Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
shared by rural New England, and in consequence the harvest of
unearned increment was rarely reaped from her sterile acres. Except
in the shipping towns there was little economic development. On its
secluded little farms New England was living a narrow parochial life,
cooping up its mind in a rigid theological system and disciplining its
character by a self-denying ordinance. Public affairs were managed
by the squire, for the minister was too busy defending John Calvin
against the Arminians to have a care for much except morality and
dogma. The renaissance became of necessity, therefore, a movement of
liberalism--a vehement protest against the torpor of the dogmatist
whose mind was shut up in a dead system. It was a sudden reawakening
of the ethical passion of Puritanism that had slept for two centuries;
a vision of a new heaven and a new earth that it proposed to take by
storm. It proposed to rid the mind of New England of its decadent
loyalties--the nightmare dreams of Calvinism that debased human
nature, and the counting-house dreams of Federalism that conceived of
man as an exploitative animal. It had discovered anew the beauty of
righteousness, and in the name of righteousness it proposed to throw
off the old tyrannies and create a society wherein the mind should be
free and the soul enjoy its religion. The battle against Calvinism was
only preliminary to greater battles which constituted the intellectual
revolution that marked the renaissance.
It was the New England minister, and the spiritual heirs of the
minister--a group of intellectuals and reformers more notable than
New England had before bred--that gave to the movement its pronounced
ethical quality. It was freedom for individual righteousness that they
sought; not freedom for intellectual epicureanism, for romance, for
aesthetic or pagan beauty. The transcendentalists and reformers had
little time to amuse themselves with such things. They were too eager
for the coming of the kingdom to dawdle over fiction or patronize the
playhouse. They had been bred from their youth up on printer’s ink;
they came of a race that had long respected the printed page. Literary
men by inheritance, they esteemed themselves stewards of a great
cause. In rejecting their fathers’ hell they became the more zealous
to make a heaven of this world; and although the more practical Yankee
was skeptical of their plans and would not suffer them to turn Boston
into a transcendental Utopia, they succeeded in making such a stir as
New England had never before known. For a brief time, at least, liberal
ideas found a welcome in homes where they had hitherto been strangers;
for a brief time the intellectual and not the merchant dominated New
England.
Part One: the Twilight of Federalism
Chapter I • The Passing of the Tie-Wig School
I • Old Boston
The year 1815, that brought to a close the unfortunate American
venture into the maelstrom of the Napoleonic wars, may be conveniently
taken to mark for New England the transition to the nineteenth
century. With the rise of Unitarianism and the development of the new
industrialism, a ruder and more vigorous age entered Boston. It met
with a somewhat chilly reception. The patriarchal eighteenth century
still clung to its warm chimney corner, not liking to be dispossessed
by heirs of whom it testily disapproved. The old order stood on
its dignity, tenacious of its habitual authority. It lived quietly
in an aristocratic past, unregardful of the vigorous commonwealths
rising beyond the Appalachian mountains, and contemptuous of the new
political philosophy that preached the rights of man. A persistent
continuity of temper marked the ruling class, a continuity little
disturbed by the tumultuous revolutions of the past two generations.
Although nearly half the voters of Massachusetts, in the year 1800,
were Jeffersonian republicans, the knowledge of that fact only
stiffened the backbones of the regnant caste. It colored their minds
with a virtuous pessimism, but it edged their temper with the zeal of
righteousness. The Boston mobsters, it would appear, were republican,
and when the present custodians of the ark of decency were gathered
to their fathers, very likely evil days would come upon the land; but
while the righteous lived they would be faithful to their stewardship.
Their own households, at least, they would keep clean of all democratic
pollution; and so Boston and New Haven and Hartford--the capitals
of New England culture--drew about them the garments of Federalist
righteousness. Since the Revolution of ’76 a new authority had risen
on the ruins of the old Tory authority, but in spite of the change
of personnel and outward political forms, the spirit of respectable
New England remained pretty much what it had always been. John Quincy
Adams and Fisher Ames and Josiah Quincy were little different in
character and aims from Thomas Hutchinson and Joseph Sewall and Daniel
Leonard--they were common chips from the tough old New England oak.
High-minded yet narrow; devout yet not emotionally religious; thrifty
yet generous in approved causes; engaged in overseas commerce yet
oddly parochial--they were men fashioned by a rugged environment into
vigorous stock, that would hold tenaciously to what they had got and
would tolerate no insubordination on the part of their social inferiors.
With its twenty-five thousand inhabitants Boston ranked fourth in size
among American cities. Philadelphia, the social capital of America,
was nearly three times as large; New York nearly two and a half times;
and even Baltimore had lately come to exceed her in population. The
economic forces that make for liberalism had become largely impotent.
