Though Irving, Cooper and Bryant were associated with New

York, there was something sporadic in their germination.

They have no common source; they stood apart; and their work

neither overlapped nor blended, but remained self-isolated.

None of them can be said to have founded a school, but

Irving left a literary tradition and Cooper had followers

in the field of historical fiction. The literary product

up to the middle of the century presents generally from its

early years the appearance of an indistinguishable mass, as

in colonial days, in which neither titles nor authors are

eminent. The association of American literature with the

periodical press is, perhaps, the most important trait to be

observed. New York and Philadelphia were book- markets, and

local presses had long been at work issuing many reprints.

Magazines in various degrees of importance sprang up in

succession to the earlier imitations of English 18th-century

periodicals, which abounded at the beginning of the century;

and as time went on these were accompanied by a host of annuals

of the English Keepsake variety. Philadelphia was especially

distinguished by an early fertility in magazines, which later

reached a great circulation, as in the case of Godey's and

Graham's; the Knickerbocker became prominent in New York

from 1833, when it was founded; Richmond had in The Southern

Literary Messenger the chief patron of southern writers from

1834, and there were abortive ventures still farther south in

Charleston. These various periodicals and like publications

were the literary arena, the place of ambition for young and

old, for known and unknown, and there literary fame and what

little money came of its pursuit were found. Minor poetry

flourished in it; sketches, tales, essays, every sort of

writing in prose multiplied there. A change in the atmosphere

of letters is also to be noted. The 18th century was fairly

left behind. The Philadelphian reprint of Galignani's

Paris edition of Keats, Shelley and Coleridge had brought

in the new romantic poetry with wide effect; and Disraeli,

Bulwer and, later, Dickens are felt in the prose; in verse,

especially by women, Mrs Hemans and Mrs Browning ruled the

moment. The product was large. In poetry it was displayed

on the most comprehensive scale in Rufus Wilmot Griswold's

(1815-1857) collections of American verse, made in the middle

of the century. Mrs Lydia Sigourney (1791-1865), a prolific

writer, and Mrs Maria Gowan Brooks (1795-1845), known as

Southey's "Maria del Occidente," a more ambitious aspirant,

the "Davidson sisters," (1808-1825: 1823-1838), and Alice

(1820-1871) and Phoebe Cary (1824-1871) illustrate the work

of the women; and Richard Henry Wilde (1789-1847), George

Pope Morris (1802-1864), Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806-1884)

and Willis Gaylord Clark (1810-1841) may serve for that of

men. In this verse, and in the abundant prose as well, the

sentimentality of the period is strongly marked; it continued

to the times of the Civil War. Two poets of a better type,

Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820), distinguished by delicacy

of fancy, and Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), who showed

ardour and a real power of phrase, are remembered from an

earlier time for their brotherhood in verse, but Drake died

young and Halleck was soon sterilized, so that the talents of

both proved abortive. The characteristic figure that really

exemplifies this secondary literature at its best is Nathaniel

Parker Willis (1806-1867) who, though born in Portland,

Maine, was the chief litterateur of the Knickerbocker

period. He wrote abundantly in both verse and prose, and

was the first of the journalist type of authors, a social

adventurer with facile powers of literary entertainment, a man

of the town and immensely popular. He was the sentimentalist

by profession, and his work, transitory as it proved, was

typical of a large share of the taste, talent and ambition

of the contemporary crowd of writers. Neighbouring him in

time and place are the authors of various stripe, known as

"the Literati," whom Poe described in his critical papers,

which, in connexion with Griswold's collections mentioned

above, are the principal current source of information

concerning the bulk of American literature in that period.

Poe.

This world of the magazines, the Literati and sentimentalism,

was the true milieu of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). Born in

Boston, his mother a pleasing English actress and his father

a dissipated stage- struck youth of a Baltimore family, left

an orphan in childhood, he was reared in the Virginian home

of John Allan, a merchant of Scottish extraction; he received

there the stamp of southern character. He was all his life

characteristically a southerner, with southern ideals of

character and conduct, southern manners towards both men

and women and southern passions. He showed precocity in

verse, but made his real debut in prose as editor of The

Southern Literary Messenger at Richmond in 1835. He was

by his talents committed to a literary career, and being

usually without definite means of support he followed the

literary market, first to Philadelphia and later to New

York. He was continuously associated with magazines as editor,

reviewer or contributor; they were his means of sustenance;

and, whether as cause or effect, this mode of life fell in

with the nature of his mind, which was a contemporary mind.

He was perhaps better acquainted with contemporary work in

literature than any of his associates; he took his first cues

from Disraeli and Bulwer and Moore, and he was earliest to

recognize Tennyson and Mrs Browning; his principal reading was

always in the magazines. He was, however, more than a man of

literary temperament like Irving and Cooper; he was a child of

genius. As in their case, there was something sporadic in

his appearance on the scene. He had no American origins,

but only American conditions of life. In fact he bore little

relation to his period, and so far as he was influenced, it

was for the worse; he transcended the period, essentially, in

all his creative work. He chose for a form of expression the

sketch, tale or short story, and he developed it in various

ways. From the start there was a melodramatic element in

him, itself a southern trait and developed by the literary

influence of Disraeli and Bulwer on his mind. He took the

tale of mystery as his special province; and receiving it as

a mystery that was to be explained, after the recent masters

of it, he saw its fruitful lines of development in the fact

that science had succeeded to superstition as the source of

wonder, and also in the use of ratiocination as a mode of

disentanglement in the detective story. Brilliant as his

success was in these lines, his great power lay in the tale

of psychological states as a mode of impressing the mind with

the thrill of terror, the thrall of fascination, the sense of

mystery. It is by his tales in these several sorts that he

won, more slowly than Irving or Cooper and effectually only

after his death, continental reputation; at present no American

author is so securely settled in the recognition of the world

at large, and he owes this, similarly to Cooper, to the power

of mystery over the human mind universally; that is, he owes

it to his theme, seconded by a marvellous power to develop it

by the methods of art. He thus added new traits to American

romanticism, but as in the case of Irving's Spanish studies

there is no American element in the theme; he is detached from

his local world, and works in the sphere of universal human

nature, nor in his treatment is there any trace of his American

birth. He is a world author more purely than any other American

writer. Though it is on his tales that his continental

reputation necessarily rests, his temperament is more subtly

expressed in his verse, in which that fond of which his tales

are the logical and intelligible growth gives out images and

rhythms, the issue of morbid states, which affect the mind

rather as a form of music than of thought. Emotion was, in

art, his constant aim, though it might be only so simple a

thing as the emotion of colour as in his landscape studies;

and in his verse, by an unconscious integration and flow of

elements within him it must be thought, he obtained emotional

effects by images which have no intellectual value, and

which float in rhythms so as to act musically on the mind

and arouse pure moods of feeling absolutely free of any other

contents. Such poems must be an enigma to most men, but

others are accessible to them, and derive from them an original

and unique pleasure; they belong outside of the intellectual

sphere. It is by virtue of this musical quality and immediacy

that his poetry is characterized by genius; in proportion

as it has meaning of an intelligible sort it begins to fade

and lower; so far as "Lenore" and "Annie" and "Annabel Lee"

are human, they are feeble ghosts of that sentimentality

which was so rife in Poe's time and so maudlin in his own

personal relations; and except for a half- dozen pieces,

in which his quality of rhythmical fascination is supreme,

his verse as a whole is inferior to the point of being

commonplace. Small as the quantity of his true verse is,

it more sustains his peculiar genius in American eyes than

does his prose; and this is because it is so unique. He

stands absolutely alone as a poet with none like him; in his

tales, as an artist, he is hardly less solitary, but he has

some ties of connexion or likeness with the other masters of

mystery. Poe lived in poverty and died in misery; but without

him romanticism in America would lose its most romantic

figure, and American literature the artist who, most of

all its writers, had the passion of genius for its work.

Poe left even less trace of himself in the work of others

than did Irving, Cooper and Bryant. He stands in succession

to them, and closed the period so far as it contributed to

American romanticism anything distinguished, original or

permanent. The ways already opened had, however, been

trod, and most notably in fiction. The treatment of manners

and customs, essentially in Irving's vein, was pleasingly

cultivated in Maryland by John Pendleton Kennedy (1795- 1870)

in Swallow Barn (1832) and similar tales of Old Dominion

life. In Virginia, Beverly Tucker (1784-1851) in The Partisan

Leader (1836), noticeable for its prophecy of secession,

and John Esten Cooke (1830-1886) in The Virginia Comedians

(1854), also won a passing reputation. The champion in the

south, however, was William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), born in

Charleston, a voluminous writer of both prose and verse, who

undertook to depict, on the same scale as Cooper and in his

manner, the settlement of the southern territory and its

Indian and revolutionary history; but of his many novels, of

which the characteristic examples are The Yemassee (1335),

The Partisan (1835) and Beauchampe (1842), none attained

literary distinction. The sea-novel was developed by Herman

Melville (1819- 1891) in Typee (1846) and its successors,

but these tales, in spite of their being highly commended by

lovers of adventure, have taken no more hold than the work of

Simms. Single novels of wide popularity appeared from time

to time, of which a typical instance was The Wide, Wide

World (1850) by Susan Warner (1819-1885). The grade of

excellence was best illustrated, perhaps, for the best current

fiction which was not to be incorporated in literature, by

the novels of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867), of a

western Massachusetts family, in Hope Leslie (1827) and its

successors. The distinct Knickerbocker strain was best

preserved by James Kirke Paulding (1778-1860) among the

direct imitators of Irving; but the better part of the Irving

tradition, its sentiment, social grace and literary flavour,

was not noticeable until it awoke in George William Curtis

(1824-1892), born a New Englander but, like Bryant, a journalist

and public man of New York, whose novels, notes of travel and

casual brief social essays brought that urbane style to an

end, as in Donald Grant Mitchell (born 1822) the school of

sentiment, descended from the same source, died not unbecomingly

in the Reveries of a Bachelor (1850) and Dream Life

(1851). Two poets, just subsequent to Poe, George Henry

Boker (1823-1890) and Thomas Buchanan Read (1822-1872), won

a certain distinction, the former especially in the drama,

in the Philadelphia group. The single popular songs, "The

Star-Spangled Banner" (1813), by Francis Scott Key (1779-1843) of

Maryland, "America" (1832) by Samuel Francis Smith (1808-1895)

of Massachusetts, and "Home, Sweet Home" (1823) by John Howard

Payne (1792-1852) of New York, may also be appropriately recorded

here. The last distinct literary personality to emerge from

the miscellany of talent in the middle of the century, in the

middle Atlantic states, was James Bayard Taylor (1825-1878)

who, characteristically a journalist, gained reputation by

his travels, poems and novels, but in spite of brilliant

versatility and a high ambition failed to obtain permanent

distinction. His translation of Faust (1870) is his chief

title to remembrance; but the later cultivation of the oriental

motive in American lyrical poetry owes something to his example.

New England scholarship.

In New England, which succeeded to New York as the chief

source of literature of high distinction, the progress of

culture in the post- Revolutionary period was as normal and

gradual as elsewhere in the country; there was no violence of

development, no sudden break, but the growth of knowledge and

taste went slowly on in conjunction with the softening of the

Puritan foundation of thought, belief and practice. What most

distinguished literature in New England from that to the west and

south was its connexion with religion and scholarship, neither

of which elements was strong in the literature that has been

described. The neighbourhood of Harvard College to Boston was

a powerful influence in the field of knowledge and critical

culture. The most significant fact in respect to scholarship,

however, was the residence abroad of George Ticknor (1791-1871),

author of The History of Spanish Literature (1849), of

Edward Everett (1794-1865), the orator, and of George Bancroft

(1800-1891), author of the History of the United States

(1834-1874), who as young men brought back new ideals of

learning. The social connexion of Boston, not only with

England but with the continent, was more constant, varied

and intimate than fell to the fortune of any other city, and

owing to the serious temper of the community the intellectual

commerce with the outer world through books was more

profound. Coleridge was early deeply influential on the

thought of the cultivated class, and to him Carlyle, who

found his first sincere welcome and effectual power there,

succeeded. The influence of both combined to introduce, and

to secure attention for, German writers. Translation, as

time went on, followed, and German thought was also further

sustained and advanced in the community by Frederick Henry

Hedge (1805-1890), a philosophical theologian, who conducted

a propaganda of German ideas. The activity of the group

about him is significantly marked by the issue of the series

of Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature (1838), edited

by George Ripley (1802-1880), the critic, which was the

first of its kind in America. French ideas, as time went on,

were also current, and the field of research extended to the

Orient, the writings of which were brought forward especially

in connexion with the Transcendental Movement to which all

these foreign studies contributed. In New England, in other

words, a close, serious and vital connexion was made, for

the first time, with the philosophic thought of the world and

with its tradition even in the remote past. Unitarianism,

which was the form in which the old Puritanism dissolved

in the cultivated class, came in with the beginning of the

century, and found its representative in the gentle character,

refined intelligence and liberal humanity of William Ellery

Channing (1780- 1842), who has remained its chief apostle.

