General reflections.
I HOPE my readers will share the satisfaction I feel, in contemplating,
at this distance, the growing prosperity of Albany, which is, I am told,
greatly increased in size and consequence, far superior, indeed, to any
inland town on the continent, and so important from its centrical
situation, that it has been proposed as the seat of congress, which,
should the party attached to Britain ever gain the ascendency over the
southern states, would, very probably, be the case. The morality, simple
manners, and consistent opinions of the inhabitants, still bearing
evident traces of that integrity and simplicity which once distinguished
them. The reflections which must result from the knowledge of these
circumstances are so obvious, that it is needless to point them out.
A reader that has patience to proceed thus far, in a narration too
careless and desultory for the grave, and too heavy and perplexed for
the gay; too minute for the busy, and too serious for the idle: such a
reader must have been led on by an interest in the virtues of the
leading characters, and will be sufficiently awake to their remaining
defects.
Very different, however, must be the reflections that arise from a more
general view of the present state of our ancient colonies.
“O for that warning voice, which he who saw
Th’ Apocalypse, heard cry, that a voice, like
The deep and dreadful organ-pipe of heaven,”
would speak terror to those whose delight is in change and agitation; to
those who wantonly light up the torch of discord, which many waters will
not extinguish. Even when peace succeeds to the breathless fury of such
a contest, it comes too late to restore the virtues, the hopes, the
affections that have perished in it. The gangrene of the land is not
healed, and the prophets vainly cry, “peace! peace!” where there is no
peace.
However upright the intentions may be of the first leaders of popular
insurrections, it may be truly said of them, in the end, instruments of
cruelty are in their habitations; nay, must be, for when they have
proceeded a certain length, conciliation or lenity would be cruelty to
their followers, who are gone too far to return to the place from which
they set out. Rectitude, hitherto upheld by laws, by custom, and by
fear, now walks alone, in unaccustomed paths, and like a tottering
infant, falls at the first assault, or first obstacle it meets; but
falls to rise no more. Let any one who has mixed much with mankind, say
what would be the consequence if restraint were withdrawn, and impunity
offered to all those whose probity is not fixed on the basis of real
piety, or supported by singular fortitude, and that sound sense which,
discerning remote consequences, preserves integrity as armour of proof
against the worst that can happen.
True it is, that amidst these convulsions of the moral world, exigencies
bring out some characters that sweep across the gloom like meteors in a
tempestuous night, which would not have been distinguished in the
sunshine of prosperity. It is in the swell of the turbulent ocean that
the mightiest living handiworks of the author of nature are to be met
with. Great minds, no doubt, are called out by exigencies, and put forth
all their powers. Though Hercules slew the Hydra, and cleansed the
Augæan stable, all but poets and heroes must have regretted that any
such monsters existed. Seriously, beside the rancour, the treachery, and
the dereliction of every generous sentiment and upright motive, which
are the rank production of the blood-manured field of civil discord,
after the froth and feculence of its cauldron have boiled over, still
the deleterious dregs remain. Truth is the first victim to fear and
policy; when matters arrive at that crisis, every one finds a separate
interest; mutual confidence, which cannot outlive sincerity, dies next,
and all the kindred virtues drop in succession. It becomes a man’s
interest that his brothers and his father should join the opposite
party, that some may be applauded for steadiness or enriched by
confiscations. To such temptations the mind, fermenting with party
hatred, yields with less resistance than could be imagined by those who
have never witnessed such scenes of horror, darkened by duplicity. After
so deep a plunge in depravity, how difficult, how near to impossible is
a return to the paths of rectitude! This is but a single instance of the
manner in which moral feeling is undermined in both parties. But as our
nature, destined to suffer and to mourn, and to have the heart made
better by affliction, finds adversity a less dangerous trial than
prosperity, especially where it is great and sudden, in all civil
conflicts, the triumphant party may, with moral truth, be said to be the
greatest sufferers. Intoxicated as they often are with power and
affluence, purchased with the blood and tears of their friends and
countrymen, the hard task remains to them of chaining up and reducing to
submission the many-headed monster, whom they have been forced to let
loose and gorge with the spoils of the vanquished. Then, too, comes on
the difficulty of dividing power where no one has a right, and every one
a claim: of ruling those whom they have taught to despise authority; and
of reviving that sentiment of patriotism, and that love of glory, which
faction and self-interest have extinguished.
