great American. He fought on the opposite side, but he fought in the
same spirit, and for a principle which is in a sense scarcely less
American than the principle of Union. He represented the idea of the
inherent--the essential--separateness of self-government. This was
not the principle of secession: that principle involved the separate
right of the several self-governing units of the federal system to
judge of national questions independently, and as a check upon the
federal government,--to adjudge the very objects of the Union. Lee did
not believe in secession, but he did believe in the local rootage of
all government. This is at the bottom, no doubt, an English idea; but
it has had a characteristic American development. It is the reverse
side of the shield which bears upon its obverse the devices of the
Union, a side too much overlooked and obscured since the war. It
conceives the individual State a community united by the most intimate
associations, the first home and foster-mother of every man born into
the citizenship of the nation. Lee considered himself a member of one
of these great families; he could not conceive of the nation apart from
the State: above all, he could not live in the nation divorced from his
neighbors. His own community should decide his political destiny and
duty.
This was also the spirit of Patrick Henry and of Sam Houston,--men
much alike in the cardinal principle of their natures. Patrick Henry
resisted the formation of the Union only because he feared to disturb
the local rootage of self-government, to disperse power so widely
that neighbors could not control it. It was not a disloyal or a
separatist spirit, but only a jealous spirit of liberty. Sam Houston,
too, deemed the character a community should give itself so great a
matter that the community, once made, ought itself to judge of the
national associations most conducive to its liberty and progress.
Without liberty of this intensive character there could have been no
vital national liberty; and Sam Houston, Patrick Henry, and Robert E.
Lee are none the less great Americans because they represented only
one cardinal principle of the national life. Self-government has its
intrinsic antinomies as well as its harmonies.
Among men of letters Lowell is doubtless most typically American,
though Curtis must find an eligible place in the list. Lowell was
self-conscious, though the truest greatness is not; he was a trifle too
“smart,” besides, and there is no “smartness” in great literature. But
both the self-consciousness and the smartness must be admitted to be
American; and Lowell was so versatile, so urbane, of so large a spirit,
and so admirable in the scope of his sympathies, that he must certainly
go on the calendar.
There need be no fear that we shall be obliged to stop with Lowell in
literature, or with any of the men who have been named in the field
of achievement. We shall not in the future have to take one type
of Americanism at a time. The frontier is gone: it has reached the
Pacific. The country grows rapidly homogeneous. With the same pace it
grows various, and multiform in all its life. The man of the simple or
local type cannot any longer deal in the great manner with any national
problem. The great men of our future must be of the composite type
of greatness: sound-hearted, hopeful, confident of the validity of
liberty, tenacious of the deeper principles of American institutions,
but with the old rashness schooled and sobered, and instinct tempered
by instruction. They must be wise with an adult, not with an
adolescent wisdom. Some day we shall be of one mind, our ideals fixed,
our purposes harmonized, our nationality complete and consentaneous:
then will come our great literature and our greatest men.
VIII.
THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY.[1]
[1] An address delivered before the New Jersey Historical Society.
In the field of history, learning should be deemed to stand among the
people and in the midst of life. Its function there is not one of
pride merely: to make complaisant record of deeds honorably done and
plans nobly executed in the past. It has also a function of guidance:
to build high places whereon to plant the clear and flaming lights of
experience, that they may shine alike upon the roads already traveled
and upon the paths not yet attempted. The historian is also a sort
of prophet. Our memories direct us. They give us knowledge of our
character, alike in its strength and in its weakness: and it is so we
get our standards for endeavor,--our warnings and our gleams of hope.
It is thus we learn what manner of nation we are of, and divine what
manner of people we should be.
And this is not in national records merely. Local history is the
ultimate substance of national history. There could be no epics were
pastorals not also true,--no patriotism, were there no homes, no
neighbors, no quiet round of civic duty; and I, for my part, do not
wonder that scholarly men have been found not a few who, though they
might have shone upon a larger field, where all eyes would have seen
them win their fame, yet chose to pore all their lives long upon the
blurred and scattered records of a country-side, where there was
nothing but an old church or an ancient village. The history of a
nation is only the history of its villages written large. I only marvel
that these local historians have not seen more in the stories they
have sought to tell. Surely here, in these old hamlets that antedate
the cities, in these little communities that stand apart and yet give
their young life to the nation, is to be found the very authentic stuff
of romance for the mere looking. There is love and courtship and eager
life and high devotion up and down all the lines of every genealogy.
