The Mexican War of 1846 was important because of its consequences. But it also had a lot of high, and sometimes low, comedy. Polk tried to play politics with the war from start to finish. In the first place he allowed the slippery Santa Ana, who was in exile in Cuba, to return to Mexico, the general having promised him he would usurp power and give America the treaty it wanted. In fact Santa Ana, who always broke his promises, broke this one too and provided such serious resistance as the American army encountered. Polk, as Senator Benton wrote, wanted "a small war, just large enough to require a treaty of peace, and not large enough to make military reputations, dangerous for the presidency." Polk also wanted to fight the war on the cheap, starving Taylor of supplies at first, and putting volunteers on short engagements. Taylor protested, refused to budge until supplies arrived, then won a brilliant three-day battle at Monterey, taking the city. That worried Polk, who feared Taylor would get the Whig nomination in 1848. Polk then tried to appoint Senator Benton, of all people, as a political general to control the army. Congress would not have that. So he turned instead to General Winfield Scott (1786-1866), general-in-chief of the army. Scott was a Whig and politically ambitious too, but he served to balance Taylor and take some of the glory from him. He was known as "Fuss-and-Feathers" because of his insistence on pipeclay and gleaming bra.s.s. Scott immediately got into a row with Polk"s Secretary of War, William L. Marcy-the man who had coined the term the "spoils system"-again over paucity of supplies, and, in reply to a quibbling letter from Marcy, he wrote that he had received it in camp "as I sat down to take a hasty plate of soup." This self-pitying phrase circulated in Washington, and got Scott dubbed "Marshal Tureen."
Fortunately for Polk, both Scott and Taylor were competent generals, and there was a dazzling supporting cast under them-Captains Robert E. Lee and George B. McClellan, Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant and Colonel Jefferson Davis, all of whom distinguished themselves. In some ways Mexico was a dress-rehearsal for the professional military side of the Civil War. Taylor was supposed to strike for Mexico City across 500 miles of desert, with inadequate means. On March 9, 1847, Scott"s army, also starved of equipment, landed at Vera Cruz without loss, the first big amphibious operation ever mounted by US forces. This was the short route to Mexico City. On May 15, having taken the second city, Puebla, Scott had to let a third of his army return home as their enlistments had run out. He insisted on waiting for more. Thus reinforced, he won four battles in quick succession (Contreras, Churubusco, Molino del Rey and Chapultepec) in August and September and entered Mexico City on September 13, a marine unit running up the flag over "the Halls of Montezuma." Meanwhile, in California, John Charles Fremont (1813-90), with a party of sixty American freebooters, had raised a flag with a grizzly bear and star on a white cloth, and proclaimed the Republic of California (June 14, 1846). Fremont was an officer in the US Topographical Corps who had surveyed the Upper Missouri and Mississippi rivers (1838-41), eloped with Jessie Benton, pretty daughter of the US Senator, and headed three expeditions to the West, which involved exploring and mapping more territory than any other American-Western Wyoming (including Fremont Peak), all of California, the routes from Utah to Oregon, and most of Nevada and Colorado.
A month later Commodore John D. Stoat of the Pacific Fleet raised the American flag and proclaimed California US territory. The conquest of California was by no means bloodless, as in the south the Mexican peasants and the Indians revolted against the new American regime and had to be put down by force at the Battle of the Plains of Mesa outside Los Angeles, in January 1847. Nor was it easy to sign a peace treaty as there was no effective government in Mexico, by this stage, to negotiate one. Polk also had trouble with his negotiator, Nicholas P. Trist (1800-74), the Chief Clerk at the State Department, who disobeyed orders and was denounced by the President as "an impudent and unqualified scoundrel." However, he did succeed in finding a Mexican government and got it to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago on February 2, 1848, so Polk swallowed his wrath and accepted the fait accompli. By this agreement Mexico accepted the Rio Grande frontier with Texas and handed over California and New Mexico. America agreed to pay off the indemnities and give Mexico an extra $15 million.
It had not exactly been the cheap war Polk planned because he ended up with well over 100,000 men under arms, with 1,721 dead and another 11,155 wiped out by disease, and with a bill for $97.7 million, plus the treaty payments. On the other side of the ledger, America got over 500,000 square miles of some of the richest territory on earth, making an extra million square miles if Texas is counted in. Five years later, Gadsden, by now Secretary of State under President Pierce, negotiated what is known as the Gadsden Purchase, whereby Mexico surrendered another 29,640 square miles on the southern borders of Arizona and New Mexico, for $1o million. This rounded off the Manifest Destiny program, but it was essentially complete during Polk"s presidency and he can fairly claim, when Oregon was counted in, to have added more territory to the United States than any other president, Jefferson (with the Louisiana Purchase) alone excepted.
California was an even greater prize than Texas. The name goes back to an imaginary island in a romance by Ordonez de Montalvo published in 1510. It was known to Cortez; Cabrillo made his way to San Diego in 1542; Drake touched there in 1579. But the permanent settlement by the Spanish did not begin until 1769, when the first of many presidios and Franciscan missions were established between San Diego and San Francisco. Considering the benevolence of its climate, the fertility of its soil, and its vast range of obvious natural resources, it is astonishing that the Spanish, then the Mexicans, did so little to make use of them. Other great powers had nosed around. In 1807 the Russians formed a plan to establish settlements in California (and at the mouth of the Colombia River and in Hawaii too), though nothing came of it. A few years later, however, the Russian-American Company was working near the Golden Gate, hunting seals. The British were interested too and, in the 1820s, had collaborated with the Americans in chasing the Russians out of the area. American agents in the area repeatedly warned Washington of the feebleness of the Spanish (later the Mexican) hold on the area, and the desirability of securing San Francis...o...b..y, "the most convenient, capacious and safe [harbor] in the world." Lieutenant Wilkes of the US Navy, there in 1841 as part of a strategic survey of the Eastern Pacific, again stressed the marvels of San Francisco, "one of the most s.p.a.cious and at the same time safest ports in the world," and underlined the vacuum of authority: "Although I was prepared for anarchy and confusion, I was surprised when I found a total absence of all government in California, and even its forms and ceremonies thrown aside."
