The American Language
particularly in New England, where the so-called codfish aristocracy
(by no means extinct, even today) exhibited an undisguised Anglomania,
and looked forward confidently to a /rapprochement/ with the mother
country.[3] This Anglomania showed itself, not only in ceaseless
political agitation, but also in an elaborate imitation of English
manners. We have already seen, on Noah Webster's authority, how it
even extended to the pronunciation of the language.
The first sign of the dawn of a new national order came with the
election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency in 1800. The issue in
the campaign was a highly complex one, but under it lay a plain
conflict between democratic independence and the [Pg065] old doctrine
of dependence and authority; and with the Alien and Sedition Laws
about his neck, so vividly reminiscent of the issues of the Revolution
itself, Adams went down to defeat. Jefferson was violently
anti-British and pro-French; he saw all the schemes of his political
opponents, indeed, as English plots; he was the man who introduced the
bugaboo into American politics. His first acts after his inauguration
were to abolish all ceremonial at the court of the republic, and to
abandon spoken discourses to Congress for written messages. That
ceremonial, which grew up under Washington, was an imitation, he
believed, of the formality of the abhorrent Court of St. James; as for
the speeches to Congress, they were palpably modelled upon the
speeches from the throne of the English kings. Both reforms met with
wide approval; the exactions of the English, particularly on the high
seas, were beginning to break up the British party. But confidence in
the solidarity and security of the new nation was still anything but
universal. The surviving doubts, indeed, were strong enough to delay
the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution,
providing for more direct elections of President and Vice-President,
until the end of 1804, and even then three of the five New England
states rejected it,[4] and have never ratified it, in fact, to this
day. Democracy was still experimental, doubtful, full of gunpowder. In
so far as it had actually come into being, it had come as a boon
conferred from above. Jefferson, its protagonist, was the hero of the
populace, but he was not of the populace himself, nor did he ever
quite trust it.
It was reserved for Andrew Jackson, a man genuinely of the people, to
lead and visualize the rise of the lower orders. Jackson, in his way,
was the archetype of the new American--ignorant, pushful, impatient of
restraint and precedent, an iconoclast, a Philistine, an Anglophobe in
every fibre. He came from the extreme backwoods and his youth was
passed amid surroundings but little removed from downright
savagery.[5] [Pg066] Thousands of other young Americans like him were
growing up at the same time--youngsters filled with a vast impatience
of all precedent and authority, revilers of all that had come down
from an elder day, incorrigible libertarians. They swarmed across the
mountains and down the great rivers, wrestling with the naked
wilderness and setting up a casual, impromptu sort of civilization
where the Indian still menaced. Schools were few and rudimentary;
there was not the remotest approach to a cultivated society; any
effort to mimic the amenities of the East, or of the mother country,
in manner or even in speech, met with instant derision. It was in
these surroundings and at this time that the thorough-going American
of tradition was born: blatant, illogical, elate, "greeting the
embarrassed gods" uproariously and matching "with Destiny for beers."
Jackson was unmistakably of that company in his every instinct and
idea, and it was his fate to give a new and unshakable confidence to
its aspiration at the Battle of New Orleans. Thereafter all doubts
began to die out; the new republic was turning out a success. And with
success came a vast increase in the national egoism. The hordes of
pioneers rolled down the western valleys and on to the great
plains.[6] America began to stand for something quite new in the
world--in government, in law, in public and private morals, in customs
and habits of mind, in the minutia of social intercourse. And
simultaneously the voice of America began to take on its
characteristic twang, and the speech of America began to differentiate
itself boldly and unmistakably from the speech of England. The average
Philadelphian or Bostonian of 1790 had not the slightest difficulty in
making himself understood by a visiting Englishman. But the average
Ohio boatman of 1810 or plainsman of 1815 was already speaking a
dialect that the Englishman would have shrunk from as barbarous and
unintelligible, and before long it began to leave [Pg067] its mark
upon and to get direction and support from a distinctively national
literature.
That literature, however, was very slow in coming to a dignified,
confident and autonomous estate. Down to Jefferson's day it was almost
wholly polemical, and hence lacking in the finer values; he himself,
an insatiable propagandist and controversialist, was one of its chief
ornaments. "The novelists and the historians, the essayists and the
poets, whose names come to mind when American literature is
mentioned," says a recent literary historian, "have all flourished
since 1800."[7] Pickering, so late as 1816, said that "in this country
we can hardly be said to have any authors by profession." It was a
true saying, though the new day was about to dawn; Bryant had already
written "Thanatopsis" and was destined to publish it the year
following. Difficulties of communication hampered the circulation of
the few native books that were written; it was easier for a man in the
South to get books from London than to get them from Boston or New
York, and the lack of a copyright treaty with England flooded the
country with cheap English editions. "It is much to be regretted,"
wrote Dr. David Ramsay, of Charleston, S. C., to Noah Webster in 1806,
"that there is so little intercourse in a literary way between the
states. As soon as a book of general utility comes out in any state it
should be for sale in all of them." Ramsay asked for little; the most
he could imagine was a sale of 2,000 copies for an American work in
America. But even that was far beyond the possibilities of the time.