It was the expression of a moral maturing and intellectual

enlightenment that took place with as little disturbance

as ever marked religious evolution in any community. The

people at large remained evangelical, but they also felt

in a less degree the softening and liberalizing tendency;

nevertheless it was mainly in the field of Unitarianism that

literature flourished, as was natural, and Transcendentalism

was a phenomenon that grew out of Unitarianism, being

indeed the excess of the movement of enlightenment and the

extreme limit of intuitionalism, individualism and private

judgment. These two factors, religion and scholarship, gave

to New England literature its serious stamp and academic

quality; but the preparatory stage being longer, it was slower

to emerge than the literature of the rest of the country.

The first stirrings of romanticism in New England were

felt, as in the country to the south, by men of literary

temperament in a sympathetic enjoyment and feeble imitation

of the contemporary English romantic school of fiction

exemplified by Mrs Radcliffe, Lewis and Godwin. Washington

Allston (1779-1843), the painter, born in South Carolina but

by education and adoption a citizen of Cambridge, showed the

taste in Monaldi (1841), and Richard Henry Dana (1787-1879)

in Paul Felton (1833); in his poem of the same date, "The

Buccaneer," the pseudo-Byronic element, which belongs to the

conception of character and passion in this school of fiction,

appears. These elder writers illustrate rather the stage of

imaginative culture at the period, and show by their other

works also--Allston by his poems "The Sylphs of the Seasons"

(1813), and Dana by his abortive periodical The Idle Man

(1821) issued at New York--their essential sympathy with

the literary conditions reigning before the time of Irving.

They both were post-Revolutionary, and advanced American

culture in other fields rather than imagination, Allston in

art and Dana in criticism, as editor of The North American

Review, which was founded in 1815, and was long the chief

organ of serious thought and critical learning, influential

in the dissemination of ideas and in the maintenance of the

intellectual life. The influence of their personality in the

community, like that of Channing, with whom they were closely

connected, was of more importance than any of their works.

Emerson: Hawthorne: Longfellow.

The definite moment of the appearance of New England in

literature in the true sense was marked by Ralph Waldo Emerson's

(1803-1882) Nature (1836), Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804-1864)

Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's

(1807-1882) Voices of the Night (1839). Of this group

of men Longfellow is the most national figure, and from the

point of view of literary history the most significant by

virtue of what he contributed to American romanticism in the

large. He felt the conscious desire of the people for an

American literature, and he obeyed it in the choice of his

subjects. He took national themes, and his work is in

this respect the counterpart in poetry to that of Cooper in

prose. In Hiawatha (1855) he poetized the Indian life; and,

though the scene and figures of the poem are no more localized

than the happy hunting-grounds, the ideal of the life of

the aborigines in the wilderness is given with freshness and

primitive charm and with effect on the imagination. It is the

sole survivor of many poetic attempts to naturalize the Indian

in literature, and will remain the classic Indian poem. In

Evangeline (1847), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858)

and The New England Tragedies (1868), he depicted colonial

life. As he thus embodied national tradition in one portion

of his work, he rendered national character in another, and

with more spontaneity, in those domestic poems of childhood

and the affections, simple moods of the heart in the common

lot, which most endeared him as the poet of the household.

These are American poems as truly as his historical verse,

though they are also universal for the English race. In another

large portion of his work he brought back from the romantic

tradition of Europe, after Irving's manner, motives which he

treated for their pure poetic quality, detached from anything

American, and he also translated much foreign verse from the

north and the south of Europe, including Dante's Divine Comedy

(1867). He has, more than any other single writer, reunited

America with the poetic past of Europe, particularly in its

romance. The same serenity of disposition that marked Irving

and Bryant characterized his life; and his art, more varied

than Bryant's or Irving's, has the same refinement, being

simple and so limpid as to deceive the reader into an oblivion

of its quality and sometimes into an unwitting disparagement

of what seems so plain and natural as to be commonplace. In

Longfellow, as in Irving, one is struck by that quietude,

which is so prevailing a characteristic of American literature,

and which proceeds from its steady and even flow from sources

that never knew any disturbance or perturbation. The life,

the art, the moods are all calm; deep passion is absent.

Hawthorne was endowed with a soul of more intense brooding,

but he remained within the circle of this peace. He developed

in solitude exquisite grace of language, and in other respects

was an artist, the mate of Poe in the tale and exceeding

Poe in significance since he used symbolism for effects of

truth. He, like Longfellow, embodied the national tradition,

in this case the Puritan past; but he seized the subject,

not in its historical aspects and diversity of character and

event, but psychologically in its moral passion in The Scarlet

Letter (1850), and less abstractly, more picturesquely, more

humanly, in its blood tradition, in The House of the Seven

Gables. In his earlier work, as an artist, he shows the

paucity of the materials in the environment, especially in

his tales; but when his residence in Italy and England gave

into his hands larger opportunity, he did not succeed so well

in welding Italy with America in The Marble Faun (1860),

or England with America in his experimental attempts at the

work which he left uncompleted, as he had done in the Puritan

romances. He had, however, added a new domain to American

romanticism; and, most of all these writers, he blended

moral truth with fiction; he, indeed, spiritualized romance,

and without loss of human reality,--a rare thing in any

literature. Both Longfellow and Hawthorne were happy in

reconciling their art with their country: both, not less than

Poe, were universal artists, but they incorporated the national

past in their art and were thereby more profoundly American.

Emerson, whose work lay in the religious sphere, not unlike

Jonathan Edwards at an earlier time of climax but in a different

way, marked the issue of Puritanism in pure idealism, and

was more contemporaneously associated with life in the times

than were the purely imaginative writers. He was the central

figure of Transcendentalism, and apart from his specific

teachings stood for the American spirit, disengaged from

authority, independent, personal, responsible only to himself.

He reached a revolutionary extreme, but he had not arrived

at it by revolutionary means; without storm or stress, with

characteristic peacefulness, he came to the great denials, and

without much concerning himself with them turned to his own

affirmations of spiritual reality, methods of life and personal

results. Serenity was his peculiar trait; amid all the

agitation about him he was entirely unmoved, lived calmly and

wrote with placid power, concentrating into the slowly wrought

sentences of his Essays (1841-1875) the spiritual essence

and moral metal of a life lived to God, to himself and to his

fellow-men. He, more than any other single writer, reunited

American thought with the philosophy of the world; more than all

others, he opened the ways of liberalism, wherever they may

lead. He was an emancipator of the mind. In his Poems

(1847-1867), though the abstract and the concrete often

find themselves awkward mates, his philosophic ideas are

put forth under forms of imagination and his personal life

is expressed with nobility; his poetic originality, though

so different in kind, is as unique as Poe's, and reaches a

height of imaginative faculty not elsewhere found in American

verse. His poetry belongs more peculiarly to universal art,

so pure in general is its philosophic content and so free from

any temporal trait is the style; but it is as distinguished

for the laconic expression of American ideas, minted with

one blow, as his prose is for the constant breathing of

the American spirit. It is the less possible to define the

American traits in Emerson, because they constituted the

man. He was as purely an American type as Lincoln. The

grain of the man is in his work also; and the best that his

prose and verse contain is his personal force. In him alone

is genius felt as power; in the others it impresses one

primarily as culture, modes of artistic faculty, phases of

temperament. In this, too, he brings to mind Jonathan Edwards,

the other climax of the religious spirit in New England; in

Edwards it was intellectual power, in Emerson it was moral

power; in both it was indigenous, power springing from what

was most profound in the historic life of the community.

Whittier: Holmes: Lowell.

Three other names, John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892),

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), James Russell Lowell

(1819-1891), complete the group of the greater writers of New

England. Holmes was a more local figure, by his humour and

wit and his mental acuteness a Yankee and having the flavour

of race, but neither in his verse nor his novels reaching

a high degree of excellence and best known by The Autocrat

of the Breakfast Table (1858), which is the Yankee prose

classic. His contemporary reputation was largely social and

owed much to the length of his life, but his actual hold on

literature already seems slight and his work of little permanent

value. Whittier stands somewhat apart as the poet of the soil

and also because of his Quakerism; he was first eminent as

the poet of the anti-slavery movement, to which he contributed

much stirring verse, and later secured a broader fame by

Snowbound (1866) and his religious poems of simple piety,

welcome to every faith; he was also a balladist of local

legends. In general he is the voice of the plain people

without the medium of academic culture, and his verse though

of low flight is near to their life and faith. Lowell first

won distinction by The Biglow Papers (1848), which with the

second series (1886) is the Yankee classic in verse, and is

second only to his patriotic odes in maintaining his poetic

reputation; his other verse, variously romantic in theme and

feeling, and latterly more kindred to English classic style,

shows little originality and was never popularly received;

it is rather the fruit of great talent working in close

literary sympathy with other poets whom from time to time he

valued. His prose consists in the main of literary studies in

criticism, a field in which he held the first rank. Together

with Holmes and Whittier he gives greater body, diversity

and illustration to the literature of New England; but in the

work of none of these is there the initiative or the presence

of single genius that characterize Emerson, Hawthorne and

Longfellow. Lowell was a scholar with academic ties, a patriot

above party, master of prose and verse highly developed and

finished, and at times of a lofty strain owing to his moral

enthusiasm; Whittier was a Quaker priest, vigorous in a

great cause of humanity, with fluent power to express in

poetry the life of the farm, the roadside and the legends

that were like folklore in the memory of the settlement;

Holmes was a town wit and master of occasional verse, with

notes here and there of a higher strain in single rare poems.

Transcendentalism.

The secondary literature that accompanied the work of

these writers was abundant. It was largely the product of

Transcendentalism and much of it gathered about Emerson.

In The Dial (1840), the organ of Transcendentalism, he

introduced to the public his young friend, Henry David Thoreau

(1817-1862), author of Walden (1854) and the father of the

nature-writers, who as a hermit-type has had some European

vogue and shows an increasing hold as an exception among

men, but whose work has little literary distinction; and

together with him, his companion, William Ellery Channing

(1818-1901), a poet who has significance only in the

transcendentalist group. With them should be named Emerson's

coeval, Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), the patriarch of

the so-called Concord philosophers, better esteemed for

his powers of monologue than as a writer in either prose or

verse. Emerson's associate-editor in The Dial was Sarah

Margaret Fuller, afterwards Marchioness d'Ossoli (1810-1850),

a woman of extraordinary qualities and much usefulness, who

is best remembered by her Woman in the Nineteenth Century

(1844), but contributed no permanent work to literature.

She was a leading figure at Brook Farm, the socialistic

community founded by members of the group, and especially by

Ripley, who like her afterwards emigrated to New York and

together with her began a distinguished critical career in

connexion with The New York Tribune. Transcendentalism

produced also its peculiar poet in Jones Very (1813-1881),

whose Poems (1839) have original quality though slight

merit, and its novelist in Sylvester Judd (1813-1853), whose

Margaret (1845) is a unique work in American fiction.

Other transcendentalist poets were Christopher Pearse Cranch

(1813-1892), and Charles Timothy Brooks (1813-1883), who

translated Faust (1856), besides a score of minor names.

Outside of this group Thomas William Parsons (1819-1892), who

translated Dante's Inferno (1843), was a poet of greater

distinction, but his product was slight. The prose of the

movement, though abundant, yielded nothing that is remembered.

History.

The literary life of Boston was, however, by no means confined

within this circle of thought. It was most distinguished

in the field of history, where indeed the writers rivalled

the imaginative authors in public fame. They were, besides

George Bancroft already mentioned, John Gorham Palfrey

(1796-1881), author of The History of New England (1858),

William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859), whose field was

Spanish and Spanish-American history, John Lothrop Motley

(1814- 1877), whose attention was given to Dutch history,

and Jared Sparks (1789-1866), whose work lay in biography.

In the writings of Prescott and Motley the romanticism of

the period is clearly felt, and they attained the highest

distinction in the literary school of history of the period.

Oratory.

Oratory also flourished in Daniel Webster (1782-1852), Edward

Everett (1794-1865), Rufus Choate (1799-1859), Wendell Phillips

(1811-1884), Charles Sumner (1811-1874), and Robert Charles

Winthrop (1809-1894), the last survivor of a long line of

fiery or classic oratory in which New England was especially

distinguished and had rivalry only from Henry Clay (1777-1852)

of Virginia, and John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850) of South

Carolina. The church also produced two powerful speakers in

Theodore Parker (1810-1860), the protagonist of the liberals

in Boston, and Henry Ward Beecher (1813- 1887), who sustained

a liberal form of New England congregationalism in Brooklyn,

New York, where he made Plymouth Church a national pulpit.

Fiction.