The first American to penetrate California by the overland route had been Jedediah Strong Smith, "the Knight of the Buckskin," who, working for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, had reached the San Gabriel mission on the Pacific coast in 1826. The first American settlers came two years later. But ordinary Americans began to learn of the wonder of the Far West only in the I840s, when two gifted and adventurous writers reported on them. Richard Henry Dana Jr (1815-82) was a young Harvard man who shipped as a common sailor on a threemaster in 1834 for health reasons, voyaged the Pacific, and spent a year gathering hides on the California coast before returning to real life at the Harvard Law School. His Two Years Before the Mast (Boston, 1840) gave an unforgettable picture of San Francis...o...b..y in its pristine state: "All around was the stillness of nature. There were no settlements on these bays and rivers, and the few ranches and missions were remote and widely separated ... On the whole coast of California there was not a lighthouse, a beacon or a buoy ... Birds of prey and pa.s.sage swooped and dived about us, wild beasts ranged through the oak groves, and as we slowly floated out of the harbor with the tide, herds of deer came to the water"s edge."", This splendid book was widely read and made countless adventurous young men itch to get to the Far West.
Even more remarkable was the work of another Harvard Bostonian, Francis Parkman (1823-93), who set out in 1846 from St Louis to see for himself the reality of unspoiled life in this region, and especially to study the Indians, before the white man overwhelmed it. His travels began in what one modern historian has called "the year of decision," the watershed between the old and the new. Parkman carried three books, the Bible, Shakespeare"s Works, and The Collected Works of Byron. He was himself a Byronic young man with an intense desire to see and experience the dangers of the Far West, pioneer trailing, a war between the Dakotas and the Snakes, and the need to move secretly through territory infested with Indian war parties. No one has ever conveyed better the loneliness, the danger, and the immensities of the Western s.p.a.ces, and the occasional cataclysmic concentrations of wild life:
From the river bank on the right, away over the swelling prairie on the left, and in front as far as the eye could reach, was one vast host of buffalo. The outskirts of the herd were within a quarter of a mile. In many parts they were crowded so densely together that in the distance their rounded backs presented a surface of uniform blackness; but elsewhere they were more scattered, and from amid the mult.i.tude rose little columns of dust where some of them were rolling on the ground. Here and there a battle was going forward among the bulls. We could distinctly see them rushing against each other, and hear the clattering of their horns and their horse bellowing.
Parkman is romantic in that he consciously describes a life which he sees is now fragile-the buffalo will be hunted to extermination, the nomadic Indians will be corralled up in reservations, the spa.r.s.e and primitive settlements will give way to towns and farms-but he is also unsentimental. He shows the Indians as they were: improvident, unreliable, sometimes treacherous, vacillating, above all lazy, with the elderly females doing all the hard work. Thus, in a nomadic party of Ogillallahs,
The moving spirit of the establishment was an old hag of eighty. You could count all her ribs through the wrinkles of her leathery skin. Her withered face more resembled an old skull than the countenance of a living being, even to the hollowed, darkened sockets, at the bottom of which glittered her little black eyes. Her arms had dwindled into nothing but whipcord and wire. Her hair, half-black, half-grey, hung in total neglect nearly to the ground, and her sole garment consisted of the remnant of a discarded buffalo-robe tied round her waist with a string of hide. Yet the old squaw"s meager anatomy was wonderfully strong. She pitched the lodge, packed the horses, and did the hardest labor in the camp. From morning till night she bustled about the lodge screaming like a screech-owl when anything displeased her.
Parkman"s marvelous account of his excitements and privations, The Oregon Trail, published in 1849, was an immediate success both with literary New England and with the great public. But by that time the modern world had already overtaken the arcadia he described. The month before the Treaty with Mexico was signed, at Sutter"s Mill in the Sacramento Valley, gold was discovered on January 24, 1848. A workman found tiny nuggets of gold in the mill-race. For some time the news was concealed while the few in the secret worked frenziedly to ice the veins and stake claims. By September, the East Coast papers were publishing reports from "the California goldfields," telling of "nuggets collected at random and without any trouble." The real rush started after President Polk, in his December 1848 message to Congress, boastingly confirmed "the accounts of the abundance of gold" in the territory recently acquired"-by him.
That spring, scores of thousands went to California, from all over the world. Some went direct from Australia, which had had a gold rush of its own in the I830s. The people of Cutler, in Maine, built and rigged their own ship and sailed her round the Horn to San Francis...o...b..y. Some went via the Panama Isthmus. More went over the Rockies by the Oregon and California trails. The early Forty-Niners got their gold by sifting off the gravel and soil using wire mesh-what they called "panning" or "placer" mining. Or they ran a stream through a "long-tom" or sluice- box. That was the easy bit, and inspired the ditty: "Oh California / That"s the land for me / I"m off for Sacramento / With my washbowl on my knee." But as the surface was worked out it became necessary to sink shafts and build crushing mills to grind the gold from the imprisoning quartz; that needed capital and organization. Many disappointed Forty-Niners went home in disgust, penniless-30,000 a year. But many more stayed because there were ample other opportunities in California, besides gold. Before the first strike, the non-Indian population of the territory was less than 14,000. By 1852 it was over 150,000. San Francisco had become a boomtown of 15,000 people, crowded with gamblers, financiers, prost.i.tutes and wild women, actors and reporters, budding politicians and businessmen. It was free-for-all America at its best and worst.
The atmosphere of the mining camps is wonderfully conveyed in the stories of Bret Harte (1836-1901), a young man from Albany, New York, who was in California in 1854 where he worked on the Mother Lode and later went into printing and journalism in San Francisco. His "The Luck of Roaring Camp" is the greatest of all mining stories. The prototype rush having taken place, there were plenty of others: Gold Hill, Colorado (1859), Virginia City, Nevada (186o), Orofino, Idaho (1861), Virginia City, Montana (1863), Deadwood, South Dakota (1876), Tombstone, Arizona (1877), Cripple Creek, Colorado (1891), and the great Alaska-Yukon rush, beginning at Nome in 1899. Nevada mining is described in glorious detail in another Mark Twain masterwork, Roughing It, which has an exact description of all the mining processes then in use and the skulduggery, violence, greed, and disappointments which surrounded them.
But nothing could beat the original Forty-nine Rush for glamour and riches. The yield of gold in the first decade, 1848-58, was $550 million. In the years 1851-5, California produced over 45 percent of the world"s entire output of gold. It was a man"s world, for fathers, sons, and brothers left to make their fortunes, telling their womenfolk to wait to be summoned. In 1851 Nevada County contained 12,500 white males, 900 females of various colors, 3,000 Indian coolies, and 4,000 Chinese cooks, laundrymen, and camp-workers. Lola Montez 1818-61), the Irish actress who had been the mistress of Louis I of Bavaria and had run his government, made her appearance, was a sensational success, and then retired to Gra.s.s Valley (her house is still there). When the editor of the Gra.s.s Valley Telegraph attacked her in print she literally horsewhipped him and he had to slink out of town. Gra.s.s Valley and Nevada City became centers of the richest and most continuous gold mining in California, with the North Star Mine, the Eureka, and the Empire setting the pace. Until the opening up of the Rand deep-level mines in South Africa in the 1930s, they were the most successful gold mines in history. Indeed, the California gold rush as a whole was a world-historical event of some importance. Until its gold came on the market, there had been a chronic shortage of specie, especially gold bullion, from which the United States, in particular, had suffered. Until the I850s in fact there was no true gold standard simply because there was not enough gold to maintain it. Once California gold began to circulate, the development of American capital markets accelerated and the huge expansion of the second half of the century became financially possible. That too (it can be argued) was the work of the "Unknown President Polk."
