NEARLY every foreign traveller who visited the United States during
these early years, carried away an impression sober if not sad. A
thousand miles of desolate and dreary forest, broken here and there
by settlements; along the sea-coast a few flourishing towns devoted
to commerce; no arts, a provincial literature, a cancerous disease of
negro slavery, and differences of political theory fortified within
geographical lines,--what could be hoped for such a country except to
repeat the story of violence and brutality which the world already
knew by heart, until repetition for thousands of years had wearied and
sickened mankind? Ages must probably pass before the interior could be
thoroughly settled; even Jefferson, usually a sanguine man, talked of a
thousand years with acquiescence, and in his first Inaugural Address,
at a time when the Mississippi River formed the Western boundary,
spoke of the country as having “room enough for our descendants to the
hundredth and thousandth generation.” No prudent person dared to act
on the certainty that when settled, one government could comprehend
the whole; and when the day of separation should arrive, and America
should have her Prussia, Austria, and Italy, as she already had her
England, France, and Spain, what else could follow but a return to the
old conditions of local jealousies, wars, and corruption which had made
a slaughter-house of Europe?
The mass of Americans were sanguine and self-confident, partly by
temperament, but partly also by reason of ignorance; for they knew
little of the difficulties which surrounded a complex society. The
Duc de Liancourt, like many critics, was struck by this trait. Among
other instances, he met with one in the person of a Pennsylvania
miller, Thomas Lea, “a sound American patriot, persuading himself
that nothing good is done, and that no one has any brains, except
in America; that the wit, the imagination, the genius of Europe are
already in decrepitude;” and the duke added: “This error is to be
found in almost all Americans,--legislators, administrators, as well
as millers, and is less innocent there.” In the year 1796 the House
of Representatives debated whether to insert in the Reply to the
President’s Speech a passing remark that the nation was “the freest and
most enlightened in the world,”--a nation as yet in swaddling-clothes,
which had neither literature, arts, sciences, nor history; nor even
enough nationality to be sure that it was a nation. The moment was
peculiarly ill-chosen for such a claim, because Europe was on the verge
of an outburst of genius. Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Haydn, Kant
and Fichte, Cavendish and Herschel were making way for Walter Scott,
Wordsworth, and Shelley, Heine and Balzac, Beethoven and Hegel,
Oersted and Cuvier, great physicists, biologists, geologists, chemists,
mathematicians, metaphysicians, and historians by the score. Turner
was painting his earliest landscapes, and Watt completing his latest
steam-engine; Napoleon was taking command of the French armies, and
Nelson of the English fleets; investigators, reformers, scholars, and
philosophers swarmed, and the influence of enlightenment, even amid
universal war, was working with an energy such as the world had never
before conceived. The idea that Europe was in her decrepitude proved
only ignorance and want of enlightenment, if not of freedom, on the
part of Americans, who could only excuse their error by pleading that
notwithstanding these objections, in matters which for the moment most
concerned themselves Europe was a full century behind America. If
they were right in thinking that the next necessity of human progress
was to lift the average man upon an intellectual and social level
with the most favored, they stood at least three generations nearer
than Europe to their common goal. The destinies of the United States
were certainly staked, without reserve or escape, on the soundness of
this doubtful and even improbable principle, ignoring or overthrowing
the institutions of church, aristocracy, family, army, and political
intervention, which long experience had shown to be needed for the
safety of society. Europe might be right in thinking that without
such safeguards society must come to an end; but even Europeans must
concede that there was a chance, if no greater than one in a thousand,
that America might, at least for a time, succeed. If this stake of
temporal and eternal welfare stood on the winning card; if man actually
should become more virtuous and enlightened, by mere process of growth,
without church or paternal authority; if the average human being could
accustom himself to reason with the logical processes of Descartes and
Newton!--what then?
Then, no one could deny that the United States would win a stake
such as defied mathematics. With all the advantages of science and
capital, Europe must be slower than America to reach the common goal.
American society might be both sober and sad, but except for negro
slavery it was sound and healthy in every part. Stripped for the
hardest work, every muscle firm and elastic, every ounce of brain
ready for use, and not a trace of superfluous flesh on his nervous
and supple body, the American stood in the world a new order of man.