The single memorable novel of the period was Mrs Harriet Beecher

Stowe's (1811-1896) Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which had a

world-wide vogue; it is the chief contribution of the anti-slavery

movement to American literature and stands for plantation life

in the old south. Another female writer, Mrs Lydia Maria Child

(1802-1880), remembered by her Philothea (1836), deserves

mention in the line of notable American women who served their

generation in literary ways and by devotion to public causes.

Scholarship.

Criticism was served excellently by Edwin Percy Whipple

(1819-1885), and less eminently by Henry Theodore Tuckerman

(1813-1871), who emigrated to New York; but scholarship in

general flourished under the protection of Harvard College,

where Ticknor, Longfellow and Lowell maintained a high ideal of

literary knowledge and judgment in the chair they successively

filled, and were accompanied in English by Francis James Child

(1825-1896), whose English and Scottish Ballads, first

issued in 1858, was brought to its final and monumental form in

1892. Cornelius Conway Felton (1807-1862), president of

Harvard College, stood for Greek culture, but the classical

influence was little in evidence. Elsewhere in New England

George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882) of Vermont, long minister to

Italy, and William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) of Yale, were

linguistic scholars of high distinction. The development

of the colleges into universities was already prophesied in

the presence and work of these men. Outside of New England

scholarship had been illustrated in New York by Charles Anthon

(1797-1867), the classical editor, by the Duyckincks, Evert

Augustus (1816-1878) and George Long (1823-1863), editors of

the Cyclopaedia of American Literature (1855), and by Giulian

Crommelin Verplanck (1786-1870), editor of Shakespeare (1846).

Characteristics of New England literature.

New England thus, standing somewhat apart, produced a characteristic

literature, more deeply rooted in the community than was the

case elsewhere; and this literature, blending with what was

produced to the south and west, became a predominant share

of what has been nationally accepted as standard American

literature. It is also the more profound and scholarly share;

and if quantity as well as quality be counted, and, as is

proper, Bryant be included as the product of Puritan culture,

it is the more artistic share. American standard literature,

so constituted, belongs to romanticism, and is a phase of the

romanticism which was then the general mood of literature;

but it is a native product, with traits of its own and inward

development from local conditions, not only apparent by its

themes, but by its distinct evolution. Though it owed much

to contact with Europe through its travelled scholars and its

intellectual commerce by means of translations and imported

books, and often dealt with matter detached from America both

in prose and poetry, it was essentially self-contained. It

was, in a marked way, free from the passions whose source

was the French Revolution and its after-throes from 1789 to

1848; it is by this fact that it differs most from European

romanticism. Just as the Puritan Rebellion in England left

the colonies untouched to their own development, the political

revolutions in Europe left the new nation unaffected to its normal

evolution. There was never any revolution, in the French

sense, in America, whether social, political, religious or

literary; its great historical changes, such as the termination

of English rule, the passing away of Puritanism, the abolition

of slavery with the consequent destruction of the old South,

were in a true sense conservative changes, normal phases of new

life. In literature this state of things is reflected in the

absence in it of any disturbance, its serenity of mood, its

air of quiet studies. It is shown especially in its lack of

passion. The only ardours displayed by its writers are moral,

patriotic or religious, and in none of them is there any sense of

conflict. The life which they knew was wholesome, regular,

still free from urban corruption, the experience of a plain,

prosperous and law-abiding people. None of these writers,

though like Hawthorne they might deal with sin or like Poe

with horror and a lover's despair at death, struck any tragic

note. No tragedy was written, no love-poetry, no novel of

passion. No literature is so maiden-pure. It is by refinement

rather than power that it is most distinguished, by taste

and cultivation, by conscientiousness in art, in poetic and

stylistic craft; it is romance retrospectively seen in the

national past, or conjured out of foreign lands by reminiscent

imagination, or symbolically created out of fantasy; and this

is supplemented by poetry of the domestic affections, the

simple sorrows, all "that has been and may be again" in daily

human lives, and by prose similarly related to a well-ordered

life. If it is undistinguished by any work of supreme genius, it

reflects broadly and happily and in enduring forms the national

tradition and character of the land in its dawning century.

The original impulse of this literature had spent its

force by 1861-- that is, before the Civil War. The greater

writers had, in general, already done their characteristic

work, and though the survivors continued to produce till

toward the close of the century, their works contained no

new element and were at most mellow fruits of age. The war

itself, like the Revolution, left little trace in literature

beyond a few popular songs and those occasional poems which

the older poets wrote in the course of the conflict. Their

attitude toward it and (with the exception of Whittier and

Lowell) toward the anti- slavery movement which led up to

it was rather that of citizens than of poets, though in the

verse of Longfellow and Emerson there is the noble stamp

of the hour, the impress of liberty, bravery and sorrow.

Lowell is the exception; he found in the Commemoration Ode

(1865) his loftiest subject and most enduring fame. The

work began to fall into new hands, and a literature since

the war grew up, which was, however, especially in poetry,

a continuation of romanticism and contained its declining

force. It was contributed to from all parts of the older

country, and also from the west, and a generation has now

added its completed work to the sum. No author, in this late

period, has received the national welcome to the same degree

as the men of the elder time; none has had such personal

distinction, eminence or public affection; and none has found

such honourable favour abroad, either in England or on the

continent. Poetry has felt the presence of the art of

Tennyson, which has maintained an extreme sensitiveness

among the poets to artistic requirements of both material and

technique; and it also has taken colour from the later English

schools. It has, however, yielded its pre-eminent position to

prose. The novel has displaced romance as the highest form of

fiction, and the essay has succeeded the review as the form of

criticism. The older colleges have grown into universities,

and public libraries have multiplied throughout the north and

west. The literature of information, meant for the popularization

of knowledge of all kinds, has been put forth in great quantity,

and the annual increase in the production of books keeps

pace with the general growth of the country. Literature of

distinction, however, makes but a small part of this large mass.

Later writers.

In poetry the literary tradition was continued in Boston by

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907), essentially a stylist in

verse, brief, definite, delicate, who carried the lighter

graces of the art, refinement, wit, polish, to a high point of

excellence. His artistic consanguinity is with Herrick and

Landor, and he takes motive and colour for his verse from every

land, as his predecessors had done, but with effects less

rich. He divided attention between drama and lyric, but as

his dramas look strictly to the stage, it is on the lyrics

that his reputation rests. He was master also of an excellent

prose and wrote novels, sketches of travel, and especially

stories, strongly marked by humour, surprise and literary

distinction. In New York, Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908)

became the chief representative of the literary profession.

He was both poet and critic, and won reputation in the former

and the first rank in the latter field. His Victorian

Poets (1875) and Poets of America (1885), followed by

comprehensive anthologies (1894-1900), together with The Nature

and Elements of Poetry (1892), are the principal critical

work of his generation, and indeed the sole work that is

eminent. His verse, less practised as time went on, was well

wrought and often distinguished by flashes of spirited song and

balladry. With him is associated his elder friend, Richard

Henry Stoddard (1825- 1903), who made his appearance before

the Civil War, and whose verse belongs in general character

to the style of that earlier period and is as rapidly

forgotten. Both Stedman and Stoddard were of New England birth,

as was also the third to be mentioned, William Winter (born

1836), better known as the lifelong dramatic critic of the

metropolis. The last of the New York poets of established

reputation, Richard Watson Gilder (b. 1844 in New Jersey;

d. 1909), was at first affiliated with the school of

Rossetti, and his work in general, Five Books of Song

(1894), strongly marked by artistic susceptibility, is in a

high degree refined and delicate. In the country at large

popular success, in England as well as in America, was won

by Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903), in Hans Breitmann's

Ballads (1871), humorous poems in the Pennsylvania Dutch

dialect. Born in Philadelphia, he spent the greater part of

his mature life abroad and wrote numerous works on diverse

topics, but his reputation is chiefly connected with his books

on gypsy life and lore. Another foreign resident who deserves

mention was Wilham Wetmore Story (1819-1895), the sculptor, of

Massachusetts, connected with the Boston group, whose verse

and prose gave him the rank of a litterateur. The South

again entered into literature with the work of Sidney Lanier

(1842-1881), in succession to Henry Timrod (1829-1867) and

Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830-1886), who find a place rather

by the affection in which they are held at the South than

by positive merit. Lanier showed originality and a true

poetic gift, but his talents were little effectual. From

the West humorous poetry was produced by Francis Bret Harte

(1839-1902), born in Albany, in The Heathen Chinee (1870)

and similar verse, but he is better remembered as the artistic

narrator of western mining life in his numerous stories and

novels. Verse of a similar kind also first brought into

literary notice John Hay (1838-1905), in Pike County

Ballads (1871), who also wrote in prose; but his reputation

was rather won as a statesman in the closing years of his

life. Minor poets of less distinction but with a vein superior

to that of the earlier period, more excellent in workmanship

and more coloured with imagination and mood, arose in all

parts, of whom the most notable are Julia Ward Howe (born

1819), in Boston, the venerable friend of many good causes,

Henry Howard Brownell (1820-1872) of Rhode Island, author

of the most vigorous and realistic poetry of the Civil War,

War Lyrics (1866), Edward Rowland Sill (1841-1887), born

in Connecticut but associated with California, Henry Van Dyke

(born 1852), in New York, better known by his prose in tale

and essay, Silas Weir Mitchell (born 1830), in Philadelphia,

whose repute as a novelist has overshadowed his admirable

verse, Eugene Field (1850-1895) of Chicago, James Whitcomb

Riley (born 1853) of Indiana, both distinguished for their

humorous and childhood verse, and Joaquin Miller (born

1841) of Oregon, whose first work, Songs of the Sierras

(1871), had in it much of the spirit of the wild land, the

colour of the desert, the free, adventurous character of the

filibuster, all strangely mixed with pseudo-Byronic passions.

Whitman.

Apart from all these, whether minor or major poets, stands

Walt Whitman (1819-1892), whose Leaves of Grass (1855) first

appeared before the war, but whose fame is associated rather

with its successive editions and its companion volumes, and

definitely dated, perhaps, from 1867. He received attention

in England, as did Miller, on an assumption that his works

expressed the new and original America, the unknown democracy,

and he has had some vogue in Germany mainly owing to his

naturalism. His own countrymen, however, steadily refuse to

accept him as representative of themselves, and his naturalism

is uninteresting to them, while on the other hand a group

apparently increasing in critical authority treat his work as

significant. It is, in general, only by those few fine lyrics

which have found a place in all anthologies of American verse

that he is well known and highly valued in his own land.

The later novel.

The chief field of literary activity has been found in

the novel, and nowhere has the change been so marked as

here. The romantic treatment of the novel practically

disappeared, and in its place came the realistic or analytic

treatment, rendering manners by minute strokes of observation

or dissecting motives psychologically. This amounted to a

substitution of the French art of fiction, in some of its forms,

for the English tradition of broad ideality and historical

picturesqueness. The protagonist of the reform was William

Dean Howells (born 1837), a cultivated literary scholar, and

a various writer of essays, travel sketches, poetry and plays,

editor of many magazines and books, whose career in letters

has been more laborious and miscellaneous than any other

contemporary, but whose main work has been the long series of

novels that he has put forth almost annually throughout the

period. He not only wrote fiction, but he endeavoured to

make known to Americans fiction as it was practised in other

lands, Russia, Italy, Spain, and to bring the art that was

dearest to him into line with the standard of the European

world. He was an apostle of the realistic school, and directed

his teaching to the advocacy of the novel of observation,

which records life in its conditions and attempts to realize

what is in the daily lives and experience of man rather than

what belongs to adventure, imagination or the dreaming part of

life. Of his works, The Lady of the Aroostook (1879),

The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), A Hazard of New Fortunes

(1889), are characteristic examples. He won a popular vogue,

and if it is now less than it was, it is because after a score

of years tastes and fashions change. The conscientiousness

of his art continues the tradition of American writers in

that respect, and he is master of an affable style. His

work, including all its phases, is the most important body

of work done in his generation. Henry James (born 1843),

who mainly resided abroad, is his compeer, and in a similar

way has followed French initiative. He also has been a

various writer of criticism and travel and the occasional

essay; but his equally long series of novels sustains his

reputation. He has developed the psychological treatment of

fiction, and of his work The Portrait of a Lady (1881),

The Princess Casamassima (1886) and The Tragic Muse

(1890) are characteristic. He has had less vogue owing to

both matter and style, but in certain respects his power,

more intellectual than that of Howells, has greater artistic

elements, while the society with which he deals is more

complex. He is really a cosmopolitan writer and has no other

connexion with America than the accident of birth. A third

novelist, also a foreign resident, Francis Marion Crawford

(1854-1909), falls into the same category. A prolific novelist,

in the beaten track of story-telling, he has always a story

to tell and excellent narrative power. The work regarded

as most important from his hand is Saracinesca (1887) and

its sequels; but his subjects are cosmopolitan, his talent

is personal, and he has no effectual connexion with his own

country. The romantic tradition of the older time was continued

by Lew Wallace (1827-1905) of Indiana, a distinguished general

and diplomat, in his Mexican tale, The Fair God (1873),

and his oriental romances, Ben Hur (1880), one of the most

widely circulated of American books, and The Prince of India

(1893). A mode of the novel which was wholly unique was

practised by Francis Richard Stockton (1834-1902) in his droll

tales, of which Rudder Grange (1879) is the best known.