The great California gold rush of 1849, attracting as it did adventurers from all over the world, was the first intimation to people everywhere that there was growing up, in the form of the United States, a materialistic phenomenon unique in history, a Promised Land which actually existed. Not that there was any shortage of routine, detailed information. Josiah T. Marshall"s Farmers and Immigrants Handbook: Being a Full and Complete Guide for the Farmer and Immigrant (1845) was nearly 500 crammed pages. Minnesota set up a State Board of Immigration in 1855 and other states copied it. By 1864 Kansas was sending emissaries abroad to whip up enthusiasm among would-be immigrants. From the early 1840s railroads began obtaining both state and federal land for the use of immigrants. The Illinois Central advertised abroad; so did the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific. Railroad land departments organized trips for newspapermen and land-seekers and regularly dispatched agents all over Europe. By the I850s a great deal of public and private money was being spent on telling the world about America.
There was also-more important, perhaps-word of mouth and traveler"s tales. By European standards, wage-rates, even for unskilled men, were enormous. After about 1820, no one got less than a dollar a day in the cities. Farmhands got $7.50 to $15 a month, with full board. Thomas Mooney, an Irish visitor, a.s.serted (1850): "You can, as soon as you a get a regular employment, save the price of an acre-and-a-half of the finest land in the world every week, and in less than a year you will have money to start for the West, and take up an 8o-acre farm which will be yours for ever." He calculated that a careful immigrant could save 7-8 English shillings a week. This was irresistible news. Immigration was going up all the time, allowing for fluctuations which reflected the trade cycle. After the first crisis dip in 1819, it rose to 32,000 in 1832 and 79,000 in 1837, then down following the credit panic, then up again to 100,000 in 1842, and then an immense increase, 1845-50, produced by bad winters in Europe, the Irish potato famine, and the revolutions of 1848-9, which caused scores of thousands to flee. Never before or since was immigration so high per capita of the American population. The California gold rush sent it up to a record 427,833 in 1854, then the late-fifties panic sent it down with a crash to 153,640 in 1860. By that date there were 4 million foreign-born settlers in the United States, out of a total population of 27 million. They came from all over Europe, but mostly from Britain, Ireland, and Germany, the Irish staying east of the Alleghenies, the Germans pushing on into the Midwest to farm.
America was also admired for many other things in addition to high wage-rates and cheap land. First was the "American Cottage," a hit in Europe about 1800. Then came "American Gardens." From about 1815 what struck Europeans most was the size and luxury of American hotels. It is not so surprising that American hotels should have been big and comfortable: entire families lived in hotels for years, and in Washington DC it was rare for congressmen, senators, and Cabinet members to acquire their own houses before 1850. The first luxury hotel was Barnham"s City Hotel in the boom-town of Baltimore, built 1825-6, which had no fewer than 200 bedrooms, twice as big as the largest in Europe. The Astor House in New York, built by J. J. Astor from 1832, had 309 bedrooms, plus-amazingly-no fewer than seventeen bathrooms. The Continental in Philadelphia (1858), which housed 800-900 people in suites, doubles, and singles, struck a new high in size and luxury (Europe"s largest was then the Queen"s, Cheltenham, "the Grandest Hotel in Europe," with 1uo rooms). American hotels were often distinguished and aggrandized by a central lobby, under a rotunda (the hotel atrium of the 1980s and 1990s is a rediscovery of this feature). The first such was the Exchange Coffee House Hotel in Boston, 1806-9, and the St Louis, in New Orleans, built in 1839, was a replica of this on a larger scale. The Palace Hotel in San Francisco, 1874-6, with its 850 bedrooms and 437 bathrooms, was so big that carriages could actually drive into the center, the coming-and-going forming an amus.e.m.e.nt for the other guests. It is significant that the influence of monumental American hotels gave rise to the first recorded complaint of Yankee cultural colonization, which came (needless to say) from a Frenchman; in 1870 Edmond de Goncourt lamented that Paris hotels were being "Americanized."
The new "utopian" factories of New England were also much admired. The English novelist Anthony Trollope called Lowell "the realisation of a commercial Utopia." Harriet Martineau, the English economist, writing of Waltham, enthused: "There is no need to enlarge on the pleasure of an acquaintance with the operative cla.s.ses of the United States."" In fact there was a strong authoritarian atmosphere in some of these "model" factories, an adumbration of Henry Ford"s system 1910-30. At Lowell in 1846, it was reported that operatives worked thirteen hours a day, from dawn till dusk in winter (but this is from a hostile account). Long hours were certainly common. In Rhode Island entire families, including small children, contracted to work for employers. What all observers recorded was the absence of begging. As one of them put it in 1839: "During two years spent in traveling through every part of the Union, I have only once been asked for alms." To Europeans, that seemed incredible, the real proof of a benevolent prosperity.
Americans were already a.s.sociated with "modernity," with new ways of doing things. This applied particularly to social welfare and public works. The first big international success was Auburn Prison, New York State, in 1820. This pinched an idea from the big Paris bazaars and applied it to a penitentiary-top-lit galleries with ma.s.sed stories of cells ranged on either side. Then in 1825, John Haviland joined this idea to Jeremy Bentham"s panopticon prison idea of 1791, with a ground-plan formed by the spokes of a wheel and a central observation hall ranked by galleries. (The spokes plan had already been used in the Maison de Force in Ghent, but that had no galleries.) This was typical of American-style utopianism and was so much admired that Haviland was asked to design prisons all over the United States. He specialized in prisons designed to accommodate huge new populations committing more crimes-and new crimes-and young criminals. Typical of his work was the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Nearly all "serious" visitors, such as Charles d.i.c.kens, Anthony Trollope, and W. M. Thackeray, who intended to write books about their travels, visited one or more prisons (as well as workhouses, homes for fallen women, and similar dismal but worthy places).
