American Language (25 page)

Sufficient evidence has been set forth, I take it, to show that the English of the United States had begun to be recognizably differentiated from the English of England by the opening of the Nineteenth Century. But as yet its free proliferation was impeded by two factors, the first being the lack of a national literature of any expanse and dignity and the second being an internal political disharmony which greatly conditioned and enfeebled the national solidarity. During the actual Revolution common aims and common dangers forced the Americans to show a more or less united front, but once they had achieved political independence they developed conflicting interests, and out of those conflicting interests came suspicions and hatreds which came near wrecking the new Confederation more than once. Politically, their worst weakness, perhaps, was an inability to detach themselves wholly from the struggle for domination then going on in Europe. The surviving Loyalists of the revolutionary era — estimated by some authorities to have constituted fully a third of the total population in 1776 — were ardently in favor of England, and such patriots as Jefferson were as ardently in favor of France. This engrossment in the rivalries of foreign nations was what Washington warned against in his Farewell Address. It was at the bottom of such bitter animosities as that between Jefferson and Hamilton. It inspired and perhaps excused the pessimism of such men as Burr. Its net effect was to make it difficult for the people of the new nation to think of themselves, politically and culturally, as Americans pure and simple.
¹
Their
state of mind, vacillating, uncertain, alternately timorous and pugnacious, has been well described by Henry Cabot Lodge in his essay on “Colonialism in America.”
²
Soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, someone referred to the late struggle, in Franklin’s hearing, as the War for Independence. “Say, rather, the War of the Revolution,” said Franklin. “The War for Independence is yet to be fought.”

“That struggle,” adds B. J. Lossing in “Our Country” (1873), “occurred, and that independence was won, by the Americans in the War of 1812.” In the interval the New Republic had passed through a period of
Sturm und Drang
whose gigantic perils and passions we have begun to forget — a period in which disaster ever menaced, and the foes within were no less bold and pertinacious than the foes without. Jefferson, perhaps, carried his fear of “monocrats” to the point of monomania, but under it there was undoubtedly a body of sound fact. The poor debtor class (including probably a majority of the veterans of the Revolution) had been fired by the facile doctrines of the French Revolution to demands which threatened the country with bankruptcy and anarchy,
³
and the class of property-owners, in reaction, went far to the other extreme. On all sides, indeed, there flourished a strong British party, and particularly in New England, where the so-called codfish aristocracy (by no means extinct today) exhibited an undisguised Anglomania, and looked forward confidently to a
rapprochement
with the mother country.
⁴
This Anglomania showed itself, not only
in ceaseless political agitation, but also in an elaborate imitation of English manners.

The first sign of the dawn of a new national order came with the election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency in 1800. The issue in the campaign was a highly complex one, but under it lay a plain conflict between democratic independence on the one hand and subservience to English precept and example on the other; and with the Alien and Sedition Laws about his neck, so vividly reminiscent of the issues of the Revolution itself, Adams went down to defeat. Jefferson was violently anti-British and pro-French; he saw all the schemes of his political opponents, indeed, as English plots; he was the man who introduced the bugaboo into American politics. His first acts after his inauguration were to abolish all ceremonial at the court of the Republic, and to abandon spoken discourses to Congress for written messages. That ceremonial, which grew up under Washington, was an imitation, he believed, of the formality of the abhorrent Court of St. James; as for the speeches to Congress, they were palpably modeled upon the speeches from the throne of the English kings. Both reforms met with wide approval; the exactions of the English, particularly on the high seas, were beginning to break up the British party. But confidence in the solidarity and security of the new nation was still anything but universal. The surviving doubts, indeed, were strong enough to delay the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for more direct elections of President and Vice-President, until the end of 1804, and even then three of the five New England States rejected it,
⁵
and have never ratified it, in fact, to this day. Democracy was still experimental, doubtful, full of gunpowder. In so far as it had actually come into being, it had come as a boon conferred from above. Jefferson, its protagonist, was the hero of the populace, but he was not a part of the populace himself, nor did he ever quite trust it.

