But in dealing with the Indians he entered a domain preëmpted by the

romantic, and his picaresque realism suffered a disastrous rivalry.

Like Robert Montgomery Bird’s _Nick of the Woods, The Yemassee_

is heavily marked by the frontier psychology. It was unfortunate,

perhaps, that Simms did not follow Cooper’s example and plunge into

the wilderness, leaving behind him the squatter and settler with their

sordid prose. Instead, his Indians are encompassed by a dark background

of civilization, and their tragic destiny is poignantly dramatized in

the fate of young Occonestoga, besotted with the white man’s rum, and

doomed to a destruction far less poetic than befalls Uncas fighting

his hereditary foes. Nevertheless a wealth of romantic material is

crowded into the volume, enough to serve Cooper for half a dozen tales.

In simplifying his plots to the uncomplicated problem of flight and

pursuit, the latter gains in dramatic swiftness of movement, but he

loses in abundance of accompanying action--the sense of cross purposes

and many-sided activities, which _The Yemassee_ so richly suggests.

The latter is an elaborately carved and heavily freighted Spanish bark

that is left far astern by the trim Yankee clipper ship; yet its cargo

of the gold of the Indies is far richer. It is the familiar story of

southern prodigality and wastefulness--an exuberant nature pouring out

its wealth in spendthrift fashion, and failing to achieve the greater

results attained by a simpler nature held in closer restraint. After

all it is idle to compare Cooper and Simms, and even more futile to

catalogue the latter as a disciple of the Cooper school. Simms was

far too rich in his own right to live as a dependent on anyone, and

certainly far too original to be an imitator. Nature was lavish in

her gifts to him, and as if his fame as a story-teller is less than

Cooper’s, the debit must be charged against his unfortunate environment.

The later years of Simms were utterly devastated by the unhappy war,

in which, as was to be expected, he was a stalwart and uncompromising

partisan. His native commonwealth that had long treated him shabbily,

sacrificed him in the end to her folly. It was his own fault of course,

but how could one warped by the pervasive southern provincialism hope

to escape? Scratch a Carolinian of the Calhoun school and you find a

Fire Eater. In this respect Simms was not different from the McDuffies

and Hamiltons from whom he took his cue--gentlemen whom, because they

were politically prominent, he regarded as socially intelligent. That

a man of such native powers as Simms should have taken seriously

the Charleston politicians--blown up like a pig’s bladder after

butchering; that he should himself have aspired to become another such

bladder--these are sobering facts to remind us that the man of letters

is very likely to be a child outside his study walls. What was wrong

with Simms that he read the signs of the times so badly? This, that

he lived in a world of unreality, of social and economic romanticism,

that was forever benumbing his strong instinct for reality. His

father-in-law owned seventy slaves; his neighbors and acquaintances

owned slaves; all South Carolina gentlemen owned slaves; and in

judging this matter of slavery Gilmore Simms went unquestioningly with

his little world. He who had drunk of the rich wine of Elizabethan

culture came at last to drink himself under the table with his drafts

of Charleston Jamaica. The dream of a Greek civilization based on

black slavery was discovered in the bottom of the cup of southern

romanticism. And Simms emptied his bottle with the rest. Charleston,

no doubt, has paid a sufficiently heavy price for her too copious

potations, but she can never atone for the undoing of her greatest

son--for the foolish intoxication that befuddled the generous mind of

Gilmore Simms. The loss is not Charleston’s alone; it is a loss to our

common American literature. There is food for thought in the words of

the epitaph which he composed for himself: “Here lies one who, after a

reasonably long life, distinguished chiefly by unceasing labors, has

left all his better works undone.” Juster words could not have been

written, nor more tragic.

Footnotes

[408] See _Writings_, Vol. II, p. 104.

[409] See “The Arbitrament of National Disputes,” in _Writings_, Vol.

I, pp. 355-357.

[410] See above, page 102.

[411] See _Katherine Walton_, Chapter XLI.

[412] See _The Forayers_, Chapters XLIII-XLVI.

Part Three: The Romance of the West

Chapter I • New Worlds

I

While Calhoun was instructing the South in the theory of a Greek

democracy, other sons of the South were learning, in the new world

to which they had removed, the ways of a very different democracy--a

democracy native to the frontier and quite unconcerned with Greek

ideals. In the Ohio valley was gathering a multitude of rough

libertarians who had exchanged the restrictions of the old settlements

for the freedom of the new. To these bumptious levelers rulership by

established authorities made no appeal. They attached no respect to

broadcloth, but preferred to manage their affairs in their own way

by appeal to the majority. Taught by experience the worth of certain

Jeffersonian principles, they took seriously the doctrine of equality

and proposed to put it into practice. They were coonskin apostles of

liberty and equality--if not of fraternity--backwoods democrats who

by virtue of numbers established in common practice the principle of

the sovereignty of the popular will. Springing up naturally on the

frontier, the practice of democracy received from it a new validity

and became the determining factor in the nationalism that America

was creating in the early years of the nineteenth century. That it

was a crude and often shoddy democracy, that it never justified its

pretentions in the eyes of a critical realism, did not lessen the zeal

with which men clung to it or weaken their loyalty. Democracy became

the common faith of the West, and in becoming the common faith of the

West it was put in the way of becoming the common faith of America.

If the romantic temper is a spontaneous by-product of social change,

that temper found in the upheaval attending the western migration

a plentiful aliment that had been wanting in the static eighteenth

century. In that older world men had been held fast in the grip of the

customary and familiar; but in the free West all was new and strange.

The crossing of the Appalachian barrier that had long held back the

settlements was an adventurous undertaking that fired the imagination.

Romantic in spirit and scope, it was meanly picaresque in a thousand

unlovely details. Plain men engaged in it, provident and improvident,

hard-working and shiftless; heroes had a share in it, but blackguards

and outlaws and broken men--the lees and settlings thrown off from the

older communities--had a share as well. The world that provided a stage

for the courage of Daniel Boone and the fighting qualities of George

Rogers Clark bred also the Davy Crocketts and Mike Finks and Col.

William Suggses, who discovered there opportunities for the development

of less admirable qualities; and it engulfed in its depths a host of

nameless adventurers who drifted into the wilderness settlements, drank

and quarreled and begot children, suffered from the chills and ague,

spread a drab poverty along the frontier, and were put away under

ground and forgotten by the more fortunate who salvaged prosperity from

the abundant wreckage.

From this crude society emerged the new states with governments

designed to serve simple ends. Jealousy for his sovereign right to

do as he pleased was the chief concern of the free western voter;

as a sovereign citizen he refused to be subject to the creature

commonwealth. If governors and legislators and judges got uppish he

would throw them out of office and put in others who better understood

the rights of free Americans. It was this rude equalitarianism that

marked the early stage of western commonwealth building. Naïve

Jeffersonians, these frontier citizens had not learned from Hamilton

how useful the political state may become to those who know how

to control its policies to their particular ends; but that lesson

they were soon to learn. The citizens of Georgia received excellent

instruction from no less a man than Chief Justice Marshall in the

matter of the Yazoo frauds; and as such lessons sank into their minds

their political philosophy underwent a silent change. The coonskin

individualism that created Jacksonian democracy was gradually

undermined by a middle-class individualism that inclined to the

Whiggery of Henry Clay. The former was a spontaneous expression of the

frontier spirit, the latter a calculating expression of the maturing

settlement. The one discovered its native habitat on the backwoods

farm, the other in the county seat town. The one was agrarian _laissez

faire_, the other was exploitative paternalistic. The followers of

Jackson wanted the state kept simple and frugal, the followers of Clay

wanted it to engage in ambitious programs of internal improvement;

and from these antagonistic principles emerged a bitter feud between

Democracy and Whiggery that in western townships revived the old

alignment of agrarian and Federalist of earlier times.

In such a contest the principle of Whiggery must eventually triumph.

It was an expression of “the genius of the times.” Economics and

psychology were daily arguing in its behalf. From the first early

settlements of the Ohio valley, it must be remembered, circumstances

were creating a new middle class that was to stamp itself indelibly on

western life and institutions. The spirit of speculation had entered

the wilderness with the early surveyors. With its vast resources the

Inland Empire offered the first opportunity to exercise the newly

won right to exploit the western hinterland, and it was seized upon

greedily. Agriculture was still the common business and land hunger

the common passion. The irruption of the land-hungry hordes upon

the fertile Ohio valley, it will be recalled, synchronized with the

speculative debauch that followed the conclusion of the peace of

1783, and this in turn was a by-product of the sudden expansion of

the new capitalistic finance. Speculation had suddenly become every

man’s business, and wild lands and wild-cat banks, joining fortunes

for better or worse, brought forth a characteristic progeny. The new

gospel of progress found more willing hearers than the old gospel of

righteousness. Every adventurer into the Ohio valley was a potential

speculator, and every settler was eager to sell out to a later comer

at an advance. The real estate agent followed close on the footsteps

of Daniel Boone, quick to profit from the explorations. Land was the

staple commodity and such a turnover had never before been known in

America. Every clearing in the woods was speedily capitalized, and

every townsite was reckoned rich in potential values. The new cities

were founded in unearned increment and prospered with its increase.

With European peasants flocking to the West from their poverty-stricken

countries, and the exploited of the East seeking new openings there,

it was an unlucky speculator who could not exchange his paper values

for substantial equivalents. Law, religion, education, culture,

were pressed into the service of speculation. How widely the spirit

permeated the West is suggested in the experience of Timothy Flint,

frontier missionary. Writing from Saint Charles, Missouri, in 1818, he

commented somewhat bitterly:

Religion, when I came here was considered contemptible. The phalanx

of opposition was in array from one end of the street to the

other. Why did they invite me here? On speculation. A minister--a

church--a school--are words to flourish in an advertisement to sell

lots. (John Ervin Kirkpatrick, _Timothy Flint, etc._, Appendix B,

p. 293.)

From the determining factors, then, of abundant wild lands, rapid

increase in population, and an elastic credit, operating on a vast

scale, came the optimistic, speculative psychology of the new West.

It is the common disease of every period of unstable economics. It

had traveled west with every extension of the frontier; and it became

acute in the Ohio valley in the romantic days following the War of

1812. In colonial times before the upheaval of the Revolution, prices

of land and commodities had been stable. The basic silver currency

varied little in quantity or value; coin was scarce, but the occasional

emission of paper money produced little disturbance, for the reason

that the farmer habitually reckoned his income in the produce of his

farm and fireside. But with the unsettling of exchange values by

the wide use of bank notes, prices at once shifted to a speculative

basis. The familiar commodities ceased to have a fixed use value, and

a cash psychology superseded the traditional commodity value. The old

stability was gone. The familiar domestic economy that functioned

primarily in terms of consumption rather than profit disintegrated

under the workings of a paper system and gave place to a speculative

economy.

It was this revolution that set apart the new West from the older

traditional America and made it the special repository of the new

middle-class spirit of progress. The change had been long preparing.

Writing from Boonesborough in January, 1776, the agent of the

Transylvania Land Company pointed out that the western country

“abounded with land mongers,” and that his company had already issued

nine hundred patents.[413] These adventurous spirits were only pioneers

pointing the way for later hordes that after 1815 pushed eagerly

onward. “Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward,”

commented a traveler in 1817 as he watched the long line of Conestoga

wagons moving towards Pittsburgh; and in the fall of the same year

Timothy Flint said of Saint Charles, Missouri, that “there was an

average of one hundred people every day coming to the town, or passing

to near-by points. Nearly all were poor and not one family in fifty had

a Bible” (Kirkpatrick, _Timothy Flint, etc._, p. 102). “This western

fever has seized old and young,” remarks a character in Cooper’s _Home

as Found_, “and it has carried off many active families from our parts

of the world.... Most of the counties adjoining our own have lost a

considerable portion of their population.” One reason for this vast

exodus from the East is suggested by a recent student who remarks:

“A considerable part of the significance of the frontier lies behind

the frontier. In one sense, the westward expansion of the American

people was a flight from the new industrialism” (Norman Ware, _The

Industrial Worker_, p. xx). To these adventurers from the East was

added an increasing immigration. During the period from the close of

the Revolution to the War of 1812, the annual immigration averaged no

more than four or five thousand. In the year 1817 it rose to 22,000,

and thereafter an augmenting stream poured into America and filtered

westward. They were natural prey to shrewd promoters, and in _Martin

Chuzzlewit_ Dickens has drawn a picture--not wholly caricature--of what

befell some of them. But whatever might be their individual fate, they

provided fuel to the fire that was consuming the old agrarianism and

clearing the ground for the western middle class.

II

With land as its staple commodity the West naturally interpreted

progress in terms of increasing land values; and these in turn were

dependent on better markets, better roads, and a freely flowing tide of

immigration. In a country of such vast distances internal improvements

were an everyday necessity. With every mile that a turnpike was driven

into the wilderness new opportunities were opened up. Monies paid for

wild land went into the Federal treasury; it was only just, according

to the western view, that such monies should return to the West in the

form of public improvements, for with such improvements tax values were

increased, prices of all commodities rose, and progress was furthered.

