For Philadelphia, see Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, _The Literary History of Philadelphia_ (Philadelphia, 1906). Also H. M. Ellis, “Joseph Dennie and His Circle” (_University of Texas Bulletin_). For the politics of New York, see Dixon Ryan Fox, _The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York_ (New York, 1918).
I. Charles Brockden Brown: _The Novels of Charles Brockden Brown ... with a Memoir_ (Boston, 1827; Philadelphia, 1857, 1887). _Wieland; or the Transformation_ (New York, 1798; best recent edition in _American Authors Series_, New York, 1926). _Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793_ (Philadelphia, 1799; Second Part, New York, 1800; numerous later editions).
No adequate life has been written. The best is by William Dunlap, _The Life of Charles Brockden Brown_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1815). See John Erskine, _Leading American Novelists_ (New York, 1910), and Annie R. Marble, in _Heralds of American Literature_ (Chicago and London, 1907).
Robert Montgomery Bird: For a list of his plays, see A. H. Quinn, _A History of the American Theatre_ (New York, 1923).
_Calavar; or, the Knight of the Conquest: a Romance of Mexico_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1834; about ten later editions).--_The Hawks of Hawks-Hollow. A Tradition of Pennsylvania_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1835; two London editions).--_The Infidel; or, The Fall of Mexico_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1835; London, 1835).--_Nick of the Woods, or, the Jibbenainosay. A Tale of Kentucky_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1837; upward of twenty later editions).
For his life, see Clement Foust, _Life and Dramatic Works of Robert Montgomery Bird_ (1919).
II. James Kent: _Commentaries on American Law_ (4 vols., New York, 1826-1830; many later editions).
For his life, see William Kent, _Memoirs and Letters of James Kent_ (Boston, 1898).
Fitz-Greene Halleck: _Poetical Works_ (New York and Philadelphia; eight editions between 1847 and 1859). _Poetical Writings with Extracts from those of Joseph Rodman Drake_ (edited by J. G. Wilson, New York, 1869, 1885).
For a life, see J. G. Wilson, _The Life and Letters of Fitz-Greene Halleck_ (New York, 1869). Also see W. C. Bryant, _Some Notices on the Life and Writings of Fitz-Greene Halleck_ (New York, 1869).
III. Washington Irving: The standard edition of his works is in forty volumes, New York, 1887.
The standard life is by Pierre M. Irving, _The Life and Letters of Washington Irving_ (4 vols., London, 1864; New York, 1879, 1883).
See also _The Letters of Washington Irving to Henry Brevoort_ (edited by George S. Hellman, 2 vols., New York, 1915). A recent study is George S. Hellman, _Washington Irving, Esq_. (New York, 1925).
James Kirke Paulding: _Works_ (15 vols., New York, 1834-1839; 4 vols., 1867-1868).--_The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan_ (New York, 1812).--_Letters from the South_ (2 vols., New York, 1817).--_The Backwoodsman. A Poem_ (Philadelphia, 1818).--_Salmagundi, Second Series_ (2 vols., New York, 1820).--_Koningsmarke, the Long Finne, A Story of the New World_ (New York, 1823; 2 vols., New York, 1834; three London editions, and a German).--_Westward Ho! A Tale_ (2 vols., New York, 1832, 1845; three London editions, a French and a German).--_The Dutchman’s Fireside. A Tale_ (2 vols., New York, 1831; latest edition, 1900).--_The Puritan and his Daughter_ (New York, 1849, 1850; also London, 1849, two editions, and one German).
No adequate life has been written, but see W. I. Paulding, _Literary Life of James K. Paulding_ (New York, 1867).
IV. James Fenimore Cooper: The editions of Cooper’s novels are numerous; as good as any is the one in thirty-two volumes (New York, 1895, 1896-97). Much of his controversial work and critical articles have not been reprinted. See _Notions of the Americans; Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1829). _A Letter to His Countrymen_ (New York, 1834). _The American Democrat; or Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States_ (Cooperstown, 1838). _The History of the Navy_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1839). Also his eight volumes of European travels.
No satisfactory life has been written. The best is by T. R. Lounsbury, _James Fenimore Cooper_ (New York, 1883). See also _Correspondence of James Fenimore-Cooper_ (edited by his grandson, James Fenimore Cooper, 2 vols., New Haven, 1922). W. C. Brownell, in _American Prose Masters_ (New York, 1909). Carl Van Doren, in _The American Novel_ (New York, 1921).
V. William Cullen Bryant: The standard edition is edited by Parke Godwin (6 vols., New York, 1883-1889: 1-2, _Biography_, 1883, 3-4, _Poetical Works_, 1883, 1901; 5-6, _Prose Writings_, 1884-1889). Much information on his work in journalism will be found in Allan Nevins, _A Century of Journalism_ (New York, 1921).
Horace Greeley: His works have not been collected. See _Hints towards Reform_ (New York, 1850). _Recollections of a Busy Life_ (New York, 1868). _Essays Designed to Elucidate the Science of Political Economy_ (Boston, 1870). _The American Conflict_ (Hartford and Chicago, 1864-1866).
For his life, see James Parton, _The Life of Horace Greeley_ (Boston, 1868). Charles Sotheran, _Horace Greeley_ (New York, 1915). See also John R. Commons, “Horace Greeley and the Working-Class Origins of the Republican Party” (_Political Science Quarterly_, Vol. XXIV, pp. 468-488).
Herman Melville: The best edition is The Standard (16 vols., London, 1922-23). Also see _Works_ (4 vols., edited by A. Stedman, New York, 1892, 1896; Boston, 1900, 1910). Convenient editions of _Typee_, _Omoo_, and _Moby-Dick_ are plentiful.
The indispensable life is Raymond Weaver’s _Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic_ (New York, 1921), with bibliography. Also see John Freeman, _Herman Melville_ (in _English Men of Letters Series_, New York, 1926).
Book III: Part I
I. For the political backgrounds, see A. E. Morse, _The Federalist Party in Massachusetts to the Year 1800_ (Princeton, 1909). W. A. Robinson, _Jeffersonian Democracy in New England_ (New Haven, 1916). Samuel Eliot Morison, _Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis_ (2 vols., Boston. 1913).
Fisher Ames: _Works_ (with memoir by J. T. Kirkland, Boston, 1809). _Works, with a Selection from his Speeches and Correspondence_ (edited by his son, Seth Ames, 2 vols., Boston, 1854).
Robert Treat Paine: _Works in Prose and Verse_ (with memoir, Boston, 1812).
II. Joseph Story: _Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States_ (3 vols., Boston, 1833; numerous later editions).
See W. W. Story, _Life and Letters of Joseph Story_ (2 vols., Boston, 1851).
Daniel Webster: The best edition of his works is The National--_The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster_ (18 vols., Boston, 1903). _Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster_ (2 vols., Boston, 1857). _Letters_ (edited by C. H. Van Tyne, New York, 1902).
See George Ticknor Curtis, _Life of Daniel Webster_ (2 vols., New York and London, 1870). For a critical contemporary estimate see Theodore Parker, _Discourse Occasioned by the Death of Daniel Webster_ (Boston, 1853). See also Charles A. Beard, _The Economic Basis of Politics_ (New York, 1922).
Book III: Part II
I. Unitarianism: See George Willis Cooke, _Unitarianism in America: A History of its Origin and Development_ (Boston, 1902). Williston Walker, _A History of the Congregational Churches in the United States_ (New York, 1894).
William Ellery Channing: _Works_ (5 vols., Boston, 1841; sixth volume added in 1843; numerous later editions).
An excellent life is J. W. Chadwick, _William Ellery Channing, Minister of Religion_ (Boston, 1903). See also William H. Channing, _Memoir of William Ellery Channing_ (3 vols., Boston, 1848).
II. Perfectionism: For materials see Garrison, _Life of William Lloyd Garrison_ (4 vols., New York, 1885-1889).
Brook Farm: See Lindsay Swift, _Brook Farm; Its Members, Scholars and Visitors_ (New York, 1906; contains bibliography). J. T. Codman, _Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs_ (Boston, 1894). Nathaniel Hawthorne, _Blithedale Romance_.
Abolitionism: Sufficient materials will be found in Garrison, _Life of William Lloyd Garrison_ (4 vols., New York, 1885-1889). See also Catherine N. Birney, _Sarah and Angelina Grimké_ (Boston, 1885); and _James C. Birney and His Times, by His Son, William Birney_ (New York, 1890).
III. William Lloyd Garrison: See Garrison, _Life of William Lloyd Garrison_ (4 vols., New York, 1885-1889).
John G. Whittier: _The Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier_ (Riverside Edition, 7 vols., Boston, 1885-1889).
See G. R. Carpenter, _John Greenleaf Whittier_ (in _American Men of Letters Series_).--T. S. Pickard, _Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier_ (2 vols., Boston, 1894).--F. H. Underwood, _John Greenleaf Whittier. A Biography_ (Boston, 1884).
Harriet Beecher Stowe: _Works_ (Riverside Edition, 16 vols., Boston, 1896; with life by Mrs. Field, 17 vols., 1898).