The principal minor product of the novel lay in the provincial

tale. The new methods easily lent themselves to the portraiture

of local conditions, types and colour. Every part of the

country had its writers who recorded its traits in this

way. For New England Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe described the

older life in Old Town Folks (1869), and was succeeded by

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) and Mary Eleanor Wilkins (born

1862). The West was notably treated by Edward Eggleston

(1837-1902) in The Hoosier School Master (1871), Mary

Hallock Foote (born 1847) in Led-Horse Claim (1883)

and Hamlin Garland (born 1860) in Main Travelled Roads

(1891). The South was represented by Mary Noailles Murfree

["Charles Egbert Craddock"] (born 1850) in In the Tennessee

Mountains (1884) and its successors, by Thomas Nelson Page

(born 1853) in Marse Chan (1887) and other tales of the

reconstruction in Virginia, and with most literary grace

by George Washington Cable (born 1844), whose novels of

Louisiana are remarkable for their poetic charm. The list is

sufficiently illustrative of the general movement, which made

what was called the dialect novel supreme for the season. This

was succeeded by a revival of the historical novel in local

fields, of which Winston Churchill (born 1871) in Richard

Carvel (1899) is the leading exponent, and together with

it the sword and dagger tale of the Dumas type, the special

contemporary plot invented by Anthony Hope, and romance in

its utmost forms of adventure and extravagance, came in like

a flood at the close of the Spanish War. There were during the

period from 1870 to 1900 many other writers of fiction, who

often proceeded in conventional and time-honoured ways to tell

their tale, but none of them is especially significant for

the general view or as showing any tendencies of an original

sort. The pietistic novel, for example, was produced with

immense popularity by Edward Payson Roe (1838-1888), who shared

the same vogue as Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819-1881), and both

fell heir to the same audience which in the earlier period had

welcomed The Wide, Wide World with the same broad acceptance.

Essayists.

The essay, and the miscellaneous work which may be classed with

it, was cultivated with most distinction by Thomas Wentworth

Higginson (born 1823), one of the Boston group, a writer of

the greatest versatility, as in his life he followed many

employments, from that of preaching in a Unitarian pulpit

to that of commanding a negro regiment in the Civil War. He

has written good verse and excellent prose, and his familiar

style, often brilliant with life and wit, especially becomes

the social essay or reminiscent paper in which he excelled,

and gives agreeableness to his writings in every form.

Atlantic Essays (1871) is a characteristic book; and, in

general, in his volumes is to be found a valuable fund of

reminiscence about the literature and the times of his long

life, not elsewhere so abundant or entertaining. Charles

Dudley Warner (1829-1900) of Hartford, also in close touch

in the later years with the Boston group, was more gifted

with gentle humour and of a literary temperament that made

the social essay his natural expression. He won popularity

by My Summer in a Garden (1870), and was the author of many

volumes of travel and several novels, but the familiar essay,

lighted with humour and touched with a reminiscence of the

Irving quality in sentiment, was his distinctive work. The

long life of Edward Everett Hale (1822- 1909), minister at

Boston, was fruitful in many miscellaneous volumes, including

fiction of note, The Man Without a Country (1868), but the

most useful writing from his pen falls into prose resembling

the essay in its form and manner of address, though cousin,

too, to the sermon. John Burroughs (b. 1837) of New York

carried on in essay form the nature tradition of Thoreau,

touched with Emersonianism in the thought, and after his

example books of mingled observation, sentiment and literary

quality, with an out-of-door atmosphere, have multiplied.

Humour.

American humour often cultivates a form akin to the essay,

but it also falls into the mould of the tale or scene from

life. In the period before the Civil War, to sum up the whole

subject in this place, it had the traits which it has since

maintained, as its local tang, of burlesque, extravaganza,

violence, but it recorded better an actual state of manners

and scene of life in raw aspects. Its noteworthy writers

were Seba Smith (1792-1868) of Maine, author of the Letters

of Major Jack Downing, which began to appear in the press

in 1830; Augustus Baldwin Longstreet of Georgia in Georgia

Scenes (1835); William Tappan Thompson (1812-1882),

born in Ohio but associated with the South by descent and

residence, in Major Jones' Courtship (1840), a Georgian

publication; Joseph G. Baldwin (1815-1864) in Flush Times

in Alabama and Mississippi (1853); and Benjamin Penhallow

Shillaber (1814-1890) in Life and Sayings of Mrs Partington

(1854). A fresh form, attended by whimsicality, appears in

George Horatio Derby's (1823-1861) Phoenixiana (1855). In

the war-times Robert Henry Newell (1836-1901) and David Ross

Locke (1833-1888), respectively known as "Orpheus C. Kerr"

and "Petroleum V. Nasby" cultivated grotesque orthography

in a characteristic vein of wit; and with more quaintness

and drollery Henry Wheeler Shaw (1818-1885) and Charles

Farrar Browne (1834-1867), known as "Josh Billings" and

"Artemus Ward," won immense popularity which extended to

England. These latter writers were men of Northern birth,

but of Western and wandering journalistic experience as a

rule. Their works make up a body of what is known as "American

humour," a characteristic native product of social conditions

and home talent. One poet, John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887)

of Vermont, attempted something similar in literary verse

after the style of Tom Hood. The heir to this tradition

of farce, drollery and joke was Samuel Langhorne Clemens

(1835-1910), known as "Mark Twain," born in Missouri, who

raised it to an extraordinary height of success and won

world-wide reputation as a great and original humorist. His

works, however, include a broader compass of fiction, greater

humanity and reality, and ally him to the masters of humorous

creation. Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) of Georgia

introduced a new variety in Nights with Uncle Remus

(1883), which is literary negro folklore, and Finley Peter

Dunne (born 1857) of Chicago, the creator of "Mr Dooley,"

continues the older American style in its original traits.

History.

History was represented in this period with a distinction

not inferior to that of the elder group by Francis Parkman

(1823-1903) of Boston, who, however, really belongs with the

preceding age by his affiliations; his series of histories

fell after the Civil War by their dates of publication, but

they began with History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851);

he was the contemporary of Lowell and differed from the other

members of the elder group, who survived, only by the fact

of the later maturing of his work. He was not less eminent

than Motley and Prescott and his history is of a more modern

type. In the next generation the field of American history

was cultivated by many scholars, and a large part of local

history and of national biography was for the first time

recorded. James Ford Rhodes's (1848) History of the United

States (1892) holds standard rank; the various writings of

John Fiske (1842-1901), distinguished also as a philosophical

writer, in the colonial and revolutionary periods are valued

both for scholarship and for excellent literary style; and

Theodore Roosevelt's (born 1858) The Winning of the West (1889)

and his several biographical studies deserve mention by their

merit as well as for his eminent position. The historians,

however, have seldom sought literary excellence, and their

works belong rather to learning than to literature. The same

statement is true of the scholarship of the universities in

general, where the spirit of literary study has changed. In

the department of scholarship little requires mention beyond

Horace Howard Furness's (born 1833) lifelong work on his

Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, the Shakespearian labours

of Henry Norman Hudson (1814-1886) and Richard Grant White

(1821-1885), the Chaucerian studies of Thomas Raynesford

Lounsbury (born 1838) of Yale, and the translations of Dante

(1867, 1892) by Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908) of Harvard.

Modern ideas.

The period has been one of great literary activity, effort

and ambition, but it affects one by its mass rather than its

details; it presents few eminent names. The romantic motives

fixed in early colonizing history as a taking possession of

the land by a race of Puritans, pioneers, river-voyagers,

backwoodsmen, argonauts, have been exhausted; and no new motives

have been found. The national tradition has been absorbed and

incorporated, so far as literature was able to accomplish

this. The national character on the other hand has been expressed

rather in local types, the colour of isolated communities and

provincial conditions for their picturesque value and human

truth, and in commonplace characters of average life; but no

broadly ideal types of the old English tradition have been

created, and the great scene of life has not been staged after

the manner of the imaginative masters of the past. There

has been no product of ideas since Emerson; he was, indeed,

the sole author who received and fertilized ideas as such,

and he has had no successor. America is, in truth, perhaps

intellectually more remote from Europe than in its earlier

days. The contact of its romanticism with that of Europe

was, as has been seen, imperfect, but its touch with the later

developments and reactions of the movement in Europe is far more

imperfect. With Tolstoy, Ibsen, d'Annunzio, Zola, Nietzsche,

Maeterlinck, Sudermann, the American people can have no

effectual touch; their social tradition and culture make them

impenetrable to the present ideas of Europe as they are current

in literary forms. Nor has anything been developed from within

that is fertile in literature. The political unity of the

nation is achieved, but it is not an integral people in other

respects. It has not the unity of England or France or

even of the general European mind; it rather contains such

disparate elements as characterize the Roman or the Turkish

empire. It is cleft by political tradition and in social

moral conviction, north and south, and by intellectual

strata of culture east and west; it is still a people in the

making. Its literature has been regional, as was said,

centred in New England, New York, Philadelphia, contributed to

sporadically from the South, growing up in Western districts

like Indiana or germinating in Louisville in Kentucky,

abundant in California, but always much dependent on the

culture of its localities; it blends to some extent in the

mind of the national reading public, but not very perfectly.

The universities have not, on the whole, been its sources or

fosterers, and they are now filled with research, useful for

learning but impotent for literature. The intellectual life

is now rather to be found in social, political and natural

science than elsewhere; the imaginative life is feeble,

and when felt is crude; the poetic pulse is imperceptible.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The best general histories of American

literature are by Barrett Wendell (1900) and William P. Trent

(1903). Histories of particular periods or topics, most

serviceable, are M. C. Tyler's History of American Literature

during the Colonial Time (2 vols., 1878), Literary History of

the American Revolution (2 vols., 1897); J. F. Jameson, History

of Historical Writing in America (1891); H. D. Addison, The

Clergy in American Life and Letters (1900); W. H. Venable,

Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley (1891); M.

Nicholson, The Hoosiers (1900); A. H. Smith, Philadelphia

Magazines and their Contributors, 1741-1850 (1892); W. B.

Cairns, Development of American Literature, 1815-1833 (1898);

O. B. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England (1876); L.

Swift, Brook Farm (1900); T. W. Higginson, Old Cambridge

(1900). The entire field is covered encyclopaedically by

Stedman and Hutchinson, Library of American Literature (11

vols., 1888-1890) and the Duyckincks, Cyclopaedia (3rd

ed., 1875), and portions of it in R. W. Griswold's successive

collections, Poets and Poetry or America (1842), Prose

Writers of America (1847), Female Poets of America (1848);

Trent and Wells, Colonial Prose and Poetry (3 vols., 1901);

Louise Manly, Southern Literature (1900), and E. C. Stedman,

American Anthology (1900). The American Men of Letters

series (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston) and the English Men

of Letters, American Series (Macmillan, New York), present

the biographical and critical view in general, to which may

be added E. C. Stedman, Poets of America (1885); W. C.

Lawton, The New England Poets (1898), and G. E. Woodberry,

America in Literature (1903). Detailed and admirable

bibliographies for all aspects of the subject are to be found

in Wendell's and Trent's Histories, and abundant and minute

biographical detail in Stedman's indexes of authors in his

collections. See also the separate bibliographies to the

articles in this work on each individual writer. (G. E. W.)

AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE (1775-1781). This war, by

which the United States definitely separated themselves from

the British connexion, began with the affair of Lexington in

Massachusetts, on the 19th of April 1773, and was virtually ended

by the capitulation of Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, on the

l0th of October 1781. In this article the progress of the war

itself is alone considered, its political side being treated

under UNITED STATES: History. From a military standpoint

as well as politically it was a conspicuous and instructive

conflict,--conspicuous, or even unique, as being the most

famous struggle in history where colonial dependencies defeated

their powerful parent state, and instructive as presenting

exceptional conditions and consequent errors in the attempt to

break down the revolt. The reasons for Great Britain's failure

appear in the progress of the war, which assumed two distinct

stages, operations in the north followed by operations in the

south. In point of time and energy military activity was

about equally divided between these two fields. As the

naval operations in connexion with the war have a European

interest as well, they are dealt with in a separate section.

Land operations.

To strike at the rebellion first in the north was natural and

inevitable. To King George and his ministry, Massachusetts

was the hotbed of disloyalty, the head and front of opposition

to their colonial policy, and there coercion should begin.

