1809.

NEW ENGLAND TRAITS.

229

Eastern section might have been deemed a cluster of noble American republics wanting the seminal republican principle. This impression, however, depended upon the point of per spective; for New England's history was assuredly the vindication of rational liberty; and it so happened that, in this era, the conservative, the exclusive, the elderly, and those to the manner born, ruled greatly in affairs. For respectability and dignity in all affairs the Eastern people cared far more than did those of any other portion of the United States. With all this sobriety, this sternness of discipline, inherited from a Puritan ancestry, this rigorous climate and stony soil, this deaconizing, so to speak, of things temporal and spiritual, unfavored sons of the East, young, ambitious of founding and being something, wandered away from the parental abode, like Carver, Standish, and the Winthrops before them, seeking a wider liberty of thought and action. To such children New England seemed a hard and repressive, though strictly conscientious mother, and of such as remained to conquer circumstances at home not a few took satisfaction in the thought of conquering also the disdain of their betters; for here a position once won was full of honor. The Western wilderness was wide for the daring, and so, too, the ocean. But women remained, and outnumbering already the male population in a society which, whatever other elements it might lose, kept the preachers, the salaried thinkers, the privileged, the native men of leisure, all who dropped into convenient channels ready to receive them, and which, moreover, was highly refined, stimulating, and cultivated for the times; where clear. minds became sharp-edged, while social and conjugal instincts. were kept down by the trammels of rank and prejudice, and all thought was freer than action; bold theories here simmered as in a closed vessel. Gossip itself rose to a fine art, and sermonizing developed a base for æsthetics. Out of all this great problems were promised for a later day and better opportunity. The profound influence of New England thought upon the national mind of the present century has been truly remarkable, nor less so the mode of its evolution and a certain practical intolerance which accompanies theories the most liberal; great breadth, great narrowness, very great earnestness.

(2.) The Middle States were not free from factional evils; but their strifes were chiefly political, expressed in coarse and disorderly manifestations; diversities here arising, indeed, not so much from intelligent differences of opinion as from the dissimilar tastes, habits, and prejudices of an incongruous community. Irish, German, British, and Swiss immigrants, all fresh from the Old World, made this section, which had always been noted for its Babel of people and tongues, their first camping ground; the idle, the vicious, and the gregarious by nationalities preferring the great seaport cities-New York city especially-for a permanent residence. In this middle. section, and chiefly in the States of New York and Pennsylvania, whose immense and diversified resources invited all Europe, the energies of life were employed, first of all, upon the great problem of material and practical development; theories and mental problems being altogether of secondary consequence. For heavy purses, the New Yorker reasoned, would command scholars and artists in time, as well as coachmen and liveries. In Philadelphia, however, was, as we have elsewhere seen,* a powerful native basis of Quaker philanthropy; and New York itself, though growing rapidly, boasted its old families. Yet, to reduce a composite to classification, and give the early Dutch or Quaker element its due place, we may, in general, affirm that, more plodding, more phlegmatic, broader-bottomed, less anxious, less intense of application, less preoccupied with ideas and abstractions, duller apparently of comprehension than his New England neighbor, but no mean organizer of money-making schemes, the citizen of the Middle States asked only freedom to work out his own course. Strangers were welcome to him because new-comers helped, and because incongruity lent an attraction to general society. His affections centred in his offspring and business; he was kindly with his neighbors, but of public spirit he had little, as compared with other sections of the Union; and the difficult thing, when it came to political issues in detail, was not so much to make a convert of him as to arouse him from utter, stolid indifference. It was the tax that touched him,

* Supra, vol. i, p. 232.

1809.

THE MIDDLE STATES.

231

and little else. Hence came it that the local politics of these Middle States fell too readily into the hands of those who worked hardest to get control of them, and after a time the ignorant and venal; the struggle of parties would degenerate into a vulgar scramble for the loaves; political leaders, even the greatest in these States, too often countenancing proscription for the sake of gratifying their essential henchmen. For an army of mercenaries must be indulged in victory when only mercenaries can be induced to enlist.

But the people of the Middle section adhered to sound general principles; they were generous and philanthropic; they appreciated their great opportunities for development; they were capable of blocking out and executing the grandest projects for material prosperity. They constructed upon solid, tangible foundations. They were liberal patrons, if not always appreciative, desiring the best which money could procure, giving native genius the first opportunities, and discarding the nonsense of rival schools. In New York and Philadelphia, rival cities, of which the former tended more to the cosmopolitan, while the latter held proudly to its traditions, the arts, sciences, and literature, under these incubating influences, promised well.

