Part 4

The moment that the Edinburg Review was thus dealing our fathers these heavy blows seemed to be the real starting point in our career of literary greatness. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James K. Paulding, Richard H. Dana, James Fenimore Cooper, Mrs. Sigourney and a host of others were giving direction to that stream of literature that has since flowed broad and free over our land, imparting life and vigor and beauty to our society and institutions. It is, however, anterior to the year 1820, the thirty or forty years of our national independence, during which Mr. Smith says we have done “absolutely nothing” in literature, science or art, to which we must more particularly advert. The literary product of those years was scanty enough, it is true. The student of this period will not find much, and not all of that of the first order, to reward his labor—not much, at least, as compared with other nations at the same time. But may there not have been some sufficient reason for this, outside of any downright intellectual deficiencies on the part of our fathers? Let us for a moment consider the condition of things at that time in this country.

In the first place, at the time referred to, the citizens of the United States were in a daily struggle with the material difficulties of their situation. The country was new. The region west and north of the Ohio and Mississippi was yet an almost unbroken wilderness, while the country east and south of those rivers was but sparsely populated. At the same time the tide of immigration was sweeping into the country, and with it all the rush and turmoil incident to life in a new country was going on. Forests were to be cut down; farms were to be cleared up; houses were to be built; roads were to be made; bridges were to be thrown across the rivers; while a livelihood was to be compelled from the forests, the streams, and the fields. The conditions of a new country are not favorable to the cultivation of the arts, of sciences, or of literature. Why do not Englishmen twit the people of Australia because during the past forty or fifty years in which they have prospered so greatly in material things, they have not produced a Macaulay, a Tennyson, a Gladstone, a Tyndall, or a Huxley? It would be just as fair to do it.

Not only was there this hand to hand contest with their physical environment, but the political conditions were also unfavorable to any general dalliance with the Muses. Only in times of tranquility and ease is it possible.

“To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair.”

The country at the period referred to, had just emerged from a long and exhausting war. Society was almost broken up; the arts of peace were well nigh forgotten; the finances were in almost hopeless confusion; the form of government was unsettled, and scarcely yet determined upon. The first thing to do was to evolve some system and some security out of this chaos. Politics alone occupied the moments of leisure. When, finally, authority had crystallized into definite government the people were not allowed to be at rest. Murderous wars with the Indians on the frontiers; the machinations of French emissaries; British oppression of American commerce, and at length another long and bloody war with England, harassed the minds of the people, and prevented them from giving themselves up more generally to the kindly and refining influences of literature and art. When we consider all the circumstances in the case, there seems a degree of severity in Sydney Smith’s sneers and taunts.

But though circumstances were thus unfavorable to the cultivation of letters, yet something was done in this direction nevertheless. Smith refers flippantly enough to Dwight, Jefferson, Barlow and Irving. But besides these there were others, not brilliant luminaries perhaps, yet stars shining in the darkness according to their orders and degrees. We do not design here to enter upon any discussion of their respective merits, but we may mention as a writer of that period no less a character than George Washington, whose greatness in other spheres of life has entirely eclipsed any fame of which he may be worthy as an author, yet whose Farewell Address alone would entitle him to a place among the most accurate writers of English. Among others we may name John Adams, whose pen was scarcely less eloquent than his tongue; Francis Hopkinson, author of The Battle of the Kegs and many other pieces, of which it has been said, that “while they are fully equal to any of Swift’s writings for wit, they have nothing at all in them of Swift’s vulgarity;” Dr. Benjamin Rush, a distinguished writer on medical and social topics; John Trumbull, the author of McFingal and The Progress of Dullness; James Madison, afterward President of the United States, one of the ablest writers in The Federalist; Philip Freneau, a poet of the Revolution and the period immediately following; Alexander Hamilton, a contributor to The Federalist, and one of the clearest of political writers; Joseph Dennie, the author of The Lay Preacher, and editor of The Portfolio; Joseph Hopkinson, author of Hail, Columbia; Charles Brockden Brown, author of Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, and other works, and who was perhaps the first American who wholly devoted his life to literary pursuits; William Wirt, author of the British Spy, the Life of Patrick Henry, and other works; and Lyman Beecher, the author of a work on Political Atheism, anti several volumes of sermons and public addresses. This list might easily be extended, but its length as it now stands, as well as the merits of the writers adduced, is sufficient to contradict effectually the statement that America had “no native literature,” and that during the thirty or forty years immediately subsequent to the Revolution she had done “absolutely nothing” for polite letters. Much of this early literature still remains, and is read; many of these authors are still familiar to this generation, and it is generally admitted that the writer whose fame survives a century is assured of a literary immortality. Sydney Smith was an acute man, a learned man, a great wit, a ready and elegant writer, a trenchant critic, but the names of some of these humble Americans whom he did not deign to mention, or mentioned only to scoff, bid fair to stand as long in the annals of literature as his own.

