Very different from the gay and cultivated Quaker City was the

commercial port of Manhattan, with its Yankee energy ingrafted on the

stolid Dutch stock, which fate seized upon and transformed into the

greatest of our new cities, the favorite home of the genius of American

enterprise. Never a cultural capital as Philadelphia had been, and

as Charleston was becoming--a fact which Fenimore Cooper untactfully

announced to the world--it was ambitious to acquire commercial and

financial ascendency; and this ascendency of the economic over the

cultural, this frank evaluation of progress in terms of exploitation,

marks the definite transition from the eighteenth century to the

nineteenth, the triumph of an aggressive middle class over the

leisurely ways of an older landed aristocracy. The romance of expansion

was creating there a new psychology, and this new psychology was

preparing the city for leadership in the new age that was rising. Its

strategic position brought to it the produce of the new settlements

that were pushing west to the great lakes and beyond; its aggressive

traders were reaching out for a share in the markets of the world;

the plodding methods of money-getting that had satisfied an earlier

generation no longer satisfied men who had discovered the richer

possibilities of capitalistic manipulation. The potentialities that lay

in the capitalistic system were shrewdly explored, and the necessary

machinery of the new finance was devised. The acquisitive spirit of the

city found itself in a position to profit from the rage of speculation

that was running through the country, and it quickly outdistanced its

rivals in the race for financial supremacy.

The changes that came to New York in the last years of the old century

were enough to muddle a head stronger than Rip Van Winkle’s. The quiet

ways of colonial times were gone, and in their stead was a restless

activity that had no leisure for its pipe and mug in the sleepy tavern.

Business and politics could not wait on men who like Wouter Van Twiller

pickled their dreams in tobacco smoke. The bewilderment of old Rip

on his return from the hills was the bewilderment of the colonial

mind in the presence of a new order. When Washington came to New York

to assume the presidency, the town contained approximately 29,000

inhabitants, some two thousand of whom were slaves. Fifty years later

the census of 1840 set down its population as 312,710. In 1789 Albany

was a Dutch village of four or five thousand, and a few miles to the

West lay an unbroken wilderness. Within the narrow zone of the quiet

settlements old and new dwelt in close proximity. The most feudal of

American aristocracies fringed the banks of the Hudson from Albany to

Manhattan; and reaching out through the Mohawk valley that aristocracy

was laying a network of speculative land-holdings through which a flood

of Yankee pioneers was making its way from the long-settled lands of

Connecticut and Massachusetts. The frontier was close at hand; the

leveling spirit was near neighbor to the feudal; potential economic

rivalries were becoming actual, and the days of a static, power-proud

Dutch aristocracy were numbered. The spirit that had dominated the

commonwealth from its founding was tenacious of life, but on January

26, 1839, died Stephen Van Rensselaer, last of the Patroons, courteous,

dignified, a worthy embodiment of the old patriarchal virtues, who

had outlived his age; and hard upon his death came the final break-up

of the traditional order. The small men got the land they had long

tilled and the influence of the Dutch gentry slowly disintegrated.

A new order was rising that had discovered shorter roads to wealth

than feudal rents. While the more energetic of the old order, men

like Gouverneur Morris and Judge William Cooper, were deep in land

speculation, in Manhattan a new aristocracy of capitalism was rising.

Wall Street was losing the distinction of housing the most exclusive

of the landed gentry, to gain a greater distinction as the home of

the new aristocracy of credit. By 1825 the rise of industrialism, the

development of banking, the completion of the Erie Canal, the influx

of proletarian immigrants, and the drift of population to the towns

had fixed the destiny of the city. In becoming the chief repository of

the new capitalism New York had become the first and greatest of our

middle-class capitals.

Of this new Manhattan the representative citizen was a man whose

aggressive ambitions differentiated him sharply from Stephen Van

Rensselaer, and whose dramatic career of exploitation seemed to

Washington Irving to embody the romantic potentialities of America.

John Jacob Astor was to the New York of 1825 what Robert Morris had

been to Philadelphia a generation before--an evidence of the wealth

that was to be got by those who would boldly exploit the vast resources

of America. A German immigrant who landed in America with small funds,

immediately following the Peace of Paris, Astor embarked in the fur

trade, acquired a fortune which he invested in Manhattan land, and

then laid his plans to engage in a great venture in imperialism.

Stirred by the Lewis and Clarke expedition, he proposed to explore

the virgin resources of the far Pacific Northwest. With the tacit

approval of the government he undertook the hazardous project of the

Astoria settlement, sent his agent to the Russian posts of Alaska, and

by subsidizing an army of trappers proposed to gather the peltries of

the entire Northwest for the rich Canton market. It was a grandiose

conception worthy of a feudal baron of commerce. It was knit up

with dreams of conquest; it necessarily entailed open warfare with

the English companies whose ambitions were equally grandiose; it

was certain to be attended by bitter hardships on the part of the

venturesome agents to whom it was intrusted; and the outcome was

uncertain as a gambler’s chance. Irving has thrown over his narrative

of the great venture a glamour of patriotism; to him it appeared as

a plan of empire building; but whether patriotism or profit was the

determining impulse in the mind of John Jacob Astor, the settlement of

Astoria suggests the romantic aspirations that were making over the

lethargic world of Dutch Manhattan, in the venturesome days of the new

capitalism. Stephen Van Rensselaer and John Jacob Astor would have had

difficulty in understanding each other.

II

In sharp contrast with Boston, New York was wanting in intellectual

background and intellectual stimulus. It had never gone to school to

dogmatic theology and neither clergy nor laity had been disciplined by

a severe Puritan regimen. Gentlemen were little given to metaphysical

speculation and the subtleties of creed never provided the staple of

talk in the farmer’s kitchen. The terrors of hell rarely troubled the

sluggish imagination of the Dutch, and the extraordinary stimulus that

came to the serious-minded New Englander from long contemplation of

the ways of God, was lacking amongst a more prosaic people. No other

stimulus supplied the want and in consequence ideas and books were

held in low esteem and the things of the mind suffered. The English

gentry commonly sent their sons to the English universities, but the

Dutch by common report seem to have been indifferent to schooling

and opportunities for education were sadly inadequate. The result

was a low plane of intellectual life, which even in Cooper’s time

was remarked by him. There were brilliant and cultivated intellects,

wits like Gouverneur Morris and statesmen like John Jay; yet even

under the stimulus of Revolutionary and Constitutional controversy

the contribution of New York to political theory was far slighter

than that of New England or Virginia. _The Federalist_ was its single

notable production, and even in that the papers of Madison were no

inconsiderable part. As a commercial port it attracted young men

ambitious to rise in the world of affairs rather than in the world of

letters. Unlike Philadelphia it had never been a cosmopolitan meeting

ground for aspiring young intellectuals and purveyors of polite

culture, nor an important center of printers, publishers and book

dealers. Aside from Philip Freneau, who had long since established

himself in New Jersey when he was not at sea, it had contributed little

to pure literature, or even to the political satire that deluged

Philadelphia. As a creative center it ranked far below Hartford,

Connecticut, where in the seventeen-eighties and nineties wit had

become a staple commodity for export. And yet despite its intellectual

lethargy it was a pleasant little town, with a note of cosmopolitanism

that rendered life amongst the upper classes genial and urbane. The

spirit of aristocracy was as yet little weakened by alien newcomers

from the more republican New England, and city and commonwealth were

ruled by a little group of old-fashioned gentlemen who upheld the rigid

Federalism of the tie-wig school.

In the year 1800 the political leaders of the state were men of long

established reputations, Hamilton, Jay, Gouverneur Morris, Rufus

King, with whom was closely associated the brilliant lawyer James

Kent, afterward Chancellor. Only two of the five were of the older

New York stock: Rufus King was from Maine, Hamilton from the West

Indies, and Kent was of Yankee Presbyterian ancestry. Politics were

already becoming turmoiled by faction, with bitter cleavages and

vindictive struggles for the spoils of office that sadly confused the

logic of the earlier alignment. The old Federalist party was led by

the distinguished gentlemen named above; the Democratic party was led

by the Livingstons and Clintons; and outside both was the ambitious

Aaron Burr who played a lone hand against the field. After the death of

Hamilton the disintegration of the old parties went forward rapidly.

The Livingstons and Clintons broke, and a fierce political feud arose

between them. The former were accounted the true Jeffersonians, but

under the name of Lewisites they drifted towards the Federalist

remnant; the Burrites went to pieces after the disgrace of their

leader; and the Clintonians remained masters of the field, with a

motley support drawn from Tammany Hall Irish, Wall Street bankers, and

odds and ends of all factions. From this sordid situation, rendered

conspicuous by the extension of suffrage under the new constitution,

emerged two master politicians, adepts in all the arts of party

manipulation, who exploited the prejudices of the voting masses in a

way to justify the gloomy fear of demagoguery that haunted the minds of

the old Federalists. Martin Van Buren and Thurlow Weed, Democrat and

Whig, were finished products of the new school of practical politicians

who held that office-holding was the great end of partisan struggle,

and that principles must not stand in the way of success.

III

Through this fierce scramble of rival politicians moved a scholarly

figure who preserved to the last the dignity and distinction of an

earlier age. James Kent, whose long life and ripe legal learning were

devoted to upholding what he conceived to be the ultimate principles

of law and politics, was the chief political thinker of the transition

days of New York. A disciple of Locke and Blackstone, remodeling

seventeenth-century liberalism into eighteenth-century conservatism,

he was concerned to erect the barriers of the Common Law about the

unsurveyed frontiers of the American experiment, assigning exact

metes and bounds beyond which it should not go. Like John Marshall

and Joseph Story he was expert in devising legal springes to catch

unwary democrats, and while the Jeffersonians were shouting over their

victories at the polls, he was engaged in the strategic work of placing

the Constitution under the narrow custodianship of the English law.

An ardent Federalist and later an equally ardent Whig, he reveals in

his precise thinking the intimate relations that everywhere exist

between economics, politics, and legal principles. With John Adams he

accepted the dictum of Locke that “the great and chief end ... of men’s

uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government,

is the preservation of their property”; and believing that the English

Common Law was the securest of all agencies devised to safeguard the

subject in the enjoyment of his property rights, he made no difficulty

in imposing that law upon the Constitution, circumscribing the

written document by Common Law fences. Government he conceived to be

a patriarchal institution erected for the single purpose of coercing

the vicious, and as such it must remain in the hands of the good, the

wise and the wealthy. It did not need the authoritative pronouncement

of his great master to convince him that the wealthy included the good

and wise. Observation of the “barbarian Jackson” and his rude followers

was enough to convince him of the truth of the fact. “All theories of

government that suppose the mass of the people virtuous,” he wrote to

Webster, “and able and willing to act virtuously, are plainly utopian,

and will remain so until the Saturnian age” (William Kent, _Memoirs and

Letters of James Kent_, p. 207). Profoundly distrustful of democracy,

he brought all his wide reading in the history of ancient and medieval

republics to demonstrate the favorite Federalist conviction--a

conviction that Paulding in his _Letters from the South_ paid his

respects to[420]--that democracy is only a euphemism for mob-rule and

that it must speedily conduct to anarchy and despotism. All leveling

principles he repudiated without waiting to hear cause. Until necessity

counseled otherwise he looked with suspicion on the holders of liquid

wealth, as likely to prove wanting in the wisdom and goodness that came

naturally to the landed proprietor. He would have the many ruled by the

few, but those few he would have owners of great estates.

After all, the learned Chancellor was only a transplanted Yankee of the

Fisher Ames school, with something of the austerity and intellectual

vigor of his two Puritan grandfathers. An ardent admirer of Hamilton,

he early broke with the more liberal faith of his family and joined

himself to the extreme Federalists. He was advanced rapidly by Governor

Jay, enjoyed for years both office and distinction, and ably defended

the party of his choice. Fearful of agrarian laws and the sequestration

of property by the enfranchised poor, he fought stubbornly every

proposal for an extension of suffrage or a larger measure of

self-government for the cities. Defeated in the great constitutional

convention of 1821 he soon after lost his office and retired to write

his _Commentaries on American Law_, a work that was to exercise a

creative influence on the later development of our jurisprudence. That

American law came to be deeply colored by Federalist political theory,

that it upheld from the bench principles that had been repudiated at

the polls, was due in no little measure to the legal scholarship of

this last of the New York Federalists. What a recent historian has

borrowed to describe another applies with equal felicity to Chancellor

Kent--“his pigmy hope that life would some day become somewhat better,

punily shivered by the side of his gigantic conviction that it might be

infinitely worse” (Fox, _Decline of Aristocracy in New York Politics_,

p. 243). As he contemplated the ways of the triumphant Jacksonians, he

found such consolation as he could in turning back to an older century

with its narrow outlook and sober culture. Writing to his brother in

1835, he said:

There never was such misrule. Our Tory rich men are becoming

startled and alarmed at our downhill course. My opinion is that

the admission of universal suffrage and a licentious press are

incompatible with government and security to property, and that the

government and character of this country are going to ruin. This

suffrage is too great an excitement for any political machine. It

racks it to pieces, and morals go with it. It is probable England

is going the same way. We are becoming selfish, profligate,

crazy.... Give me the writings of Addison and Locke, and the

Presbyterianism of Dr. Ripley, Dr. Stiles, and old Dr. Rogers.

(Kent, _Memoirs and Letters of James Kent_, pp. 218-219.)

