group lived in cities when they were at
home, and the other in the country.
Nor was this American social life scorned by European noblemen. Charles
Sumner was always welcome in the greatest houses of London, and the
Slidells and the Masons of the South received no less flattering
attentions from their European economic and social kinsmen. One of
Bismarck's most intimate friends was John L. Motley, and the friendship
had been contracted long before Motley had won fame as a historian.
American heiresses had already found suitors among the British nobility.
The kinship of Eastern social life with that of Europe was recognized,
and the relations of the well-to-do at the North with the wealthy of the
South were many and intimate. Thus in America as elsewhere talent,
birth, and money produced social strata, and before 1860 the
distinctions of class were only less sharply drawn here than in the
older countries of the world.
But, next to the very necessaries of life, religion was the most
important subject to Americans of 1860. The Puritan spirit, while losing
some of its hold in New England, had captured the people of the rest of
the country. Except as to the Catholics and the Episcopalians, all
Americans were born, or thought themselves born, utterly depraved and
weighted down with the sin of Adam and Eve, their "first parents," from
which burden the only way of escape was through prayer and agony of
soul. Even this prospect was denied to many, for some influential
religious teachers urged that God could not hear the supplications of
sinners. These must await the call of Heaven, and if this failed, they
were bound for the "lake of fire," whence there was no return. The
intelligent and well-informed spoke with all seriousness of "getting
religion," and in the vast country districts the most suitable season
for this was the hot July and August days. Revivals among nearly all the
leading denominations were held at this time in the churches or under
widespread arbors made from the branches of trees. The preaching and the
singing were not unlike that which brought the Germans of the eighth
century to the Roman communion. The other worlds were just two: one the
city of the golden gates and pearly streets, the other the bottomless
pit of liquid fire into which Satan would surely plunge all who failed
to make their peace with God in this life. The old Puritan lines
formerly learned by every child--
"God's vengeance feeds the flame
With piles of wood and brimstone flood,
That none can quench the same"--
represented to most people of the decade just preceding the Civil War
all they said. Both old men and young children dreamed of the awful
retribution which awaited them in the other world.
And there was a fiery zeal in the work of saving men's souls from the
wrath to come which showed that it was no figurative faith which moved
the preachers and their co-workers. A song sung by all ran in one of its
favorite stanzas:--
"Must I be carried to the skies
On flow'ry beds of ease,
While others fought to win the prize
And sailed through bloody seas?"
Excitement naturally overcame many, and they rushed forward to the
mourner's benches in front of the altar and cried out for mercy, or
silently prayed for days and weeks till the light "broke upon them" and
they went forth shouting for joy. These then became exhorters, and moved
among their friends in the congregation, begging them to yield their
"proud and haughty spirits" ere it should be too late. At times scores
of penitents would be on their knees in the spaces about the altar,
others would be "laboring" with the sinners not yet stricken, and still
others thanking God in loud voices for their delivery from sin and
Satan, whom all regarded as an active demon always seeking whom he might
destroy.
In the South the deism which had influenced the generation led by
Washington and Jefferson had given way to the stern faith of the
Calvinists, for whether one were Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, or
Campbellite, the essentials of his religion were the same. Wealthy
planters, small farmers, and negro slaves sought the salvation of their
souls in the same churches and under the same preachers. In fact it was
common for men to be told by their pastors that unless they were willing
to sit down in heaven by the side of the "poor slave" they could not be
saved, and the slave often begged his master to accept the terms of
salvation. A few great planters who were not touched by the religious
fervor of the time held aloof, and the poorer whites and the slaves came
to accept the view that these were the rich men who could not be saved,
and commonly said hell was their unavoidable portion.