On the eastern slope of the Andes are a thousand springs from which the slender rills, half hidden at times by the grass, scarcely at any time seen or heard, trickle down the side of the immense mountain range, here and there falling into each other and swelling in volume as they flow, until at length is formed the mighty Amazon, that drains the plateaus and valleys of half a continent. So the beginnings of our literature, like the beginnings of every literature, are small, indistinct, half hidden; but as they proceed, these little rills of thought and expression grow and expand, until the mighty stream is formed that irrigates the whole world of intellectual activity.

This stream, as we have said, first began to assume definite form and direction about the time that Sydney Smith was uttering his tirades against the genius and achievements of our countrymen. In 1817, appeared in the North American Review a remarkable poem called “Thanatopsis.” The author was a young man named William Cullen Bryant, only twenty-three years of age; yet the poem had been written four years before. The annals of literature do not furnish another example of such excellence at so early an age. The poem yet stands as one of the most exquisite in the language. A recent critic has characterized it as “lofty in conception, beautiful in execution, full of chaste language and delicate and striking imagery, and, above all, pervaded by a noble and cheerful religious philosophy.” This first effort on the part of Bryant was succeeded by a long career of eminence in the field of literature. In 1818 appeared a volume of miscellanies called “The Sketch Book,” by Washington Irving, a young man who had already acquired some slight reputation as a dabbler in literature of a trifling or humorous kind. The Sketch Book was almost immediately honored by republication in England. This initial volume was followed by a second series of miscellanies called “Bracebridge Hall,” which was published in London in 1822. In the preliminary chapter the author pleasantly adverts to the general feeling with which American authorship was regarded in England. “It has been a matter of marvel to my European readers,” says he, “that a man from the wilds of America should express himself in tolerable English. I was looked upon as something new and strange in literature; a kind of demi-savage, with a feather in his hand instead of on his head; and there was a curiosity to hear what such a being had to say about civilized society.” In the same year with Irving’s Sketch Book appeared Drake’s Culprit Fay, a poem that has not been surpassed in its kind since Milton’s Comus. In 1821 Percival issued his first volume of poems, Dana his Idle Man, and Cooper, his Precaution. His last named volume was at once followed by a long list of works including such famous titles as The Spy, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer. It marked the advent of our most distinguished novelist—a man who has been styled the Walter Scott of America. He justly stands in the same rank with the mighty Wizard of the North, and has no other equal. Thus the stream of American literature rolled on its course, and was swelled as it flowed by the contributions of Everett, Prescott, Bancroft, Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Willis, Holmes, Whittier, Lowell, and a host of others, whose names the world will not willingly let die.

America has not yet produced a Shakespere or a Milton; but it must be remembered that England has produced but one, each of these in a period of a thousand years. Anywhere below these two great names, American literature of the last seventy years is able to parallel the best work that has been produced by our kinsmen on the other side of the Atlantic. In wealth and elegance of diction, in depth of thought or feeling, in brightness and grace of expression, in any of the thousand forms and flights in which genius seeks to express himself, the current literature of America stands on a level with the current literature of England; and Sydney Smith’s sneers, which must have touched our fathers to the quick, find no response now except the smile of contempt which alone they ever deserved.

T. J. CHAPMAN.

THE OHIO SOCIETY, AND OHIO IN NEW YORK.

I.

