Chapter XIV

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ON THE AMERICAN HALF-SHELL.

The contrasted Beginning and End of the Half-Century.—What America
brought to the New-Year’s Day of 1850 in the Raw, and what for the
Grill of more refined Tastes.—Historical Stews, and their Foreign and
Domestic Sauces.—What they were.—Attempts at, and Failures in,
Insurrections in America.—Mechanical Inventions of the Half-Century;
Steamboats, Telegraphs, Reapers, Sewing-Machines, etc.—Their
Advantages.—Vestments and Investments.—Of Ether.—How Populations
drifted to Cities.—Chicago bibulous and dropsical.—Public Men and
their Versatile Principles.—Newspapers and their unfulfilled
Prophecies.—Plutocracy.—Fashions and their Constancy to Change.—The
Stormy Petrels of Commercial Disasters.—How Owners turn
Wreckers.—Profits out of Losses.—Of Merchant Salvors.—The Effects of
Gold Discoveries in California on Labor, Ladies’ Heads and
Hearts.—Auriferous Marriages.—The Spite of Midas against
Children.—Ecclesiastical Gardens in America.—The new Mormon Shrub of
the _Genus Polygamous_.—Architectural Improvements.—American Houses
and their Sites.—Farmsteads; their Better Complexion.—The Crops from
the National Farms, the Sea and Land, in 1850.—Of American Literature,
Science, Natural History, The Philosophies and other Branches of
Knowledge, and their Cultivators, through the Half-Century.—Summary of
the Bill of Fare for the Repast on the Half-Shell.—Its Character and
Critics.

The nineteenth century began in America comparatively lean and unfattened, with but sixteen States, and a population of 5,305,939. When, on New Year’s day, 1850, it was taken up from its native beds, it had grown to thirty States, and a population of 23,191,876. It had gathered American history enough to be served up in every style to its hungry, impatiently waiting crowds of customers.

There was still plenty of it in the raw; heaps of materials swimming in abundant liquor; common work at rough, resisting nature, bivalved between the ordinary shells of laborious days and unwaking, sonorous nights; good honest-minded rough-handed labor, swinging the axe among Western settlements, and pricking gold, silver, and lead veins, and draining off their arterial currents into Atlantic bowls; shaggy-jacketed enterprise, brave in work, in patience, and cheerful endurance, quelling the rebellions of empty stomachs,—those quickly rising, wrathful, and speedily armed revolutionists,—and subjecting them to serve while the wheat ripened, and to wait upon a nourishing hope; and ploughmen planting broad and newly claimed fields with tasselled banners, and marching with their sheaved battalions to take growing towns and marts of business.

“A mighty _maize_, but not without a plan.”

Others there were drawing fresh, healthy milk, from the breasts of buxom mother Earths; pioneer, shaggy-coated energy, East as well as West, South as well as North, creating, organizing, and crystallizing around nuclei, snatching newly created words, as woman, from the ribs of necessities, and planting them amid the needs of freshly staked Edens; new-laid towns, from whose hasty nests speculators run cackling; mining villages, planted at sunset out of hand, watered by hot whiskeys, stimulated by the guano of revolvers, faro, monte, and warmly stirred politics, and growing over night into rough-timbered climbers up and up the mountain-side, to look over into the canyon beyond; hastily lit oil and other speculations, around whose flame the idle moths of the pulpit, the bar, and the counter fly and singe themselves until they fall helpless upon the table of others; struggling schools, churches, seminaries, and charities, reaching upwards to the sunlight, growing more graceful as they straighten away from their earthy roots, but still raw; and all the many-visaged, polysided life of fresh energy, struggling for the mastery over the down-wrestled but ever-rising work of new soils, wants, and needs, and destined, in spite of its great, rude, sinewy strength, to exhaust itself upon what time, patience, and long-applied skill shall shape into greater symmetry and proportion, and then to vanish away into the tomb of all ex-workmen.

There, too, were heaped up and ready for the grill, and for tastes more refined, capital, massing itself into centripetal, compacting, aggregated wealth, touching large levers that swing inflowing products from port to port, across wide-reaching inland spaces, or over high mountains; multiform industries, translating and exchanging, without parallel, the growths of every parallel; and associated earnings of diligent thrift, extracting the best notions from hard, quartz-headed mountains. There was vivid and intelligent joint enterprise, which plunges beneath the waves, and places the sensitive nerves of thought below the gambols of the leviathan, for the especial benefit of gamblers in bonds, cotton, gold, and stocks; pries open the shut gates of science, and entices her occult learning to minister to the enlarging demands of commerce, agriculture, manufactures, and trade; sets in motion the steel fingers which pick, cull, card, spin, and weave the cotton, flax, silk, and wool, whose fabrics clothe us through all seasons; quickens the spindles, machines, and contrivances—busy everywhere—which create our necessaries and our luxurious comforts; drags our fuel from the tight clutches of the mine; adulterates our food and drinks; sews up our vestments and sometimes our investments, and supplies our dwellings with furniture, our stores with goods, our fields with mowers, reapers, steam-ploughs, and steam-impelling implements, and our grave-yards with monuments, hewn by machinery and chiselled by the nimble fingers of patented tools.