In the East, save in the Unitarian and Episcopalian churches, there was
the same religious realism. In the great revivals of 1857 earnest men
and great congregations prayed aloud that God might convert the
heretical Theodore Parker, or that, if he were not a subject of grace,
as many believed he was not, he might be taken from this world, where he
was doing infinite mischief. Of course he was to be consigned
immediately to the "fiery furnace below." And the greatest of American
preachers, Henry Ward Beecher, in the same revival, gathered about him
the hard-headed business men of New York City and together they prayed
that wicked playwrights and worldly-minded theater-goers might be
brought to a realizing sense of the shame of their conduct, and that the
houses of their frivolous vice might be converted into temples of
Christian worship. Again, those who would not heed the solemn warnings
of the pulpit were "given up," and the Heavenly Father was asked to
remove them "hence."
The influence of this sense of the awfulness of the after life to those
who might not be saved was far-reaching. The farmer, driven by the hard
necessity of making a living for himself and family to remain away from
church, meditated sorrowfully as he followed his plow, and often at the
end of his furrow fell upon his knees and besought the Creator to save
his undying soul and spare him the everlasting torture of the damned. A
popular little gift book, published by the American Tract Society of New
York, was entitled _Passing Over Jordan_, and on an early page we find
the following typical lines:--
"My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead:
What horrors seize my guilty soul
Upon a dying bed."
And a young woman who received this as a New Year's present was a
perfectly normal girl of Cincinnati and the daughter of a prominent
family there.
What was happening in the United States during the thirty years we are
studying was the saving of the people from the rough and often coarse
and sensual life of the frontier. Under conditions such as have been
described the influence and power of the preacher in young America were
extraordinary. And the clergy deserved the authority they exercised.
Never before the war was a Methodist bishop even charged with immoral
conduct. The standards of the Baptists and Presbyterians were equally
high. The preachers who called men to repentance were beyond question of
the highest character. Earnest, sincere, overwhelmed with the sense of
their responsibility, they "preached the Word with power," and the Word
was the Bible which all believed implicitly from cover to cover. It was
not clear to preacher or congregation how God spoke to man first in the
Hebrew of the Old Testament, then in the Greek of the New Testament, and
finally in the Authorized Version of James I. But it mattered not; the
Bible was inspired by the Heavenly Father, for it was so stated in
Revelation, and a curse was held up for him who denied its truth or so
much as removed one syllable or added a line. It was the authority of
the Bible as preached by Martin Luther and John Calvin, and the
interpreters of the Sacred Book were the clergy, not the Pope or some
distant sacerdotal see.
Just how many people were members of the churches it would be very
difficult accurately to determine. The Methodists of the South numbered
nearly a million in 1860, those of the North were equally strong. The
Baptists, North, South, and West, were nearly as numerous. The
Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Christians (Campbellites) had
each some hundreds of thousands of members. All the churches, including
Catholics, offered seating accommodations for about 20,000,000 of the
31,000,000 people of the country; which is a large proportion. And from
the census returns, it seems that church accommodations were always best
and most plentiful in the older communities, the East having almost as
many pews as there were people. The South could seat 6,500,000
worshipers,--that is, a little more than half of the population; the
Northwest was able to accommodate only about 4,000,000.
With Protestant churches so powerful and their ministers so influential,
it is only natural that the religious teachings of the time should have
told in politics and the sectional struggle. The Southerners believed
almost implicitly in the claim of their great Presbyterian preacher, B.