There are many things that link the capital city of financial and commercial America, to the State of Ohio, that New England enterprise, and New York encouragement, and Virginian patriotism, did so much to build beyond the Alleghenies. It is not merely in the associations and connections of to-day that New York and Ohio are bound together. A pregnant era of the early past, was disposed toward good results forever, by the patriotic generosity of the Empire State, at a time when Ohio was but a name in the far off wilderness; a promise that many things must nurture, before it could be realized.

Historians will recall, when this much has been said, the events that were pressed close upon each other, before the soil upon which Ohio now stands, was declared the property of the nation, disentangled from the conflicting claims of jealous States, and how New York by her self-renunciation, led the way to harmony. For a century had Virginia and Connecticut made their claims to the vast westward territory; vaster than the imagination of any living man then conceived. When the French were driven from the lands west of the bounds of Pennsylvania, the contention commenced, and claims were urged from time to time, until both voices of dispute were temporarily silenced by the war in which the rivals fought side by side for the freedom of both. When that conflict was ended, the question again arose; not, this time, with the English Crown as the greater power, but with the loose jointed Confederation, under which America endeavored to work out a national salvation. Virginia, made her demand under the grant of James, in 1609, which gave her: “All those lands, countries and territories, situated, lying, and being in that part of America called Virginia, from the point of the eastern land called Cape or Point Comfort, all that space and circuit of land lying, from the seacoast of the precinct aforesaid, up into the land, throughout, from sea to sea, west and northwest, and also all the islands lying within one hundred miles along the coast of the both seas of the precinct aforesaid.”

This generous King, who was giving away so much that did not belong to him, was really giving more than he dreamed of; for the writer of the grant evidently believed that the South Sea, or Pacific Ocean, was but little westward of the Atlantic, and never dreamed that he was extending his line so as to take in the magnificent Western and Northwestern empire of to-day.

Connecticut made her claim under Charles the II, who in 1662, gave to the colony “All that part of our dominion in New England, in America, bounded on the east by the Narragansett River, commonly called Narragansett Bay, where the said river falleth into the sea, and on the north by the line of the Massachusetts plantation, and on the south by the sea, and in longitude as the line of the Massachusetts colony, running from east to west; that is to say, from the said Narragansett Bay, on the east to the South Sea on the west part, with the islands thereto adjoining.”

It was under this very vague, but very extensive grant, that Connecticut laid claim to, and maintained that claim, for that part of Ohio known the world over, as the “Connecticut Western Reserve.”

While Virginia, Connecticut and Pennsylvania were warring in the courts, in the legislatures, and before the people over their various claims, there were many others who virtually assumed that the whole unoccupied and unorganized land to the west, belonged to the nation at large, and that no state had a right to exclusive jurisdiction. This discussion threatened all sorts of difficulties, at a time when peace and prosperity could only come through a mutual helpfulness and internal harmony, and the wisest and most patriotic declared themselves willing to waive all personal claims, and allow the national government to administer the general estate for the general good. Congress so viewed it, and appealed to the States to yield their claims. The first response came from New York, which conceded all her possible ownership to western territory, to the general government, and the other States followed in her wake. Virginia followed New York; and Massachusetts Virginia; and eventually Connecticut came into line.

In the appeal of Congress to the States there was no ambiguity as to the purpose to which these lands were to be devoted. The act of October 10, 1780, resolved that “the unappropriated lands that may be ceded or relinquished to the United States by any particular State,” should be disposed of “for the common benefit of the United States, and shall be settled and formed into distinct republican States, which shall become members of the Federal Union, and have the same right of sovereignty, freedom and independence as the other States; that each which shall be so formed shall contain a suitable extent of territory not less than one hundred nor more than one hundred and fifty miles square, or as near thereto as circumstances will admit, that the necessary and reasonable expense which any particular State shall have incurred since the commencement of the present war, in subduing any part of the territory that may be ceded or relinquished to the United States, shall be reimbursed.” It was further agreed that said lands should be “granted or settled at such times and under such regulations” as should be thereafter agreed upon by the United States, or any nine or more of them.

