THE growth of character, social and national,--the formation of men’s
minds,--more interesting than any territorial or industrial growth,
defied the tests of censuses and surveys. No people could be expected,
least of all when in infancy, to understand the intricacies of its
own character, and rarely has a foreigner been gifted with insight to
explain what natives did not comprehend. Only with diffidence could the
best-informed Americans venture, in 1800, to generalize on the subject
of their own national habits of life and thought. Of all American
travellers President Dwight was the most experienced; yet his four
volumes of travels were remarkable for no trait more uniform than their
reticence in regard to the United States. Clear and emphatic wherever
New England was in discussion, Dwight claimed no knowledge of other
regions. Where so good a judge professed ignorance, other observers
were likely to mislead; and Frenchmen like Liancourt, Englishmen like
Weld, or Germans like Bülow, were almost equally worthless authorities
on a subject which none understood. The newspapers of the time were
little more trustworthy than the books of travel, and hardly so well
written. The literature of a higher kind was chiefly limited to
New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. From materials so poor no
precision of result could be expected. A few customs, more or less
local; a few prejudices, more or less popular; a few traits of thought,
suggesting habits of mind,--must form the entire material for a study
more important than that of politics or economics.
The standard of comfort had much to do with the standard of character;
and in the United States, except among the slaves, the laboring class
enjoyed an ample supply of the necessaries of life. In this respect,
as in some others, they claimed superiority over the laboring class in
Europe, and the claim would have been still stronger had they shown
more skill in using the abundance that surrounded them. The Duc de
Liancourt, among foreigners the best and kindest observer, made this
remark on the mode of life he saw in Pennsylvania:--
“There is a contrast of cleanliness with its opposite which to
a stranger is very remarkable. The people of the country are as
astonished that one should object to sleeping two or three in the same
bed and in dirty sheets, or to drink from the same dirty glass after
half a score of others, as to see one neglect to wash one’s hands and
face of a morning. Whiskey diluted with water is the ordinary country
drink. There is no settler, however poor, whose family does not take
coffee or chocolate for breakfast, and always a little salt meat; at
dinner, salt meat, or salt fish, and eggs; at supper again salt meat
and coffee. This is also the common regime of the taverns.”
An amusing, though quite untrustworthy Englishman named Ashe, who
invented an American journey in 1806, described the fare of a Kentucky
cabin:--
“The dinner consisted of a large piece of salt bacon, a dish of
hominy, and a tureen of squirrel broth. I dined entirely on the last
dish, which I found incomparably good, and the meat equal to the
most delicate chicken. The Kentuckian eat nothing but bacon, which
indeed is the favorite diet of all the inhabitants of the State, and
drank nothing but whiskey, which soon made him more than two-thirds
drunk. In this last practice he is also supported by the public
habit. In a country, then, where bacon and spirits form the favorite
summer repast, it cannot be just to attribute entirely the causes of
infirmity to the climate. No people on earth live with less regard to
regimen. They eat salt meat three times a day, seldom or never have
any vegetables, and drink ardent spirits from morning till night.
They have not only an aversion to fresh meat, but a vulgar prejudice
that it is unwholesome. The truth is, their stomachs are depraved by
burning liquors, and they have no appetite for anything but what is
high-flavored and strongly impregnated by salt.”
Salt pork three times a day was regarded as an essential part of
American diet. In the “Chain-bearer,” Cooper described what he called
American poverty as it existed in 1784. “As for bread,” said the
mother, “I count that for nothing. We always have bread and potatoes
enough; but I hold a family to be in a desperate way when the mother
can see the bottom of the pork-barrel. Give me the children that’s
raised on good sound pork afore all the game in the country. Game’s
good as a relish, and so’s bread; but pork is the staff of life.... My
children I calkerlate to bring up on pork.”
Many years before the time to which Cooper referred, Poor Richard
asked: “Maids of America, who gave you bad teeth?” and supplied the
answer: “Hot soupings and frozen apples.” Franklin’s question and
answer were repeated in a wider sense by many writers, but none was so
emphatic as Volney:--
“I will venture to say,” declared Volney, “that if a prize were
proposed for the scheme of a regimen most calculated to injure the
stomach, the teeth, and the health in general, no better could be
invented than that of the Americans. In the morning at breakfast they
deluge their stomach with a quart of hot water, impregnated with tea,
or so slightly with coffee that it is mere colored water; and they
swallow, almost without chewing, hot bread, half baked, toast soaked
in butter, cheese of the fattest kind, slices of salt or hung beef,
ham, etc., all which are nearly insoluble. At dinner they have boiled
pastes under the name of puddings, and the fattest are esteemed the
most delicious; all their sauces, even for roast beef, are melted
butter; their turnips and potatoes swim in hog’s lard, butter, or fat;
under the name of pie or pumpkin, their pastry is nothing but a greasy
paste, never sufficiently baked. To digest these viscous substances
they take tea almost instantly after dinner, making it so strong that
it is absolutely bitter to the taste, in which state it affects the
nerves so powerfully that even the English find it brings on a more
obstinate restlessness than coffee. Supper again introduces salt
meats or oysters. As Chastellux says, the whole day passes in heaping
indigestions on one another; and to give tone to the poor, relaxed,
and wearied stomach, they drink Madeira, rum, French brandy, gin, or
malt spirits, which complete the ruin of the nervous system.”