It was prisons which drew to America the most perceptive and influential of the European observers, Alexis de Tocqueville. Of n.o.ble descent, born in a Normandy chateau, he was nonetheless a liberal, in some ways a radical, whose object (he said) was "to abate the claims of the aristocrats" and "prepare them for an irresistible future"-which he saw to be emerging in America. In 1831 the new French "liberal" government of Louis-Philippe, which had been delightedly hailed by President Jackson as the first real sign that his kind of democracy was spreading to Europe, gave de Tocqueville an unpaid commission to investigate American penology and write a report, which he published in 1833. He subsequently published his Democracy in America, part one in 1835, two in 1840. It has remained in print ever since.- The theme of the work is that "The gradual development of the principle of equality is a Providential fact," and he traces the implication in American inst.i.tutions, both in theory and in practice. Volume one is mainly about America, and is tremendously optimistic; volume two is also about France, and tends to pessimism. But this work, and his copious letters, and his subsequent memoirs provide wonderful glimpses of American society in the 1830s.
The sharp-eyed and reflective Frenchman went from Boston to New Orleans with brief forays west of the Alleghenies, and did many of the usual things. He stayed in Boston"s Fremont Hotel, built two years before, marveling at the "private parlor" attached to each room, the slippers supplied while boots were being polished, and the terrific bellboys-though he also noted universal and disastrous bed-sharing in the interior. In Baltimore he dined with Charles Carroll-evidently a public monument to be visited by all, if sufficiently distinguished-and rejoiced at the way such aristocrats, unlike their European counterparts, accepted the new democracy graciously and even managed to get themselves elected by universal suffrage. He had an appalling time in the savage winter of 1831-2. In a letter to his mother he described how he had shared a Mississippi steamship with a crowd of Choctaw warriors being forcibly moved west:
There was a general air of ruin and destruction in this sight, something which gave the impression of a final farewell, with no going back; one couldn"t witness it without a heavy heart. The Indians were calm but gloomy and taciturn. One of them knew English. I asked him why the Choctaws were leaving their country. "To be free," he answered. I couldn"t get anything else out of him. Tomorrow we will set them down in the Arkansas wilderness. I must confess it is an odd coincidence that we should have arrived in Memphis to witness the expulsion, or perhaps the dissolution, of one of the last vestiges of one of the oldest American nations.
Shortly afterwards he came across Sam Houston, riding "a superb stallion," a man he described as "the son in law of an Indian chief and an Indian chief himself."
What makes de Tocqueville"s account memorable is the way in which he grasped the moral content of America. Coming from a country where the abuse of power by the clergy had made anticlericalism endemic, he was amazed to find a country where it was virtually unknown. He saw, for the first time, Christianity presented not as a totalitarian society but as an unlimited society, a compet.i.tive society, intimately wedded to the freedom and market system of the secular world. "In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other," he wrote, "but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country." He added: "Religion ... must be regarded as the foremost of the political inst.i.tutions of the country for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free inst.i.tutions." In fact, he concluded, most Americans held religion "to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican inst.i.tutions." And de Tocqueville noted on an unpublished sc.r.a.p of paper that, while religion underpinned republican government, the fact that the government was minimal was a great source of moral strength:
One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government (when a people is fortunate enough to be able to do without it, which is rare) is the development of individual strength that inevitably follows from it. Each man learns to think, to act for himself, without counting on the support of an outside force which, however vigilant one supposes it to be, can never answer all social needs. Man, thus accustomed to seek his well-being only through his own efforts, raises himself in his own opinion as he does in the opinion of others; his soul becomes larger and stronger at the same time.
In de Tocqueville"s view, it was education which made this spirit of independence possible. The Rev. Louis Dwight said to him that the Americans were the best-educated people in the world: "[Here] everyone takes it for granted that education will be moral and religious. There would be a general outcry, a kind of popular uprising, against anyone who tried to introduce a contrary system, and everyone would say it would be better to have no education at all than an education of that sort. It is from the Bible that all our children learn to read." As a result of a liberal system of education and free access to uncensored books and newspapers, there were fewer dark corners in the American mind than elsewhere. Reflecting on his conversations in Boston, he noted: "Enlightenment, more than anything else, makes [a republic] possible. The Americans are no more virtuous than other people, but they are infinitely more enlightened (I"m speaking of the great ma.s.s) than any other people I know. The ma.s.s of people who understand public affairs, who are acquainted with laws and precedents, who have a sense of the interests, well understood, of the nation, and the faculty to understand them, is greater here than any other place in the world."
De Tocqueville, significantly, felt that the American syndrome-morality/independence/enlightenment/industry/success-tended not to work where slavery existed. He was shocked to find the French-speaking people of New Orleans infinitely more wicked and dissolute than the pious French Canadians, and blamed the infection of slavery, anti-freedom. Similarly, he contrasted "industrious Ohio" with "idle Kentucky": "On both sides [of the Ohio River] the soil is equally fertile, the situation just as favorable." But Kentucky, because of slavery, is inhabited "by a people without energy, without ardor, without a spirit of enterprise." He was led, he said, again and again to the same conclusion: leaving aside the slave states, "the American people, taking them all in all, are not only the most enlightened in the world, but (something I place well above that advantage), they arc the people whose practical, political education is the most advanced."
The Americans certainly made tremendous, continuous, and heartbreakingly genuine efforts to become "enlightened." Even more than i9thcentury Britain, America was a country of conscious self-betterment. The state was trying to make itself better; the people were trying too, not for want of urging. The great orator Daniel Webster took the occasion of the unveiling of the Bunker Hill monument in Boston (June 17, 1825) to intone: "Our proper business is improvement. Let our age be the age of improvement. In a day of peace, let us advance the arts of people and the works of peace." The "works of peace" were proceeding all the time. Boston had gas street-lighting in 1822, almost as soon as London. It came to New York in 1823, to Philadelphia in 1837. But Philadelphia was ahead with piped water, getting it in 1799. By 1822 the Fairmount Waterworks had brought piped water to the entire city. This was amazing even by the standards in England, regarded then as the world pioneer in munic.i.p.al utilities. Moreover, this magnificent waterworks, in the best cla.s.sical architecture, expanded from the banks of the Schuylkill, and its grounds embraced a huge area of the country, and in order to preserve it from pollution Philadelphia ultimately created the largest urban park in the world, in the process preserving for posterity all the splendid riverside villas we have already described. There were, to be sure, early signs of skulduggery in the provision of munic.i.p.al services. Aaron Burr"s Manhattan Water Company (1799), the first to build a reservoir in New York, was in reality a front for an unlawful bank competing with Alexander Hamilton"s Bank of New York (now the Chase-Manhattan). But, at this stage anyway, most services, public and private, were honest, compet.i.tive, and, by world standards, go-ahead. New York got its first omnibuses only a year after Paris and the same year as London, 1828-the first line was Wall Street-Greenwich Village. Philadelphia had buses three years later. America was also quick to imitate Britain"s penny post, knocking down the steep prices the generous President Jefferson paid to 5 cents for half an ounce delivered at up to 300 miles (1846). Open compet.i.tion was driving down prices relentlessly: thus the first penny newspaper dates from 1840, an amazing price by European (even British) standards at that time."