From Maine to Florida, society was in this respect the same, and was
so organized as to use its human forces with more economy than could
be approached by any society of the world elsewhere. Not only were
artificial barriers carefully removed, but every influence that could
appeal to ordinary ambition was applied. No brain or appetite active
enough to be conscious of stimulants could fail to answer the intense
incentive. Few human beings, however sluggish, could long resist the
temptation to acquire power; and the elements of power were to be had
in America almost for the asking. Reversing the old-world system, the
American stimulant increased in energy as it reached the lowest and
most ignorant class, dragging and whirling them upward as in the blast
of a furnace. The penniless and homeless Scotch or Irish immigrant was
caught and consumed by it; for every stroke of the axe and the hoe made
him a capitalist, and made gentlemen of his children. Wealth was the
strongest agent for moving the mass of mankind; but political power was
hardly less tempting to the more intelligent and better-educated swarms
of American-born citizens, and the instinct of activity, once created,
seemed heritable and permanent in the race.
Compared with this lithe young figure, Europe was actually in
decrepitude. Mere class distinctions, the _patois_ or dialect of the
peasantry, the fixity of residence, the local costumes and habits
marking a history that lost itself in the renewal of identical
generations, raised from birth barriers which paralyzed half the
population. Upon this mass of inert matter rested the Church and the
State, holding down activity of thought. Endless wars withdrew many
hundred thousand men from production, and changed them into agents
of waste; huge debts, the evidence of past wars and bad government,
created interests to support the system and fix its burdens on the
laboring class; courts, with habits of extravagance that shamed
common-sense, helped to consume private economies. All this might
have been borne; but behind this stood aristocracies, sucking their
nourishment from industry, producing nothing themselves, employing
little or no active capital or intelligent labor, but pressing on
the energies and ambition of society with the weight of an incubus.
Picturesque and entertaining as these social anomalies were, they were
better fitted for the theatre or for a museum of historical costumes
than for an active workshop preparing to compete with such machinery as
America would soon command. From an economical point of view, they were
as incongruous as would have been the appearance of a mediæval knight
in helmet and armor, with battle-axe and shield, to run the machinery
of Arkwright’s cotton-mill; but besides their bad economy they also
tended to prevent the rest of society from gaining a knowledge of
its own capacities. In Europe, the conservative habit of mind was
fortified behind power. During nearly a century Voltaire himself--the
friend of kings, the wit and poet, historian and philosopher of his
age--had carried on, in daily terror, in exile and excommunication, a
protest against an intellectual despotism contemptible even to its own
supporters. Hardly was Voltaire dead, when Priestley, as great a man
if not so great a wit, trying to do for England what Voltaire tried
to do for France, was mobbed by the people of Birmingham and driven
to America. Where Voltaire and Priestley failed, common men could not
struggle; the weight of society stifled their thought. In America
the balance between conservative and liberal forces was close; but in
Europe conservatism held the physical power of government. In Boston a
young Buckminster might be checked for a time by his father’s prayers
or commands in entering the path that led toward freer thought; but
youth beckoned him on, and every reward that society could offer was
dangled before his eyes. In London or Paris, Rome, Madrid, or Vienna,
he must have sacrificed the worldly prospects of his life.
Granting that the American people were about to risk their future on
a new experiment, they naturally wished to throw aside all burdens
of which they could rid themselves. Believing that in the long run
interest, not violence, would rule the world, and that the United
States must depend for safety and success on the interests they could
create, they were tempted to look upon war and preparations for war as
the worst of blunders; for they were sure that every dollar capitalized
in industry was a means of overthrowing their enemies more effective
than a thousand dollars spent on frigates or standing armies. The
success of the American system was, from this point of view, a question
of economy. If they could relieve themselves from debts, taxes,
armies, and government interference with industry, they must succeed
in outstripping Europe in economy of production; and Americans were
even then partly aware that if their machine were not so weakened by
these economies as to break down in the working, it must of necessity
break down every rival. If their theory was sound, when the day of
competition should arrive, Europe might choose between American and
Chinese institutions, but there would be no middle path; she might
become a confederated democracy, or a wreck.