An American breakfast never failed to interest foreigners, on account
of the variety and abundance of its dishes. On the main lines of
travel, fresh meat and vegetables were invariably served at all meals;
but Indian corn was the national crop, and Indian corn was eaten three
times a day in another form as salt pork. The rich alone could afford
fresh meat. Ice-chests were hardly known. In the country fresh meat
could not regularly be got, except in the shape of poultry or game; but
the hog cost nothing to keep, and very little to kill and preserve.
Thus the ordinary rural American was brought up on salt pork and Indian
corn, or rye; and the effect of this diet showed itself in dyspepsia.
One of the traits to which Liancourt alluded marked more distinctly the
stage of social development. By day or by night, privacy was out of the
question. Not only must all men travel in the same coach, dine at the
same table, at the same time, on the same fare, but even their beds
were in common, without distinction of persons. Innkeepers would not
understand that a different arrangement was possible. When the English
traveller Weld reached Elkton, on the main road from Philadelphia to
Baltimore, he asked the landlord what accommodation he had. “Don’t
trouble yourself about that,” was the reply; “I have no less than
eleven beds in one room alone.” This primitive habit extended over the
whole country from Massachusetts to Georgia, and no American seemed to
revolt against the tyranny of innkeepers.
“At New York I was lodged with two others, in a back room on the ground
floor,” wrote, in 1796, the Philadelphian whose complaints have already
been mentioned. “What can be the reason for that vulgar, hoggish
custom, common in America, of squeezing three, six, or eight beds into
one room?”
Nevertheless, the Americans were on the whole more neat than their
critics allowed. “You have not seen the Americans,” was Cobbett’s
reply, in 1819, to such charges; “you have not seen the nice, clean,
neat houses of the farmers of Long Island, in New England, in the
Quaker counties of Pennsylvania; you have seen nothing but the
smoke-dried ultra-montanians.” Yet Cobbett drew a sharp contrast
between the laborer’s neat cottage familiar to him in Surrey and
Hampshire, and the “shell of boards” which the American occupied, “all
around him as barren as a sea-beach.” He added, too, that “the example
of neatness was wanting;” no one taught it by showing its charm. Felix
de Beaujour, otherwise not an enthusiastic American, paid a warm
compliment to the country in this single respect, although he seemed
to have the cities chiefly in mind:--
“American neatness must possess some very attractive quality, since it
seduces every traveller; and there is no one of them who, in returning
to his own country, does not wish to meet again there that air of ease
and neatness which rejoiced his sight during his stay in the United
States.”
Almost every traveller discussed the question whether the Americans
were a temperate people, or whether they drank more than the English.
Temperate they certainly were not, when judged by a modern standard.
Every one acknowledged that in the South and West drinking was
occasionally excessive; but even in Pennsylvania and New England the
universal taste for drams proved habits by no means strict. Every
grown man took his noon toddy as a matter of course; and although few
were seen publicly drunk, many were habitually affected by liquor.
The earliest temperance movement, ten or twelve years later, was
said to have had its source in the scandal caused by the occasional
intoxication of ministers at their regular meetings. Cobbett thought
drinking the national disease; at all hours of the day, he said, young
men, “even little boys, at or under twelve years of age, go into stores
and tip off their drams.” The mere comparison with England proved that
the evil was great, for the English and Scotch were among the largest
consumers of beer and alcohol on the globe.
In other respects besides sobriety American manners and morals were
subjects of much dispute, and if judged by the diatribes of travellers
like Thomas Moore and H. W. Bülow, were below the level of Europe.
Of all classes of statistics, moral statistics were least apt to be
preserved. Even in England, social vices could be gauged only by
the records of criminal and divorce courts; in America, police was
wanting and a divorce suit almost, if not quite, unknown. Apart from
some coarseness, society must have been pure; and the coarseness was
mostly an English inheritance. Among New Englanders, Chief-Justice
Parsons was the model of judicial, social, and religious propriety;
yet Parsons, in 1808, presented to a lady a copy of “Tom Jones,” with
a letter calling attention to the adventures of Molly Seagrim and
the usefulness of describing vice. Among the social sketches in the
“Portfolio” were many allusions to the coarseness of Philadelphia
society, and the manners common to tea-parties. “I heard from married
ladies,” said a writer in February, 1803, “whose station as mothers
demanded from them a guarded conduct,--from young ladies, whose age
forbids the audience of such conversation, and who using it modesty
must disclaim,--indecent allusions, indelicate expressions, and even at
times immoral innuendoes. A loud laugh or a coarse exclamation followed
each of these, and the young ladies generally went through the form of
raising their fans to their faces.”
Yet public and private records might be searched long, before they
revealed evidence of misconduct such as filled the press and formed one
of the commonest topics of conversation in the society of England and
France. Almost every American family, however respectable, could show
some victim to intemperance among its men, but few were mortified by a
public scandal due to its women.