Historical stews, too, those fifty years had, of course, produced in abundance; some flavored with British, others with French sauces. Domestic ones, too, had simmered and sputtered; but, stirred by bayonet-shaped spoons, they had so far gone off in smoke as to leave only an insipid taste on the homely palate of our peace-loving household. Of these were the Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania, and Dorr’s Suffrage Rebellion in Rhode Island in 1842, made of very poor materials, and smothered with a rude domestic bread sauce, which, more like a poultice for the outside than a relishable compound for the inside, soon took away the vicious appetite. Indeed, since the Great Rebellion which severed the long threads that tied us to Great Britain, no insurrections have ever had any success in America. Sharp newspaper _émeutes_, looking like imminent war, yes; sectional animosities threatening, like the South Carolina chattering of 1832, to embroil a piece of us, yes; State grievances, bubbling up with heated convention resolves, until the steam of revolution almost arose from the agitated surface, yes, and often; and, to quote an example since 1850, even a land-wasting war of four years, reducing large plantations to cinders, and leaving in funereal gloom many hopes and households,—even this, yes; but a genuine, earnest, well-founded, and just revolt, rising from wrongs and oppressions, and appealing to armed manly protest, and resulting in deserved success, never, never!

Upon the half-shell were served some remarkable mechanical inventions. Water raised into steam was, in 1806, applied by Fulton to propel the first steamboat over water; an application never contemplated by the Constitution, but which, in spite of the many private constitutions suddenly broken up by it, the appalling increase in American biographies, and the wreck of matter thrown upon life-insurance reserves, must be kindly remembered as one of the great benefactions of genius to humanity. In 1832 Samuel F. B. Morse discovered the mode of electro-magnetizing thought, and of ticking down words at places where thoughts were seldom spontaneously produced. The wiry telegraph is daily bringing to light other incidental discoveries, which show how great benefits sometimes pendulate with petty remorses. There are developed at most stations a class of people, formerly unknown, and called “operators,” who believe that small accidents, in places unrewarded by the notice of geographers, are national; that the births, deaths, or marriages of owners of petroleum, fast horses, or other rapid stock, concern all readers of newspapers; that the time, age, and pedigree of quadrupeds, kept for jumping long spaces in a short time, and the weights of bipeds, sent to college to acquire an increase of their intellectual strength, but who punish instead an ash stick some four hours a day, by sweeping with it some frog-pond in the vicinity, are vital statistics; and that the election of constables, supervisors, aldermen, mayors, and members of Congress are matters which every intelligent patriot, instead of banishing from all recollection as speedily as possible, desires to have forced upon his journalistic readings. If Morse started, re-morse has often followed after, the telegraph.

In 1833, one Hussey, from Cincinnati, improving upon hints glinting out through agricultural books and poems from the time of the Romans, perfected somewhat a mower and reaper, which, as since bettered by Manny, Ketchum, and McCormick, has made such quick work with our meadows and grain-fields, as to break up all the delicious reveries into which picturesque men in them, and sentimentalists over books representing them, formerly indulged. Gone is the mower’s scythe, now nicked into the quick-sliding saw which eats in a day through acres of grass and golden-bloomed wheat. Gone, Ruth-lessly, the maidens in broad hats, turning with a fork the low-lying clover, and with their eyes the uncut young Timothy, ever near at hand. Vanished from American harvest-fields the whistling grain-gatherers, driven from sight and pictorial illustrations by a single hussy.

During the half-century, too, was set up that useful American music-box, the sewing-machine,—a box that now sings joyful songs of shirts, frills, pantaloons, and vests, in all airs, flights, and stories. In 1846 the application of ether to lure pain into insensibility was first discovered. The honor is contested between three Americans, an honor large enough to be divided up, and a third given to each; but as each naturally covets the exclusive claim, the retort-like monument to perpetuate the discovery must be inscribed, to ether.

At the middle of the century populations had begun to gather into city centres; 515,547 in New York; 340,045 in Philadelphia; 169,054 in Baltimore; 136,881 in Boston; 116,375 in New Orleans; 115,436 in Cincinnati; 77,860 in St. Louis; and in Brooklyn, un-scared by German invasions, 96,838. Chicago, with just a score of years, had more than a score of thousands; but its frequent doublings since have run up so many scores, that the sum leaps the bars of all arithmetics, save its own. Since it has taken to drinking out of Lake Michigan, and begun to draw upon the Atlantic and Liverpool, our calculations have become so dropsical that nothing but tapping can save them.