Whether these ideas were sound or weak, they seemed self-evident to
those Northern democrats who, like Albert Gallatin, were comparatively
free from slave-owning theories, and understood the practical forces of
society. If Gallatin wished to reduce the interference of government
to a minimum, and cut down expenditures to nothing, he aimed not so
much at saving money as at using it with the most certain effect. The
revolution of 1800 was in his eyes chiefly political, because it was
social; but as a revolution of society, he and his friends hoped to
make it the most radical that had occurred since the downfall of the
Roman empire. Their ideas were not yet cleared by experience, and were
confused by many contradictory prejudices, but wanted neither breadth
nor shrewdness.
Many apparent inconsistencies grew from this undeveloped form of
American thought, and gave rise to great confusion in the different
estimates of American character that were made both at home and abroad.
That Americans should not be liked was natural; but that they should
not be understood was more significant by far. After the downfall of
the French republic they had no right to expect a kind word from
Europe, and during the next twenty years they rarely received one.
The liberal movement of Europe was cowed, and no one dared express
democratic sympathies until the Napoleonic tempest had passed. With
this attitude Americans had no right to find fault, for Europe cared
less to injure them than to protect herself. Nevertheless, observant
readers could not but feel surprised that none of the numerous
Europeans who then wrote or spoke about America seemed to study the
subject seriously. The ordinary traveller was apt to be little more
reflective than a bee or an ant, but some of these critics possessed
powers far from ordinary; yet Talleyrand alone showed that had he but
seen America a few years later than he did, he might have suggested
some sufficient reason for apparent contradictions that perplexed him
in the national character. The other travellers--great and small, from
the Duc de Liancourt to Basil Hall, a long and suggestive list--were
equally perplexed. They agreed in observing the contradictions,
but all, including Talleyrand, saw only sordid motives. Talleyrand
expressed extreme astonishment at the apathy of Americans in the
face of religious sectarians; but he explained it by assuming that
the American ardor of the moment was absorbed in money-making. The
explanation was evidently insufficient, for the Americans were capable
of feeling and showing excitement, even to their great pecuniary
injury, as if they frequently proved; but in the foreigner’s range of
observation, love of money was the most conspicuous and most common
trait of American character. “There is, perhaps, no civilized country
in the world,” wrote Félix de Beaujour, soon after 1800, “where there
is less generosity in the souls and in the heads fewer of those
illusions which make the charm or the consolation of life. Man here
weighs everything, calculates everything, and sacrifices everything
to his interest.” An Englishman named Fearon, in 1818, expressed
the same idea with more distinctness: “In going to America, I would
say generally, the emigrant must expect to find, not an economical
or cleanly people; not a social or generous people; not a people of
enlarged ideas; not a people of liberal opinions, or toward whom you
can express your thoughts free as air; not a people friendly to the
advocates of liberty in Europe; not a people who understand liberty
from investigation and principle; not a people who comprehend the
meaning of the words ‘honor’ and ‘generosity.’” Such quotations
might be multiplied almost without limit. Rapacity was the accepted
explanation of American peculiarities; yet every traveller was troubled
by inconsistencies that required explanations of a different kind. “It
is not in order to hoard that the Americans are rapacious,” observed
Liancourt as early as 1796. The extravagance, or what economical
Europeans thought extravagance, with which American women were allowed
and encouraged to spend money, was as notorious in 1790 as a century
later; the recklessness with which Americans often risked their money,
and the liberality with which they used it, were marked even then,
in comparison with the ordinary European habit. Europeans saw such
contradictions, but made no attempt to reconcile them. No foreigner
of that day--neither poet, painter, nor philosopher--could detect in
American life anything higher than vulgarity; for it was something
beyond the range of their experience, which education and culture had
not framed a formula to express. Moore came to Washington, and found
there no loftier inspiration than any Federalist rhymester of Dennie’s
school.
“Take Christians, Mohawks, democrats and all,
From the rude wigwam to the Congress hall,--
From man the savage, whether slaved or free,
To man the civilized, less tame than he:
’Tis one dull chaos, one unfertile strife
Betwixt half-polished and half-barbarous life;
Where every ill the ancient world can brew
Is mixed with every grossness of the new;
Where all corrupts, though little can entice,
And nothing’s known of luxury but vice.”
