The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 78, April, 1864

We claim to have done our full share in the way of industrial inventions since we have become a nation. The four elements have all accepted the American as their master. The great harvests of the earth are gathered by his mowing and reaping machines. The flame that is creeping from its lair to spring at the roofs of the crowded city is betrayed to its watchful guardians by the American telegraphic fire-alarm, and the conflagration that reddens the firmament is subdued by the inundation that flows upon it from an American steam-fire-engine. In the realm of air, the Frenchman who sent a bubble of silk to the clouds must divide his honors with the American who emptied the clouds themselves of their electric fires. Water, the mightiest of all, which devours the earth and quenches the fire, and rides over the air in vaporous exhalations, has been the chosen field of ingenious labor for our people. The great American invention of ice,—perhaps there is a certain approach to its own coolness in calling it an invention, though Sancho, it may be remembered, considered sleep in that light,—this remarkable invention of ice, as a tropical commodity, could have sprung only from a republican and revolutionary brain. The steamboat has been claimed for various inventors, for one so far back as 1543; but somehow or other it happened, as it has so often happened, that "the chasm from mere attempts to positive achievement was first bridged by an American." Our wave-splitting clippers have changed the whole model of sailing-vessels. One of them, which was to have been taken in tow by the steam-vessels of the Crimean squadron, spread her wings, and sailed proudly by them all. Our iron water-beetles would send any of the old butterfly three-deckers to the bottom, as quickly as one of these would sink a Roman trireme.

The Yankee whittling a shingle with his jack-knife is commonly accepted as a caricature, but it is an unconscious symbolization of the plastic instinct which rises step by step to the clothes-pin, the apple-parer, the mowing-machine, the wooden truss-bridge, the clipper-ship, the carved figure-head, the Cleopatra of the World's Exhibition.

One American invention, or discovery, has gone far towards paying back all that the new continent owes to the old civilizations. The cradle of artificial anæsthesia—man's independence of the tyranny of pain—must be looked for at the side of the Cradle of Liberty. Never was a greater surprise than the announcement of this miraculous revelation to the world. One evening in October, 1846, a professional brother called upon the writer of this paper. He shut the door carefully, and looked nervously around him. Then he spoke, and told of the wondrons results of the experiment which had just been made in the operating-room. "In one fortnight's time," he said, "all Europe will be ablaze with this discovery." He then produced and read a paper that he had just drawn up for a learned society of which we were both members, the first paper ever written on this subject. On that day not a surgeon in the world, out of a little New-England circle, made any profession of knowing how to render a patient quickly, completely, pleasantly, safely insensible to pain for a limited period. In a few weeks every surgeon in the world knew how to do it, and the atmosphere of the planet smelt strong of sulphuric ether. The discovery started from the Massachusetts General Hospital, just as definitely as the cholera started from Jessore, to travel round the globe.

The advance of our civilization is still more strongly marked by the number and excellence of musical instruments, especially pianos, which are made in this country. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the piano keeps pace with the plough, as our population advances. More striking evidence than even this is found in the fact that the highest grade of the highest instruments used for scientific research is produced by our artisans. One of the two largest telescope-lenses in the world is that made by Mr. Clark, of Cambridge, whose reputation is not confined to our own country. The microscopes of Mr. Spencer, which threw those of the Continent into the shade at once, and challenged competition with the work of the three great London opticians, were made in a half-cleared district of Central New York, where, in our pilgrimages to that Mecca of microscopists, Canastota, we found the shrine we sought in the midst of the charred stumps of the primeval forest. While Mr. Quekett was quoting Andrew Ross, the most famous of the three opticians referred to, as calling "135° the largest angular pencil that can be passed through a microscopic object-glass," Mr. Spencer was actually making twelfths with an angle of more than 170°. Those who remember the manner in which the record of his extraordinary success was deliberately omitted from the second edition of a work which records the minutest contrivance of any English amateur,—the first edition having already mentioned the "young artist living in the backwoods,"—will recognize in it something of the old style in which the mother-country used to treat the Colonists.