There was no doubt about the determination with which "enlightenment" was pursued in the field of education, at all levels of American society. Since the colonial period, America had rejoiced in the highest rate of adult literacy in the world, higher even than Germany"s. This was due primarily to the school reformers in the big cities. Horace Mann"s work in Boston we have already noted, in the context of teaching religion. In 1806 the Public School Society of New York introduced the Lancaster system from England, in which "pupil teachers" or monitors were used to give basic instruction to the thousands of new city children. From 1815 the society"s "model system" of public schools got state aid, and when New York State finally took over the system in 1853 it was providing education for 600,000 children. In the newer states, Ohio for instance, the sixteenth section of each planned township was devoted to education. But in the Western states, sheer distance made universal education difficult. In Louisiana the population density (1860) was only eleven per square mile; in Virginia (including what is now West Virginia) it was fourteen, by contrast with Ma.s.sachusetts, where it was 127. Census data show that by 1840 some 78 percent of the total population was literate (91 percent of the white population), and this was mainly due to a rise in national school enrollment rates: from 35 percent in 1830 (ages five to nineteen), to 50.4 percent in 1850 and 61.1 percent in 1860. All the same, there were still 1 million adult illiterates in America in 1850, of whom 500,000 were in the South. Most of these illiterates were not new immigrants (though that too was a problem, because of language) but blacks, an early indication of trouble to come.
At the end of the 1760s, America, on the eve of Independence, had nine colleges, or universities as they were later called. All were denominational, though William and Mary was partly secularized in 1779, when the professorships of Hebrew and Divinity were turned over to law and modern languages. The Presbyterians founded four new colleges in the 178os, including Liberty Hall, which became the nucleus of Washington and Lee, and Transylvania Seminary, the first inst.i.tution of higher education beyond the Appalachians. By that date Yale was taking in a freshman cla.s.s of seventy, Harvard thirty-one, Princeton ten, Dartmouth twenty. Such early foundations bred scores of satellites-sixteen Congregationalist colleges sprang from Yale and twenty-five Presbyterian ones from Princeton, all before 1860. A total of 516 colleges and universities were scattered over sixteen states by the coming of the Civil War. (Some of these were short-lived: only 104 of this group were still flourishing at the end of the 1920s.) The state universities began with Jefferson"s University of Virginia, and some of them had humble beginnings. Thus Michigan had one as early as 1817-the first in the West-but it was really a glorified high school until 1837, when it was moved to Ann Arbor and endowed with state lands proceeds. Another great state university, Wisconsin, was created at Madison in 1836. Curiously enough, such inst.i.tutions enrolled more students than the big foundations of the East: even by the 184os, a Western youngster had a better chance of going to college than a contemporary in the Eastern cities (Boston and Philadelphia excepted). Thus New York in 11846, with half a million population, enrolled only 241 new students at its two colleges.
Up to the 1780s, the overwhelming majority of college graduates went into the ministry, though politics claimed a surprising number (thirty-three out of fifty-five men attending the Const.i.tutional Convention were graduates). During the 1790s, however, the balance swung in favor of the lawyers, and by 1800 only about 9 percent went into orders, with 50 percent going into the law. The influence of Germany, whose universities were the best on earth, was enormous. Between 1830 and 1860, for instance, virtually every young professor at Yale had spent a year in a German university. The rise of the Western university was very much influenced by government land policy. If a proceeds-from-land-sales arrangement was in force, a college would spring up overnight, and there was no difficulty in obtaining staff or attracting students. The big breakthrough came with the Morrill Act of 1862, which enabled state agricultural colleges to be founded using federal land funds, and in many cases these were quickly broadened into general universities.
This enlightened Act also benefited women. There were a few women"s colleges before that date-Oberlin in Ohio, for instance, dates from 1833 and Georgia Female from 1838. But the Morrill Act encouraged the admission of women to state universities-Wisconsin admitted them from 1867 and Minnesota from 1869. By then some superb women"s universities were competing-Va.s.sar (1861), Minnesota (1869), Wellesley (1870). By 1872 women were admitted to ninety-seven colleges or universities and by 1880 they const.i.tuted one-third of all students, though over 70 percent of them were condemned to (or chose) teaching. The real shortage was in black higher education: only twenty-eight blacks had graduated by the time of the Civil War. Thereafter a few black colleges came into existence: Atlanta in 1865, Lincoln and Fisk in 1866, and Howard in 1867. By this time one in a hundred American adults was having a college education.
By any statistical standards, America made enormous progress in the first half of the 19th century in making itself "enlightened." But not everyone agreed with De Tocqueville that the country had succeeded. f.a.n.n.y Trollope, herself a novelist and the mother of the more famous Anthony, was in the United States 1827-31, trying to earn a living for herself in Cincinnati and elsewhere. She had been married to a fanatical clergyman who had been unable to support her, and in consequence she took a cynical view of religion: she thought America had far too much of it. The moral point, so important to De Tocqueville, entirely escaped her. What she noted was the manners. She thought it outrageous that the only form of garbage collection in Cincinnati were the pigs (this was true of New York, too, until 1830). She found it was "petty treason" to call a servant such: "help" was the only acceptable term, an early example of Political Correctness. Moreover, such was the American mobility of labor that it was impossible to hire a "help" except for a short term, and in the process of engagement it was the "help" not the mistress who dictated terms. Thus the first she engaged, when asked what she expected per annum, replied: "Oh Gimini! You be a downright Englisher, sure enough. I should like to see a young lady engage by a year in America! I hope I shall get a husband before many months, or I expect I shall be an outright old maid, for I be most seventeen already. Besides, mayhap I may want to go to school. You must just give me a dollar and a half a week, and mother"s slave, Phillis, must come over once a week, I expect, from the other side of the water to help me clean."