Moore’s two small volumes of Epistles, printed in 1807, contained much
more so-called poetry of the same tone,--poetry more polished and less
respectable than that of Barlow and Dwight; while, as though to prove
that the Old World knew what grossness was, he embalmed in his lines
the slanders which the Scotch libeller Callender invented against
Jefferson:--
“The weary statesman for repose hath fled
From halls of council to his negro’s shed;
Where, blest, he woos some black Aspasia’s grace,
And dreams of freedom in his slave’s embrace.”
To leave no doubt of his meaning, he explained in a footnote that his
allusion was to the President of the United States; and yet even Moore,
trifler and butterfly as he was, must have seen, if he would, that
between the morals of politics and society in America and those then
prevailing in Europe, there was no room for comparison,--there was room
only for contrast.
Moore was but an echo of fashionable England in his day. He seldom
affected moral sublimity; and had he in his wanderings met a race of
embodied angels, he would have sung of them or to them in the slightly
erotic notes which were so well received in the society he loved to
frequent and flatter. His remarks upon American character betrayed
more temper than truth; but even in this respect he expressed only
the common feeling of Europeans, which was echoed by the Federalist
society of the United States. Englishmen especially indulged in
unbounded invective against the sordid character of American society,
and in shaping their national policy on this contempt they carried
their theory into practice with so much energy as to produce its own
refutation. To their astonishment and anger, a day came when the
Americans, in defiance of self-interest and in contradiction of all the
qualities ascribed to them, insisted on declaring war; and readers of
this narrative will be surprised at the cry of incredulity, not unmixed
with terror, with which Englishmen started to their feet when they
woke from their delusion on seeing what they had been taught to call
the meteor flag of England, which had burned terrific at Copenhagen
and Trafalgar, suddenly waver and fall on the bloody deck of the
“Guerriere.” Fearon and Beaujour, with a score of other contemporary
critics, could see neither generosity, economy, honor, nor ideas of
any kind in the American breast; yet the obstinate repetition of these
denials itself betrayed a lurking fear of the social forces whose
strength they were candid enough to record. What was it that, as they
complained, turned the European peasant into a new man within half an
hour after landing at New York? Englishmen were never at a loss to
understand the poetry of more prosaic emotions. Neither they nor any
of their kindred failed in later times to feel the “large excitement”
of the country boy, whose “spirit leaped within him to be gone before
him,” when the lights of London first flared in the distance; yet none
seemed ever to feel the larger excitement of the American immigrant.
Among the Englishmen who criticised the United States was one greater
than Moore,--one who thought himself at home only in the stern beauty
of a moral presence. Of all poets, living or dead, Wordsworth felt most
keenly what he called the still, sad music of humanity; yet the highest
conception he could create of America was not more poetical than that
of any Cumberland beggar he might have met in his morning walk:--
“Long-wished-for sight, the Western World appeared;
And when the ship was moored, I leaped ashore
Indignantly,--resolved to be a man,
Who, having o’er the past no power, would live
No longer in subjection to the past,
With abject mind--from a tyrannic lord
Inviting penance, fruitlessly endured.
So, like a fugitive whose feet have cleared
Some boundary which his followers may not cross
In prosecution of their deadly chase,
Respiring, I looked round. How bright the sun,
The breeze how soft! Can anything produced
In the Old World compare, thought I, for power
And majesty, with this tremendous stream
Sprung from the desert? And behold a city
Fresh, youthful, and aspiring!...
Sooth to say,
On nearer view, a motley spectacle
Appeared, of high pretensions--unreproved
But by the obstreperous voice of higher still;
Big passions strutting on a petty stage,
Which a detached spectator may regard
Not unamused. But ridicule demands
Quick change of objects; and to laugh alone,
... in the very centre of the crowd
To keep the secret of a poignant scorn,
... is least fit
For the gross spirit of mankind.”
Thus Wordsworth, although then at his prime, indulging in what sounded
like a boast that he alone had felt the sense sublime of something
interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the
round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of
man,--even he, to whose moods the heavy and the weary weight of all
this unintelligible world was lightened by his deeper sympathies with
nature and the soul, could do no better, when he stood in the face of
American democracy, than “keep the secret of a poignant scorn.”