It may be fairly claimed that the alert and inventive spirit of the American has lightened the cumbrous awkwardness of Old-World implements, has simplified their traditional complexity, has systematized methods of manufacture, and has shown a certain audacity in its innovations which might be expected from a community where every mechanic is a voter, and a maker of lawgivers, if not of laws. We are deficient principally in patience of detail, and the skill which springs from minute subdivision of labor and from hereditary training. All this will come by-and-by,—all the sooner, if our ports are closed by foreign war. No natural incapacity prevents us from making as good broadcloth, as fine linen, as rich silks, as pure porcelain, as the Old World can send us. If England wishes to hasten our complete industrial independence, she has only to quarrel with us. We should miss many things at first which we owe to her longer training, but they are mostly products of that kind of industry which furnishes whatever the market calls for.

The intellectual development of the Colonists was narrowed and limited by the conditions of their new life. There was no need of legislation to discourage the growth of an American literature. At the period of the Revolution two books had been produced which had a right to live, in virtue of their native force and freshness; hardly more than two; for we need not count in this category the records of events, such as Winthrop's Journal, or Prince's Annals, or even that quaint, garrulous, conceited farrago of pedantry and piety, of fact and gossip, Mather's "Magnalia." The two real American books were a "Treatise on the Will," and "Poor Richard's Almanack." Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin were the only considerable names in American literature in all that period which, beginning with Milton and Dryden, and including the whole lives of Newton and Locke, reached the time of Hume and Gibbon, of Burke and Chatham, of Johnson and Goldsmith,—a period embracing five generations, filled with an unbroken succession of statesmen, philosophers, poets, divines, historians, who wrote for mankind and immortality. The Colonies, in the mean time, had been fighting Nature and the wild men of the forest, getting a kind of education as they went along. Out of their religious freedom, such as it was, they were rough-hewing the ground-sills of a free state: for religion and politics always play into each other's hands, and the constitution is the child of the catechism. Harvard College was dedicated to "Christ and the Church," but already, in 1742, the question was discussed at Commencement, "Whether it be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate, if the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved,"—Samuel Adams speaking in the affirmative.

Such was the condition of America at the period just preceding the Revolutionary movement. Commercial and industrial dependence maintained by Acts of Parliament, and only beginning to be openly rebelled against under the irritation produced by oppressive enactments. Native development in the fields of letters and science hardly advanced beyond the embryonic stage; a literature consisting of a metaphysical treatise and a popular almanac, with some cart-loads of occasional sermons, some volumes of historical notes, but not yet a single history, such as we should now hold worthy of that name, and an indefinite amount of painful poetry. Not a line, that we can recall, had ever been produced in America which was fit to sparkle upon the "stretched forefinger" of Time. Berkeley's "Westward the course of Empire" ought to have been written here; but the curse of sterility was on the Western Muse, or her offspring were too puny to live.

The outbreak of the Revolution arrested what little growth there was in letters and science. Franklin carried his reputation, the first one born of science in the country, to the French court, and West and Copley sought fame and success, and found them, in England. All the talent we had was absorbed in the production of political essays and state-papers. Patriotic poems, satires, jeux d'esprit, with more or less of the esprit implied in their name, were produced, not sparingly; but they find it hard work to live, except in the memory of antiquaries. Philip Freneau is known to more readers from the fact that Campbell did him the honor to copy a line from him without acknowledgment than by all his rhymes. It is not gratifying to observe the want, so noticeable in our Revolutionary period, of that inspiration which the passions of such a struggle might have been expected to bring with them.