M. Palmer, when he declared in 1860: "In this great struggle, we defend
the cause of God and religion; it is our solemn duty to ourselves, to
our slaves, to the world, and to Almighty God to preserve and transmit
our existing system of domestic servitude, with the right, unchallenged
by man, to go and root itself wherever Providence and Nature may carry
it." Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, and all other important bodies of
Christians in the South held and taught the same doctrine. In the
Northwest there was some hesitation about going so far, but the majority
undoubtedly believed with Dr. Nathan L. Rice, of Chicago, that slavery
was divinely established and not to be disturbed by man. In the East
some of the Unitarians taught abolition and supported Garrison and
Phillips; more of the Congregationalists were of the same mind. But in
Boston, New York, and Philadelphia the greater clergy had come to regret
the former tendency to denounce slavery, and they were inclined to
preach the doctrine that Providence had established slavery and that it
should be left to Providence to remove it in due time. Only in the rural
districts of the East, where the old New England spirit still
flourished, was slavery declared to be "the awful curse." And here it
was that the old sectional hatred was strongest. The churches and the
clergy with all their influence had thus given up the problem of
slavery, and their counsel and advice were to maintain the Union and to
put down all sectional conflict. Nationalism with the South dominant was
the meaning of this; nor do the election returns of 1852 and 1856 make a
different showing.
Where religious influences were so potent, it was natural that the
clergy should exert themselves for the education of the young. Yale
College was a "school of the prophets" which sent out to the West the
young preachers and teachers so much needed if Congregationalism was to
hold its own in that region. Princeton was Presbyterian headquarters for
both West and South, and few institutions have ever exerted a greater
civilizing force in a new nation than that school of sternest theology.
Dr. Charles Hodge was there a tower of orthodox and conservative
strength which could be seen from afar. In numerous other institutions
the Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Friends, and Campbellites
trained their ministers and urged upon all the importance of education.
At the University of Virginia there were chaplains maintained by the
different denominations for the religious instruction of the students.
The Methodists of Michigan regularly appointed a professor to the state
university for the same purpose. Other state universities, like those of
Indiana and North Carolina, were brought under practical denominational
control through the zealous activity of Presbyterian presidents.
The education of the little children was, however, too much for the most
zealous of religious organizations. Jefferson had set in motion
influences which had greatly strengthened the cause of popular education
in the South and West. But nowhere did the States prepare fully for the
work. In the Northwest the public school lands were wasted by
thoughtless or venal politicians, and in the older South the label,
"school for the children of the poor," went far to defeat all efforts
made by legislatures on behalf of good public school systems. In the
period of 1840-50 Horace Mann revived the New England interest in
education and laid the foundations for the school systems of to-day.
Even so ardent a Southerner as William L. Yancey, of Alabama, became a
disciple of the New England reformer, and tried to do a similar work in
his State. In Indiana, Illinois, and the other Western States
educational reforms followed. There were in consequence about 5,000,000
children in school in the year 1860. Of these the South had 796,000, the
Northwest, exclusive of California, 2,005,196, and the East, 2,011,826;
which shows that Southern public opinion had not yet been aroused to
the importance of the subject. But the figures for illiteracy, already
given, do not show a worse condition among the whites of the South than
is shown in the Northwestern States.
If the returns for college education be taken, the balance among the
sections is fairly reëstablished. There were 25,882 college students in
the South in 1860, and this does not take into account the large number
of Southern students in Eastern institutions like Princeton and Harvard.
There were at the same time 16,959 college students in the Northwest,
and 10,449 in the East.
Between education and the attainments of science and invention there is
some connection, though genius often defies all conventional methods of
instruction. In addition to the epoch-making inventions of McCormick and
his competitors, Samuel F. B. Morse had perfected his electric
telegraph, which was in operation in most of the countries of Europe
before 1860. Richard M. Hoe revolutionized newspaper publishing in the
late forties by his rotary printing-press, which put out thousands of
copies of a paper in an hour. Nor was Elias Howe's sewing-machine any
less of a wonder when it came into use about 1850. Draper and Morse's
new photography, Thurber's typewriter, Woodruff's sleeping-car, and many
other marvelous contrivances of the same period showed the fertility of
the American inventive genius.
In scientific research the United States could not present so many
evidences of her success, though in 1860 Alexander Dallas Bache, the
head of the Coast Survey, was counted one of the leading scientists of
his time, and Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-American naturalist, was teaching
now in Charleston, now in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, and
beginning the great work, _Contributions to the Natural History of the
United States_, which his son, Alexander, was to complete. Joseph Henry,
the first head of the Smithsonian Institution, was equally well known,
and he and Professor Bache were the backbones of the American National
Academy of Science, just beginning its beneficent work. Silliman, of
Yale, and Mitchell, of the University of North Carolina, were the
best-known geologists.