Possibly the view of Wordsworth and Moore, of Weld, Dennie, and Dickens
was right. The American democrat possessed little art of expression,
and did not watch his own emotions with a view of uttering them either
in prose or verse; he never told more of himself than the world might
have assumed without listening to him. Only with diffidence could
history attribute to such a class of men a wider range of thought or
feeling than they themselves cared to proclaim. Yet the difficulty
of denying or even ignoring the wider range was still greater, for
no one questioned the force or the scope of an emotion which caused
the poorest peasant in Europe to see what was invisible to poet and
philosopher,--the dim outline of a mountain-summit across the ocean,
rising high above the mist and mud of American democracy. As though
to call attention to some such difficulty, European and American
critics, while affirming that Americans were a race without illusions
or enlarged ideas, declared in the same breath that Jefferson was a
visionary whose theories would cause the heavens to fall upon them.
Year after year, with endless iteration, in every accent of contempt,
rage, and despair, they repeated this charge against Jefferson.
Every foreigner and Federalist agreed that he was a man of illusions,
dangerous to society and unbounded in power of evil; but if this view
of his character was right, the same visionary qualities seemed also to
be a national trait, for every one admitted that Jefferson’s opinions,
in one form or another, were shared by a majority of the American
people.
Illustrations might be carried much further, and might be drawn from
every social class and from every period in national history. Of all
presidents, Abraham Lincoln has been considered the most typical
representative of American society, chiefly because his mind, with
all its practical qualities, also inclined, in certain directions, to
idealism. Lincoln was born in 1809, the moment when American character
stood in lowest esteem. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a more distinct idealist,
was born in 1803. William Ellery Channing, another idealist, was born
in 1780. Men like John Fitch, Oliver Evans, Robert Fulton, Joel Barlow,
John Stevens, and Eli Whitney were all classed among visionaries. The
whole society of Quakers belonged in the same category. The records
of the popular religious sects abounded in examples of idealism and
illusion to such an extent that the masses seemed hardly to find
comfort or hope in any authority, however old or well established. In
religion as in politics, Americans seemed to require a system which
gave play to their imagination and their hopes.
Some misunderstanding must always take place when the observer is at
cross-purposes with the society he describes. Wordsworth might have
convinced himself by a moment’s thought that no country could act on
the imagination as America acted upon the instincts of the ignorant and
poor, without some quality that deserved better treatment than poignant
scorn; but perhaps this was only one among innumerable cases in which
the unconscious poet breathed an atmosphere which the self-conscious
poet could not penetrate. With equal reason he might have taken the
opposite view,--that the hard, practical, money-getting American
democrat, who had neither generosity nor honor nor imagination, and
who inhabited cold shades where fancy sickened and where genius died,
was in truth living in a world of dream, and acting a drama more
instinct with poetry than all the avatars of the East, walking in
gardens of emerald and rubies, in ambition already ruling the world
and guiding Nature with a kinder and wiser hand than had ever yet been
felt in human history. From this point his critics never approached
him,--they stopped at a stone’s throw; and at the moment when they
declared that the man’s mind had no illusions, they added that he
was a knave or a lunatic. Even on his practical and sordid side, the
American might easily have been represented as a victim to illusion.
If the Englishman had lived as the American speculator did,--in the
future,--the hyperbole of enthusiasm would have seemed less monstrous.
“Look at my wealth!” cried the American to his foreign visitor. “See
these solid mountains of salt and iron, of lead, copper, silver, and
gold! See these magnificent cities scattered broadcast to the Pacific!
See my cornfields rustling and waving in the summer breeze from ocean
to ocean, so far that the sun itself is not high enough to mark where
the distant mountains bound my golden seas! Look at this continent of
mine, fairest of created worlds, as she lies turning up to the sun’s
never-failing caress her broad and exuberant breasts, overflowing with
milk for her hundred million children! See how she glows with youth,
health, and love!” Perhaps it was not altogether unnatural that the
foreigner, on being asked to see what needed centuries to produce,
should have looked about him with bewilderment and indignation.
“Gold! cities! cornfields! continents! Nothing of the sort! I see
nothing but tremendous wastes, where sickly men and women are dying of
home-sickness or are scalped by savages! mountain-ranges a thousand
miles long, with no means of getting to them, and nothing in them when
you get there! swamps and forests choked with their own rotten ruins!
nor hope of better for a thousand years! Your story is a fraud, and you
are a liar and swindler!”
