PART IV. NATIONAL VERSUS CHAPTER VIII THE GROWTH OF A NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS A NEW AMERICAN SPIRIT America, In the two decades following our second war with 59. British England, when the land between the Alleghenies and the opinions of Mississippi was rapidly filling up, America was most con- 1820-1837 spicuously a pioneer community. Social amenities, polished [191] manners, literary and artistic ambitions, were all in abeyance before the stern necessity of coping with the actual physical task of building a home, a city, an empire of the West. Our many British visitors and critics in this period judged our pioneer community harshly—the more harshly, perhaps, as it supplemented a rather breezy confidence in Yankee push and shrewdness with the boastful, persistent reminder that America had twice brought Great Britain to treat for peace. In a review of Adam Seybert's "Statistical Annals of the United States," published at Philadelphia in 1818, Sydney Smith writes in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1820: Jonathan must not grow vain and ambitious; or allow himself to be dazzled by that galaxy of epithets by which his orators and newspaper scribblers endeavor to persuade their supporters that they are the greatest, the most refined, the most enlightened, and the most moral people upon earth. The effect of this is unspeakably ludicrous on this side of the Atlantic and even on the other, we should imagine, must be rather humiliating to the reasonable part of the population. The Americans are a brave, industrious, and acute people; but they have hitherto given no indications of genius, and made no approaches to the heroic, either in their morality or character. They are but a recent offset, indeed, from England; and should make it their chief boast, for many generations to come, that they are sprung from the same race with Bacon and Shakespeare and Newton. Considering their numbers, indeed, and the favorable circumstances in which they have been placed, they have yet done marvellously little to assert the honor of such a descent, or to show that their English blood has been exalted or refined by their republican training and institutions. Their Franklins and Washingtons, and all the other sages and heroes of their revolution, were born and bred subjects of the King of England,and not among the freest or most valued of his subjects. And, since the period of their separation, a far greater proportion of their statesmen and artists and political writers have been foreigners, than ever occurred before in the history of any civilized and educated people. During the thirty or forty years of their independence, they have done absolutely nothing for the Sciences,. for the Arts, for Literature, or even for the statesmanlike studies of Politics or Political Economy. . . . In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered, or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in the mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture? When these questions are fairly and favorably answered, their laudatory epithets may be allowed: But, till that can be done, we would seriously advise them to keep clear of superlatives. One of our most unsparing critics was Mrs. F. M. Trollope, an English novelist and mother of the more famous Anthony Trollope, who lived three years (1828–1831) in the new town of Cincinnati, "the western limit of our civilization." Mrs. Trollope found the people among whom she lived harsh, uncouth, unfeeling, conceited, boastful, tricky, and sanctimonious.1 Her stay in America confirmed her in the aristocratic faith that "the advantages of life are on the side of those who are governed by the few," and that "degradation invariably follows the wild scheme of placing all the power of the State in the hands of the populace." My general appellation amongst my neighbors was "the English old woman,” but in mentioning each other they constantly employed the term "lady"; and they evidently had a pleasure in using it, for I repeatedly observed, that in speaking of a neighbor, instead of saying Mrs. Such-a-one, they described her as "the lady over the way what takes in washing," or as “that there lady, out by the gully, what is making dip-candles.” . . . Our respective titles certainly were not very important; but the eternal shaking hands with these ladies and gentlemen was really an annoyance, and the more so, as the near approach of the gentlemen was always redolent of whiskey and tobacco. But the point where this republican equality was the most distressing was in the long and frequent visitations that it produced. No one dreams of fastening a door in Western America; I was told that it would be considered as an affront by the whole 1 Charles Dickens, in "Martin Chuzzlewit," paints a very unflattering picture of western American society (1844). "One might almost fancy," says H. T. Peck in his introduction to Mrs. Trollope's memoirs, "that Mrs. Trollope's descriptions are the material from which the more highly colored pictures of Dickens were elaborated." |