See Mrs. J. T. Fields, _The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe_ (Boston, 1897).
Book III: Part III
I. Transcendentalism: The literature is abundant. See _The Dial_ (4 vols., Boston, 1840-1844).--_The Harbinger_ (4 vols., New York, 1844-1848).--Harold Clarke Goddard, _Studies in New England Transcendentalism_ (New York, 1908).--O. B. Frothingham, _Transcendentalism in New England. A History_ (New York, 1876).--See also Sylvester Judd, _Margaret. A Tale of the Real and Ideal_ (2 vols., Boston, 1845; revised edition, 1851).
II. Ralph Waldo Emerson: _Works_ (Riverside Edition, edited by James Eliot Cabot, 12 vols., Boston, 1884-1893; London, 1884-1893; Centenary Edition, with biographical introduction and notes by E. W. Emerson, 12 vols., Boston, 1903-04; London, 1904).--_Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with Annotations_ (edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, 10 vols., Boston, 1909-1914).--_Uncollected Writings. Essays, Addresses, Poems, Reviews and Letters by Ralph Waldo Emerson_ (New York [1912]).
See George Willis Cooke, _Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson_ (Boston, 1908). James Eliot Cabot, _A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson_ (2 vols., Boston, 1887). George Willis Cooke, _Ralph Waldo Emerson; His Life, Writings, and Philosophy_ (Boston, 1881). Oscar W. Firkins, _Ralph Waldo Emerson_ (Boston, 1915). W. C. Brownell, _American Prose Masters_ (New York, 1909).
III. Henry David Thoreau: _Works_ (Riverside Edition, 11 vols., Boston, 1894; Manuscript Edition, 20 vols. [Vols. VII-XX contain the Journals], Boston, 1906).
See Francis H. Allen, _A Bibliography of Henry David Thoreau_ (Boston and New York, 1908). William E. Channing, _Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist_ (Boston, 1873, 1902). F. B. Sanborn, _Henry D. Thoreau_ (in _American Men of Letters Series_, Boston, 1882, 1910); _The Personality of Thoreau_ (Boston, 1901); _The Life of Henry David Thoreau_ (Boston and New York, 1917). Léon Bazalgette, _Henry Thoreau--Bachelor of Nature_ (translated by Van Wyck Brooks, New York, 1924).
IV. Theodore Parker: _Collected Works_ (edited by F. P. Cobbe, 14 vols., London, 1863-71). _The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Theodore Parker_ (Boston, 1843). _Speeches, Addresses and Occasional Sermons_ (2 vols., Boston, 1876). _The American Scholar_ (with notes by George Willis Cooke, Boston, 1907).
An excellent study is J. W. Chadwick, _Theodore Parker, a Biography_ (Boston, 1900), containing a bibliography John Weiss, _Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker_ (2 vols., New York, 1864)--indispensable.
V. Margaret Fuller: Her works have not been collected. Important titles are: _Woman in the Nineteenth Century_ (New York and London, 1845; with additional papers and introduction by Horace Greeley, New York, 1855). _Life Without and Life Within_ (Boston, 1860; New York, 1869). _Papers on Literature and Art_ (2 vols., New York and London, 1846).
An excellent study is Katharine Anthony, _Margaret Fuller: A Psychological Biography_ (New York, 1920). See also R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke, _Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli_ (2 vols., Boston, 1833). Thomas Wentworth Higginson, _Margaret Fuller Ossoli_ (in _American Men of Letters Series_, Boston, 1884), containing bibliography.
Book III: Part IV
I. Henry W. Longfellow: _The Writings of ... with Bibliographical and Critical Notes_ (11 vols., Boston, 1886 [Vols. I-VI, _Poetical Works_; VII-VIII, _Prose Works_; IX-XI, _Dante_]).
See Samuel Longfellow, _Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_ (3 vols., Boston and New York, 1891). T. W. Higginson, _Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_ (in _American Men of Letters Series_, Boston and New York, 1902).
II. Nathaniel Hawthorne: _Works_ (12 vols., Boston, 1871-76; Fireside Edition, 12 vols., Boston, 1879; Riverside Edition, 12 vols., Boston, 1883; Standard Library Edition, 15 vols., Boston, 1891 [contains _Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife_, by Julian Hawthorne]; New Wayside Edition, 13 vols., Boston, 1902).
The best-known life is Julian Hawthorne, _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife_ (2 vols., Boston, 1885). Henry James, _Nathaniel Hawthorne_ (in _English Men of Letters Series_, London, 1879; New York, 1885, 1887). See also W. C. Brownell, _American Prose Masters_ (New York, 1909). John Erskine, _Great American Novelists_ (New York, 1910). Carl Van Doren, _The American Novel_ (New York, 1921); Stuart P. Sherman, _Americans_ (New York, 1923).
III. Oliver Wendell Holmes: _Works_ (Riverside Edition, 13 vols., Boston, 1891, additional volume, 1892; Autocrat Edition, 13 vols., Boston and New York, 1904).
See George B. Ives _A Bibliography of Oliver Wendell Holmes_ (Boston and New York, 1907). John T. Morse, _Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes_ (2 vols., Boston and New York, 1896).--Lewis W. Townsend, _Oliver Wendell Holmes. Centenary Biography_ (London, 1909).
James Russell Lowell: _Works_ (Riverside Edition, 13 vols., Boston and New York, 1902 [contains Scudder’s _Life_]; Elmwood Edition, 16 vols., Boston, 1904 [four volumes of letters]). _Anti-Slavery Papers_ (2 vols., Boston and New York, 1902). _Letters of James Russell Lowell_ (edited by Charles Eliot Norton, 2 vols., New York, 1893; 3 vols., Boston, 1904). _Early Prose Writings of ..._ (2 vols., New York, 1903).
G. W. Cooke, _A Bibliography of James Russell Lowell_ (Boston and New York, 1906). H. E. Scudder, _James Russell Lowell: A Biography_ (2 vols., Boston, 1901). Ferris Greenslet, _James Russell Lowell: A Biography_ (2 vols., Boston, 1901). Ferris Greenslet, _James Russell Lowell: His Life and Work_ (Boston, 1905). See also C. Hartley Grattan, “Lowell” (_The American Mercury_, Vol. II, p. 69): Harry Hayden Clark, _Lowell’s Criticism of Romantic Literature_ (“Publications of the Modern Language Association,” March, 1926); W. D. Howells, _Literary Friends and Acquaintances_ (New York, 1902); Henry James, _Essays in London and Elsewhere_ (New York, 1893); J. J. Reilly, _James Russell Lowell as a Critic_ (New York, 1915); and John M. Robertson, _Lowell as a Critic_ (_North American Review_, February, 1919).