The Federal government could not fairly leave its offspring to shift

for themselves, but must consider itself _in loco parentis_ to the

rising commonwealths. It was a persuasive argument, appealing alike to

farmer and speculator, to town and country, but it played havoc with

the older Jeffersonianism. Jefferson thought always in terms of the

agrarian producer functioning in a stable economic world; speculation

was not in his philosophy; unearned increment was a crop he never

calculated on; and in sympathy with an older liberalism he would reduce

the state to the narrow rôle of policeman. But the new West, thinking

in terms of its immediate needs, desired a broad and benevolent

paternalism. It wanted the Federal government to butter its bread

regardless of the ultimate cost of the butter.

The complete embodiment of this spirit of paternalistic progress was

the master politician of the times, whose dramatic career, beginning

as a Jeffersonian and ending as a Hamiltonian, suggests the confusions

of a world in transition. Henry Clay was the hero of the new West, the

spokesman of the new ambitions. A man of great personal charm, engaging

manners, buoyant temperament, exuberant patriotism, and persuasive

tongue, he migrated in 1797 at the age of twenty-one from Richmond,

Virginia, to Lexington, Kentucky, then a booming county-seat town only

twenty-two years removed from the building of its first blockhouse. The

population of the state had more than doubled in seven years, and by

1797 it had risen above 180,000. Of this aggressive little world Clay

soon became the accredited representative at Washington. He had been

brought up under the old domestic economy and carefully tutored in the

Jeffersonian philosophy. For four years he had been private secretary

to George Wythe, a distinguished Virginian of the older generation,

a profound lawyer and teacher, a scholarly political thinker, a

humanitarian, and a confirmed agrarian. When Clay left Virginia he

carried with him the Jeffersonianism of Wythe; but he was wanting in

the trained intellect of his preceptor and his views were inadequately

grounded. His subsequent career revealed him as an impressionable

nature modifying his convictions with his environment. In Kentucky the

spirit of speculative expansion seized him and inoculated his mind with

the new gospel of progress. He early convinced himself that government

was not doing its full duty unless it helped its citizens to make

money, and he persistently pressed on Congress the need of federal aid

to develop the West. In 1812 he fell victim to the war psychology,

turned jingo, and substituted an ardent patriotism for sober reason.

Thereafter he became increasingly nationalistic, demanding a strong

army and navy, pleading for a loose construction of the constitution,

arguing for paternalism. His Jeffersonianism was quietly put away

like a garment out of style. Grossly ignorant of the schools of

economic thought, he was an opportunist who shifted from the older

domestic economy to the later capitalistic, without comprehending the

significance of the change. Unread in history and political theory,

he trusted his fluency to get him out of any inconsistencies he might

blunder into. In the course of his long career he found himself

at different times on both sides of every important question; yet

gravitating to the middle-class position, the exponent of exploitation

in the name of progress, spokesman of the commercial, financial and

manufacturing interests, a new-model Federalist passionately defending

the new money economy--a curious ending for one who began as a pupil of

George Wythe.

And yet not curious when one considers the ambitions of the world that

molded him. Clay was a born politician who rarely came to grips with

reality. Devoted to the principles of republican liberty as he found

them in the Constitution, he professed to believe that government

could be trusted to distribute favors with impartial hand. Personally

honest, he never realized how often he allowed himself to become the

unconscious tool of powerful economic interests. With his desire to

please everybody he was an easy prey for skillful lobbyists. He had

been at one time attorney for the Bank, yet he denied vehemently

that his defense of the institution had been influenced by such

connection. He had become a Hamiltonian without gaining Hamilton’s

clear understanding of the economic basis of politics. A brilliant

opportunist, he was guided by no fixed political principles but tacked

with the shifting winds. A brilliant romantic, he was the persuasive

prophet of an age that was dreaming of a prosperity that should gather

in certain favored reservoirs through the agency of subsidies and

taxes, and trickle thence through all the land to water the roots

of industry. It was fitting that such a man should be the father of

Whiggery, and fitting also that he should stand as the embodiment of

the spirit of compromise. One great lesson, at least, he had learned,

that greater men too often do not learn, the lesson that republican

government rests on good will and that such good will demands a

policy of give and take among rival interests. Compromise may be

displeasing to earnest souls, but it is implied in any workable system

of democratic rule.

Like Calhoun and Webster, Clay was a victim of changing times. If he

had lived a generation later, when the middle-class revolution had been

accomplished and the principle of capitalism was in undisputed control,

he would have achieved a far greater personal success. But capitalism

was not yet strong enough to uphold him against rival economies, and

he failed of his lifelong ambition to be President. He was broken by

the Jacksonian revolution, in spite of the fact that no other American

politician has been so loved by a hero-worshiping electorate--and it

should be added, has been so lovable.

Footnotes

[413] See James Hall, _Romance of American History_, Appendix.

Chapter II • Two Spokesmen of the West

I • Andrew Jackson • Agrarian Liberal

Clay’s pleasant dream of a paternalistic prosperity for America got

its first rude awakening from General Jackson and his motley following

of western equalitarians and eastern proletarians. Gentlemen were

suddenly reminded that the plain people had been overlooked in the

distribution of benefits. The waters of prosperity, it would seem, had

been trickling somewhat too scantily to them from the great reservoirs

where they were impounded; and as they saw the wealth pouring into

private ponds through governmental pipe lines, a natural human envy

took possession of them. In theory the pipe lines belonged to them,

and the impounded waters were to be used for common irrigation; but

in practice the mains seemed to conduct only to Lowell industrialists

and Philadelphia and New York capitalists, and the waters turned out

to be privately owned. As the recognition of this fact came home to

the producing mass it provided a rallying point for an anti-monopolist

movement and determined the great objective of the Jacksonian attack,

the assault on the Bank.

The driving force of the new Democracy was the same class-feeling

that had done service a generation before, the will to destroy the

aristocratic principle in government. This conscious class-feeling

had been strengthened by the spread of the dogma of equalitarianism

through the frontier, and this in turn had brought about an extension

of manhood suffrage which enfranchised a numerous body of voters who

turned against an aristocracy that had long resisted their demands for

the vote. The spirit of 1798 was rising afresh, and the re-alignment

assumed the form of a democratic-aristocratic struggle, which for

the moment obscured the more significant fact of an emerging middle

class. The battle seemed to lie between homespun and broadcloth for

control of government, and this serves to explain the odium that

quickly attached to Jacksonian Democracy in polite circles. In drawing

together mechanics and frontiersmen, the new party inevitably became

a lower-class instrument, offensive to gentlemen of the old school

of politics. The records of the times carry abundant evidence, often

amusing, of this aristocratic contempt. In the early forties a girl

of seventeen living on a Mississippi plantation, describing Jefferson

Davis--whose wife she afterwards became--was surprised at the contrast

between his politics and his manners. “Would you believe it,” she

wrote, “he is refined and cultivated, and yet he is a Democrat!”

(_Jefferson Davis, A Memoir by his Wife_, Vol. I, p. 192.)

There were quite evident reasons for this aristocratic contempt. The

new Democracy was heavily weighted with what gentlemen were pleased to

call the rabble. Fresh Democratic recruits had been gathering since

Jefferson molded the first party of protest. Industrialism was creating

a city proletariat, and the frontier was producing the coonskin voter;

neither as yet possessed any adequate political philosophy, but they

needed no philosophy to enlist against the traditional privileges and

perquisites of broadcloth. They had had their fill of such rule. The

stake-in-society theory was worn threadbare, and other philosophies

were preparing. Meanwhile in the person of Old Hickory they saw the

visible embodiment of their vague aspirations, and they turned to

him with an unquestioning loyalty that nothing could weaken. He was

our first great popular leader, our first man of the people. If he

aroused a wild enthusiasm in breasts covered by linsey-woolsey, it

was because he believed that linsey-woolsey had its stake-in-society

equally with broadcloth. He was one of our few Presidents whose heart

and sympathy were with the plain people, and who clung to the simple

faith that government must deal as justly with the poor as with the

rich. Believing so, he could not be turned aside from his course by

paid clamor, but with a courage rare in the White House he dared make a

frontal attack on the citadel of exploitation in the face of an army of

mercenaries.

The dramatic career of Andrew Jackson, so unlike that of Jefferson,

which was determined by a speculative temperament and founded on a

critical examination of diverse systems of society and politics, was

shaped in large measure by prejudice and circumstance. A man of iron

will and inflexible purpose, he was almost wholly lacking in political

and social philosophy. His conclusions were the reactions of a simple

nature of complete integrity, in contact with plain fact. Fundamentally

realistic, he cherished few romanticisms. There was no subtlety in his

mental processes and this lack kept him free from the temptation to

follow devious paths beloved of politicians. He must take the shortest

way to his objective, crashing through such obstacles as lay in his

path. He was never a bookish man. He was surprisingly ill read, and his

grammar and spelling were those of the plain people. He loved horse

racing and was a master of profanity; yet in spite of characteristics

that link him with Davy Crockett, he possessed an innate dignity and

chivalry that set him far above the wag of the canebrakes. He was a

born leader whose headlong onslaughts and rash mistakes might imperil

the cause but could not shake the confidence of his followers. All

who knew a man when they saw one respected Andrew Jackson. Imperious

and dictatorial, he knew how to command but not to obey; he took

orders from no one, not even his superiors, unless such orders fell

in with his own plans. In short General Jackson represented the best

which the new West could breed in the way of capable and self-reliant

individualism, and the backwoodsmen loved him for the enemies he made,

and backed him loudly in his fight against the aristocratic East.

When Jackson settled in Nashville in 1788, at the age of twenty-one,

the Cumberland valley had somewhat under five thousand inhabitants

scattered a distance of eighty-five miles along the river. The first

settlements had been made only nine years before, and Nashville was a

frontier post with frontier manners. Into this rough society the young

Scotch-Irishman fitted easily. His smattering of the law sufficed to

gain him clients and he soon became a local political leader. When

he was only twenty-nine he was sent to Philadelphia as the first

Congressman from the state of Tennessee, where he came in contact with

the “aristocratic Neebobs” of the government and heartily disliked

them. The next year he was sent to the Senate, but a single session

satisfied him and he resigned to accept a judgeship in the state

Supreme Court, which post he held for six years. During these early

years he was unconsciously following the path that conducted straight

to a middle-class philosophy. He threw himself into speculation,

bought and sold land in great blocks, traded in horses and slaves,

set up a general store, and was well on the road to wealth when the

panic of 1795 caught him unprepared. He lost most of his extensive

holdings, including his homestead and many of his slaves, and removed

to a six hundred and forty acre tract eight miles from Nashville--the

Hermitage--which was to become one of the famous places of America.

With this removal his middle-class ambitions fell away and he became a

planter with a simple agrarian point of view; and this old-fashioned

agrarianism became in later years the determining force in all his

political thinking.

He was fifty-eight when he emerged as a potential candidate for the

Presidency in 1822, and for years his sole interests, other than those

of his plantation, had been military. He was singularly wanting in any

formulated political philosophy, and his reëlection to the Senate two

years later did little to supply the lack. He had picked up some shreds

of the protectionist theory and in a letter written in 1824 he went so

far as to declare for a “judicious” protective tariff, basing his view

on the grounds of the country’s economic unpreparedness at the time

of the War of 1812, on the lack of markets for the produce of western

farms, and on the desirability of drawing labor from the farm to the

factory. But he added a significant passage that reveals the agrarian

bias of his mind. To the end of his life he insisted that he was an old

Republican of 1798, and this comment of 1824 suffices to connect his

later attack on the Bank with Jefferson’s attack on Hamilton’s fiscal

policy.

Beyond this, I look at the Tariff with an eye to the proper

distribution of labor and revenue; and with a view to discharge our

national debt. I am one of those who do not believe that a national

debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic;

inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration

a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.

(Quoted in Bassett, _Life of Andrew Jackson_, Vol. I, p. 346.)

The tariff was the only question on which he was receptive to Whiggish

arguments, and although he never openly repudiated a protectionist

policy he soon grew lukewarm in its support. Such other fragments of

Whiggery as found accidental lodgment in his mind were swept away in

the fierce struggles that marked his years in the White House. During

those eight years Jackson found himself, and the man who emerged from

the struggle was an agrarian of the old Virginian school. As he came to

understand the significance of the principle of exploitation he learned

to interpret social classes in terms of economics. He instinctively

hated all aristocrats, extending his dislike to the circle that

pretended to social preëminence in Tennessee, speaking of them

contemptuously as the “aristocrats of Nashville.” But in these later

years a change in his vocabulary appeared; his favorite phrases became

“the monied capitalists” and the “hydra of corruption.” He had come to

associate aristocracy with the control of the economics of society. He

was learning how aristocracies are built up through the instrumentality

of the state; and as that lesson sank into his mind his opposition to

such class favoritism hardened into adamant. He would put a stop to

such practices, cost what it might. His attack on the Bank was perhaps

the most courageous act in our political history; he knew how fiercely

it would be defended; yet he was amazed at the number of hornets that

issued from the shaken nest. “Such has been the scenes of corruption

in our last congress,” he wrote in 1833, “that I loath the corruption

of human nature and long for retirement, and repose on the Hermitage.

