Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of the gold of the Indies is far richer. It is the familiar story of
southern prodigality and wastefulness--an exuberant nature pouring out
its wealth in spendthrift fashion, and failing to achieve the greater
results attained by a simpler nature held in closer restraint. After
all it is idle to compare Cooper and Simms, and even more futile to
catalogue the latter as a disciple of the Cooper school. Simms was
far too rich in his own right to live as a dependent on anyone, and
certainly far too original to be an imitator. Nature was lavish in
her gifts to him, and as if his fame as a story-teller is less than
Cooper’s, the debit must be charged against his unfortunate environment.
The later years of Simms were utterly devastated by the unhappy war,
in which, as was to be expected, he was a stalwart and uncompromising
partisan. His native commonwealth that had long treated him shabbily,
sacrificed him in the end to her folly. It was his own fault of course,
but how could one warped by the pervasive southern provincialism hope
to escape? Scratch a Carolinian of the Calhoun school and you find a
Fire Eater. In this respect Simms was not different from the McDuffies
and Hamiltons from whom he took his cue--gentlemen whom, because they
were politically prominent, he regarded as socially intelligent. That
a man of such native powers as Simms should have taken seriously
the Charleston politicians--blown up like a pig’s bladder after
butchering; that he should himself have aspired to become another such
bladder--these are sobering facts to remind us that the man of letters
is very likely to be a child outside his study walls. What was wrong
with Simms that he read the signs of the times so badly? This, that
he lived in a world of unreality, of social and economic romanticism,
that was forever benumbing his strong instinct for reality. His
father-in-law owned seventy slaves; his neighbors and acquaintances
owned slaves; all South Carolina gentlemen owned slaves; and in
judging this matter of slavery Gilmore Simms went unquestioningly with
his little world. He who had drunk of the rich wine of Elizabethan
culture came at last to drink himself under the table with his drafts
of Charleston Jamaica. The dream of a Greek civilization based on
black slavery was discovered in the bottom of the cup of southern
romanticism. And Simms emptied his bottle with the rest. Charleston,
no doubt, has paid a sufficiently heavy price for her too copious
potations, but she can never atone for the undoing of her greatest
son--for the foolish intoxication that befuddled the generous mind of
Gilmore Simms. The loss is not Charleston’s alone; it is a loss to our
common American literature. There is food for thought in the words of
the epitaph which he composed for himself: “Here lies one who, after a
reasonably long life, distinguished chiefly by unceasing labors, has
left all his better works undone.” Juster words could not have been
written, nor more tragic.
Footnotes
[408] See _Writings_, Vol. II, p. 104.
[409] See “The Arbitrament of National Disputes,” in _Writings_, Vol.
I, pp. 355-357.
[410] See above, page 102.
[411] See _Katherine Walton_, Chapter XLI.
[412] See _The Forayers_, Chapters XLIII-XLVI.
Part Three: The Romance of the West
Chapter I • New Worlds
I
While Calhoun was instructing the South in the theory of a Greek
democracy, other sons of the South were learning, in the new world
to which they had removed, the ways of a very different democracy--a
democracy native to the frontier and quite unconcerned with Greek
ideals. In the Ohio valley was gathering a multitude of rough
libertarians who had exchanged the restrictions of the old settlements
for the freedom of the new. To these bumptious levelers rulership by
established authorities made no appeal. They attached no respect to
broadcloth, but preferred to manage their affairs in their own way
by appeal to the majority. Taught by experience the worth of certain
Jeffersonian principles, they took seriously the doctrine of equality
and proposed to put it into practice. They were coonskin apostles of
liberty and equality--if not of fraternity--backwoods democrats who
by virtue of numbers established in common practice the principle of
the sovereignty of the popular will. Springing up naturally on the
frontier, the practice of democracy received from it a new validity
and became the determining factor in the nationalism that America
was creating in the early years of the nineteenth century. That it
was a crude and often shoddy democracy, that it never justified its
pretentions in the eyes of a critical realism, did not lessen the zeal
with which men clung to it or weaken their loyalty. Democracy became
the common faith of the West, and in becoming the common faith of the
West it was put in the way of becoming the common faith of America.
If the romantic temper is a spontaneous by-product of social change,
that temper found in the upheaval attending the western migration
a plentiful aliment that had been wanting in the static eighteenth
century. In that older world men had been held fast in the grip of the
customary and familiar; but in the free West all was new and strange.
The crossing of the Appalachian barrier that had long held back the
settlements was an adventurous undertaking that fired the imagination.
Romantic in spirit and scope, it was meanly picaresque in a thousand
unlovely details. Plain men engaged in it, provident and improvident,
hard-working and shiftless; heroes had a share in it, but blackguards
and outlaws and broken men--the lees and settlings thrown off from the
older communities--had a share as well. The world that provided a stage
for the courage of Daniel Boone and the fighting qualities of George
Rogers Clark bred also the Davy Crocketts and Mike Finks and Col.