Index [Volume Two]
_Abolitionists, The_, 333, 337
_Abraham Davenport_, 370
_Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East_, 173, 174, 176
Adams, John, 13, 15, 17, 22, 78, 82, 95, 119, 187, 198, 226, 231, 282, 283, 305, 306, 316, 325, 393, 456
----, John Quincy, 242, 249, 276, 365
----, Samuel, 292, 380, 423
Addison, Joseph, 31, 35, 199, 453
_Additional Speeches_, 297 n, 300, 316, 415, 420, 421 n, 422, 423
_Adventures of Captain Bonneville_, 209, 211
_Aeneid_, 32
Agassiz, Louis, 458
_Agriculture of England, The_, 304
Alcott, Bronson, 342, 348, 349, 394, 402, 426
_Alcuin, A Dialogue_, 189
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 469
_Alexander H. Stephens, Life of_, 83, 86, 89, 91
Alexis, Grand Duke, 458
_American Democrat, The_, 226, 227
_American Liberty_, 287
_American Mercury, The_, 466 n
_American Note-Books_, 447, 448, 449
_American Notes_, 441
_American Novel, The_, 133
_American Political Ideas_, 94, 334 n
_American Scholar, The_, 390
Ames, Fisher, ii, 19, 21, 36, 109, 113, 116, 119, 198, 241, 276, 279-288, 291, 293, 296, 297, 315, 317, 329
----, Dr. Nathaniel, 279, 280
_Anarchiad, The_, 24
Anne, Queen, 452
Anthony, Katharine, 427, 432
_Anti-Apis_, 464 n
Anti-Rent Novels, 231, 233
_Apology and Defense_, 309 n
_Arbitrament of National Disputes, The_, 121 n
Aristotle, 307
Arnold, Matthew, 265, 472
_Arthur Mervyn_, 190
Astor, John Jacob, 195, 201, 203, 208, 211, 231
_Astoria_, 209, 211
Ashe, Thomas, 215
_Augustus Baldwin Longstreet_, 169 n, 170
_Authorship of David Crockett’s Autobiography, The_, 177 n
_Autobiography of Davy Crockett_, 166
_Autobiography of Joseph Story_, 300
_Backwoodsman, The_, 215
Bacon, Lord, 31, 307
Baldwin, Joseph G., 133, 162, 166
Bancroft, George, 437-439
_Bank of the United States, The_, 309 n
Barlow, Joel, 188
Bartol, C. A., 384
_Basis of the Senate, The_, 306, 307, 310, 315
Bassett, John, 148, 149
Baxter, Richard, 371
Beard, Professor Charles A., 13 n, 15, 18-19
_Beauchampe_, 130
Beecher, Elizabeth, 342 n
----, Henry Ward, 238, 344, 351, 399
----, Lyman, 357, 371, 375, 376
Benjamin, Parke, 238
Bennett, James Gordon, 102 n, 356
Bentham, Jeremy, 166
Benton, Thomas H., 14, 55, 151, 246, 309
Berkeley, Bishop, 380
Beveridge, Albert J., 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 316 n
_Bibliolâtres_, 464 n
Biddle, Nicholas, 55
_Biglow Papers, The_, 368, 464, 464 n
Bird, Robert Montgomery, 135, 162, 166, 190-192, 220, 235
Birney, James G., 246, 333, 351, 359, 365
Blackstone, 31, 35, 47, 113, 117, 120, 168, 197, 302, 313
_Blithedale Romance, The_, 442, 448
Blücher, Marshal, 94
Boone, Daniel, 138, 139, 162
_Border Beagles_, 128
_Boston Kidnapping, The_, 423
Bourlamaqui, 117
Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 236
Bradbury, John, 215
Brevoort, Henry, 205
Briant, Lemuel, 325, 326
Bright, John, 241
Brisbane, Albert, ii, 101, 108, 200, 208, 242, 251, 350, 448
_British Spy, The_, 31, 33, 41
_Broker of Bogota, The_, 191
Brown, Charles Brockden, 188-190
----, John, 155, 159, 360, 364, 399, 402, 412, 458
Brownson, Orestes, ii, 108
Bryant, William Cullen, 201, 208, 238-246, 247, 257, 258, 366, 458
Buckminster, Rev. Joseph Stevens, 113
Bunyan, John, 366
Burgess, John W., 94
Burke, Edmund, 12, 15, 31, 94, 305, 311, 366, 392, 467
Burns, Anthony, 359, 360, 411, 423
----, Robert, 366
Burr, Aaron, 197
Bushnell, Rev. Horace, 356
Byrd, Col. William, 8
Byron, Lord, 111, 116, 200, 216
Cabell, James Branch, 259, 260
Cabot, George, 296
_Caleb Williams_, 190
Calhoun, John C., 4, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 61, 66, 67, 68, 69-82, 83, 89, 91, 93, 102, 109, 115, 120, 123, 126, 136, 137, 144, 150, 152, 153, 168, 170, 299, 311, 312, 357, 399, 467, 468, 473
Calvin, John, 215, 272, 273, 321, 340, 416, 457
_Camillus_, 285-286
Campbell, Thomas, 200
_Capture of Fugitive Slaves near Washington, On the_, 464 n
Carey, Matthew, 185-186
Carlyle, Thomas, 47, 101, 111, 381, 389, 393, 406, 412
Carpenter, G. R., 351, 367
Caruthers, Dr. William Alexander, 28, 41-46, 377
Cass, Lewis, 246
_Cathedral, The_, 266
Catullus, 453
_Cavaliers of Virginia, The_, 41, 45
Chadwick, John White, 330, 338
_Chainbearer, The_, 232, 234, 236
_Chambered Nautilus, The_, 453
Channing, William Ellery, 188, 252, 300, 314, 317, 319, 325, 326, 327, 328-338, 339, 342, 357, 361, 371, 390, 393, 420, 435, 443, 454, 456
----, William Ellery (Younger), 401
----, William Henry, 108, 228, 241, 347, 348, 428, 429
Chapman, Mrs., 351
_Chardon Street Convention, The_, 345
_Charlemont_, 130
Charles I, King, 372
“_Charming Creature” as a Wife, The_, 172
Chase, L. B., 102
Chaucer, 47
_Chicora and Other Poems_, 103
Child, Francis, 465
----, Lydia Maria, 351
Choate, Rufus, 152, 329, 367, 368, 397, 398, 421, 423
_Chronicle, The_, 206
Churchill, Charles, 452
_Civil Disobedience_, 409, 410, 411
_Civil Liberty and Self-Government_, 95
_Clarel_, 265, 266-267
Clark, George Rogers, 138
Clarke, J. F., 429, 430
Clay, Henry, 4, 34, 37, 46, 48, 67, 69, 71, 122, 138, 139, 142-144, 145, 150, 152, 153, 209, 218, 242, 243, 249, 296, 298, 309, 333, 353, 365, 366, 397, 399
Clayton, Augustus S., 176
Cleon, 398
Cliffton, William, 188
_Climbing the Natural Bridge_, 46
Clinton, De Witt, 201
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 265
Cobbett, William, 185, 186
Cobden, Richard, 241
Coke, Sir Edward, 15, 47, 117
_Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas_, 173, 178 n
Coleridge, Samuel T., 58, 381, 389
Collins, Wilkie, 458
_Columbus_, 464 n
_Commentaries on American Law_, 199
_Commentaries on the Constitution_, 301-303, 311, 312
Commons, John R., 250, 252, 253, 254
Comte, Auguste, 30
Condillac, Etienne de, 382
Condorcet, Marquis de, 10, 11, 293
_Congressional Debates_, 175
Congreve, William, 54
_Connecticut_, 202
_Constitutional History of Greece, The_, 116
_Constitutional View of the War between the States_, 9, 56, 83, 88, 89, 90 n, 91, 302
_Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States, The_, 311
_Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated_, 299
Conway, Moncure D., 90
Cooke, Jay, 474
----, John Esten, ii, 28
Cooper, James Fenimore, 37, 131, 133, 135, 141, 183, 193, 196, 204, 207, 208, 216, 220, 222-237, 238, 257, 266, 457
----, James Fenimore (grandson), 207 n, 229
----, Judge William, 194, 224, 225
----, Dr., 72
_Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper_, 207 n, 229
Cotton, Rev. John, 118
_Country, The_, 103
_Courier and Enquirer, The_, 253
Cousin, Victor, 381
Coverley, Sir Roger de, 52
Cowper, William, 188, 264
Crafts, William, 112-114
_Crater, The_, 226
Crawford, W. H., 168
_Cream of the Jest, The_, 259
Crèvecœur, Hector St. John de, 215
_Croaker Papers_, 200
Crockett, Davy, 45, 138, 147, 162, 165, 172-179, 192, 366
Cromwell, Oliver, 213, 464
Cruse, Peter Hoffman, 48
Cujacius, 117
Curtis, George William, 238
Cushing, Caleb, 362, 365
_Daniel Webster_, 297 n
Dante, 440, 466
Darwin, Charles, 419, 455
Davis, Jefferson, 4, 62, 65-66, 70, 86, 146, 299, 468
_Debating Society, The_, 172
_Declaration of Whig Principles and Purposes_, 310
_Decline of Aristocracy in New York Politics_, 199, 224, 244
_Democracy_, 467 n
_Democracy, Pacific and Constructive_, 244
Dennie, Joseph, 187
De Quincey, Thomas, 258
Dew, Professor, 102
_Dial, The_, 348
Dickens, Charles, 47, 127, 141, 441
Dickinson, John, 186
_Discourses on Government_, 354
_Disquisition on Government, A_, 75 n, 77, 79, 299
_Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan, The_, 214
_Divina Commedia_, 440
_Divinity School Address_, 337, 390
_Domnei_, 260
_Don Quixote_, 31
Douglas, Stephen A., 153, 397, 398
Drake, Joseph Rodman, 200
_Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp_, 377
_Dred Scott_, 157
Dryden, John, 31, 104, 289
Dumas, Alexandre, 216
_Dutchman’s Fireside, The_, 220
Dwight, Theodore, 278
----, Timothy, 71, 188, 240, 324, 340, 371
_Early Spanish Ballads_, 116
_Ecclesiastes_, 264
_Echo, The_, 24
_Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, The_, 13 n, 15, 19
Edward I, King, 260
Edwards, Jonathan, 71, 321, 323, 324, 372, 373, 379, 399, 445
Eliot, Rev. John, 201, 343
_Elliot’s Debates_, 83
Elliott, S. K., 102
_Elsie Venner_, 454, 459
_Emancipation of Labor, The_, 256