If the absence of positive evidence did not prove American society
to be as pure as its simple and primitive condition implied, the
same conclusion would be reached by observing the earnestness with
which critics collected every charge that could be brought against
it, and by noting the substance of the whole. Tried by this test, the
society of 1800 was often coarse and sometimes brutal, but, except
for intemperance, was moral. Indeed, its chief offence, in the eyes
of Europeans, was dulness. The amusements of a people were commonly a
fair sign of social development, and the Americans were only beginning
to amuse themselves. The cities were small and few in number, and
the diversions were such as cost little and required but elementary
knowledge. In New England, although the theatre had gained a firm
foothold in Boston, Puritan feelings still forbade the running of
horses.
“The principal amusements of the inhabitants,” said Dwight, “are
visiting, dancing, music, conversation, walking, riding, sailing,
shooting at a mark, draughts, chess, and unhappily, in some of the
larger towns, cards and dramatic exhibitions. A considerable amusement
is also furnished in many places by the examination and exhibitions
of the superior schools; and a more considerable one by the public
exhibitions of colleges. Our countrymen also fish and hunt. Journeys
taken for pleasure are very numerous, and are a very favorite object.
Boys and young men play at foot-ball, cricket, quoits, and at many
other sports of an athletic cast, and in the winter are peculiarly
fond of skating. Riding in a sleigh, or sledge, is also a favorite
diversion in New England.”
President Dwight was sincere in his belief that college commencements
and sleigh-riding satisfied the wants of his people; he looked upon
whist as an unhappy dissipation, and upon the theatre as immoral.
He had no occasion to condemn horse-racing, for no race-course was
to be found in New England. The horse and the dog existed only in
varieties little suited for sport. In colonial days New England
produced one breed of horses worth preserving and developing,--the
Narragansett pacer; but, to the regret even of the clergy, this animal
almost disappeared, and in 1800 New England could show nothing to
take its place. The germ of the trotter and the trotting-match, the
first general popular amusement, could be seen in almost any country
village, where the owners of horses were in the habit of trotting
what were called scratch-races, for a quarter or half a mile from the
door of the tavern, along the public road. Perhaps this amusement had
already a right to be called a New-England habit, showing defined
tastes; but the force of the popular instinct was not fully felt
in Massachusetts, or even in New York, although there it was given
full play. New York possessed a race-course, and made in 1792 a
great stride toward popularity by importing the famous stallion
“Messenger” to become the source of endless interest for future
generations; but Virginia was the region where the American showed his
true character as a lover of sport. Long before the Revolution the
race-course was commonly established in Virginia and Maryland; English
running-horses of pure blood--descendants of the Darley Arabian and
the Godolphin Arabian--were imported, and racing became the chief
popular entertainment. The long Revolutionary War, and the general
ruin it caused, checked the habit and deteriorated the breed; but with
returning prosperity Virginia showed that the instinct was stronger
than ever. In 1798 “Diomed,” famous as the sire of racers, was imported
into the State, and future rivalry between Virginia and New York could
be foreseen. In 1800 the Virginia race-course still remained at the
head of American popular amusements.
In an age when the Prince of Wales and crowds of English gentlemen
attended every prize-fight, and patronized Tom Crib, Dutch Sam, the
Jew Mendoza, and the negro Molyneux, an Englishman could hardly have
expected that a Virginia race-course should be free from vice; and
perhaps travellers showed best the general morality of the people
by their practice of dwelling on Virginia vices. They charged the
Virginians with fondness for horse-racing, cock-fighting, betting,
and drinking; but the popular habit which most shocked them, and with
which books of travel filled pages of description, was the so-called
rough-and-tumble fight. The practice was not one on which authors
seemed likely to dwell; yet foreigners like Weld, and Americans like
Judge Longstreet in “Georgia Scenes,” united to give it a sort of
grotesque dignity like that of a bull-fight, and under their treatment
it became interesting as a popular habit. The rough-and-tumble fight
differed from the ordinary prize-fight, or boxing-match, by the absence
of rules. Neither kicking, tearing, biting, nor gouging was forbidden
by the law of the ring. Brutal as the practice was, it was neither
new nor exclusively Virginian. The English travellers who described
it as American barbarism, might have seen the same sight in Yorkshire
at the same date. The rough-and-tumble fight was English in origin,
and was brought to Virginia and the Carolinas in early days, whence it
spread to the Ohio and Mississippi. The habit attracted general notice
because of its brutality in a society that showed few brutal instincts.
Friendly foreigners like Liancourt were honestly shocked by it; others
showed somewhat too plainly their pleasure at finding a vicious habit
which they could consider a natural product of democratic society.
Perhaps the description written by Thomas Ashe showed best not only
the ferocity of the fight but also the antipathies of the writer, for
Ashe had something of the artist in his touch, and he felt no love for
Americans. The scene was at Wheeling. A Kentuckian and a Virginian were
the combatants.