But until I can strangle this hydra of corruption, the Bank, I will

not shrink from my duty.” And a little later, “I want relaxation from

business and rest, but where can I get rest; I fear not on this earth”

(Bassett, _Life of Andrew Jackson_, Vol. II, pp. 635, 637).

As his policy unfolded it became clear that Jackson had not changed

with the changing times. He remained to the last the product of an

earlier domestic economy, with an old-fashioned horror of debt. He

was too generous to be frugal, too kind-hearted to be thrifty, too

honest to live above his means. He desired a simple independence for

himself and for his country. He believed that the government should

pay its debt, reduce its revenues, and live simply. In his austere

personal rectitude he exhibited a Puritan conviction of the sacredness

of stewardship; he must return to the common people, who had put their

trust in him, an honest reckoning of that trust. It was not in his

nature to betray their faith. He would have nothing to do with the

new theory that government is an agency to help business. To take

profits from an instrument erected supposedly for the common good was

abhorrent to his old-fashioned views; it was impossible for him to

lend the sanction of his office to particular or special interests;

and when circumstances made the Bank the central vexing problem of his

administration, his position was predetermined by every conviction of

his mind. While he was President he would not allow the government to

be used for business ends; he would not permit its funds or credit to

be turned to private profits; he would not tolerate a money monopoly,

no matter how conventionally correct its operations might be proved to

be, that challenged the sovereignty of the national government. The

twin powers of the purse and sword--to recall Clay’s famous phrase

that every Whig orator used on the stump--were in Jackson’s opinion

the ultimate tests of sovereignty; and to turn over the money of the

government to private hands for private use, he believed, was as grave

an abrogation of sovereign rights as would be the use of the army and

navy by private interests for private ends.

In the judgment of many critics Jackson, in his ignorance of the

intricacies of capitalistic finance, wantonly destroyed a necessary

credit system, thereby bringing a devastating panic on the country.

Whether or not that judgment is true is of little importance today.

More interesting historically is the fact that in his attitude towards

the Bank, as in his attitude towards internal improvements, Jackson

returned to the agrarian position of Jefferson and John Taylor,

nullifying for a time the victories gained by the middle class

during the boom period of nationalism. The more he learned about

the methods of capitalistic finance, the more he distrusted it. His

prejudices were his strength. He disliked speculation and he could

see nothing permanently wise or sound in a speculative economy that

put American industry at the mercy of bankers to expand or contract

credit. With an old-fashioned love of a stable currency he gave his

warm support to the project to return the country to a specie basis.

“The great desideratum, in modern times,” he said in his message to

the twenty-fourth Congress, “is an efficient check upon the power of

banks, preventing that excessive issue of paper whence arise those

fluctuations in the standard of value which render uncertain the

rewards of labor.” The establishment of additional mints to provide an

adequate coinage of gold or silver became therefore a natural corollary

of his attack upon bank currency. It was John Taylor’s economics

written into the law of the land.

In his attitude towards the state Jackson followed the nationalistic

tendencies of the West. He was as patriotic as Clay, and in spite of

strong states-rights sympathies he contemptuously rejected Calhoun’s

theory of nullification. But he had no love for an omnicompetent

state. More and more he drifted back to the Jeffersonian position in

his conception of the powers and duties of the federal government.

Replying to the vote of censure of 1834, he stated his ideal of

government in words that would have become Jefferson’s first inaugural

speech. He had been charged with being ambitious, to which he replied:

The ambition which leads me on, is an anxious desire and a fixed

determination, to return to the people, unimpaired, the sacred

trust they have confided to my charge--to heal the wounds of the

constitution and preserve it from further violation; to persuade

my countrymen, so far as I may, that it is not in a splendid

government, supported by powerful monopolies and aristocratical

establishments, that they will find happiness, or their liberties

protected, but in a plain system, void of pomp--protecting all, and

granting favors to none--dispensing its blessings like the dews of

heaven, unseen and unfelt, save in the freshness and beauty they

contribute to produce. It is such a government that the genius of

our people requires--such a one only under which our States may

remain for ages to come, united, prosperous, and free. (Benton,

_Thirty Years’ View_, Vol. I, p. 427.)

The evils entailed on America by the Jacksonian revolution were many,

but they cannot properly be charged against Andrew Jackson. They

came in spite of him, and they came as a result of the great object

lesson in the manipulation of the majority will that his popularity

had laid bare. His instincts and the main outline of his policy were

Jeffersonian; but neither he nor any other man was strong enough

to stop the current of middle-class individualism then running.

The American people were wanting in an adequate democratic program

suited to the changing times, as they were wanting in desire for a

social democracy. And when his capable hands fell from the machine

he had created, it was seized by the politicians and used for narrow

partisan ends. Yet one far-reaching result survived the movement, the

popularization of the name of democracy and the naïve acceptance of the

belief that the genius of America was democratic. In choosing a party

name the Jacksonians were shrewder politicians and better prophets than

the Whigs. For better or worse the American masses, and in particular

the nationalistic West, had espoused the principle of democracy, and

interpreted it in terms of political equalitarianism--a principle that

had inspired a fanatical hatred in the breasts of old Federalists.

To gentlemen of that earlier school democracy had meant the right of

the propertyless majority to plunder the minority in the name of the

law. The later Whigs did not make so blundering a mistake. Instead of

proclaiming democracy the mother of all mischiefs, they welcomed it as

an effective aid in vote-getting. Learning their lesson from Jackson,

the Whig politicians outdid him in democratic professions. They had

discovered that business has little to fear from a skillfully guided

electorate; that quite the safest way, indeed, to reach into the public

purse is to do it in the sacred name of the majority will. Perhaps the

rarest bit of irony in American history is the later custodianship

of democracy by the middle class, who while perfecting their tariffs

and subsidies, legislating from the bench, exploiting the state and

outlawing all political theories but their own, denounce all class

consciousness as unpatriotic and all agrarian or proletarian programs

as undemocratic. But it was no fault of Andrew Jackson if the final

outcome of the great movement of Jacksonian democracy was so untoward;

it was rather the fault of the times that were not ripe for democracy.

II • Lincoln • Free-Soil Liberal

The equalitarian West that bred Andrew Jackson bred Lincoln also,

a man with the same homespun mind, the same sterling integrity of

nature, the same instinctive democracy, but shaped by an environment

in which the new philosophy of progress had displaced the older

agrarianism. The road of middle-class ideals he traveled further

than Jackson, but in the end he also turned back to pick up once

more the democratic faith then being repudiated by the proponents

of slavery, north as well as south. Long an ardent Whig of the Clay

school, and thoroughly indoctrinated in a paternalistic nationalism,

he was brought, as every thoughtful American of the times was brought,

to weigh the program of slave imperialism in the scales with the

Declaration of Independence. The doctrines of that great document lay

before every man’s feet in those uncertain days, to get over as one

could. They could not easily be evaded or got round; they must be

dealt with. Rufus Choate, representing Boston Toryism, had come upon

them and dismissed them as “glittering and sounding generalities.”

Calhoun, representing southern imperialism, had come upon them and

essayed to destroy them by a critical realism. Lincoln, embodying the

spontaneous liberalism of the West, came upon them and paused to take

his bearings afresh. He could neither wave them aside nor destroy

them. The deep-rooted equalitarianism of his simple social philosophy

found in them an eloquent pronouncement of its democratic faith, that

set him upon considering how such doctrine might be squared with the

reality of slavery. The agrarianism of John Taylor and the Whiggery of

Henry Clay could tell him nothing about that; he must seek elsewhere;

and the solution he found in an amalgamation of equalitarianism and

free-soilism, in an adaptation of western Whiggery to Jeffersonian

principles.

Whatever party name he might call himself by, in his love of justice

and his warm humanity Lincoln was essentially Jeffersonian. He

respected property rights, but other rights he believed more sacred.

And as he watched the emergence in the South of the ideal of a Greek

democracy, as he considered how the party of Jackson had become

the party of Calhoun and Douglas, bent solely on strengthening and

spreading the institution of slavery, his equalitarianism took alarm.

He could not sit quiet while the principles of the Declaration of

Independence were being openly flouted; he must speak out; he must

arouse the idealism of the people to deal with the iconoclasts. In an

important pronouncement written in 1859, he set the problem before them

thus:

Remembering ... that the Jefferson party was formed upon its

supposed superior devotion to the personal rights of men, holding

the rights of property to be secondary only, and greatly inferior

... it will be ... interesting to note how completely the two

[parties] have changed hands as to the principles upon which they

were originally supposed to be divided. The Democracy of today hold

the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict

with another’s right of property; Republicans, on the contrary,

are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the

man before the dollar.... But, soberly, it is now no child’s play

to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this

nation.... The principles of Jefferson are the principles and

axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, with

no small show of success. One dashingly calls them “glittering

generalities.” Another bluntly calls them “self-evident lies!”

And others insidiously argue that they apply to “superior races.”

These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and

effect--the supplanting the principles of free government, and

restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy.... They

are the vanguard, the miners and sappers of returning despotism.

We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us. (Letter to H. L.

Prince and Others, April 6, 1859, in _Works_, Vol. V, pp. 125-126.)

Two conceptions were here competing in Lincoln’s mind, the older

equalitarianism that sprang from French humanitarianism and the newer

economics that came from English _laissez faire_; and the attempt to

reconcile them suggests how far he had traveled along the path of

western Whiggery. With the spirit of enterprise he had no complaint;

the ideal of progress was associated in his mind with a fluid economics

that permitted the capable to rise through skillful exploitation. He

had no love for the stable economics of the eighteenth century that

Jackson preferred; the profit motive, functioning freely, he regarded

as the legitimate driving force of society; but he was concerned that

competition should be open to all on equal terms. As he watched the

transition from an agrarian to an industrial order, he found himself

more in sympathy with the new than the old. Accepting the principle

of exploitation he came to the position of the little capitalist who

believed that in America capitalism could be democratized by the simple

method of keeping the opportunities for exploitation open to every

citizen. It was common view of western Whiggery, and in so far Lincoln

remained a Whig, content with a system which he accepted as peculiarly

suited to the genius of the American people. In a late speech he summed

it up thus:

What is the true condition of the laborer? I take it that it is

best to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he

can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a

man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while

we don’t propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the

humblest man an equal chance to get rich with anybody else. When

one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is

such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that

there is no fixed condition of labor for his whole life.... I want

every man to have a chance--and I believe a black man is entitled

to it--in which he can better his condition--when he may look

forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work

for himself afterwards, and finally to hire men to work for him.

That is the true system. (Speech at New Haven, March 6, 1860, in

_Works_, Vol. V, pp. 360-361.)

But as a western man Lincoln was far more concerned over the

application of _laissez faire_ to the problem of western lands, and as

he contemplated the practical workings of “squatter sovereignty” he

learned how the free functioning of _laissez faire_ may be interfered

with by economic imperialisms. That lesson determined his final stand.

The virgin prairies beyond the Mississippi were coveted equally by

northern and southern exploiters; and who should finally possess them,

whether the small freeholder or the slave-master, was a question that

could not be put off forever. None knew this better than the small

farmers who were already staking out homesteads there. If Congress

yielded to the pro-slavery demands their economic future would be

endangered. It was the free-soil West that sent the first anti-slavery

men to Washington and provided the backbone of the new party. Not the

respectable West, but the plain people, Whig as well as Democrat. “Much

of the plain old Democracy is with us,” said Lincoln in 1858, “while

nearly all the old exclusive silk-stocking Whiggery is against us. I

don’t mean nearly all the old Whig party, but nearly all of the nice

exclusive sort” (Letter to A. C. Henry, in _Works_, Vol. V, p. 95). It

was no humanitarian regard for the rights of the negro that welded them

into a militant party. Racially and economically the free-soiler was

hostile to the black, whether slave or free. The Topeka constitution

adopted by the Kansas free-soilers barred all negroes from the new

state; Kansas was to be a white man’s country. The free labor of the

West wanted no competition with an alien race, and was prepared to

fight both the white master and free black for exclusive possession of

the national domain. There were few John Browns among these western

homesteaders--uncompromising idealists who rebelled at the injustice

done the negro. The free-soiler hated slavery because it threatened

his immediate interests; nevertheless as the great struggle developed,

the moral injustice of slavery was thrust to the fore and imparted a

humanitarian motive to the free-soil argument. This humanitarian motive

Lincoln seized upon, wedded it to the ideal of national union, and thus

doubly armed went forth to the fight.

To amalgamate idealism and economics is no easy task. “Public opinion,”

he said in a speech at Hartford, “is founded, to a great extent, on a

property basis.” But it is not the sole basis. The ideal of justice

comes in to upset all purely economic calculations. “The property basis

will have its weight. The love of property and a consciousness of right

and wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often make

a man’s course seem crooked, his conduct a riddle” (_Works_, Vol. V, p.