It was also a convenient point for a prompt display of

authority, as the town of Boston was the headquarters of General

Gage, recently appointed royal governor of Massachusetts

and commander of the king's troops in North America. He had

with him four regiments of regulars, the initial force with

which to overawe the restless and defiant population in his

vicinity. While Gage is to be credited with advising his

government that not less than 20,000 men would be necessary

for the work in hand, he proceeded at once to suppress

demonstrations around Boston. His principal expedition

brought about the skirmish of the 19th of April 1775 (see

LEXINGTON), in which a detachment sent to seize some military

stores collected at Concord suffered heavily at Lexington,

Concord and other places, at the hands of the surrounding

militia. This encounter roused the New England colonies,

and in a few days some 16,000 of their townsmen marched

in small bands upon Boston to protest against and resist

further similar incursions; and in this irregular body we

have the nucleus of the colonial forces which carried the war

through. A noteworthy incident of the Concord affair, and

characteristic of the attitude which the provincials had

maintained and continued to maintain for another year, was

the official representation to the king by the Massachusetts

people that the regulars were the first to fire upon them,

and that they returned the fire and fought through the day

in strict defence of their rights and homes as Englishmen.

They repeated their professions of loyalty to his majesty

and the principles of the English Constitution. Conscious,

nevertheless, that a struggle impended, they instantly

sent word to all the other colonies, whose whig elements

sympathetically responded to the alarm. The war had opened.

Bunker Hill.

The home government extended its precautions and preparations.

General (Sir) William Howe, who succeeded Gage in the chief

command in October, and Generals (Sir) Henry Clinton and John

Burgoyne were sent out at once with reinforcements. Cornwallis

followed a year later. These four generals were identified

with the conduct of the principal operations on the side of

the British. The force at Boston was increased to 10,000

men. The American Congress at Philadelphia, acting for all

the thirteen colonies, voted general defensive measures,

called out troops and appointed George Washington of Virginia

commander-in-chief. Before he reached the camp forming

around Boston, a second and more important collision took

place. On the 17th of June 1775 occurred the battle of Bunker

Hill (q.v.), in which, although victorious, the British

suffered heavily, losing one-third of their force in storming

the hastily constructed lines of the "rebels." The latter's

most serious loss was that of General Joseph Warren, one

of the prominent leaders of the revolutionary movement in

Massachusetts. In moral effect the battle proved anything

but a defeat to the Americans, who now drew a cordon of works

around Boston, hemming Howe's army in a contracted, and, as it

proved, untenable, position. On the 3rd of July Washington

took command of the American army at Cambridge and proceeded

with what is known as the "siege of Boston," which was marked

by no special incident, and closed with the evacuation of the

town by the British on the 17th of March 1776, Howe sailing

away to Halifax, Nova Scotia. While the main interest centred

at this point, the year 1775 was marked by two enterprises

elsewhere. Fort Ticonderoga, the key to the passage of Lakes

George and Champlain to Canada, was surprised and taken on the

10th of May by a small band under Colonel Ethan Allen, while

Colonel Benedict Arnold headed an expedition through the Maine

woods to effect the capture of Quebec, where Sir Guy Carleton

commanded. Arnold joined General Richard Montgomery, who

was already near the city, and the combined force assaulted

Quebec on the 31st of December, only to meet with complete

defeat. Montgomery was killed and many of his men taken

prisoners. Demonstrations against Canada were soon discontinued,

Arnold drawing off the remnant of his army in May 1776.

The events of 1775, though favourable to America, were but

a prelude to the real struggle to come. For the campaign

of 1776 both sides made extensive preparations. To the home

government the purely military problem, although assuming

larger dimensions and more difficulties, still seemed to

admit of a simple solution, namely, to strike hard where

the rebellion was most active and capable of the longest

resistance. Defeated there, it would quickly dissipate in all

quarters. As much more than one-half of the population and

resources of the colonists lay north of Chesapeake Bay--New

England alone having an estimated population of over 700,000

persons--it was only a question as to what point in this

area should be made the future base of operations. Largely

upon the representations of Howe, Burgoyne and others, it

was determined to shift the field from Boston to New York

city, from there to hold the line of the Hudson river in

co-operation with a force to move down from Canada under Carleton

and Burgoyne, and thus effectually to isolate New England.

Long Island.

Upon this plan the new campaign opened in June 1776.

Howe, heavily reinforced from home, sailed on the 10th from

Halifax to New York and on the 5th of July encamped on Staten

Island. Washington, anticipating this move, had already

marched from Boston and fortified the city. His left flank

was thrown across the East river beyond the village of

Brooklyn, while his front and right on the harbour and North

or Hudson river were open to a combined naval and military

attack. The position proved untenable. Howe drove Washington

out of it, and forced the abandonment of the whole of Manhattan

Island by three well-directed movements upon the American

left. On the 22nd of August he crossed the Narrows to the

Long Island shore with 15,000 troops, increasing the number to

20,000 on the 25th, and on the 27th surprised the Americans,

driving them into their Brooklyn works and inflicting a loss

of about 1400 men. Among the prisoners were Generals J.

Sullivan and W. Alexander, soi-distant earl of Stirling. (See

LONG ISLAND.) Howe has been criticized, rightly or wrongly,

for failing to make full use of his victory. Washington

skilfully evacuated his Brooklyn lines on the night of the

29th, and in a measure relieved the depression which the

defeat had produced in his army. On the 15th of September

Howe crossed the East river above the city, captured 300

of the militia defending the lines and occupied the city.

Washington had withdrawn his main army to the upper part of the

island. A skirmish, fought the next day, opposite the west

front of the present Columbia University, and known as the

affair of Harlem Heights, cost the British a loss of seventy

of their light infantry. Delaying until the 12th of October,

Howe again moved forward by water into Westchester county,

and marching toward White Plains forced another retreat on

Washington. In the fight on Chatterton Hill at the Plains,

on the 28th of October, an American brigade was defeated.

Fort Washington.

Instead of pressing Washington further, Howe then returned to

Manhattan Island, and on the 16th of November captured Fort

Washington with nearly 3000 prisoners. This was the heaviest

blow to the Americans throughout the war in the north. The

British then pushed down through New Jersey with designs on

Philadelphia. Washington, still retreating with a constantly

diminishing force, suddenly turned upon Lieutenant-Colonel

Rall's advanced corps of Hessians at Trenton on the 26th of

December and captured nearly 1000 prisoners. This brilliant

exploit was followed by another on the 3rd of January, when

Washington, again crossing the Delaware, outmarched Cornwallis

at Trenton, and marching to his rear defeated three British

regiments and three companies of light cavalry at Princeton,

New Jersey. Marching on to Morristown, Washington encamped

there on the flank of the British advance in New Jersey, thus

ending the first campaign fought on the new issue of American

Independence, which had been declared on the 4th of July 1776.

Branywine.

While these closing successes inspirited the Americans, it

was undeniable that the campaign had gone heavily against

them. Having raised a permanent force for the war called the

Continental Line, they awaited further operations of the enemy.

Following up the occupation of New York, Howe proceeded in 1777

to capture Philadelphia. Complete success again crowned his

movements. Taking his army by sea from New York to the head

of the Chesapeake, he marched up into Pennsylvania, whither

Washington had repaired to watch him, and on the 26th of

September entered the city. The Americans attempted to check

the advance of the British at the river Brandywine, where an

action occurred on the 11th, resulting in their defeat (see

BRANDYWINE); and on the 4th of October Washington directed a

well-planned attack upon the enemy's camp at Germantown on the

outskirts of the city, but failed of success. (See GERMANTOWN.)

Howe's victorious progress in Pennsylvania was neutralized by

disasters farther north. Burgoyne marched from Canada in June

1777, with a strong expeditionary force, to occupy Albany

and put himself in touch with Howe at the other end of the

Hudson. Driving the Americans under General Arthur St Clair out

of Ticonderoga, and making his way through the deep woods with

difficulty, he reached the Hudson at Fort Edward on the 30th of

July. General Philip Schuyler, commanding the Americans in

that quarter, retreated to Stillwater, 30 m. above Albany,

barricading the roads and impeding Burgoyne's progress.

Dissatisfaction with his conduct led Congress to replace him

in command by General Gates. On the 13th of August Burgoyne

despatched a force to Bennington, Vermont, under the German

colonel Friedrich Baum, to capture stores and overawe the

country. On the 16th Baum was attacked by General John

Stark with the militia from the surrounding country, and was

overwhelmed. Colonel Breyman, marching to his relief, was

also routed. The misfortune cost the British 1000 men.

Saratoga.

Equally unfortunate was the fate of an expedition sent

under Colonel Barry St Leger to co-operate with Burgoyne

by way of the Mohawk Valley. On the 6th of August he was

met at Oriskany by General Nicholas Herkimer and forced to

retreat. Despite these disasters Burgoyne pushed south to

Stillwater, where he was defeated by Gates's improvised army

of continentals and militia in two battles on the 19th of

September (Freeman's Farm) and the 7th of October (Bemis's

Height). On the 17th he was forced to surrender. (See SARATOGA,

BATTLE OF.) This disaster was followed by the alliance between

America and France in 1778, and later by the addition of

Spain to England's enemies--events of far-reaching importance.

A movement of importance, in 1778-79, was the expedition

of George Rogers Clark, under the authority of the state of

Virginia, against the British posts in the north-west. With

a company of volunteers Clark captured Kaskaskia, the chief

post in the Illinois country, on the 4th of July 1778, and

later secured the submission of Vincennes, which, however, was

recaptured by General Henry Hamilton, the British commander at

Detroit. In the spring of 1779 Clark raised another force,

and recaptured Vincennes from Hamilton. This expedition

did much to free the frontier from Indian raids, gave

the Americans a hold upon the north-west, of which their

diplomats duly took advantage in the peace negotiations,

and later, by giving the states a community of interest

in the western lands, greatly promoted the idea of union.

In 1778 Sir Henry Clinton succeeded Howe in the chief command in

America. With fewer resources than his predecessor had disposed

of, he could accomplish practically nothing in the north.

In June 1778 he evacuated Philadelphia, with the intention of

concentrating his force at New York. Washington, who had passed

the winter at Valley Forge, overtook him at Monmouth, N.J., and

in an action on the 28th of June both armies suffered about equal

loss. Thereafter (except in the winter of 1779, at Morristown)

Washington made West Point on the Hudson the headquarters of

his army, but Clinton avowed himself too weak to attack him

there. In 1779 he attempted to draw Washington out of the

Highlands, with the result that in the manoeuvres he lost

the garrison at Stony Point, 700 strong, the position being

stormed by Wayne with the American light infantry on the 16th of

July. During the summer General John Sullivan marched with

a large force against the Indians (all the Iroquois tribes

except the Oneidas and part of the Tuscaroras siding with the

British during the war) and against the Loyalists of western

New York, who had been committing great depredations along the

frontier; and on the 29th of August he inflicted a crushing

defeat upon them at Newtown, on the site of the present

Elmira. In addition several Indian villages and the crops of the

Indians were destroyed in the lake region of western New York.

Meanwhile the co-operation of the French became active. In

July Count Rochambeau arrived at Newport, Rhode Island. That

place had been occupied by the British from 1776 to the close of

1779. An unsuccessful attempt was made to drive them out in

1778 by the Americans assisted by the French admiral d'Estaing

and a French corps. The year 1780 is also marked by the

treason of General Benedict Arnold (q.v.), and the consequent

execution of Major Andre. Minor battles and skirmishes

occurred until in August 1781 Washington conceived the project

of a combined American-French attack on Cornwallis at Yorktown,

Va., the success of which was decisive of the war (see below).

Campaign in Georgia.

The inadequate results of the British campaigns against the

northern colonies in 1776 and 1777 led the home government

to turn its attention to the weaker colonies in the south.

Operations in the north were not to cease, but a powerful

diversion was now to be undertaken in the south with a view

to the complete conquest of that section. Success there would

facilitate further movements in the north. An isolated attack

on Charleston, South Carolina, had been made by Sir Henry

Clinton and Sir Peter Parker as early as June 1776, but this was

foiled by the spirited resistance of General William Moultrie;

after 1778 the southern attempts, stimulated in part by the

activity of the French in the West Indies, were vigorously

sustained. On the 29th of December of this year Colonel

Archibald Campbell (1739- 1791) with an expeditionary corps of

3500 men from Clinton's army in New York, captured Savannah,

Georgia, defeating the American force under General Robert

Howe. In the following month he pushed into the interior

and occupied Augusta. General Benjamin Lincoln, succeeding

Howe, undertook to drive the British out of Georgia, but

General Augustine Prevost, who had commanded in Florida,

moved up and compelled Lincoln to retire to Charleston.

Prevost, making Savannah his headquarters, controlled

Georgia. In September 1779 he was besieged by Lincoln in

conjunction with a French naval and military force under Admiral

d'Estaing, but successfully repelled an assault (October 9), and

Lincoln again fell back to Charleston. In this assault Count

Casimir Pulaski, on the American side, was mortally wounded.