William Suggses, who discovered there opportunities for the development
of less admirable qualities; and it engulfed in its depths a host of
nameless adventurers who drifted into the wilderness settlements, drank
and quarreled and begot children, suffered from the chills and ague,
spread a drab poverty along the frontier, and were put away under
ground and forgotten by the more fortunate who salvaged prosperity from
the abundant wreckage.
From this crude society emerged the new states with governments
designed to serve simple ends. Jealousy for his sovereign right to
do as he pleased was the chief concern of the free western voter;
as a sovereign citizen he refused to be subject to the creature
commonwealth. If governors and legislators and judges got uppish he
would throw them out of office and put in others who better understood
the rights of free Americans. It was this rude equalitarianism that
marked the early stage of western commonwealth building. Naïve
Jeffersonians, these frontier citizens had not learned from Hamilton
how useful the political state may become to those who know how
to control its policies to their particular ends; but that lesson
they were soon to learn. The citizens of Georgia received excellent
instruction from no less a man than Chief Justice Marshall in the
matter of the Yazoo frauds; and as such lessons sank into their minds
their political philosophy underwent a silent change. The coonskin
individualism that created Jacksonian democracy was gradually
undermined by a middle-class individualism that inclined to the
Whiggery of Henry Clay. The former was a spontaneous expression of the
frontier spirit, the latter a calculating expression of the maturing
settlement. The one discovered its native habitat on the backwoods
farm, the other in the county seat town. The one was agrarian _laissez
faire_, the other was exploitative paternalistic. The followers of
Jackson wanted the state kept simple and frugal, the followers of Clay
wanted it to engage in ambitious programs of internal improvement;
and from these antagonistic principles emerged a bitter feud between
Democracy and Whiggery that in western townships revived the old
alignment of agrarian and Federalist of earlier times.
In such a contest the principle of Whiggery must eventually triumph.
It was an expression of “the genius of the times.” Economics and
psychology were daily arguing in its behalf. From the first early
settlements of the Ohio valley, it must be remembered, circumstances
were creating a new middle class that was to stamp itself indelibly on
western life and institutions. The spirit of speculation had entered
the wilderness with the early surveyors. With its vast resources the
Inland Empire offered the first opportunity to exercise the newly
won right to exploit the western hinterland, and it was seized upon
greedily. Agriculture was still the common business and land hunger
the common passion. The irruption of the land-hungry hordes upon
the fertile Ohio valley, it will be recalled, synchronized with the
speculative debauch that followed the conclusion of the peace of
1783, and this in turn was a by-product of the sudden expansion of
the new capitalistic finance. Speculation had suddenly become every
man’s business, and wild lands and wild-cat banks, joining fortunes
for better or worse, brought forth a characteristic progeny. The new
gospel of progress found more willing hearers than the old gospel of
righteousness. Every adventurer into the Ohio valley was a potential
speculator, and every settler was eager to sell out to a later comer
at an advance. The real estate agent followed close on the footsteps
of Daniel Boone, quick to profit from the explorations. Land was the
staple commodity and such a turnover had never before been known in
America. Every clearing in the woods was speedily capitalized, and
every townsite was reckoned rich in potential values. The new cities
were founded in unearned increment and prospered with its increase.
With European peasants flocking to the West from their poverty-stricken
countries, and the exploited of the East seeking new openings there,
it was an unlucky speculator who could not exchange his paper values
for substantial equivalents. Law, religion, education, culture,
were pressed into the service of speculation. How widely the spirit
permeated the West is suggested in the experience of Timothy Flint,
frontier missionary. Writing from Saint Charles, Missouri, in 1818, he
commented somewhat bitterly:
Religion, when I came here was considered contemptible. The phalanx
of opposition was in array from one end of the street to the
other. Why did they invite me here? On speculation. A minister--a
church--a school--are words to flourish in an advertisement to sell
lots. (John Ervin Kirkpatrick, _Timothy Flint, etc._, Appendix B,
p. 293.)
From the determining factors, then, of abundant wild lands, rapid
increase in population, and an elastic credit, operating on a vast
scale, came the optimistic, speculative psychology of the new West.
It is the common disease of every period of unstable economics. It
had traveled west with every extension of the frontier; and it became
acute in the Ohio valley in the romantic days following the War of
1812. In colonial times before the upheaval of the Revolution, prices
of land and commodities had been stable. The basic silver currency
varied little in quantity or value; coin was scarce, but the occasional
emission of paper money produced little disturbance, for the reason
that the farmer habitually reckoned his income in the produce of his
farm and fireside. But with the unsettling of exchange values by
the wide use of bank notes, prices at once shifted to a speculative
basis. The familiar commodities ceased to have a fixed use value, and
a cash psychology superseded the traditional commodity value. The old