IV

With the extraordinary upheaval in economics and politics New York

unfortunately underwent no corresponding intellectual revolution. The

renaissance that a generation earlier had created a new Virginia, and

that was awakening in Massachusetts a many-sided intellectual activity,

touched the mind of New York only lightly. The ground was unprepared

for the new philosophies. To Virginia, French romantic theory had

come with the appeal of a new gospel for the reason that plantation

economics fell in with the major premises of Physiocratic liberalism,

and the old-world dogmas seemed to find new-world justification. To

New England, German idealism had come likewise with the appeal of a

new gospel, after Unitarianism had broken the fetters of Calvinism and

set free its traditional idealism. But among the young men of New York

in 1825 neither France nor Germany was a determining influence. With

an inadequate cultural background and no responsive economics, they

were attracted only casually to the current European liberalisms. They

were wanting in idealism and in consequence the major intellectual

and social movements of the times influenced the form and content of

the new Knickerbocker literature far less profoundly than was the

case in New England. New York was as insular as Charleston. That

the growing economic unrest would ultimately find expression in a

controversial or Utopian literature, was a matter of course; and that

the cosmopolitanism of the city should make for vigorous discussion,

was equally a matter of course. Nevertheless Albert Brisbane, William

Leggett, Parke Godwin and Horace Greeley were far less representative

of the dominant literary spirit than Irving and Halleck and Willis of

the earlier group, or Stedman and Stoddard later.

The Knickerbocker movement was inaugurated by four young men whose

clever sketches caught the provincial ear of polite society and set the

new fashion in prose and verse. Irving and Paulding in _Salmagundi_,

and Halleck and Drake in the _Croaker Papers_, were lucky adventurers

whose slight crafts made the most prosperous of voyages. Bright young

fellows with a charming literary swagger, they aspired to be wits and

exploit the amusing foibles of Broadway. Twelve years separated the

two ventures, and in the interval Byron and Scott had been supplanting

Moore and Campbell in the esteem of the Town, and the literary mode of

New York was changing. From their gay provincialism, happily Irving and

Paulding later freed themselves; Drake died at the age of twenty-five;

but Halleck retained to the end of a leisurely life the mannerisms of

the Croaker period--a crochety wit who affected persiflage, a brisk

young buck who gently slid into a _blasé_ old buck, a free lance in

verse who lived in state on the income of a small literary investment

made in his twenties.

The very considerable reputation of Fitz-Greene Halleck resulted in

part from the literary sterility of New York in his early days, and in

part from the personal popularity of the man. A Connecticut Yankee,

descended on his mother’s side from old John Eliot, he was drawn to

the city as a promising field for an accountant, and eventually found

his way into the office of John Jacob Astor by whom he was later

pensioned. He accepted the views and shared the antipathies of his Wall

Street associates, but with a certain affectation of individuality that

took delight in shocking them by whimsical pronouncements in favor of

the Catholic church and the monarchical system. There is perhaps a

suggestion of seriousness in the remark that Bryant has preserved: “The

ship of state,” so he reports Halleck as saying, “must be governed and

navigated like any other ship, without consulting the crew. What would

become of the stanchest bark in a gale, if the captain were obliged to

call all hands together and say: ‘All you who are in favor of taking

in sail, will please to say ay’” (_Orations and Addresses_, p. 186).

His political affiliations were Federalist-Whig, and his satire exudes

much of the old prejudice against the democratic mass. The pompous

long-winded DeWitt Clinton was a fair mark for his shafts;[421] the

demagoguery of office-seeking politicians was a fruitful theme for

his wit;[422] and Halleck’s satire plays upon them with good-natured

raillery. But his gayety cannot hide a certain animus in dealing with

the tousled-headed democracy. When the labor movement was painfully

getting under way in New York Halleck contemplated the curious

phenomenon with a tolerant contempt--in something of the spirit of a

wit of pre-Revolutionary times who amused the Town with his couplet:

Down at night a bricklayer or carpenter lies,

Next sun a Lycurgus or Solon doth rise.

As an illustration of the attitude of polite society in New York a

hundred years ago towards the aspirations of the proletariat, Halleck’s

forgotten _Epistle to Robert Hogbin, Esq., Chairman of the Committee of

Working-Men, etc._, deserves quotation:

Mr. Hogbin,--I work as a weaver--of rhyme--

And therefore presume with a working-man’s grace,

To address you as one I have liked for some time.

Though I know not (no doubt it’s a fine one) your face.

There is much in a name, and I’ll lay you a wager

(Two ale-jugs from Reynolds), that Nature designed,

When she formed you, that you should become the drum-major

In that choice piece of music, the Grand March of Mind.

A Hogbin! a Hogbin! how cheering the shout

Of all that keep step to that beautiful air,

Which leads, like the treadmill, about and about,

And leaves us exactly, at last, where we were!

Yes, there’s much in a name, and a Hogbin’s so fit is

For that great moral purpose whose impulse divine

Bids men leave their own workshops to work in committees,

And their own wedded wives to protect yours and mine!...

When the moment arrives that we’ve won the good fight,

And broken the chains of laws, churches, and marriages,

When no infants are born under six feet in height,

And our chimney-sweeps mount up a flue in their carriages--

That glorious time when our daughters and sons

Enjoy a _blue Monday_ each day of the week,

And a clean shirt is classed with the mastodon’s bones,

Or a mummy from Thebes, an undoubted antique--

Then, then, my dear Hogbin, your statue in straw,

By some modern _Pig_malion delightfully wrought,

Shall embellish the Park, and our youths’ only law

Shall be to be Hogbins in feeling and thought.

In Halleck’s better work there is sometimes evident a certain critical

detachment that permitted him to see both sides of his theme. In

the lines to his native Connecticut he has taken pretty accurately

the measure of the Puritan and the Yankee. He rests under no awe

in presence of the old worthies, and he throws overboard the pious

fairy-tales of Cotton Mather--“that slanderer of the memory of our

fathers”--only to forgive the preacher who scolded his friends

“up from earth to heaven” because of the “sour grapejuice in his

disposition.” Unfortunately little of his work possesses the virility

of _Connecticut_. His most ambitious poem, _Fanny_, is a feeble and

discursive satire on the social climber. It was a great favorite at

the time and passed through several editions, but the sparkle is gone

out of its affected jauntiness and little has been lost in its being

forgotten. Halleck’s casual literary activity continued only for the

brief period between the years 1819 and 1828; thereafter for close on

forty years he was content to turn out an occasional _jeu d’esprit_,

enjoy the deepening twilight of his reputation, and watch his fellow

Yankee, Willis, invest his talents in the ephemeral. The day of the wit

was past in New York.

Footnotes

[420] See _Letters_, etc., Vol. I, p. 207.

[421] See _Governor Clinton’s Speech_.

[422] See _The Recorder_.

Chapter III • Two Knickerbocker Romantics

I • Washington Irving

Fortunately the stolid New York of earlier days was not to pass away

without bequeathing to posterity some fragments of its chronicles.

In the midst of a pleasant society of smallclothes and tie-wigs, of

feudalism and Federalism, appeared young Washington Irving at the

precise moment when Sansculottism was beginning to make a stir in

the land, and gentlemen were putting away their knee-breeches to

don a republican dress--a decline in taste to which he would not

easily reconcile himself. A boyish wit from the eighteenth century,

a genial loiterer in the twilight of the old, he found himself out

of humor with the ambitions that were making over the little city he

loved. The present seemed to him not so amusing as the past, nor so

picturesque. That he had any business with the world of trade and

speculation he could not believe. Its concerns were not his. Its

new Wall Street counted for less in his eyes than the pipe of old

Diedrich Knickerbocker. Its decadent Federalism that was clinging

to the wreck of its hopes, and its roistering Democracy that wore

greasy clothes, spoke with an Irish accent, and was marshaled to the

polls by Tammany Hall, were of less consequence to him than the black

bottle that brought such curious adventures to Rip Van Winkle. The

wit and romance he took pleasure in were of another sort than the

kind his generation was getting drunk on--more insubstantial, less

heady, picturesque rather than profitable. So Irving gently detached

himself from contemporary America, and detached he remained to the end

of a loitering life, untroubled by material ambitions, enjoying the

abundance of good things that fell in his way, mingling with prosperous

folk and liking everybody--men as diverse as John Jacob Astor and

Martin Van Buren and John P. Kennedy--and unconsciously taking the

color of his environment, careful to turn into limpid prose such

romantic tales as he came upon and achieving thereby both reputation

and profit--a pleasant blameless way of living, certainly, yet

curiously unrepresentative of the America in which chance had set him

and which was to claim him as its first man of letters.

An incorrigible _flâneur_, Irving’s business in life was to loaf

and invite the picturesque. A confirmed rambler in pleasant places,

in the many lands he visited he was a lover of the past rather than

the present, seeking to recreate the golden days of the Alhambra or

live over the adventurous mood of the fur trader. The immediate and

the actual was an unsatisfying diet for his dreams. There was in him

nothing of the calm aloofness of the intellectual that stands apart

to clarify its critical estimate, and none of the reforming zeal of

the Puritan that is at peace only in the thick of a moral crusade. The

duty of saving the world was not laid on his untroubled soul. No man

of his generation was less of a rebel than Irving, and he went his

way unconcerned at things that quite upset Fenimore Cooper’s peace of

mind. In his early days, to be sure, he broke with the ambitious middle

class--if gently drawing away can be called breaking--because he could

not bring himself to like its ways and the devastation those ways were

entailing on the leisurely world he loved. Revolutions seemed to him

somewhat vulgar affairs. The French Revolution had brought destruction

on too many lovely things, and the industrial revolution was taking

too heavy a toll of the picturesque, to please him. He thought it a

pity that steam should drive the clipper ship from the seas and put

an end to snug posting in the tally-ho. Progress might be bought at

too dear a price. The bluff squire with his hounds, the great hall

with its ancient yuletide customs, the patriarchal relations between

master and man, seemed to him more worth while than the things progress

was substituting for them; so he turned away from the new and gently

ingratiated himself into the past in order to gather up such fragments

of the picturesque as progress had not yet destroyed.

But only for a time. His dislike of capitalism rested on no more

substantial basis than its substitution of vulgar trousers for

gentlemanly smallclothes. It was too new to have achieved dignity or

the charm of assured position. When that time should come and masters

of finance should stand before the world as generous dispensers of

patronage, when the development of business should have produced its

new barons, Irving’s dislike would lessen and he would associate with

the new capitalism on the same easy terms that he associated with the

old feudalism. In the meantime he stood apart, unconcerned with praise

or blame. The industrial revolution might work itself out as it would.

The seventeen years he spent abroad on his great pilgrimage were black

years for England. Wretchedness and poverty were all about him if he

chose to see. The “condition of England” question was rising out of the

factory smoke to challenge the conscience of England. But he did not

choose to see and his conscience was untroubled. As he idled about the

countryside or visited the hospitable manor houses, his eye was caught

by the grace of medieval spires rising from parish churches rather than

by the condition of the proletariat. He saw no children working in the

coalpits, for he did not choose to visit the collieries. He sympathized

vaguely with the new social movements then getting under way, but it

was not in his nature to be partisan to a cause. He may not have been

a Tory but he had lived so long with Tories and enjoyed so frankly

the charm of upper-class society, that his outlook was unconsciously

determined by such intimate contacts. While Secretary to the Legation

at London in the reform years from 1829 to 1831, he was aware of the

tremendous stir all about him, but his infrequent references to the

Reform Bill in his letters turned usually on its disastrous effects on

the publishing business. Only once during his long residence abroad

does he seem to have felt deeply the significance of the current

revolutionary unrest, and the mood that swept him away from his

habitual indifference bears the marks of a sudden awakening. Writing

from London on March 1, 1831, he said:

We are in the beginning of an eventful week.... However, _the great

cause of all the world_ will go on. What a stirring moment it is

to live in. I never took such intense interest in the newspapers.

It seems to me as if life were breaking out anew with me, or

that I were entering upon quite a new and almost unknown career

of existence, and I rejoice to find my sensibilities, which were

waning as to many objects of past interest, reviving with all their

freshness and vivacity at the scenes and prospects opening around

me. I trust, my dear Brevoort, we shall both be spared to see a

great part of this grand though terrible drama that is about to

be acted. There will doubtless be scenes of horror and suffering,

but what splendid triumphs must take place over these vile systems

of falsehood in every relation of human affairs, that have been

woven over the human mind, and for so long a time have held it down

in despicable thraldom. (Pierre M. Irving, _Life and Letters of

Washington Irving_, Vol. II, p. 199.)

Irving lacked a month of being forty-nine when he wrote this confession

of interest in matters political. It marks the first appearance of

liberalism in his thinking, and the last--somewhat vague to be sure,

unduly bottomed on romantic expectations, yet significant in so placid

a life and explanatory of his course, when a year later he returned to

America to knit up once more the raveled threads of his interests. It

was as an incipient liberal that he came back to a land then in the

first flush of the Jacksonian victory, eager to discover a romantic

charm in the vast changes that had come during the seventeen years

he had been abroad. He plunged into the business of re-discovery

with enthusiasm. He was in want of new literary materials, and as

he took his bearings, his creative interest was stirred to write on

American themes. He went to Washington and for three months listened

to the great debate on Nullification. He talked with business men

and politicians, with those who were prosperous and prominent, and

he drifted easily with the tide of liberalism. To be sure he could

scarcely be called a Jacksonian. Parties and causes did not greatly

interest him even then. An intelligent man, indeed, could hardly be

less concerned about political principles. Thirty years before, as a

clever young man about town, he had gone with the dominant Federalism

of the times, and had amused himself with political ambitions. His

brother Peter was editor of the Lewisite paper the _Chronicle_, but

Josiah Ogden Hoffman, with whose firm Irving was connected during his

desultory incursion into the law and to whose daughter Matilda he

was betrothed, was an old Loyalist and ardent Hamiltonian. His wife,

to whom Irving was warmly attached, was a daughter of John Fenno,

Hamilton’s editor. Under such tutelage it was natural for Irving to

poke good-natured fun at President Jefferson’s red velvet breeches in

_Salmagundi_; but his venture into practical politics proving little to

his taste, he quickly gave over such ambitions. In a letter to a clever

young lady of Republican sympathies, he thus announced his abandonment

of political hopes:

I am as deep in mud and politics as ever a modern gentleman would

wish to be; and I drank beer with the multitude; and I talked

hand-bill fashion with the demagogues; and I shook hands with the

mob, whom my heart abhorreth.... Truly this saving one’s country

is a nauseous piece of business, and if patriotism is such a dirty

virtue,--prythee, no more of it. (_Life and Letters_, Vol. I, Chap.

