Chapter V

THE CHIEF AMERICAN PRODUCTIONS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

The Cereals and Serials of the last Century.—Hares caught before
cooked.—Useless Indians put under Ground.—Human Bones the Phosphates
of History.—The Statecraft of Washington, Jefferson, and Others.—The
Automatic Workings of Governments exposed.—What small Brains
rule.—Description of our Government Machine.—Its Merits and
Demerits.—The Disadvantages of frequent Changes of official
Workmen.—How the Machine-Oil is stolen.—The Inventions of the
Eighteenth Cycle of Time.—An American Noah inebriated by the
Cotton-Gin.—How Ham laughed and how Japhet put a Blanket over the
Patriarch.—The Growth of Commerce.—The Notions which Importations put
in and on the Heads of the Young People.—Paris supplies the Mistakes
of Nature.—Of Dress.—Hoops, Head-Gear, Coats, Vests, Tights, etc.,
descanted upon.—Improvements in Roads and Means of Transit.—The
Journey from New York to Boston in 1732.—The Road-Maker and
Vehicle-Propeller as Leaders of Civilization.—The great Invention now
needed.—The Populations of New York and Boston in 1700.—Description of
the Former in that Year by an English Traveller.—Slave-Market in New
York in 1711.—Manufactures and their Growth.—The Habits of the Period
described.—Improvements in Morals, and wherein.—A general Review of
American Literature and Book-Making through the Century.—The first
American printed Volume; and how fast and long it ran.—Earliest
Original Book of Poems; by a Woman, with a touching Specimen
therefrom.—An Account of the leading Writers on Theology, Political
Science, Government, Natural Science, Natural History, of Novels,
etc.—The American Joss; its Worshippers, and their Treatment.

Before turning our backs upon the eighteenth and leaping upon the engine-driven nineteenth century, to be borne swiftly through its rapidly changing scenes, it is well to take a hurried glance backward over the path we have traversed and to pick up a few waifs strewn along the wayside.

The largest American products of the last century were material. Cereals were common and abundant; serials uncommonly few. The Western lobe or half of the world’s brain did not work so actively as the Eastern. Our forefathers were occupied with the earnest business of first catching their hare before preparing to cook him. They improved the breeds of useless Indians by putting them thoroughly under ground. They disposed also of not a few Englishmen and Hessians during the last quarter of the century by converting them at Saratoga, Princeton, Eutaw Springs, Yorktown, and elsewhere into good compost, making our soil historically fruitful.

Human bones are the phosphates of history. They quicken a rich heroic growth over sterile soils. Our ancestors enriched many American fields in this way. It is not Quaker husbandry, and Quaker phosphates are few; but for all that, the seeds which they raise and sell never do as well as when sown in these phosphated furrows.

A large crop of political principles was gathered in by such laborers as Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Jay, Patrick Henry, and others, unpractised in other fields, but yet found to be efficient and skilful. They learned the old art and mystery of government so readily, and showed its workings with such unreserve, that statecraft,—which theretofore had been, in spite of its pretentious parade, mainly a system of mutual imposition and overreaching,—saw itself suddenly exposed to popular inspection, and made a subject of vulgar, every-day comment. Like the automatic chess-player, which seemed such a mystery in its curious, systematic, intelligent work, these old automatic, governmental machines were found to be contrivances, very common when taken apart; in fact, like the wonderful chess-player, kept slyly in motion, by a very ordinary chap, boxed up inside and moving from his hidden quarters, springs invented by a person whose name was concealed, and which kept the pieces going just as well as if the operator had a brain to work with. The machine which our forefathers finished in 1789,—scorning to take out a patent for it, or in any way to make it exclusively their own,—apparently complex but really simple, and open to inspection in all its parts, consisted of a stiff popular main-spring, distributing its propelling forces through primary wheels and political chain-work, which runs from the main wheel to smaller state wheels, and so back and through governors and assemblies of ingenious cogged and racket motions, securing thus a free yet regulated movement to all the parts. It is a good machine, although operated at a great disadvantage by reason of the frequent changes in the hands employed, who have scarcely time to learn their business before they are required to give another set a chance. It is inexpensive, notwithstanding that some of the workmen are learning the kingly trick of considering as their own a good share of the oil which, in fact, belongs exclusively to its owners, and is intended only to keep the machine running. Of course foreigners found not a little fault with this American product, alleging defects which seem very great when viewed under European lights. At first they expressed as many objections to it as the cotton-planters to Whitney’s gin; but it is now very manifest that, while taking exceptions to the political machine, these foreign gentlemen have copied the planters’ example of getting up, as soon as they conveniently could, very palpable imitations of the deprecated plan.