With greater wealth had come, of course, into America greater variety of aspirations, tastes, modes of display, versatility of social invention and experiment. Most of our leading public men had lived long enough to have as many principles as they could number decades, as many heads as the hydra, as unlike each other as in cheap weeklies, and yet at one period or another a faithful likeness. Good-natured voters, who could recall twenty years of ballot experience, could remember a vote given for and against almost every Whig and Democratic chief. The country had survived the predictions of its downfall, although, at intervals, the New York “Evening Post” for forty-nine years, the “National Intelligencer” for thirty-seven, the “Boston Post” for nineteen, the “New York Herald” for fifteen, and the New York “Daily Tribune” for nine years, had in startling type assured its readers, with most staccato emphasis and adjectives, of its speedy overthrow, if some measure which it reprehended was adopted, or unless some principle which it advocated was not at once received into the national creed.

Plutocracy, of course, also, got larger Josses and re-gilded their shrines with many fantastic patterns. Fashions enlarged and contracted, through the five decades, with every east wind from Paris; and American men, women, and children hastened to change the boots, hats, and vestments, so lovely and so much admired before the last arrival, with the same alarm after the new mode was out, as they would have doffed a garment that had encased a cholera patient.

Fortunate then as now the feather or flower which formed a whole tri-mestral lodgement among the native, or foreign beds of hair, that are so beautifully upholstered one month to be taken down and ridiculed the next.

THE PROGRESS OF FASHION.
(p. 432)
]

The stormy petrels of disaster had frequently appeared over the fluctuating sea of our commercial life, covering it in 1837, and in every few successive epochs since, with its screaming, ill-omened, harpy brood, while fleets and single vessels of mercantile adventure broke up and lined the shore with their shattered wrecks. Then as now the owner sometimes turned wrecker of his own cargo, and often made more from the stranded pieces than he would have netted from the entire cargo had it arrived safely in port; as the expected payment of its purchase price would then have reduced the profits. This species of mercantile salvage, by which the proprietor profits by his losses, although not unknown to the traders of Carthage, has had an extension in modern days, that threatens to put merchandizing among those equivocal ventures, which puzzle casuists in cases of conscience, and often defy even the doctrine of chances as to the payment.

The discovery, in 1848, of gold in California bestowed upon America the Midas-touch it had fervently prayed for. Gold, sweated from the pores of labor, was sprinkled in a dusty shower upon the head of beauty, dropped in bars upon the scales of the vendors of dry goods and wet goods, filmed the eyes of marriageable girls with an aureous ophthalmia which indisposed them to see any desirable wedding unless it was golden, and so veneered the duties and chairs of railway directors, members of the legislature and of Congress, with a yellow smearing, that nearly all bills, resolutions, or orders have refused to dip into or drink from any stream but Pactolus. Many homes, however, through that half-century, we are happy to say, unwatered by the curse of that thirsty stream, had taken root and sent up solid shafts whose numerous branches bloomed with bountiful clusters, while sweet-smelling vines, springing alongside the family trees from the roots of the simple love-knots, spread a protecting shade over many a family roof-tree.

Curiously enough, Midas always had a spite against children, which grow up thickest among heaps of clam-shells and on poor side-hills.

Into our flowering ecclesiastial garden, planted with every known variety, and exhibiting large and vigorous growths, Joseph Smith—a Vermont simple—introduced, in 1827, a new shrub. It bore at first a double Mormon flower-looking tip, distributed in pretty equal numbers on its deep-green, sucker-like shoots; but transplanted first to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1838, and ten years later to the alkaline soil of Utah, it immediately bore the female variety in alarming disproportion. This Salt Lake shrub—of the _genus polygamous_—has become by cultivation a very rank weed, smelling earthily to heaven. Its numerous Young off-shoots require severe cutting, if not distinct subsoil treatment.

Architecture at last began to raise its tasteful fronts, Elizabethan, Gothic, Italian cottage, or American composite, set in trim yards or on smooth-shaven lawns, netted and webbed by paths and walks. On headlands, fringed with sea-wave ruffles; in valleys gladdened by the smiles of brooks and rallied into happy, healthy, joyousness by the outbursting frolicsome hills that cannot hold in their peculiar humors; on the sloping banks of many rivers seaward running; and on bossed and tufted hillocks where the pines, spruces, and larches hang aloft through all seasons their graceful flags, tasteful residences with clustering out-houses, sheltered thrift, corralled the domestic wealth which Midas cannot buy, and resounded with whoops that brought out other hoops in turn. Farmsteads had steadily added improvements, amplified their breadths, changed their white coats into colors more harmonious, and gathered around them well-adjusted farm buildings, and in their neatly fenced yards better stock, quadrupedal, bipedal, feathered, furred, and scaly.

