Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
that was running through the country, and it quickly outdistanced its
rivals in the race for financial supremacy.
The changes that came to New York in the last years of the old century
were enough to muddle a head stronger than Rip Van Winkle’s. The quiet
ways of colonial times were gone, and in their stead was a restless
activity that had no leisure for its pipe and mug in the sleepy tavern.
Business and politics could not wait on men who like Wouter Van Twiller
pickled their dreams in tobacco smoke. The bewilderment of old Rip
on his return from the hills was the bewilderment of the colonial
mind in the presence of a new order. When Washington came to New York
to assume the presidency, the town contained approximately 29,000
inhabitants, some two thousand of whom were slaves. Fifty years later
the census of 1840 set down its population as 312,710. In 1789 Albany
was a Dutch village of four or five thousand, and a few miles to the
West lay an unbroken wilderness. Within the narrow zone of the quiet
settlements old and new dwelt in close proximity. The most feudal of
American aristocracies fringed the banks of the Hudson from Albany to
Manhattan; and reaching out through the Mohawk valley that aristocracy
was laying a network of speculative land-holdings through which a flood
of Yankee pioneers was making its way from the long-settled lands of
Connecticut and Massachusetts. The frontier was close at hand; the
leveling spirit was near neighbor to the feudal; potential economic
rivalries were becoming actual, and the days of a static, power-proud
Dutch aristocracy were numbered. The spirit that had dominated the
commonwealth from its founding was tenacious of life, but on January
26, 1839, died Stephen Van Rensselaer, last of the Patroons, courteous,
dignified, a worthy embodiment of the old patriarchal virtues, who
had outlived his age; and hard upon his death came the final break-up
of the traditional order. The small men got the land they had long
tilled and the influence of the Dutch gentry slowly disintegrated.
A new order was rising that had discovered shorter roads to wealth
than feudal rents. While the more energetic of the old order, men
like Gouverneur Morris and Judge William Cooper, were deep in land
speculation, in Manhattan a new aristocracy of capitalism was rising.
Wall Street was losing the distinction of housing the most exclusive
of the landed gentry, to gain a greater distinction as the home of
the new aristocracy of credit. By 1825 the rise of industrialism, the
development of banking, the completion of the Erie Canal, the influx
of proletarian immigrants, and the drift of population to the towns
had fixed the destiny of the city. In becoming the chief repository of
the new capitalism New York had become the first and greatest of our
middle-class capitals.
Of this new Manhattan the representative citizen was a man whose
aggressive ambitions differentiated him sharply from Stephen Van
Rensselaer, and whose dramatic career of exploitation seemed to
Washington Irving to embody the romantic potentialities of America.
John Jacob Astor was to the New York of 1825 what Robert Morris had
been to Philadelphia a generation before--an evidence of the wealth
that was to be got by those who would boldly exploit the vast resources
of America. A German immigrant who landed in America with small funds,
immediately following the Peace of Paris, Astor embarked in the fur
trade, acquired a fortune which he invested in Manhattan land, and
then laid his plans to engage in a great venture in imperialism.
Stirred by the Lewis and Clarke expedition, he proposed to explore
the virgin resources of the far Pacific Northwest. With the tacit
approval of the government he undertook the hazardous project of the
Astoria settlement, sent his agent to the Russian posts of Alaska, and
by subsidizing an army of trappers proposed to gather the peltries of
the entire Northwest for the rich Canton market. It was a grandiose
conception worthy of a feudal baron of commerce. It was knit up
with dreams of conquest; it necessarily entailed open warfare with
the English companies whose ambitions were equally grandiose; it
was certain to be attended by bitter hardships on the part of the
venturesome agents to whom it was intrusted; and the outcome was
uncertain as a gambler’s chance. Irving has thrown over his narrative
of the great venture a glamour of patriotism; to him it appeared as
a plan of empire building; but whether patriotism or profit was the
determining impulse in the mind of John Jacob Astor, the settlement of
Astoria suggests the romantic aspirations that were making over the
lethargic world of Dutch Manhattan, in the venturesome days of the new
capitalism. Stephen Van Rensselaer and John Jacob Astor would have had
difficulty in understanding each other.