330). Beyond question it was this recognition of the perennial conflict

between economics and justice, between realism and idealism, that

explains the hesitancies and harassing doubts that marked Lincoln’s

development. To reconcile the principle of exploitation with the

Declaration of Independence it was necessary to stick like a flea to

_laissez faire_--to eliminate slave labor and accept only free labor.

Lincoln was a slow man and cautious, and he pulled himself forward

to such a position by main force. He was not a rare intellect like

Thoreau, to think swiftly to a conclusion and abide the consequences.

He was a political leader rather than an intellectual, and he could

advance only a little ahead of the slow-moving mass he sought to draw

after him. A hundred invisible ties held him back--his belief in

the rights of local democracies, his respect for law and order, his

devotion to the Constitution, his recognition of property interests in

the slave, his understanding of the complexity of the problem, with

the entire economy of the South resting on a slave basis. Here were

difficulties enough to trouble an honest mind. His practical sense,

which is only another name for political realism, restrained his

idealism and made him of necessity an opportunist, willing to yield

much if he might save the Union. A simple, tolerant, easy-going man,

he was at bottom a realist who had come to understand what may be

considered the greatest truth in political science, namely, that an

enduring state must rest on willing allegiance. Force cannot compel

loyalty; authority may put down revolt but it cannot destroy the

seeds of discontent; for that only the sovereignty of good will is

competent, and in free states the sovereignty of good will must rest

upon compromise. Lincoln was a better democrat than Jackson, for he

would rather persuade than drive. If Hamilton embodied the aristocratic

principle of coercive government, Lincoln embodied the democratic

principle of give and take, that prefers compromise to bayonets. With

a cause resting on the common good will it might safely be trusted to

muddle through.

Slowly pushed forward by his cautious realism, Lincoln was forty-nine

before he reached the “divided house” position of the Douglas debates,

that was to entail such consequences. It was a bold pronouncement to

address to a generation desperately engaged in erecting sham defenses

against reality, in fleeing from the truth that cried aloud to be

heard. But he would not let men stop their ears longer; the truth must

be spoken to their understanding.

In my opinion [he said] agitation will not cease until a crisis

shall have been reached and passed. “A house divided against

itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure

permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to

be dissolved--I do not expect the house to fall--but I do expect

it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all

the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further

spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the

belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its

advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in

all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South. (Speech

at Springfield, June 16, 1858.)

The situation could not have been put more neatly. It was an appeal of

honest realism to put away all shoddy romanticisms, all mean evasions,

and to face the situation fairly; and it cut across the murky clouds

like a flash of lightning. Thenceforth there could be no longer a

conspiracy of silence; the problem of slavery had been brought home to

the common mind and common conscience, the question of its relation to

our national unity and national well-being had been brought out into

the realm of homely discussion. It is the democratic way, and as an

honest democrat, Lincoln stripped away all the protective coloring of

lies that politicians use and appealed to the honesty of plain men. The

same method he applied to the Dred Scott decision. He proposed to bring

to the bar of the majority opinion the stale legal romanticisms of the

Supreme Court. He refused to accept the divine right of the courts to

rulership, he denied the sovereignty of the judiciary, and proposed

to make a political issue of the matter. He would have it settled

in town-meetings and at the polls, by the plain people, and not by

lawyers and judges. It was a reversion to Jeffersonian principles, to

the simple democratic creed that fundamentals of public policy must be

determined by the people themselves.

Lincoln had thought his way slowly to the “divided house” position,

but he could not pause there. Those were hurrying times, and the

liberalism of yesterday was inadequate for the liberalism of today. A

weak man or a time-server would have gone upon the rocks, and a man of

unyielding policy must have broken; to be certain of one’s conclusions

was possible only to one who saw less than the whole. Patience and an

open mind alone could be relied on, an intelligent opportunism alone

would serve during the months the country was fiercely debating with

itself; and the heart-breaking hesitation of Lincoln, the troublesome

doubts and perplexed questionings, reveal as nothing else could the

simple integrity of his nature. He must go forward, but he must carry

the people with him, the North as a whole, the border states it

possible, even the rebellious South if charity might suffice. Though in

arms, they were Americans, and their hearts must be brought to willing

allegiance; how otherwise could a democratic people emerge from the

bitterness of civil war? He was not made for a dictator, and blood and

iron he accounted poor cement to mend the sundered democracies. He

trusted the better impulses of men to prevail in the end, because with

Jefferson he believed in the essential justice of the plain people. In

this faith he exemplified his democracy. Not a great political thinker,

he was a great leader because he never forgot that he was one with

those he led.

The slow unfolding of Lincoln’s mind is sufficiently revealed in the

changing quality of his speeches. He was rarely eloquent--never after

the ornate fashion of the time; and the bits of Hebraic poetry that

have come to be associated with his name are singularly few and belong

to the last years of his life. His usual style was plain homespun,

clear and convincing, but bare of imagery and lacking distinction of

phrase. The thought seems to break into speech hesitatingly, in the

way of a man visibly seeking to adapt his words to his meaning. Matter

he judged to be of greater significance than manner. Few men who have

risen to enduring eloquence have been so little indebted to rhetoric.

Very likely his plainness of style was the result of deliberate

restraint, in keeping with the simplicity of his nature. When he let

himself go he discovered a well of poetry in his heart. When he chose

he could even play the rhetorician. In those rare moments when he put

caution behind him, his words fell into a stately rhythm that suggests

the orator. Witness such a passage as this:

In those days our Declaration of Independence was held sacred

by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making

the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed

and sneered at and construed, and hawked at and torn, till, if

its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all

recognize it. All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining

against him. Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy

follows, and the theology of the day is fast joining the cry.

They have him in his prison-house; they have searched his person,

and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they

have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him,

as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can

never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key--the keys

in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a

hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to

what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be

produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than

it is. (Speech at Springfield, June 27, 1857, in _Works_, Vol. II,

pp. 327-328.)

But he did not often let himself go. As one reads his speeches one

feels that an English diffidence held him back--this and the strong

prose of his environment. Like a true Anglo-Saxon he was reluctant

to speak out, afraid to let his emotions seize upon his speech. Only

at the last did that diffidence yield to complete unconsciousness.

The Gettysburg speech and the Second Inaugural are marked by the

sincerity and self-effacement that ennobled the words of John Brown

in the Virginia court-room--it is the eloquence which rises from the

heart when life has been felt in its tragic reality, an eloquence that

Webster could not rise to. Such words come only to those who have been

purified by fire; they are the distillation of bitter experience.

But the mass of his speeches are in quite another manner--that of

the simple, everyday world that bred him. He had none of the itch of

publicity that afflicts the second-rate mind. Webster was a magnificent

poseur; Edward Everett repeated the same academic oration a hundred

times; but Lincoln was too modest to pose and too honest to turn parrot

and speak by rote. He was a man who loved to talk with his neighbors

in homely metaphor, and it was then that his thought clothed itself in

whimsical humor. He did not wear his heart on his sleeve, but like Mark

Twain he let it slip out in a witticism.

Even more than Washington has Lincoln suffered at the hands of the

myth makers. Of late years he has come to be looked upon too often as

the invaluable asset of the political party that he honored in its

founding, and too rarely as the embodiment of the kindly, liberal soul

of our native democracy in the simpler days of a fluid economics and

an unsophisticated equalitarianism. With his instinctive kindliness,

his abiding faith in the good will of men, his dislike of coercion,

his readiness to compromise, he may seem old-fashioned to a generation

that has grown intolerant--but that is a reflection on our own times

rather than on Lincoln. The real Lincoln can grow old-fashioned no

more than Jefferson. As he went back in a day of sordid imperialisms

to the earlier liberalism of the great Virginian, seeking to rescue

the idealism of the Declaration of Independence from the desecration

of the market place where it was openly flouted, so in a day of vaster

imperialisms and greater complexity we may take counsel of his

humanitarianism, his open-mindedness, his trust in tolerance and good

will, his democratic faith that held firm in spite of disappointment.

The market place is mighty now as it was then, and liberalism finds as

few friends there; but when did its gods become immortal?

Chapter III • The Frontier in Letters

When the West began to appear in literature in the late twenties and

early thirties, it was the Ohio valley that became the beneficiary of

the new interest, and over the vast region through which flowed the

Beautiful River--as far as the Mississippi and beyond--was thrown the

romance of the settlement. It was a beguiling theme with its background

of dark forests and bloody Indian fights, with its venturesome

flatboats that drifted with the current, its picturesque rivermen,

“half horse, half alligator,” who towed their heavy crafts upstream,

its rude miscellany of settlers who intrusted their families and goods

and cattle to great rafts and set forth hopefully on waters that were

to bear them presumably to the Promised Land--a theme to appeal to

imaginations easily stirred to romance. There was a darker side to

be sure; wrecks in plenty littered the shores, wrecks of fortune and

character and life; outlaws and blackguards thronged the river and

preyed on the adventurers; but in spite of such misadventures the great

movement was invested with dramatic interest, and the Ohio valley

became the particular repository of the romance of the frontier, a

monopoly which later times never despoiled it of and which only the

Golden Coast of California ever remotely rivaled. It was fortunate

in that its early history was recorded by a romanticizing generation

that wove its myths about the wilderness scouts, that delighted in the

picturesque talk of river boatmen and discovered themes for epics in

the founding of new commonwealths.

From the first, therefore, the literature of the new West fell

naturally into the romantic note. The early writers who essayed to deal

with frontier materials were eastern men who proposed to exploit the

romance of the Inland Empire as frankly as their fellow adventurers

were exploiting the material resources. Gradually in their work two

main conceptions crystallized, which came to overshadow all lesser

themes: one localized itself in Kentucky and took form in the poetic

conception of the Dark and Bloody ground; the other associated itself

first with the rivermen but quickly diffused its spirit through the

backwoods and took form in the conception of western humor. The first

was a heritage from the early days when the Indian tribes fought for

their ancient hunting grounds and fell upon the isolated stations with

knife and tomahawk; the second grew up with a later generation that had

penetrated far into the wilderness, where, stimulated by much whisky,

its rough vigor found issue in exaggerated boasting. Each created its

legendary hero about whom popular imagination wove its myths: the

figure of Daniel Boone came to symbolize the heroic qualities of a race

of scouts and backwoodsmen who matched their wits in woodcraft with

the Indians and proved the quality of their Kentucky rifles in many a

brush with the warriors; and the figure of Davy Crockett came to embody

in the popular mind the loquacious eccentricities and exaggerated

wit that were already passing into a literary tradition. Many hands

contributed to the common work: writers as different as James Kirke

Paulding with his _Westward Ho!_, Robert Montgomery Bird with his _Nick

of the Woods_, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker with his _George Balcombe_,

Albert Pike with his _Prose Sketches and Poems_, Augustus Longstreet

with his _Georgia Scenes_, and Joseph G. Baldwin with his _Flush

Times of Alabama and Mississippi_--to name only a few. From such

diverse elements was created the new literature of the West that was

contemporary with the rise of Jacksonian democracy and that gave wide

currency to certain romantic conceptions.

I • The Romantic Frontier

Of this very considerable group of writers the two who earliest

wrote from immediate first-hand knowledge of frontier life were

Timothy Flint, Harvard graduate and missionary, and Judge James Hall,

Pennsylvania lawyer, both of whom spent a considerable portion of their

mature lives in the West. Of Timothy Flint’s restless wanderings and

periodic settlements, at Saint Charles, Missouri, at New Orleans, at

Alexandria on the Red River in Louisiana, at Cincinnati, with frequent

returns to his native Massachusetts and a short editorial experience

in New York City, it is impossible to speak in detail; they suggest,

however, the breadth and intimacy of his knowledge of the West got from

twenty-five years’ experience there from 1815 to his death in 1840.

Few men traveled so widely through the frontier, or carried with them

such keenly observant eyes. He wrote much, conducted for several years

a literary magazine in Cincinnati, was for a short time editor of _The

Knickerbocker Magazine_ on the withdrawal of Charles Fenno Hoffman, and

established a considerable reputation as a representative of western

letters. Much of his work was frankly casual, but his _Recollections

of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings

in the Valley of the Mississippi_, published in 1826, and his four

novels published between 1826 and 1830, make up the first important

contribution to the new literature of the West.

In temperament Timothy Flint seems to have been something of a realist.

In his daily life he was frankly outspoken and critical, often to his

own hurt, and some of the many troubles he met with in his honest

preaching to frontier heathen, resulted from this plain speaking. He

refused to measure life and conduct by the crude western standards,

and the enmities resulting from such refusal brought about a rupture

with the home society that had supported his missionary undertaking.