Charleston.

The prestige thus won by the British in the south in 1779

was immensely increased in the following year, when they

victoriously swept up through South and North Carolina.

Failing, as stated, to achieve any advantage in the north in

1779, Sir Henry Clinton, under instructions from government,

himself headed a combined military and naval expedition

southward. He evacuated Newport, R.I. (October 25), left New

York in command of the German general Wilhelm von Knyphausen,

and in December sailed with 8500 men to join Prevost at

Savannah. Cornwallis accompanied him, and later Lord Rawdon

joined him with an additional force. Marching upon Charleston,

Clinton cut off the city from relief, and after a brief

siege, compelled Lincoln to surrender on the 12th of May. (See

CHARLESTON.) The loss of this place and of the 3000 troops

included in the surrender was a serious blow to the American

cause. The apparent submission of South Carolina followed.

In June Clinton returned to New York, leaving Cornwallis

in command, with instructions to reduce North Carolina

also. Meanwhile an active and bitter partisan warfare

opened. The British advance had been marked by more than

the usual destruction of war; the Loyalists rose to arms;

the whig population scattered and without much organization

formed groups of riflemen and mounted troopers to harass the

enemy. Little mercy was shown on either side. The dashing

rider, Colonel Banastre Tarleton, cut to pieces (April

14, 1780) a detachment of Lincoln's cavalry, and followed

it up by practically destroying Buford's Virginia regiment

near the North Carolina border. On the other hand, daring

and skilful leaders such as Francis Marion and Thomas

Sumter kept the spirit of resistance alive by their sudden

attacks and surprises of British outposts. Hanging Rock,

Ninety-Six, Rocky Mount and other affairs brought their

prowess and devotion into notice. By the month of August

1780, with the main British force encamped near the North

Carolina line, the field seemed clear for the next advance.

Camden.

The threatening situation in the Carolinas alarmed Congress and

Washington and measures were taken to protect the distressed

section. Before Cornwallis could be brought to bay he was

faced successively by four antagonists--Generals Gates,

Greene, Lafayette and Washington. They found in him the most

capable and dangerous opponent of the war. Greene called

him "the modern Hannibal." With Lincoln's surrender of nearly

all the continental soldiers in the south, a new force had to

be supplied to meet the British veterans. Two thousand men,

mainly the Maryland line, were hurried down from Washington's

camp under Johann de Kalb; Virginia and North Carolina put

new men into the field, and the entire force was placed under

command of General Gates. Gates marched towards Camden, S.C.,

and on the 16th of August encountered Cornwallis near that

place. Each army by a night march attempted a surprise of the

other, but the British tactics prevailed, and Gates was utterly

routed. The reputation he had won at Saratoga was ruined on

the occasion by over-confidence and incompetence. De Kalb

was killed in the action. General Greene, standing next

to Washington as the ablest and most trusted officer of the

Revolution, succeeded Gates. Cornwallis marched leisurely

into North Carolina, but before meeting Greene some months

later he suffered the loss of two detachments sent at intervals

to disperse various partisan corps of the Americans. On the

7th of October 1780 a force of 1100 men under Major Patrick

Ferguson was surrounded at King's Mountain, S.C., near the

North Carolina line, by bands of riflemen under Colonels

Isaac Shelby, James Williams, William Campbell and others,

and after a desperate fight on the wooded and rocky slopes,

surrendered. Ferguson himself was killed. On the 17th of

January 1781 General Daniel Morgan was attacked at Cowpens,

south-west of King's Mountain, by Colonel Tarleton with his

legion. Both were leaders of repute, and a most stirring

action occurred in which Morgan, with Colonel William

Washington leading his cavalry, practically destroyed Tarleton's

corps. Despite the weakening his army suffered by these

losses, Cornwallis marched rapidly through North Carolina,

giving Greene a hard chase nearly to the Virginia line.

Guilford Court House.

On the 15th of March the two armies met at Guilford Court

House (near the present Greensboro, N.C.), and a virtually

drawn battle was fought. The British, by holding their ground

with their accustomed tenacity when engaged with superior

numbers, were tactically victors, but were further weakened by

a loss of nearly 600 men. Greene, cautiously avoiding another

Camden, retreated with his forces intact. With his small

army, less than 2000 strong, Cornwallis declined to follow

Greene into the back country, and retiring to Hillsborough,

N.C., raised the royal standard, offered protection to the

inhabitants, and for the moment appeared to be master of

Georgia and the two Carolinas. In a few weeks, however, he

abandoned the heart of the state and marched to the coast

at Wilmington, N.C., to recruit and refit his command.

At Wilmington the British general faced a serious problem,

the solution of which upon his own responsibility unexpectedly

led to the close of the war within seven months. Instead of

remaining in Carolina he determined to march into Virginia,

justifying the move on the ground that until Virginia was reduced

he could not firmly hold the more southern states he had just

overrun. This decision was subsequently sharply criticized

by Clinton as unmilitary, and as having been made contrary

to his instructions. To Cornwallis he wrote in May: "Had

you intimated the probability of your intention, I should

certainly have endeavoured to stop you, as I did then as

well as now consider such a move likely to be dangerous to

our interests in the Southern Colonies." The danger lay in

the suddenly changed situation in that direction; as General

Greene, instead of following Cornwallis to the coast, boldly

pushed down towards Camden and Charleston, S.C., with a

view to drawing his antagonist after him to the points where

he was the year before, as well as to driving back Lord

Rawdon, whom Cornwallis had left in that field. In his main

object, the recovery of the southern states, Greene succeeded

by the close of the year; but not without hard fighting and

repeated reverses. "We fight, get beaten, and fight again,"

were his words. On the 25th of April 1781 he was surprised

in his camp at Hobkirk's Hill, near Camden, by Lord Rawdon

and defeated, both sides suffering about an equal loss.

Eutaw Springs.

On the 22nd of May he attempted to storm the strong British

post at Ninety-Six but was repulsed; and finally on the 8th

of September he fought the last battle of the war in the

lower southern states at Eutaw Springs, S.C. In the first

part of the action Greene was successful after a desperate

conflict; in the pursuit, however, the Americans failed to

dislodge the British from a stone house which they held,

and their severe loss in both engagements was over 500

men. The British lost about 1000, one-half of whom were

prisoners. Better success attended the American partisan

operations directed by Greene and conducted by Marion,

Sumter, Andrew Pickens, Henry Lee and William Washington.

They fell upon isolated British posts established to protect

the Loyalist population, and generally captured or broke them

up. Rawdon found himself unable with his diminishing

force to cover the country beyond Charleston; and he fell

back to that place, leaving the situation in the south as

it had been in the early part of 1780. On the American

side, Greene was hailed as the deliverer of that section.

Virginia campaign.

Cornwallis, meantime, pursued his Virginia project. Leaving

Wilmington, N.C., on the 25th of April 1781, he reached

Petersburg on the 20th of May. There he found British

detachments, 2000 strong, composed of troops whom Clinton

had sent down separately under Generals Benedict Arnold and

William Phillips to establish a base in the Chesapeake, as

a diversion in favour of the operations of Cornwallis in the

Carolinas. Virginia at the moment presented a clear field

to the British, and they overran the state as far north as

Fredericksburg and west to Charlottesville. At the latter

place Jefferson, governor of the state, barely escaped

capture by Tarleton's men. A small American force under

Lafayette, whom Wayne reinforced during the summer, partially

checked the enemy. At Green Spring, near Jamestown Island,

Lafayette boldly attacked his antagonist on the 6th of

July, but had to save himself by a hasty retreat. Early

in August Cornwallis retired to Yorktown to rest and await

developments. There he fortified himself, and remained until

the American-French military and naval combination, referred to

above, appeared and compelled his surrender. (See YORKTOWN.)

With this event war operations ceased. Preliminary articles

of peace, signed on the 30th of November 1782, were followed

by a definitive treaty concluded on the 3rd of September

1783. Charleston, S.C., was evacuated late in 1782; New

York on the 25th of November 1783. The reasons of Great

Britain's misfortunes and failure may be summarized as

follows:--Misconception by the home government of the

temper and reserve strength of her colonists, a population

mainly of good English blood and instincts; disbelief at the

outset in the probability of a protracted struggle covering

the immense territory in America; consequent failure to

despatch sufficient forces to the field; the safe and Fabian

generalship of Washington; and finally, the French alliance

and European combinations by which at the close of the

conflict England was without a friend or ally on the continent.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. The most exhaustive reference work for

this period is vol. vi. of Winsor's Narrative and Critical

History of America (Boston, 1887). Its nine chapters,

prepared by different writers, give a complete review of the

struggle, both military and naval, and each closes with

numerous illustrative notes, editorial criticisms and a full

list of authorities. The volume is interspersed, far more

extensively and richly than any other treatise on the war,

with reproductions of contemporary plans, maps, documents,

portraits and prints. Supplementing Winsor and bringing

the material down to recent date is Prof. C. H. Van Tyne's

American Revolution (Harper's "Am. Nation" Series, New

York, 1905), chap. xviii., on bibliographical aids and

authorities. General histories of the war are mainly of

American authorship, such as: George Bancroft's History of

the United States (Boston, 1883-1885) which, in spite of minor

errors of fact and judgment, will remain standard; J. Fiske's

American Revolution (2 vols., Boston, 1891); Carrington's

Battles of the American Revolution (New York, 1876) is a

critical study by a military officer; L. J. Lossing's Pictorial

Field Book of the Revolution (2 vols., New York, 1850-1859),

not always accurate, but preserves local traditions and

details. Monographs on single events or campaigns abound:

Dawson's papers on Ticonderoga, "Storming of Stony Point,"

&c. (New York, 1866-); Johnston's "Campaign of 1776 around

New York" (L. I. Hist. Soc., 1877), "Yorktown Campaign" New

York, 1881), &c.; Sargent's Life of Major John Andre

(Boston, 1861), one of the best of Revolutionary biographies:

Gen. William Stryker's Battles of Trenton and Princeton

(Boston, 1898); and others mentioned in Winsor and Van Tyne.

English works of importance are Lord Mahon's History of England,

vol. vi.; Sir George O. Trevelyan's American Revolution

(New York and London; vol. i., 1899; 4 vols. published,

1908), a new study of cabinet and parliamentary politics of

the period, with review of the military events; Hon. J. W.

Fortescue, History of the British Army, vol. iii. (1902);

Stedman's American War (2 vols., 1794); Col. Tarleton's

Southern Campaigns, 1780-1781 (London, 1787); the pamphlet

controversy between Sir Henry Clinton and Lord Cornwallis

(1783), see Winsor, vi., p. 516, n.; Burgoyne's State of the

Expedition from Canada in 1777 (London, 1780). (H. P. J.*)

Effect of sea-power.

The naval operations of the War of Independence divide

themselves naturally into two periods. (1) From 1775 till the

summer of 1778 the British navy was engaged in co-operating

with the troops employed against the insurgents, on the

coasts, rivers and lakes of North America, or in endeavouring

to protect British commerce against the enterprise of American

privateers. (2) During the second period the successive

interventions of France, Spain and Holland extended the

naval war till it ranged from the West Indies to the Bay of

Bengal. This second period lasted from the summer of 1778

to the middle of 1783, and it included both such operations

as had already been in progress in America, or for the

protection of commerce, and naval campaigns on a great

scale carried out by the fleets of the maritime powers.

First Period.--The history of the naval war from 1775

to 1778 was made up of many small operations. The naval

force at the disposal of the admirals commanding on the

station, who until Lord Howe took up the command on the 12th

of July 1776 were Samuel Graves and Molyneux Shuldham, was

insufficient to patrol the long line of coast. A large part

of such squadrons as there were was necessarily limited to

aiding General Gage and Sir W. Howe at Boston, in seeking

stores for the army and in supplying naval brigades. At

other points of the coast the British navy was employed in

punitive expeditions against the coast towns--as for example

the burning of Falmouth (now Portland, Maine) in October

1775--which served to exasperate, rather than to weaken the

enemy, or the unsuccessful attack on Charleston, S.C., in June

1776. It was wholly unequal to the task of blockading

the many towns from which privateers could be fitted

out. British commerce therefore suffered severely, even as

far off as the Irish coasts, where it was found necessary

to supply convoy to the Belfast linen trade. The Americans

were not yet in a position to provide a fleet. On the 23rd

of March 1776 Congress did indeed issue letters of marque and

reprisal, and efforts were made to fit out a national force.