XI.)

Years now separated him from that youthful experience. His long

absence from his native land had completely alienated him from

the fierce partisanship of contemporary America and he could view

matters political with calm detachment. Inclined to make the best

of any government _de facto_, he found it easy on his return to

accept Jacksonianism, and he soon discovered a genuine liking for Old

Hickory. “The more I see of this old cock of the woods,” he wrote

from Washington, “the more I relish his game qualities” (_ibid._,

Vol. II, p. 255). No doubt his early friend Paulding had much to do

with his ready acceptance of the new order, although he had come

in close contact with Martin Van Buren at the London legation and

was drawn to him. “He is one of the gentlest and most amiable men I

have ever met with,” he wrote to his brother, “with an affectionate

disposition that attaches itself to those around him, and wins their

kindness in return” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 220). Although distrustful

of some of the “elbow counsellors” of the Democracy he found little

cause for criticism and soon came to be regarded as one with them. The

Jacksonians were eager to make political capital out of his literary

reputation, and he was urged by Tammany Hall to stand for Congress and

later to accept a mayoralty candidacy. In 1837, probably through the

intervention of Paulding, he was offered a post in Van Buren’s cabinet.

These partisan offers he had the good sense to decline, but when in

1842 he was tendered the post of Minister to Spain he gladly seized the

opportunity to revisit a land he loved. His nephew is explicit in his

statement that the offer came wholly unsolicited, but Fenimore Cooper

was of another opinion.[423] Very likely Cooper was misinformed, but

whatever the truth the appointment was a godsend to Irving. His affairs

were in a bad way. The popularity of his writings was on the wane, the

panic had caught him with much of his capital invested in unprofitable

land speculations, and the “Roost” at Tarrytown was a heavy drain,

although he wrote whimsically, “I beat all the gentlemen farmers in

my neighborhood, for I can manage to raise my vegetables and fruits

at very little more than twice the market price” (_Life and Letters_,

Vol. II, p. 320). Only a severe nature like Cooper, sorely wounded

by the angry reception of his own honest criticism, would cavil at an

appointment so honorable to the government.

A friendly nature, Irving discovered friendliness wherever he went. His

own generosity appealed to the generosity of others, and he found it

easy in consequence to take a kindly view of men and parties. He was

harassed by none of Cooper’s quick suspicions and rigid principles, and

it must be added he had none of Cooper’s intuitive penetration into the

secret springs of human action that made the latter so acute a critic

of contemporary America. The sharp contrast in moods in which the two

men returned to America from their travels, the one harshly critical

of middle-class economics and frontier leveling, the other responding

naïvely to the enthusiasm for speculative expansion and eager to

exploit the romance of the westward movement, sufficiently reveals

the difference between them. The one was a dogmatic Puritan with the

dictatorial ways of the quarter-deck, the other was a play-boy of

letters temperamentally incapable of critical analysis. There was not a

grain of realism in Irving’s nature. His cheerful optimism was little

more than the optimism of the prosperous. Wholly ignorant of economics,

he never comprehended the significance of the revolutions in process

all about him, and this _naïveté_ blinded him to the motive of John

Jacob Astor in financing Astoria, as it blinded him to all the major

forces of the times. He was easily brought to see the romance of the

great struggle between rival companies for mastery of the fur trade,

but he did not comprehend how the glamour he threw about the venture

must inevitably strengthen his patron’s investment in imperialism.

Gullible as a child, he discovered nothing more significant in the

great struggle between agrarianism and capitalism for control of

government than the ungenerous suspicions and novel theories it bred.

For the outstanding liberals of New York he had scant sympathy. William

Leggett, Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, William Cullen Bryant,

influenced his views far less than did the masters of Wall Street; and

from the courageous movement of Locofocoism he drew back in distrust.

The one letter in which he elaborated such political convictions as he

had come to hold, is an interesting document that deserves quotation.

As far as I know my own mind, I am thoroughly a republican,

and attached, from complete conviction, to the institutions of

my country; but I am a republican without gall, and have no

bitterness in my creed. I have no relish for puritans either in

religion or politics, who are for pushing principles to an extreme,

and for overturning everything that stands in the way of their own

zealous career. I have, therefore, felt a strong distaste for some

of those locofoco luminaries who of late have been urging strong

and sweeping measures, subversive of the interests of great classes

of the community. Their doctrines may be excellent in theory, but,

if enforced in violent and uncompromising opposition to all our

habitudes, may produce the most distressing effects. The best of

remedies must be cautiously applied, and suited to the taste and

constitution of the patient.... Ours is a government of compromise.

We have several great and distinct interests bound up together,

which, if not separately consulted and severally accommodated, may

harass and impair each other.... I always distrust the soundness

of political councils that are accompanied by acrimonious and

disparaging attacks upon any great class of our fellow-citizens.

Such are those urged to the disadvantage of the great trading

and financial classes of our country. You yourself know ... how

important these classes are to the prosperous conduct of the

complicated affairs of this immense empire. You yourself know,

in spite of all the common-place cant and obloquy that has been

cast upon them by political spouters and scribblers, what general

good faith and fair dealing prevails throughout these classes.

Knaves and swindlers there are doubtless among them, as there are

among all great classes of men; but I declare that I looked with

admiration at the manner in which the great body of our commercial

and financial men have struggled on through the tremendous trials

which have of late overwhelmed them, and have endeavored, at every

pecuniary sacrifice, to fulfill their engagements. (_Life and

Letters_, Vol. II, pp. 312-313.)

This persuasive presentation of the philosophy of compromise, with its

implicit defense of capitalism, marks Irving’s drift back to the middle

class with which he had long before broken. In the six years since his

return he had watched the country react to the great panic, and he went

with it in its veering towards the Whiggery of Henry Clay. The fragile

bonds of his attachment to the Democracy were becoming tenuous; other

attachments were insensibly drawing him towards the more congenial

representatives of wealth. He had all his life associated with the

Tory classes and it was easy for him to transfer his loyalty to the

American Tories. Under such influences began a slow _rapprochement

cordial_ towards the new philosophy of progress. He was seized with

the common mania of speculation and made some unfortunate investments

in wild lands and railways that seriously hampered him later, and he

commercialized his literary reputation by such money-making ventures as

_Astoria_ and the _Adventures of Captain Bonneville_. He discovered a

new romance in the great business of exploitation, and found the hand

of God in the profits of unearned increment. In the letter above quoted

from, he justified the ways of speculation thus:

There are moral as well as physical phenomena incident to every

state of things, which may at first appear evils, but which are

devised by an all-seeing Providence for some beneficent purpose.

Such is the spirit of speculative enterprise which now and then

rises to an extravagant height, and sweeps throughout the land....

The late land speculations, so much deprecated, though ruinous to

many engaged in them, have forced agriculture and civilization

into the depths of the wilderness; have laid open the recesses of

primeval forests; made us acquainted with the most available points

of our immense interior; have cast the germs of future towns and

cities and busy marts in the heart of savage solitudes, and studded

our vast rivers and internal seas with ports that will soon give

activity to a vast internal commerce. Millions of acres which might

otherwise have remained idle and impracticable wastes, have been

brought under the dominion of the plough, and hundreds of thousands

of industrious yeomen have been carried into the rich but remote

depths of our immense empire, to multiply and spread out in every

direction, and give solidity and strength to our confederacy.

All this has in a great measure been effected by the extravagant

schemes of land speculators. I am, therefore, inclined to look upon

them with a more indulgent eye than they are considered by those

violent politicians who are prescribing violent checks and counter

measures, and seem to have something vindictive in their policy.

(_Life and Letters_, Vol. II, p. 314.)

Thus did Irving become completely domesticated in the new world that

Rip Van Winkle had found so disconcerting when he came upon it out

of the quiet colonial past. The rediscovery of America proved to be

an agreeable business, and profitable in a professional way. His

enthusiasms, which in 1831 he felt were “waning as to many objects of

past interest,” were stimulated by the vast stir of the country, and

the spirit of romance once more ran briskly in his veins. The better

part of a year he rambled widely about the country, in order, as he

said, to get at home “upon American themes.” He visited Boston and the

White Mountains, then West to Ohio and St. Louis, then with an Indian

commissioner he penetrated the southwest prairies as far as the wild

Pawnee country beyond the South Canadian River, then to New Orleans and

Charleston, finally settling down in Washington to immerse himself in

politics. From there he passed over the Potomac for an extended trip

through the Old Dominion, returning to New York where he spent some

time with Astor at Hell Gate, finally in 1835 settling at Tarrytown

which was to be his home to the last. He had definitely determined on

his new field of work. His imagination had been stirred by his visit

to the prairies; the romance of the westward expansion was beginning

to find expression in the works of Timothy Flint and James Hall; the

public interest was ripe and John Jacob Astor was at hand to encourage

him. Thus stimulated Irving proposed to make the field of western

romance his own, with the result that he published in quick succession

_A Tour of the Prairies_, _Astoria_, and _The Adventures of Captain

Bonneville_.

On the whole the new venture did not prosper. The spirit of the

West was not to be captured by one whose heart was in Spain. In

_A Tour of the Prairies_ there is a certain homely simplicity and

straightforwardness that spring from a plain recital of undramatic

experience; and in _Astoria_ there is an unembellished narrative of

appalling hardship and heroic endurance, with none of the tawdry

romantics that mar the work of Flint and Hall. Yet neither is

creatively imaginative, neither stirs one with a sense of high drama.

The atmosphere of Snake River could not be created in the quiet study

at the “Roost”; it needed the pen of a realist to capture the romance

of those bitter wanderings in mountain and sagebrush. It is journeyman

work, and on every page one is conscious of the professional man of

letters faithfully doing this day’s allotment. It is much the same

with his _Life of Washington_. In this last great undertaking Irving

no longer writes with gusto. The golden days of Diedrich Knickerbocker

and Rip Van Winkle are long since gone; the magic is departed from

his pen; and a somewhat tired old gentleman is struggling to fulfill

his contract with his publisher. It was a mistake to venture on

the work, despite the fact that he had long been planning it. His

historical equipment was inadequate. He might make a pretty story out

of Washington’s early life and his days with the army, but he was far

too ignorant of politics, too credulous in judging his materials, to

interpret justly the fierce party struggles that seethed about the

President. Quite unconsciously in this last work he returned to the

political prejudices of his youth, and wrote an account of Washington’s

administrations deeply colored by his Federalist sources.

The most distinguished of our early romantics, Irving in the end was

immolated on the altar of romanticism. The pursuit of the picturesque

lured him away into sterile wastes, and when the will-o’-the-wisp was

gone he was left empty. A born humorist, the gayety of whose spirits

overflowed the brim, he was lacking in a brooding intellectuality,

and instead of coming upon irony at the bottom of the cup--as the

greater humorists have come upon it after life has had its way with

them--he found there only sentiment and the dreamy poetic. As the

purple haze on the horizon of his mind was dissipated by a sobering

experience, he tried to substitute an adventitious glamour; as romance

faded, sentiment supplied its place. So long as youth and high spirits

endured, his inkwell was a never-failing source of gayety, but as the

sparkle subsided he over-sweetened his wine. This suffices to account

for the fact that all his better work was done early; and this explains

why the Knickerbocker _History_ remains the most genial and vital of

his volumes. The gayety of youth bubbles and effervesces in those magic

pages, defying time to do its worst. The critic may charge the later

Irving with many and heavy shortcomings, but the romantic smoke-clouds

that ascend from Wouter Van Twiller’s pipe cannot be dissipated by the

winds of criticism.