Mrs Trollope started to write down such things, for her letters home, otherwise her London friends would not believe her; and from this came Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832, which was an immediate bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, made Mrs Trollope the most hated author in America, and still makes American hackles rise today. Her criticisms were all calculated to wound. The Americans were rude, ill-bred, pushy, and coa.r.s.e. They had no fun and no sense of humor: "I never saw a population so divested of gaiety: there is no trace of this feeling from one end of the Union to the other." Americans were totally self-absorbed, uninterested in the outside world, and with a hugely inflated idea of their own importance and merits. The women were ignorant, the men disgusting. She excepted a few bookish men from this censure, adding that America was a signal proof of "the immense value of literary habits" not only in "enlarging the mind" but in "purifying the manners." She added: "I not only never met a literary man who was a chewer of tobacco or a whiskey drinker, but I never met any who were not, who had escaped these degrading habits."
Here we come to it; if there was one thing English visitors could not stand about America, it was the habit of spitting. The English middle and upper cla.s.ses had cured themselves of public spitting in the 1760s-it was one of the great turning-points of civilization-so that by the 1780s, they were already censorious of the French, and other Continentals, for continuing it: Dr Johnson was particularly severe on this point. In the United States, however, the spitting habit was com pounded by the business of chewing tobacco, which in the first half of the 19th century was carried on by three-quarters of the males and even by some females. Hence spitting became an almost continuous process, and where spittoons of enormous size were not provided in large numbers, the results were catastrophic to sensitive souls. It was the first thing all the English, from d.i.c.kens to Thackeray, noticed and commented on, and English lady travelers, like Mrs Trollope, were especially offended. When she, and others, were shown round the Senate, their eyes were glued to the gigantic bra.s.s spittoons attached to every member"s desk.
That was a pity, because the Senate of those days, and for several decades afterwards, was a remarkable inst.i.tution, perhaps the greatest school of oratory since Roman times. And its finest hour was 1850, when the last Great Compromise on slavery was debated, attacked, defended, and carried. The background was extremely complicated-the reader will have gathered by now that everything to do with slavery in America was complicated-and the Compromise itself was complex. The old Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had prohibited slavery in the new Northwest, and all the states created there were free. In most of the other acquisitions America had made, the whole of the Louisiana Purchase, Florida, and Texas, forms of slavery had existed under the French or Spaniards, so maintaining it there, or reimposing it as in Texas, did not appear so horrific. But when what was eventually to become California, which had always been slave-free, was acquired in 1848, and some of the freebooters who were seizing power there proposed to make it a slave state, the Northern conscience was powerfully aroused. When President Polk submitted a money Bill to the House, asking for funds to make peace with Mexico (in effect to bribe Santa Ana), a Pennsylvania congressman, David Wilmot, added an amendment stipulating, and using the language of the Northwest Ordinance, that in any territory so acquired "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist." Furious, Polk got his friends to table a counter-amendment, proposing that the Old Missouri Compromise line, running at lat.i.tude 36.30, should be extended and divide freedom and slavery in the new territories, as in the old. But the moderates who would have voted for this were denounced as traitors in the South or as Doughfaces (Northerners with Southern principles) in the North. So both were voted down by extremists. Wisconsin got statehood in 1848 with a free const.i.tution, but Polk left office with the issue unresolved in Utah, New Mexico, and California.
From the so-called Wilmont debates, new principles emerged. The first was that Congress had the right to ban slavery wherever its jurisdiction extended-freedom was national, slavery only sectional. That was an important step forward. Both the Free Soil and the Republican Parties were later formed to enforce this doctrine. On the other hand, the Southerners also put forward a new doctrine: not only did Congress have no right to prohibit slavery in the territories, it had a positive duty to protect it there, once established. Calhoun now produced a new theory, reversing the const.i.tutional practice of the past sixty years: newly acquired territories belonged to "the states united," not to the United States. Congress, he argued, was merely "the Attorney to a Partnership" and every partner had an equal right to protection of his property on his territory. He denied that Lord Mansfield"s 1772 ruling on slavery in England applied in America, where slaves were "common law property." To be sure Congress had prohibited slavery north of 36.30 in 1820-but that was unconst.i.tutional. Slavery followed the United States flag, automatically, wherever it was planted. This doctrine was embodied in resolutions adopted by the Virginia legislature in 1847, later known as the "Platform of the South."
It also became the doctrine underlying the Supreme Court"s fateful decision in the Dred Scott Case in 1857. Describing this takes us a little ahead of the California issue, but it is important to get its implications clear now. Scott was a Missouri slave who was taken (1834) by his master to places where slavery was prohibited by law. In 1846, Scott sued for his freedom in the Missouri courts, arguing that his four-year stay on free soil had given it to him. He won his case but the verdict was reversed in the state supreme court. He then appealed it to the federal Supreme Court, and Taney and his colleagues again ruled against him, for four reasons. First, since Scott was a negro and therefore not a citizen, he could not sue in a federal court. Second, as he was suing in Missouri, what happened in Illinois, under its law, was immaterial. Third, even so, Scott"s temporary sojourn on free territory did not in itself make him free. Fourth, the original Missouri Compromise was unconst.i.tutional since it deprived persons of their property (slaves) without due process of law and was therefore contrary to the Fifth Amendment. The Dred Scott ruling became of critical importance in the events leading up directly to the Civil War, which we will examine later. Here, it is enough to say that its reasoning followed, and gave const.i.tutional legitimacy to (or appeared to do so), Calhoun"s case. However, at this point it is important to remember one thing. Neither Congressman Wilmot nor Senator Calhoun regarded himself as extremist. Both thought they were putting forward defensive strategies, preemptive strikes as it were, to ward off aggression by the other side. And it is true that there were many more extreme men (and women) in Ma.s.sachusetts and South Carolina, determined to end slavery, or to maintain it, at literally any cost.
Disgusted by his failure to get a solution to the California admission problem, and worn out anyway, Polk made good his promise not to run again (dying soon after leaving the White House). The Democrats fielded a strong Manifest Destiny candidate in the shape of Lewis Ca.s.s (1782-1866), a Michigan senator who favored cheap land, squatters" rights, and all kinds of popular causes. The Whigs countered this by picking General Zachary Taylor (thus confirming Polk"s fears of "political generals"), whose victory at Buena Vista had made him a semi-legendary figure. Neither party had a proper platform, especially on the slavery issue. But Taylor came from Louisiana and had scores of slaves working on his estates. This infuriated three groups of Whigs: Van Buren"s New Yorkers who called themselves "Barnburners," fanatical Ma.s.sachusetts anti-slavery men who called themselves "Conscience Whigs," and another abolitionist group who called themselves the Liberty Party. They ganged up together, called themselves the Free Soil Party, and nominated Van Buren. In theory this should have split the Whig, anti-slavery vote, and let Ca.s.s and the Democrats in. In practice it had the opposite effect. In the election razzmatazz, Taylor was so identified with the South that he carried eight slave states. Ca.s.s, the Democrat, could manage only seven. Moreover, the free soilers split the Democratic as well as the Whig vote in New York and handed it to Taylor. He won by 1,360,099 to Ca.s.s"s 1,220,544 (Van Buren getting only 291,263), and by 163 to 127 college votes.