But the so-called "continental" vessels which sailed with the

commission of the Congress hardly differed in character, or

in the nature of their operations, from the privateers. The

British navy was able to cover the retreat of the army from

Boston to Halifax in April 1776, and to convey it to New York in

June. It assisted in the expedition to Philadelphia in July

1777. On the St Lawrence and the Lakes it was able to play

a more aggressive part. The relief of Quebec by Captain-

-afterwards Sir Charles--Douglas in May 1776 forced the

American general Arnold to retreat. The destruction of his

squadron on Lake Champlain in October covered the frontier

of Canada, and supplied a basis for the march of General

Burgoyne in 1777 which ended in the surrender at Saratoga.

Second Period.--The disaster at Saratoga was followed in

1778 by war with France, which had already given much private

help to the American privateers and to their forces in the

field. The rupture came in March when the British ambassador,

Lord Stormont, was recalled from Paris, but as neither fleet

was ready for service, actual conflict did not take place till

July. The French government was somewhat more ready than the

British. On the 13th of April it despatched a squadron of

twelve sail of the line and four frigates from Toulon to

America under the command of the Count d'Estaing. As no

attempt was made to stop him in the Straits of Gibraltar, he

passed them on the 16th of May, and though the rawness of his

crews and his own error in wasting time in pursuit of prizes

delayed his passage, he reached the mouth of the Delaware

on the 8th of July unopposed. The French government, which

by the fault of the British administration was allowed to

take the offensive, had three objects in view--to help the

Americans, to expel the British from the West Indies and

to occupy the main strength of the naval forces of Great

Britain in the Channel. Therefore a second and more powerful

fleet was fitted out at Brest under the command of the Count

d'Orvilliers. The British government, having neglected to

occupy the Straits of Gibraltar in time, despatched Admiral

Byron from Plymouth on the 9th of June with thirteen sail of

the line to join Admiral (Lord) Howe, Sir William's brother,

in America, and collected a strong force at home, called the

Western Squadron, under Viscount Keppel. Keppel, after a

preliminary cruise in June, brought d'Orvilliers to action

off Brest on the 27th of July. The fleets were equal and

the action was indecisive,--as the two forces merely passed

one another, cannonading. A violent quarrel exacerbated by

political differences broke out among the British commands,

which led to two courts-martial and to the resignation of

Keppel, and did great injury to the discipline of the

navy. No further event of note occurred in European waters.

On the coast of America the news of the approach of d'Estaing

compelled the British commanders to evacuate Philadelphia

on the 18th of June. Howe then concentrated his force of

nine small line-of-battle ships at Sandy Hook on the 29th of

June, and on the 11th of July he learnt that d'Estaing was

approaching. The French admiral did not venture to make an

attack, and on the 22nd of July sailed to co-operate with the

Americans in an endeavour to expel the British garrison from

Rhode Island. Howe, who had received a small reinforcement,

followed. The French admiral, who had anchored above Newport,

R.I., came to sea to meet him, but both fleets were scattered by

storms. D'Estaing sailed to Boston on the 21st of August.

Howe received no help from Byron, whose badly appointed fleet

was damaged and scattered by a gale on the 3rd of July in

mid-Atlantic. His ships dropped in by degrees during September.

Howe resigned on the 25th of that month, and was succeeded by

Byron. The approach of winter made a naval campaign on the coast

of North America dangerous. The operations of naval forces in

the New World were largely dictated by the facts that from June

to October are the hurricane months in the West Indies, while

from October to June includes the stormy winter of the northern

coast. On the 4th of November d'Estaing sailed for the West

Indies, on the very day that Commodore William Hotham was

despatched from New York to reinforce the British fleet in those

waters. On the 7th of September the French governor of

Martinique, the marquis de Bouille, had surprised the British

island of Dominica. Admiral Samuel Barrington, the British

admiral in the Leeward Islands, had retaliated by seizing

Santa Lucia on the 13th and 14th of December after the arrival

of Hotham from North America. D'Estaing, who followed Hotham

closely, was beaten off in two feeble attacks on Barrington

at the Cul-de-Sac of Santa Lucia on the 15th of December.

On the 6th of January 1779 Admiral Byron reached the West

Indies. During the early part of this year the naval forces

in the West Indies were mainly employed in watching one

another. But in June, while Byron had gone to Antigua to guard

the trade convoy on its way home, d'Estaing first captured

St Vincent, and then on the 4th of July Grenada. Admiral

Byron, who had returned, sailed in hopes of saving the island,

but arrived too late. An indecisive action was fought off

Grenada on the 6th of July. The war now died down in the West

Indies. Byron returned home in August. D'Estaing, after

co-operating unsuccessfully with the Americans in an attack on

Savannah, in September also returned to Europe. In European

waters the Channel had been invaded by a combined French and

Spanish fleet of sixty-six sail of the line, Spain having now

joined the coalition against Great Britain. Only thirty-five

sail of the line could be collected against them under the

command of Sir Charles Hardy. But they came late and did

nothing. The allies retired early in September and were

not even able to molest the British trade convoys. In the

meantime the Spaniards had formed the siege of Gibraltar.

So far the British navy had stood on the defensive, without

material loss except in the West Indies, but without

triumph. The operations of 1780 went on much the same lines.

The British government, not feeling strong enough to blockade

Brest and the Spanish ports, was compelled to regulate its

movements by those of its opponents. In the Channel it was

saved from disaster by the ineptitude of the French and Spanish

fleets. The only real success achieved by this numerically

imposing force was the capture on the 8th and 9th of August

of a large British convoy of ships bound for the East and

West Indies carrying troops. But on the American coast and in

the West Indies more vigour was displayed. Early in the year

Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot was sent to take command in North

America. On the French side the count de Guichen was sent

with reinforcements to the West Indies to take command of the

ships left in the previous year by d'Estaing. He arrived in

March, and was able to confine the small British force under

Sir Hyde Parker at Gros Islet Bay in Santa Lucia. In May M.

d'Arzac de Ternay was sent from Brest with seven line-of-battle

ships, and a convoy carrying 6000 French troops to act with the

Americans. He had a brush with a small British force under

Cornwallis near Bermuda on the 20th of June, and reached Rhode

Island on the 11th of July. During the rest of the year, and

part of the next, the British and French naval forces in North

American waters remained at their respective headquarters,

New York and Newport, watching one another. The West Indies

was again the scene of the most important operations of the

year. In February and March a Spanish force from New Orleans,

under Don Bernardo de Galvez, invaded West Florida with

success. But the allies made no further progress. At the

close of 1779 Sir George Rodney had been appointed to command

a large naval force which was to relieve Gibraltar, then

closely blockaded, and send stores to Minorca. Rodney was to

go on to the West Indies with part of the fleet. He sailed

on the 29th of December 1779 with the trade for the West

Indies under his protection, captured a Spanish convoy on his

way off Finisterre on the 8th of January, defeated a smaller

Spanish force near Cape St Vincent on the 16th, relieved

Gibraltar on the 19th, and left for the West Indies on the

13th of February. On the 27th of March he joined Sir Hyde

Parker at Santa Lucia, and Guichen retired to Fort Royal in

Martinique. Until July the fleets of Rodney and Guichen, of

equal strength, were engaged in operations round the island of

Martinique. The British admiral endeavoured to force on a close

engagement. But in the first encounter on the 17th of April

to leeward of the island, Rodney's orders were not executed

by his captains, and the action was indecisive. He wished to

concentrate on the rear of the enemy's line, but his captains

scattered themselves along the French formation. In two

subsequent actions, on the 15th and 19th of May, to windward of

Martinique, the French admiral would not be brought to close

action. The arrival of a Spanish squadron of twelve ships

of the line in June gave a great numerical superiority to

the allies, and Rodney retired to Gros Islet Bay in Santa

Lucia. But nothing decisive occurred. The Spanish fleet

was in bad health, the French much worn-out. The first

went on to Havana, the second to San Domingo. In July,

on the approach of the dangerous hurricane season, Rodney

sailed for North America, reaching New York on the 14th of

September. Guichen returned home with the most worn-out of his

ships. On the 6th of December Rodney was back at Barbadoes

from the North American station, where he was not able to

effect anything against the French in Narragansett Bay.

The rambling operations of the naval war till the close

of 1780-- directed by the allies to such secondary objects

as the capture of West Indian islands, or of Minorca and

Gibraltar, and by Great Britain to defensive movements--began

to assume a degree of coherence in 1781. Holland having now

joined the allies, the British government was compelled to

withdraw part of its fleet from other purposes to protect

the North Sea trade. A desperate battle was fought on the

Dogger Bank on the 5th of August between Sir Hyde Parker and

the Dutch admiral Zoutman, both being engaged in protecting

trade; but Holland did not affect the general course of the

war. The allies again failed to make a vigorous attack on the

British forces in the Channel. They could not even prevent

Admiral George Darby from relieving Gibraltar and Minorca in

April. The second of these places was closely invested later

on, and was compelled to surrender on the 5th of February

1782. But a vigorous policy was carried out by France

in the West Indies and America, while she began a most

resolute attack on the British position in the East Indies.

In the West Indies Rodney, having received news of the

breach with Holland early in the year, took the island of St

Eustatius, which had been a great depot of contraband of war,

on the 3rd of February. The British admiral was accused of

applying himself so entirely to seizing and selling his booty

that he would not allow his second in command, Sir Samuel

Hood, who had recently joined him, to take proper measures

to impede the arrival of French forces known to be on their

way to Martinique. The French admiral, the count de Grasse,

reached the island with reinforcements in April. Until July

he was engaged in a series of skilful operations directed to

menacing the British islands while he avoided being brought

to battle by Rodney. In July he sailed for the coast of North

America, whither he was followed in August by Sir S. Hood,

Rodney having been compelled to return home in ill- health.

On the coast of North America the war came to its crisis.

In the earlier part of the year the British at New York and

the French at Newport continued to watch one another. In

April the British admiral Arbuthnot did indeed succeed in

baffling an attempt of the French to carry reinforcements

to the American cause in Virginia. The action he fought

off the capes of Virginia on the 16th of April was ill

conducted, but his main purpose was achieved. Washington,

who was wisely anxious to concentrate attack on one or other

of the centres of British power in Virginia or New York,

had to wait till the arrival of Grasse before he could see

his ideas applied. The French admiral gave the allies a

superiority of naval strength on the coast of Virginia, and

Lord Cornwallis, the British commander, was beleaguered in

Yorktown. Admiral Thomas Graves, Arbuthnot's successor, who

had been joined by Hood from the West Indies, endeavoured to

drive off the French fleet. But the feeble battle he fought

on the 5th of September failed to shake the French hold on the

Chesapeake, and Grasse having been reinforced, Graves sailed

away. Yorktown fell on the 19th of October, and the war was

settled as far as the coast of North America was concerned.

The French admiral, having rendered this vital service to his

ally, now returned to the West Indies, whither he was followed

by Hood, and resumed the attacks on the British islands.

In January and February 1782 he conquered St Christopher,

in spite of the most determined opposition of Hood, who with

a much inferior force first drove him from his anchorage at

Basseterre, and then repulsed his repeated attacks. The next

purpose of the French was to combine with the Spaniards for an

attack on Jamaica. Sir George Rodney, having returned to his

command with reinforcements, baffled this plan by the series

of operations which culminated in the battle of the 12th of

April 1782. (See SAINTS, BATTLE OF.) No further operations

of note occurred in the West Indies. At home Howe relieved

Gibraltar for the last time in September and October 1782.

The war in the East Indies formed a separate series of

episodes. In 1778 the British authorities had little difficulty

in seizing the French settlement of Pondicherry. A naval

engagement of a very feeble kind took place on the 10th of

August in the Bay of Bengal, between the British naval officer

in command and M. de Tronjoly. But the French were too weak

in these seas for offensive movements, and therefore remained

quiescent at Bourbon and Mauritius till the beginning of

1782. In the spring of 1781 the bailli de Suffren was sent

to the East with a small squadron; on his way he fell upon

a British force which had been sent to take the Cape from

the Dutch, and which he found in the Portuguese anchorage

of Porto Praya, on the 16th of April. Having provided for

the security of the Cape, Suffren went on to the French

islands. He sailed from them early in 1782 to carry out a

vehement attack on the British forces in the Bay of Bengal.

From the 17th of February 1782 to the 20th of June 1783 he

fought a series of fine actions against Sir Edward Hughes, by

which he secured a marked superiority on the water. Though

he had no port in which to refit and no ally save Hyder Ali,

he kept the sea and did not even return to the French islands

during the north-easterly monsoon. Suffren failed in his main

purpose, which was to make such a capture as would put his

government in a strong position during the negotiations for

peace. But his capture of Trincomalee in July 1782 in spite

of Sir Edward Hughes, and the heavy loss he inflicted on the

British fleet in several of the actions he fought, constitute the

most honourable part of the French naval operations in the war.

AUTHORITIES.--The Influence of Sea Power upon History,

Captain Mahan, gives the best critical examination of the

naval aspects of the war. The French side will be found

in the Histoire de la marine francaise pendant la Guerre

de l'Independence americaine (Paris, 1877), by Captain

Chevalier. For accounts of the American navy see C. O.

