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THROUGHOUT the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the United States, though forming a political entity, were in everything but name divided into three separate nations, each one of which was quite unlike the other two. This difference sprang partly from the character of the population in each, partly from divergent tendencies in American colonial development, and partly from conditions which were the result of both these causes. The culture-history, therefore, of each of the three sections exhibits, naturally enough, a distinct and definite phase of intellectual activity, which is reflected very clearly in the records of American literature.

In the Southern States, just as in the Southern colonies out of which they grew, the population was homogeneous and of English stock. Almost the sole occupation of the people was agriculture, while the tone of society was markedly aristocratic, as was to be expected from a community dominated by great landowners who were also the masters of many slaves. These landowners, living on their estates rather than in towns and cities, caring nothing for commerce or for manufactures, separated from one another by great distances, and cherishing the intensely conservative traditions of that England which saw the last of the reigning Stuarts, were inevitably destined to intellectual stagnation. The management of their plantations, the pleasures of the chase, and the exercise of a splendid though half-barbaric hospitality, satisfied the ideals which they had inherited from their Tory ancestors. Horses and hounds, a full-blooded conviviality, and the exercise of a semi-feudal power, occupied their minds and sufficiently diverted them. Such an atmosphere was distinctly unfavourable to the development of a love of letters and of learning. The Southern gentleman regarded the general diffusion of education as a menace to his class; while for himself he thought it more or less unnecessary. He gained a practical knowledge of affairs by virtue of his position. As for culture, he had upon the shelves of his library, where also were displayed his weapons and the trophies of the chase, a few hundred volumes of the standard essayists, poets, and dramatists of a century before. If he seldom read them and never added to them, they at least implied a recognition of polite learning and such a degree of literary taste as befitted a Virginian or Carolinian gentleman. But, practically, English literature had for him come to an end with Addison and Steele and Pope and their contemporaries. The South stood still in the domain of letters and education. Not that there were lacking men who cherished the ambition to make for themselves a name in literature. There were many such, among whom Gayarré, Beverly, and Byrd deserve an honourable remembrance; but their surroundings were unfavourable, and denied to them that intelligent appreciation which inspires the man of letters to press on to fresh achievement. An interesting example is found in the abortive history of Virginia undertaken by Dr. William Stith, who was President of William and Mary College, and who possessed not only scholarship but the gift of literary expression. The work which he began, however, was left unfinished, because of an utter lack of interest on the part of the public for whom it had been undertaken. Dr. Stith's own quaint comment throws a light upon contemporary conditions. He had laboured diligently in collecting documents which represented original sources of information; yet, when he came to publish the first and only volume of his history, he omitted many of them, giving as his reason:—

"I perceive, to my no small Surprise and Mortification, that some of my Countrymen (and those too, Persons of high Fortune and Distinction) seemed to be much alarmed, and to grudge, that a complete History of their own Country would run to more than one Volume, and cost them above half a Pistole. I was, therefore, obliged to restrain my Hand, … for fear of enhancing the Price, to the immense Charge and irreparable Damage of such generous and publick-spirited Gentlemen."[1]

The Southern universities were meagrely attended; and though the sons of wealthy planters might sometimes be sent to Oxford or, more usually, to Princeton or to Yale, the discipline thus acquired made no general impression upon the class to which they belonged. In fact, the intellectual energy of the South found its only continuous and powerful expression in the field of politics. To government and statesmanship its leading minds gave much attention, for only thus could they retain in national affairs the supremacy which they arrogated to themselves and which was necessary to preserve their peculiar institution. Hence, there were to be found among the leaders of the Southern people a few political philosophers like Jefferson, a larger number of political casuists like Calhoun, and a swarm of political rhetoricians like Patrick Henry, Hayne, Legaré, and Yancey. But beyond the limits of political life the South was intellectually sterile. So narrowing and so hostile to liberal culture were its social conditions that even to this day it has not produced a single man of letters who can be truthfully described as eminent, unless the name of Edgar Allan Poe be cited as an exception whose very brilliance serves only to prove and emphasise the rule.