This confused and confusing election brought to the White House a man whom Clay, who had now missed his last-ever chance to become president, dismissed as "exclusively a military man," with no political experience, "bred up and always living in the camp with his sword by his side and his Epaulettes on his shoulders." By contrast, Clay characterized his friend Millard Fillmore (1800-74), the Vice-President, an experienced New York Tweed machine-man, as "able, enlightened, indefatigable and ... patriotic." Both these verdicts were soon put to the test. Clay was wrong about Taylor. He was not a mere general, nor was he a pro-slaver, as the South had hoped. He encouraged the Californians, who were anxious to get on with things and achieve const.i.tutional respectability, to elect a free state administration. This was done all the more easily because the miners were overwhelmingly antislavery, fearing their jobs would be taken by slaves. On December 4, 1849, in his message to Congress, Taylor asked it to admit California immediately, and to stop debating "exciting topics of sectional character"-he meant slavery-"which produced painful apprehensions in the public mind"-that is, talk and fear of secession.
Millard, by contrast, justified Clay"s eulogium by presiding fairly and skillfully over the Senate, an important point since Congress, far from heeding the President"s advice to steer off slavery, debated virtually nothing else in 1850. Then, on July 4, the President, having" presided over the ceremonies, gobbled down a lot of raw fruit, cabbages, and cuc.u.mbers-food "made for four-footed animals and not Bipeds" as one observer put it-and gulped quant.i.ties of iced water (the heat and humidity were intense). It was probably the iced water that did it, though there was talk of poison. Five days later the President died in agony of acute gastroenteritis, and Fillmore took over. The new President, unlike Taylor, favored compromise over the California issue, and Senator Clay, in effect the administration"s spokesman in Congress, was able to deliver it to him. By this time the debates had already lasted six months. Students of rhetorical form rate the speeches in the Senate as among the greatest in the entire history of Anglo-Saxon oratory, worthy to rank with the duels of Pitt and Fox, and Gladstone and Disraeli. In fact the three main protagonists were uttering their swansongs. Calhoun was dying, Clay was at the end of his immense career, and Webster became secretary of state in the Fillmore administration. Readers can consult the record of the debates and decide for themselves who won. 14" The Senate was crowded and enthralled throughout and the spittoons had never been in such continuous use. But it is one of the sad things about congressional or parliamentary democracy that great speeches rarely make much difference to historical outcomes.
What the debates did make clear, however, was that secession by the South, if it did not get its way in making slavery "safe for ever," was a real possibility, and that it would not and could not be bloodless. That helped to smooth the road to compromise, which was piloted by old Clay, much a.s.sisted by a young Democratic senator, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois (1813-61). Clay had originally hoped to get all the issues tied up together in one gigantic compromise, what he called an Omnibus Bill. The Senate would not wear it. Then Douglas divided it up into its five component bits, and got them all through separately. Senator Benton explained this by saying that the components "were like cats and dogs that had been tied together by their tails for four months, scratching and biting, but being loose again, everyone ran off to his own hole and was quiet." Possibly: there are many irrational and, in the end, inexplicable aspects to the whole controversy over slavery, and between North and South, which baffle historians, as they baffled most people in the middle at the time. The upshot is that Clay carried his last great Compromise in early September and on the 20th of the month Fillmore signed the five Bills into law.
In the Compromise, the most important sop to the South was a new Fugitive Slave Law. This made the capture and return of escaped slaves a matter for federal law and rendered it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for Northern states to evade their responsibilities under the Const.i.tution. Second, to balance matters a bit, the anti-slavery lobby in the North was given the minor sop of the District of Columbia becoming an area where slave-trading was made unlawful. It was still possible to keep slaves in Washington, but not to buy or sell them there or hold them for sale elsewhere. If you marched slaves through the street in chains-a common sight up to now, which grievously shocked sensitive Northerners and all foreigners-you were inviting arrest. Third and fourth, both New Mexico and Utah became territories and the acts making them such left their slave- or free-state future vague, beyond insisting that their legislatures were to possess authority over ,all rightful subjects of legislation," subject to appeal to federal courts. Finally, California entered the Union as a free state. This ended the Senate slave/free balance and ensured that in future Congress would have an anti-slavery majority in both Houses.
The crisis between North and South, having seethed and bubbled for months, suddenly went off the boil, just as it had done after the confrontation of 1819-20. Men on both sides, and still more women, relaxed as the horrific shadow of civil war suddenly disappeared, and they could get on with other things. And there was so much to do in mid-I9th-century America, so many blessings to rejoice in and opportunities to seize! America was becoming not merely a wealthy country but in a growing number of ways a civilized and sophisticated one. The year 1850 is remarkable not merely for the apogee of Congressional oratory but for the long-delayed but sure and true beginnings of a great national literature. Considering how a.s.sertive politically America was, even in the mid-i8th century, it was remarkably slow to a.s.sert itself culturally. Speech is a very democratic force: it is the demotic which penetrates upwards into the hieratic, not the other way round. "Americanisms" had been appearing since the mid-17th century in the way ordinary people spoke, though the term was not coined until 1802, by a Scots immigrant, on the a.n.a.logy of Scotticism. But Independence was declared, and the Const.i.tution written, debated, approved, and amended entirely in standard English, if anything with a slight touch of archaism, though spelling was already diverging.
In 1783-5 Noah Webster (1758-1843), a Yale-trained lexicographer and philologist from Connecticut, produced A Grammatical Inst.i.tute of the English Language, the first part of which was extracted to form his Spelling Book, which gave standard American variations of English spelling forms for use in schools. In 1790 he produced his Rudiments of English Grammar, the first book to challenge the linguistic hegemony of Britain, in which he argued "Now is the time, and this is the country, in which we may expect success, in attempting changes favorable to language, science and government." But he discovered the hard way that it was easier to turn America from a monarchy into a republic than to force systematic language and spelling reform on a stubborn people who spoke as they felt. The same year he produced a volume of essays in his reformed spelling: "essays and Fugitive Peeces ritten at various times ... as will appeer by their dates and subjects." Readers laughed at him. Another language reformer, William Thornton, urged, in Cadmus, or a Treatise on the Elements of a Written Language (Philadelphia 1793), addressed to the American people: "You have corrected the dangerous doctrines of European powers, correct now the language you have imported ... The AMERICAN LANGUAGE will thus be as distinct as its government, free from all the follies of unphilosophical fashion and resting upon truth as its only regulator." He then gave the text in his new spelling-system. Practical Americans dismissed it as gibberish and went on talking, and changing, the English language as they had learned it from their parents.