Paullin, The Navy of the American Revolution (Chicago,

1906); E. S. Maclay, History of the U.S. Navy, vol.

i. (New York, 1897): C. H. Lincoln, Naval Records of

the American Revolution (Washington, 1906); and Edward

Field, Esek Hopkins, Commander-in-chief of the Continental

Navy during the American Revolution (Providence, R.I.,

1898). For details of actions the reader may be referred to

Beatson's Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain from

1727 to 1783 (London, 1804), and to Sir W. Laird Clowes's

The Royal Navy: A History (London, 1897, &c.). (D. H.)

AMERICAN WAR OF 1812. The war between the United States

and Great Britain, commonly known as "of 1812," began by the

American declaration of war on the 18th of June of that year,

and lasted till the beginning of 1815. The treaty of peace

signed at Ghent on the 24th of December 1814 was ratified by

the president of the United States on the 17th of February

1815. These two years and a half of conflict were filled

with isolated encounters which can hardly be reduced to

coherent and ordered operations. Although the outbreak of

war had been preceded by years of angry diplomatic dispute,

the United States were absolutely unready, while Great Britain

was still hard pressed by the hostility of Napoleon, and was

compelled to retain the greater part of her forces and her

best crews in European waters, till the ruin of the Grande

Armee in Russia and the rising of Germany left her free

to send an overwhelming force of ships to American waters.

The forces actually available on the American side when

the war began consisted of a small squadron of very fine

frigates and sloops in an efficient state. Twenty-two was

the extreme limit of the naval force the States were able to

commission. The paper strength of the army was 35,000, but

the service was voluntary and unpopular, while there was an

almost total want of trained and experienced officers. The

available strength was a bare third of the nominal. The

militia, called in to aid the regulars, proved untrustworthy.

They objected to serve beyond the limits of their states, were

not amenable to discipline, and behaved as a rule very ill in

the presence of the enemy. On the British side, the naval force

in American waters under Sir John Borlase Warren, who took up

the general command on the 26th of September 1812, consisted

of ninety-seven vessels in all, of which eleven were of the

line and thirty-four were frigates, a power much greater than

the national navy of America, but inadequate to the blockade

of the long coast from New Brunswick to Florida. The total

number of British troops present in Canada in July 1812 was

officially stated to be 5004, consisting in part of Canadians.

The scene of operations naturally divided into three

sections:--(1) the ocean; (2) the Canadian frontier, from

Lake Huron, by Lakes Erie and Ontario, the course of the

St Lawrence and Lake Champlain; (3) the coast of the United

States. As the operations on these three fields had little

interaction on one another, it will be more convenient to take

them separately than to follow the confusing chronological

order. Operations on the Ocean.--These cover all cruises

of sea-going ships, even when they did not go far from the

coast. They again subdivide into the actions of national

vessels, and the raids of the privateers. The first gave

to the United States the most brilliant successes of the

war. When it began two small squadrons were getting ready

for sea at New York; the frigate "President" (44) and sloop

"Hornet" (18), under Commodore John Rodgers, who had also

the general command; and the frigates "United States" (44)

and "Congress" (38), with the brig "Argus" (16) to which

two guns were afterwards added, under Captain Stephen

Decatur. Rodgers would have preferred to keep his command

together, and to strike with it at the main course of British

commerce, but he was overruled. He sailed on the 21st of

June, and after chasing the British frigate "Belvidera"

(36), which escaped into Halifax by throwing boats, &c.,

overboard, stood across the North Atlantic in search of a

West Indian convoy, which he failed to sight, returning by the

31st of August to Boston. While he was absent, Captain Isaac

Hull, commanding the "Constitution" (44), sailed from the

Chesapeake, and after a narrow escape from a British squadron,

which pursued him from the 18th to the 20th of July, reached

Boston. Going to sea again on the 2nd of August he captured

and burned the British frigate "Guerriere," (38). On the

8th of October Rodgers and Decatur sailed--the first on

a cruise to the east, the second to the south. Commodore

Rodgers met with no marked success, but on the 25th of October

Captain Decatur in the "United States" captured the British

frigate "Macedonian" (38), which he carried back to port.

At the close of the month Captain Bainbridge sailed with the

"Constitution," "Essex" (32) and "Hornet" (18) on a southerly

cruise. On the 20th of December, when off Bahia, he fell

in with the British frigate "Java" (38), which was carrying

General Hislop, the governor of Bombay, to India, and took her

after a sharp action. The "Essex" and "Hornet" were not in

company. The first, under the command of Captain David

Porter, went on to the Pacific, where she did great injury

to British trade, till she was captured off Valparaiso by

the British frigate "Phoebe" (38) and the sloop "Cherub"

(24) on the 28th of March 1814. In these actions, except the

last, the Americans had the advantage of greater size and a

heavier broadside, but they showed excellent seamanship and

gunnery. The capture of three British frigates one after

another caused a painful impression in Great Britain and

stimulated her to greater exertions. Vessels were accumulated

on the American sea-board, and the watch became more

strict. On the 1st of June 1813 the capture of the U.S.

frigate "Chesapeake" (38), by the British frigate "Shannon"

(38), a vessel of equal force, counterbalanced the moral

effect of previous disasters. The blockade of American ports

was already so close that the United States ships found it

continually more difficult to get to sea, or to keep the sea

without meeting forces of irresistibly superior strength.

The operations of American privateers were too numerous

and far- ranging to be told in detail. They continued

active till the close of the war, and were only partially

baffled by the strict enforcement of convoy by the British

authorities. A signal instance of the audacity of the

American cruisers was the capture of the U.S. sloop "Argus"

(20) by the British sloop "Pelican" (18) so far from home

as St David's Head in Wales on the 14th of August 1813.

The "Pelican's" guns were heavier than those of the "Argus."

Operations on the Lakes.--The American people, who had

expected little from their diminutive navy, had calculated

with confidence on being able to overrun Canada. As,

however, they had taken no effectual measures to provide a

mobile force they were disappointed. The British general,

Sir George Prevost, was neither able nor energetic, but his

subordinate, Major-General Isaac Brock, was both. In July,

before the Americans were ready, Brock seized Mackinac at

the head of Lake Huron; and on the 16th of August Detroit in

the channel between Huron and Erie was surrendered. Kingston

was held at the east end of Ontario. Montreal on the St

Lawrence was a strong position on the British side to which,

however, the Americans had an easy road of approach by Lake

Champlain. Sound reasoning would have led the Americans to

direct their chief attacks on Kingston and Montreal, since

success at those points would have isolated the British

posts on Lakes Ontario, Erie and Huron. But they were much

influenced by fear of the Indians, who had been won over

to the British side by the energy of Brock. They therefore

looked more carefully to the lakes than to the course of the

St Lawrence, and it may be added that their leaders showed

an utter want of capacity for the intelligent conduct of war.

The impracticable character of the communications by land made

it absolutely necessary for both parties to obtain control

of the water. Neither had made any preparations, and the

war largely resolved itself into a race of shipbuilding. The

Americans, who had far greater facilities for building than

the British, allowed themselves to be forestalled. In the

second half of 1812 the British general, Sir Isaac Brock,

lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, adopted measures for

opposing the Americans on the frontier line, between Huron and

Erie. The American brigadier-general William Hull invaded

Canada on the 12th of July from Detroit, just below the

small Lake of St Clair between Huron and Erie. His army was

mainly composed of militiamen, who behaved very badly, and

his papers having been captured in a boat, his plans were

revealed. General Brock drove him back and forced him

to surrender at Detroit on the 16th of August. Brock now

promptly transferred himself to the western end of Erie, where

the American general Henry Dearborn was attempting another

invasion. Brock fell in action on the 13th of October, while

repulsing Dearborn's subordinate Van Rensselaer, a politician

named to command by favour, and ignorant of a soldier's

business. The Americans were driven back. In this field also

their militia behaved detestably. The Canadians on the other

hand, both the French who were traditionally amenable to

authority and those of English descent, who being largely sons

of loyalists of the War of Independence had a bitter hatred

of the Americans, did excellent service. The discontent of

New England with the war both hampered the American generals

and also aided the British, who drew their supplies to a great

extent from United States territory. On the 22nd of January

1813, at Frenchtown, the American troops under Winchester

surrendered to a British and Indian force under Procter.

During the winter both sides were busy in building ships. On

Ontario the Americans pushed on their preparations at Sackett's

Harbour under Isaac Chauncey; the English were similarly

engaged at Kingston. Sir James Lucas Yeo took command on

the 15th of May 1813. On Erie the American headquarters were

at Presqu' Isle, now the city of Erie; the English at Fort

Malden. The American commander was Captain Oliver Perry, the

British commander, Captain Robert Barclay. On Lake Ontario

Yeo formed a more mobile though less powerful force than

Chauncey's, and therefore manoeuvred to avoid being brought

to close action. Three engagements, on the 10th of August,

11th of September and 28th of September, led to no decisive

result. By the close of the war Yeo had constructed a ship

of 102 guns which gave him the superiority, and the British

became masters of Lake Ontario. On Lake Erie the energy

of Captain Perry, aided by what appears to have been the

misjudgment of Barclay, enabled him to get a superior force

by the 4th of August, and on the 10th of September he fought

a successful action which left the Americans masters of Lake

Erie. The military operations were subordinate to the

naval. In April 1813 the Americans took York (now Toronto),

and in May moved on Fort George; but a counter-attack by

Yeo and Prevost on Sackett's Harbour, on the 29th of May,

having made the Americans anxious about the safety of their

base, naval support failed the American generals, and they

were paralysed. A success was gained by them (October

5) at the Thames, where the Indian chief Tecumseh fell,

but they made no serious progress. The Americans turned

to the east of Ontario, intending to assail Montreal by

the St Lawrence in combination with their forces at Lake

Champlain. But the combination failed; they were severely

harassed on the St Lawrence, and the invasion was given up.

The operations of 1814 bear a close resemblance to those of

1813, with, however, one important difference. The American

generals, having by this time brought their troops to order,

were able to fight with much better effect. Their attack on

the Niagara peninsula led to hot fighting at Chippewa (July

5) and Lundy's Lane (July 25), the first a success for the

Americans, the second a drawn battle. The fall of Napoleon

having now freed the British government from the obligation

to retain its army in Europe, troops from Spain began to pour

in. But on the Canadian frontier they made little difference.

In August 1814 Sir George Prevost attacked the American forces at

Champlain. But his naval support, ill prepared, was hurried

into action by him at Plattsburg on the 11th of September, and

defeated. Prevost then retired. His management of the

war, more especially on Lake Champlain, was severely

criticized, and he was threatened with a court-martial,

but died before the trial came on. A British occupation of

part of the coast of Maine proved to be mere demonstration.

Operations on the American Coast.--When the war began the

British naval forces were unequal to the work of blockading

the whole coast. They were also much engaged in seeking for

the American cruisers under Rodgers, Decatur and Bainbridge.

The British government, having need of American foodstuffs for

its army in Spain, was willing to benefit by the discontent of

the New Englanders. No blockade of New England was at first

attempted. The Delaware and Chesapeake were declared in a

state of blockade on the 26th of December 1812. This was

extended to the whole coast south of Narragansett by November

1813, and to the whole American coast on the 31st of May

1814. In the meantime much illicit trade was carried on

by collusive captures arranged between American traders

and British officers. American ships were fraudulently

transferred to neutral flags. Eventually the United States

government was driven to issue orders for the purpose of

stopping illicit trading, and the commerce of the country was

ruined. The now overpowering strength of the British

fleet enabled it to occupy the Chesapeake and to execute

innumerable attacks of a destructive character on docks and

harbours. The burning by the American general McClure, on

the 10th of December 1813, of Newark (Niagara on the Lake),

for which severe retaliation was taken at Buffalo, was made

the excuse for much destruction. The most famous of these

destructive raids was the burning of the public buildings

at Washington by Sir Alexander Cochrane, who succeeded

Warren in April in the naval command, and General Robert

Ross. The expedition was carried out between the 19th and

29th of August 1814, and was well organized and vigorously

executed.1 On the 24th the American militia, collected at

Bladensburg to protect the capital, fled almost before they were

attacked. A subsequent attack on Baltimore, in which General

Ross was killed (September 12, 1814), was a failure. The

expedition to New Orleans (q.v.) is separately dealt with.

AUTHORITIES.--In his Sea Power in its Relations to the

War of 1812 Captain Mahan has given a careful account

of the war by land and sea with reference to services.

The Naval War of 1812, by Theodore Roosevelt (New York,

1882), is lively but somewhat passionate, and not free from

prejudice. A vehement statement of the Canadian side will be

found in How Canada was held for the Empire, by James Hannay

(London, Edinburgh, Toronto, 1903). See also The Canadian

War of 1812, by Charles P. Lucas (Oxford, 1906). (D. H.)