If we are forced to put this estimate upon our earlier achievements in the domain of letters, it is not surprising that they were held of small account in the mother-country. It is not fair to expect the British critics to understand our political literature, which was until these later years all we had to show. They had to wait until De Lolme, a Swiss exile, explained their own Constitution to them, before they had a very clear idea of it. One British tourist after another visited this country, with his glass at his eye, and his small vocabulary of "Very odd!" for all that was new to him; his "Quite so!" for whatever was noblest in thought or deed; his "Very clever!" for the encouragement of genius; and his "All that sort of thing, you know!" for the less marketable virtues and heroisms not to be found in the Cockney price-current. They came, they saw, they made their books, but no man got from them any correct idea of what the Great Republic meant in the history of civilization. For this the British people had to wait until De Tocqueville, a Frenchman, made it in some degree palpable to insular comprehension.

The true-born Briton read as far as the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. There he stopped, and there he has stuck ever since. That sentence has been called a "glittering generality,"—as if there were some shallow insincerity about it. But because "all that glitters is not gold," it does not follow that nothing which glitters is gold. Because a statement is general, it does not follow that it is either untrue or unpractical. "Glittering generality" or not, the voice which proclaimed that the birthright of equality belonged to all mankind was the fiat lux of the new-born political universe. This, and the terrible series of logical consequences that flowed from it, threatening all the dynasties, menacing all the hierarchies, undermining the seemingly solid foundations of all Old-World abuses,—this parent truth, and all to which it gave birth, made up the literature of Revolutionary America, and dwarfed all the lesser growths of culture for the time, as the pine-tree dwarfs the herbage beneath the circle of its spreading branches.

As English policy had pursued the uniform course of provincializing our industry during the colonial period, discouraging every form of native ingenuity, so English criticism, naturally enough, after industry was set free, discountenanced the growth of a native American literature. That famous question of the "Quarterly Review," "Who reads an American book?" was the key—note of the critical chorus. There were shortcomings enough, no doubt, and all the faults that belong to an imperfectly educated people. But there was something more than the feeling of offended taste or unsatisfied scholarship in the animus of British criticism. Mr. Tudor has expressed the effect it produced upon our own writers very clearly in his account of the "North American Review," written in 1820. He recognizes the undue deference paid to foreign critics, and, as its consequence, "a want, or rather a suppression, of national feeling and independent judgment, that would sooner or later have become highly injurious."

It is not difficult to find examples, of earlier and of later date, which illustrate the tone of British feeling towards this country, as it has existed among leading literary men, and at times betrayed itself in an insolence which amuses us after the first sense of irritation has passed away.

In 1775, Dr. Samuel Johnson, champion of the heavy-weights of English literature, the "Great Moralist," the typical Englishman of his time, wrote the pamphlet called "Taxation no Tyranny." It is what an Englishman calls a "clever" production, smart, epigrammatic, impertinent, the embodiment of all that is odious in British assumption. No part of the Old World, he says, has reason to rejoice that Columbus discovered the New. Its inhabitants—the countrymen of Washington and Franklin, of Adams and Jefferson—multiply, as he tells us, "with the fecundity of their own rattlesnakes." Of the fathers of our Revolution he speaks in no more flattering terms:—"Probably in America, as in other places, the chiefs are incendiaries, that hope to rob in the tumults of a conflagration, and toss brands among a rabble passively combustible." All these atrocities and follies amuse and interest us now; they are the coprolites of a literary megatherium, once hateful to gods and men, now inoffensive and curious fossilized specimens.

In 1863, a Scotchman, whom Dr. Johnson would have hated for his birth, and have knocked down with his Dictionary for his assaults upon the English language, has usurped the chair of the sturdy old dogmatist. The specious impertinence and shallow assumptions of the English sage find their counterpart in the unworthy platitude of the Scottish seer, not lively enough for "Punch," a mere disgrace to the page which admitted it; whether a proof of a hardening heart or a softening brain is uncertain, but charity hopes the latter is its melancholy apology.