An external influence of great potency helped to keep the national
literature scant and timorous during those early and perilous days. It
was the extraordinary animosity of the English critics, then at the
zenith of their pontifical authority, to all books of American origin
or flavor. This animosity, culminating in Sydney Smith's famous
sneer,[8] was but part of a [Pg068] larger hostility to all things
American, from political theories to table manners. The American,
after the war of 1812, became the pet abomination of the English, and
the chief butt of the incomparable English talent for moral
indignation. There was scarcely an issue of the /Quarterly Review/,
the /Edinburgh/, the /Foreign Quarterly/, the /British Review/ or
/Blackwood's/, for a generation following 1814, in which he was not
stupendously assaulted. Gifford, Sydney Smith and the poet Southey
became specialists in this business; it took on the character of a
holy war; even such mild men as Wordsworth were recruited for it. It
was argued that the Americans were rogues and swindlers, that they
lived in filth and squalor, that they were boors in social
intercourse, that they were poltroons and savages in war, that they
were depraved and criminal, that they were wholly devoid of the
remotest notion of decency or honor. The /Foreign Quarterly/, summing
up in January, 1844, pronounced them "horn-handed and pig-headed,
hard, persevering, unscrupulous, carnivorous, with a genius for
lying." Various Americans went to the defense of their countrymen,
among them, Irving, Cooper, Timothy Dwight, J. K. Paulding, John Neal,
Edward Everett and Robert Walsh. Paulding, in "John Bull in America,
or, the New Munchausen," published in 1825, attempted satire. Even an
Englishman, James Sterling, warned his fellow-Britons that, if they
continued their intolerant abuse, they would "turn into bitterness the
last drops of good-will toward England that exist in the United
States." But the avalanche of denunciation kept up, and even down to a
few years ago it was very uncommon for an Englishman to write of
American politics, or manners, or literature without betraying his
dislike. Not, indeed, until the Prussian began monopolizing the whole
British talent for horror and invective did the Yankee escape the
lash.[9]
This gigantic pummelling, in the long run, was destined to encourage
an independent spirit in the national literature, if [Pg069] only by
a process of mingled resentment and despair, but for some time its
chief effect was to make American writers of a more delicate
aspiration extremely self-conscious and diffident. The educated
classes, even against their will, were influenced by the torrent of
abuse; they could not help finding in it an occasional reasonableness,
an accidental true hit. The result, despite the efforts of Channing,
Knapp and other such valiant defenders of the native author, was
uncertainty and skepticism in native criticism. "The first step of an
American entering upon a literary career," says Lodge, writing of the
first quarter of the century, "was to pretend to be an Englishman in
order that he might win the approval, not of Englishmen, but of his
own countrymen." Cooper, in his first novel, "Precaution," chose an
English scene, imitated English models, and obviously hoped to placate
the critics thereby. Irving, too, in his earliest work, showed a
considerable discretion, and his "History of New York," as everyone
knows, was first published anonymously. But this puerile spirit did
not last long. The English onslaughts were altogether too vicious to
be received lying down; their very fury demanded that they be met with
a united and courageous front. Cooper, in his second novel, "The Spy,"
boldly chose an American setting and American characters, and though
the influence of his wife, who came of a Loyalist family, caused him
to avoid any direct attack upon the English, he attacked them
indirectly, and with great effect, by opposing an immediate and
honorable success to their derisions. "The Spy" ran through three
editions in four months; it was followed by his long line of
thoroughly American novels; in 1834 he formally apologized to his
countrymen for his early truancy in "Precaution." Irving, too, soon
adopted a bolder tone, and despite his English predilections, he
refused an offer of a hundred guineas for an article for the
/Quarterly Review/, made by Gifford in 1828, on the ground that "the
/Review/ has been so persistently hostile to our country that I cannot
draw a pen in its service."
The same year saw the publication of the first edition of [Pg070]
Webster's American Dictionary of the English language, and a year
later followed Samuel L. Knapp's "Lectures on American Literature,"
the first history of the national letters ever attempted. Knapp, in
his preface, thought it necessary to prove, first of all, that an
American literature actually existed, and Webster, in his
introduction, was properly apologetic, but there was no real need for
timorousness in either case, for the American attitude toward the
attack of the English was now definitely changing from uneasiness to
defiance. The English critics, in fact, had overdone the thing, and
though their clatter was to keep up for many years more, they no
longer spread terror or had much influence. Of a sudden, as if in
answer to them, doubts turned to confidence, and then into the wildest