CHAPTER IX CRITICS AND CONTROVERSY Anti-British Prejudices-Cooper and the Riddle of the I In view of the then constant hostility between America and England, sometimes suppressed but never altogether extinguished, the amicable tone of the American travel records in the early part of the nineteenth century is one of the most surprising of all their characteristics. There was, to be sure, a retort from America to the attacks of the British press and the false representations of the English travelers in America. The new nation was too full of vitality to take her verbal chastisement in silence, but, strangely enough, the men who were most active in answering the British charges had, for the most part, never been in England. The travelers themselves directed the preponderance of their efforts towards increased understanding and greater tolerance. The British verbal attack started early, and was apparently caused by two things: the growing realization that America, with her vast resources and her demonstrated energy, was becoming a rival nation of great power; and the increase in emigration to the new land, which, being brought about chiefly by the unequal social conditions at home, was to the British mind a domestic rather than an international problem. It has been suggested, probably with much truth, that many English travel records of America were written chiefly as anti-emigration propaganda, and some of the American answers, like Colton's Manual for Emigrants to America (1832), frankly accepted this as the basis for the debate. Added to this was the natural scorn of small minds, like those of the editors of the Quarterly and some other English reviews, an enmity prompted chiefly by a feeling of superiority and the desire for self-justification.1 The American retort took at least three forms: a direct answer in the periodical press; the publication of controversial books, chiefly as satires or fictitious travels in England; and counter-analyses of the conditions in England, which aimed to prove that, although America was not perfect, England herself was still far from the ideal. The North American Review was the leader of the defense in the first field, and its campaign of reviews was conducted in a tone which is mild in comparison with that of the English journals. The American newspapers and weeklies were not so moderate. The most interesting aspect of America's answer was, however, the second. The Inchiquin letters were published as though written by a Jesuit priest touring the United States, although their American authorship was very thinly veiled. Tyler's Yankee in London (1809), Paulding's numerous volumes, of which his Sketch of Old England, (1815), and John Bull in America (1825), are representative, Grant Thorburn's (Laurie Todd) Men and Manners 1 For a fuller consideration of the English basis of attack, see Henry Tuckerman, America and her Commentators, 1864; J. L. Mesick, The English Traveller in America, 1785-1835, 1922; and Allan Nevins, American Social History, 1923. 2 Inchiquin, the Jesuit's Letters, During a Late Residence in the United States of America, N. Y., 1810. in Great Britain (1835), and Cooper's Notions of the Americans, written before his longer residence in London, are all frankly controversial. Some of these books professed English authorship and attempted a fair representation of American life; others, which attacked English conditions in return for the misrepresentations of British travelers in America, were usually issued anonymously. Of the more moderate American retorts, Timothy Dwight's Remarks on the Review of the Inchiquin Letters (1815), Robert Walsh's Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain (1819), James A. Jones's Letter to an English Gentleman (1826), and Calvin Colton's The Americans (1833) are perhaps the most important documents in the case. Joel Barlow (1792), Robert Walsh, Jr. (1813), Alexander Everett (1822), and Christopher Gore undertook the counter-analysis of conditions in England and in Europe at large. When the controversy is reviewed in its broader aspects, however, no better summary of the faults and virtues of the opposing parties can be found than Irving's brief analysis of the situation in the Sketch Book. In a word, England was jealous and America was proud. England sent men of small intellect and imagination to America, while Americans of like stamp stayed at home. The American in England was usually a man of broader sympathies, and he strove to reconcile rather than to increase international animosities. When he set foot in England, his predominant emotion was an affection for his fatherland. If he had any antagonism, founded on the state of active or imminent warfare, or on resentment to the British charges, it faded in the light of his stronger feelings of kinship. There are several groups of travelers, however, who retained some of these anti-British prejudices in their writ |