It was reserved for Andrew Jackson, a man genuinely of the people, to lead the rise of the lower orders and give it dramatic effectiveness. Jackson was the archetype of the new American who appeared after 1814 — ignorant, pushful, impatient of restraint and precedent, an iconoclast, a Philistine, an Anglophobe in every fiber.
“He was,” says his biographer, James Parton, “the most American of Americans — an embodied Declaration of Independence — the Fourth of July incarnate.” He came from the extreme backwoods, and his youth was passed, like that of Abraham Lincoln after him, amid surroundings but little removed from savagery. Thousands of other young Americans of the same sort were growing up at the same time — youngsters filled with a vast impatience of all precedent and authority, revilers of all that had come down from an elder day, incorrigible libertarians. They swarmed across the mountains and down the great rivers, wrestling with the naked wilderness and setting up a casual, impromptu sort of civilization where the Indian still menaced. Schools were few and rudimentary; there was not the remotest approach to a cultivated society; any effort to mimic the amenities of the East, or of the mother country, in manner or even in speech, met with instant derision. It was in these surroundings and at this time that the thoroughgoing American of tradition was born; “blatant, illogical, elate,” “greeting the embarrassed gods” uproariously, and matching “with Destiny for beers.” Jackson was unmistakably of that company in every instinct and idea, and it was his fate to give a new and unshakable confidence to its aspiration at the Battle of New Orleans. Thereafter all doubts began to die out; the new Republic was turning out a success. And with success came a great increase in the national egoism. The hordes of pioneers rolled down the Western valleys and on to the great plains.
⁶
America began to stand for something quite new in the world — in government, in law, in public and private morals, in customs and habits of mind, in the minutiæ of social intercourse. And simultaneously the voice of America began to take on its characteristic tone-colors, and the speech of America began to differentiate itself unmistakably from the speech of England. The average Philadelphian or Bostonian of 1790 had not the slightest difficulty in making himself understood by a visiting Englishman. But the average Ohio boatman of 1810 or plainsman of 1815 was already speaking a dialect that the Englishman would have shrunk from as barbarous and unintelligible, and before long it began to leave its marks, at first only faintly but
in the end very clearly, upon a distinctively national literature. That literature, however, was very slow in coming to a dignified, confident and autonomous estate. Down to Jefferson’s day it was predominantly and indeed almost wholly polemical, and hence lacking in anything properly describable as æsthetic value; he himself, an insatiable propagandist and controversialist, was one of its chief ornaments. “The novelists and the historians, the essayists and the poets, whose names come to mind when American literature is mentioned,” said Barrett Wendell, “have all flourished since 1800.”
⁷

But when a beginning was made at last, it was made with what might almost be described as a whoop. The violent reviling of the English reviewers, described at length in
Chapter I
, had at last overshot its mark. Abashed and alarmed by it for years, the American literati were goaded, in the end, into meeting it with defiance, and that defiance both supported and got support from the rising national feeling. The same year, 1828, which saw the beginning of Jackson’s first term also saw the publication of Noah Webster’s “
American
Dictionary of the English Language,” and a year later followed Samuel Lorenzo Knapp’s “Lectures on American Literature,” the first formal treatise on the national letters ever written. Knapp, by that time, had enough materials at hand to make a very creditable showing — for example, Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” (published in the
North American Review
in 1817); Irving’s “Knickerbocker” (1809), “The Sketch-Book” (1819), “Bracebridge Hall” (1822), “Tales of a Traveler” (1824) and “Columbus” (1828); Cooper’s “The Spy” (1821), “The Pilot” (1823) and “The Prairie” (1826); Hawthorne’s “Fanshaw” (1828); and Poe’s “Tamerlane and Other Poems” (1827); not to mention Schoolcraft’s “Through the Northwest” (1821) and “Travels in the Mississippi Valley” (1825), Kent’s “Commentaries” (1826), Marshall’s “Washington” (1804) and Audubon’s “Birds of America” (1827). But Knapp was not content to put these new pearls in array; he must also deliver himself of Jacksonian exultations. Where in all England, he demanded, was there a “tuneful sister” comparable to Mrs. Lydia Sigourney, whose