Met in this spirit, the American, half perplexed and half defiant,
retaliated by calling his antagonist a fool, and by mimicking his heavy
tricks of manner. For himself he cared little, but his dream was his
whole existence. The men who denounced him admitted that they left him
in his forest-swamp quaking with fever, but clinging in the delirium
of death to the illusions of his dazzled brain. No class o£ men could
be required to support their convictions with a steadier faith, or pay
more devotedly with their persons for the mistakes of their judgment.
Whether imagination or greed led them to describe more than actually
existed, they still saw no more than any inventor or discoverer must
have seen in order to give him the energy of success. They said to
the rich as to the poor, “Come and share our limitless riches! Come
and help us bring to light these unimaginable stores of wealth and
power!” The poor came, and from them were seldom heard complaints of
deception or delusion. Within a moment, by the mere contact of a moral
atmosphere, they saw the gold and jewels, the summer cornfields and the
glowing continent. The rich for a long time stood aloof,--they were
timid and narrow-minded; but this was not all,--between them and the
American democrat was a gulf.
The charge that Americans were too fond of money to win the confidence
of Europeans was a curious inconsistency; yet this was a common
belief. If the American deluded himself and led others to their death
by baseless speculations; if he buried those he loved in a gloomy
forest where they quaked and died while he persisted in seeing there
a splendid, healthy, and well-built city,--no one could deny that he
sacrificed wife and child to his greed for gain, that the dollar was
his god, and a sordid avarice his demon. Yet had this been the whole
truth, no European capitalist would have hesitated to make money
out of his grave; for, avarice against avarice, no more sordid or
meaner type existed in America than could be shown on every ’Change
in Europe. With much more reason Americans might have suspected that
in America Englishmen found everywhere a silent influence, which they
found nowhere in Europe, and which had nothing to do with avarice or
with the dollar, but, on the contrary, seemed likely at any moment
to sacrifice the dollar in a cause and for an object so illusory
that most Englishmen could not endure to hear it discussed. European
travellers who passed through America noticed that everywhere, in the
White House at Washington and in log-cabins beyond the Alleghanies,
except for a few Federalists, every American, from Jefferson and
Gallatin down to the poorest squatter, seemed to nourish an idea that
he was doing what he could to overthrow the tyranny which the past
had fastened on the human mind. Nothing was easier than to laugh at
the ludicrous expressions of this simple-minded conviction, or to cry
out against its coarseness, or grow angry with its prejudices; to
see its nobler side, to feel the beatings of a heart underneath the
sordid surface of a gross humanity, was not so easy. Europeans seemed
seldom or never conscious that the sentiment could possess a noble
side, but found only matter for complaint in the remark that every
American democrat believed himself to be working for the overthrow of
tyranny, aristocracy, hereditary privilege, and priesthood, wherever
they existed. Even where the American did not openly proclaim this
conviction in words, he carried so dense an atmosphere of the sentiment
with him in his daily life as to give respectable Europeans an uneasy
sense of remoteness.
Of all historical problems, the nature of a national character is
the most difficult and the most important. Readers will be troubled,
at almost every chapter of the coming narrative, by the want of some
formula to explain what share the popular imagination bore in the
system pursued by government. The acts of the American people during
the administrations of Jefferson and Madison were judged at the time
by no other test. According as bystanders believed American character
to be hard, sordid, and free from illusion, they were severe and
even harsh in judgment. This rule guided the governments of England
and France. Federalists in the United States, knowing more of the
circumstances, often attributed to the democratic instinct a visionary
quality which they regarded as sentimentality, and charged with many
bad consequences. If their view was correct, history could occupy
itself to no better purpose than in ascertaining the nature and force
of the quality which was charged with results so serious; but nothing
was more elusive than the spirit of American democracy. Jefferson, the
literary representative of the class, spoke chiefly for Virginians,
and dreaded so greatly his own reputation as a visionary that he seldom
or never uttered his whole thought. Gallatin and Madison were still
more cautious. The press in no country could give shape to a mental
condition so shadowy. The people themselves, although millions in
number, could not have expressed their finer instincts had they tried,
and might not have recognized them if expressed by others.
In the early days of colonization, every new settlement represented
an idea and proclaimed a mission. Virginia was founded by a great,
liberal movement aiming at the spread of English liberty and empire.