II
In sharp contrast with Boston, New York was wanting in intellectual
background and intellectual stimulus. It had never gone to school to
dogmatic theology and neither clergy nor laity had been disciplined by
a severe Puritan regimen. Gentlemen were little given to metaphysical
speculation and the subtleties of creed never provided the staple of
talk in the farmer’s kitchen. The terrors of hell rarely troubled the
sluggish imagination of the Dutch, and the extraordinary stimulus that
came to the serious-minded New Englander from long contemplation of
the ways of God, was lacking amongst a more prosaic people. No other
stimulus supplied the want and in consequence ideas and books were
held in low esteem and the things of the mind suffered. The English
gentry commonly sent their sons to the English universities, but the
Dutch by common report seem to have been indifferent to schooling
and opportunities for education were sadly inadequate. The result
was a low plane of intellectual life, which even in Cooper’s time
was remarked by him. There were brilliant and cultivated intellects,
wits like Gouverneur Morris and statesmen like John Jay; yet even
under the stimulus of Revolutionary and Constitutional controversy
the contribution of New York to political theory was far slighter
than that of New England or Virginia. _The Federalist_ was its single
notable production, and even in that the papers of Madison were no
inconsiderable part. As a commercial port it attracted young men
ambitious to rise in the world of affairs rather than in the world of
letters. Unlike Philadelphia it had never been a cosmopolitan meeting
ground for aspiring young intellectuals and purveyors of polite
culture, nor an important center of printers, publishers and book
dealers. Aside from Philip Freneau, who had long since established
himself in New Jersey when he was not at sea, it had contributed little
to pure literature, or even to the political satire that deluged
Philadelphia. As a creative center it ranked far below Hartford,
Connecticut, where in the seventeen-eighties and nineties wit had
become a staple commodity for export. And yet despite its intellectual
lethargy it was a pleasant little town, with a note of cosmopolitanism
that rendered life amongst the upper classes genial and urbane. The
spirit of aristocracy was as yet little weakened by alien newcomers
from the more republican New England, and city and commonwealth were
ruled by a little group of old-fashioned gentlemen who upheld the rigid
Federalism of the tie-wig school.
In the year 1800 the political leaders of the state were men of long
established reputations, Hamilton, Jay, Gouverneur Morris, Rufus
King, with whom was closely associated the brilliant lawyer James
Kent, afterward Chancellor. Only two of the five were of the older
New York stock: Rufus King was from Maine, Hamilton from the West
Indies, and Kent was of Yankee Presbyterian ancestry. Politics were
already becoming turmoiled by faction, with bitter cleavages and
vindictive struggles for the spoils of office that sadly confused the
logic of the earlier alignment. The old Federalist party was led by
the distinguished gentlemen named above; the Democratic party was led
by the Livingstons and Clintons; and outside both was the ambitious
Aaron Burr who played a lone hand against the field. After the death of
Hamilton the disintegration of the old parties went forward rapidly.
The Livingstons and Clintons broke, and a fierce political feud arose
between them. The former were accounted the true Jeffersonians, but
under the name of Lewisites they drifted towards the Federalist
remnant; the Burrites went to pieces after the disgrace of their
leader; and the Clintonians remained masters of the field, with a
motley support drawn from Tammany Hall Irish, Wall Street bankers, and
odds and ends of all factions. From this sordid situation, rendered
conspicuous by the extension of suffrage under the new constitution,
emerged two master politicians, adepts in all the arts of party
manipulation, who exploited the prejudices of the voting masses in a
way to justify the gloomy fear of demagoguery that haunted the minds of
the old Federalists. Martin Van Buren and Thurlow Weed, Democrat and
Whig, were finished products of the new school of practical politicians
who held that office-holding was the great end of partisan struggle,
and that principles must not stand in the way of success.
III
Through this fierce scramble of rival politicians moved a scholarly
figure who preserved to the last the dignity and distinction of an
earlier age. James Kent, whose long life and ripe legal learning were
devoted to upholding what he conceived to be the ultimate principles
of law and politics, was the chief political thinker of the transition
days of New York. A disciple of Locke and Blackstone, remodeling
seventeenth-century liberalism into eighteenth-century conservatism,
he was concerned to erect the barriers of the Common Law about the
unsurveyed frontiers of the American experiment, assigning exact
metes and bounds beyond which it should not go. Like John Marshall
and Joseph Story he was expert in devising legal springes to catch
unwary democrats, and while the Jeffersonians were shouting over their
victories at the polls, he was engaged in the strategic work of placing
the Constitution under the narrow custodianship of the English law.
An ardent Federalist and later an equally ardent Whig, he reveals in
his precise thinking the intimate relations that everywhere exist
between economics, politics, and legal principles. With John Adams he
accepted the dictum of Locke that “the great and chief end ... of men’s
uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government,
is the preservation of their property”; and believing that the English
Common Law was the securest of all agencies devised to safeguard the
subject in the enjoyment of his property rights, he made no difficulty
in imposing that law upon the Constitution, circumscribing the
written document by Common Law fences. Government he conceived to be
a patriarchal institution erected for the single purpose of coercing
the vicious, and as such it must remain in the hands of the good, the
wise and the wealthy. It did not need the authoritative pronouncement
of his great master to convince him that the wealthy included the good
and wise. Observation of the “barbarian Jackson” and his rude followers
was enough to convince him of the truth of the fact. “All theories of
government that suppose the mass of the people virtuous,” he wrote to
Webster, “and able and willing to act virtuously, are plainly utopian,
and will remain so until the Saturnian age” (William Kent, _Memoirs and
Letters of James Kent_, p. 207). Profoundly distrustful of democracy,
he brought all his wide reading in the history of ancient and medieval
republics to demonstrate the favorite Federalist conviction--a