II • James Kirke Paulding

Far more native to the limitations and hardships of American life and

far more loyal to its homely aspirations was James Kirke Paulding,

whose literary reputation came to be so deeply overshadowed by that

of his early friend. Sprung from plain stock--whether English or

Dutch his son remained in doubt, although inclining to believe the

former--and cradled in the fierce partisanship of the Revolutionary

struggle, he never abandoned his inherited liberalism or found his

love of country growing less. To the end of his life he remained a

primitive American of an earlier generation, somewhat puzzled by the

ways of another age that speculated in prosperity by running in debt,

and measured a man’s wealth by the amount he owed. His father had been

an active Whig in a Tory neighborhood who did not stint his service

to the Revolutionary cause. He was a member of the local Committee of

Safety, and acted as State Commissary to the Revolutionary forces, a

post which in the end brought him to ruin. In the dark days of the

struggle he pledged his private credit for supplies, and was never

reimbursed by a negligent commonwealth. The outcome was financial

disaster. The father was imprisoned for debt and his courage broken,

and the family long suffered from want. “We were not only poor,” the

son wrote later, “but steeped in poverty.” But there was excellent

stuff in the awkward, dreamy country boy. He was “built of stubborn

oak,” he remarked whimsically, “seasoned in the school of poverty,

like an old chimney-piece in a log cabin.” When at the age of nineteen

he was suddenly plunged into the world of New York City, he was shy,

uncouth, self-educated, and felt himself an alien in Wall Street and

Broadway. For the Federalist upper class he seems to have felt the

instinctive hostility of the outsider; but through the agency of the

Irvings--an elder sister having married William Irving--he was brought

into the companionship of a group of clever young men, and under the

stimulus of high talk and exuberant pranks, the latent idealism of his

nature expanded freely. This was his university, and while it left

something to be desired in the way of discipline, suffering too free

a rein to his discursive fancy, it quickened his native wit, awakened

his creative imagination, and put him to school to the pleasant craft

of writing. The _Salmagundi Papers_ were the first fruits of the

literary apprenticeship of the group, and although Irving has come to

receive the chief credit for them, the wit of Paulding seems quite as

sprightly, and his gayety as fresh.

That his later career in letters was less notable resulted in part from

the fact that he was an inveterate rambler by nature, and partly from

the fact that writing with him was occasional, a pleasant relief from

humdrum duties, and he did not choose to lay a curb on his vagrant

ways. In letters as in life he was always discursive, forgetful of his

objective in his delight at the beauty of the countryside, loading

his pages down with nature descriptions and clogging the action

of his tales with somewhat tedious homilies. After forty years of

writing he remained still an amateur, incapable of pruning the wilful

tangle of his fancy--an essayist of the leisurely school who ventured

incautiously into the realms of verse and fiction without mastering the

technic of the business. There was perhaps too much of the homespun

in him to permit him to become an artist. The experience of his youth

marked him too deeply, and all his life he remained as conscious a son

of the people as Hamlin Garland was later, delighting to chronicle the

ways of the obscure, somewhat militant in proclaiming the excellence

of homely virtues. Formed in an environment that bred a spontaneous

democracy, he was a confirmed equalitarian, untroubled by the itch to

rise in the world or exploit his fellows. Alone among the Knickerbocker

group, he was a Jeffersonian in the fundamentals of his social creed;

not in the lesser matters of Kentucky Resolutions and the like, but in

his Physiocratic leanings, in his profound distrust of all middle-class

programs and his preference for the simple country ways over the city

economy; and it was this deep-rooted agrarianism that set him against

capitalism and made him a later Jacksonian. In him there spoke out the

authentic New York, not of Broadway merchants or Wall Street bankers,

but of the plain rank and file of the people. Untouched by foreign

travel but widely acquainted with his native America, he was fashioned

out of the wool from the fireside loom and domestic dye-pot.

A writer so consciously and completely American would find abundant

occasion to put his pen to the service of his country at a time when

every English traveler turned critic and on his return home published a

volume of truculent disparagement of ways and things American. For the

most part those volumes were a defense of Toryism by the easy method

of attacking democracy, and they annoyed Paulding beyond measure. He

would not let them go unanswered, and from _The Diverting History

of John Bull and Brother Jonathan_ (1812) to _John Bull in America_

(1825), he published five different replies, varying his attack from

argument to burlesque. Something more than loyalty to his country

seems to have spurred him on. His dislike of England was inveterate,

partly because of the old Revolutionary feud, partly because of later

antagonisms. Almost at the hour of his birth the Paulding family had

been forced to quit their home for fear of the British and Tories who

daily threatened them; and a deep hatred of the British Tory he drew

in with his mother’s milk. To him England was a Tory country, reeking

with social injustice, the home of ancient abuses, and necessarily the

implacable enemy of democratic America. He was convinced that want and

tyranny and subserviency dogged the daily life of the English common

people; and the English Reviews that attacked the ways of democracy

with caustic British superiority, filled his honest republican heart

with wrath, and he jabbed his quill into the tough skin of John Bull

with patriotic vigor. The shame of the burning of the capitol rankled

in the American heart, and Paulding discovered fresh grievances in

remembering that from England had come the banking system and the

“shin-plaster dynasty” that would breed in the new country the evils

of the old if they were not looked to. He was convinced that the mother

country wished ill to her offspring, and he thanked God in successive

volumes that democratic America was not what Tory England was.

For despite the English travelers--Weld, Parkinson, Ashe, Bradbury,

Hall, Trollope, and all the rest of the loquacious tribe--Paulding was

persuaded that America constituted the hope of the future. Here in

this land he believed that men should eventually achieve a measure of

well-being undreamed of in the old world; already the old tyrannies

had been destroyed, the ancient poverty abated. From this stubborn

idealism nothing could turn him aside. It finds expression in an early

poem, and it provides the theme for his last novel. _The Backwoodsman_,

published in 1818, is a rambling and somewhat plethoric idyll of the

West, the hero of which is an archetype of the oppressed and exploited,

who finds a generous asylum in the free land beyond the Alleghenies,

and like Crèvecœur’s Andrew the Hebridean, expands the horizons of

his mind under the beneficent touch of freedom. _The Puritan and His

Daughter_, written over thirty years later, deals with a different

phase of the same general theme. It is a vivid picture of the strife

engendered in America by immigrant families who bring hither their

old-world feuds and animosities, and the curative influence of the

free environment that, in discovering the good rather than the bad in

neighbors, draws together the younger generation despite the jealous

parental authority that would keep them apart. The bigoted fathers make

trouble enough--the fanatical Puritan who fought with Cromwell and the

headstrong Cavalier who defended divine right--wilful men whom even

the common frontier perils cannot reconcile or make tolerant; but they

are powerless to thwart the ways of nature. The son of the Cavalier

discovers an attractive woman in the daughter of the Puritan, and when

love walks in the twilight what matters theology or politics. Youth has

its own notions of divine right; in its creed the dogmas of John Calvin

and Robert Filmer have no place; and if the lovers are more tolerant

than the fathers it only proves that a freer environment will manage

to soften the traditional animosities and beget a kindlier race from

the merging of classes. Such at least is the characteristic thesis

that Paulding elaborates through two volumes of discursive narrative

interspersed with bits of vigorous action.

Of this kindly melting pot Paulding himself was a product. He had

rid himself wholly of all ties that would bind him to Europe. He was

partisan to no cause or party, literary or political, of the old world.

He was content to be American and suffer his native land to bound his

loyalties. In his own literary practice he refused to imitate the

current English fashions and he spoke his mind freely to the American

reading public for its greedy swallowing of cheap imported food. He did

not take kindly to the English romantic writers, and went often out of

his way to have a dig at his two pet aversions, Scott and Byron.[424]

His amusing tale of _Koningsmarke, the Long Finne_, is a good-natured

burlesque of certain romantic mannerisms of the Waverley novels, and

a defense of Cooper’s _Pioneers_ for its homely realism. Paulding’s

dislike of the “blood-pudding” fiction that had come over from England,

and that proved so disastrous to the genius of Gilmore Simms, was

inveterate, and in his whimsical dedication of _The Puritan and His

Daughter_ to the sovereign people he comments on the public taste thus:

I am not ignorant of your preference for high-seasoned dishes

of foreign cookery, most especially blood-puddings, plentifully

spiced and sauced with adultery, seduction, poisoning, stabbing,

suicide, and all other sublime excesses of genius. I am aware also

that Your Majesty, being yourself able to perform impossibilities,

believed nothing impossible. Possessing this clew to Your Majesty’s

royal approbation, I solemnly assure you I have gone as far as I

could to secure it, with a safe conscience. I have laid about me

pretty handsomely, and sprinkled a good number of pages with blood

enough, I hope, to make a pudding. If I have any apology to make

to Your Majesty, it is for permitting some of my people to die a

natural death, a thing so unnatural that it has been banished from

all works of fiction aiming at the least semblance to truth....

But, may it please Your Majesty, I am troubled with weak nerves,

and my great grandfather was a Quaker. I am, therefore, naturally

averse to bloodshed, and have more than once nearly fallen into

convulsions over the pages of Monsieur Alexandre Dumas, whom

I consider a perfect Guillotine among authors. In short, may

it please Your Majesty, I abjure poisoning, or smothering with

charcoal, and confess myself deplorably behind the spirit of this

luminous age, which is as much in advance of all others, as the

forewheel of a wagon is ahead of the hind ones.

In his politics--and as a good American of the times he took his

politics seriously--Paulding found in the popular drift towards

Jacksonian democracy an expression of his deepest convictions. It

was moving in the direction he had long faced, and he went with

it whole-heartedly, enjoyed some of the emoluments of office, and

eventually served as Secretary to the Navy in the cabinet of Van Buren.

With Jackson’s attack on the Bank he must have been in deep sympathy,

for his dislike of the new financial system was of long standing. His

father had suffered heavily from a depreciated Continental currency,

and he early came to distrust all banks and banking. His political

views, indeed, were pretty much determined by the Physiocratic

convictions that underlay his thinking. He had been a Jeffersonian

long before the rise of Jacksonianism. Portions of his _Letters from

the South_, published in 1817, seem like excerpts from the agrarian

writings of John Taylor of Caroline. There is the same contemptuous

analysis of the “shin-plaster dynasty,” the same concern at the growth

of trading towns, the same conviction that cities and poverty and low

morals go hand in hand, the same trust in the perennial wholesomeness

of country life. Such a passage as this will suffice to reveal his

leanings towards a Physiocratic economy:

I was saying, that we have too many people living in cities,

in proportion to our farmers, who, after all, are the backbone

of every country, whence originates its riches and its solid

strength.... Yet our people cling to the towns and cities,

attracted by the hope of sudden wealth, and despising the slow,

yet sure, rewards of agriculture, which, without leading a man to

inordinate riches, secure him for ever from the chances of sinking

into beggary or want. The race of paupers receives no recruits

from them; for in all my sojournings, I may say with truth, that

I never saw an industrious farmer forsaken, “or his seed begging

bread.” One great cause of the disproportion of numbers ...

between the agricultural and other classes of the community, is

the great system of paper money, which has struck at the root of

regular, persevering industry, whose rewards, though slow, are

always certain. For some years back, hardly a tradesman in our

cities, and of late in our little towns (each of which, however

insignificant, has now its snug little bank) thinks of growing rich

by his industry. No; he must get accommodations at some bank, and

plunge into speculations: nor can you now go into a cobbler’s stall

without seeing a bank notice, or perhaps two or three, stuck up

with an awl at the chimney-piece, to remind the honest gentleman

that he owes a great deal more than he can pay. Thus is the axe

laid to the very root of national morals, and consequently national

prosperity, and the whole American people, farmers excepted, sunk

into an abject subjection to banks and their directors. (_Letters

from the South_, Vol. I, pp. 100-102.)

So confirmed an agrarian would easily arrive at agrarian conclusions in

his meditations on the nature and functions of the political state.

Unlike Irving, who, having no political convictions, was equally

pleased with Whig or Democrat if he happened to be a gentleman,

Paulding was something of a political philosopher with clear-cut

doctrines. He was too shrewd an observer of ways political to be

caught by party cries, or to ignore the class selfishness that would

make government a party to its ends. As a Jeffersonian he retained an

old-fashioned distrust of the political state. As an eighteenth-century

liberal he would keep the state within narrow bounds. Jealous for a

freedom worthy of free citizens, he wanted government to keep hands

off what did not concern it. He would not have the state used as a

cat’s-paw to pull anybody’s chestnuts out of the fire, whether in the

form of Clay’s American System, or what not. For protective tariffs

and internal improvements--those grandiose schemes for hastening

prosperity--he felt an old-fashioned repugnance that found issue

in amusing caricature. In _Westward Ho!_ he introduces a French

publican of a Mississippi River village who does not care for Yankee

improvements and describes them thus:

Diable! monsieur, another improvement; last year they assess me for

one grand public improvement! one road to go somewhere, I don’t

know. Eh bien! I pay the money. Well, this year they assess me for

one other grand public improvement--very grand--voilà, monsieur,

one other road, right alongside the other, both going to the same

place. Diable! I no want to travel on two turnpike roads. Ah!

monsieur le colonel, I shall be very rich, O! very rich indeed,

by these grand improvements. They take away all my land to make

room for the grand improvement; they take away all my money to

pay for him, and then they tell me my land worth four, six time

so much as before. Peste! what that to me when my land all gone

to the dem public improvement, hey? I shall be very rich then.

Diable! I wish myself gone to some country where every thing was

go backwards--what you call tail foremost, instead of forwards,

for the dem march of improvement shall ruin me at last. (Vol. II,

Chapter XVI.)

Satire aimed at the new gospel of progress is not infrequent in

Paulding. In _Koningsmarke_ he drew the picture of a politician that

was perhaps intended for a burlesque of Henry Clay. The worthy Wolfgang

Langfanger, member of the council of Elsingburgh, having “brought

his private affairs into great confusion, by devoting too much time

to the public good,” began “to think it high time the public good

should repay some part of its weighty obligations. He had accordingly

invented, and persuaded the Heer Piper to put into practice, a system

of internal improvement, which has been imitated, from time to time,

in this country ever since with great success. The essence of his plan

consisted in running in debt for the present, and living afterwards

upon the anticipation of future wealth” (Book Second, Chapter VI). Big

with his wonderful idea the busy councilor projected great docks and

wharves for the commerce that was to be invited to come, a fine canal

that would cut off a full six miles for barges that were not yet on

the stocks, and a magnificent plan of new streets that led through

houses that must be pulled down and fields that must forego their

usual harvests. Such goodly improvements naturally cost money, and to

maintain the public credit taxes were levied, and still more taxes,

until, like the French tavern-keeper, the good people of Elsingburgh

were brought to doubt the wisdom of investing in future prosperity at

so high a present cost.

