And still New England.--Sui Generis.--Her Ruggedness the
Soil of Liberty.--The Contrast.--The New England
Conservative.--The New England Man of Business.--The West
has no Past.--_Fast_, and Hospitable.--Saxon Blood and Saxon
Spirit.
Such is a picture of some of the old-school New England men, as they
flourished years ago. Such are some of the portraits and images that rise
up, and stand out vividly before me.
New England is unlike anything the pioneer sees, hears, or feels in a
wilderness country. She is unlike his country in her creation. Her solemn
mountains, lone lakes--her rushing streams, that dart like arrows from her
precipices--the roar of her cataracts, amid her rugged gorges--her long and
tranquil reaches of valley--the cold, solemn, and quiet pictures of Nature
that she mingles and groups on her canvas, give soul and spirit to the
people who are nursed upon her soil; and they, too, grow gigantic, like the
objects around them--patriotism, integrity, firmness, germinate and become
athletic in such fastnesses: Liberty last expires upon the mountains.
Why was civil and religious liberty planted, amid December snows, upon her
inhospitable coast? Why was it committed to her rugged elements of Nature,
if not to harden the men, and strengthen and preserve principles? Had the
May Flower discharged its freight of ideas amid abundance, soft skies, and
a teeming soil, it is not certain that the Declaration would have been
signed in 1776.
How different is the great West! One great plain of prairie and woodland,
reaching from zone to zone, fairly bursting with the richness of its varied
soil and climate--reserved, as it were, by Providence, to receive the less
hardy and vigorous generations which time might throw off upon her--tame in
scenery, but filled with the resources of wealth and power.
But New England is not only unlike the West in its creation, but her
people, from a thousand causes, have fixed and established habits and
customs as unlike. And all these have become as stereotyped by ages, as the
figures upon a panorama. The New England panorama, in all its essential
features, rolls off to-day as it did years ago. Who has not been impressed
with this truth? Select an old New England town--analyze it as you once
knew it, and as it is now. How was it, how is it made up? It was finished
then--the last blow was struck, the last foundation laid, the rubbish all
cleared away; as if it only waited for the final explosion of all
things--even the magnificent elms that solemnly swept its streets, grew no
longer--they, too, had reached maturity, and gone to sleep. So it is now.
A western village, in its general aspect, presents the very reverse of
this. Like Jonah's gourd, it is the "son of a night." It seems to have been
thrown up by an army on the march--and such is the fact--the mighty army of
pioneers, who are here to-day and there to-morrow, and who are only traced
by such huge footsteps.
The people of a New England village appear to have been procured, assorted
and arranged, for their positions and occupations. Each person treads in
his own circle--each is stamped with a value--branded good, bad, or
indifferent. There is the conservative gentleman--the dash that connects
generations--he who has taken a preemption right to respectability--whose
patent dates away back among historical reminiscences and dead bones--whose
presence is _prima facie_ evidence of all that is claimed and exercised. A
man of authority is he. He carries an odor of the past around with him--an
air--a something that smells of blood--a consciousness that some time, or
somehow, somebody or something had given his ancestors a cross that
followed and sublimated his whole race.
Such men impress a consequence upon objects around them. Their family
carriages look wise and venerable--heirlooms embalmed by generations gone.
They drive horses that think and know who and what they are--and who live
and die under the protection of their masters. Their church-pews blaze in
crimson--are piled with cushions, arrayed with stools, and tables, and
books, with two pillows and a foot-stove in the corner, for the old _lady_
of seventy, who wheezes and takes snuff.
Perhaps, reader, you have met just such a New England character. He never
moves below a line in society--a line as arbitrary with him as 36 deg. 30'. He
had a broad face, double chin, heavy nose, wide-brimmed hat, and buff vest,
filled with ruffles. You have heard him deliver his opinion upon a question
of public policy, or public morals--his voice slow and sepulchral--his
manner heavy, almost melancholy--made impressive through the aid of a
gold-headed cane, with which he occasionally beats out the emphatic
portions of his homily. Perhaps you attempted to make a suggestion
yourself--if you did, you recollect the frown, the reproof that came down
upon you, from those cold, gray eyes of his, and perhaps the shock you
inflicted upon the timid around you, from your impudence.
This class do not, by any means, constitute the backbone of New England.
The enterprise that breaks through her mountains, upheaves her valleys, and
sends the iron horse on its way--creates the roar of machinery that
reverberates among her hills--grasps with, and battles for, the public
questions of the _day_--pours a tide of life and energy into everything
around--which makes itself felt through the long arms of commerce in every
part of the world, and whose touch electrifies every mart--_this
enterprise_ is born, and quickened, and sustained somewhere else. These men
are the mere spectators of all this bustle. They are rather drag-weights
upon it--the acknowledged conservative army of "masterly inactivity."