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 108, 226, 230, 258, 264, 266, 304, 314, 316, 317, 319, 337, 344, 349, 373, 379, 380, 383, 384, 385, 386-399, 401, 409, 412, 420, 426, 429, 431, 433, 439, 447, 449, 451, 455, 462, 474
_Encyclopedia Americana_, 94
_English Serfdom and American Slavery_, 102
_English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_, 461
_Epipsychidion_, 259
_Epistle of Robert Hogbin, Esq._, 201
_Essays_ (Emerson), 387, 390
_Essay on Politics_, 393, 394, 396, 397
_Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females_, 342 n
_Essay on Thoreau_, 346 n
Evans, George Henry, 254
_Evening Post, The_, 102 n, 239, 242 n, 244, 245
Everett, Edward, 109, 159, 317, 319, 320, 329, 397, 399, 423, 437, 458, 460
_Examination of the Late Proceedings in Congress Respecting ... the Secretary of the Treasury, An_, 15
_Exclusion of Slavery from the Territories, On the_, 312-313
“Falkland,” 287
_Fanny_, 202
_Federal Orrery, The_, 294
_Federalist, The_, 24, 196, 286, 302, 303
Felton, Professor, 367
Fenn, William W., 324 n, 327
Fenno, John, 186, 206
_Ferdinand and Isabella_, 434
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 382, 430
Fielding, Henry, 128
_Fight, The_, 172
Fillmore, President Millard, 47
Filmer, Sir Robert, 215
Fink, Mike, 138, 192
_First Settlement of England, The_, 306, 307-308
Flint, Rev. Timothy, 51, 140, 141, 162-163, 211
_Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi_, 133, 162, 166
Follen, Professor Charles, 94, 441
_Forayers, The_, 132, 134
Forrest, Edwin, 191
Fourier, François Charles Marie, 30, 244, 251, 348, 349, 431
Fox, Dixon Ryan, 199, 224, 244
_Francis Berrian, or the Mexican Patriot_, 163
Franklin, Benjamin, 11, 185, 225, 228, 308
_Frederick Douglass_, 431
Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 439
Freneau, Philip, 186, 196
Frothingham, Octavius B., 348, 379, 380, 384
_Fugitive Slave Law, The_, 315
Fuller (Ossoli), Margaret, 314, 349, 426-434, 436, 439, 448
----, Timothy, 427
Gage, General, 459
Gaines, Francis Pendleton, 102 n
Galloway, Joseph, 186
_Gander Pulling, The_, 172
Gansevoort, Maria, 259, 260, 261
----, Major-General Peter, 260
Garland, Hamlin, 213
Garrison, William Lloyd, 256, 314, 319, 332, 341, 343, 351, 352-361, 365, 366, 411, 415, 416, 420, 431, 448, 458
Genêt, Citizen, 292
_Genius of Universal Emancipation, The_, 353
_George Balcombe_, 162
George, Henry, 467
_George Mason, the Young Backwoodsman; or “Don’t Give up the Ship_,” 163
_Georgia Historical Quarterly, The_, 177 n
_Georgia Scenes_, 51, 162, 166, 168, 169, 172, 178 n
_Georgia Theatrics_, 172, 178 n
_Gladiator, The_, 191
Gladstone, W. E., 472
_Glance Behind the Curtain, A_, 464, 464 n
_Godey’s Lady’s Book_, 187
Godkin, Edwin Lawrence, 257, 468, 471
Godwin, Parke, 200, 243, 244
----, William, 11, 22, 33, 188, 189, 190, 242, 331, 335, 336, 409
Goethe, 389, 430, 433
Gournay, Vincent de, 11
_Governor Clinton’s Speech_, 201 n
Grant, General U. S., 48
Grattan, C. Hartley, 466 n
Gray, Edward, 48
----, Elizabeth, 48
----, Thomas, 31, 188
Grayson, William J., 103-108, 110, 111, 256
Greeley, Horace, 101, 107, 108, 200, 208, 238, 242, 244, 247-258, 352, 399, 432, 458
Green, Duff, 36
Greene, General, 132
_Greenfield Hill_, 340
Grimké, Angelina, 342 n, 432
---- Sisters, 343, 351
Grotius, 117, 306
_Gulliver’s Travels_, 262
_Guy Rivers_, 130
Hale, Edward Everett, 462 n
Hall, Captain Basil, 215
----, James, 51, 140 n, 162, 164, 172, 211
Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 200, 238
Hamilton, Alexander, 13, 14, 16, 20, 21, 24, 36, 48, 89, 93, 94, 95, 138, 143, 148, 156, 196, 197, 198, 206, 227, 245, 285, 291, 297, 305, 309, 316, 473
Hammond, Governor, 102
_Harbinger, The_, 244
Harper, Chancellor, 102
_Harpe’s Head_, 164, 165, 172
Harrington, James, 5, 305, 306, 307
_Harrison Gray Otis_, 341 n
Hartford Wits, The, 24, 188
_Harvard Graduates_, 467
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 259, 265, 442-450
Hayes, President Rutherford B., 472
Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 126
----, Robert Young, 310, 330
Hedge, Frederick Henry, 430
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 318
Heine, Heinrich, 439
Helper, Hinton R., 133
Henry, Patrick, 33, 34
Hergesheimer, Joseph, 445
_Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic_, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265
Hervey, James, 31
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 314, 344 n, 351, 414
Hildreth, Richard, 438
_Hints toward Reforms_, 250 n, 252 n, 257
_Hireling and the Slave, The_, 103, 104, 108
_History of the American Drama, A_, 191
_History of the Congregational Churches in the United States_, 324 n, 325 n
_History of the United States_, 437-438
Hoar, Judge, 402
Hobbes, Thomas, 78
Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 163
----, Josiah Ogden, 206
----, Matilda, 206
Holmes, Abiel, 454
----, Oliver Wendell, 260, 319, 320, 451-459, 460
_Home as Found_, 141, 229, 230, 233
_Homeward Bound_, 233
Hone, Philip, 245
_Hopes and Fears for Art_, 407
Hopkins, Samuel, 329, 340, 373, 375-376
Hopkinson, Francis, 186
Horace, 453
_Horace Greeley_, 254 n
_Horace Greeley and the Working-Class Origins of the Republican Party_, 250, 252, 253, 254
_Horseshoe Robinson_, 41, 51, 53
_Horse Swap, The_, 172
_House of the Seven Gables, The_, 446
Howells, William Dean, 466
Huger, Alfred, 103
Hughes, Thomas, 469
Hume, David, 385
Hunt, Gaillard, 71, 72 n, 80
Hutchinson, Governor Thomas, 276
_Ichabod_, 315
_Illinois Monthly Magazine, The_, 164
_Independent in Politics, The_, 471 n, 469
_Industrial Worker, The_, 141
_Inquiry into the Nature of the Constitution of the United States, An_, 299
_Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, An_, 15
_Inquiry into the Principles and Tendencies of Certain Public Measures, An_, 15
_Introductory Remarks_, 326, 333-334, 336
_Introduction to the Old Testament_, 417
_Invention of Letters, The_, 291
Irving, Pierre M., 205
----, Washington, 29, 47, 49, 50, 51, 54, 172, 183, 195, 200, 203-212, 213, 218, 238, 471
----, William, 213
Jackson, Andrew, 4, 8, 26, 29, 34, 36, 37, 55, 63, 90, 122, 139, 145-152, 154, 156, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 198, 207, 241, 242, 243, 249, 298, 309, 353
----, Stonewall, 65, 70
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 345, 382
_Jacobiniad, The_, 294
_James Russell Lowell_, 465
_James Russell Lowell and his Friends_, 462 n
_Java Head_, 445
Jay, John, 196, 198, 224, 225, 227
Jefferson, Thomas, 4, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 21, 22, 26, 33, 38, 61, 62, 66, 69, 70, 71, 77, 84, 88, 89, 90, 111, 119, 120, 142, 146, 148, 150, 151, 153, 158, 159, 206, 228, 239, 240, 241, 243, 251, 252, 272, 277, 278, 284, 287, 288, 300, 301, 302, 335, 366, 383, 390, 394, 396, 421, 430, 462, 468, 473
_Jefferson Davis, A Memoir by his Wife_, 146
_Jeffersonian Democracy in New England_, 255 n
Jeremiah, 282
_Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians_, 116
_John Bull in America_, 214
_John G. Whittier_, 367
_John Greenleaf Whittier_, 351
Johnson, Andrew, 468
----, Dr. Samuel, 35, 109
_Jonathan Wild_, 128
_Journal_ (Thoreau), 411 n
_Journals_ (Emerson), 317, 344, 349, 386, 387, 391, 392, 393 n, 395, 398, 399, 409
_Justice and Expediency_, 362, 377
Juvenal, 453
Kane, Elisha Kent, 50
Kant, Emmanuel, 343, 382, 430
_Katherine Walton_, 128 n
Keats, John, 111, 453
Kennedy, John Pendleton, ii, 28, 37, 41, 46-56, 160, 172, 177, 203, 377
----, William Sloane, 367
Kent, Chancellor James, 117, 196, 197-199
----, William, 198
_Kentuckian in New York, The_, 41, 45, 46, 377
King, Charles, 245
----, Rufus, 196
Kirkland, President, 280, 281, 284-285
Kirkpatrick, John Ervin, 140, 141
Kneeland, Abner, 463, 469
“Knickerbocker” _History_, 212
_Knickerbocker Magazine, The_, 46, 163
_Knights of the Horse-Shoe, The_, 45
Knox, General, 291
_Koningsmarke_, 216, 218, 219
Lamar, L. Q. C., 62
----, President, 170
_Landing at Plymouth, The_, 3 n
Landor, Walter Savage, 389
_Last Days of John Brown, The_, 412
_Last Leaf, The_, 260
_Last of the Mohicans, The_, 235
_Law of God and the Statutes of Men, The_, 421 n
_Leaves of Grass_, 466
_Leaves from Margaret Smith’s Journal of Massachusetts Bay_, 363