But the masterpiece of Langfanger’s policy was that of pulling

down an old market, and building a new one in another part of the

village, in the management of which business he is supposed to have

laid down the first principles of the great and thriving science of

political economy, or picking people’s pockets on a grand scale.

He caused the people living near the old market to pay roundly

for its removal as a nuisance; and then he caused the people that

lived about where the new one was to be built, to pay roundly for

the vast pleasure and advantage of its neighbourhood. Thus he

pinched them through both ears, and got the reputation of a great

financier. (Book Seventh, Chapter III.)

_Koningsmarke_ is Paulding’s most interesting work, and the utter

neglect that has overtaken it is far from deserved. It is native and

original, full of shrewd comment and sly satire, and it embodies most

of Paulding’s pet theories and aversions. Few books of the time are

more amusing than this tale of the Long Finne who moves in a dark cloud

of mystery woven by Bombie of the Frizzled Head, barks his sturdy

shins on many a blood-curdling adventure, proves a true knight to his

lady, and in the end turns out to be a very ordinary fellow who has

been blown up to heroic size by the black art of romance. Paulding

must have had great fun writing it, for his wit still preserves its

freshness after a hundred years. It is a whimsical satire on the ways

of the hour, literary and other, set against the background of an

old Swedish settlement on the banks of the Delaware; but the chief

purpose of its quizzical pages is the pouring of a broadside into

the picturesque hull of contemporary fiction. It is an attack on the

abundant extravagance of current romance that had been inflated by

“Monk” Lewis and Sir Walter. Paulding cleverly hits off the high-flown

and ghostly, the love of blood pudding, the snobbish contempt for the

homely and native. Written in 1823, the year of Cooper’s _Pioneers_,

it defends the realism of characters and setting in that work against

the charge of vulgarity and commonplace, but it takes pains to satirize

Cooper’s noble red man of the forest. Paulding’s Indians are more like

Bird’s than Cooper’s, material for burlesque rather than romance, but

as he runs over the names of the warriors--“the Big Buffalo, the Little

Duck-Legs, the Sharp-Faced Bear, the Walking Shadow, the Iron Cloud,

the Jumping Sturgeon, the Belly Ache, and the Doctor, all legitimate

sovereigns, with copper rings in their noses, blanket robes of state,

and painted faces”--amusement at their childishness is tempered by the

recognition that they have been overreached and dispossessed by the

grasping white men.

In some of his later work the line between burlesque and serious is not

so clearly marked, and one hesitates to pronounce whether _Westward

Ho!_ is a sober attempt at popular romance or a _reductio ad absurdum_

of the current romantic flummery. Certainly it is a preposterous story

with its melancholy hero driven mad by fear of madness and indulging in

gibberish that comes straight out of Shakespeare, and with its ample

crop of stock characters--Master Zeno Paddock and Mrs. Judith Paddock

with their prying inquisitiveness, Colonel Dangerfield the easy-going

Virginia gentleman who in staking his estate on a horse race embodies

the plantation tradition, and Bushfield the backwoodsman who cannot

live in a world that has left off its moccasins, and removes to a place

where there are no laws and no lawyers and where constables do not

visit a man who has thrashed his neighbor. _Westward Ho!_ is not an

amusing book; it is quite lacking in local color, and its casual bits

of realism and occasional satire are too inconsequential to signify.

_The Dutchman’s Fireside_, written at about the same time, is far more

successful. It purports to be an account of the Knickerbocker society

in the days of the Old French war, and it contains some lovely pictures

of old times that one reads with pleasure; but it indulges somewhat

freely in adventure amongst the Indians and in the war, and its love

story is needlessly romantic. Although Paulding still protests against

a blood-pudding diet, he indulges occasionally in the high-flown, to

the detriment of the idyllic note. Romance was all about him and

he could not wholly escape its compulsions. Too casual in his work,

too undisciplined in the craft of writing, he remained to the end an

amusing amateur, a homespun man of letters who never took the trouble

to master his technic. There was excellent stuff in him, solider

perhaps than in Irving, but his failure suggests the difference between

the journeyman and the artist.

Footnotes

[423] Writing to his wife a month afterwards, Cooper said: “By the

way, Mrs. Willing has let out the secret of Irving’s appointment. He

wrote to Webster to remember him _if any good thing offered_. So that

instead of not asking for the office, he asked for anything that was

good. There has been more humbug practised concerning this man than

concerning any other now living” (Cooper, _Correspondence of James

Fenimore-Cooper_, Vol. II, p. 469).

[424] See _Letters from the South_, Vol. I, _Letter XXII_.

Chapter IV • James Fenimore Cooper • Critic

Fenimore Cooper is one of the puzzling figures of his generation.

In his substantial character was embodied what may well appear no

more than a bundle of contradictions. Romancer and social critic,

feudal-minded yet espousing a republican faith, he pretty much baffled

his own generation in its testy attempts to understand him, as he has

pretty much baffled later times. No other major writer, unless it be

Whitman, has been so misunderstood, and no other offers a knottier

problem to the student of American letters. The stubborn clay of

his nature was molded to a pattern unlike that of his fellows, and

the difference was long accounted to him as a grave shortcoming.

His outspoken individualism was a constant irritant to a sensitive

majority, and his aloofness from the common enthusiasms was reckoned

no better than treason to his native land. The right of the individual

to question the herd pronouncements was a right not acknowledged by

the herd, and the more it tried to silence Cooper’s tongue the more

caustic and loquacious it became. He refused to be silenced though

it should come to open warfare. His later years in consequence were

rendered unhappy by a thousand petty vexations, and his creative work

was brought only this side of shipwreck.

How and why so great a misadventure befell him are questions of

prime importance to which little attention has been given. That his

tactlessness was at fault is commonly believed--his tactlessness and a

certain pugnacious virtue that would inculcate righteousness by means

of a broken head. But such an explanation, true enough so far as it

goes, does not go far enough. The trouble lay deeper than that; it lay

in the mind of Cooper himself, in the doubts and uncertainties that

dwelt side by side with stubborn dogmatisms, troubling his speculations

and perplexing his plainest counsels. And that trouble must be traced

to an underlying conflict between the man and his age, between the

ideal and the real, between high loyalties and petty fact. Fenimore

Cooper was the barometer of a gusty generation, sensitive to every

storm on the far horizon. No other observer of that changing generation

suffered so keenly in mind and conscience from the loosening of ancient

ties, and none labored so hard to keep his countrymen to the strait

path of an old-fashioned rectitude. His busy life covered the middle

years of the great shift from an aristocratic order to a capitalistic

order, and this revolutionary change provided him ample materials for

brooding speculation. At every turn in the road fresh doubts assailed

him. The perplexities and dogmatisms that clutter so many of his later

pages, playing havoc with his romantic art, are a testimony to the

confusions of a generation in the midst of epic changes. As honest a

man as ever spoke his mind frankly, he endeavored to reconcile the

irreconcilable, and establish sure standards amid the wreck of all

standards. He could not drift. He must discover some working agreement

between the old America and the new, between the reputed excellencies

of the traditional aristocratic order, and the reputed justice of the

democratic ideal. But unfortunately for this difficult business he was

temperamentally ill-equipped. He was always at war with himself. His

loyalties and his conscience ran at cross-purposes. His mind was packed

with prejudices as an egg with meat. He was too partisan to compromise,

and too honest to be content with the shoddy. His instinctive

romanticisms were always being buffeted by fact, and his troubled mind

in consequence was forever constructing laborious defense-mechanisms.

For those deep confusions that marred his later work and brought

such bitter misunderstanding upon him, his heritage was much to

blame. A romantic at heart, he was out of sympathy with the dominant

romanticisms of his generation. Certain hold-overs from the past held

him back from hearty participation in the present. He loved the world

that was falling into decay too much to put away its virtues with its

smallclothes; he would preserve what was excellent in the old to enrich

and dignify what was excellent in the new; he would have the young

democracy learn the decorum of a staid aristocracy. It is this fond

lingering between worlds that sets Cooper apart from his fellows. He

was an English squire of the old school turned republican, who did not

quite like the company he found himself in. He was equally puzzled at

the bumptious leveling of the coonskin democracy, and the exploitative

spirit of Wall Street Whiggery. But though he railed at the newfangled

ways with the testiness of a squire, he was too confirmed a republican,

too deeply concerned that the great venture in republicanism should

demonstrate its wisdom, to overlook its shortcomings. He would have

it be so true to its ideal that the world would acknowledge its

excellence. He could not circumscribe his duties to election-day

hurrahs; he must ferret out treason in the market place; he must be

faithful in counsel though he utter unwelcome truths. It was the very

faithfulness of Cooper to his conception of an ideal republic that

brought him into collision with his fellows and filled his later days

with bitterness.

It is easy to see where Cooper got those stubborn notions that marked

him as the last of our eighteenth-century squires and left him obsolete

after the adoption of the Constitution of 1821. From his father, from

the Tory rector of St. Peter’s, Albany, who first schooled him, from

the Loyalist family of De Lancey into which he married, from Governor

Jay and the old gentry with whom he was brought up, he imbibed certain

stalwart conservatisms--political, religious, social, economic--that

mingled in his blood and nourished the tissues of caste prejudice

from which his maturer social philosophy struggled in vain to escape.

In spite of his deliberate acceptance of the democratic principle,

as he understood that principle, he remained at heart as sturdily

eighteenth-century as any fox-hunting master of English acres. He

had early been bred in the old traditions at Otsego Hall where he

spent his boyhood. His father, Judge William Cooper, “a testy and

choleric gentleman easily wrought into passion,”--whom he idealized as

Judge Temple in _The Pioneers_--was an old-school politician of high

Federalist persuasion, a vigorous, not to say truculent, embodiment of

the stake-in-society principle of statecraft. Smitten with the common

itch for large land holdings, he had got his hands on a huge virgin

tract which he managed in the old baronial fashion. He was a real lord

of the manor and late in life he recalled that “there were 40,000 souls

holding land, directly or indirectly, under me”; and in the year 1800

“he set up a claim to having placed the plough upon more acres than any

other man in America” (quoted in D. R. Fox, _The Decline of Aristocracy

in the Politics of New York_, p. 136). Otsego Hall in Cooperstown was

a frontier citadel of Federalism defending the western marches against

Jeffersonian democracy, and Judge Cooper used his economic power

over tenants with telling effect. He “rode far and wide in the cause

of Jay and later Aaron Burr, always preaching the musty doctrine that

government had better be left to gentlemen, and that simple folk should

vote as they were told” (_ibid._, pp. 136-137). When persuasion failed

he resorted to threats, and in 1792 he was before the legislature on

impeachment charges. From the testimony it appears that the patriarchal

Judge used direct methods with tenants in arrears; he “had been round

to the people and told them that they owed him, and that unless they

voted for Mr. Jay, he would ruin them” (_ibid._, p. 140). By such

arguments it was thought some seven hundred votes had been brought into

the Federalist column by this exemplar of the old virtues.

But Cooper had drifted with his age far from such old-fashioned methods

of class domination. In spite of his great love for his father he

seems never to have espoused the latter’s political creed. With the

disintegration of Federalism the young man went with the country in

its turning towards French romanticism. When and why he adopted the

democratic faith is not apparent, but until middle life it would seem

that he concerned himself little with political theory. He remained a

provincial American with an intense pride of patriotism. But his long

stay in Europe, lasting from June, 1826, to November, 1833, and the

Jacksonian revolution that took place during his absence, put him upon

an anxious examination of first principles, and thereafter to the end

of his life the social and political problems of America were a burden

on his conscience. He arrived late at a reasoned political faith, as

he arrived late at his literary art, and it is impossible to trace the

steps of his intellectual development; yet confused though his thinking

was, and shot through with narrowing prejudices, he persistently sought

for the light; and the germinal source of his dissatisfactions was the

deepening conviction that, in Franklin’s phrase, the affairs of this

world are preposterously managed. From this conviction Cooper never

swerved. The contrast everywhere between the real and the ideal took

hold of his mind as an obsession, and put an end to his contentment.

His romantic art suffered from the intrusion of realism; the romancer

was constantly impelled to turn critic. It was his travels more than

anything else that destroyed his provincial contentment. The perturbing

influence of that experience abroad has never perhaps been adequately

considered by his critics. No other American was so unsettled by

contact with European civilization. It was a Europe in the throes

of revolution and Cooper threw himself with enthusiasm into French

politics, hoping for a wise republican issue from the overturn. But

it was a Europe also of dignified and generous culture that was a

challenge to his Americanism. It made a critic of him and turned his

mind to political and social problems. Europe appealed to his native

aristocratic prejudices, but repelled his democratic; Jacksonian

America appealed to his democratic prejudices, but rode roughshod

over his aristocratic. He found himself nowhere at home. Puzzled and

perturbed, he leveled his shafts at both worlds and sought a haven of

refuge in vicarious existence, at times in the wilderness beyond the

soil and smutch of the Jacksonian frontier, at times in the Utopian

world of _The Crater_ where an honest man could find free play for his

creative energy, until the trouble makers came upon him.