These conservatives are not without value, but they can only exist in a
fixed state of society. They are the work of ages, and cannot be created in
a breath. No such characters can be found in the western world. The roots
of such a growth lie away back among the Puritans. One can smell Plymouth
Rock, Cotton Mather, Bunker Hill, and indeed the whole revolutionary war,
in the very production. Pedigree associations, musty ideas, which lie
scattered everywhere, and yet nowhere in particular, are the foundation of
this kind of aristocracy; all of which is submitted to by custom and
habit.
What if an attempt should be made to build up such a society in a new
country? Where would we begin? There is no past to hallow and dignify the
present; and without a past to draw upon, and anchor to, an aristocracy
would be all afloat. The past of Puddleford, so far as my researches go,
ends in the _Pottawatomie Indians_--a little later in Longbow, Turtle, and
Bates. This is the extent of our resources; and no one has been yet found
who was willing to go into that kind of business on such a capital. Money,
so often the foundation of pretension, is widely diffused, in very small
parcels. Historical local incidents there are none. The conquest of the
country was by the axe and an indomitable spirit. There was no blood nor
brimstone used. The pioneer's little family of sinewy children was the army
that entered it, and took possession of the soil.
But the people of New England, I said, were assorted. The man of business,
the merchant, the mechanic, was a merchant, a mechanic, in the same place,
the same building, perhaps forty years ago--and his whole life is one of
order and system. He lives by rule--is as fixed in his sphere as the
conservative in his. His income for the future can be calculated from the
past. His duties are foreseen and provided for. Domestic expenses so much;
support of the gospel so much; charity so much; pleasure so much; which,
deducted from income, balance, so much. Here, again, is the fruit of a
fixed society. The creditor of a New England merchant knows where his
customer will be next year--at his old post, or dead.
How is it in a new country? Not one resident in ten is permanently located.
Every man expects to remove somewhere else, at some time. Here is no
association, no tie, to bind him to the soil. The pioneer is but a
passenger who has stopped over night, as it were, and he holds himself
ready to push forward at the blow of the trumpet. Villages, and even whole
townships, change inhabitants in short periods, and other men, with other
views and habits, step in and take their places. Where does the merchant
creditor find his western customer of last year? Sold out, perhaps, to Mr.
A., and Mr. A. sold to Mr. B., and Mr. B. to Mr. C. Mr. C. pays all
arrearages, and Mr. A. and B. are boating on the Mississippi, or
"ballooning" in some fancy speculation on the north shore of the Oregon.
While the great West suffers from a want of the virtues that attend a fixed
society, as it undoubtedly does, it does not find itself obliged to contend
against its prejudices. There are no arbitrary lines drawn, based upon mere
ideas--no venerable fictions in the way. Custom, habit, society, immemorial
usage, hang no dead-weights upon the young and ambitious. All start from
the same line, the prize is aloft in full view, and he who first reaches it
creates his own precedence.
If there is no past to hallow and chasten the people of a new country, no
permanent present to hold them to one spot, so in one sense there is no
future. There is no locality that is adorned and beautified for coming
years--no spot designated to become venerable to posterity--no tree nursed
and protected in memory of him who planted it--no ground consecrated for
the burial of the dead. Houses are built, localities adorned, trees
planted, cemeteries erected, but they who fashioned all this do not abide
with them--they are ever on the march, and the stranger takes possession
of the memorials they leave behind; and if posterity should attempt to
collect the works of such an ancestor, it would find them scattered over
the circuit of states.
We have attempted, in a plain way, to draw a comparison, very briefly, to
be sure, between a fixed and an unfixed society. Both have their advantages
and their disadvantages.
If New England is slow and methodical, she is strong. She moves in close
phalanx upon any public question or duty. The very bonds of habit which
pervade all, and all alike, concentrate and intensify her action. Her
people act in a mass towards one point. They strike through organizations
which are gigantic and reverend with age. The Church gathers the energies
and means of the benevolent. Public opinion is harmonious about public
ends. And this very fixedness of society enables its members to push
forward with a unity and strength almost omnipotent.
In a new country, as we have seen, action is individual and ends are
individual; men are unorganized. He who goes forward with axe in hand to
hew his pathway to competence and respectability, is governed by few relics
of the past. He breaks away, in time (too completely perhaps), from old
associations, some of which were trammels, being the mere result of usage,
and some of which he ought to cherish for their intrinsic excellence. He
looks forward to a country and people in the future (_somewhere_ in the
future; locality is nothing), and he hurries on, with fury almost, to reach
the destination of his dreams.