When the white and red roses were the symbols of faction in England, and
when the contest between Baliol and Bruce made way for invasion and
tyranny in Scotland, the destruction of armies and of cities, public
executions, plunder and confiscations, were the least evils that they
occasioned. The annihilation of public virtue and private confidence;
the exasperation of hereditary hatred; the corrupting the milk of human
kindness, and breaking asunder every sacred tie by which man and man are
held together: all these dreadful results of civil discord are the means
of visiting the sins of civil war on the third and fourth generation of
those who have kindled it. Yet the extinction of charity and kindness in
dissensions like these, is not to be compared to that which is the
consequence of an entire subversion of the accustomed form of
government. Attachment to a monarch or line of royalty, aims only at a
single object, and is at worst loyalty and fidelity misplaced: yet war
once begun on such a motive, loosens the bands of society, and opens to
the ambitious and the rapacious the way to power and plunder. Still,
however, the laws, the customs, and the frame of government stand where
they did. When the contest is decided, and the successful competitor
established, if the monarch possesses ability, and courts popularity,
he, or at any rate, his immediate successor, may rule happily, and
reconcile those who were the enemies, not of his place, but of his
person. The mighty image of sovereign power may change its “head of
gold” for one of silver; but still it stands firm on its basis,
supported by all those whom it protects: but when thrown from its
pedestal by an entire subversion of government, the wreck is far more
fatal and the traces indelible. Those who on each side support the heirs
claiming a disputed crown, mean equally to be faithful and loyal to
their rightful sovereign; and are thus, though in opposition to each
other, actuated by the same sentiment. But when the spirit of
extermination walks forth over prostrate thrones and altars, ages cannot
efface the traces of its progress. A contest for sovereignty is a
whirlwind, that rages fiercely while it continues, and deforms the face
of external nature. New houses, however, replace those it has
demolished; trees grow up in the place of those destroyed; the landscape
laughs, the birds sing, and every thing returns to its accustomed
course. But a total subversion of a long established government is like
an earthquake, that not only overturns the works of man, but changes the
wonted course and operation of the very elements; makes a gulf in the
midst of a fertile plain, casts a mountain into a lake, and in line,
produces such devastation as it is not in the power of man to remedy.
Indeed, it is too obvious that, even in our own country, that fire which
produced the destruction of the monarchy, still glows among the ashes of
extinguished factions; but that portion of the community who carried
with them across the Atlantic, the repugnance to submission, which grew
out of an indefinite love of liberty, might be compared to the Persian
Magi. Like them, when forced to fly from their native country, they
carried with them a portion of the hallowed fire, which continued to be
the object of their secret worship. Those who look upon the revolution,
of which this spirit was the prime mover, as tending to advance the
general happiness, no doubt consider these opinions as a rich
inheritance, productive of the best effects. Many wise and worthy
persons have thought and still continue to think so. There is as yet no
room for decision, the experiment not being completed. Their mode of
government, anomalous, and hitherto inefficient, has not yet acquired
the firmness of cohesion, or the decisive tone of authority.
The birth of this great empire is a phenomenon in the history of
mankind. There is nothing like it in reality or fable, but the birth of
Minerva, who proceeded full armed and full grown out of the head of the
thunderer. Population, arts, sciences, and laws, extension of territory,
and establishment of power, have been gradual and progressive in other
countries, where the current of dominion went on increasing as it
flowed, by conquests or other acquisitions, which it swallowed like
rivulets in its course; but here it burst forth like a torrent,
spreading itself at once into an expanse, vast as their own Superior
lake, before the eyes of the passing generation which witnessed its
birth. Yet it is wonderful how little talent or intellectual
pre-eminence of any kind has appeared in this new-born world, which
seems already old in worldly craft, and whose children are indeed “wiser
in their generation than the children of light.” Self-interest, eagerly
grasping at pecuniary advantages, seems to be the ruling principle of
this great continent.