It was this intellectual honesty that filled his _Recollections_ with

an invaluable body of observation and criticism, and constituted

it an important source-book for later historians. Paulding early

made use of it writing his _Westward Ho!_--published in 1832--and

in his introduction, after paying tribute to Flint’s “picturesque

description,” he went on to say that the work “has not met its deserts,

and he should be highly gratified if this passing notice served in any

way to call public attention to its interesting details.” Unfortunately

the occasional realism of the _Recollections_ gave place in his novels

to romance saturated with sentiment and heavily coated with moralizing.

With a fund of exact information at his disposal he chose to turn

away from reality and project his stories into regions he had visited

only in imagination. _Francis Berrian, or the Mexican Patriot_, deals

with a Southwest far beyond his extremest journeyings; _The Life and

Adventures of Arthur Clenning_ is a romanticized version of Robinson

Crusoe; and _The Shoshonee Valley_ is a romance conceived out of tales

told him by far western travelers, woven into an extravagantly romantic

plot. The only one of his tales that makes use of familiar settings is

_George Mason, the Young Backwoodsman; or “Don’t Give up the Ship,”_

in which he put some of the materials gathered in his journeyings up

and down the Mississippi, but sentimentalized and moralized out of

all realism. It is a pity that Flint should have fallen in with the

extremest mode of the times, for in many essential respects he was the

best qualified man of the West to write an honest account of a world

just taking form.

The literary reputation of Timothy Flint soon came to be overshadowed

by that of Judge Hall. “Among writers of short narratives, the most

characteristically Western fiction of the time,” remarks a recent

student, “James Hall was clearly preëminent; and he became the

central figure in a kind of school of experimenters in the materials

of frontier life” (Ralph Leslie Rusk, _The Literature of the Middle

Western Frontier_, Vol. I, p. 274). In the early twenties he had ridden

the circuit in Illinois as a very young lawyer, when the settlements

were scattered thinly through the southern portion of the state. At

Vandalia he started the _Illinois Monthly Magazine_, which survived for

two years, when he removed to Cincinnati and established _The Western

Monthly Magazine_, which in the four years from 1832 to 1836 became

one of the “most important of the pioneer period.” “The purpose,” says

the student above quoted, “was not so much to introduce the East to

the West as to make the West conscious of itself” (Rusk, _ibid._, Vol.

I, p. 173). To this end Hall was writing and publishing short tales

and descriptions, and he had already collected a miscellany of prose

and verse by several hands which he issued as an annual, _The Western

Souvenir, a Christmas and New Year’s Gift for 1829_. Thus launched on a

literary career, he wrote in the next twenty years a very considerable

amount, including tales, sketches of manners, history and casual

comment.

His best-known story is probably _Harpe’s Head_, which he later

incorporated with other tales in a volume entitled _Legends of the

West: Sketches Illustrative of the Habits, Occupations, Privations,

Adventures and Sports of the Pioneers of the West_, and published

in 1832. The work proved popular and passed through half a dozen

editions. Sketchy and loose in construction, it belongs to the school

that hovered between the essay and the romance, delighting in the

picturesque, exuding sentiment, and going out of its way to exploit the

pleasantly horrible. It is a mingling of Virginia chivalry and frontier

bravery, woven about a central plot of a daughter of a Virginia house

who removes to Kentucky under tragic circumstances, is abducted by a

roving band of Indians, and subsequently rescued. Additional romantic

interest is sought in the melodramatic deeds of the title hero--a

well-known border ruffian with an insatiable blood-lust who murders his

unsuspecting victims wherever he comes upon them--and in the curious

exploits in rattlesnake killing of Hark Short, a waif from the Carolina

swamps who lives like a fox in his den. The interest of the story

today lies in the pleasantly idealized descriptions of such scenes as

the barbecue and the camp meeting, rather than in the portrayal of

backwoods characters. Although Hall frequently professed his devotion

to realism, there is little evidence of it; occasional figures like

Pete Featherton, whose rifle had been bewitched, and occasional

indulgence in a conventionalized backwoods dialect, serve only to

heighten the somewhat gaudy romance of the whole. Yet even such timid

ventures brought on his head criticism from a Cincinnati editor “for

tiring the reader with vulgar backwoods expressions” (Rusk, _ibid._,

Vol. I, p. 282).

That Hall’s interest in backwoods eccentricities of speech and manner

suffered a heavy handicap from the romantic taste of his readers may

easily be believed. Matter excluded from his tales he sometimes put

into his introductions. Thus in the third edition of _Harpe’s Head_

he analyzed at some length certain characteristics of the crude

pioneers who were creating the psychology of the West--their fondness

for drinking, betting, horse-trading, stump-speaking, swearing.

Particularly it is the exuberance of their picturesque language that

he emphasized, an exuberance that was already becoming a literary

tradition and that flowered in the cento of western folk ways that were

gathered into the Davy Crockett myth. A single passage will suffice to

suggest some of the elements from which Davy was created:

Though usually taciturn in the presence of strangers, [the

frontiersman] is communicative to his friend or guest, has often

strong colloquial powers, with quaint, singular, figurative,

and even eloquent forms of expression. His language, which is

commonly brief, sententious, and abrupt, becomes, when excited by

the interest of the subject or by passion, highly expletive, and

redundant with exaggerated forms and figures of comparison. When

he swears--and he is probably not more given to this exceedingly

vulgar vice than other men--but when he does swear in earnest, his

philology becomes concentrated, and explodes with an appalling

energy, which would have astonished even the celebrated army in

Flanders. (_Ibid._, Introduction, p. xii.)

In his last collection, _The Wilderness and the War Path_, published

in 1846 and including some earlier tales, Hall contributed little that

was new. There is the same heavy romance with touches of realism, and

by way of reply to Bird’s interpretation of the Indian character he

exploits the romantic qualities of the red man; but his failures are

commoner than his successes, and his work as a whole must be regarded

as a sacrifice to the bad taste of his generation. From this judgment,

perhaps, should be excepted his _Romance of American History_, which is

still pleasantly readable.

II • The Realistic Frontier

Far more vital than these literary tales with their heavy coating

of romance are the few realistic sketches--only too rare in those

exuberant days of the high-flown--that preserve the authentic ways

of backwoods life in their rude vernacular. Of such sketches those

that most faithfully reveal the impress of the frontier, preserving

down to the present the note of verisimilitude, are _Georgia Scenes_

by Augustus B. Longstreet, and the _Autobiography of Davy Crockett_,

to which may be added, perhaps, Joseph G. Baldwin’s _Flush Times of

Alabama and Mississippi_.

1 • Augustus Longstreet • The Georgia Frontier

For some reason no glamour has ever gathered about the Georgia

frontier. It may be that fate conspired against it in bestowing

no idealizing historian to throw a romantic haze over life in the

pine woods. Or perhaps it was the Georgians themselves who did the

commonwealth an evil turn. As a matter of sober fact what could even

romance do with the raw materials that went to the making of this

crude southern Yankee state? How could the most confirmed romantic

discover rare graces in the indigenous Cracker, or weave poetry about

the ubiquitous peddler with his pack of Yankee notions? Any honest

historian could hardly avoid taking into account the ungainly throng

that attended a gander pulling, or depict Ransy Sniffle as other than

a pallid, pot-bellied, clay-eating grotesque. Crude, uncouth, drab,

with primitive passions and unlovely manners, Georgia offered scanty

materials for the most ardent eulogist. Frontier life there ran a

petty round between fist fights and horse races, between politics and

religion. These were the staples of everyday existence, as necessary

to the natural man as whisky and salt pork; and the honest Georgian

preferred his whisky straight and his politics and religion red-hot.

The Jeffersonian hated the Federalist vindictively; and Presbyterian,

Baptist, and Methodist regarded each other malignantly, convinced that

the devil was stoking his fires for the lost neighbor who persisted in

sitting under the wrong preaching. Denominationalism on the Georgia

frontier was as harsh and unforgiving as political partisanship.

Alexander H. Stephens believed that the plain people of Georgia were

the most democratic on the face of the earth, and the kindliest;

yet the pugnacious little democrat was himself nearly butchered by

a democratic neighbor. In depicting such a society realism was the

only honest method; but to make it palatable it must be well seasoned

with humor. If it were garnished with moralizing, so much the better.

There must be no subtleties in the treatment, no literary touches. The

humor must be in the backwoods vernacular, and the preaching open and

aboveboard--frank pulpit-thumping lessons to awaken the surliest sinner.

For such business Gus Longstreet was ideally fitted. A true child of

the Georgia border, he never quite outgrew his early environment.

Born in Augusta in 1790 of New Jersey parents, Holland Dutch but with

a large admixture of English blood,[414] he came of plain stock. A

driving, robust, energetic fellow, never squeamish, with a ready

wit, he was at home amongst the plain people, the greatest wag in

every gathering. He could knock a man down or shoot out a squirrel’s

eye with any champion of them all; he could enter into a dance or a

revival meeting with equal ardor, or take the stump against a seasoned

campaigner. A fellow must be simple-minded who would expect to get the

best of him in swapping horses, or in the way of a practical joke. It

came hard for so vigorous a plebeian to settle down as a substantial

citizen, and the dignified titles that he gathered in the course

of a long and prosperous career--judge, doctor of laws, doctor of

divinity--fitted him somewhat incongruously. On the whole one prefers

the plain Gus Longstreet to Judge Longstreet, but his neighbors, who

thought they knew a man when they saw one, thrust his titles upon him.

Besides he had gone to college and was thereby lifted to a place of

distinction which he could not avoid. The process of scraping off the

bark of the frontier followed orthodox southern lines. A few years’

schooling at Dr. Moses Waddell’s celebrated Academy, where at different

times Calhoun, Crawford, McDuffie, Petigru and Legaré prepared for

college, and two years at Yale, provided him with a stock of rusty

Latin to suffice a college president; and a winter or two at the law

school in Litchfield, Connecticut, following Calhoun’s high example,

furnished him with enough Blackstone to meet the demands of Georgia law

courts. Thus provided intellectually, he went forth boldly to cope with

the Georgia world as he found it.

It was a plebeian world that approved his plebeian qualities. There was

nothing of the southern patrician in Gus Longstreet, nothing of the

ascetic Puritan that marked so deeply men like Calhoun, Legaré, and the

Grimkés. In his strong instinct of acquisitiveness, his canny thrift

that never failed to seize advantage by the forelock, his desire to

get on in the world while serving God, he was a Georgia Yankee, with

an emotional religion that took comfort in discovering that God was

always on his side of any controversy. Yankee also was his knack of

doing many things well enough to impress his less capable neighbors. He

was a frontier jack-of-all-trades, passing easily from one profession

to another, lawyer, newspaper editor, writer, minister, politician,

teacher, and between times busying himself with all sorts of odd jobs,

doing everything readily and nothing thoroughly well. A good talker,

his chief interests were politics, religion, and money-making. He wrote

much in careless haste, apologizing always for the lack of finish; but

except for the sketches which were gathered under the title of _Georgia

Scenes_, he produced nothing that needs to be remembered. At the age of

forty-eight he quitted the law for the Methodist ministry, proved to be

a mediocre preacher, and was soon given the berth of president of Emory

College, a denominational school then recently established at Oxford,

for which his literary reputation and his reputed scholarship seemed to

fit him. Later he was president for a few months of Centenary College,

Louisiana, but found the place uncongenial, resigned, and was chosen

president of the University of Mississippi, where he served seven years

and made full use of the opportunity to speculate in real estate. At

the age of sixty-six he was made president of the University of South

Carolina, where he ruled patriarchally till the school was closed by

the war.

How great a man he was judged to be by his fellow Georgians is hard

for us to realize today. Throughout his later years he was regarded

by his friends as the brightest ornament of Georgia society, a

Christian gentleman who was a model to southern youth, a scholar who

had brought honor to the commonwealth, an author who had silenced

the reproach that the state had produced no literature. Yet it must

be confessed that the Judge shrinks in compass when taken out of his

native environment. Beside John P. Kennedy or Hugh Legaré, he lacks

distinction either of mind or manner; compared with Gilmore Simms he

is only an amateur in letters. His latest biographer[415] has sifted

a mass of material to prove the solid and eminent worth of the man;

yet no impression of intellectual vigor emerges from the analysis;

one must take it on the authority of somewhat incompetent witnesses.

The figure that emerges from the clutter of contemporary estimate is

that of a capable, expansive, middle-class soul, disputatious in the

lordly southern manner, genially domineering, magnificently superior

to logic, given to erecting an imposing structure of convictions on

the slightest of foundations, impatient of contradiction and inclined

to lose his temper when the argument went against him--a witty,

agreeable gentleman, at home amongst mediocre preachers, and an oracle

to admiring friends. He was on terms of intimacy with not a single

first-class mind. He had no intellectual curiosity and was incapable of

rigorous intellectual processes. Yet good fortune had marked him for

her own. A small investment in letters, made at odd moments between

law cases and farming operations, returned him such dividends in the

way of contemporary fame that for forty years thereafter he lived in

the sunshine of a literary reputation. No other American, unless it

were William Wirt, ever drew such ample revenues of popular praise from

a casual investment, and certainly none ever expanded with greater

self-satisfaction. To the end of his life he was the much-sought-after

author of _Georgia Scenes_, and the most ambitious southern magazines

were glad to publish his frequent effusions; in all of which the Judge

delighted, for he was a simple soul and accounted himself an apostle of

southern culture, a mentor of southern taste, and he loved to see his

name in print.