What strength, too, and bold endeavor in the cutting down of forests
to make the clearings; what breath of hope and discovery in scaling
for the first time the nearest mountains; what longings ended or begun
upon the coming in of ships into the harbor; what pride of earth in the
rivalries of the village; what thoughts of heaven in the quiet of the
rural church! What forces of slow and steadfast endeavor there were
in the building of a great city upon the foundations of a hamlet: and
how the plot broadens and thickens and grows dramatic as communities
widen into states! Here, surely, sunk deep in the very fibre of the
stuff, are the colors of the great story of men,--the lively touches of
reality and the striking images of life.
It must be admitted, I know, that local history can be made deadly dull
in the telling. The men who reconstruct it seem usually to build with
kiln-dried stuff,--as if with a purpose it should last. But that is
not the fault of the subject. National history may be written almost
as ill, if due pains be taken to dry it out. It is a trifle more
difficult: because merely to speak of national affairs is to give hint
of great forces and of movements blown upon by all the airs of the wide
continent. The mere largeness of the scale lends to the narrative a
certain dignity and spirit. But some men will manage to be dull though
they should speak of creation. In writing of local history the thing
is fatally easy. For there is some neighborhood history that lacks any
large significance, which is without horizon or outlook. There are
details in the history of every community which it concerns no man to
know again when once they are past and decently buried in the records:
and these are the very details, no doubt, which it is easiest to find
upon a casual search. It is easier to make out a list of county clerks
than to extract the social history of the county from the records
they have kept,--though it is not so important: and it is easier to
make a catalogue of anything than to say what of life and purpose the
catalogue stands for. This is called collecting facts “for the sake of
the facts themselves;” but if I wished to do aught for the sake of the
facts themselves I think I should serve them better by giving their
true biographies than by merely displaying their faces.
The right and vital sort of local history is the sort which may be
written with lifted eyes,--the sort which has an horizon and an outlook
upon the world. Sometimes it may happen, indeed, that the annals of a
neighborhood disclose some singular adventure which had its beginning
and its ending there: some unwonted bit of fortune which stands unique
and lonely amidst the myriad transactions of the world of affairs,
and deserves to be told singly and for its own sake. But usually the
significance of local history is, that it is part of a greater whole. A
spot of local history is like an inn upon a highway: it is a stage upon
a far journey: it is a place the national history has passed through.
There mankind has stopped and lodged by the way. Local history is thus
less than national history only as the part is less than the whole. The
whole could not dispense with the part, would not exist without it,
could not be understood unless the part also were understood. Local
history is subordinate to national only in the sense in which each
leaf of a book is subordinate to the volume itself. Upon no single
page will the whole theme of the book be found; but each page holds
a part of the theme. Even were the history of each locality exactly
like the history of every other (which it cannot be), it would deserve
to be written,--if only to corroborate the history of the rest, and
verify it as an authentic part of the record of the race and nation.
The common elements of a nation’s life are the great elements of its
life, the warp and woof of the fabric. They cannot be too much or too
substantially verified and explicated. It is so that history is made
solid and fit for use and wear.
Our national history, of course, has its own great and spreading
pattern, which can be seen in its full form and completeness only when
the stuff of our national life is laid before us in broad surfaces and
upon an ample scale. But the detail of the pattern, the individual
threads of the great fabric, are to be found only in local history.
There is all the intricate weaving, all the delicate shading, all
the nice refinement of the pattern,--gold thread mixed with fustian,
fine thread laid upon coarse, shade combined with shade. Assuredly
it is this that gives to local history its life and importance. The
idea, moreover, furnishes a nice criterion of interest. The life of
some localities is, obviously, more completely and intimately a part
of the national pattern than the life of other localities, which are
more separate and, as it were, put upon the border of the fabric. To
come at once and very candidly to examples, the local history of the
Middle States,--New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania,--is much more
structurally a part of the characteristic life of the nation as a whole
than is the history of the New England communities or of the several
States and regions of the South. I know that such a heresy will sound
very rank in the ears of some: for I am speaking against accepted
doctrine. But acceptance, be it never so general, does not make a
doctrine true.