“Bulk and bone were in favor of the Kentuckian; science and craft
in that of the Virginian. The former promised himself victory from
his power; the latter from his science. Very few rounds had taken
place or fatal blows given, before the Virginian contracted his whole
form, drew up his arms to his face, with his hands nearly closed in
a concave by the fingers being bent to the full extension of the
flexors, and summoning up all his energy for one act of desperation,
pitched himself into the bosom of his opponent. Before the effects
of this could be ascertained, the sky was rent by the shouts of the
multitude; and I could learn that the Virginian had expressed as much
beauty and skill in his retraction and bound, as if he had been bred
in a menagerie and practised action and attitude among panthers and
wolves. The shock received by the Kentuckian, and the want of breath,
brought him instantly to the ground. The Virginian never lost his
hold. Like those bats of the South who never quit the subject on which
they fasten till they taste blood, he kept his knees in his enemy’s
body; fixing his claws in his hair and his thumbs on his eyes, gave
them an instantaneous start from their sockets. The sufferer roared
aloud, but uttered no complaint. The citizens again shouted with joy.”
Ashe asked his landlord whether this habit spread down the Ohio.
“I understood that it did, on the left-hand side, and that I would
do well to land there as little as possible.... I again demanded
how a stranger was to distinguish a good from a vicious house of
entertainment. ‘By previous inquiry, or, if that was impracticable, a
tolerable judgment could be formed from observing in the landlord a
possession or an absence of ears.’”
The temper of the writer was at least as remarkable in this description
as the scene he pretended to describe, for Ashe’s Travels were believed
to have been chiefly imaginary; but no one denied the roughness of the
lower classes in the South and Southwest, nor was roughness wholly
confined to them. No prominent man in Western society bore himself with
more courtesy and dignity than Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, who in 1800
was candidate for the post of major-general of State militia, and had
previously served as Judge on the Supreme Bench of his State; yet the
fights in which he had been engaged exceeded belief.
Border society was not refined, but among its vices, as its virtues,
few were permanent, and little idea could be drawn of the character
that would at last emerge. The Mississippi boatman and the squatter
on Indian lands were perhaps the most distinctly American type then
existing, as far removed from the Old World as though Europe were a
dream. Their language and imagination showed contact with Indians. A
traveller on the levee at Natchez, in 1808, overheard a quarrel in a
flatboat near by:--
“I am a man; I am a horse; I am a team,” cried one voice; “I can whip
any man in all Kentucky, by God!” “I am an alligator,” cried the
other; “half man, half horse; can whip any man on the Mississippi,
by God!” “I am a man,” shouted the first; “have the best horse, best
dog, best gun, and handsomest wife in all Kentucky, by God!” “I am a
Mississippi snapping-turtle,” rejoined the second; “have bear’s claws,
alligator’s teeth, and the devil’s tail; can whip _any_ man, by God!”
And on this usual formula of defiance the two fire-eaters began their
fight, biting, gouging, and tearing. Foreigners were deeply impressed
by barbarism such as this, and orderly emigrants from New England and
Pennsylvania avoided contact with Southern drinkers and fighters;
but even then they knew that with a new generation such traits must
disappear, and that little could be judged of popular character from
the habits of frontiersmen. Perhaps such vices deserved more attention
when found in the older communities, but even there they were rather
survivals of English low-life than products of a new soil, and they
were given too much consequence in the tales of foreign travellers.
This was not the only instance where foreigners were struck by what
they considered popular traits, which natives rarely noticed. Idle
curiosity was commonly represented as universal, especially in the
Southern settler who knew no other form of conversation:--
“Frequently have I been stopped by one of them,” said Weld, “and
without further preface asked where I was from, if I was acquainted
with any news, where bound to, and finally my name. ‘Stop, Mister!
why, I guess now you be coming from the new State?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Why,
then, I guess as how you be coming from Kentuck?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Oh,
why, then, pray now where might you be coming from?’ ‘From the low
country.’ ‘Why, you must have heard all the news, then; pray now,
Mister, what might the price of bacon be in those parts?’ ‘Upon my
word, my friend, I can’t inform you.’ ‘Ay, ay; I see, Mister, you
be’ent one of us. Pray now, Mister, what might your name be?’”
Almost every writer spoke with annoyance of the inquisitorial habits
of New England and the impertinence of American curiosity. Complaints
so common could hardly have lacked foundation, yet the Americans as a
people were never loquacious, but inclined to be somewhat reserved, and
they could not recognize the accuracy of the description. President
Dwight repeatedly expressed astonishment at the charge, and asserted
that in his large experience it had no foundation. Forty years later,
Charles Dickens found complaint with Americans for taciturnity. Equally
strange to modern experience were the continual complaints in books
of travel that loungers and loafers, idlers of every description,
infested the taverns, and annoyed respectable travellers both native
and foreign. Idling seemed to be considered a popular vice, and was
commonly associated with tippling. So completely did the practice
disappear in the course of another generation that it could scarcely
be recalled as offensive; but in truth less work was done by the
average man in 1800 than in aftertimes, for there was actually less
work to do. “Good country this for lazy fellows,” wrote Wilson from
Kentucky; “they plant corn, turn their pigs into the woods, and in
the autumn feed upon corn and pork. They lounge about the rest of
the year.” The roar of the steam-engine had never been heard in the
land, and the carrier’s wagon was three weeks between Philadelphia and
Pittsburg. What need for haste when days counted for so little? Why not
lounge about the tavern when life had no better amusement to offer? Why
mind one’s own business when one’s business would take care of itself?