Nor was art degenerating in this period of great prosperity. Hiram
Powers, of Cincinnati, the ablest sculptor of his country, was greatly
hurt because Congress refused him the contract for the decorative work
on the magnificent Capitol in Washington, at last nearing completion.
His aspirations were not unreasonable, for his Greek Slave, a beautiful
work in marble, had captured the imagination of both American and
foreign critics in 1851. Still, Thomas Crawford, his successful
competitor, was a sculptor of real gifts, as one may see in his statues
of Jefferson and Patrick Henry in Richmond. The work of Allston, Sully,
and De Veaux, the painters, was being improved upon by Chester Harding,
Eastman Johnson, and William Morris Hunt, all influenced, however, by
Turner of England, the Düsseldorf (Germany) and Barbizon (France)
schools. There were now many wealthy business men in the country, and
thus artists had a fair chance of a livelihood while their ideals and
technique were developing. In Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were
the beginnings of the museums which were a few years later to become
schools of art of no mean importance.
But the flower of American culture was its literature. To be sure
Edgar Allan Poe, whose _Raven_ and short stories were ere long to
give him the first rank among all American men of letters, had been
suffered to starve in the midst of New York's millions in 1849,
and Hawthorne found it very difficult to find the means of a meager
livelihood in Massachusetts. If the _Raven_ and the _Scarlet Letter_
were born unwelcome, Ralph Waldo Emerson was making a living as
author and sage of his generation, and there were others of the
Transcendentalists--Thoreau, the woodland poet, Margaret Fuller, the
woman knight-errant, recently drowned at sea, and Amos Bronson
Alcott--whose writings appeared in standard editions and who lived by
their pens. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a professor at Harvard till
1854, though savagely criticized by Poe and Margaret Fuller, had won the
American heart in his _Village Blacksmith_ and _Evangeline_. He scored
his greatest triumph in _Miles Standish_ in 1858. And another Harvard
professor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was just coming into a national
reputation in 1860 by his _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_ and other
similar writings.
A more radical poet was John Greenleaf Whittier, contributor to the
_National Era_, a radical anti-slavery journal which first gave
publicity to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.
Whittier's _Ichabod_, which appeared in 1850, and is already quoted in
these pages, gave its author a devoted following among the radicals and
hastened Webster to his grave. Mrs. Stowe's work was perhaps the most
influential book ever written by an American, though it hardly ranks as
literature. Of a similarly intense nature was James Russell Lowell,
whose _Biglow Papers_ of 1846 to 1857 unmercifully lampooned the party
which waged the war on Mexico and ridiculed the leaders of the South and
West. Succeeding Longfellow at Harvard, Lowell helped to establish in
1857 the _Atlantic Monthly_, which still remains the best of American
magazines.
There was nowhere else in the country such a school of literary men as
this of New England, though in Charleston William Gilmore Simms was
still publishing historical novels, espousing the cause of Southern
literature in _Russell's Magazine_, and stimulating the ambitions of
young men. One of his pupils, Henry Timrod, whose _At Magnolia Cemetery_
is likely to prove immortal, was worthy to be compared with Poe; and
another, Paul Hamilton Hayne, certainly deserved a higher rank and a
better fortune than either of these struggling poets has been accorded.
But perhaps the most original writings of the time were those of a
certain group of obscure men in Georgia and the lower South. A. B.
Longstreet, the author of _Georgia Scenes_, William Tappan Thompson, of
_Major Jones's Courtship_, and Joseph B. Baldwin, of _Flush Times in
Alabama and Mississippi_, struck a rich vein of ludicrous humor which
Mark Twain worked out after the war.
