Half a dozen rivulets leap down the western declivity of the Rocky Mountains, and unite; four thousand miles away the mighty Missouri debouches into the Mexican Gulf as the result of that junction. Did the rivulets propose or plan the river? Not at all; but they knew, each, its private need to find a lower level; the universal law they obeyed accomplished the rest. So is it with the great human streams. Mighty beginnings do not lie in the minds of the beginners. History is a perpetual surprise, ever developing results of which men were the agents without being the expectants. Individual actors, with respect to the master claim of humanity, are, for the most part, not unlike that fleet hound which, enticed by a tempting prospect of meat, outran a locomotive engine all the way from Lowell to Boston, and won a handsome wager for his owner, while intent only on a dinner for himself. Humanity is served out of all proportion to the intention of service. Even the noble souls, never wanting in history, who follow not a bait, but belief, see only in imperfect survey the connections and relations of their deeds. Each is faithfully obeying his own inward vocation, a voice unheard by other soul than his own, and the inability to calculate consequences makes the preëminent grandeur of his position; or he is urged by the high inevitable impulse to publish or verify an idea: the Divine Destiny works in their hearts, and plans over their heads.

Socrates felt a sacred impulse to test his neighbors, what they knew and were: this is such account of his life as he himself can give at its close. His contemporaries generally saw in him an imperturbable and troublesome questioner, fatally sure to come at the secret of every man's character and credence, whom no subterfuge could elude, no compliments flatter, no menaces appall,—suspected also of some emancipation from the popular superstitions: this is the account of him which they are able to give. At twenty-three centuries' distance we see in him the source of a river of spiritual influence, that yet streams on, more than a Missouri, in the minds of men,—more than a Missouri, for it not only flows as an open current, but, percolating beneath the surface, and coming up in distinct and distant fountains, it becomes the hidden source of many a constant tide in the faiths and philosophies of nations.

The veil covers the eyes of spectators and agents alike. Columbus returns, freighted with wondrous tidings, to the Spanish shore; the nation rises and claps its hands; the nation kneels to bless its gods at all its shrines, and chants its delight in many a choral Te Deum. What, then, do they think is gained? Why, El Dorado! Have they not gained a whole world of gold and silver mines to buy jewelled cloaks and feathers and frippery with? Have they not gained a cornucopia of savages, to support new brigades at home by their enslavement, and new bishoprics abroad by their salvation? Touching, truly, is the childish eagerness and bonhommie with which those Spaniards in fancy assume, as it were, between thumb and finger, this continent, deemed to be nothing less than gold, and feed with it the leanness of hungry purses; and the effect is not a little enhanced by the extreme pains they are at to say a sufficient grace over the imagined meal. "Oh, wonderful, Pomponius!" shouts the large-minded Peter Martyr. "Upon the surface of that earth are found rude masses of gold, of a weight that one fears to mention!… Spain is spreading her wings," etc. He is of the minority there, who does not suppose this New World a Providential donation to aid him to dinners, dances, and dawdling, or at best to promote his "glory" and pride of social estimation. Even Columbus, more magnanimous than most of his contemporaries, is not so greatly more wise. The noblest use he can conceive for his discovery is to aid in the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. With the precious metals that should fall to his share, says his biographer, he made haste to vow the raising of a force of five thousand horse and fifty thousand foot for the expulsion of the Saracens from Jerusalem. Nor is this the only instance in which even the noble among men have sought to clutch the grand opening futures, and wreathe the beauty of their promise about the consecrated graves of the past. "Servants of Sepulchres" is a title which even now, not individuals alone, but whole nations, may lawfully claim.