As a man close to the people Longstreet reflected the current Georgia

views on politics. He was an idolatrous admirer of Calhoun and George

McDuffie. The former he rated “above William Pitt, or any other premier

who ever lived before or since his day” (Wade, _Augustus Baldwin

Longstreet_, p. 124) and the latter he regarded as “hardly inferior to

him in anything.” Calhoun’s innate Hebraisms, so deeply imbued with a

patriarchal spirit, fitted to a nicety his own Hebraized conception of

a Jeffersonian order. Writing of Calhoun, in after years, Longstreet

remarked with evident approval:

I believe that he regarded the government of the children of

Israel in the wilderness, the most perfect that ever existed on

earth. Be that as it may, he called my attention to it more than

once as exactly the government ours ought to be, or was intended

to be. “There,” said he, “each tribe had its place on the march

and in the camp, each managed its own concerns in its own way,

neither interfered in the slightest degree, with the private

affairs of another, nor did their common head interfere with any of

them in any matters, save such as were of equal interest to all,

but unmanageable by them as separate and distinct communities.”

(_Ibid._, p. 60.)

The background of his political thought was Jeffersonian agrarian.

He was always a countryman at heart, and his dearest interests were

agricultural. But he seems to have been quite unread in political

theory, and probably had never heard of John Taylor’s economic

principles. Suffering from an incurable political itch, he was one of

the earliest and most ardent of states-rights advocates. He went for

Nullification before either Calhoun or McDuffie had espoused it; and

he followed his premises through to the logical end of secession. But

with the growth of northern Abolitionism his Jeffersonianism began

to disintegrate. Garrison’s appeal to equalitarianism and the rights

of man aroused all his southern prejudices. A philosophy that could

be turned against the sacred institution was no philosophy for a

southern gentleman, and like Calhoun he repudiated the whole French

liberal philosophy that he had imbibed in his youth. He even went so

far as to play with Calhoun’s doctrine of economic representation.

Writing to President Lamar, of Texas, in the late thirties, he said,

“A government should have a legislative assemblage to represent

each of its large economic interests, one, say, agricultural, one

manufacturing, one commercial. No bill not acceptable to all three

of these assemblages should become a law” (_ibid._, p. 138). But in

defense of slavery he argued as a minister rather than an economist. He

declined to consider it an economic question; he would not discuss it

as a social question; political theories, he believed, had nothing to

do with it. The right to hold slaves he regarded as a moral question

to be determined exclusively by the authority of the Bible, and on

such a question he professed to speak with assurance. He was vastly

annoyed at the Abolitionists’ unchristian appeal to the old doctrine

of equalitarianism, and in 1845 he wrote angrily, “Will not some

of you accept my ideas and then argue through the question on that

basis, without taking recourse to the Declaration of Independence or

throwing up a breastwork out of the long-forsaken rubbish of the Social

Contract, or bewildering your pursuers in the mazes of metaphysical

subtlety?” (_ibid._, p. 282). His religion was deeply involved in

the institution of slavery, and it seemed to him uncharitable for

an intellectual like Theodore Parker to question the sufficiency of

a southern minister’s texts, or to drag him beyond his intellectual

depths. So exasperated did he grow that finally he would have no

fellowship with northern Methodists, and was a prime mover in the great

schism that rent the church into sectional branches. Abolitionism

seemed to him hypocrisy and blasphemy and as a minister of Christ

he could not hold fellowship with those who rejected the Master’s

word. After the war, in reviewing the long controversy, his Christian

pugnacity flared up anew, and he flung at the northern churches the

accusation that they had been “the most man-astounding, God-offending

foes that we had” (_ibid._, p. 367).

There could be no more telling commentary on the literary poverty of

_ante-bellum_ Georgia than the extraordinary popularity of Longstreet’s

sketches. Written for the most part between the years 1832 and 1836,

while he was publishing the _State Rights Sentinel_, they profess to

be authentic documents of frontier life in Georgia in the early years

of the century, and the deliberate note of realism contributes to the

impression of authenticity. The love of the romantic that spread like

the plague among southern men of letters during the long reign of Sir

Walter, fortunately did not infect the robust nature of Longstreet.

The best of the sketches are spun out of the vernacular; they are

as objective as Longstreet could make them--conscious studies in

the local, done with obvious delight in butternut ways and frontier

dialect. The quality of the work improves as he draws nearer the

backwoods, and comes upon the unregenerate Cracker in his native

habitat. There his humor has free play, exuding in practical jokes and

ready repartee, in boyish pranks and homely idiom. And there he finds

characters to his liking and bits of realistic drama. If one were to

single out the sketch that is most indigenous to the Georgia frontier,

the truest local document, the choice might well fall on _The Fight_,

an account of a bloody meeting between backwoods gladiators brought

on by skillful diplomacy of Ransy Sniffle, a grotesque clay-eater and

Longstreet’s favorite character. Other excellent sketches are _The

Gander Pulling_, _The Shooting Match_, _Georgia Theatrics_, _The Horse

Swap_, _The Militia Company Drill_--stories that throw an unromantic

light on the ways of the Georgia Cracker. Longstreet was as uncritical

as his readers and his frequent failures are glaring in their badness.

Perhaps the worst of the sketches are the absurd _The “Charming

Creature” as a Wife_, a crude sermon on the folly of marrying a lazy

woman; _The Song_, an overdone burlesque, and the puerile _The Debating

Society_, a heavy practical joke which for some inexplicable reason Poe

thought the best of the whole.

Slight though the sketches in _Georgia Scenes_ are, they embody

solid merits; they are not literary and they are quite unaffected by

Irving and the exploitation of the picturesque. Realism was only too

rare in those days of high-flown romance, and how honestly realistic

was Longstreet’s work is revealed by a comparison with James Hall’s

contemporary stories of the West, such as _Harpe’s Head_, or even with

Kennedy’s _Swallow Barn_. After all Gus Longstreet was an original,

and he set the style that was followed in a long series of frontier

sketches, and established the tradition of frontier humor that flowered

at last in Mark Twain.

2 • The Davy Crockett Myth

_The Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee_

was woven from the same stuff that Longstreet made use of, but the

fabric is of far better texture. It is the great classic of the

southern frontier, far more significant than _Georgia Scenes_, far

more human and vital. Realistic in method, it is romantic in spirit.

In its backwoods vernacular it purveys the authentic atmosphere of

the cabin and the canebrake; it exhibits the honesty, the wit, the

resourcefulness, the manly independence of a coonskin hero; it

reveals, in short, under the rough exterior of a shiftless squatter and

bear-hunter, qualities that are sterling in every society where manhood

is held in repute. It is an extraordinary document, done so skillfully

from life that homespun becomes a noble fabric and the crudest

materials achieve the dignity of an epic.

The thing had long been waiting to be done. The literary romantics had

tried their hand at the frontier materials and had failed, and then

came a realist of the Georgia school who used the stuff as he found it

and created a lasting document. A practiced writer collaborated with a

picturesque talker, and the fame of the Tennessee Congressman was made.

Romantic America found a new hero and Davy Crockett reaped a surprising

reward. He had the good fortune to preëmpt the romance of the

backwoods, to file on an unsurveyed tract of western life, and when the

lines were run it was found that his claim embraced all that was native

and picturesque along the Mississippi frontier. Popular imagination

seized upon him and endowed the mighty hunter of the canebrakes

with the fugitive romance that had been gathering for years. He was

erected into a mythical figure that drew to itself the unappropriated

picturesque that sprang spontaneously from the crude western life. How

this astonishing result came about, how good fortune came to single out

Davy Crockett for her smiles, offers a somewhat amusing commentary on

the ways of an unsophisticated generation.

That in its later development, if not in the beginning, the Davy

Crockett myth was a deliberate fabrication scarcely admits of doubt,

nor that its immediate purpose was frankly partisan. It did not

spring from the soil of the Tennessee canebrakes; it was created at

Washington. It was not the spontaneous product of popular imagination;

it was the clever work of politicians. The successive stages through

which it passed in its triumphant progress can be traced fairly

accurately with the aid of a little historical imagination. Roughly

they were three; the exploitation of Davy’s canebrake waggery, the

exploitation of his anti-Jackson spleen, and the exploitation of

his dramatic death at the Alamo. The first phase is embodied in the

_Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee_

(1833); the second, in _An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North

and Down East_ (1835), and _The Life of Martin Van Buren_ (1835); and

the last, in _Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas_ (1836).

Midway between the first and second stages stands _A Narrative of the

Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee_ (1834), which may

be accepted in the main as authentic autobiography. None of the five

was written by Crockett. He probably had a hand in the first in spite

of his repudiation of the work, for most of the important facts of his

life and the language of many of the picturesque episodes were taken

from its pages to be reproduced in the _Narrative_. The _Tour_ and

_Martin Van Buren_ were claimed by him and were certainly done under

his eye and with his help, but the _Exploits_ is quite as certainly

sheer fabrication, done by a hack writer after Davy’s death. It was

the politicians who contributed most to the success of the myth. They

exploited Davy as a convenient weapon against Jackson, saw their work

prosper beyond all expectation, get out of their hands, enlarge itself

to a cento of backwoods romance and pass into folklore. It was an

unforeseen outcome that must have been vastly amusing to those who set

the thing going.

The early thirties, it will be remembered, were robustious times when

broadcloth in politics had suddenly gone out of style and homespun had

come in. The new coonskin democracy had descended upon Washington,

and picturesque figures provided with ample plugs of tobacco were

making themselves free with Congressional perquisites. Nothing like

it had been seen before in the city of dignified politicians, and the

spectacle must have delighted the wags of the capital. But to the

members of the overthrown dynasty the Jacksonian votes which these

picturesque backwoodsmen represented were very far from amusing. The

loss of desirable offices was a hard lesson that taught them the need

of catering to this new element of the great American democracy. In

their remunerative occupation as representatives of the prosperous and

genteel constituencies of the East, the old-school politicians had too

long overlooked the power of the plain voter which the progress of

manhood suffrage was daily increasing. Hence began a desperate campaign

to counteract the Jacksonian appeal. The coonskin vote could no longer

be ignored and shrewd plans were laid to capture the backwoods for the

new Whig party. The program of internal improvements was well enough

in its way, and the old Revolutionary cry of the sword and the purse

might prove useful; but the party needed a picturesque figure to draw

the coonskin democracy to its standard. Men rather than principles

appealed to the West, self-made men, speaking the western vernacular,

imbibing western views with their whisky, uncorrupted by broadcloth.

This explains the tremendous Whig hurrah over log cabins and hard cider

that marked a later campaign; and this explains likewise the singular

fate that overtook Davy Crockett, the bear-hunter from the canebrakes.

Davy had first come to Washington during Adams’ administration, and in

four years’ loafing and boasting at the Congressional bar had achieved

some distinction as a picturesque original with the tongue of a wag.

He spoke rarely in the House and the few records in the _Congressional

Debates_ are sadly commonplace. Until after he broke with Jackson his

political influence at Washington was negligible. But that fortunate

break was the beginning of his fame. He had unwittingly made himself.

He had become a valuable asset to the Whig party. To find a native

Tennesseean, a real coonskin democrat, one who had served under Jackson

and been sent to Congress as a Jacksonian, as authentic a Westerner as

the General himself, at bitter personal odds with Old Hickory, ready to

talk out in meeting and eager to repudiate the latter’s attack upon the

Bank, was a find indeed to the hard-pressed Whigs; and they would have

been no politicians if they had not used what God sent. In consequence

Davy soon found himself talked about. His picturesque eccentricities

began to be exploited. His rugged western honesty was applauded; his

shrewd backwoods intelligence was praised; his frontier humor was

skillfully touched up; his characteristic motto, “go ahead,” was seized

upon as an expression of the progressive spirit of the lusty young Whig

party. In short he was speedily turned into a myth by ways not unknown

in our time, and sent forth as useful campaign material in the fight

for political righteousness. Davy was vastly surprised at his sudden

rise to fame. He had never realized how great a man he was; but he

accepted it as an agreeable fact and went ahead.

The work had already begun with the publication of the _Sketches and

Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett_, that came from the clever pen

of some journalist with a liking for the new vein of backwoods humor.

A Whig bias runs through the pages, but the book is more a character

sketch than a political document. The first embroiderings laid upon

the original homespun are seen in an extravagance of picturesque

language--an extravagance quite lacking in the more realistic

_Narrative_. A well-known passage professing to relate an occurrence

on Davy’s first trip to Washington will serve to reveal an early stage

of the myth-making process--the fathering upon Davy of a type of humor

then being exploited by clever young writers:

I was _rooting_ my way to the fire, not in a good humour, when some

fellow staggered towards me, and cried out, “Hurrah for Adams!”