Our national history has been written for the most part by New England
men. All honor to them! Their scholarship and their characters alike
have given them an honorable enrollment amongst the great names of our
literary history; and no just man would say aught to detract, were it
never so little, from their well-earned fame. They have written our
history, nevertheless, from but a single point of view. From where they
sit, the whole of the great development looks like an Expansion of New
England. Other elements but play along the sides of the great process
by which the Puritan has worked out the development of nation and
polity. It is he who has gone out and possessed the land: the man of
destiny, the type and impersonation of a chosen people. To the Southern
writer, too, the story looks much the same, if it be but followed to
its culmination,--to its final storm and stress and tragedy in the
great war. It is the history of the Suppression of the South. Spite of
all her splendid contributions to the steadfast accomplishment of the
great task of building the nation; spite of the long leadership of her
statesmen in the national counsels; spite of her joint achievements in
the conquest and occupation of the West, the South was at last turned
upon on every hand, rebuked, proscribed, defeated. The history of the
United States, we have learned, was, from the settlement at Jamestown
to the surrender at Appomattox, a long-drawn contest for mastery
between New England and the South,--and the end of the contest we
know. All along the parallels of latitude ran the rivalry, in those
heroical days of toil and adventure during which population crossed
the continent, like an army advancing its encampments. Up and down the
great river of the continent, too, and beyond, up the slow incline of
the vast steppes that lift themselves toward the crowning towers of the
Rockies,--beyond that, again, in the gold-fields and upon the green
plains of California, the race for ascendency struggled on,--till at
length there was a final coming face to face, and the masterful folk
who had come from the loins of New England won their consummate victory.
It is a very dramatic form for the story. One almost wishes it were
true. How fine a unity it would give our epic! But perhaps, after all,
the real truth is more interesting. The life of the nation cannot
be reduced to these so simple terms. These two great forces, of the
North and of the South, unquestionably existed,--were unquestionably
projected in their operation out upon the great plane of the continent,
there to combine or repel, as circumstances might determine. But
the people that went out from the North were not an unmixed people;
they came from the great Middle States as well as from New England.
Their transplantation into the West was no more a reproduction of New
England or New York or Pennsylvania or New Jersey than Massachusetts
was a reproduction of old England, or New Netherland a reproduction
of Holland. The Southern people, too, whom they met by the western
rivers and upon the open prairies, were transformed, as they themselves
were, by the rough fortunes of the frontier. A mixture of peoples,
a modification of mind and habit, a new round of experiment and
adjustment amidst the novel life of the baked and unfilled plain, and
the far valleys with the virgin forests still thick upon them: a new
temper, a new spirit of adventure, a new impatience of restraint, a new
license of life,--these are the characteristic notes and measures of
the time when the nation spread itself at large upon the continent, and
was transformed from a group of colonies into a family of States.
The passes of these eastern mountains were the arteries of the
nation’s life. The real breath of our growth and manhood came into our
nostrils when first, like Governor Spotswood and that gallant company
of Virginian gentlemen that rode with him in the far year 1716, the
Knights of the Order of the Golden Horseshoe, our pioneers stood upon
the ridges of the eastern hills and looked down upon those reaches of
the continent where lay the untrodden paths of the westward migration.
There, upon the courses of the distant rivers that gleamed before them
in the sun, down the farther slopes of the hills beyond, out upon the
broad fields that lay upon the fertile banks of the “Father of Waters,”
up the long tilt of the continent to the vast hills that looked out
upon the Pacific--there were the regions in which, joining with people
from every race and clime under the sun, they were to make the great
compounded nation whose liberty and mighty works of peace were to
cause all the world to stand at gaze. Thither were to come Frenchmen,
Scandinavians, Celts, Dutch, Slavs,--men of the Latin races and of the
races of the Orient, as well as men, a great host, of the first stock
of the settlements: English, Scots, Scots-Irish,--like New England men,
but touched with the salt of humor, hard, and yet neighborly too. For
this great process of growth by grafting, of modification no less than
of expansion, the colonies,--the original thirteen States,--were only
preliminary studies and first experiments. But the experiments that
most resembled the great methods by which we peopled the continent
from side to side and knit a single polity across all its length and
breadth, were surely the experiments made from the very first in the
Middle States of our Atlantic seaboard.
Here from the first were mixture of population, variety of element,
combination of type, as if of the nation itself in small. Here was
never a simple body, a people of but a single blood and extraction, a
polity and a practice brought straight from one motherland. The life of
these States was from the beginning like the life of the country: they
have always shown the national pattern. In New England and the South it
was very different. There some of the great elements of the national
life were long in preparation: but separately and with an individual
distinction; without mixture,--for long almost without movement. That
the elements thus separately prepared were of the greatest importance,
and run everywhere like chief threads of the pattern through all our
subsequent life, who can doubt? They give color and tone to every part
of the figure. The very fact that they are so distinct and separately
evident throughout, the very emphasis of individuality they carry with
them, but proves their distinct origin. The other elements of our life,
various though they be, and of the very fibre, giving toughness and
consistency to the fabric, are merged in its texture, united, confused,
almost indistinguishable, so thoroughly are they mixed, intertwined,
interwoven, like the essential strands of the stuff itself: but these
of the Puritan and the Southerner, though they run everywhere with the
rest and seem upon a superficial view themselves the body of the cloth,
in fact modify rather than make it.