In Richmond the _Southern Literary Messenger_ was still the
clearing-house for Southern writers, and _De Bow's Review_ was eminent
in the field of social and economic studies. New York City had, however,
become the Mecca of the men who had manuscripts to submit. There the
Harper Brothers published their _Harper's Magazine_, which went to
150,000 subscribers, we are told, each month, and the _Knickerbocker
Magazine_, distinguished by the contributions of Washington Irving, the
Nestor of American writers, tried to keep pace. Both the Harpers and the
Putnams did an enormous business in books of all kinds, now that so many
Americans had grown rich. Walter Scott's novels were imported for the
South in carload lots, while Dickens's numberless volumes found ready
sale in the East, thus showing the different tastes of the sections.
And the historians had increased their vogue with a people just
beginning to realize that they had ancestors and taking a becoming pride
in their early history. Bancroft's _History of the United States_ was
sold in all sections in a way that would astound present-day historians.
Richard Hildreth, a sturdy partisan, added his six volumes to Bancroft's
in 1849-54 by way of antidote; and George Tucker, of the University of
Virginia, still further "corrected" the history of his country, the
better to suit the tastes of Southerners. John L. Motley published his
_Rise of the Dutch Republic_ in 1856 at his own expense, and suddenly
found himself one of the foremost historians of his time, his work being
quickly translated into all the important languages of Europe. William
H. Prescott, an older man and a greater historian, already well known
for his _Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella_, gave to the printer his
_Reign of Philip II_ in 1855-58, and easily maintained his supremacy in
the field of history.
It was an aspiring generation that produced Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, and
the rest, and if one considers the character of American culture, its
lack of unity, and the still youthful nature of its people, it is easy
to understand the pride in its budding art and maturer literature, the
sensitiveness to foreign criticism, the provincialism which demands
attention and a "place in the sun." Carlyle's scorn and Macaulay's
contempt were indeed as irritating as they were unjust, for America had
gone a long way since the rough backwoodsman, Andrew Jackson, came to
the Presidency by almost unanimous consent in 1829.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
James Ford Rhodes in his _History of the United States_, vol. _I_, chap.
_IV_, gives an account of social conditions in the South just prior to
the war and, in vol. _III_, chap. _XII_, there is a similar picture of
conditions in the North. McMaster's last volume describes the life of
the people for this period. But I have found most valuable information
in works of travel like F. L. Olmsted's _A Journey in the Seaboard Slave
States_ (1856) and _A Journey Through the Back Country_ (1863), W. H.
Russell's _My Diary North and South_ (1863), Sir Charles Lyell's _A
Second Visit to the United States_ (1849), Peter Cartwright's
_Autobiography_ (1856), and James Dixon's _Personal Narrative_ (1849);
and in John Weiss's _Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker_ (1864);
Beecher and Scoville's _Biography of Henry Ward Beecher_ (1888); W. E.
Hatcher's _Life of J. B. Jeter_ (1887); T. C. Johnson's _The Life and
Letters of Benjamin Morgan Palmer_ (1906); and the valuable _American
Church History_ series (1893-97). On American sculpture Lorado Taft's
_American Sculpture_ (1903), and Charles H. Caffin's _American Masters
of Sculpture_ (1903), are useful and discriminating. Caffin has also
written _The Story of American Painting_ (1907), which is perhaps the
best short account of the subject. For a good view of the literary and
publishing interests of 1860, W. P. Trent's _A History of American
Literature_ (1903) is most valuable, and W. B. Cairns's _A History of
American Literature_ (1912) is likewise important. George H. Putnam's
_George Palmer Putnam: A Memoir_ (1912) and J. H. Harper's _The House of
Harper_ (1912) give important information about the rise of the
publishing houses. Of course _De Bow's Review_, _Resources of the South
and West_, and the _Reports of the Census_ for 1850 and 1860 are
indispensable.