Said I, “Stranger, you had better hurrah for hell, and praise your

own country.” Said he, “And who are you?”

“I’m that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods,

half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the

snapping-turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon

a streak of lightning, and slip without a scratch down a honey

locust; can whip my weight in wild-cats--and if any gentleman

pleases, for a ten-dollar bill, he may throw in a panther--hug a

bear too close for comfort, and eat any man opposed to Jackson.”

(_Ibid._, Chapter XIII.)

The touching up of the picturesque in the _Sketches_ seems to have been

a little too much for Davy, who resented the note of clownishness; but

he was not the man to permit undue modesty to blight so agreeable a

myth in its tender stage. He loved to swagger in the public eye too

much for that, and he joined heartily with his new political friends

to clothe it in more dignified dress. His incredible egotism was

aroused and he swallowed the Whig bait, hook, line and sinker. He began

to take himself seriously and set about the business of propagating

the myth. He conceived the plan of issuing in his own name books

which he humorously claimed to have written in the same way that the

President wrote his state papers. Some wag having suggested his name

for the presidency to succeed Jackson, Davy was at great pains to

advertise the fact to the world. To link himself with Jackson in the

public eye and to contrast his own rugged honesty with the latter’s

reputed abandonment of democratic principles, was the single purpose

of these Whig documents. The autobiography was quickly followed by

the _Tour_, and this by the _Life of Martin Van Buren_, each more

obvious propaganda than the last, and frankly designed to undermine

the popularity of the President and his advisers with the coonskin

democracy. Who the writer was that lent his pen to the work has never

been determined. A recent student has adduced testimony to prove that

it was Augustin S. Clayton, a Georgia Congressman, a ready talker and

writer, a man of sound culture, a close friend of Longstreet and fond

of the backwoods vernacular. The argument is plausible, but the case

is not established.[416] In the _Life of Martin Van Buren_ the mask

is dropped and all the malicious gossip of the Congressional lobby is

poured out on “little Van,” the “heir-apparent to the ‘government.’”

The backwoods character is retained only in an occasional coarseness

or deliberate lapse of grammar inserted in a text that is written

with vigor and skill. The book is far less amusing than Kennedy’s

_Quodlibet_. Davy is pretty much lost out of its pages and its

contribution to the myth was probably slight.

It is in the _Tour_, on the title page of which Davy formally accepts

the brevet dignity of Colonel conferred upon him by the writer of the

_Sketches_, that the myth expands more genially. A clever and amusing

campaign document, it is a masterpiece of Whig strategy to gull the

simple. The loquacious Davy joined heartily with his managers to cash

in on his reputation. His egotism was played upon at every turn and

he was quite unconscious that he had become a mere cat’s-paw to pull

Whig chestnuts out of the coals. He was paraded at meetings with

Daniel Webster, given great dinners, applauded for his rustic wit and

homespun honesty, presented with a fine rifle; and he seems never to

have realized how grossly he was being exploited. His self-esteem was

proof against disillusionment and he accepted the applause greedily.

Wherever he went he was taken in charge by the young Whigs. Everything

was carefully arranged beforehand. News was sent forward that he was

coming; crowds were gathered to greet him; publicity was attended to;

morning, noon, and night he was invited to speak, and the speeches were

carefully reprinted--not the authentic speeches, probably, but good

campaign material nevertheless. It was a gratifying experience and Davy

swelled up like a turkey cock.

As a result of his tour he was immensely strengthened in his new

political faith and became a staunch nationalist. When he first went

to Congress he was anti-tariff and had won his seat on that issue; but

he was invited to Lowell, shown an idyllic picture of contented and

prosperous mill-hands, dined, given a prepared table of statistics

proving how industrialism “is calculated not only to give individual

happiness and prosperity, but to add to our national wealth and

prosperity,” and bidden Godspeed in the work of spreading the true

gospel among the honest, simpleminded and patriotic frontiersmen.

After having been presented by Mr. Lawrence with a fine suit of

domestic broadcloth, Davy would have been an ingrate not to vote for a

protective tariff. But alas! the opportunity never came. A backwoods

constituency that had never been dined by Lowell capitalists and

had little use for fine broadcloth, a constituency that persisted

in throwing up coonskin caps for Old Hickory in spite of Lowell

statistics, resented his apostasy from the Democratic faith and at

the next election invited him to stay in the canebrakes. The gorgeous

bubble was pricked. Davy had expanded under prosperity and could not

now endure adversity. In a fit of anger he quitted his family and the

state of Tennessee, went off on the mad chase to Texas and in March

of the next year fell at the Alamo. Vain, ignorant Davy Crockett! A

simple-minded frontiersman, he went down to Jericho and fell among

thieves, and when they were done with him they left him despoiled

politically but invested with a fame that has grown to this day. After

his death other hands took up the work, wove around his name the humor

and romance of the frontier, and made of him a legendary figure. It

would have pleased Davy to know how the myth had prospered.[417]

Yet from this crude romanticism, this picturesque propaganda of

coonskin days, one solid contribution remains--the autobiography. It

is a striking bit of realism, done after the manner of the Longstreet

school. There is politics in it, of course. Written just after Davy had

gone through a bitter campaign from which he had emerged triumphant, it

is a bold pronouncement that he wears no collar marked “My dog--Andrew

Jackson.” In the campaign of 1830 he had been defeated by the

Jacksonians, but two years later he “made a mash” of his opponents, and

the elation of that victory adds a certain cockiness to his habitual

swagger. But it is much more than a political tract; it is a vital

frontier document. The main facts of his biography, as set down there,

may be accepted as true, and the general picture of backwoods existence

in Tennessee; but the humor has been elaborated and the effect of the

picturesque heightened by his collaborator. Such added touches were

only natural. The real Davy was very far from romantic. An honest

picture of the Tennessee democracy in its native habitat would reveal

few idyllic features. It was a slovenly world and Davy was pretty

much of a sloven. Crude and unlovely in its familiar details, with its

primitive courtships and shiftless removals, its brutal Indian campaign

and fierce hunting sprees, its rough equality, its unscrupulous

politics, its elections carried by sheer impudence and whisky, the

autobiography reveals the backwoods Anglo-Irishman as an uncivilized

animal, responding to simple stimuli, yet with a certain rough vigor of

character. Wastefulness was in the frontier blood, and Davy was a true

frontier wastrel. In the course of successive removals he traversed the

length of Tennessee, drinking, hunting, talking, speculating, begetting

children, scratching a few acres of land to “make his crap,” yet living

for the most part off the country; and his last squatting place on the

Obion River, seven miles from the nearest neighbor, was as primitive

as the first. Willing to endure almost incredible hardships to obtain

a keg of gunpowder to celebrate Christmas, risking his skin to kill a

bear with a butcher knife, he was never much given to mending fences

or enlarging his plow lands. He was a hunter rather than a farmer,

and the lust of killing was in his blood. With his pack of hounds he

slaughtered with amazing efficiency. A later generation would call

him a game-hog. His family must have had Gargantuan appetites to have

consumed one-tenth of the meat that fell before his beloved Betsy; the

rest went to the dogs and hogs and buzzards. His hundred and five bears

in a single season, his six deer shot in one day while pursuing other

game--two of which were left hanging in the woods--serve to explain

why the rich hunting grounds of the Indians were swept so quickly

bare of game by the white invaders. Davy was but one of thousands who

were wasting the resources of the Inland Empire, destroying forests,

skinning the land, slaughtering the deer and bear, the swarms of

pigeons and turkey, the vast buffalo herds. Davy the politician is a

huge western joke, but Davy the wastrel was a hard, unlovely fact.

Strip away the shoddy romance that has covered up the real man and the

figure that emerges is one familiar to every backwoods gathering, an

assertive, opinionated, likable fellow, ready to fight, drink, dance,

shoot or brag, the biggest frog in a very small puddle, first among the

Smart Alecks of the canebrakes. Davy was a good deal of a wag, and the

best joke he ever played he played upon posterity that has swallowed

the myth whole and persists in setting a romantic halo on his coonskin

cap. Yet in spite of the romantic machinery the play turns out to be

broad farce.

Footnotes

[414] The family name of Langestraet was given an English form by his

grandfather.

[415] John Donald Wade, _Augustus Baldwin Longstreet_.

[416] See John Donald Wade, “The Authorship of David Crockett’s

_Autobiography_,” _Georgia Historical Quarterly_, September, 1922.

[417] Among the miscellaneous material gathered together in the

_Exploits and Adventures in Texas_ and attributed to Davy is

Longstreet’s _Georgia Theatrics_, lifted verbatim from _Georgia Scenes_.

Book Two • The Mind of the Middle East

The literature of the Middle East during the years of the romantic

revolution, unlike contemporary letters north and south, revealed

no coalescing unity of spirit and purpose; it was rather the casual

and somewhat fortuitous expression of two cities, both of which were

divided by language and custom into fairly equal groups, and neither

of which had developed a homogeneous native culture. There were no

intellectual hinterlands to Philadelphia and New York, as there were

to Boston and Charleston and Richmond; no common ideals spread over

broad areas, no dominant schools of thought, no branching roots by

which a common literature might be nourished. In consequence it may,

perhaps, be reckoned a misuse of terms to speak of the mind of the

Middle East, as one may speak of the mind of New England or of the

Old Dominion, where in spite of pronounced variations of individual

temperament a common culture had set its mark on the literature. There

were few common ties and few intellectual sympathies to bind together

the men of letters of New York or Philadelphia. Certainly Irving and

Paulding and Cooper and Melville and Whitman reveal none of that strong

community of taste and purpose that marks the Concord group, or the

Boston-Cambridge group, or even the Charleston group. They expressed

no common culture, they had been disciplined in no common faith,

and they were held together by no common economic or political or

intellectual interests; as a result their writing is a frank expression

of individual temperament and taste, unfettered by schools, drawing its

nourishment from no common soil. They stand on their own feet, and to

understand them requires no critical examination of a complex cultural

background. And yet this very diversity may prove to be symptomatic of

the hurrying changes that the rise of the middle class was bringing

to America--to the city perhaps even more dramatically than to the

country. The confusions and diversity of thought that mark the

literature of Philadelphia and New York may, perhaps, most adequately

suggest the mercurial temper of the revolutionary transition from the

eighteenth century to the nineteenth, of which the romantic spirit was

the natural expression.

Chapter I • The Old Capital

I

In the year 1800 one might well have expected Philadelphia to retain

indefinitely its proud ascendency as the cultural capital of America.

For decades no other colonial city had come near to rivaling it as a

pleasant center of wealth and refinement. Its society was accounted the

politest and most agreeable in America, and during the Revolutionary

War young British officers had found its hospitable drawing-rooms

an agreeable substitute for London clubs. It had long prided itself

on its culture and it was on chatty terms with the fine arts, with

books and music and painting, with actors and plays and playhouses.

It was the recognized center of the publishing business, and its busy

presses turned out books and magazines and newspapers for remote

colonial readers. Ambitious young men were drawn to it as by a magnet,

and Matthew Carey from Ireland and William Cobbett from England

were outstanding figures amongst the many who found Philadelphia as

attractive as Franklin had earlier found it. Certainly it was the least

provincial spot in America in 1800, managing to keep abreast of the

latest English fashions in letters as well as smallclothes; and when

the supercilious Tom Moore favored the city with his presence in the

summer of 1804, he found there the companionship which in some measure

compensated for the meanness of the rest of America, where he professed

to see:

One dull chaos, one unfertile strife,

Betwixt half-polish’d and half-barbarous life,

Where every ill the ancient world can brew

Is mixed with every grossness of the new.[418]

The pronounced intellectual stir expressed itself not only in

_belles lettres_, and in the scientific experiments of Franklin

and Rittenhouse, but more adequately still in politics. Political

disputation would seem, indeed, to have been the common Philadelphia

passion. Party forces were more equally divided than in Boston. From

the beginnings of the Revolutionary disputes Philadelphia had produced

notable disputants on both sides--pamphleteers like Joseph Galloway

and John Dickinson, and satirists like Joseph Stansbury and Francis

Hopkinson. In the succeeding decades partisan pens had augmented rather

than abated their vigor. During Washington’s administration the French

Revolution shook Philadelphia as it shook no other American city, and

the fierce battle between Federalist and Jacobin was waged with amazing

fury and limitless invective. The deadly journalistic duel between

Freneau and Fenno in their two _Gazettes_ was reflected in the equally

bitter duel of couplets between Matthew Carey and William Cobbett. If

Philadelphia was not more catholic than Boston, it was at least better

informed on party questions, for clever writers were daily flinging

their arguments at its head. So long as the political capital of the

nation remained in Philadelphia the city was clearly the place for the

young American to sharpen his wits, inform his mind, and quicken his

literary enthusiasm.

Economically the future of the city seemed equally bright. A younger

generation of speculative merchants had taken the place of the older

conservatives, and great fortunes were being made with a rapidity

before unknown. When title to the western lands passed from the crown

to the new republic, Philadelphia merchants took the lead in land

speculation, and Robert Morris entered upon a spectacular career that

profoundly impressed his generation. The city became the chief center

of land speculation to which western and southern investors looked.