Free land had long since been exhausted in Massachusetts and social
lines were fixed. The northern frontier of Maine and New Hampshire
was rugged and uninviting, and York State lay to the West. Except in
the Connecticut valley the soil was thin and farming unproductive,
and in consequence the more ambitious turned to commerce and
manufacture which the physical conditions of the country invited. The
dominant interest of Boston was commercial, and the ruling coterie of
merchants and lawyers was narrowly Whiggish. They had modified their
pre-Revolutionary political philosophy no further than to substitute
the word republican for monarchical. The aristocratic temper dominated
the town meetings, and the principle of property rule was commonly
accepted as the essence of political wisdom. In substituting Federalism
for Toryism there was no easing of the restrictions on rebellious
plebeians. Quite repudiated were the rude leveling ways of the great
Revolutionary adventure. Boston gentlemen had come to understand too
well the danger of encouraging the mob, for as Fisher Ames pointed out
in 1787, “The people have turned against their teachers the doctrines,
which were inculcated to effect the late revolution” (_Works_, p.
11). Boston had had enough of revolutions since Daniel Shays had got
up one of his own aimed at the Boston purse, and French Jacobins had
let loose their devastating ideas upon a gullible world. Revolutions
that were not made in Boston, by Boston gentlemen, were quite certain
to be wicked and seditious; and Boston had definitely gone out of the
revolution business. It wanted above all things to undo the mischief
that had already been done, and take back into safe hands the political
power which in the days of revolutionary enthusiasm had been seized by
the agrarian democracy.
In the last decade of the eighteenth century the intellectual isolation
of New England was sharply accentuated and the consequent intellectual
stagnation became more disastrous. In other portions of America French
revolutionary theories of man and society were spreading widely and
shouldering aside the outworn past. A romantic equalitarianism,
based on the doctrine of human perfectibility, was displacing the
traditional economic realism, established on the dogma of total
depravity. The leveling movement, in consequence, was provided with
a persuasive idealism that awakened troublesome aspirations in the
disfranchised majority and gave a strong impetus to the democratic
movement. But New England leaders stood resolutely apart, accounting
all equalitarianism sheer romantic folly. The old stubborn realism held
its ground, interpreting political principles in terms of economics,
and dogmatically maintaining the sacred rights of property. Boston
Federalism refused to have anything to do with “atheistic France,” the
fruitful mother of Jacobin follies. Pollution, it was convinced, must
result from any commerce with infidel and innovating ideas. Gunpowder
that was played with might explode, and New England wanted no blowing
up of her excellent society. Virginia had lent credulous ears to the
voice of France, and the result was the atheist Jefferson and the
rabble of his licentious followers. Massachusetts was not gullible
and it would tolerate no Jeffersonian atheisms. And so instead of
adapting French romantic philosophy to new world needs, seizing upon
its social idealism to leaven the crude American lump--as Jefferson
and Colonel Mason and John Taylor and many another Virginia gentleman
had done--Boston Federalism rejected French ideas in the mass, dubbed
French idealism Jacobinism, and turned back upon a stubborn reaction.
The disastrous consequences of that rejection upon the mind of New
England cannot easily be measured. It is clear enough, nevertheless,
that the renaissance was delayed a full generation, and when it
came it assumed certain provincialisms that greatly lessened its
permanent influence upon the rest of America. The impress of its
contribution upon our national thought has been far less permanent than
that of Virginia, that came a generation earlier and was primarily
economic and political. It is a suggestive fact that in the work
of adapting the new Federal Constitution to democratic ends, New
England contributed no creative leader, none in any way comparable to
Jefferson; but on the contrary her most representative leaders--and
in particular Webster--followed the eighteenth-century tradition in
combating the equalitarian advance in the interest of economic groups.
Some explanation of this fact may be found, perhaps, in the selfish
isolation of New England Federalism, that closed the door on the
liberal thought of France.
In consequence of such isolation Boston became the recognized home of
the philosophy of a stake-in-society. If it clung tenaciously to an
old-fashioned Federalism after it had been abandoned elsewhere, it
was because Boston was more middle-class than Charleston, and had not
learned from experience with Jacksonianism how easily the majority will
may be shaped and controlled to particular ends. It inherited the old
Tory contempt for democracy and relied on the old stock arguments to
combat it. Its habitual tone was one of virtuous arrogance. The one
great and ever-present fear that haunted the pillows of worthy Boston
merchants and turned their dreams to nightmares, was fear of the mob
getting out of hand; and democracy, for them, was only a euphemism
for the mob--the ever-present menace to sober and decent government.
In the judgment of Theodore Dwight, brother of Timothy, “there could
be nothing more dreadful this side of hell.” Nowhere else in America
did the reaction against the democratic ideal carry so far as in
Boston. The church and the merchant associations joined with polite
society to cry it down, and upon the head of the democrat fell the
most extravagant vituperation. For a generation few respectable New
Englanders raised their voices in defense of democracy, but gentlemen
of principle and property followed the lead of the little clique that