The Old World, we say, seized upon this magnificent new force now thrown into history, and harnessed it unsuspiciously to its own car, as if it could have been designed for no other possible use. Happily, however, the design was different, and Providence having a peculiar faculty of protecting its own plans, the holding of the reins after such a steed proved anything but a sinecure. Spain, indeed, rode in a high chariot for a time, but at length, in that unlucky Armada drive, crashed against English oak on the ocean highways, and came off creaking and rickety,—grew thenceforth ever more unsteady,—finally, came utterly to the ground, with contusions, fractures, and much mishap,—and now the poor nation hobbles hypochondriacally upon crutches, all its brave charioteering sadly ended. England drove more considerately, but could not avoid fate; so in 1783 she, too, must let go the rein with some mental disturbance. For the great Destiny was not exclusively a European Providence,—had meditated the establishment of a fresh and independent human centre on the western side of the sea. The excellent citizens of London and Madrid found themselves incapable of crediting this until it was duly placarded in gunpowder print.—It is, indeed, an unaccountable foible men have, not to recognize a plain fact till it has been published in this blazing hieroglyphic. What were England and France doing at Sebastopol? Merely issuing a poster to this effect,—"Turkey is not yours,"—in a type that Russia could feel free to understand. Terribly costly editions these are, and in a type utterly hideous; but while nations refuse to see the fact in a more agreeable presentation, it may probably feel compelled to go into this ugly, but indubitable shape.—Well, somewhat less than a century since, England had committed herself to the proposition, that America was really a part or dependency of Europe, a lower-caste Europe, having about the same relation to the Cisatlantic continent that the farmer's barn has to his house. Mild refutations of this modest doctrine having been attempted without success, posters in the necessary red-letter type were issued at Concord, Bunker Hill, Yorktown, etc., which might be translated somewhat thus:—"America has its own independent root in the world's centre, its own independent destiny in the Providential thought." This important fact, having then and there exploded itself into legibility, and come to be known and read of all men, admits now of no dispute, and requires no confirmation. It is evidently so. The New World is not merely a newly-discovered hay-loft and dairy-stall for the Old, but is itself a proper household, of equal dignity with any. To draw the due inferences from this, to see what is implied in it, is all that we are here required to do.

Be it, then, especially noted that the continent by itself can take no such rank. A spirituality must appear to crown and complete this great continental body; otherwise America is acephalous. Unless there be an American Man, the continent is inevitably but an appendage, a kitchen and laundry for the European parlor. American Man,—and the word Man is to receive a large emphasis. Observe, that it does not refer to mere population. The fact required will hardly be reported in the census. Indeed, there is quite too much talk about population, about prospective increase of numbers. We are to have thirty millions of inhabitants, they say, in 1860; soon forty, fifty, one hundred millions. Doubtless; and if that be all, one yawns over the statement. Could any prophet assure us of one million of men who would stand for the broadest justice as Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans stood for Lacedaemon! But Hebrew David was thought to be punished for taking a census; nor is the story without significance. To reckon numbers alone a success is a sin, and a blunder beside. Russia has sixty millions of people: who would not gladly swap her out of the world for glorious little Greece back again, and Plato and Aeschylus and Epaminondas still there? Who would exchange Concord or Cambridge in Massachusetts for any hundred thousand square miles of slave-breeding dead-level? Who Massachusetts in whole for as many South American (or Southern) republics as would cover Saturn and all his moons? Make sure of depth and breadth of soul as the national characteristic; then roll up the census columns; and roll out a hallelujah for each additional thousand.

Thus had the great Genoese been destined merely to make a new highway on the ocean and new lines on the map,—to add the potato, maize, and tapioca to the known list of edibles, and tobacco to that of narcotics,—to explode Spain, give England a cotton-field, Ireland a hospital, and Africa a hell. This could by no means seem sufficient. The crew of the Pinta shouted, "Land! Land!"—peering through the dark at the new shores; the Spanish nation chanted, "Gold! Gold!"—gazing out through murky desires toward the wondrous West; but it is only with the cry of "Man! Man!" as at the sight of new cerebral shores and wealth of more than golden humanities, that the true America is discovered and announced. So whatever reason we have to assert for America a really independent existence and destiny, the same have we for predicting an opulence of heart and brain, to which Western prairies and Californian gold shall seem the natural appurtenance.

And this noble man must be likewise a new man,—not merely a migrated European. Western Europe pushed a little farther west does not meet our demand. Why should Europe go three thousand miles off to be Europe still? Besides, can we afford to England, France, Spain, a larger room in the world? Are we more than satisfied with their occupancy of that they already possess? The Englishman is undeniably a wholesome picture to the mental eye; but will not twenty million copies of him do, for the present? It would seem like a poverty in Nature, were she unable to vary, but must go helplessly on to reproduce that selfsame British likeness over all North America. But history fully warrants the expectation of a new form of man for the new continent. German and Scandinavian Teutons peopled England; but the Englishman is sui generis, not merely an exported Teuton. Egypt, says Bunsen, was peopled by a colony from Western Asia; but the genius and physiognomy of Egypt are peculiar and its own. Mr. Pococke will have it that Greece was a migrated India: it was, of course, a migration from some place that first planted the Hellenic stock in Europe; but if the man who carved the Zeus, and built the Parthenon, and wrote the "Prometheus" and the "Phaedrus," were a copy, where shall we find the original? Indeed, there has never been a great migration that did not result in a new form of national genius. And it is the thoroughness of the transformations thus induced which makes the chief difficulty in tracing the affinities of peoples.

