Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
particular heroes, prospered greatly, purchased the Ellicott Mills a
few miles out of Baltimore, and set up a half feudal estate vastly
attractive to discriminating visitors like Irving.
Kennedy’s marriage to Elizabeth Gray in 1829 seems to have been the
turning-point of his life. Before this he had been a disinterested
liberal in his views, concerning himself in a political way with such
humanitarian issues as the repeal of the brutal debtor laws. He had
never been an avowed Jeffersonian like William Wirt and many of his
Virginia connections, but the Jeffersonian idealism must have appealed
to the generous sympathies of the young man. Immediately upon being
taken into the Gray family he adopted its ample scale of living, its
genial hospitality, its social and political philosophy. The influence
of the masterful Edward Gray was thenceforth a dominant creative factor
in Kennedy’s life, and he followed faithfully in the footsteps of his
father-in-law. The profits of the Ellicott Mills had been greatly
increased by the tariff act of 1824. Naturally Edward Gray was an
ardent protectionist, and Kennedy frankly espoused the same policy. He
accepted Henry Clay as his political leader, was sent to Congress on a
protectionist platform, lectured before Workingmen’s Institutes on the
advantages of industrial development, and gained a very considerable
reputation as an expounder of the American Plan. After the war he
became a Republican, voted for Grant, and adopted extreme nationalist
views. That the family income was dependent on tariff favors is a
detail which only a more realistic generation would suggest in
explanation of his political course; the fact remains, nevertheless,
that the youthful disciple of William Wirt adopted the new philosophy
of prosperity, became president of the board of directors of the
Baltimore and Ohio Railway, invested in West Virginia coal lands,
and was by way of becoming a captain of industry. The break with his
southern antecedents was complete and final; he went with his native
city in preferring the industrial to the plantation economy.
Baltimore in Kennedy’s day was a thriving port with a growing trade
to the West Indies and Europe. It had long been a convenient market
for the tobacco of Virginia, and with the development of the clipper
service its over-sea commerce expanded greatly. Unlike Charleston,
the mercantile interests predominated over the planter. Middle-class
ideals, to be sure, were still tempered by the dignified decorum that
lingered on from the eighteenth century. Merchants still emulated the
gentry and strove for personal distinction. They professed benevolent
ideals and their talk was much of public spirit and the progress of the
town. They adopted the romantic faith of their class in the beneficent
processes of trade and industry in furthering social well-being,
and they endowed Mechanics Institutes and founded public libraries
and museums with all the ardor of converts. In this agreeable work
of expounding the gospel of progress, Kennedy joined heartily. It
satisfied the latent idealism of his nature and recompensed him for
the loss of his Virginia heritage. Intellectually he was too honest to
pervert the gospel of progress to selfish class interest and seek to
hide the perversion behind sonorous platitudes, as his friend Robert C.
Winthrop of Boston was guilty of doing. He had too much love for the
English language to misuse it even in defense of the family income.
He could not contract his mind to the compass of a Whig politician’s.
His defense of industrialism, in consequence, embodies the spirit of
the best English liberalism as that liberalism was interpreted by
Victorian Englishmen. He seems to have been honestly convinced that the
future well-being of America was dependent upon the development of an
industrialism to provide an economic balance between manufactures and
agriculture.
Like his friend Irving, Kennedy was a devout romantic, with a love of
the old-time picturesque; but as a consistent Whig he would spin and
weave his romance out of domestic materials, refusing to import. He
was a child of the effervescent days following 1812, when the static
eighteenth century was breaking up and an ebullient romanticism was
permeating the land. Of this youthful period his thought reveals the
clear impress. Washington Irving from long pottering over the old-world
picturesque had become English romantic, with an inveterate dislike of
all innovation. The vulgar nineteenth century was destroying for him
the charm of the eighteenth; he would have had the world remain as it
was before the American and French revolutions had despoiled life of
picturesque feudal ways. Whereas Kennedy, sharing in a romanticism that
was economic and social--that was creating a wonderful America of the
future out of the raw materials of life--was content to remain native,
at home in the land of his birth. He might turn to the past for the
figures and scenes of his stories, but he discovered in the activities
of the present materials for romance quite as fascinating. He was
wholly Victorian in his genial optimism. He was receptive to new ideas
and promising ventures. He listened sympathetically to inventors and
scientists and promoters. He was instrumental in securing Congressional
aid to erect Morse’s telegraph line between Washington and his native
city. As Secretary of the Navy he provided for Commodore Perry’s
expedition to Japan, and the expedition to search for Dr. Kane in the
Arctic regions. But unfortunately his economic romanticism gradually
undermined his literary romanticism; he outgrew his earlier literary
ambitions, and the romances of his later life never got written. In the
end the gospel of progress was his undoing.