But in the interval between the cudgel-stroke of Johnson and the mud-throwing of Carlyle, America had grown strong enough to bear the assaults of literary bullies and mountebanks without serious annoyance. The question which had been so superciliously asked was at last answered. Everybody reads an American book. The morning-star of our literature rose in the genius of IRVING. There was something in his personal conditions which singularly fitted him to introduce the New World in its holiday-dress to the polite company of the Old World. His father was a Scotchman, his mother was an Englishwoman, and he was born in America. "Diedrich Knickerbocker" is a near relation of some of Scott's characters; "Bracebridge Hall" might have been written by an Englishman; while "Ichabod Crane" and "Rip Van Winkle" are American to their marrow. The English naturally found Irving too much like their own writers in his English subjects, and they could not thoroughly relish his purely American pictures and characters. Cooper, who did not love the English, and showed it, a navy officer, too, who dwelt with delight on the sea-fights of the War of 1812, was too American to please them. Dr. Channing had a limited circle of admirers in Great Britain, but could reach only a few even of the proscribed Dissenting class in any effective way.

Prescott, we believe, did more than any other one man to establish the independence of American authorship. He was the first, so far as we know, who worked with a truly adequate literary apparatus, and at the same time brought the results of his extensive, long-continued, costly researches into picture-like and popular forms. It was not the judgment of England, but of Europe, that settled his claims in the world of letters; and from the day when the verdict of the learned world awarded him a place in the first rank of historians, the hereditary curse of American authorship was removed, and the insolent question of the Quarterly was asked no more.

From that time nearly to this the literary relations between England and America have been growing more and more intimate, until every English writer of repute reckoned upon his great circle of readers in the United States, and every native author of a certain distinction depended upon a welcome, more or less cordial, but still a welcome, from a British reading constituency.

Never had the mutual interchange of literary gifts from the one people to the other been so active as during the years preceding the outbreak of the Great Conspiracy. So close was the communication of thought and feeling, that it seemed as if there were hardly need of a submarine cable to stretch its nervous strands between two national brains that were locked in Siamese union by the swift telegraph of thought. We reprinted each other's books, we made new reputations for each other's authors, we wrote in each other's magazines, and introduced each other's young writers to our own several publics. Thought echoed to thought, voice answered to voice across the Atlantic.

But for one fatal stain upon our institutions,—a stain of which we were constantly reminded, as the one thing that shamed all our pretensions,—it seemed as if the peaceful and prosperous development of the great nation sprung from the loins of England were accepted as a gain to universal civilization. In the fulness of time the heir of Great Britain's world-shadowing empire came among us to receive the wide and cordial welcome which we could afford to give without compromising our republicanism, and he to receive without lessening his dignity. It was the seal upon the entente cordiale which seemed to have at last established itself between the thinkers as well as the authorities of the two countries.

A few months afterwards came the great explosion which threatened the eternal rending asunder of the Union. That the British people had but an imperfect understanding of the quarrel, we are ready to believe. That they were easily misled as to some of the motives and intentions of the North is plain enough. But this one fact remains: Every one of them knew, by public, official statements, that what the South meant to do was to build a new social and political order on Slavery,—recognized, proclaimed, boasted of, theoretically justified, and practically incorporated with its very principle of existence. They might have their doubts about the character of the North, but they could have none about the principles or intentions of the South. That ought to have settled the question for civilized Europe. It would have done so, but that jealousy of the great self-governing state swallowed up every other consideration.

We will not be unjust nor ungrateful. We have as true friends, as brave and generous advocates of our sacred cause, in Great Britain as our fathers found in their long struggle for liberty. We have the intelligent coöperation of a few leading thinkers, and the instinctive sympathy of a large portion of the people,—may God be merciful to them and to their children in the day of reckoning, which, sooner or later, awaits a nation that is false to advancing civilization!