Under improved cultivation our two national farms—the sea and land—produced, in 1850, crops that weighted the census heavily. The former showed 1,360 new American-built vessels, carrying 272,218 tons; and the latter bore a growth that year of 53,000,000 pounds of wool, 100,000,000 bushels of wheat, 592,000,000 bushels of Indian corn, 813,000,000 pounds of cotton, 14,000,000 tons of hay, grown on farms valued at $3,300,000,000, upon which were used implements costing $153,000,000, and stocked with live animals valued at $544,000,000.

But while American hands were thus busy through the half-century, American heads were not idle or unproductive. Of course in numbers political writings led, as political discussion is the intellectual bread and butter of Americans. Histories of many of the States—of Connecticut, by Benjamin Trumbull; of Pennsylvania, by Robert Proud; of New England, by Hannah Adams; “Annals of America,” by Dr. Abiel Holmes, father of the many-tongued, myriad-sided Oliver Wendell, and others—gathered up the variously colored skeins of the busy-fingered past; while lives of eminent statesmen—Patrick Henry’s, by the accomplished Wirt, _laus laudato viro_; of Columbus, by Irving, himself a discoverer of new worlds in America; Washington’s, Franklin’s, Adams’s, and others, by Jared Sparks; and a long catalogue of others—presented pictures of rare personal daring, heroism, patriotism, learning, and worth, set in choicely carved and polished frames.

Investigations in, and sketches of, our physical geography and of the natural history of our flora, fauna, reptilia, fishes, and birds, by Professor Barton, Alexander Wilson, John J. Audubon, Samuel L. Mitchell, Timothy Flint, and kindred minds, brought out, in lights as brilliant as our October sunsets, our wide surfaces, and the objects crawling, flitting, or flying upon and over them. In sacred literature, theology, and polemics, Samuel Miller, Edward Robinson, Moses Stuart, William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, Nicholas Murray, the Wares (father and son), Theodore Parker, the Alexanders, George Bush, Edward Beecher, and a marshalled host of others, upheld by logical force and with learned or lively dialectics the cherished views of their various sects. Philosophy, moral, mental, metaphysical, and international, spoke golden-mouthed and eloquent its reasoned rules, principles, and large, grasping deductions through Henry James, Tayler Lewis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Asa Mahan, C. S. Henry, L. P. Hickok, Henry Wheaton, and other diligent minds; while language was enriched and fertilized by the culturing labors of Worcester, Webster, Marsh, Schoolcraft, and Duponceau.

In general literature our hemisphere sparkled with fixed stars, like Irving, Prescott, Story, the Everetts (Alexander and Edward), Cooper, Motley, Ticknor, Bancroft, Paulding, Hawthorne, Hillard, Wilde, Legarè, and uncounted more, which lit it up with beautiful lights, that blent their flames with the soft poetic rays of Bryant, Longfellow, Halleck, Whittier, Saxe, Lowell, Poe, Willis, Hillhouse, the Careys, the Davidson sisters,—scarcely shown ere they were snatched away,

“Ostendent terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra
Esse sinent.”

Magazines and Reviews, although first appearing in 1745, began to be cultivated about 1815 by scholarly minds, for refined readers. “The North American Review,” “The American Quarterly,” “Southern Quarterly,” “The Christian Examiner,” “The New York Review,” “The Knickerbocker,” and eager crowds of less note, presented, ere the half-shell was cast aside, such palatable relishes that people wondered how they had ever contrived to make a meal without them.

On the whole, looking over the multiform bill of fare, it presented a healthy and not discreditable array. If the service was not as faultless as a Sybarite luxury of taste might desire, or if absent, might criticise, it was not destitute of refinement, and while consciously susceptible of improvement, was as consciously guiltless of many of the sins so wittily summarized against it by Sidney Smith. There was, doubtless, veal too young for the goggle-eyed epicure, who had haunted the _Trois Freres Provencaux_, in Paris, for twoscores of years, and the dishonest debaucheries of European courts, with vicious diligence; there was manifestly beef too much done for the dyspeptically over-fed stomach, too critical to enjoy, too weak to digest, anything hearty; there was pork here and there in the place of pheasants’ hearts and nightingales’ tongues; there were plump joints, which stood where foreign-fed stomachs might have preferred to find some rare, unpronounceable dish, some New-found-land estray, smothered in the sudden tides of French sauces, and, there were, also certain culinary anachronisms that had, by an uncalculating liberality—so abundant in America—piled themselves thoughtlessly on the great half-shell,—a blue-pouted oyster, for example, in a month destitute of an r and of ar-oma, or sweetmeats and sweetbreads for breakfast. Still, there was a very lavish spread, out of which a reasonable foreigner or an un-Europeanized native might pick a good deal, before he churlishly finished his meal on vinegar, or pettishly gave himself up to sugared water.