Yet however idle the American sometimes appeared, and however large
the class of tavern loafers may have actually been, the true American
was active and industrious. No immigrant came to America for ease or
idleness. If an English farmer bought land near New York, Philadelphia,
or Baltimore, and made the most of his small capital, he found that
while he could earn more money than in Surrey or Devonshire, he worked
harder and suffered greater discomforts. The climate was trying; fever
was common; the crops ran new risks from strange insects, drought, and
violent weather; the weeds were annoying; the flies and mosquitoes
tormented him and his cattle; laborers were scarce and indifferent; the
slow and magisterial ways of England, where everything was made easy,
must be exchanged for quick and energetic action; the farmer’s own
eye must see to every detail, his own hand must hold the plough and
the scythe. Life was more exacting, and every such man in America was
required to do, and actually did, the work of two such men in Europe.
Few English farmers of the conventional class took kindly to American
ways, or succeeded in adapting themselves to the changed conditions.
Germans were more successful and became rich; but the poorer and more
adventurous class, who had no capital, and cared nothing for the
comforts of civilization, went West, to find a harder lot. When, after
toiling for weeks, they reached the neighborhood of Genessee or the
banks of some stream in southern Ohio or Indiana, they put up a rough
cabin of logs with an earthen floor, cleared an acre or two of land,
and planted Indian corn between the tree-stumps,--lucky if, like the
Kentuckian, they had a pig to turn into the woods. Between April and
October, Albert Gallatin used to say, Indian corn made the penniless
immigrant a capitalist. New settlers suffered many of the ills that
would have afflicted an army marching and fighting in a country of
dense forest and swamp, with one sore misery besides,--that whatever
trials the men endured, the burden bore most heavily upon the women
and children. The chance of being shot or scalped by Indians was
hardly worth considering when compared with the certainty of malarial
fever, or the strange disease called milk-sickness, or the still more
depressing home-sickness, or the misery of nervous prostration,
which wore out generation after generation of women and children on
the frontiers, and left a tragedy in every log-cabin. Not for love of
ease did men plunge into the wilderness. Few laborers of the Old World
endured a harder lot, coarser fare, or anxieties and responsibilities
greater than those of the Western emigrant. Not merely because he
enjoyed the luxury of salt pork, whiskey, or even coffee three times a
day did the American laborer claim superiority over the European.
A standard far higher than the average was common to the cities; but
the city population was so small as to be trifling. Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, and Baltimore together contained one hundred and eighty
thousand inhabitants; and these were the only towns containing a white
population of more than ten thousand persons. In a total population of
more than five millions, this number of city people, as Jefferson and
his friends rightly thought, was hardly American, for the true American
was supposed to be essentially rural. Their comparative luxury was
outweighed by the squalor of nine hundred thousand slaves alone.
From these slight notices of national habits no other safe inference
could be drawn than that the people were still simple. The path their
development might take was one of the many problems with which their
future was perplexed. Such few habits as might prove to be fixed,
offered little clew to the habits that might be adopted in the process
of growth, and speculation was useless where change alone could be
considered certain.
If any prediction could be risked, an observer might have been
warranted in suspecting that the popular character was likely to be
conservative, for as yet this trait was most marked, at least in the
older societies of New England, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Great as
were the material obstacles in the path of the United States, the
greatest obstacle of all was in the human mind. Down to the close
of the eighteenth century no change had occurred in the world which
warranted practical men in assuming that great changes were to come.
Afterward, as time passed, and as science developed man’s capacity
to control Nature’s forces, old-fashioned conservatism vanished from
society, reappearing occasionally, like the stripes on a mule, only
to prove its former existence; but during the eighteenth century
the progress of America, except in political paths, had been less
rapid than ardent reformers wished, and the reaction which followed
the French Revolution made it seem even slower than it was. In 1723
Benjamin Franklin landed at Philadelphia, and with his loaf of bread
under his arm walked along Market Street toward an immortality such as
no American had then conceived. He died in 1790, after witnessing great
political revolutions; but the intellectual revolution was hardly as
rapid as he must, in his youth, have hoped.
In 1732 Franklin induced some fifty persons to found a subscription
library, and his example and energy set a fashion which was generally
followed. In 1800 the library he founded was still in existence;
numerous small subscription libraries on the same model, containing
fifty or a hundred volumes, were scattered in country towns; but all
the public libraries in the United States--collegiate, scientific,
or popular, endowed or unendowed--could hardly show fifty thousand
volumes, including duplicates, fully one third being still theological.
Half a century had passed since Franklin’s active mind drew the
lightning from heaven, and decided the nature of electricity. No one in
America had yet carried further his experiments in the field which he
had made American. This inactivity was commonly explained as a result
of the long Revolutionary War; yet the war had not prevented population
and wealth from increasing, until Philadelphia in 1800 was far in
advance of the Philadelphia which had seen Franklin’s kite flying among
the clouds.