In the Middle States, on the other hand, a very different condition of things existed. Here the population was never homogeneous. The English Royalists and the Dutch in New York, the English Quakers and the Germans in Pennsylvania and the Swedes in Delaware, made inevitable, from the very first, a cosmopolitanism that favoured variety of interests, with a resulting breadth of view and liberality of thought. Manufactures flourished and foreign commerce was extensively pursued, insuring diversity of occupation. The two chief cities of the nation were here, and not far distant from each other. Wealth was not unevenly distributed, and though the patroon system had created in New York a landed gentry, this class was small, and its influence was only one of many. Comfort was general, religious freedom was unchallenged, education was widely and generally diffused. The large urban population created an atmosphere of urbanity. Even in colonial times, New York and Philadelphia were the least provincial of American towns. They attracted to themselves, not only the most interesting people from the other sections, but also many a European wanderer, who found there most of the essential graces of life, with little or none of that combined austerity and rawness which elsewhere either disgusted or amused him. We need not wonder, then, if it was in the Middle States that American literature really found its birth, or if the forms which it there assumed were those which are touched by wit and grace and imagination. Franklin, frozen and repelled by what he thought the bigotry of Boston, sought very early in his life the more congenial atmosphere of Philadelphia, where he found a public for his copious writings, which, if not precisely literature, were, at any rate, examples of strong, idiomatic English, conveying the shrewd philosophy of an original mind. Charles Brockden Brown first blazed the way in American fiction with six novels, amid whose turgid sentences and strange imaginings one may here and there detect a touch of genuine power and a striving after form. Washington Irving, with his genial humour and well-bred ease, was the very embodiment of the spirit of New York. Even Professor Barrett Wendell, whose critical bias is wholly in favour of New England, declares that Irving was the first of American men of letters, as he was certainly the first American writer to win a hearing outside of his own country. And to these we may add still others—Freneau, from whom both Scott and Campbell borrowed; Cooper, with his stirring sea-tales and stories of Indian adventure; and Bryant, whose early verses were thought to be too good to have been written by an American. And there were also Drake and Halleck and Woodworth and Paine, some of whose poetry still continues to be read and quoted. The mention of them serves as a reminder that American literature in the nineteenth century, like English literature in the fourteenth, found its origin where wealth, prosperity, and a degree of social elegance made possible an appreciation of belles-lettres.

Far different was it in New England. There, as in the South, the population was homogeneous and English. But it was a Puritan population, of which the environment and the conditions of its life retarded, and at the same time deeply influenced, the evolution of its literature. One perceives a striking parallel between the early history of the people of New England and that of the people of ancient Rome. Each was forced to wrest a living from a rugged soil. Each dwelt in constant danger from formidable enemies. The Roman was ready at every moment to draw his sword for battle with Faliscans, Samnites, or Etruscans. The New Englander carried his musket with him even to the house of prayer, fearing the attack of Pequots or Narragansetts. The exploits of such half-mythical Roman heroes as Camillus and Cincinnatus find their analogue in the achievements credited to Miles Standish and the doughty Captain Church. Early Rome knew little of the older and more polished civilisation of Greece. New England was separated by vast distances from the richer life of Europe. In Rome, as in New England, religion was linked closely with all the forms of government; and it was a religion which appealed more strongly to men's sense of duty and to their fears, than to their softer feelings. The Roman gods needed as much propitiation as did the God of Jonathan Edwards. When a great calamity befell the Roman people, they saw in it the wrath of their divinities precisely as the true New Englander was taught to view it as a "providence." In both commonwealths, education of an elementary sort was deemed essential; but it was long before it reached the level of illumination.

Like influences yield like results. The Roman character, as moulded in the Republic's early years, was one of sternness and efficiency. It lacked gayety, warmth, and flexibility. And the New England character resembled it in all of these respects. The historic worthies of Old Rome would have been very much at ease in early Massachusetts. Cato the Censor could have hobnobbed with old Josiah Quincy, for they were temperamentally as like as two peas. It is only the Romans of the Empire who would have felt out of place in a New England environment. Horace might conceivably have found a smiling angulus terrarum somewhere on the lower Hudson, but he would have pined away beside the Nashua; while to Ovid, Beacon Street would have seemed as ghastly as the frozen slopes of Tomi. And when we compare the native period of Roman literature with the early years of New England's literary history, the parallel becomes more striking still. In New England, as in Rome, beneath all the forms of a self-governing and republican State, there existed a genuine aristocracy whose prestige was based on public service of some sort; and in New England, as in Rome, public service had in it a theocratic element. In civil life, the most honourable occupation for a free citizen was to share in this public service. Hence, the disciplines which had a direct relation to government were the only civic disciplines to be held in high consideration. Such an attitude profoundly affected the earliest attempts at literature. The two literary or semi-literary pursuits which have a close relation to statesmanship are oratory and history—oratory, which is the statesman's instrument, and history, which is in part the record of his achievements. Therefore, at Rome, a line of native orators arose before a native poet won a hearing, and therefore, too, the annalists and chroniclers precede the dramatists.