What in fact has been the course of American history? How is it to be
distinguished from European history? What features has it of its own,
which give it its distinctive plan and movement? We have suffered, it
is to be feared, a very serious limitation of view until recent years
by having all our history written in the East. It has smacked strongly
of a local flavor. It has concerned itself too exclusively with the
origins and Old-World derivations of our story. Our historians have
made their march from the sea with their heads over shoulder, their
gaze always backward upon the landing-places and homes of the first
settlers. In spite of the steady immigration, with its persistent tide
of foreign blood, they have chosen to speak often and to think always
of our people as sprung after all from a common stock, bearing a family
likeness in every branch, and following all the while old, familiar,
family ways. The view is the more misleading because it is so large a
part of the truth without being all of it. The common British stock
did first make the country, and has always set the pace. There were
common institutions up and down the coast; and these had formed and
hardened for a persistent growth before the great westward migration
began which was to re-shape and modify every element of our life. The
national government itself was set up and made strong by success while
yet we lingered for the most part upon the eastern coast and feared a
too distant frontier.
But, the beginnings once safely made, change set in apace. Not only
so: there had been slow change from the first. We have no frontier
now, we are told,--except a broken fragment, it may be, here and there
in some barren corner of the western lands, where some inhospitable
mountain still shoulders us out, or where men are still lacking to
break the baked surface of the plains and occupy them in the very teeth
of hostile nature. But at first it was all frontier,--a mere strip of
settlements stretched precariously upon the sea-edge of the wilds: an
untouched continent in front of them, and behind them an unfrequented
sea that almost never showed so much as the momentary gleam of a sail.
Every step in the slow process of settlement was but a step of the
same kind as the first, an advance to a new frontier like the old. For
long we lacked, it is true, that new breed of frontiersmen born in
after years beyond the mountains. Those first frontiersmen had still
a touch of the timidity of the Old World in their blood: they lacked
the frontier heart. They were “Pilgrims” in very fact,--exiled, not at
home. Fine courage they had: and a steadfastness in their bold design
which it does a faint-hearted age good to look back upon. There was
no thought of drawing back. Steadily, almost calmly, they extended
their seats. They built homes, and deemed it certain their children
would live there after them. But they did not love the rough, uneasy
life for its own sake. How long did they keep, if they could, within
sight of the sea! The wilderness was their refuge; but how long before
it became their joy and hope! Here was their destiny cast; but their
hearts lingered and held back. It was only as generations passed and
the work widened about them that their thought also changed, and a new
thrill sped along their blood. Their life had been new and strange
from their first landing in the wilderness. Their houses, their food,
their clothing, their neighborhood dealings were all such as only the
frontier brings. Insensibly they were themselves changed. The strange
life became familiar; their adjustment to it was at length unconscious
and without effort; they had no plans which were not inseparably a part
and a product of it. But, until they had turned their backs once for
all upon the sea; until they saw their western borders cleared of the
French; until the mountain passes had grown familiar, and the lands
beyond the central and constant theme of their hope, the goal and dream
of their young men, they did not become an American people.
When they did, the great determining movement of our history began. The
very visages of the people changed. That alert movement of the eye,
that openness to every thought of enterprise or adventure, that nomadic
habit which knows no fixed home and has plans ready to be carried any
whither,--all the marks of the authentic type of the “American” as we
know him came into our life. The crack of the whip and the song of the
teamster, the heaving chorus of boatmen poling their heavy rafts upon
the rivers, the laughter of the camp, the sound of bodies of men in the
still forests, became the characteristic notes in our air. A roughened
race, embrowned in the sun, hardened in manner by a coarse life of
change and danger, loving the rude woods and the crack of the rifle,
living to begin something new every day, striking with the broad and
open hand, delicate in nothing but the touch of the trigger, leaving
cities in its track as if by accident rather than design, settling
again to the steady ways of a fixed life only when it must: such was
the American people whose achievement it was to be to take possession
of their continent from end to end ere their national government was
a single century old. The picture is a very singular one! Settled
life and wild side by side: civilization frayed at the edges,--taken
forward in rough and ready fashion, with a song and a swagger,--not by
statesmen, but by woodsmen and drovers, with axes and whips and rifles
in their hands, clad in buckskin, like huntsmen.