In less than six months after the issuing of this broad invitation, New York set an example of generosity to her young sister States, which had so much yet to learn in the way of mutual concessions for the general good. And she made no conditions in her surrender. She simply said that she would draw a line across the western end of Lake Ontario, north and south, and that while all east of it should be hers, all west would be forever quit-claimed to the nation. It took Virginia three years to make up her mind, and when she waived her claim in March, 1784, she yet reserved nearly four million acres to the south and east of the Ohio. The year following, Massachusetts came in with no conditions, while Connecticut followed, in the fall of 1786, conditioning that she should retain the magnificent Western Reserve, upon which a New Connecticut was eventually built in the wilderness—that Reserve that has played so important a part in the history, and the moral development of the republic. South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia, at last straggled, one by one, into the path of manifest destiny; although the century had turned the point of time by two notches, before the last hand was lessened, and the Nation became in law what she had already been in fact—the architect and master of the splendid empire that stretched from the western edge of the civilization of that day, to where the Spaniard and the Frenchman still held a nominal right to the westward of the Mississippi.

With these cessions, the territorial system of our government came into existence. That which Georgia gave, became the Mississippi Territory; that from the Carolinas, the Southwest Territory; and all that north of the Ohio River, the Northwest Territory; and this brings us to a point where New York again had a part in creating the State of Ohio, and in dedicating the soil upon which she was reared, forever to the cause of human liberty.

It was within the limits of her chief city that the very foundation stones, not only of the one State but of many, were laid with a far-seeing wisdom and prophetic foresight that mark the men of that early Congress as among the sages of legislative wisdom. In the old hall, that stood at the corner of Wall and Broad streets, where the restless oceans of a financial world roll in a flood that never rests, and to which the lines of monetary interest center from all the far-off corners of the land, upon the spot now hallowed to the memory of Washington by a colossal statue of bronze, there was enacted, in the midsummer of 1787, an ordinance that has well been called[10] “The most important legislative act in American History”—there came into existence a law that gave Ohio and Indiana, and that galaxy of northwestern states to the Union; those free states, without which that Union never could have been saved in the day of its imminent peril.

Many States have been created, many important acts have been passed by the various Congresses that have sat in New York, in Philadelphia, and in Washington, but there was in this measure something that saved the nation from being sometime all slave; that reserved for freedom an empire that by mere stress of moral example if in nothing else, was a menace forever before the slaveholder. In that ordinance was one little clause that made Ohio and Wisconsin and Illinois what they afterwards became.

“There shall be,” it recited, “neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude in said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes.” Simple enough these words sound now, when human bondage upon American soil is but the echo of a dead past, but for the day in which they were uttered, they were the clarion call of a new era—the death knell of a monster wrong; and the voice was none the less that of God speaking in human legislation, because many of the men who had become His instrument, had no dream of the great things to which they had put their hands, and to which they had given their votes.

So, in one sense, Ohio may be said to have had her beginning in New York. From the days of her earliest childhood, she has been a willing neighbor, willing to give and take of friendly offices with her elder sister to the East. Two of her chief magistrates were the sons of the Empire State; she has borrowed not a little of her legislation from the experience of the older State; she patterned her canals after those which DeWitt Clinton had so largely aided to bring into being; she has developed many of her native resources by New York’s financial aid; she has sought to build her railways so that they should lead direct to the metropolis; she has in a thousand ways acknowledged the commercial and financial supremacy of the greater city and State; and last, but not the least, she has sent scores of her sons to the East, to prove that the Buckeye is capable of gaining and holding his own among the best, in any lines of human labor or human thought—and it is with this subject largely, that we have at present to deal.

There hangs in certain cheerful rooms at No. 236 Fifth avenue, a modestly framed document that is more significant in that which it suggests, than in what it declares. It is a call for a meeting, and a pledge of certain gentlemen whose names are attached, that they will do what lies within their power to create in this great metropolis, a hearthstone around which those who claimed Ohio for a mother or a foster-mother, might congregate now and then, for such mutual help or association as would keep the memory of the old home alive in the new. The beginning was modest and quiet, and yet out of it has grown an organization that is in many ways a model of its kind, and that certainly has fulfilled the intentions of its originators.

“We the undersigned,” to quote from the language of the call, “hereby agree to unite with each to form an association to be known as The Ohio Association in New York, and to that end will meet at any place designated, for the purpose of completing such organization upon notice given to us whenever twelve persons shall have signed this agreement. There is to be no expense incurred until the organization is completed, and assented to by each member.”

“New York, October 7th, 1885.”