So it is that the world is enriched. Every new form of man establishes another current in those reciprocations of thought, in those electrical streams of sympathy,—of wholesome attraction and wholesome repulsion,—by which the intellectual life is kindled and quickened. Thought begins not until two men meet. Col. Hamilton Smith makes it quite clear that civilization has found its first centres there where two highways of national movement crossed, and dissimilar men looked each other in the face. They have met, it may be, with the rudest kind of greetings; but have obtained good thoughts from hard blows, and beaten ideas out of each other's heads, if not into them, according to the ancient pedagogic tradition. Higher culture brings higher terms of meeting; traffic succeeds war, conversation follows upon traffic; ever the necessity of various men to each other remains. There is no pure white light until seven colors blend; so to the mental illumination of humanity many hues of national genius must consent: and the value of life to all men is greater so soon as a new man has made his advent.

All this is matter of daily experience with us. We do not, indeed, tire of old friends. A soul whose wealth we have once recognized must be ever rich to us. Gold turns not to copper by keeping; and perhaps old friends are rather like old wine, and can never be too old. Yet who does not mark in the calendar those days wherein he has met a new rich soul, that has a physiognomy, a grace and expression, peculiarly its own? Even decided repulsions have also a use. We whet our conscience on our neighbors' faults, as sober Spartans were made by the spectacle of drunken Helots;—though he who makes habitual talk about his neighbors' faults whets his conscience across the edge. If there be sermons in stones, no less is there blessing in bores and in bullies. We found one day in the face of a black bear what could not be so well found in libraries. The creature regarded us attentively, and with affection rather than malice,—saw simply certain amounts of savory flesh, useful for the satisfaction of ursine hungers,—and saw nothing more. It was an incomparable lesson to teach that the world is an endless series of levels, and that each eye sees what its own altitude commands; the rest to it is non-extant. That bear was in his natural covering of hair; his brothers we frequently meet in broadcloth.

Now, as Nature keeps up this inexhaustible variety of individual genius which individual quickening requires, so on the larger scale is she ever working and compounding to produce varieties of national genius. Her aim is the same in both cases,—to enrich the whole by this electrical and enlivening relation between its parts. And thus an American man, no copy, but an original, formed in unprecedented moulds, with his own unborrowed grandeur, his own piquancy and charm, is to be looked for,—is, indeed, even now to be seen,—on this shore.

Yes, the man we seek is already found, his features rapidly becoming distinct. He is the offspring of Northern Europe; he occupies Central North-America. Other fresh forms are doubtless to appear, but, though dimly shaping themselves, are as yet inchoate. But the Anglo-American is an existing fact, to be spoken of without prognostication, save as this is implied in the recognition of tendencies established and unfolding into results. The Anglo-American may be considered the latest new-comer into this planet. Let us, then, a little celebrate his advent. Let us make all lawful and gentle inquiry about the distinguished stranger.

First, what is his pedigree? He need not be ashamed to tell; for he comes of a noble family, the Teutonic,—a family more opulent of human abilities, and those, for the most part, the deeper kind of abilities, than any other on the earth at present. He reckons among his progenitors and relatives such names as Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, the two Bacons, Lessing, Richter, Schiller, Carlyle, Hegel, Luther, Behmen, Swedenborg, Gustavus Adolphus, William of Orange, Cromwell, Frederick II., Wellington, Newton, Leibnitz, Humboldt, Beethoven, Handel, Turner; and nations might be enriched out of the names that remain when the supreme ones in each class have been mentioned. Consider what incomparable range and variety, as well as depth, of genius are here affirmed. Greece and India possessed powers not equally represented here; but otherwise these might stand for the full abilities of mankind, each in its handsomest illustration.—It is remarkable, too, that our Anglo-American has no "poor relations." Not a scurvy nation comes of this stock. They are the Protestant nations, giving religion a moral expression, and reconciling it with freedom of thought. They are the constitutional nations, exacting terms of government that acknowledge private right. Resource may also be emphasized as a characteristic of these nations. Hitherto they have honored every draft that has been made upon them. The Dutch first fished their country out from under the sea, and afterwards defended it in a war of eighty years' duration against the first military power on the globe: two feats, perhaps, equally without parallel.