That the generous comfort in which he lived afforded him leisure, means
of travel, contact with distinguished people, goes without saying; but
that it was favorable to letters is far from clear. Divided interests
consumed his energies and kept him an amateur to the last. His literary
development was an evolution from a sketchy and humorous Addisonian,
with its echoes of the eighteenth century, to the full Victorian
romantic. The foreign elements from an earlier time slowly settled
to the bottom of the vat and left the pure wine of romance. But it
took time. Like other amateurs he was influenced by current literary
successes, and was much given to following the changing fashions. His
three best-known books, written between the ages of thirty-six and
forty-five, are unlike enough to have been written by different men.
_Swallow Barn_, like the youthful sketches of _The Red Book_, is
Irvingesque, and the Irving influence crops out again in a late book
_Quodlibet_; but _Horseshoe Robinson_ is substantial Revolutionary
romance, done in sober narrative with touches of realism; and _Rob of
the Bowl_ is light and whimsical cavalier romance, all atmosphere and
small talk, utterly unlike Irving. It is in this latter book, perhaps,
written in 1838 at the age of forty-two, that Kennedy really found
himself; he seems to move through the scenes more easily and with
greater delight than in any other of his pages.
That the leisurely sketches of _Swallow Barn_ belong to the school of
Irving is a fact as obvious as Kennedy’s love for the idling plantation
life. Quite too much, however, has been made of this imitativeness--it
is an imitativeness rather of method than of theme or style. If it was
not quite a pioneer work in the field of local description, it was
amongst the earliest. Paulding had dealt with Dutch colonial life,
and Timothy Flint and James Hall had begun the descriptive literature
of the West; but little else had been done at the time _Swallow Barn_
appeared. Longstreet’s _Georgia Scenes_ came out two years later.
Intrinsically as well as historically the work is curiously suggestive.
Nowhere else does the plantation life of the Old Dominion in the days
before its decline appear so vividly as in these discursive pages: “the
mellow, bland, and sunny luxuriance of her old-time society--its good
fellowship, its hearty and constitutional _companionableness_, the
thriftless gaiety of the people, their dogged but amiable invincibility
of opinion, and that overflowing hospitality which knows no ebb.”
Like Irving, Kennedy went back to the old home, but that old home was
Virginia and not England; and there he found still lingering on the
great plantations charmingly romantic anachronisms that had disappeared
elsewhere--a spontaneous romanticism of temperament that gave color and
zest to the daily routine. The aloofness of plantation life had bred in
the Virginia gentry a piquant individuality, a distinction as of old
morocco or calfskin. Philly Wart, the shrewdly humorous fox-hunting
lawyer; old Mr. Tracy of The Brakes, “turning a little sour with age”
and resembling “that waterish, gravelly soil that you see sometimes
around a spring, where nothing grows but sheep-sorrel,” who cherishes a
hereditary boundary dispute, pursuing his hypothetical rights through
all the law courts and discovering, when the matter has been amicably
settled by arbitration, that much of the zest has gone out of his
life; the heroine Bel Tracy, a frank wholesome girl with a dash of Di
Vernon in her romantic affectations that lead her to play at hawking:
such figures fit as naturally into the background as the pampered house
servants, the horseback riding, the constant visiting, the abundant
dinners. Especially the dinners, when the neighborhood is invited in.
The table spread with opulent hospitality and careless profusion--the
baked ham at one end and the saddle of roast mutton at the other, with
fried chicken, oysters, crabs, sweet potatoes, jellies, custards--a
prodigal feast that only outdoor stomachs could manage, and all by way
of preliminary to the dusty wine-bottles and easy stories that hold the
men long after the ladies have withdrawn. Surely the romance of Old
Virginia, preserved in these light-hearted discursive pages, is worth
remembering by later generations who have forgotten how to live so
genially.
In 1832 when _Swallow Barn_ was written, the southern mind was just
at the turn in its attitude towards slavery, and Frank Meriwether, a
Virginian Sir Roger de Coverley, bred in the humanitarianism of the
older liberals, accepts the institution as a present evil that is in
a way of natural extinction. Slavery in _Swallow Barn_ is kept in the
background. There are slaves, of course, on the plantation, many of
them; but they are in the tobacco fields or the quarters, far from the
mansion; and not till near the end of the book does Kennedy’s curiosity
induce him to visit the cabins and draw out Frank Meriwether in talk
on slavery. The result is what one could have foreseen. The plantation
master was the victim of a benevolent romanticism that vaguely looks
for a solution to colonization schemes that will return the negro to
Africa; but like other southern gentlemen he is somewhat testy at the
suggestion of outside interference. Slavery he regards as an exclusive
southern problem, to be solved by those who understand its complex
domestic implications. It would be better for everybody if Abolition
busybodies would mind their own affairs and cease stirring up feelings
where no good can come of it. To prove that Virginia gentlemen are
aware of their responsibility, Meriwether offers a half humorous
suggestion that negro emancipation might well follow the example of
English villeinage, with a slow break-up of the system, the emancipated
negro to remain in a protective feudal relation to his master. It was
an amiable notion to play with, and it fitted the feudal psychology of
the plantation.
In these early sketches Kennedy revealed an easy knack at writing