_Leben Jesu_, 417
_Lectures on Constitutional Law_, 299
Lee, General Robert E., 29, 65
Legaré, Hugh Swinton, ii, 96, 103, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114-124, 168, 169, 438
_Legends of the West_, 164
Leggett, William, 200, 208, 243, 244, 245
Leonard, Daniel, 276
_Letter to A. C. Henry_ (Lincoln), 155
_Letter to the Members of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society of Boston_, 417 n, 418, 419, 420
_Letters of James Russell Lowell_, 437 n, 461, 462 n, 463, 466, 467, 469, 470, 471
_Letter of Mr. Paul Ambrose on the Great Rebellion in the United States_, 56
_Letters from the South_, 198, 216 n, 217
_Letters on Slavery_, 102
Lewis, Matthew Gregory (“Monk”), 220
_Liberator, The_, 341, 353, 359
_Life and Adventures of Arthur Clenning, The_, 163
_Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, The_, 347-348, 414, 417 n
_Life and Letters of Joseph Story, The_, 301
_Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, The_, 453
_Life and Letters of Washington Irving, The_, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210
_Life of Andrew Jackson_, 148, 149
_Life of William Lloyd Garrison_, 256 n, 332 n, 342 n, 344, 344 n, 353-354, 356, 358, 359-360, 365, 368
_Life of James Louis Petigru_, 103, 104, 111
_Life of John P. Kennedy_, 48
_Life of John Marshall_, 22, 24
_Life of Martin Van Buren_, 173, 174, 176, 177
_Life of Milton_, 466
_Life of Henry David Thoreau_, 314
_Life of Washington_, 211
_Life of Whitman_, 367
_Life Without and Life Within_, 430 n, 431
_Literary History of America, A_, 416 n, 427
Lieber, Francis, 93-98
Lincoln, Abraham, 4, 66, 152-160, 242, 420 n, 422, 473
_Literary History of Philadelphia_, 185
_Literature of the Middle Western Frontier, The_, 164
Livingston, Chancellor, 227
Locke, John, 197, 198, 199, 228, 282, 287, 305, 380, 381, 382, 420
Longfellow, Henry W., 319, 320, 439-441, 453, 465
Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 51, 162, 166-172, 176, 178
_Lord Byron’s Character and Writings_, 116
Loring, Commissioner Edward G., 360, 368, 411, 423
_Lost Occasion, The_, 367
Lovejoy, Elijah P., 246, 333
Lowell, Rev. Charles, 402, 463
----, Francis Cabot, 462
----, James Russell, 266, 314, 315, 351, 368, 436, 440, 460-472, 474
----, John, 461, 462
_Lucius Junius Brutus_, 284, 285
Lundy, Benjamin, 353
_Lyrical and other Poems_, 114
McDuffie, Governor George, 62, 81, 136, 168, 170
Madison, James, 6, 71, 196, 288, 305
_Magnalia Christi Americana_, 371
_Man the Reformer_, 396, 397
Mann, Horace, 399
_Manual of American Literature, A_, 438 n
Marcy, Governor William M., 244
_Mardi_, 260, 261, 262, 263
_Margaret Fuller, A Psychological Biography_, 427 n, 432
Marshall, John, 8, 20-27, 47, 94, 138, 197, 245, 300, 301, 302, 316, 473
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, 141
Martineau, Harriet, 351
Marx, Karl, 251, 467
Mason, Col. George, 277
_Massachusetts to Virginia_, 368
Masson, David, 466
Mather, Cotton, 202, 371, 391, 414, 428, 447
May, Samuel J., 351
Mayhew, Jonathan, 325, 326, 462
Mazzini, 428, 433
_Mellichampe_, 129
Melvill, Sir Richard, 260
Melville, Allan, 260, 261
----, Herman, ii, 58, 131, 183, 238, 258-267, 445, 449
----, Major Thomas, 260
_Memoirs and Letters of James Kent_, 198
_Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli_, 429, 430, 431, 434
_Menander to Philenia_, 288
Merriam, Charles A., 72 n, 94, 334 n
Metternich, Prince, 94
_Militia Company Drill, The_, 72
Mill, James, 428
----, John Stuart, 104, 472
Milton, John, 109, 366
_Minister’s Wooing, The_, 374
_Minutes and Debates of the Constitutional Convention_, 72
Mirabeau, Marquis de, 10, 293
_Moby Dick_, 131, 261, 262, 263
Modestinus, 117
_Monikins, The_, 227, 228, 229
Monroe, James, 71
Montesquieu, Charles, 73, 75, 76, 94, 306, 392, 393
Moore, Tom, 30, 111, 114, 185, 187, 200
_Moral Bully, The_, 453, 454
Morison, S. E., 341 n
Morley, John, 472
Morris, Gouverneur, 194, 196, 230, 280
----, Robert, 8, 21, 183, 195
----, William, 396, 406, 407, 408, 472
Morse, Jedidiah, 321
----, John T., 453
----, S. F. B., 50
Morton, Mrs. Sarah Wentworth, 288
Motley, John Lothrop, 83, 438
Mott, Lucretia, 35, 428
Napoleon, 240
_Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee_, 172, 174, 175
_Narrative of the Surprizing Works of God_, 445
Nathan, James, 428
_Nation, The_, 468, 470
_National Philanthropist, The_, 342
_Nature_, 390, 447
_Nature and Progress of Liberty_, 291
_Nebraska Question, The_, 420, 421-422, 424
Nemours, Du Pont de, 3, 10, 243
Nevins, Allan, 102 n, 242 n, 244, 245
_New England Chattels_, 102
_New Views of the Constitution of the United States_, 299
_New York Herald, The_, 102 n, 356-357
_Nick of the Woods, or the Jibbenainosay_, 135, 191, 192, 235
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 94
Nightingale, Florence, 107
_North American Review, The_, 111, 442
Norton, Andrews, 329, 454
----, Charles Eliot, 441, 460, 465, 470
Novalis, 430
Noyes, John Humphrey, 343-346, 355, 359
Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson, 185
_Oceana, The_, 306, 307
_Old Cambridge_, 341 n
_Old-Town Folks_, 372, 373, 374
_One-Hoss Shay, The_, 453, 454
_Orations and Addresses_, 201
_Origin of Species, The_, 419
_Origin, History and Influence of Roman Legislation, The_, 116
_Ossian_, 31, 111, 186
Ossoli, Count, 428
Otis, Harrison Gray, 279, 353
----, James, 325
Owen, Robert, 30, 242, 349
Page, J. W., 102
----, Thomas Nelson, 28
Paine, Robert Treat, 113, 279, 288-295, 317, 329, 436, 452
----, Thomas, 11, 12, 22, 88, 96, 284, 288, 342, 356, 366
Papinian, 117
Parker, Theodore, 108, 115, 124, 171, 256, 297 n, 300, 311, 314, 315, 316 n, 319, 327, 329, 338, 342, 347, 351, 373, 398, 399, 414-425, 426, 430, 433, 439, 455, 456, 458
Parkinson, Richard, 215
Parkman, Francis, 438-439, 458
_Parson Turell’s Legacy_, 453
_Partisan, The_, 53, 134
_Partisan Leader, The_, 35, 36, 37
Pascal, 264
_Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia_, 7, 8
_Patrick Henry, Sketches of the Life and Character of_, 31-33
Paulding, James Kirke, 162, 163, 183, 190, 198, 200, 207, 212-221, 238
Peabody, Elizabeth, 443
----, Sophia, 443, 449
Peaslee, Mary, 364
Pendleton, L. B., 83, 86, 87, 91
----, Nancy, 47
_Perfectionist, The_, 343
Perry, Commodore, 50
Petigru, James Louis, 103, 110, 123, 168
Phillips, Wendell, 108, 256, 314, 333, 351, 420, 436, 458
_Phocion_, 287
Pickering, Timothy, 187, 296
Pierpont, John, 365
_Pierre, or the Ambiguities_, 261, 263, 264
Pike, Albert, 162
_Pilgrim’s Progress_, 129
Pinckney, General Charles Cotesworth, 110
Pindar, 402
_Pioneer, The_, 464 n
_Pioneers, The_, 216, 220, 224
Pitt, William, 170, 282
Plato, 252, 259, 264, 318, 381, 427
_Plea for Captain John Brown, A_, 413
Poe, Edgar Allan, 57-59, 127
_Poet of the Breakfast Table, The_, 455, 457, 458
_Poganuc People_, 372, 374
_Political Ethics_, 95
_Political Justice_, 331, 335, 336, 409-410
_Political Science Quarterly, The_, 250
Pope, Alexander, 31, 104, 114, 289, 290, 452, 466
_Port Folio, The_, 187
_Prairie, The_, 232
Prescott, W. H., 367, 438
_Present Age, The_, 395
_Present Crisis, The_, 464, 464 n
Prince, H. L., 154
_Professor at the Breakfast Table, The_, 455, 456
_Progress and Poverty_, 467
_Prometheus_, 463, 464, 464 n
_Prometheus Bound_, 402
_Pro-Slavery Argument_, 102
_Pro-Slavery Propaganda in American Fiction in the Fifties_, 102
_Prose Sketches and Poems_, 162
Pufendorf, Baron von, 117
_Puritan and his Daughter, The_, 215, 216
Quesnay, François, 3, 10, 11
Quincy, Edmund, 314, 343, 345, 331, 359, 436
----, Josiah, 276, 279, 329, 343, 368, 460, 462
Quinn, Arthur Hobson, 191 n
_Quodlibet_, 37, 51, 55, 56, 177
Rabelais, 262, 265
_Raciad, The_, 114
Radcliffe, Mrs. Ann, 111
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 307
Randolph, John of Roanoke, 8, 9, 26, 30, 31, 35, 57
Ranke, Leopold von, 437
_Rawle on the Constitution_, 299
_Rebellion, The_, 468 n
_Recollections of a Busy Life_, 249
_Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi_, 163
_Recorder, The_, 201 n
_Red Book, The_, 48, 51
_Redskins, The_, 226 n, 229, 230, 231, 236
Reed, Amy Louise, 446, 448
_Religious History of New England: King’s Chapel Lectures_, 324 n, 327
_Rhymed Lesson, A_, 452 n