Being thus satisfied upon the point of pedigree, we may proceed to inquire about estate. To what inheritance of land has Nature invited our New Man? He comes to the country of highest organization, perhaps, upon either hemisphere. Brazil and China suggest, but probably do not sustain, a rivalry. What is implied in superior organization will appear from the items to be mentioned.

1. Elaboration. Central North-America is to an extraordinary degree worked out everywhere in careful detail, in moderate hill and valley, in undulating prairie and fertile plain,—not tossed into barren mountain-masses and table-lands, like that vast desert plateau which stretches through Central Asia,—not struck out in blank, like the Russian steppes and the South American llanos, as if Nature had wanted leisure to elaborate and finish. Indeed, these primary conditions of fertility and large habitability appertain to America, as a whole, to such degree, that, with less than half the extent of the Old World, it actually numbers more acres of fertile soil, and can, of course, sustain a larger population.

2. Unity. Between the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic coast, and between the Gulf of Mexico and the northern wheat-limit, a larger space of fertile territory, embracing a wider variety of climate and production, is thrown into one mass, broken by no barrier, than can, perhaps, elsewhere be found.

3. Communication. No mass of land equal in other advantages is to the same extent thrown open and enriched by natural highways. The first item under this head is access to the ocean, which is the great road-space and highway of the world. Not mentioning the Pacific, as that coast is not here considered, we have the open sea upon two sides, while upon the northern boundary is an inclosed sea, the string of lakes, occupying a space larger than Great Britain and Ireland, and of a form to afford the greatest amount of coast-line and accommodation in proportion to space. But coast-line is not enough; land and sea must be wedded as well as approximated. The Doge of Venice went annually forth to wed the Adriatic in behalf of its queen, and to cast into its bosom the symbolic ring; but Nature alone can really join the hands of ocean and main. By bays, estuaries, ports, spaces of sea lovingly inclosed by arms of sheltering shore, are conversation and union established between them.

"The sea doth wash out all the ills of life," sings Euripides; and it is, indeed, with some penetration of wonder that one observes how deep and productive a relation to man the ocean has sustained. Some share in the greatest enterprises, in the finest results, it seldom fails to have. Not capriciously did the subtile Greek imagination derive the birth of Venus from the foam of the sea; for social love,—that vast reticulation of wedlock which society is—has commonly arisen not far from the ocean-shore. The Persian is the only superior civilization, now occurring to our recollection, which has no intimate relation either with river or sea; and that pushed inevitably toward the Tigris and Euphrates. Now to Europe must be conceded the supremacy in this single respect, that of representing the most intimate coast relation with the sea; North America follows next in order. Africa, washed, but not wedded, by the wave, represents the greatest seclusion,—and has gone into a sable suit in her sorrow. After the ocean, rivers, which are interior highways, claim regard. The United States have on this side the Rocky Mountains more than forty thousand miles of river-flow, that is, eighty thousand miles of river-bank,—counting no stream of less than one hundred miles in length. Europe, in a larger space, has but seventeen thousand miles. The American rivers are nearly all accessible from the ocean, and, owing to the gentle elevation of the continent, flow at easy declivities, and accordingly are largely navigable. The Mississippi descends at an average of only eight inches per mile from source to mouth; the Missouri is said to be navigable to the very base of the Rocky Mountains; and these monarch streams represent the rivers of the continent. Thus here do these highways of God's own making run, as it were, past every man's door, and connect each man with the world he lives in.