In the year 1753 Franklin organized the postal system of the American
colonies, making it self-supporting. No record was preserved of the
number of letters then carried in proportion to the population, but
in 1800 the gross receipts for postage were $320,000, toward which
Pennsylvania contributed most largely,--the sum of $55,000. From
letters the Government received in gross $290,000. The lowest rate of
letter-postage was then eight cents. The smallest charge for letters
carried more than a hundred miles was twelve and a half cents. If on
an average ten letters were carried for a dollar, the whole number of
letters was 2,900,000,--about one a year for every grown inhabitant.
Such a rate of progress could not be called rapid even by
conservatives, and more than one stanch conservative thought it
unreasonably slow. Even in New York, where foreign influence was active
and the rewards of scientific skill were comparatively liberal, science
hardly kept pace with wealth and population.
Noah Webster, who before beginning his famous dictionary edited
the “New York Commercial Advertiser,” and wrote on all subjects
with characteristic confidence, complained of the ignorance of his
countrymen. He claimed for the New Englanders an acquaintance with
theology, law, politics, and light English literature; “but as to
classical learning, history (civil and ecclesiastical), mathematics,
astronomy, chemistry, botany, and natural history, excepting here
and there a rare instance of a man who is eminent in some one of
these branches, we may be said to have no learning at all, or a mere
smattering.” Although defending his countrymen from the criticisms
of Dr. Priestley, he admitted that “our learning is superficial in a
shameful degree, ... our colleges are disgracefully destitute of books
and philosophical apparatus, ... and I am ashamed to own that scarcely
a branch of science can be fully investigated in America for want of
books, especially original works. This defect of our libraries I
have experienced myself in searching for materials for the History of
Epidemic Diseases.... As to libraries, we have no such things. There
are not more than three or four tolerable libraries in America, and
these are extremely imperfect. Great numbers of the most valuable
authors have not found their way across the Atlantic.”
This complaint was made in the year 1800, and was the more significant
because it showed that Webster, a man equally at home in Philadelphia,
New York, and Boston, thought his country’s deficiencies greater than
could be excused or explained by its circumstances. George Ticknor
felt at least equal difficulty in explaining the reason why, as late
as 1814, even good schoolbooks were rare in Boston, and a copy of
Euripides in the original could not be bought at any book-seller’s shop
in New England. For some reason, the American mind, except in politics,
seemed to these students of literature in a condition of unnatural
sluggishness; and such complaints were not confined to literature
or science. If Americans agreed in any opinion, they were united in
wishing for roads; but even on that point whole communities showed
an indifference, or hostility, that annoyed their contemporaries.
President Dwight was a somewhat extreme conservative in politics and
religion, while the State of Rhode Island was radical in both respects;
but Dwight complained with bitterness unusual in his mouth that Rhode
Island showed no spirit of progress. The subject of his criticism was
an unfinished turnpike-road across the State.
“The people of Providence expended upon this road, as we are informed,
the whole sum permitted by the Legislature. This was sufficient to
make only those parts which I have mentioned. The turnpike company
then applied to the Legislature for leave to expend such an additional
sum as would complete the work. The Legislature refused. The principal
reason for the refusal, as alleged by one of the members, it is
said, was the following: that turnpikes and the establishment of
religious worship had their origin in Great Britain, the government
of which was a monarchy and the inhabitants slaves; that the people
of Massachusetts and Connecticut were obliged by law to support
ministers and pay the fare of turnpikes, and were therefore slaves
also; that if they chose to be slaves they undoubtedly had a right
to their choice, but that free-born Rhode Islanders ought never to
submit to be priest-ridden, nor to pay for the privilege of travelling
on the highway. This demonstrative reasoning prevailed, and the road
continued in the state which I have mentioned until the year 1805. It
was then completed, and free-born Rhode Islanders bowed their necks to
the slavery of travelling on a good road.”
President Dwight seldom indulged in sarcasm or exaggeration such as he
showed in this instance; but he repeated only matters of notoriety in
charging some of the most democratic communities with unwillingness to
pay for good roads. If roads were to exist, they must be the result
of public or private enterprise; and if the public in certain States
would neither construct roads nor permit corporations to construct
them, the entire Union must suffer for want of communication. So
strong was the popular prejudice against paying for the privilege of
travelling on a highway that in certain States, like Rhode Island and
Georgia, turnpikes were long unknown, while in Virginia and North
Carolina the roads were little better than where the prejudice was
universal.
In this instance the economy of a simple and somewhat rude society
accounted in part for indifference; in other cases, popular prejudice
took a form less easily understood. So general was the hostility to
Banks as to offer a serious obstacle to enterprise. The popularity of
President Washington and the usefulness of his administration were
impaired by his support of a national bank and a funding system.
Jefferson’s hostility to all the machinery of capital was shared by
a great majority of the Southern people and a large minority in the
North. For seven years the New York legislature refused to charter the
first banking company in the State; and when in 1791 the charter was
obtained, and the Bank fell into Federalist hands, Aaron Burr succeeded
in obtaining banking privileges for the Manhattan Company only by
concealing them under the pretence of furnishing a supply of fresh
water to the city of New York.