Ricardo, David, 241
_Richard Hurdis_, 128, 130
Richter, Jean Paul, 430
_Rights of Man, The_, 12
_Rights of Woman_, 331
Ripley, Dr. Ezra, 199, 402
----, George, 101, 108, 242, 347, 348, 349, 350
----, Sophia, 349
_Rise of the Dutch Republic, The_, 438
Rittenhouse, David, 185
_Rob of the Bowl_, 51, 53, 54
Robespierre, 398
_Robinson Crusoe_, 163
Robinson, William A., 255 n
Rogers, Dr., 199
_Romance of American History_, 140 n, 166
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 11, 22, 242, 261, 264, 284, 318, 331, 345, 366, 390, 402, 413, 420, 430, 433, 434, 466
_Ruling Passion, The_, 290
Rusk, Ralph Leslie, 164, 165
Ruskin, John, 101, 406, 407
_Saint’s Rest_, 371
_Salmagundi_, 200, 206, 213
Sampson, Abbot, 101
Sanborn, F. B., 314
Sand, Georges, 429
Sargent, John O., 453
_Satanstoe_, 235
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 58
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 382
Scollay, Priscilla, 260
Scott, Sir Walter, 28, 30, 47, 111, 120, 129, 171, 200, 216, 220, 371
_Scout, The_, 133
Scudder, H. E., 465
Sedgwick, Catherine M., 241
----, Henry M., 241
----, Theodore, Jr., 241
_Self-Portraiture in the Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne_, 446, 448
_Seventh of March Speech, The_, 313, 314, 367, 368
Sewall, Jonathan, 351
----, Joseph, 276
----, Samuel, 364, 446
Seward, William Henry, 107
Shakespeare, 47, 129, 130
Shaw, Elizabeth, 259
Shays, Daniel, 276, 282, 284, 297, 340
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 111, 259, 381, 453
_Shooting Match, The_, 172
_Shoshonee Valley, The_, 163
Sibley, J. L., 467
Sidney, Algernon, 354, 420
“Sidney, Edward William,” 36
Simms, William Gilmore, ii, 37, 39, 47, 53, 54, 102, 110, 112, 125-136, 169, 190, 232, 474
_Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett of West Tennessee_, 173, 175, 176, 177
_Skipper Ireson’s Ride_, 370
_Slavery_, 333, 335
_Slavery in Massachusetts_, 412
_Social Destiny of Mankind, The_, 251
Socrates, 427
Solomon, 264, 265
_Song, The_, 172
_Songs of Labor_, 370
Sotheran, Charles, 254 n
_South Atlantic Quarterly, The_, 102 n
_Southern Plantation, The_, 102 n
_Southern Quarterly Review, The_, 39
_Southern Review, The_, 112, 114
Smith, Adam, vii, 3, 121, 241, 242, 243, 308, 400
----, Gerrit, 351, 359, 365
Smollett, Tobias, 128
_Snowbound_, 370
Sparks, Rev. Jared, 330, 367, 437
_Spectator, The_, 31
_Speech on the Compromise Measures_, 313
_Speech at New Haven_, 154
_Speech at Springfield_, 157, 159
_Speech in Wall Street_, 309 n
Spinoza, 264
_Spirit of the Sub-Treasury_, 122
Spotswood, Governor Alexander, 7, 45
Staël, Madame de, 381
Stansbury, Joseph, 186
Stanton, Theodore, 438 n
_State Rights Sentinel, The_, 171
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 200, 238
Stephen, Leslie, 461, 469
Stephens, Alexander H., 39, 56, 62, 64, 65, 69, 82-93, 94, 167, 302, 473
Sterne, Lawrence, 31, 33, 35
Stiles, Rev. Ezra, 199
Stoddard, Richard Henry, 200, 238
Story, Joseph, 83, 88, 93, 117, 197, 260, 297, 300-303, 304, 311
----, W. W., 301
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 107, 314, 371-378, 428
_Stranger in America, The_, 95
Strauss, David Friedrich, 417
Stuart, Moses, 367
_Studies in Psychology_, 446
_Sullivan’s Island_, 114
Sumner, Charles, 106, 351
_Swallow Barn_, 28, 41, 50, 51, 52, 172, 377
Swift, Jonathan, 228, 453
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 436, 466
Swinton, Mary, 115
Taine, Hippolyte, 466
Tandy, Jeannette Reid, 102
Tappan, Arthur, 351
----, Lewis, 351, 362
_Tariff, The_, 308 n
Taylor, John of Caroline, ii, 14-19, 20, 21, 29, 61, 90, 122, 123, 150, 153, 170, 217, 277, 299, 336
----, Zachary, 71
_Tempora Mutantur_, 470
_Tent on the Beach, The_, 369
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 47, 54
_Thanatopsis_, 239
_Thirty Years’ View_, 14, 151
_Thomas Carlyle and his Works_, 413
Thoreau, Henry David, 156, 258, 264, 266, 314, 319, 367, 389, 394, 400-413, 426, 433, 440, 449, 451, 458, 460
Thornton, W. T., 241
Ticknor, George, 116, 367, 437
_Timothy Flint, Pioneer, Missionary, Author, Editor_, 140, 141
Toombs, Robert, 39, 62, 86, 91
Tocqueville, Alexis de, vi
_Tour of the Prairies, A_, 211
_Transcendentalism in New England_, 348, 379, 380, 381
_Transcendentalist, The_, 384, 385
_Transient and Permanent in Christianity, On the_, 338
_Treatise on True Virtue, A_, 372
Trent, Professor William Peterfield, 39, 131
_Tribune, The_, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 255
_Tristram Shandy_, 31, 47
Trollope, Mrs., 215
Tucker, Henry St. George, 299
----, Nathaniel Beverley, ii, 35-40, 41, 42, 47, 57, 119
Tuckerman, Henry T., 48, 238
Turner, J. M. W., 407
----, Nat, 355
Twain, Mark, 159, 172, 259, 366
Tweed, “Boss,” 471
Tyler, President John, 8, 116
_Typee_, 261
Ulpian, 117
_Uncle Robin in his Cabin in Virginia and Tom without one in Boston_, 102
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, 102, 376, 377, 441
_Unitarian Christianity most Favorable to Piety_, 330-331
Van Buren, Martin, 36, 55, 197, 203, 207, 217, 246
Vanderbilt, Commodore, 231, 474
Van Doren, Carl, 133
Van Rensselaer, Stephen, 194, 195, 231
Vattel, Emrich von, 117
_Virginians, The_, 54
Voet, 117
Voltaire, 382
_Vote Yourself a Farm_, 254
Waddell, Dr. Moses, 168
Wade, John Donald, 169, 170, 177 n
_Walden_, 400, 403, 405, 406, 407, 408, 413
Walker, Nathaniel, 327
----, Williston, 324, 324 n
Ware, Norman, 141
Washington, George, 7-8, 21, 48, 159, 194, 211, 265, 291, 292, 300, 301, 356, 437
_Waverley Novels_, 216
Weaver, Raymond, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265
_Webster Address_, 424
Webster, Daniel, 37, 67, 69, 88, 90, 94, 116, 122, 144, 159, 177, 207 n, 227, 242, 246, 252, 278, 298, 299, 300, 301, 304-316, 317, 330, 335, 359, 367, 368, 387, 397, 398, 399, 412, 424, 458
Weed, Thurlow, 197
_Week, The_, 404, 406
Weems, “Parson,” 437
Weiss, John, 347, 412, 417 n, 422 n
Weld, Isaac, 215
Welles, Gideon, 64
Wendell, Barrett, 416 n, 427
Wertenbaker, Thomas J., 7, 8
_Western Monthly Magazine, The_, 164
_Western Souvenir, The; A Christmas and New Year’s Gift for 1829_, 164
_Westward Ho!_, 162, 163, 217, 220
Wette, Wilhelm Martin de, 417
Wharton, Edith, 435
_White Jacket_, 262
White, Maria, 351, 463, 465
Whitman, Walt, 127, 183, 222, 244, 264, 265, 366, 367
Whittier, John G., 244, 314, 315, 319, 351, 352, 359, 361-370, 377
----, Robert, 364
_Wieland_, 190
_Wilderness and the War-Path, The_, 165
Willard, President, 292
William IV, King, 452
_William Ellery Channing_, 330, 338
_William Gilmore Simms, Life of_, 39
Williams, Roger, 97, 327, 345, 379, 399
Willing, Mrs., 207 n
Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 200, 202, 238
Wilson, Henry, 469
_Windsor Forest_, 114
Winthrop, John, 124
----, Robert C., 47, 49
Wirt, William, 29, 30-35, 47, 48, 49, 56, 169
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 188, 189, 242, 331, 430, 432
_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_, 432
_Woodcraft_, 131, 134
Woods, Leonard, 367
Woolsey, Theodore, 94
Wordsworth, William, 111, 381, 389, 453, 466
_Working Man’s Advocate, The_, 254
_World’s Fair, The_, 470
Wright, Fannie, 242, 244, 428
----, Henry C., 343, 358
_Wyandotté_, 235
Wythe, George, 25, 29, 142, 143
Yates, Robert, 72
_Yemassee, The_, 134, 135
Young, Edward, 31, 111, 254
The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America [Volume Three]
Vernon Louis Parrington
The sudden death of Professor Vernon Louis Parrington in England, June 16, 1929, cut tragically short his labors on the last volume of _Main Currents in American Thought_. Of this third volume approximately the first half had been completed, which, together with the outline of the work and some scattered essays in sections otherwise undeveloped, constitutes all that the author left. Unfinished it is, yet no completion by another can be justified. That anyone could duplicate his felicity of style, so unobtrusively individual, so sensitively adjusted to the freighted thought, is hardly to be hoped for; and more important, that another scholar could accurately reproduce his interpretation is an assumption not to be warranted. The decision to publish the author’s incomplete work is a tribute to his brilliance.