In New England it was much the same. Almost from the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, there were men among the colonists who wrote down with diffusive dulness the records of whatever they had seen and suffered. Governor William Bradford composed a history of New England; and Thomas Prince, minister of the Old South Church, compiled another work of like title, described by its author as told "in the Form of Annals." Hutchinson prepared a history of Massachusetts Bay; and many others had collected local traditions, which seemed to them of great moment, and had preserved them in books, or else in manuscripts which were long afterwards to be published by zealous antiquarians. Cotton Mather's curious Magnalia, printed in 1700, was intended by its author to be history, though strictly speaking it is theological and is clogged with inappropriate learning,—Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The parallel between early Rome and early Massachusetts breaks down, however, when we consider the natural temperament of the two peoples as distinct from that which external circumstances cultivated in them. Underneath the sternness and severity which were the fruits of Puritanism, there existed in the New England character a touch of spirituality, of idealism, and of imagination such as were always foreign to the Romans. Under the repression of a grim theocracy, New England idealism still found its necessary outlet in more than one strange form. We can trace it in the hot religious eloquence of Edwards even better than in the imitative poetry of Mrs. Bradstreet. It is to be found even in such strange panics as that which shrieked for the slaying of the Salem "witches." Time alone was needed to bring tolerance and intellectual freedom, and with them a freer choice of literary themes and moods. The New England temper remained, and still remains, a serious one; yet ultimately it was to find expression in forms no longer harsh and rigid, but modelled upon the finer lines of truth and beauty.

The development was a gradual one. The New England spirit still exacted sober subjects of its writers. And so the first evolution of New England literature took place along the path of historical composition. The subjects were still local or, at the most, national; but there was a steady drift away from the annalistic method to one which partook of conscious art. In the writings of Jared Sparks there is seen imperfectly the scientific spirit, entirely self-developed and self-trained. His laborious collections of historical material, and his dry but accurate biographies, mark a distinct advance beyond his predecessors. Here, at least, are historical scholarship and, in the main, a conscientious scrupulosity in documentation. It is true that Sparks was charged, and not quite unjustly, with garbling some of the material which he preserved; yet, on the whole, one sees in him the founder of a school of American historians. What he wrote was history, if it was not literature. George Bancroft, his contemporary, wrote history, and was believed for a time to have written it in literary form. To-day his six huge volumes, which occupied him fifty years in writing, and which bring the reader only to the inauguration of Washington, make but slight appeal to a cultivated taste. The work is at once too ponderous and too rhetorical. Still, in its way, it marks another step.

Up to this time, however, American historians were writing only for a restricted public. They had not won a hearing beyond the country whose early history they told. Their themes possessed as yet no interest for foreign nations, where the feeble American Republic was little known and little noticed. The republican experiment was still a doubtful one, and there was nothing in the somewhat paltry incidents of its early years to rivet the attention of the other hemisphere. "America" was a convenient term to denote an indefinite expanse of territory somewhere beyond seas. A London bishop could write to a clergyman in New York and ask him for details about the work of a missionary in Newfoundland without suspecting the request to be absurd. The British War Office could believe the river Bronx a mighty stream, the crossing of which was full of strategic possibilities. As for the American people, they interested Europe about as much as did the Boers in the days of the early treks. Even so acute an observer as Talleyrand, after visiting the United States, carried away with him only a general impression of rusticity and bad manners. When Napoleon asked him what he thought of the Americans, he summed up his opinion with a shrug: Sire, ce sont des fiers cochons et des cochons fiers. Tocqueville alone seems to have viewed the nascent nation with the eye of prescience. For the rest, petty skirmishes with Indians, a few farmers defending a rustic bridge, and a somewhat discordant gathering of planters, country lawyers, and drab-clad tradesmen held few suggestions of the picturesque and, to most minds, little that was significant to the student of politics and institutional history.

There were, however, other themes, American in a larger sense, which contained within themselves all the elements of the romantic, while they closely linked the ambitions of old Europe with the fortunes and the future of the New World. The narration of these might well appeal to that interest which the more sober annals of England in America wholly failed to rouse. There was the story of New France, which had for its background a setting of savage nature, while in the foreground was fought out the struggle between Englishmen and Frenchmen, at grips in a feud perpetuated through the centuries. There was the story of Spanish conquest in the south—a true romance of chivalry, which had not yet been told in all its richness of detail. To choose a subject of this sort, and to develop it in a fitting way, was to write at once for the Old World and the New. The task demanded scholarship, and presented formidable difficulties. The chief sources of information were to be found in foreign lands. To secure them needed wealth. To compare and analyse and sift them demanded critical judgment of a high order. And something more was needed—a capacity for artistic presentation. When both these gifts were found united in a single mind, historical writing in New England had passed beyond the confines of its early crudeness and had reached the stage where it claimed rank as lasting literature. Rightly viewed, the name of William Hickling Prescott is something more than a mere landmark in the field of historical composition. It signalises the beginning of a richer growth in New England letters—the coming of a time when the barriers of a Puritan scholasticism were broken down. Prescott is not merely the continuator of Sparks. He is the precursor of Hawthorne and Parkman and Lowell. He takes high rank among American historians; but he is enrolled as well in a still more illustrious group by virtue of his literary fame.