(3.) In the South, whose people, in successive generations, had been reared under a peculiar combination of influences, with slavery and the plantation system at the foundation of a social fabric commenced nearly two centuries before, a singular type of civilization was exhibited. States showed a contradiction in precept and example. The planter would avow himself a republican; but his republicanism, as carried out in practical life, was of that Spartan or Roman breed which nourishes arrogance, and permits the favored citizen to lord it over a servile class. Wealth was here unequally distributed, and at the same time represented by capital which could not be transferred or converted into money at pleasure. The South was a section of agriculturists; but, instead of adjacent farms cultivated by plain, industrious folk, who planted and reaped their own acres, and had neighborly interests, as in Pennsylvania, one saw, as soon as he passed through lower

Maryland and Virginia southwards, plantations far apart, tilled by gangs of black laborers, and stately, aristocratic mansions, standing isolated, with only little smoky huts and log-cabins for miles about; these last occupied by poor and ignorant tenants, who, to use Wirt's language, though boasting of freedom, would come to the great house, cap in hand, and trembling.*

Negro slavery may smirch a broader soil than that upon which negro labor has been thought indispensable; yet the gradual abolition of slavery in the Northern States, and the growth of a humane sentiment for alleviating the miseries of the black race, counteracted in influence as all this was by the ravenous demand abroad for American cotton in addition to rice and tobacco, had changed of late the aspect of our domestic slave institution. It was becoming geographical, and so identified with developing the great Southern staples as henceforth to band the Southern agricultural interest together, first for self-preservation, next so that room westward might be opened in order to propagate their valuable plants and the social system together. South Carolina and Georgia, especially the former, gave the great impulse to this later movement; and because the negro could pick cotton in the broiling sun and delve in malarial rice-swamps, where white laborers would have died from the exposure, it was becoming an accepted sequence that negro sweat and toil ought, like that of cattle, to be his white master's working capital.

Mountains diversify greatly human character and agricultural pursuits; even arctic plants may be reached by climbing from the plain, instead of sailing to the pole. The Southern population identified thus inseparably with negro capital was mostly lowland, like the Southern staples themselves, and mountain ranges skirted all of the Southern States now in the Union, excepting Louisiana and little Delaware. Where the State was cleft by these ridges, a highland population, whose tastes and pursuits were Northern, will be found to have resisted slave encroachments quite strenuously, considering how closely the legal meshes of the system were woven about them;

* Wirt's British Spy.

1809.

SOUTHERN SLAVERY.

233

and, in fact, half a century later, when the slaveholder drew his sword against the Union to preserve that system, Virginia became rent in twain because of that internal conflict, and Tennessee nearly so.* In these two States mountains did not skirt, but subdivided the jurisdiction.

The census of 1810 reckoned the colored population of the United States at 1,377,800 souls, 1,191,300 of these being held in bondage. A small proportion, truly, did this afford of colored freemen; but a greater one considerably than at the first national census of 1790; for in twenty years the free blacks had more than trebled in number, while the colored race as a whole had not doubled. This was the worthy result of gradual emancipation acts and private manumission. The clean free States in 1810 were four: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Ohio. Slaves had nearly disappeared, through the process of gradual emancipation, from the soil of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, and their number had diminished in New York, New Jersey, and even Delaware. Of all the States in the Union Virginia, at this time, had by far the darkest shade of population; or, in other words, the greatest number of slaves, with a white population in disproportion. North Carolina's slave ratio had lessened in the last twenty years; while about four-fifths of the inhabitants of Kentucky and Tennessee were white. But in South Carolina and Georgia, States so zealous of late as missionaries of bondage, there were by 1810 nearly as many blacks as whites.

While at the North, as we have seen, the first antislavery agitation now died out,§ the foreign slave-trade being abol

* Writers had before 1809 pointed out that Virginia had these races: (1), that of the seaboard, sickly, feeble, indolent; (2), thence to the base of Blue Ridge, robust and powerful; (3), that on the Ridge, hardy and enterprising. Western Virginia was at that time, we may add, thinly settled; the Ohio colonization developed it later. See Wirt's British Spy.

This last-mentioned State, whose mills at this time gave it great celebrity, was in business relations closely connected with Philadelphia, and in politics with New England; it was Southern only in having failed to abolish local slavery.

U. S. Census Tables, 1810, 1870.