Nevertheless it is possible to know Professor Parrington’s chief intentions, particularly when one understands, as his associates did, his principles for organizing materials and his standards of value. Students as well as associates first of all noticed beneath the richness and complexity of his thought a constancy of purpose as clear as the treatment of mass in a Gothic cathedral. Indeed it was through a delight in architecture pursued as a hobby for many years that Parrington expressed this desire for a unity, balanced, harmonious, and properly proportioned.
This architectonic feeling, abundantly illustrated in his writing habits, was carried over not only into his classroom procedure and conversation, but also into his varied interests. Painting as well as architecture had long intrigued him. Though few people knew it, he wrote poetry distinguished for restraint in expression and clarity of form; while in conversation he persistently sought the appropriate phrase, spiced it with wit, salted it with homely realism; for no gentleman of the eighteenth century was more conscious of the charms of good discourse.
Professor Parrington’s classroom procedure had a reputation that attracted students not much interested in literature and which appealed to all ranges of intellect. The source of that popularity was the personality of the teacher, together with his gift for presenting ideas and evoking a response. By means of a Socratic cross-examination Parrington made the student discover his intellectual deficiencies; while the class, to its astonishment and delight, found the quest for truth both elusive and exciting. Surprise and satisfied expectation kept the easily bored from sinking into apathy, for there was no telling from day to day just what Professor Parrington was going to do. He paired every occasion with a fitting response; yet this flexibility did not degenerate into an aimless drifting, since he persistently simplified his main objectives and concentrated the material to be studied, while expressing its meaning through a significant symbol or a telling phrase. His classes in the eighteenth century, for example, were given the concept of harmony, balance, and proportion. They found it in architecture, they saw it in dress, they heard it in conversation, they watched it work out in the heroic couplet, they pursued it in Addison, Pope, and Swift; in short, they analyzed the whole social structure of the age and discovered it everywhere. A germinal idea, Parrington liked to call it, while he held it before the class like a many-faceted crystal, slowly turning it around and around so the student could see every face. As a result no student who had taken the course ever forgot the significance of this architectonic trilogy.
In writing habits there was a similar all-encompassing purpose. He habitually began with his thesis--a phrase, a sentence, or a revealing figure. This was examined and stripped of its implications as one would peel an onion layer by layer. So imperious was the habit of this procedure that his ability to write would be blocked until he had in mind a perfectly crystallized concept expressible at the maximum in one sentence. An example of this occurred shortly before he left on his trip to England. He had been working on the period that Mark Twain had labeled the “Gilded Age,” but found the title inadequate to his idea, and, as a result, his writing did not get on. Another day some weeks later there was an obvious satisfaction expressed in his bearing and an exceptionally pronounced twinkle in his eye. “I have found the phrase,” he said; “I will call it The Great Barbecue.” Similarly, the three volumes of this work began in a single paragraph which by progressive unfoldings he expanded to its present scope.
After having made a provisional outline, with each section condensed into a single sentence, he began writing, completing a unit here or there as circumstance and mood directed. When it was completed the process of readjustment began. Each portion was inspected for its length, which had to be fitted to its relative importance; an emphasis here was shifted to balance an emphasis there; the mood of one part was altered to make it harmonize with the mood of its neighbor. As many as twelve times he rewrote a single section in this complex and delicate effort for harmonious adjustment. Finally, he made from this his finished outline.
Knowing Professor Parrington’s methods one can now understand the problem he faced and the solution he found when bent on the task of writing a history of American literature. Although he was by nature partial to the claims of aesthetics, yet it was obvious to him that such an approach was foredoomed to failure. All too few of the American writers would deserve treatment on any aesthetic test, while many who were undeniably significant could not possibly be left out even though inferior artistically. Moreover, one only had to look at the numerous attempts already made to see the failure of the belletristic interpretation. What were these histories of American literature? Sprawling lists of names arranged in a fashion that gave little save conventionalized data and some dubious evaluations. Already there was a widespread demand for a new interpretation growing out of these past failures.
Professor Parrington found the first step to a solution when he remembered the day he opened Taine’s _Histoire de la littérature anglaise_. It had come as a new and inspiring discovery to find a method that envisaged the literature of a people as the inevitable outgrowth of their racial peculiarities, environment, and epoch. It is true that the claim set up by Paine, that his method was scientific and could account for every phenomenon, proved to be unfounded; but nevertheless his work was epoch-making; it gave a unity and a significance never before attained, and this was what attracted Parrington. Nothing less unifying than Paine’s method was thinkable.
A second source of inspiration came from a close friend and colleague, J. Allen Smith, another pioneer figure, who applied to the abstract theorizings of political science the economic realities that underlie and determine them. The method was so fruitful of results that it quickly spread to a group of American political scientists, from whose findings much of Parrington’s significant work received its first flattering confirmation. Under such a stimulus Parrington was quick to realize the fruitfulness of economic determinism when applied even to literature.
A third idea completed the synthesis. When he envisaged American literature as American thought, the trammel of the belletristic was broken and he was free to reëvaluate American writers, to follow the trail of their work wherever it led; for at last he had found a method true to facts, yet one which would satisfy his insatiable demand for a significant unity, balanced, harmonious, and properly proportioned. The economic forces imprint their mark upon political, social, and religious institutions; literature expresses the result in its thought content.
But a technique, though vitally necessary, is not the end of the story. There still remains, even for the most impartial scholar, the final and, be it admitted, inescapable evaluation. Parrington was too honest with himself to dodge the issue; he made his choice and abided the result. In the foreword to the first volume he made his confession: “The point of view from which I have endeavored to evaluate the materials is liberal rather than conservative, Jeffersonian rather than Federalistic; and very likely in my search I have found what I went forth to find, as others have discovered what they were seeking. Unfortunately the _mens aequa et clara_ is the rarest of attributes, and dead partisanships have a disconcerting way of coming to life again in the pages of their historians. That the vigorous passions and prejudices of the time I have dealt with may have found an echo in my judgments is, perhaps, to be expected; whether they have distorted my interpretation and vitiated my analysis is not for me to determine.”
Professor Parrington’s _Main Currents in American Thought_ has, then, for its subject the adventures of American liberalism. To anyone alive to the issue an adventurous story it is, as becomes more apparent when the author’s own liberalism is completely understood. Those sections where his sympathies are kindled, where he stamps his seal of enthusiastic admiration, provide the clue which his treatment of Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Channing, and Theodore Parker assuredly verifies. All of his latent enthusiasms burst into bloom until, as in his essay on Roger Williams, nothing less than the cadence and passion of the Song of Solomon would express it. “Running through his writings is a recurrent echo of the Hebrew love-song that Puritan thought suffused with glowing mysticism: ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.... I will arise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.’ But when he went into the broad ways of Carolinian England, seeking the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley, he discovered only abominations. The lover was tempted by false kisses; the Golden Image was set up in the high places, and the voice of authority commanded to bow down to it. And so as a Christian mystic Roger Williams became a Separatist, and set his mind upon the new world where the lover might dwell with his bride.”[477]
The liberalism of Parrington had this great virtue, which all too many creeds lack: it was built on an obligation first to examine and understand all points of view before exercising the right to condemn them. Although he disliked the personalities and groaned at the dreary pages of men like Cotton Mather, yet he was not satisfied until he got at their marrow. And again there was an abiding sense of the humane in Parrington before which all abstractions, generalizations, and logical systems had to pass in review. He feared above all, as did the sensitive Jefferson, the cancer of power. “Man,” he used to say, “has never proved himself worthy of an unrestrained control of his fellows, nor has any special group of men ever been dominant without injustice to others.” Combined with this love of freedom was an urbanity and a sense of personal integrity not subject to the interference of outside forces in convention or mob--an integrity which so impressed everyone having contact with the man, that he has been often called an aristocrat. Parrington would not have objected to the label, nor have seen it as contradictory to the principles of liberalism, since in his opinion only liberalism expressing itself in a democratic society provides for the free exercise of personal rights. Elevating oneself by riding on the shoulders of others, a common device of the pseudo-aristocrat, was to him but a vulgar gymnastic performance.