In temperament and outlook this later Cooper was another John Adams

modified by changing times. A realist in his long brooding over social

and political evils, he was at heart an idealist greatly concerned

with justice amongst men, with a romantic fondness for dwelling on

the virtues of earlier days. Like Adams he understood very well that

equality is a Utopian dream; that social classes exist in every society

that has accumulated property, and that sovereignty in the long run

will fall into the hands that control the social economics.[425] The

problem he set himself to consider was the problem of reconciling this

universal fact with his own predilection in favor of democracy. That

he regarded himself as a democrat his emphatic assertions suffice

to prove; but no more than Emerson was he deceived by the spurious

democracy of the times. “The writer believes himself to be as good a

democrat as there is in America,” he said in the Introduction to _The

American Democrat_. “But his democracy is not of the impracticable

school. He prefers a democracy to any other system, on account of its

comparative advantages, but not on account of its perfection. He knows

it has evils; great and increasing evils, and evils peculiar to itself;

but he believes that monarchy and aristocracy have more. It will be

very apparent to all who read this book, that he is not a believer in

the scheme of raising men very far above their natural propensities.”

He would lift his voice in no hurrah for the majority, for he knew

that the majority was very likely to be the tool of the demagogue. He

saw no peculiar virtue or special intelligence in a coonskin cap, and

he discovered no advantage in log cabins and hard cider as a training

school for statesmen. He had watched the disgraceful campaign of 1840

with concern that gentlemen should stoop to the demagoguery that marked

that electoral debauch; and it confirmed him in the conviction that

“old-fashioned, high principled gentlemen” of an earlier age would

never have been guilty of such traffic in votes--men like Chancellor

Livingston who devoted his later years to raising Merino sheep, or John

Jay who after filling with dignity many high offices retired to his

estate to concern himself with new varieties of melons.

Hating all humbug, Cooper made it his business to free his mind from

the several varieties of cant that were overrunning America like

pigweed. “Had a suitable compound offered,” he said of _The American

Democrat_, “the title of this book would have been something like

‘Anti-cant.’” Roughly, the history of his essays in criticism falls

into two broad phases: the struggle to pull himself out of the bog

of eighteenth-century caste philosophy--from that stake-in-society

theory which his father upheld; and the struggle to escape the

fallacies of the nineteenth-century philosophy rising about him--from

the rude equalitarianism of Jacksonian democracy, and the materialism

of capitalistic exploitation. His abandonment of the principle of

gentleman-rule marks his definite break with the philosophy of

Federalism and the substitution of democracy. It cost him a prolonged

struggle, for the social-stake theory ran with many of his oldest

predilections, and the evidence of that struggle is scattered broadly

through the pages written in the late thirties; but having convinced

himself of the social wrong involved in the principle, he was tireless

in refutation. In _The American Democrat_ he laid down the principle

that “A government founded on the representation of property, however

direct or indirect, is radically vicious.... It is the proper business

of government to resist the corruptions of money, and not to depend

on them” (_On Property_, p. 141). But it is _The Monikins_, a strange

book much laughed at by the critics, rarely read and little understood,

that concerns itself most largely with the theory. Sadly bungled though

the satire quite obviously is, it is nevertheless a spirited attack on

the social-stake principle that reveals how far Cooper had traveled

from the doctrines of Hamilton and Webster, of Federalist and Whig.

Both England and America--Leaphigh and Leaplow--show meanly under his

caustic analysis, the former perhaps more meanly than the latter; their

institutions, societies, politics, manners, are an unlovely compound of

cant and hypocrisy; and the root of the common meanness he discovers

in human selfishness. He conceives of man as a queer mixture of good

and evil from whom much is not to be expected; something nearer to

Swift’s conception than William Ellery Channing’s; with too much of the

Monikin in him to pass for a child of God; prone to error even under

a republican system; insolent, tyrannical, loving fetishes, given to

brag, too poor-spirited to be free, gilding his fetters and belying

Locke’s saying that chains are an ill wearing. There are depths of

bitterness in _The Monikins_ that startle the reader. It is a tale of

doubt and disillusion, Gulliver-like in its fierceness of attack, that

strikes through all the shoddy romanticisms of the times and reduces

the current democracy to humbug. Subjected to such analysis the old

Federalist shibboleth of men of principle and property is no more than

the East wind in empty bellies. The possession of money does not change

human nature; rich as well as poor are driven by selfish interest, and

to give a loose to property power is to invite political disaster.

Your social-stake system supposes that he who has what is termed a

distinct and prominent interest in society, will be the most likely

to conduct its affairs wisely, justly, and disinterestedly. This

would be true, if those great principles which lie at the root of

all happiness were respected; but unluckily, the stake in question,

instead of being a stake in justice and virtue, is usually reduced

to be merely a stake in property.... Now, all experience shows

that the great property-incentives are to increase property, to

protect property, and to buy with property those advantages which

ought to be independent of property, viz., honors, dignities,

power and immunities. I cannot say how it is with men, but our

[Monikin] histories are eloquent on this head. We have had the

property-principle carried out thoroughly in our practice, and the

result has shown that its chief operation is to render property as

intact as possible, and the bones, and sinews, and marrow of all

who do not possess it, its slaves. (_The Monikins_, Chapter XXVII.)

But though Cooper might deny the validity of the eighteenth-century

social-stake theory, he saw no valid reason to abandon his

eighteenth-century economics. In his preference for a social order

founded on agriculture he was as confirmed a Physiocrat as Franklin or

Jefferson; and this preference determined his judgment on the economic

revolution under way in America. A people living close to the soil was

living more wholesomely, he believed, than a city people immersed in

trade and manufacture. For the capitalistic expansion that followed the

new fiscal system of the seventeen-nineties, he felt an instinctive

repugnance. Banking and the manipulation of credit seemed to him mean

and sordid, and the spirit of speculation that was overrunning the

land he believed was destructive of common morality. The activities

of Wall Street he looked upon with the eyes of an English squire. To

expect any sane progress from such worship of money, to assume that a

high and excellent civilization could result from such worship, seemed

to him plain madness. “God protect the country that has nothing but

commercial towns for capitals,” he wrote his wife in 1839 (Cooper,

_Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper_, Vol. II, p. 404), and the

comment found amplification in many a caustic passage in his novels of

criticism. A materialistic middle class with its gospel of progress

interpreted in terms of wasteful exploitation seemed to him the hateful

progeny of a period of “moral occultation”; and against this “Yankee”

philosophy he waged an unrelenting warfare. In _The Monikins_ he drew

a gloomy picture of the America of the thirties when the land had come

under a great moral eclipse; and in _Home as Found_ and _The Redskins_

he commented bitterly on the universal restlessness that was driving

thousands to the new West to seek their fortunes. The settlement of

the Inland Empire was no romance for him. The Great Migration seemed

to imply the break-up of the older America he loved; and the impact of

the frontier spirit upon the country seemed likely to destroy the last

excellence of an earlier age. It marked for Cooper the final triumph

of the acquisitive Yankee spirit, grasping and lawless in its crude

leveling.

From these germinal sources--his love of the dignified ways of the old

manorial families, his contempt for the middle class, his dislike of a

bumptious leveling, his hatred of brag and cant and enterprise--came

those sharp contrasts in his pictures that set the vulgar present

over against the dignified past. His criticism was in no small part

the reaction of a romantic to the unlovely works of an economic

revolution. From his loyalty to the old came that subtle romanticizing

of the eighteenth century that lends a charm to his tales, and from it

came also that vindictive hatred of the frontier that spurred him to

ill-balanced criticism. He could not like the new that was destroying

the old. Like Emerson he was a man without a party, but unlike him he

sought consolation in the past rather than the future. The excellence

he yearned for he found in that older world whose stable ways were as

yet unsettled by the romantic revolution, and from the meanness of the

present he stole away to find consolation in the dignity and worth of

honester times. The late eighteenth century became, therefore, his

romantic haven and City of Refuge to which he returned gladly. He

was always seeking to revitalize the old in an environment where, as

he lamented, “the eighteenth century may be set down as a very dark

antiquity.”

That Cooper unconsciously romanticized the past is only too evident.

Too often he accepted its self-proclaimed virtues as sober fact and

created a race of squires that never existed outside his pages.

Realist though he was in certain moods, he abandoned his realism in

the presence of the tie-wig gentry. His father was as graspingly

eighteenth century as Gouverneur Morris and saw to it that his own nest

was well feathered; yet the son failed to perceive that the dignified

professions of those old gentlemen were little more than splendid

gestures. He made the mistake of taking them at their face value.

Honest himself, he attributed an equal honesty to the older generation,

and he watched with unfeigned regret the disintegration of an order

that seemed to him the repository of much that was excellent. Fragments

of its ideals he clung to; its dignity, its concern for breeding

and manners, its fine distinction. Fragments also of its political

convictions: its concern for law and order, its belief that all just

law is founded in morality, its insistence that American government

is one of principles and not of men. He put his finger shrewdly on

certain fallacies of eighteenth-century theory, but he took too many

of its values at par. The twilight is a mighty sorcerer and Cooper was

bewitched by the half light that lingered softly on the familiar past.

This suffices to explain the grounds of the charge of aristocratic

leanings that Cooper was persistently brought under. His bold defense

of the landed gentry gave mortal enmity to the Jacksonians, and the

tactlessness with which he pointed out the crude provincialisms of

America--the bumptious plebeians he set over against the priggish

gentlemen--was rubbing salt on open sores. _Home as Found_ and _The

Redskins_ were onslaughts on the ways of the sacred majority that

America could not forgive him for. Yet no counter criticism ever moved

Cooper from his conviction that gentlemen of an earlier generation

possessed dignity, principles, character, far beyond the speculators

and politicians and “small-potato lawyers” of the present time of

“moral occultation”; and the difference in favor of the old he traced

to the economic basis of the tie-wig gentry. Believing with John Adams

that an aristocracy is implicit in every established society, he

frankly preferred a landed to a capitalistic aristocracy. Gentlemen of

the old school were neighborhood patriarchs. Secure in position and

possessions they disdained to keep an ear to the ground or court a

silly popularity. They were squires with a high sense of responsibility

to themselves and society. Their stake in the land was a stabilizing

influence in their lives; and their ample way of living, their

well-bred leisure, their courteous bearing learned from a cosmopolitan

experience, seemed to Cooper a desirable influence in a society lacking

refinement and exact standards. To supplant them with the new gentry of

Wall Street seemed to him plain folly, and he watched the decay of the

old families with a pathetic concern. The Anti-Rent novels are a long

defense of a thesis that comes to final expression in such a passage as

this from _The Redskins_:

I say that, in a country like this, in which land is so abundant

as to render the evils of a general monopoly impossible, a landed

gentry is precisely what is most needed for the higher order of

civilization, including manners, tastes, and the minor principles,

and is the very class which, if reasonably maintained and properly

regarded, would do the most good at the least risk of any social

caste known. (Chapter XXVI.)

It is not hard, indeed, to understand Cooper’s preference for Stephen

Van Rensselaer the Patroon, to John Jacob Astor the fur trader, or

Commodore Vanderbilt the ferryman; yet such preference was charged

against him as un-American.

It was this revulsion from the meanness of the present that sent

Cooper into the wilderness or out on the high seas, to seek adventure

in the company of nature’s noblemen, and forget the sordidness of the

real. Here again the French school prompted his thinking, if only to

supplement the romance of his boyish recollections. Natty Bumppo is

quite evidently man as he came from the hand of nature, uncorrupted by

the vices of the settlements; indeed one might question whether the

back-to-nature literature can show another figure so enduringly vital

as the Leatherstocking. From this same material is fashioned Uncas

and the younger Chingachgook and still other lovable figures of his

romances. They belong to the free wilderness beyond the settlements,

where the dramatic flight and pursuit go on unchecked by impertinent

fences. Here their native virtues expand and their generous gifts find

ample play. They shunned the settlements as Cooper shunned them. On the

frontier, the middle ground between nature and civilization, Cooper’s

spirits flagged. He had no love for the stumpy clearings, the slovenly

cabins, the shiftless squatters; the raw devastation of the ax grieved

him and he breathes contentedly only after he has left the last scars

behind and is in the deep woods beyond the smell of rum. Such a man

obviously was unfitted to write a just account of the frontier as

it straggled westward. He hated its ways too fiercely to do justice

to it, and when he comes upon it in his tales, when he introduces a

frontier figure such as Ishmael Bush in _The Prairie_ or old Aaron

Thousandacres in _The Chainbearer_, it is to depict the unhappy state

of society where the virtues of nature are gone and the refinements

of civilization not yet come. No writer has set down a more sweeping

indictment of the frontier than Cooper, and he set it down because the

frontier seemed to him the muddy source of the vulgar leveling he hated

so heartily. A gentleman, whether Indian or squire or scout, Cooper

loved to be with; but a vulgarian he could not endure, and a rascal

stirred his Puritan wrath. In consequence there runs through his work

little of the amusing picaresque strain that the heartier nature of

Gilmore Simms delighted in, and that made him a truer chronicler of

frontier ways.

Democrat though he professed to be, Cooper shrank from the logical

application of the democratic principle. The adoption of manhood

suffrage in New York brought in its train a sorry scramble of

demagogues to sway the popular will, a debasement of the press, and

a vulgarizing of political life that proved a sore trial to Cooper’s

faith. He was too severely moralist to enjoy the little weaknesses of

human nature, but must set himself up as custodian of public morals.