The Pilgrims of Plymouth, the Puritans of Boston, the Quakers of
Pennsylvania, all avowed a moral purpose, and began by making
institutions that consciously reflected a moral idea. No such character
belonged to the colonization of 1800. From Lake Erie to Florida, in
long, unbroken line, pioneers were at work, cutting into the forests
with the energy of so many beavers, and with no more express moral
purpose than the beavers they drove away. The civilization they carried
with them was rarely illumined by an idea; they sought room for no new
truth and aimed neither at creating, like the Puritans, a government
of saints, nor, like the Quakers, one of love and peace; they left
such experiments behind them, and wrestled only with the hardest
problems of frontier life. No wonder that foreign observers, and even
the educated, well-to-do Americans of the sea-coast, could seldom see
anything to admire in the ignorance and brutality of frontiersmen,
and should declare that virtue and wisdom no longer guided the United
States! What they saw was not encouraging. To a new society, ignorant
and semi-barbarous, a mass of demagogues insisted on applying every
stimulant that could inflame its worst appetites, while at the same
instant taking away every influence that had hitherto helped to
restrain its passions. Greed for wealth, lust for power, yearning for
the blank void of savage freedom such as Indians and wolves delighted
in,--these were the fires that flamed under the caldron of American
society, in which, as conservatives believed, the old, well-proven,
conservative crust of religion, government, family, and even common
respect for age, education, and experience was rapidly melting away,
and was indeed already broken into fragments, swept about by the
seething mass of scum ever rising in greater quantities to the surface.
Against this Federalist and conservative view of democratic
tendencies, democrats protested in a thousand forms, but never in
any mode of expression which satisfied them all, or explained their
whole character. Probably Jefferson came nearest to the mark, for
he represented the hopes of science as well as the prejudices of
Virginia; but Jefferson’s writings may be searched from beginning
to end without revealing the whole measure of the man, far less of
the movement. Here and there in his letters a suggestion was thrown
out, as though by chance, revealing larger hopes,--as in 1815, at a
moment of despondency, he wrote: “I fear from the experience of the
last twenty-five years that morals do not of necessity advance hand in
hand with the sciences.” In 1800, in the flush of triumph, he believed
that his task in the world was to establish a democratic republic,
with the sciences for an intellectual field, and physical and moral
advancement keeping pace with their advance. Without an excessive
introduction of more recent ideas, he might be imagined to define
democratic progress, in the somewhat affected precision of his French
philosophy: “Progress is either physical or intellectual. If we can
bring it about that men are on the average an inch taller in the next
generation than in this; if they are an inch larger round the chest;
if their brain is an ounce or two heavier, and their life a year or
two longer,--that is progress. If fifty years hence the average man
shall invariably argue from two ascertained premises where he now jumps
to a conclusion from a single supposed revelation,--that is progress!
I expect it to be made here, under our democratic stimulants, on a
great scale, until every man is potentially an athlete in body and
an Aristotle in mind.” To this doctrine the New Englander replied,
“What will you do for moral progress?” Every possible answer to this
question opened a chasm. No doubt Jefferson held the faith that men
would improve morally with their physical and intellectual growth;
but he had no idea of any moral improvement other than that which
came by nature. He could not tolerate a priesthood, a state church,
or revealed religion. Conservatives, who could tolerate no society
without such pillars of order, were, from their point of view, right in
answering, “Give us rather the worst despotism of Europe,--there our
souls at least may have a chance of salvation!” To their minds vice
and virtue were not relative, but fixed terms. The Church was a divine
institution. How could a ship hope to reach port when the crew threw
overboard sails, spars, and compass, unshipped their rudder, and all
the long day thought only of eating and drinking. Nay, even should the
new experiment succeed in a worldly sense, what was a man profited if
he gained the whole world, and lost his own soul? The Lord God was a
jealous God, and visited the sins of the parents upon the children; but
what worse sin could be conceived than for a whole nation to join their
chief in chanting the strange hymn with which Jefferson, a new false
prophet, was deceiving and betraying his people: “It does me no injury
for my neighbor to say there are twenty Gods or no God!”
On this ground conservatism took its stand, as it had hitherto done
with success in every similar emergency in the world’s history, and
fixing its eyes on moral standards of its own, refused to deal with
the subject as further open to argument. The two parties stood facing
opposite ways, and could see no common ground of contact.