But, with all our gratitude to the noble few who have pleaded our cause, we are obliged to own that we have looked in vain for sympathy in many quarters where we should assuredly have expected it. Where is the English Church in this momentous struggle? Has it blasted with its anathema the rising barbarism, threatening, or rather promising, to nationalize itself, which, as a cardinal principle, denies the Word of God and the sanctities of the marriage relation to millions of its subjects? or does it save its indignation for the authors of "Essays and Reviews" and the over-curious Bishop of Natal? Where are the men whose voices ought to ring like clarions among the hosts of their brethren in the Free States of the North? Where is Lord Brougham, ex-apostle of the Diffusion of Knowledge, while the question is of enforced perpetual ignorance as the cement of that unhallowed structure with which this nineteenth century is to be outraged, if treason has its way? Where is Dickens, the hater of the lesser wrongs of Chancery Courts, the scourge of tyrannical beadles and heartless schoolmasters? Has he no word for those who are striving, bleeding, dying, to keep from spreading itself over a continent a system which legalizes outrages almost too fearful to be told even to those who know all that is darkest in the record of English pauperism and crime? Where is the Laureate, so full of fine indignations and high aspirations? Has he, who holds so cheap those who waste their genius

"To make old baseness picturesque,"

no single stanza for the great strife of this living century? is he too busy with his old knights to remember that

"One great clime....Yet rears her crest, unconquered and sublime,Above the far Atlantic?"

has he a song for the six hundred, and not a line for the six hundred thousand? Where is the London "Times," so long accepted as the true index of English intelligence and enlightened humanity? Where are those grave organs of thought which were always quarrelling with Slavery so long as it was the thorn in the breast of our nation, but almost do homage to it now that it is a poisoned arrow aimed at her life? Where is the little hunchback's journal, whose wit was the dog-vane of fashionable opinion, once pointing towards freedom as the prevailing wind seemed to blow, now veered round to obey the poisoned breath of Slavery? All silent or hostile, subject as they are themselves to the overmastering influence of a class which dreads the existence of a self-governing state, like this majestic Union, worse than falsehood, worse than shame, worse than robbery, worse than complicity with the foulest of rebellions, worse than partnership in the gigantic scheme which was to blacken half a hemisphere with the night of eternal Slavery!

It is the miserable defection of so many of the thinking class, in this time of the greatest popular struggle known to history, which impresses us far more than the hostility of a few land-grasping nobles, or the coldness of a Government mainly guided by their counsels. The natural consequence has been the complete destruction of that undue deference to foreign judgments which was so long a characteristic of our literature. The current English talk about the affairs that now chiefly interest us excites us very moderately. The leading organs of thought have lost their hold upon the mind of most thinking people among us. We have learned to distrust the responses of their timeserving oracles, and to laugh at the ignorant pretensions of their literary artisans. These "outsiders" have shown, to our entire satisfaction, that they are thoroughly incompetent to judge our character as a community, and that they have no true estimate of its spirit and its resources. The view they have taken of the strife in which we have been and are engaged is not only devoid of any high moral sympathy, but utterly shallow, and flagrantly falsified by the whole course of events, political, financial, and military.

Perhaps we ought not to be surprised or disappointed. With a congenital difference of organization, with a new theory of human rights involving a virtual reconstruction of society, with larger views of human destiny, with a virgin continent for them to be worked out in, the American should expect to be misunderstood by the civilizations of the past, based on a quagmire of pauperism and ignorance, or overhung by an avalanche of revolution. Other peoples, emerging from, a condition of serfdom, retaining many of the instincts of a conquered race, get what liberty they have by extorting it piecemeal from their masters. Magna Charta was forced from a weak monarch by a conspiracy of nobles, acting from purely selfish motives, in behalf of their own order. The Habeas Corpus Act was unpalatable to the Lords, and was passed only by a trick or a blunder. What is there in common between the states which recognize the rule of any persons who happen to be descended from the bold or artful men who obtained their power by violence or fraud, and a state which starts with the assumption that the government belongs to the governed, subject, we must remember, to the laws which make a people a nation,—laws recognized just as unhesitatingly by the Rebel States as applying to Western Virginia or East Tennessee, as the Union recognizes their application to these same Rebel States?