Affronted by a bumptious vulgarity, he became the assailant rather than

the critic of Jacksonian ways. The land to which he returned in 1833

was a broad target for his shafts and he sent them into the white. The

America of log cabins and hard cider seemed to him to have repudiated

the traditional standards, moral as well as cultural, and he attributed

the disintegration to the corruption that came from the extension of

the suffrage to classes unprepared to use it wisely. It was this that

embittered his criticism in the caustic pages of _Homeward Bound_ and

_Home as Found_. He was startled and resentful at the changes. “You

have been dreaming abroad,” remarked one of the characters in the

former, “while your country has retrograded, in all that is respectable

and good, a century in a dozen years” (_Homeward Bound_, Chapter XVII).

The colossal brag, the meaningless unrest, the abysmal provincialism,

he marked as the natural by-products of the mob mind. In throwing off

its old restraints America was coming to deny all standards of decency

and excellence. “What then do you deem our greatest error--our weakest

point?” asks one of his characters, and the reply is explicit:

Provincialisms, with their train of narrow prejudices, and a

disposition to set up mediocrity as perfection, under the double

influence of an ignorance that unavoidably arises from a want of

models, and of the irresistible tendency to mediocrity in a nation

where the common mind so imperiously rules. (_Home as Found_,

Chapter XXV.)

It was during the bustling decade of the forties, when the agrarian

unrest in York State was putting in jeopardy the old manorial system,

that Cooper’s antagonism to the spirit of leveling became bitterest;

and it was in defense of the old system that he wrote the Anti-Rent

trilogy that should always be set over against the Leatherstocking

tales. Taken together the two series contain pretty much the whole

of Cooper, his sea tales excepted; either alone gives an inadequate

and partial view. The one is a social study, the other a romantic

epic. The one gives a picture of the changes the years have brought

to a given region, the other follows the retreating wilderness as the

frontier moved westward. The Anti-Rent novels present the reverse of

the romantic picture of the Leatherstocking tales. Their central figure

is Aaron Thousandacres the squatter, who has come out of Connecticut

to possess what pleases him, regardless of legal rights. Offspring of

generations of covetous, psalm-singing Puritans, he has no difficulty

in justifying his lawlessness by Yankee logic. The devil can quote

Scripture, and in this respect old Thousandacres is the devil’s own

son. When Scripture fails the easy gospel of natural rights comes to

his aid; the written law may be on the side of the title-holder, but

natural law is on the side of the squatter.

“There’s two rights to all the land on ’arth, and the whull world

over,” the squatter replied to Chainbearer’s legal argument. “One

of these rights is what I call a king’s right, or that which

depends on writin’s, and laws, and sich like contrivances; and

the other depends on possession. It stands to reason, that fact

is better than any writin’ about it can be.” (_The Chainbearer_,

Chapter XXV.)

Such lax doctrine, to Cooper, was the evil fruit of the spirit of

lawlessness that was laying a blight upon America. A retributive bullet

ends the fierce career of old Thousandacres, but his tigress wife,

his rough sons and slattern daughters are driven from their home to

plunge deeper into the wilderness, there to beget other generations of

squatters whose vicious doctrines return to plague society. No romance

blends with the tale of their lives; no sympathy softens the picture of

the stern old Yankee. He has set himself against law and order and must

yield or be destroyed. It is the old story of the struggle for land, a

struggle that went on for generations between speculator and squatter,

between rich and poor, with much wrong and much right on both sides;

yet Cooper’s sympathies are cold to the squatter’s plea and he enlists

God, morality, and the law, in defense of a title to forty thousand

acres wheedled from the Indians for ninety-six pounds, York currency,

spent in trinkets. Righteousness without a sense of humor is not easy

to live with.

In much of his later work Cooper’s romantic impulses are held in check

by a growing tendency towards realism. It was there from the first but

as he grew more critical it spread over more of his pages. He tried

to hold the scales of his judgment even, but his realism was marred

and distorted by his vehement nature. A mind exuding prejudice is

ill equipped to deal objectively with material, and Cooper was too

inveterate a moralist to accept the principle of impersonal detachment.

He prided himself on facing fact, but he loved to preach; and having

pointed out the wrongfulness of vicious morals he must follow it

with a vigorous homily on right conduct. And yet despite his gross

shortcomings there is a deal of realism scattered through his volumes.

He consciously tried to be a chronicler of manners, to depict America

truly, to recreate fairly present and past, red man and white, Dutch

and Yankee. His prejudices certainly got the better of him in dealing

with New England, and his romance certainly got the better of him in

describing the Mohicans. Yet though he might romanticize Uncas he

did not romanticize Saucy Nick in _Wyandotté_, but drew an excellent

picture of the struggle between the drunkard and the warrior in the

heart of the Tuscarora that reveals much of the Indian nature--an

analysis that holds the scales more evenly than they are held in _The

Last of the Mohicans_ or in Bird’s _Nick of the Woods_. The book as a

whole, indeed, is an excellent example of Cooper’s desire to substitute

a critical for a romantic treatment of materials. In his discriminating

analysis of the motives separating families in the Revolutionary war,

there is no glorification of partisanship, no prejudiced espousal of a

sacred cause, no division of sheep and goats. Cooper will have none of

the cheap romance of patriotism, but probes skillfully into the motives

and impulses that divided honest men amid the difficulties of civil

war. More than that, he makes his villain one of the patriot party who

uses the unsettlement of the times to cover his dirty tracks. It is a

characteristic document that deserves to stand beside _Satanstoe_ as an

example of his later work.

Politics was all about Cooper while he was writing these tales, and

his sporadic incursions into criticism led him into the field of

political theory. So doughty a warrior must break a lance when all

America was engaged in a great political tourney. While Whig and

Democrat were loudly professing allegiance to the new doctrine of

majority rule, Cooper was making his way back to the principles of

the eighteenth century and discovering the essence of good government

in self-restraint. The mistake of the new school, he was convinced,

lay in confusing the present will of the majority with the rule of

the people; the mistake of the old school lay in confusing the will

of the minority with the rule of the people. Above and beyond both

majority and minority is the eternal principle of justice, and any

government that flouts that principle is bad government, no matter

how sanctioned. In a republic which foolishly believes that the voice

of the people is the sole criterion of right, the problem of justice

is peculiarly difficult, for what remedies are available in cases “in

which the people themselves happen to go astray, _en masse_”? It is the

problem that attends every ethical interpretation of sovereignty, and

it awakened acute concern in Cooper’s mind. He could find no solution

except in the good sense of the people, and with a vicious press and

persuasive demagogues doing their best to befuddle the public mind,

the outlook seemed dark. It was not the people he distrusted, but the

self-seekers who set up to be leaders of the people. All the noise was

made by demagogues who proclaimed their own mouthings to be authentic

public opinion. How ineffectively Cooper struggled with the problem is

written down in many a passage in his critical novels.

God help the nation [he said in _The Redskins_] where

self-government, in its literal sense, exists.... When a people

that has been properly educated by experience calmly selects its

agents, and coolly sets to work to adopt a set of principles to

form its fundamental law or constitution, the machine is on the

right track, and will work well enough so long as it is kept there;

but this running off and altering the fundamental principles every

time a political faction has need of recruits, is introducing

tyranny in its worst form--a tyranny that is just as dangerous to

real liberty as hypocrisy is to religion. (Chapter XIII.)

Some observers pretend that ... respect for law is gradually

decreasing among us [he argued in _The Chainbearer_] and that

in its place is sensibly growing up a disposition to substitute

the opinions, wishes, and interests of local majorities, making

the country subject to men instead of principles. The last are

eternal and immutable; and coming of God, men, however unanimous

in sentiment, have no more right to attempt to change them, than

to blaspheme His holy name. All that the most exalted and largest

political liberty can ever beneficially effect is to apply these

principles to the good of the human race, in the management of

their daily affairs; but when they attempt to substitute for these

pure and just rules of right, laws conceived in selfishness and

executed by the power of numbers, they merely exhibit tyranny

in its popular form, instead of in its old aspect of kingly and

aristocratic abuses. It is a fatal mistake to fancy that freedom

is gained by the mere achievement of a right to govern, unless the

manner in which that right is to be both understood and practised

is closely incorporated with all popular notions of what has been

obtained. The right to govern means no more than the right of the

people to avail themselves of the power thus acquired to apply the

great principles of justice to their own benefit, and from the

possession of which they had hitherto been excluded. It confers

no power to do that which is inherently wrong, under any pretense

whatever. (Chapter XXVIII.)

Like Hugh Henry Brackenridge before him, Cooper was a democrat who

criticized the ways of a reputed democracy because of his love for

an ideal republic. Too few of his kind have arisen in America; too

few who dare to speak their minds unterrified by public opinion. An

individualist of the old English breed, he could not be intimidated

or coerced in the matter of his rights by any clamor, whether of

newspapers or mobs. He had his shortcomings in plenty, both as

romancer and critic. Testy, opinionated, tactless, forever lugging

in disagreeable truths by the ears, he said many wise things so

blunderingly as to make truth doubly offensive, and he hewed at his art

so awkwardly as well-nigh to destroy the beauty of his romance. Yet the

more intimately one comes to know him, the more one comes to respect

his honest, manly nature that loved justice and decency more than

popularity. His daily life became a long warfare with his fellows, who

exacted of him a great price for his idealism; but later generations

should love him none the less for the battles he fought. That America

has been so tardy in coming to know him as a man and a democrat, as

well as a romancer, is a reflection upon its critical acumen.

Footnotes

[425] See the Preface to _The Redskins_.

Chapter V • Some Contributions of New England

It was the good fortune of New York to draw to the bustling city some

of the best and most vigorous minds of New England. If the sons of

Yankees flocked thither, the sons of Puritans came likewise, and the

contributions of these latter to the idealism of a society rather too

fond of material progress must not be overlooked. The literature of

New York in particular was heavily indebted to New England. One need

only run over a list of writers who came from New England to realize

how great was its total contribution to the production of the New York

group. Bryant and Halleck and Willis and Greeley and Beecher and Curtis

and Tuckerman and Parke Benjamin and Stedman and Stoddard and even, in

a sense, Melville, were products of that more serious-minded world that

was to create transcendentalism and issue in strange projects of social

reform; they were men who would easily share the ethical enthusiasm of

their Puritan fellows, and create a literature concerned with other

than aesthetic values. Not all of them were Puritan in ideals; Halleck

and Willis quite evidently not; nevertheless the severe idealism of

their work sets it apart from the productions of the Knickerbocker

school. Perhaps not above, but certainly apart; and this unlikeness

calls for some special consideration. Over against Irving and Paulding

and Cooper may be set Bryant and Greeley and Melville, and the sharp

contrast between them will serve to differentiate the native mind of

New York from that of New England.

I • William Cullen Bryant • Puritan Liberal

For upwards of half a century now too much of Bryant has been

obscured by the brightness of his early fame. Since his death a

serious injustice has been done him by the critics, who have dwelt

too exclusively on his work in the field of verse to the neglect of

other work in fields perhaps quite as significant. The journalist

has been forgotten in the poet, the later democrat who spoke for

American liberalism has been displaced by the youthful versifier who

described American scenery. For this our bellettristic historians, who

are impatient of any incursions into matter of fact, are to blame.

Yet to ignore so much of Bryant results in underestimating him, and

this serves to explain the thin and shadowy quality of his present

reputation. He was a much larger man and more significant than the

critics have made him out to be. His active and many-sided life is very

inadequately expressed in the slender volume of his verse, excellent

as much of that is. The journalist and critic who for fifty years sat

in judgment on matters political and economic as well as cultural,

who reflected in the _Evening Post_ a refinement of taste and dignity

of character before unequaled in American journalism, was of service

to America quite apart from his contribution to our incipient poetry.

He was the father of nineteenth-century American journalism as well

as the father of nineteenth-century American poetry. In the columns

of the _Evening Post_ the best liberalism of the times found a place,

inspired and guided by Bryant’s clear intelligence. The lucidity of his

comment and the keenness of his humanitarian criticism set the editor

apart from shriller contemporaries, and made him a power for sanity in

a scurrilous generation. But with his death the evanescent character of

even the highest journalism asserted itself, and with the fading of his

journalistic reputation the earlier Bryant of _Thanatopsis_ shouldered

aside the Bryant of the _Evening Post_, and an unconscious distortion

of his career began, a distortion made easier by the fact that no

outstanding work of the later period remained to restore the balance.

In this he is like Jefferson. He is scattered piecemeal through his

occasional writings as the latter through his letters, and the task of

piecing him together and visualizing his work as a whole has not yet

been done.

It will not prove an easy task. The narrow but real genius of Bryant

is peculiarly elusive. His was essentially a self-pollenizing nature

that needed few contacts with other minds. He lived within himself,

little swayed by modes of thought, slowly maturing the native fruit of

his speculation. The very tenacity and persistence of his intellectual

life, the rigid integrity of his thinking, suggest the confidence of

one who drew his nourishment from within, whose life was an organic

growth. It is impossible to mistake his origins. The roots go down

to deep substrata of Puritan seriousness and Puritan austerity, and

the fruits which they nourish--somewhat scanty it may be but of firm

texture and good keeping qualities--possess the slightly acrid flavor

of old Puritan orchards where the care of the husbandman is pitted

against harsh seasons and a meager soil. There is no pagan luxuriance,

no riot of color or scent. The ethical idealism of New England is

given stately form if not rendered altogether lovely; the passion for

righteousness is held in restraint but it retains much of its tempered

acidity. Happily there was little of the schools in Bryant, and nothing

of the intellectual play-boy. His early life in the Berkshire hills, on

his father’s farm, as student at Williams College for a few months, and

as a country lawyer, threw him upon his own intellectual resources and

made possible a normal unfolding of his mind. He was fortunately spared

a much-coveted life at Yale, where the narrow classicism and ungenerous

dogmatisms could have done him little good. From Timothy Dwight the

young Bryant could have got little to enrich his mind, and he might

have got some disastrous checks. Left to himself he appropriated such

nourishment as fell in his way and went forward on the path of a sober

liberalism.