Rivers await their due celebration. We easily see that Nile, Ganges, Euphrates, Jordan, Tiber, Thames, are rivers of influence in human history, no less than water-currents on the earth's surface. They have borne barks and barges that the eye never saw. They have brought on their soft bosoms freight to the cities of the brain, as well as to Memphis, Rome, London. Some experience of their spiritual influence must have fallen to the lot of most men. The loved and lovely Merrimac no longer accedes to the writer's eye, but, as of old, glides securely seaward in his thought,—like a strain of masterly music long ago heard, and, when heard, identical in its suggestions with the total significance and vital progress of one's experience, that, intertwining itself as a twin thread with the shuttled fibre of life, it was woven into the same fabric, and became an inseparable part of the consciousness; so, hearken when one will, after the changes and accessions of many peopled years, and amid the thousand-footed trample of the mob of immediate impressions, still secure and predominant it is heard subtly sounding. Deep conversation with any river readily interprets to us that venerable mythus which connects Eden with the four rivers of the world; as if water must flow where man is chiefly blest.

But the point here to be emphasized is, that rivers are the progressive and public element in its geographical expression. They throw the continent open; they are doors and windows, through which the nations look forth upon the world, and leave and enter their own household. They are the hospitality of the continent,—every river-mouth chanting out over the sea a perpetual, "Walk in," to all the world. Or again, they are geographical senses,—eyes, ears, and speech; for of these supreme mediators in the body, voice, vision, and hearing, it is the office, as of rivers, to open communication between the interior and exterior world; they are rivers of access to the outlying universe of men and things, which enters them, and approaches the soul through the freighted suggestions of sight and sound. Rivers, lastly, are the geographical symbol of public spirit, the flowing and connecting element, suggesting common interests and large systems of action.

Thus in these characteristics of Various Productiveness, Unity, and Openness or Publicity, the continent indicates the description of man who may be its fit habitant. It suggests a nation vast in numbers and in power, existing not as an aggregate of fragments, but as an organic unit, the vital spirit of the whole prevailing in each of its parts; and consequently predicts a man suitable for wide and yet intimate societies. Let us not, however, thoughtlessly jump to accept these easy prognostics; first let it be fully understood what an enormous demand they imply. Americans speak complacently of their prospective one hundred millions of inhabitants; but do they bear well in mind that the requisition upon the individual is augmented by every multiplication and extension of the mass? It is not without significance, that great empires have uniformly been, or become, despotisms. Liberty lives only in the life of just principle; and as the weight of an elephant could not be sustained by the skeleton of a gazelle,—as, moreover, the bones must be made stouter as well as longer,—so must a vast body politic be permeated by a sturdier element of justice than is required for a diminutive state. It is, indeed, the chief recommendation of our federative form of government, that this, so far as may be, localizes legislation, and thus, by lessening the number of interests that demand a national consent, lessens equally the strain upon the conscience and judgment of the whole. Near at hand, the mere good feeling of neighbors, the companionable sentiment of cities and clans, proves a valuable succedaneum for that deeper principle which is good for all places and times. But this sentiment, like gravitation, diminishes in the ratio of the square of the distance, and at any considerable remove can no longer be reckoned upon as a counter-balance to the lawlessness of egotism. Athenians could be passably just, or at least not disastrously unjust, to Athenians; Spartans to Spartans; but Sparta must needs oppress the other cities of Laconia, while Athens was at best a fickle ally; and when Grecian liberty could be strong only in Grecian union, the common sentiment was bankrupted by too great a draft upon its resources. How far beyond the range of egotism of neighborhood a free state may go is determined chiefly by limits in the souls of its constituents. At that point where equal justice begins to halt, fatigued by too long a journey, the inevitable boundaries of the state are fixed. Nor is it the mere sentiment of justice alone that suffices; but this must be sustained in its applications by a certain breadth of nature, a certain freedom and flexibility, akin to the dramatic faculty, which enables us to enter into the feelings and wants of others. Nothing, perhaps, in the world can be so unjust as a narrow and frigid conscience beyond its proper range. The bounds of the state may, indeed, not pause where the sustenance of its integral life fails. But then its extension will be purchased with its freedom,—the quality be debased as the quantity increases. Jelly-fish, and creatures of the lowest animation, may sustain magnitude of body, not only with a slight skeleton, but with none at all; and society of a cold-blooded or bloodless kind follows the analogy. But these low grades of social organization, having some show of congruity with the blank levels of Russia, can pretend to none with the continent we inhabit. Yet some species of arbitrament between man and man is sure to establish itself; if it live not, as a part of freedom, in the bosom of each, then does it inevitably build itself into a Fate over their heads; and despotism, war, or similar brutal and violent instrumentalities of adjustment, supply in their way the demand that love and reason failed to meet.

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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 12, October, 1858

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