Americans were immensely resourceful in making these changes, adapting, translating, inventing, and knocking about words to suit their needs and tastes. Some of these early neologisms were from the French, both from Canada and Louisiana: depot, rapids, prairie, shanty, chute, cache, creva.s.se. Some were from the Spanish of Florida and the Gulf: mustang (1808), ranch (1808), sombrero (1823), patio (1827), corral (1829), and la.s.so (1831). Americans resurrected obsolete English words like talented and invented ones like obligate. They adopted, for instance, the German words dumm, which became dumb, stupid. Words from their new political customs appeared: ma.s.s meeting, caucus, settlers" words like lot and squatter. The Lewis-Clark and other expeditions introduced a new crop: portage, racc.o.o.n, groundhog, grizzly, backtrack, medicine man, huckleberry, war party, running-time, overnight, overall, rattlesnake, bowery, and moose. Variant meanings were given to old English terms: snag, stone, suit, bar, brand, bluff, fix, hump, k.n.o.b, creek, and settlement.
Then there was the wonderful fertility of the Americans in coining new phrases and amalgams: keep a stiff upper lip (1815 ), fly off the handle (1825), get religion-an important one, that-in 1826, knockdown (1827), stay on the fence (1828), in cahoots (1829), horse-sense (1832), and barking up the wrong tree (1833), plus less datable novelties: take on, cave in, flunk out, stave off, let on, hold on. As early as the 1820s Americans were trying to get the hang of a thing and insisting there"s no two ways about it. The American thirst added many terms: c.o.c.ktail (1806), barroom (1807), mint julep (1809), a Kentucky Breakfast (1822), defined as "three c.o.c.ktails and a chaw of terbacka," and a long drink (1828). At varying speeds most of these new words and expressions crossed the Atlantic. By the time Webster came to produce his An American Dictionary of the English Language in two thick volumes in 1828, he was able to list 5,000 words not hitherto included in English dictionaries, including many Americanisms, and using definitions which Americans, rather than the British, recognized. He revised this standard work in 1840 to include 70,000 words instead of the original 38,000 and, suitably amended from time to time, it has become second only to the Oxford English Dictionary as the prime authority on English words.
In the hieratic, as opposed to the demotic, the Americans were slower to become creative. In a notorious article in the Edinburgh Review of 1819, the great English wit and reformer the Rev. Sydney Smith hailed some American political innovations but argued that Americans "during the thirty or forty years of their existence" had done "absolutely nothing for the Sciences, for the Arts, for Literature or even for the statesman-like studies of Politics and Political Economy." This was nonsense as regards the sciences, as we have seen, and Smith had obviously never read the Federalist or any of the great debates on the Const.i.tution, which rivaled Burke in their penetrating a.n.a.lysis of basic political issues. He was wrong about literature, too, if one considers the works of Jonathan Edwards and Franklin. But it was odd, as he suggested, that independence had not brought about a corresponding pleiade of American literary stars.
Many Americans agreed with him. In 1818 the Philadelphia Portfolio published an essay by George Tucker, On American Literature, drawing attention to the contrast between the literary output of America, with 6 million people, and the performance of tiny countries like Ireland and Scotland-where were the American equivalents of Burke, Sheridan, Swift, Goldsmith, Berkeley, and Thomas Moore from Ireland, and Thomson, Burns, Hume, Adam Smith, Smollett, and James Boswell from Scotland? He pointed out that the two most distinguished novelists were Scott and Maria Edgeworth, both from little Scotland. He calculated that America produced on average only twenty new books a year, Britain (with admittedly a population of i8 million) between 500 and 1,000. In 1823, Charles Jared Ingersoll in an address to the American Philosophical Society, "A Discourse Concerning the Influence of America on the Mind," noted that 200,000 copies of Scott"s Waverley novels had been printed and sold in the United States, while the American novel was almost nonexistent. The Edinburgh and the Quarterly were now printed in America and sold 4,000 copies each issue there, whereas the American equivalent, the North American Review, was unknown and un.o.btainable in London.
Even when the first real American literary personality emerged, in the shape of Washington Irving (1783-1859), he seemed to be guilty of the "Cultural Cringe," and based himself on English models, chiefly Scott and Moore, to a stultifying degree. When he traveled to Europe from 1815 onwards, he made himself heavily dependent on German literary sources too. His most famous character, Rip Van Winkle, and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, published in The Sketch Book (1820), were taken straight from Christophe Martin Wieland and Riesbeck"s Travels Through Germany-he merely expanded the Winkle tale and gave it an American setting. Irving was an enormous success in England, precisely because of his cringing and his deference to British cultural idol, such as Scott, and also because of his sensible attempts to stop American publishers pirating English copyrights. Irving sold well on both sides of the Atlantic, and seems to have earned from his writings the immense sum of $200,000. Many towns, hotels, squares, steamboats, and even cigars were named after him. He was the first American to achieve celebrity in literature and when he died New York, his home city, closed down: there were 15o carriages in his funeral procession and 1,000 mourners crowded outside the packed church. President Jackson, who objected to his being made minister in Madrid, snarled: "He is only fit to write a book, and scarcely that." Behind the philistinism, one detects a note of all-American truth.
By contrast, the first great American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), was undoubtedly indigenous in his work and spirit. He grew up in a 40,000-acre tract of land in upper New York State, his father being a land investor and agent who at one time owned 750,000 acres and controlled much more. Cooper Sr wandered at will in what was then largely unexplored country and wrote a Guide to the Wilderness. But this was published posthumously in 1810 because when young Cooper was twenty his father was shot dead at a political meeting-not uncommon in those days. Cooper"s third novel, The Pioneers (1823), first of what became known as the Leatherstocking Tales, introduced his frontiersman hero, Natty b.u.mppo. The five books of the series, above all The Last of the Mohicans (1826), made Cooper world-famous. Natty is the first substantial character in American fiction, a recurrent American ideal-type, putting his own special sense of honor and character above money and position-not so different from the Ernest Hemingway hero who would emerge almost exactly a century later. Cooper used his father"s experiences as well as his own to recreate the American wilderness, fast disappearing even as he recorded it. The novels fascinated readers in the big East Coast cities, to whom all this was new and strange. Equally, perhaps more, important it brought home to literally millions of people in Europe what they a.s.sumed to be the realities of American frontier life. Germans in particular loved them: they were read aloud at village clubs. The Pioneers was published in Britain and France the same year it appeared in America and within twelve months