That he went forward at all is sufficient testimony to his native

integrity of character. In 1825 when he removed to New York, the

intellectual renaissance of Boston was just at the beginning, and in

his new environment he never quite kept pace with the transcendental

enthusiasms that so stimulated the New England radicals. At Great

Barrington where he had been growing more discontented with his

“shabby” profession of the law, he discovered little to encourage

an independent liberalism. Bred up in an environment of intolerant

Federalism and an equally intolerant Calvinism, he had much to outgrow

and little to feed on. Few innovating ideas penetrated to the Berkshire

hills where he was brooding on life and poetry, and the training of

his youth was strong upon him. As a mere boy he had expostulated

with President Jefferson in shrill heroic couplets, declaiming on

the latter’s reputed moral lapses and inviting him to resign his

high office. He had summoned Napoleon to the bar of Cummington

respectability and adjudged him guilty of high crimes against humanity;

but such rhetorical outbursts were only echoes of a narrow world he

was soon to outgrow. The blight of the tie-wig school of Fisher Ames

did not fasten itself deeply on him, and by the time he had reached his

twenties he was moving towards the twin goals towards which liberal

New England was moving--the Unitarianism of Channing and the democracy

of Jefferson. It was far more difficult for a Berkshire man to think

his way through to such revolutionary goals than for a Concord; yet

the unschooled Bryant who had never visited Boston till he went there

in his twenty-seventh year to read a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa

society at Harvard had already outstripped the Cambridge scholastics

in the great work of setting his mind free. The stages through which

he passed cannot easily be traced, but the fact of his decisive break

with the dogmas of his youthful world is plain enough. During the last

years at Great Barrington he put himself upon a course of reading and

thinking, and from that provocative experience emerged the Bryant that

we know. Calvinism and Federalism he put away, and he went up to New

York completely new-outfitted in a fashion he never afterwards saw

reason to change. In politics and religion, as in poetry, he was a man

of few ideas, but those ideas were creative, and determined all his

thinking.

For this change that was unconsciously preparing him for his later work

on the _Evening Post_, Bryant owed something to his father, who had

turned moderate Unitarian, but very much more to the Berkshire family

of Sedgwicks, one of whom, Catherine M. Sedgwick, was just beginning

her modest career as a “lady novelist;” another, Henry M. Sedgwick,

was at the head of the New York bar, wealthy and liberal-minded; and

a third, Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., was a trusted adviser on legal and

economic matters, on whose pen Bryant came to rely in a difficult

situation. Theodore Sedgwick seems to have been a liberal of the

English school of Bright and Cobden, a confirmed free trader, and he

induced Bryant to undertake a course of reading in political economy.

During the years 1822 to 1824 the young man turned away from poetry and

law to study Adam Smith, Thornton, and Ricardo, together with a number

of pamphlets that issued from the Parliamentary debates over free trade

in 1820. The adventure proved stimulating and definitely determined

his attitude towards men and measures at a moment when American ideas

were in a state of flux. It was therefore as an English liberal that he

judged Jackson and Clay and Webster, and as an English liberal that he

weighed the Utopian programs of Greeley and Brisbane and Ripley. There

is no evidence that he read the works of the French romantics, although

the major ideas of Rousseau came to him in the guise of Unitarianism;

and this aloofness from the social enthusiasm of French thought, this

failure to sympathize with the idealism of the new sociology, may

perhaps be accounted his greatest intellectual shortcoming. Rousseau

and Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft could have taught him much that

he needed to know, could have warmed his cool blood and awakened his

Puritan sense of justice to the wrongs of an exploitative order. A dash

of Utopian enthusiasm would have made him a better poet and a better

editor; but lacking that he found himself sometimes out of sympathy

with men and women whom he should have understood better. A liberal

might smile at the measureless zeal of Fanny Wright and Robert D. Owen;

might dislike the militancy of the Abolitionists; he might well counsel

moderation; but he should not add his shaft to the flight sent against

them. But unfortunately Bryant too often distrusted those who outran

him, and would rather attack than restrain them.[426]

As an English liberal it was inevitable that Bryant should turn

Democrat and support Jackson against Clay and Adams; and an ardent

Democrat he remained till the re-alignment over the slavery question

turned him into a free-soiler. He early supported Lincoln for the

Republican nomination--the more easily because members of his family

had removed to Illinois and there followed the career of Lincoln

sympathetically--and he accepted the Republican faith till the open

alliance of the party with post-war capitalism aroused his opposition

and weakened his allegiance. Democrat though he was in conviction

and sympathy, Bryant was never a Jeffersonian, perhaps not even a

Jacksonian, but rather an anti-Whig, who measured the new America of

the industrial revolution and capitalistic finance by the yardstick of

eighteenth-century liberalism. As a disciple of Adam Smith, believing

in the sufficiency of _laissez faire_, he looked askance at an

engrossing political state that enlisted its sovereign powers on the

side of the longest purses, and he viewed with scorn the mercenaries

of the bench and Senate who defended the new citadels of capitalism.

In spite of his augmenting wealth he remained a simple countryman

at heart, never a city man, never liking the ways of Wall Street,

concerned with other things than money-making. If he had supplemented

Adam Smith with Du Pont de Nemours he might easily have followed

Jefferson into a Physiocratic agrarianism; if he had been bred in the

frontier West he might have discovered more sympathy for a coonskin

equalitarianism with its engrossing majority will. As it was, he

occupied a middle ground between Jefferson and Jackson, an economic

individualist who refused to conceive of the political state as a fat

cow to be milked by whoever could lay hands on her. He wanted no share

of the milk for himself and he saw no reason why others should have

any. He turned his back on all middle-class temptations, refusing to

speculate, not grasping at unearned increment, believing that America

had a nobler destiny in store than could be measured by exploitation.

An old-fashioned liberal, he set himself resolutely against the

exploitative spirit that was clamoring for internal improvements, a

protective tariff, speculative profits. The bitter struggle over the

Bank and the American System, in which he was drawn to Jackson by

principle as well as by admiration for his courage, laid the emphasis

in his mind on financial and industrial problems and made him the

outstanding journalistic opponent of Henry Clay. From first to last

Bryant was anti-Whig.

There were times, to be sure, when he went further than that;

times when his ingrained liberalism threw off its cool restraint

and flamed up in dangerously disturbant fashion. In the depths of

his Puritan nature was a quick sense of justice that might uncover

strange potentialities; and associated as he was in the intimacies

of daily work with two of the most radical spirits in New York,

William Leggett and Parke Godwin, he could not remain untouched by

their social enthusiasms. The former was a man of immense vitality

and boundless sympathies, to whom social justice was a religion. A

left-wing equalitarian democrat, Leggett hated all tariffs, subsidies,

monopolies, credit manipulation, everything that the new capitalism

represented. His sympathies were enlisted on the side of the new

proletarian movement, and with the zeal of a knight-errant he greeted

every opportunity to do battle for the cause. A home-made radical,

created out of the native economics of the industrial revolution, he

has been called by a late historical writer “one of the most sincere

and brilliant apostles of democracy that America has ever known.” His

political leaders in the _Evening Post_ aroused the admiration of such

different men as Whittier and Walt Whitman, and were “perhaps the most

potent force in shaping the ideas of democracy” held by the latter

(Allan Nevins, _The Evening Post, etc._, p. 141). His son-in-law,

Godwin, on the other hand, was a radical of the imported school,

an ardent disciple of Fourier, deeply concerned with communistic

experiments at Brook Farm and elsewhere, and an assistant editor

of _The Harbinger_, the mouthpiece of Brook Farm after it passed

from transcendental to Fourierist control. His _Democracy, Pacific

and Constructive_, was accounted by Horace Greeley the best of the

contemporary studies of collectivism. Less militant than Leggett, his

radicalism ebbed with the years and growing prosperity, but it sufficed

to instruct Bryant in the elements of the current Utopian philosophies.

With such associates the older man was led somewhat unwillingly into

the thick of social struggle and his mind shifted unconsciously to

the left. The movement of Locofocoism in particular absorbed Leggett

and drew Bryant after him. Set on foot by a combination of reforming

economists opposed to banks, paper money, and monopolies, and the

rising proletarian movement then beginning its long struggle to

unionize the city workers, Locofocoism represented the extreme left

wing of democratic equalitarianism, the avowed objective of which

was to take government out of the hands of bankers and lodge it in

the hands of the producers. It was one of the first native attempts

at conscious class alignment between capital and labor. “What

distinguishes the present from every other struggle in which the human

race has been engaged,” wrote Fanny Wright, “is that the present is

evidently, openly and acknowledgedly a war of class.... It is the

ridden people of the earth who are struggling to overthrow the ‘booted

and spurred riders’ whose legitimate title to work and starve will

no longer pass current” (quoted by Fox, _Aristocracy in the Politics

of New York_, p. 396). How the democratic radicalism of Leggett was

received by conservative New York is thus described by the historian of

the _Evening Post_:

He was charged [says Nevins] with Utopianism, agrarianism,

Fanny-Wrightism, Jacobinism, and Jack Cade-ism. His writings were

said to set class against class, and to threaten the nation with

anarchy. Gov. William M. Marcy called Leggett a “knave.” The

advance of the Locofoco movement was likened to the great fire

and the great cholera plague of these years. When Chief Justice

Marshall died in the summer of 1835, Leggett unsparingly assailed

him and Hamilton as men who had tried “to change the character of

the government from popular to monarchical,” and to destroy “the

great principle of human liberty.”... Ex-Mayor Philip Hone was

handed that editorial on the Albany steamboat by Charles King, and

dropped the journal with the vehement ejaculation, “Infamous!”

“This is absolutely a species of impiety for which I want words to

express my abhorrence,” he entered in his diary. (Allan Nevins,

_The Evening Post, etc._, p. 152.)

The enthusiasm of Leggett sometimes carried further than the more

tempered liberalism of Bryant could follow. He shared Leggett’s

distrust of Marshall and Hamilton, but he seems to have been only a

moderate supporter of Locofoco principles. The paper had been brought

close upon financial breakers by its attack on the money-interests. The

working classes read it eagerly, but their indorsement could not make

good the loss of advertising and patronage by the wealthy; yet even

in such straits Bryant remained true to his liberalism and joined his

associates in upholding the proletarian cause. The labor union movement

had aroused the wrath of the employers and the courts were appealed to

to suppress it. In May, 1836, “twenty-one journeymen tailors who had

formed a union were indicted for a conspiracy injurious to trade and

commerce,” and after a trial the presiding judge charged the jury to

bring in a verdict of guilty. Bryant at once attacked the judge in the

_Evening Post_:

We do not admit, until we have further examined the question, that

the law is as laid down by the Judge; but if it be, the sooner

such a tyrannical and wicked law is abrogated the better.... The

idea that arrangements and combinations for certain rates of wages

are injurious to trade and commerce, is as absurd as the idea that

the current prices of the markets, which are always the result

of understandings and combinations, are injurious. (_Ibid._, pp.

164-165.)

When the tailors were heavily fined by the court Bryant returned to

the attack. He again pointed out the fatuousness of the legal logic

by showing how the very price current was a similar evidence of

conspiracy, and then appealed to a sense of common fairness:

Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of

generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the

legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is

not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of

associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman,

and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the

soil. (_Ibid._, p. 165.)

From defending the rights of free labor to defending the rights of free

speech, was an easy step. When James G. Birney’s Abolitionist press

was suppressed by a Cincinnati mob, Bryant spoke out vigorously. “So

far as we are concerned, we are resolved that this despotism shall

neither be submitted to nor encouraged.... We are resolved that the

subject of slavery shall be, as it ever has been, as free a subject

for discussion, and argument, and declamation, as the difference

between whiggism and democracy, or the difference between Arminians

and Calvinists” (_ibid._, p. 171). And when Elijah P. Lovejoy was

murdered and his press thrown into the river, Bryant replied to those

who believed that the Abolitionists had got their deserts: “Whether

they erred or not in their opinions, they did not err in the conviction

of their right, as citizens of a democratic State, to express them;

nor did they err in defending their rights with an obstinacy that

yielded only to death” (_ibid._, pp. 171-172). From the defense of free

speech Bryant went forward to the defense of free soil, and in 1848 he

bolted Lewis Cass, the Democratic nominee, and joined the “Barnburner”

movement that nominated Martin Van Buren. The terse pronouncement of

the convention, indeed, might well be taken as an epitome and summary

of Bryant’s lifelong liberalism--“We inscribe on our banner Free Soil,

Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men.”

A trenchant critic of the rising capitalism, delighting in exposing

the fallacies of the new economics and in pricking the bladders of

political reputations--suggesting, for example, that it was scarcely

god-like of the great Webster to accept a purse of $65,000 from his

high tariff friends--Bryant was perhaps the most distinguished of the

liberals created by the revolutions that were enthroning the middle

class in power. The simplicity of his _laissez-faire_ philosophy, like

his admiration for “Old Bullion” Benton--whom he rated one of the

greatest statesmen of the times--may seem somewhat old-fashioned today;

but his ingrained democracy, his sturdy defense of the rights of free

men, his championship of unpopular causes, his tolerance and fairness

and keen sense of justice, ought not to seem old-fashioned. He may not

have been a great poet, but he was a great American.

II • Horace Greeley • Yankee Radical