Among the mechanical inventions, the gin for cleaning cotton-seeds out of the white tangle, combing the shock head of the old king, and thus making him at once a power and a presentable personage among other self-constituted sovereigns,—an invention wrought out in 1793 by a cute Yankee,—was one which, in its results directly on the material, and indirectly on the moral, condition of the United States stands eminently foremost. By the old hand-picking process, the slave had his hands full to separate the seeds from a single pound of cotton a day. The new mechanical picker cleaned six thousand six hundred pounds within the same time. The gin so intoxicated the planter, that he committed all sorts of political extravagances and uttered many maudlin ejaculations, until finally, in 1861, he threw himself down upon a bed of 3,400,000 bales in the condition of Noah when, after the flood, he became very hilarious in the presence of his children. Ham laughed exceedingly at the spectacle of the American Noah; but Japhet, after allowing the drunkenness four years to cool, at last put over the offensive nakedness a large patch-work blanket, reconstructed at a quilting-match in Washington. It is expected that hereafter his majesty will wear colors of a faster moral hue than before he so abused the gin.

Commerce, no longer tied up to the shore by the English navigation acts, began, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, to creep out from the commodious bays and harbors of our long, wavy coast; and soon, not content with these timorous tentatives, put on waistbands, top-gallant manners, and flaunting gear, and went boldly courting among the wine-cheeked nations, the silk-growing empires, and spicy-tongued kingdoms of the earth. Importations, of course, not only put many new things on, but in, the heads of the emancipated Americans, who showed their independence, then as now, by buying abroad liberally the things which they did not make or need here. In spite of sumptuary laws, which in some of the new States imposed fines for owning more than one silk gown in a family, and which banished jewelry from homes still innocent of aught but trinkets that cost less money than taste, the beaux and belles of the period whereof we speak began to put on hairs where nature had forgotten to furnish them, and supplied from Paris, in amounts limited it is true, appliances to remedy defects which fashion insisted had been left by the Creator, in making up woman from a sleepy man. Hoops every few years girdled the larger or smaller conceits of Madam Mode’s improved figures. Of course Paris was always finding mistakes in the original Eden pattern; and her customers were ever ready to try her suggestions as to the newest mode of correcting them. Top-gears naturally varied like the _crescendo et diminuendo_ notes in music, or the equally flexible bars of the gold market, whose undulating lines draw such different tunes from its performers, and sometimes run so high as to take away all their breath. Tights, now unwhisperable except in veracious histories, held their own with elderly gentlemen to the very close of the century, and were clasped with silver enough to bring a smile, in our day, all over the wrinkling face of the Secretary of the Treasury. The wide-tailed coats and broad-lapelled vests of the respectable citizens of the Washington and Adams periods would, if worn now upon the platform of an equal rights convention, make the fame of their wearers, and insure full-length portraitures of their inner selves by conversation-drawing correspondents.

Another production of the eighteenth century was better material ways for translation over the surface of our rapidly augmenting areas. In 1732 enterprising stages took fourteen days from New York to Boston; but ere the cycle had rounded up to 1800, the time, by reason of better roads, was reduced one half. The hard earnings, trickling from the little heaps that labor had gathered up, began to flow out into turnpikes; and milestones chronicled spaces and pointed the fingers of Time to measures for ascertaining and so accelerating speed. The road-maker and the vehicle-propeller are the two Dioscuri of modern civilization. Whoever subtracts portions of the earth’s surface, be it solid or aqueous, from between separated States, communities, or individuals, multiplies the well-being and happiness of the human race. Could the tea raiser in China be placed alongside of the tea consumer in America, or the cotton manufacturer of Lowell within a half-hour’s delivery of his fabrics from their purchaser, the expenses of handling at either end, the long, costly, tedious voyages that now waste so much labor, time, and money, and the accumulated taxes upon the articles sold added by intermediate commissions, would be saved. The costs of translation are a necessary but onerous assessment upon productive industry. The greatest invention now needed is one which would so condense the earth’s bulk by improved and rapid communication, as to squeeze out the distances that separate nations and chill their natural outflow from themselves into others.

In 1700 the population of Boston was 7,000; that of New York 5,250, of which latter one in seven was colored; a proportion which was augmented in 1711 in favor of the blacks, by the establishment of a regular and public slave-market. An English traveller describes Boston in 1700 as a place whose “buildings are, like its women, neat and pretty; the streets of pebble, like the hearts of the men.” From such flinty masculines no wonder that the population only reached to 24,937 in the next one hundred years.

Among the leading productions of this century the establishment and growth of manufactures must be reckoned. Even before the Revolution, iron-mills at Salisbury, Connecticut, at Cold Spring, on the Hudson, at Valley Forge and Durham, Pennsylvania, had lifted their ponderous hammers to weld the fused ores, dragged out of our slightly tumbled beds by cars, and had commenced to fabricate instruments of husbandry, kitchen utensils, and other tripods on which sat, then as now, the Pythonesses of life, who not only interpret, but are themselves the oracles of fate. Our running streams soon coaxed cotton to take a turn around the spindles which Arkwright, in 1768, had so taught to whirl with their mechanical iron fingers, that one man could work a stubborn iron mule up to a capacity equal to one hundred and thirty of the human species. The cotton-gin, ere the century closed accounts with its busy customers, had handed over such clean cotton to the coquettish jennies, that very pretty yarns began to be spun along many gliding streams.