This conservative habit of mind was more harmful in America than in
other communities, because Americans needed more than older societies
the activity which could alone partly compensate for the relative
feebleness of their means compared with the magnitude of their task.
Some instances of sluggishness, common to Europe and America, were
hardly credible. For more than ten years in England the steam-engines
of Watt had been working, in common and successful use, causing a
revolution in industry that threatened to drain the world for England’s
advantage; yet Europe during a generation left England undisturbed to
enjoy the monopoly of steam. France and Germany were England’s rivals
in commerce and manufactures, and required steam for self-defence;
while the United States were commercial allies of England, and needed
steam neither for mines nor manufactures, but their need was still
extreme. Every American knew that if steam could be successfully
applied to navigation, it must produce an immediate increase of
wealth, besides an ultimate settlement of the most serious material
and political difficulties of the Union. Had both the national and
State Governments devoted millions of money to this object, and had the
citizens wasted, if necessary, every dollar in their slowly filling
pockets to attain it, they would have done no more than the occasion
warranted, even had they failed; but failure was not to be feared, for
they had with their own eyes seen the experiment tried, and they did
not dispute its success. For America this question had been settled
as early as 1789, when John Fitch--a mechanic, without education or
wealth, but with the energy of genius--invented engine and paddles of
his own, with so much success that during a whole summer Philadelphians
watched his ferry-boat plying daily against the river current. No one
denied that his boat was rapidly, steadily, and regularly moved against
wind and tide, with as much certainty and convenience as could be
expected in a first experiment; yet Fitch’s company failed. He could
raise no more money; the public refused to use his boat or to help him
build a better; they did not want it, would not believe in it, and
broke his heart by their contempt. Fitch struggled against failure,
and invented another boat moved by a screw. The Eastern public still
proving indifferent, he wandered to Kentucky, to try his fortune on the
Western waters. Disappointed there, as in Philadelphia and New York,
he made a deliberate attempt to end his life by drink; but the process
proving too slow, he saved twelve opium pills from the physician’s
prescription, and was found one morning dead.
Fitch’s death took place in an obscure Kentucky inn, three years before
Jefferson, the philosopher president, entered the White House. Had
Fitch been the only inventor thus neglected, his peculiarities and the
defects of his steamboat might account for his failure; but he did
not stand alone. At the same moment Philadelphia contained another
inventor, Oliver Evans, a man so ingenious as to be often called the
American Watt. He, too, invented a locomotive steam-engine which he
longed to bring into common use. The great services actually rendered
by this extraordinary man were not a tithe of those he would gladly
have performed, had he found support and encouragement; but his success
was not even so great as that of Fitch, and he stood aside while
Livingston and Fulton, by their greater resources and influence, forced
the steamboat on a sceptical public.
While the inventors were thus ready, and while State legislatures were
offering mischievous monopolies for this invention, which required only
some few thousand dollars of ready money, the Philosophical Society of
Rotterdam wrote to the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia,
requesting to know what improvements had been made in the United
States in the construction of steam-engines. The subject was referred
to Benjamin H. Latrobe, the most eminent engineer in America, and
his Report, presented to the Society in May, 1803, published in the
Transactions, and transmitted abroad, showed the reasoning on which
conservatism rested.
“During the general lassitude of mechanical exertion which succeeded
the American Revolution,” said Latrobe, “the utility of steam-engines
appears to have been forgotten; but the subject afterward started
into very general notice in a form in which it could not possibly
be attended with much success. A sort of mania began to prevail,
which indeed has not yet entirely subsided, for impelling boats
by steam-engines.... For a short time a passage-boat, rowed by a
steam-engine, was established between Bordentown and Philadelphia,
but it was soon laid aside.... There are indeed general objections
to the use of the steam-engine for impelling boats, from which no
particular mode of application can be free. These are, first, the
weight of the engine and of the fuel; second, the large space it
occupies; third, the tendency of its action to rack the vessel and
render it leaky; fourth, the expense of maintenance; fifth, the
irregularity of its motion and the motion of the water in the boiler
and cistern, and of the fuel-vessel in rough water; sixth, the
difficulty arising from the liability of the paddles or oars to break
if light, and from the weight, if made strong. Nor have I ever heard
of an instance, verified by other testimony than that of the inventor,
of a speedy and agreeable voyage having been performed in a steamboat
of any construction. I am well aware that there are still many very
respectable and ingenious men who consider the application of the
steam-engine to the purpose of navigation as highly important and as
very practicable, especially on the rapid waters of the Mississippi,
and who would feel themselves almost offended at the expression of an
opposite opinion. And perhaps some of the objections against it may be
obviated. That founded on the expense and weight of the fuel may not
for some years exist in the Mississippi, where there is a redundance
of wood on the banks; but the cutting and loading will be almost as
great an evil.”