Love of country, that amiable and noble sentiment, which by turns exalts
and softens the human mind, nourishes enthusiasm, and inspires alike the
hero and sage, to defend and adorn the sacred land of their nativity, is
a principle which hardly exists there. An American loves his country, or
prefers it rather, because its rivers are wide and deep, and abound in
fish; because he has the forests to retire to, if the god of gainful
commerce should prove unpropitious on the shore. He loves it because if
his negro is disrespectful or disobedient, he can sell him and buy
another; while if he himself is disobedient to the laws of his country,
or disrespectful to the magistracy appointed to enforce them, that
shadow of authority, without power to do good, or prevent evil, must
possess its soul in patience.
We love our country because we honour our ancestors; because it is
endeared to us not only by early habit, but by attachments to the spots
hallowed by their piety, their heroism, their genius, or their public
spirit. We honour it as the scene of noble deeds, the nurse of sages,
bards, and heroes. The very aspect and features of this blest asylum of
liberty, science, and religion, warm our hearts, and animate our
imaginations. Enthusiasm kindles at the thoughts of what we have been,
and what we are. It is the last retreat, the citadel, in which all that
is worth living for is concentrated. Among the other ties which were
broken, by the detachment of America from us, that fine ligament, which
binds us to the tombs of our ancestors, (and seems to convey to us the
spirit and the affections we derive from them) was dissolved: and with
it perished all generous emulation. Fame,
“That spur which the clear mind doth raise
To live laborious nights and painful days,”
has no votaries among the students of Poor Richard’s almanack, the great
_Pharos_ of the states. The land of their ancestors, party hostility has
taught them to regard with scorn and hatred. That in which they live
calls up no images of past glory or excellence. Neither hopeful nor
desirous of that after-existence, which has been most coveted by those
who do things worth recording, they not only live, but thrive; and that
is quite enough. A man no longer says of himself with exultation, “I
belong to the land where Milton sung the song of seraphims, and Newton
traced the paths of light; where Alfred established his throne in
wisdom, and where the palms and laurels of renown shade the tombs of the
mighty and the excellent.” Thus dissevered from recollections so dear,
and so ennobling, what ties are substituted in their places? Can he
regard with tender and reverential feelings, a land that has not only
been deprived of its best ornaments, but become a receptacle for the
outcasts of society from every nation in Europe? Is there a person whose
dubious or turbulent character has made him unwelcome or suspected in
society, he goes to America, where he knows no one, and is of no one
known; and where he can with safety assume any character. All that
tremble with the consciousness of undetected crimes, or smart from the
consequence of unchecked follies; fraudulent bankrupts, unsuccessful
adventurers, restless projectors, or seditious agitators, this great
Limbus Patrum has room for them all; and too it they fly in the day of
their calamity. With such a heterogeneous mixture a transplanted Briton
of the original stock, a true old American, may live in charity, but
never can assimilate. Who can, with the cordiality due to that sacred
appellation, “my country,” apply it to that land of Hivites and
Girgashites, where one cannot travel ten miles, in a stretch, without
meeting detachments of different nations, torn from their native soil
and first affections, and living aliens in a strange land, where no one
seems to form part of an attached connected whole.
To those enlarged minds, who have got far beyond the petty consideration
of country and kindred, to embrace the whole human race, a land, whose
population is like Joseph’s coat, of many colours, must be a peculiarly
suitable abode. For in the endless variety of the patchwork, of which
society is composed, a liberal philosophic mind might meet with the
specimens of all those tongues and nations which he comprehends in the
wide circle of his enlarged philanthropy.
-------