Yet even then one part of the American social system was proving
itself to be rich in results. The average American was more intelligent
than the average European, and was becoming every year still more
active-minded as the new movement of society caught him up and swept
him through a life of more varied experiences. On all sides the
national mind responded to its stimulants. Deficient as the American
was in the machinery of higher instruction; remote, poor; unable
by any exertion to acquire the training, the capital, or even the
elementary textbooks he needed for a fair development of his natural
powers,--his native energy and ambition already responded to the spur
applied to them. Some of his triumphs were famous throughout the world;
for Benjamin Franklin had raised high the reputation of American
printers, and the actual President of the United States, who signed
with Franklin the treaty of peace with Great Britain, was the son of
a small farmer, and had himself kept a school in his youth. In both
these cases social recognition followed success; but the later triumphs
of the American mind were becoming more and more popular. John Fitch
was not only one of the poorest, but one of the least-educated Yankees
who ever made a name; he could never spell with tolerable correctness,
and his life ended as it began,--in the lowest social obscurity.
Eli Whitney was better educated than Fitch, but had neither wealth,
social influence, nor patron to back his ingenuity. In the year 1800
Eli Terry, another Connecticut Yankee of the same class, took into
his employ two young men to help him make wooden clocks, and this
was the capital on which the greatest clock-manufactory in the world
began its operations. In 1797 Asa Whittemore, a Massachusetts Yankee,
invented a machine to make cards for carding wool, which “operated as
if it had a soul,” and became the foundation for a hundred subsequent
patents. In 1790 Jacob Perkins, of Newburyport, invented a machine
capable of cutting and turning out two hundred thousand nails a day;
and then invented a process for transferring engraving from a very
small steel cylinder to copper, which revolutionized cotton-printing.
The British traveller Weld, passing through Wilmington, stopped, as
Liancourt had done before him, to see the great flour-mills on the
Brandywine. “The improvements,” he said, “which have been made in the
machinery of the flour-mills in America are very great. The chief of
these consist in a new application of the screw, and the introduction
of what are called elevators, the idea of which was evidently borrowed
from the chain-pump.” This was the invention of Oliver Evans, a
native of Delaware, whose parents were in very humble life, but who
was himself, in spite of every disadvantage, an inventive genius of
the first order. Robert Fulton, who in 1800 was in Paris with Joel
Barlow, sprang from the same source in Pennsylvania. John Stevens, a
native of New York, belonged to a more favored class, but followed
the same impulses. All these men were the outcome of typical American
society, and all their inventions transmuted the democratic instinct
into a practical and tangible shape. Who would undertake to say that
there was a limit to the fecundity of this teeming source? Who that
saw only the narrow, practical, money-getting nature of these devices
could venture to assert that as they wrought their end and raised the
standard of millions, they would not also raise the creative power
of those millions to a higher plane? If the priests and barons who
set their names to Magna Charta had been told that in a few centuries
every swine-herd and cobbler’s apprentice would write and read with
an ease such as few kings could then command, and reason with better
logic than any university could then practise, the priest and baron
would have been more incredulous than any man who was told in 1800 that
within another five centuries the ploughboy would go a-field whistling
a sonata of Beethoven, and figure out in quaternions the relation of
his furrows. The American democrat knew so little of art that among
his popular illusions he could not then nourish artistic ambition; but
leaders like Jefferson, Gallatin, and Barlow might without extravagance
count upon a coming time when diffused ease and education should
bring the masses into familiar contact with higher forms of human
achievement, and their vast creative power, turned toward a nobler
culture, might rise to the level of that democratic genius which found
expression in the Parthenon; might revel in the delights of a new
Buonarotti and a richer Titian; might create for five hundred million
people the America of thought and art which alone could satisfy their
omnivorous ambition.
Whether the illusions, so often affirmed and so often denied to the
American people, took such forms or not, these were in effect the
problems that lay before American society: Could it transmute its
social power into the higher forms of thought? Could it provide for
the moral and intellectual needs of mankind? Could it take permanent
political shape? Could it give new life to religion and art? Could it
create and maintain in the mass of mankind those habits of mind which
had hitherto belonged to men of science alone? Could it physically
develop the convolutions of the human brain? Could it produce, or was
it compatible with, the differentiation of a higher variety of the
human race? Nothing less than this was necessary for its complete
success.