Economic opportunities increased with the setting up of the new

government, and the stir of national politics increased the general

activity. With the establishment of the Bank, Philadelphia became the

financial capital of the country, receiving and disbursing the monies

of the government and attracting outside funds for investment. The

decade of the nineties was its golden age. Then came the removal of the

seat of the Federal government to Washington, and the gay little city

underwent a swift eclipse. It was an unwilling victim to the topography

of the North American continent. Between it and the Inland Empire,

on which rested its future economic expansion, lay the Appalachian

mountain range. To be sure, the opening of the Pittsburgh turnpike

seemed to promise that Philadelphia should become the shipping port

for the Ohio valley; but the law of gravity sent the produce of the

back-country downstream to New Orleans, rather than upstream to the

East. Mountains were a serious barrier then to cheap transportation,

and in consequence the contributory hinterland to Philadelphia was

narrowly restricted, and with the rise of the more fortunately situated

New York her economic ascendency was lost past recovery.

A like unforeseen fate overtook the cultural aspirations of the

ambitious little city. In the year 1799 Timothy Pickering, Secretary

of State in Adams’ cabinet, invited to Philadelphia as his secretary

Joseph Dennie, a young Boston lawyer who had achieved a wide reputation

as a writer of Addisonian essays; and with his coming the literary

vigor of Philadelphia flared up in a last brilliant blaze. He

established _The Port Folio_, gathered a club of congenial spirits, and

gained an extraordinary reputation throughout the country at large.

Dennie was a fierce Federalist who hated French Jacobinism with more

than the ardor of his party, and he was encouraged by Tom Moore, who

wrote,

Long may you hate the Gallic dross that runs

O’er your fair country and corrupts its sons.

But with the swift decay of Federalism Dennie’s own fortunes fell into

a like decay, and with the suspension of _The Port Folio_ in 1809 the

golden age of Philadelphia came to a definite end. Though it long

retained its primacy as a publishing center, and though later _Godey’s

Lady’s Book_ became almost a national institution, its intellectual

vigor lessened, and its literary leadership passed to other cities. It

succumbed to the tastes of Victorianism and became the acknowledged

home of “female genius” that for years fed the American reading public

on cambric tea. It enjoyed no such renaissance as came to Boston and

Charleston, and ambitious young writers abandoned it for more promising

fields. While other cities were caught up in the swirl of romantic

expansion that followed the War of 1812, Philadelphia remained content

with the ways of the eighteenth century, immersed in an old-fashioned

culture. With its geographical position disqualifying it to reap the

harvest of the westward movement, and with no Merrimac falls to invite

industrial development on a great scale, its fate was sealed. It had

been a delightful capital for an older America, but it was too narrowly

environed, too straitened in potential resources for exploitation, to

become the capital of a more expansive and ambitious generation.

II

Yet it enjoyed a brief moment of literary creativeness before the hand

of fate finally settled upon it. In the twilight of the eighteenth

century the new liberalisms that were turmoiling Europe found their

way to Philadelphia, and for the moment it seemed as if the city were

to lead the thought of America in its venture into new fields. It was

a convenient port for the unloading of foreign romanticisms, and under

the stimulus of national politics the demand for such commodities was

greatly increased. Certainly in no other American city did the French

upheaval quicken so sympathetic a ferment, and with this ferment came

a more romantic spirit in letters. The English pre-romantics found

there responsive readers. In the verse of young Philadelphians began to

appear a note of the vague, the mysterious, the melancholy, echoes of

Gray and Cowper and Ossian, as a pleasant relief from vigorous satire

as practiced by the Hartford Wits. But it was in the field of fiction

that the new spirit most adequately revealed itself, and particularly

in the work of a young Philadelphian who had broken wholly with the

Federalism that immured the sympathies of young poets like William

Cliffton, and welcomed the romantic philosophies then being formulated

by radical thinkers in France and England.

Brockden Brown was fortunately spared the fate that might well have

been his if circumstances had not determined otherwise. As a boy he

had meditated epics on romantic historical figures, inspired perhaps

by Dwight and Barlow; but from so profitless a career he was saved by

an early introduction to overseas fashions. By William Godwin and Mary

Wollstonecraft he was influenced as profoundly as was young William

Ellery Channing a few years afterward, and with like results. Later

generations have too carelessly forgotten how persuasive to young

intellectuals, a century or more ago, was the philosophy of Godwin. To

generous minds there was something vastly attractive in his confident

appeal to reason and justice; and to a new world and a new venture

in government it came with double appeal. How could the republican

experiment better justify itself than by establishing justice in

the new social order--justice for men and justice for women who had

too long suffered under narrow handicaps? It was certainly an ideal

worth serious consideration--particularly since the French school had

suggested that the germinal source of social injustice must be sought

in institutions rather than in the nature of man. It was natural enough

for gentlemen who profited by social wrong to charge that injustice was

inherent in human nature--that man’s innate selfishness was to blame

for the ills of society. But the new thinkers were of an inquiring turn

of mind, and under their critical scrutiny the old conception was seen

to rest on a perversion of fact. Gentlemen had got the cart before the

horse. The crying evils of civilization, when analyzed, were traceable

to vicious environment, to social and political maladjustments; not

to human nature. The mind of the infant is plastic. Very well. If it

is molded by social environment, why is it so often misshapen and

perverted to base purposes, if institutions are not at fault? why may

it not be molded to nobler ends under more beneficent institutions?

Reason is a common possession; the ideal of justice is a common ideal.

The evil genius that has hitherto thwarted their benevolent work is

the overgrown political state, debased to selfish ends. Once let the

beneficent sway of social instincts supersede the exploiting machinery

of the political state, and reason must conduct to justice. The heart

of man is sound. Let it be free to follow its natural promptings and

war must give way to peace, the selfish struggle of classes disappear

in a common brotherhood.

To an ardent young American like Brockden Brown, with the Hamiltonian

struggle for power before his eyes, such a philosophy must have come

with immense appeal. America confronted a future unmortgaged to the

past; why should it repeat the old follies and mistakes that had

reduced Europe to its present level? Here the pressure of vicious

institutions was light as yet. Here the appeal to reason and justice

was less hampered by selfish preëmptions. Let social commendation be

bestowed on the uncorrupted heart, on generous impulses, on native

integrity of character. Let education be a natural unfolding of humane

instincts, not a sharpening of wits to overreach one’s fellows. Let

rewards go to frank, outspoken truth, rather than to chicanery and

deceit. Inspired by such sentiments, Brockden Brown proposed to

make fiction serve social ends. He would spread the gospel of Mary

Wollstonecraft and Godwin by means of popular tales. The views of

the former he elaborated in _Alcuin; A Dialogue_, which in the year

1798 presented for the consideration of the American people the

Wollstonecraft feminism in such passages as this:

Marriage is an union founded on free and mutual consent. It

cannot exist without friendship. It cannot exist without personal

fidelity. As soon as the union ceases to be spontaneous, it ceases

to be just. This is the sum. If I were to talk for months I could

add nothing to the completeness of the definition.

But it is in _Arthur Mervyn_ that he gives his fullest pronouncement

of what he conceives must be done in America. He takes his hero fresh

from the plowtail, one of nature’s noblemen, and traces his triumphant

course through the thick of sordid intrigue to a happy end. Generous

in instincts, impulsive in sociability, responsive to suffering,

hating injustice, loving the pure and disinterested, Arthur Mervyn

is a Godwinian figure drawn to captivate the imagination with the

social ideal. It is not so much the plot of the story that reveals

the enormous influence of Godwin--patent as the likeness is to _Caleb

Williams_, but rather the expansive nature of the title hero, whose

instincts bid him espouse justice, and whose life is an implied

criticism of all that is sordid and mean.

With the political romanticism of his work was joined a literary

romanticism that likewise came from England, where it was muddying

the stream of English fiction and turning it aside from the vigorous

realism of the middle eighteenth century. The movement that Paulding

dubbed the “blood-pudding school” was one of the by-products of the

romantic development that ran a far more disastrous course in America

than in England, distorting the growth of native fiction for half

a century. It was perhaps unfortunate for the American novel that

_Wieland_ should have been Brockden Brown’s most finished work, for

it contributed in consequence more powerfully to the spread of the

melodramatic. Lacking his strain of rationalism, other writers reveled

increasingly in the luridly picaresque, till the popular taste was so

debauched that Gilmore Simms found it well-nigh impossible to struggle

against it. For this of course Brown was not to blame; yet his gross

romanticisms of manner persisted long after his Godwinian romanticisms

had faded out of the popular mind, if indeed they ever found lodgment

there.

III

Brockden Brown’s career was in a sense symbolic of the fate of his

native city--a few brilliant years and then a swift decline. Death cut

him down before he fulfilled his promise. Something of a like fate

befell his most brilliant successor, Robert Montgomery Bird, probably

the ablest man of letters that Philadelphia produced. Caught up by

the romantic movement at the beginning of his precocious career, he

plunged into dramatic writing and from 1830 to 1834, between the ages

of twenty-four and twenty-eight, he wrote four plays for Edwin Forrest,

one of which, _The Gladiator_, met with extraordinary success, both

in this country and in England; and another, _The Broker of Bogota_,

kept the stage for years. At the age of thirty he gave over the writing

of plays and turned to other fields. The explanation of so unusual a

course, according to a recent historian, is not far to seek. He had

been overreached by Forrest, and after parting with his manuscripts

to the actor, the playwright found himself in the condition of the

farmer who after shipping his potatoes to market discovers himself to

be in debt to the commission merchant.[419] That he determined to try

a different crop was natural enough, but unfortunate for the American

drama.

Of his subsequent ventures into the field of romantic fiction, one at

least was an extraordinary success, rivaling if not surpassing _The

Gladiator_ in popular favor. _Nick of the Woods, or the Jibbenainosay_

still remains one of the few outstanding tales of the Kentucky

settlement. Published in Philadelphia in 1837, it has been reissued in

successive editions, more than twenty in all down to the present. It

was translated into German in 1838, into Dutch in 1877, and into Polish

in 1905. There is abundant reason for its popularity. It is a story of

calculating revenge, done with extraordinary vividness and set against

a romantic background. A frontier Quaker, trusting in the spirit of

good will, finds his non-resistance futile; he is set upon by Indians,

his family murdered before his eyes, and himself scalped and left for

dead beside his burnt cabin. Recovering, he sets forth on a fierce

career. Under the mask of a non-resistant, so effectively worn as to

awaken the contempt of the frontier Indian-haters, he became a hunter

of men, and his secret passages through the wilderness leave no other

trail than the marked bodies of slaughtered warriors. The Jibbenainosay

is an uncanny figure who strikes with appalling suddenness, a Nemesis

that fills the hearts of border Indians with terror and turns their

dreams to nightmares--one of the most striking and fearful figures

in our early fiction. The Indians whom he pursues so remorselessly

are depicted as thorough savages. In describing them Bird has put all

his romanticisms aside. There is no sentimentalizing of the noble

red man in the brisk pages of _Nick of the Woods_; the warriors are

dirty drunken louts, filled with an unquenchable blood-lust, whom

the frontiersman kills with as little compunction as he would kill a

rattlesnake. The ugly feud that so long soiled the Border is depicted

with almost startling frankness, and through its worst phases moves the

figure of Bloody Nathan, professing to be a man of peace whilst cutting

an appalling lot of notches in his gun, an epileptic who perhaps

deceives even himself.

If one likes stirring action that is certain to end in blood-letting,

there is good foraging in _Nick of the Woods_, despite its excesses

of conventional romance. And there is much else as well. Bird had

evidently studied his western materials with some care, and he did

his part to popularize certain conceptions that literature had come

to associate with the Ohio valley. The character of Ralph Stackpole

is clearly suggestive of the wild antics supposed to be common to the

river boatmen. “The history of this wild scape-gallows,” says Bird,

“his prowess in the pin-fold and the battle-field, his adventure on

the beech-tree, and his escape from the meshes of the law, with other

characteristic events not included in our relation, are recollections

still cherished in some parts of Kentucky, and made the theme of many

a gleesome story.” But what seems more suggestive today is Bird’s

conscious attempt to reproduce the new type of western humor that

found its expression in the Davy Crockett myth. Perhaps the wild

extravagance of Ralph Stackpole’s vocabulary goes back to Mike Fink,

perhaps it derives from Davy himself; at any rate the mode had spread

so widely by 1837 that this Philadelphia man of letters had come to

believe that such was the indigenous form of humor in the new West of

the Ohio valley, and he took particular pains to draw the irrepressible

Ralph with vigorous touches. A pronounced romantic, Bird unconsciously

contributed his mite to the myth of western humor.

Footnotes

[418] Quoted in Oberholtzer, _Literary History of Philadelphia_, p. 178.

[419] See A. H. Quinn, _A History of the American Drama, etc._, pp.

244-248.

Chapter II • The New Capital

I