The people of the West are called a _fast_ people. How can they be
otherwise? Their very necessities _drive_ them. They cannot fall back upon
any prop; they can move onward without limit. It required, half a century
ago, the labor of a generation to sweep off the forest, and plant cities
and villages--but all this is accomplished in half of that time now.
Pioneers grow more expanded in their views. The father of the pioneer of
to-day grew into consequence as a heavy landed proprietor upon a farm of
forty acres--his son can hardly satisfy his ambition with six hundred--and
that is always for sale--(there is no poetry, as we have seen, about a
western homestead)--and he stands ready to vacate upon six months' notice
and a consideration.
This miscellaneous state of society begets a peculiar hospitality. New
England has been famed for its hospitality; but the kind I mean is a very
different thing. Hospitality in an old country, under the bonds of society,
is too formal, too cold, and sometimes a little oppressive. It is not
always hospitality; it is, sometimes, the performance of a social duty,
according to the rules and regulations prescribed for its
observance--painful to all parties concerned. It is artificial--as hearty,
perhaps, as it can be under "bonds." The table, in the West, is _always_
spread, and the roof _always_ offers shelter. There is an ease, an
abandonment in its exercise, that is positively beautiful, and can be
understood only when felt.
A fixed state of society begets feuds, and cherishes old grudges. A quarrel
that originated between grandfathers is often carried down and kept
brewing. Families are divided from other families for years, and sometimes
for generations, about matters of no consequence. It is perhaps a point of
etiquette, a stinging remark, an accidental or premeditated slight, a
question of dollars and cents, a political or religious difference of
opinion, that opened the breach which will not be healed. Thus, bombshells
are often thrown from one to another, by fathers and children and
grandchildren, and families kept in an uproar about nothing. This society
not only cherishes old grudges, but it is nervous and sensitive to the
least touch of the present. A morbid pride of wealth, family, position, is
ever on the lookout for an attack upon its consequence--perhaps to make an
onslaught upon others.
Here the West has the advantage. There is no one to keep alive old grudges.
Not one man in a hundred can tell what his neighbor's father or grandfather
was--where he flourished or decayed--what were his personal piques or
social battles. And as for present causes of personal war, they are few--it
requires something more than a sublimated idea or notion--an antiquated
figment of the brain or present artificiality--to warm up the combatants.
The practical realities of the West are too great and pressing to give time
or disposition to dally with abstractions. Gross outrages are quickly met
and redressed--they are not carried down on the docket of time for
posterity to try, nor nursed in the bosom from the revengeful pleasure they
afford.
Reader, these are a few of the advantages and disadvantages of the two
states of eastern and western society--not western society after it becomes
rooted and established, as it has in many of the states--but during its
first ten, perhaps twenty years, in its green state, while the gristle is
hardening into bone.
These few suggestions are written in no morbid or carping spirit. They are
written with a consciousness of the manly virtues, and solid worth, of New
England, as she is, and always has been. They simply mark points of
difference worked upon men by a change of soil and society--points that
should be known, whether approved or condemned. What son of New England
does not look back upon her with pride? What associations throng around him
when her name is mentioned! Her hills, her hearts, her homes, send a thrill
through the soul, and make him, for a time at least, a better man. What
armies of scholars have walked forth into the battle of life from her
cloisters? How many have been girded and helmeted in her halls? Where is
the spot where her footsteps are not imprinted, her cheering voice heard?
Shall we ever forget her? What sermons her old homesteads are continually
preaching to her children, scattered as they are throughout every degree of
latitude and longitude, in all positions and avocations! The cold brooks,
where the trout darted--the grove where the nuts dropped--the blue
sublimity of her mountain-tops, where sunlight first broke in the morn, and
last died at night--the great shadows that slept in her valleys--the
reverberation of her thunder--her solemn "fasts and feasts"--her day of
Thanksgiving, that united again the broken fragments of the family
circle--the merry voice of Christmas, that rung so cheerily through her
halls--her graves, that hold all that remains of those who were giants in
religion, liberty, and law, and who, "although dead, yet speak"--her
arts--her monuments--her altars, where generations have knelt and passed
away--are all living eloquence to her children, and can never be forgotten,
if not always remembered. She is the Mecca to which many a weary pilgrim
turns for strength and counsel in the storm and bustle of life, and her
brain, and her capital, and her example are felt throughout half the globe.
Let us not, however, in our veneration for New England, forget the
iron-souled and true-hearted men, who have gone forth from that ancient
hive to make a way in the wilderness for incoming generations, whose march
is ever upon the ear. They had _their_ mission, too, and nobly have they
performed it. What but Saxon blood, and Saxon spirit, could have
accomplished so much? If it was, and still is, done roughly, it was all
done for time, and will stand--it is something that will bear looking back
upon, and of which no son of posterity will be ashamed.