The habits prevailing through the eighteenth century were still transitional. It was the chrysalis film, covering the flitting worm which had succeeded the inert and slow-moving grub of the seventeenth, and which was soon to burst into the gayer, full-winged butterfly of the nineteenth cycle of time. What habits they had were of solid silver. The platings, spread over and hiding darker substances with polished surfaces, were not yet invented.

Morals, too, triturated by the ever-restless surges of time, like the pebbles on a shore which the industrious ocean ever scrubs and washes, became rounder and smoother, and lost something of those angular asperities which added nothing to their usefulness or strength.

If we take an account of the purely intellectual and literary stock on hand in America at the close of the century, we shall find that, while the one hundred years had been run on a slender and mainly upon borrowed capital, there were results in fabricated stuffs by no means discreditable, and in raw material a mass very pleasant to contemplate. To a large extent our literary manufactures were still imitations of English styles, with an increasing tendency to introduce American figures in the patterns. The first literary effort was in hymn and psalm books. The very first volume printed in this country was “The Bay Psalm-Book,” published, of course, near Boston (at Cambridge) in 1640; rather slow in metres, but which, before 1750, had run through seventy editions,—run in fact so well and fast that, like certain plays now, it forgot how or where to stop. Singing-books, as an intellectual circulation, thus went to the American head, and, without blowing the matter too much, we may reasonably assume that this tendency set up the American nose as an instrument of psalmody.

The first book of original poems was by a woman, Mrs. Anne Bradstreet. The third edition came out in Boston in 1758. Besides this intellectual progeny, she had eight children; and to these latter she thus alludes in the printed issue:—

“I had eight birds hatch’t in the nest;
Four cocks there were and hens the rest;
I nurst them up with pains and care,
Nor cost nor labor did I spare,
Till at last they felt their wing,
Mounted the trees and learned to sing.”

During the first half of the century, ecclesiastical and religious writings in all departments naturally took the lead, as in these American mind was left free. In this field roamed the two Mathers, father and son,—Increase, the first, but unfortunately not the last, who was created a D. D.; and Cotton, who committed nearly three hundred and eighty-three sins in as many books, with which he loaded down the world, the greatest like its title, Magnalia. He made a partial atonement in a few good treatises. In the same department wrought largely, and with a “Freedom of the Will,” Jonathan Edwards, of whom Dugald Stewart said, “that in logical acuteness and subtilty he did not yield to any disputant bred in the universities of Europe”; Samuel Johnson, the first president of Columbia College, and the father of that highly respectable family, the American Protestant Episcopal Church; Ezra Stiles, who delivered orations in good Latin, and found audiences to listen to them; Timothy Dwight, his successor as president of Yale College, whose “System of Theology” still claims attention, even among the acute researches of the bibliologists of our time, and whose four volumes of “Travels in New England and New York” give rare reading on express trains; Samuel Hopkins, Joseph Bellamy, William White, the first American bishop of the Episcopal Church, and whose sweet spirit perfumed even his controversial writings; Edward Payson, Joseph S. Buckminster, and many others;—of but few of whom it could be said, “that their works do follow them”—to silence; for the churches still hold them in living honor.

Political writings divided with the theological the public mind as soon as government became domesticated. In books like “The Federalist,” “Notes on Virginia,” “Discourses on Davila”; in speeches embedding constitutional argument; in treatises, tracts, and in all forms and ways known to type, many of the wise men of the Revolution, with James Otis, Josiah Quincy, Jeremy Belknap, David Ramsey, and others, spake out in varied logic, historical research, wit, satire, and in captivating dialogue, discussing principles of government, political ethics, and social economy.

In the natural sciences, Benjamin Franklin, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Rush, Samuel L. Mitchell, and Count Rumford; in natural history, Cadwallader Golden, Paul Dudley, John Bartram, and Alexander Wilson; in history, William Stith, Abiel Holmes; among the singing birds, in the same tree with Anne Bradstreet but on higher branches, Philip Freneau, John Trumbull, the author of “McFingal,” Joel Barlow, who got up “Hasty Pudding,” and survived “The Columbiad,” and Joseph Hopkinson, who salutes us evermore in “Hail Columbia”; and finally, in fiction, standing by himself, Charles Brockden Brown, whose nine novels in paper covers delighted our great-grandmothers;—all these were quite equal to the instruction of their various audiences, and might, had they lived long enough, written something—perhaps several novels each—for the “New York Ledger.”

The last production, whereof we shall speak, was that great American Joss, money, which was set up as an idol in many households, but which had not yet been installed in municipal halls, fashionable churches, and State capitals. Beautiful to the sight at first were its golden hands and feet, and almost kissable the wand which it drew before the glistering eyes of its frantic worshippers. Of course no one was believed then, any more than now, who called attention to the cruel steel knives which it hid in its dollar-embossed breast, and against whose sharp points he pressed those who yielded to his fatal embrace.

THE AMERICAN JOSS.
(p. 372)
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