Within four years the steamboat was running, and Latrobe was its
warmest friend. The dispute was a contest of temperaments, a
divergence between minds, rather than a question of science; and a few
visionaries such as those to whom Latrobe alluded--men like Chancellor
Livingston, Joel Barlow, John Stevens, Samuel L. Mitchill, and Robert
Fulton--dragged society forward. What but scepticism could be expected
among a people thus asked to adopt the steamboat, when as yet the
ordinary atmospheric steam-engine, such as had been in use in Europe
for a hundred years, was practically unknown to them, and the engines
of Watt were a fable? Latrobe’s Report further said that in the spring
of 1803, when he wrote, five steam-engines were at work in the United
States,--one lately set up by the Manhattan Water Company in New York
to supply the city with water; another in New York for sawing timber;
two in Philadelphia, belonging to the city, for supplying water and
running a rolling and slitting mill; and one at Boston employed in some
manufacture. All but one of these were probably constructed after 1800,
and Latrobe neglected to say whether they belonged to the old Newcomen
type, or to Watt’s manufacture, or to American invention; but he added
that the chief American improvement on the steam-engine had been the
construction of a wooden boiler, which developed sufficient power to
work the Philadelphia pump at the rate of twelve strokes, of six feet,
per minute. Twelve strokes a minute, or one stroke every five seconds,
though not a surprising power, might have answered its purpose, had
not the wooden boiler, as Latrobe admitted, quickly decomposed, and
steam-leaks appeared at every bolt-hole.
If so eminent and so intelligent a man as Latrobe, who had but recently
emigrated in the prime of life from England, knew little about Watt,
and nothing about Oliver Evans, whose experience would have been well
worth communicating to any philosophical society in Europe, the more
ignorant and unscientific public could not feel faith in a force of
which they knew nothing at all. For nearly two centuries the Americans
had struggled on foot or horseback over roads not much better than
trails, or had floated down rushing streams in open boats momentarily
in danger of sinking or upsetting. They had at length, in the Eastern
and Middle States, reached the point of constructing turnpikes and
canals. Into these undertakings they put sums of money relatively
large, for the investment seemed safe and the profits certain. Steam as
a locomotive power was still a visionary idea, beyond their experience,
contrary to European precedent, and exposed to a thousand risks. They
regarded it as a delusion.
About three years after Latrobe wrote his Report on the steam-engine,
Robert Fulton began to build the boat which settled forever the value
of steam as a locomotive power. According to Fulton’s well-known
account of his own experience, he suffered almost as keenly as Fitch,
twenty years before, under the want of popular sympathy:--
“When I was building my first steamboat at New York,” he said,
according to Judge Story’s report, “the project was viewed by the
public either with indifference or with contempt as a visionary
scheme. My friends indeed were civil, but they were shy. They
listened with patience to my explanations, but with a settled cast
of incredulity upon their countenances. I felt the full force of the
lamentation of the poet,--
‘Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land,
All fear, none aid you, and few understand.’
As I had occasion to pass daily to and from the building-yard while
my boat was in progress, I have often loitered unknown near the idle
groups of strangers gathering in little circles, and heard various
inquiries as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was
uniformly that of scorn, or sneer, or ridicule. The loud laugh often
rose at my expense; the dry jest; the wise calculation of losses and
expenditures; the dull but endless repetition of the Fulton Folly.
Never did a single encouraging remark, a bright hope, or a warm wish
cross my path.”
Possibly Fulton and Fitch, like other inventors, may have exaggerated
the public apathy and contempt; but whatever was the precise force
of the innovating spirit, conservatism possessed the world by right.
Experience forced on men’s minds the conviction that what had ever
been must ever be. At the close of the eighteenth century nothing had
occurred which warranted the belief that even the material difficulties
of America could be removed. Radicals as extreme as Thomas Jefferson
and Albert Gallatin were contented with avowing no higher aim than
that America should reproduce the simpler forms of European republican
society without European vices; and even this their opponents thought
visionary. The United States had thus far made a single great step
in advance of the Old World,--they had agreed to try the experiment
of embracing half a continent in one republican system; but so little
were they disposed to feel confidence in their success, that Jefferson
himself did not look on this American idea as vital; he would not
stake the future on so new an invention. “Whether we remain in one
confederacy,” he wrote in 1804, “or form into Atlantic and Mississippi
confederations, I believe not very important to the happiness of either
part.” Even over his liberal mind history cast a spell so strong, that
he thought the solitary American experiment of political confederation
“not very important” beyond the Alleghanies.
The task of overcoming popular inertia in a democratic society was new,
and seemed to offer peculiar difficulties. Without a scientific class
to lead the way, and without a wealthy class to provide the means of
experiment, the people of the United States were still required, by
the nature of their problems, to become a speculating and scientific
nation. They could do little without changing their old habit of mind,
and without learning to love novelty for novelty’s sake. Hitherto
their timidity in using money had been proportioned to the scantiness
of their means. Henceforward they were under every inducement to
risk great stakes and frequent losses in order to win occasionally a
thousand fold. In the colonial state they had naturally accepted old
processes as the best, and European experience as final authority.
As an independent people, with half a continent to civilize, they
could not afford to waste time in following European examples, but
must devise new processes of their own. A world which assumed that
what had been must be, could not be scientific; yet in order to make
the Americans a successful people, they must be roused to feel the
necessity of scientific training. Until they were satisfied that
knowledge was money, they would not insist upon high education; nor
until they saw with their own eyes stones turned into gold, and vapor
into cattle and corn, would they learn the meaning of science.