When he described Jefferson “with his aristocratic head set on a plebeian frame”[478] he was unconsciously describing himself, for there was a deep love of the soil in Parrington. One saw it, surprisingly, in his hands. They were thick and sturdy, blunted at the ends as if from too much delving into the black loam of his flower garden, where roses, peonies, and crocuses were cherished companions, and the delight of his leisure hours. He secretly suspected the apartment dweller as any true farmer would; and though there was a twinkle in his eye when he called New York a Babylon or spoke of its corrupting influence on scholar and artist, yet there was a meaning implied more serious than the jest.
It was Parrington’s hope to vindicate this liberalism “stemming,” as he said, “from the fruitful loins of the eighteenth century.” As he diagnosed it, that era had two creative currents of thought: a hopeful, vigorous liberalism, together with a sturdy realism which did not balk at men’s selfishness or deny the economic basis of social forces. Unfortunately the nineteenth-century liberal attended only to hopes and neglected the realism, while the swelling forces of industrialism accepted the economic realities but cynically brutalized them. Failure was the inevitable result; the liberals despair while Babbitt, regnant, infests the country with his blustering agents. In the unfinished section of this last volume it was Parrington’s purpose to show this parlous state of twentieth-century America, to discern the hopeful gleam in the darkness, and to uncover the hidden forces working for a more stable and just society. Parrington’s point of view then, was that of a staunch and kindly liberalism, the motif in the three volumes, the theme never absent from a page of the whole composition. It is a liberalism not to be found in any program yet formulated by political party or economic sect; it is rather a generous idealism that can envisage a future richer in values, more humane in distribution of favors than any known past. Wise to the ways of man, such a liberalism refuses confinement in the strait-jacket of any set formula, yet escapes the emasculation awaiting mere enthusiasm; for it can separate foes from friends and recognize the point where compromise means surrender.
If my analysis thus far is to any purpose it will suggest what these main objectives that Parrington never completed were to have been. The unfinished Book Two was to chronicle three parties of revolt against the plutocracy born of the Gilded Age. Of these rebellions the first was engendered on the Middle Border, where the farmers, beset by hard times, struck out against the source of their ills. As the agrarians diagnosed the situation, these economic maladjustments were brought on by a currency manipulated for the benefit of creditors, and further enhanced by capitalistic control of the political machine. One of the last of Parrington’s completed units deals with the economic phase of the revolt; the next section was to record the farmer’s effort to democratize the government. Through pressure of third-party movements the farmers tried to inject such reforms as the initiative and referendum, the recall, the direct primary, and the income tax; until, seduced by Bryan’s oratory, they joined with the Democrats in an attack upon the intrenchments of capitalism. As Parrington saw it, these agrarian descendants of Jefferson, lacking the intellectual leadership which the South had contributed in earlier days, at a tactical disadvantage, and already a minority economic group, were fated to lose their last great uprising.
Also out of the valley of the Mississippi came a literature of the Middle Border. Such writers as Edward Eggleston and E. W. Howe had already initiated a realism that revealed the drabness of frontier life and suggested its smoldering discontent, although the pastoral note fathered by the genial and romantic James Whitcomb Riley did not lack its prose children. Notably did Meredith Nicholson, William Allen White, and Booth Tarkington[479] portray the village neighborliness, its wholesomeness, its spirit of democracy, until they cast such a fog of sentiment over the scene as to blur all the realities. But the true spirit of Populism is represented in the impassioned work of Hamlin Garland, whose “admirable realism and passionate democracy” Parrington depicts in a chapter that he completed.
The second chorus of dissent came from the very citadels of plutocracy, for the wage-earners, unable to escape slavery by flight to an unshackled frontier that no longer existed, were brought to bay. The doctrine of class war, which had been ignored since the eighteenth century, was revived by the German socialists and given an added plausibility by the employers’ unscrupulous use of injunction, black list, and lockout. T. V. Powderly, who found a solution to the labor problem in syndicalism, organized the Knights of Labor. Although this union had a promising inception, it was soon wrecked, while the craft unionism recommended by Samuel Gompers forged to the front because of its middle-class ideology and spirit of compromise. On the other hand the left wing of the labor cause embraced various brands of socialism. The tragic flare-up of the Haymarket riot, which resulted in a “red” scare and persecution of the humane Governor Altgeld, served Parrington as a dramatic illustration of the obloquy that descended upon the leaders of socialism, Daniel De Leon, Eugene V. Debs, and Victor Berger. Needless to say, Parrington had planned a vindication of them horn of his desire to see more justice in the world.
There were echoes of this proletarian strife manifested in the world of letters. Certain writers following Edward Bellamy joined the quest for a socialistic Utopia. Parrington had completed his passage on Bellamy, but of the party formed to agitate for principles advanced in _Looking Backward_ and of the other writers of Utopian novels, such as Tourgée, he left no treatment. A second set of writers were grouped together by reason of their common concern over the darkening future of American civilization. Edwin Markham, his humanitarian sympathies aroused, penned an indictment of wage exploitation in his “The Man with the Hoe” that caused no little concern in its day and spurred defenders of the existing economic system to offer liberal prizes for an equally convincing reply. The emergence of naturalism, seen in Stephen Crane[480] and Frank Norris,[480] was also a response to the darkening social outlook. Parrington defined naturalism as “a pessimistic realism that sets man in a mechanical world.” He traced this pessimistic determinism to the machine industrialism so overwhelming in its power as to impress man with his own impotence, to the centralization of wealth, which causes a caste regimentation of society, and finally to the great city, which reduces the inhabitant to an infinitesimal unit of a vast beehive. Other writers, equally oppressed by this state of affairs, concentrated on the phenomena of the city. It was here that Parrington intended to discuss Henry B. Fuller, Harold Frederic, Robert Grant, and Edith Wharton.[481]
The third party of revolt was a hesitant one--the South, still convalescing from the Civil War and further weakened by divisions in its counsels. Though burdened by parochial creeds, weakened by lack of intellectual leadership, the agrarian South, largely plebeian, joined the Middle Border in its uprising. The middle-class South, represented by Henry W. Grady, proposed a surrender to the Yankee principle of industrial exploitation, while the remnant of the old aristocracy resisted the new and clung to the traditions of the past. Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Mary Murfree, and George Washington Cable attended to these romantic traditions of the plantation, the negro, the mountaineer, and the creole; while Sidney Lanier[482] became the poet of southern landscape and sunrise. Far more significant in Parrington’s eye was the rebirth of a southern intelligentsia represented in letters by Ellen Glasgow, W. W. Woodward, the debunker, and James Branch Cabell,[483] the ironic romanticist. Professor Parrington, who had been among the first to appreciate Cabell, admired the competence of his style and the effectiveness of his ironic commentary on American civilization.
Book Three was to present the movement of liberalism from 1903 to 1917, and the reaction to it following the war. Parrington called this period of liberalism the “great stock-taking venture.” These liberals announced that the democratic hopes of earlier days had not been fulfilled, that the Constitution is not a democratic instrument nor was it intended to be, and that while Americans were professing to create a democracy, they had been creating in fact a plutocracy. They then determined upon a new program based on their discovery of the relations between economics and politics. Such relations made necessary the control of property by the collective will, and to that end they endeavored to squeeze the Hamiltonian state into a Jeffersonian mold.[484]
The muckrakers of 1903 to 1910 attacked the plutocracy where its joints creaked. In effect this group of writers from Henry D. Lloyd to Charles Edward Russell, Gustavus Meyers, and A. M. Simons popularized economics and made the liberals conscious of what was going on behind the closed doors of the directors’ meetings. On the other hand, the movement of Progressivism, engaged in the hopeless task of directing the political machinery to democratic ends, was typified by Robert La Follette, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Only one, La Follette, remained true to the colors; the other two compromised, then surrendered, and the hopes of liberalism went down in a tragic _débâcle_.
In the realm of letters this liberalism found expression in three major groups of writers. A set of intellectuals turned critical began to scrutinize the economic, political, and social institutions of America. Of these critics Parrington considered Randolph Bourne and Charles A. Beard[485] the most important. Another set turned to fiction, shifting their point of view from liberalism to radicalism, from politics to economics. Winston Churchill[486] had discovered the emptiness of the profit motive with its resultant destruction of beauty, freedom, and creative craftsmanship. Similarly Robert Herrick[486] became a pathologist of the city, investigated its ethics, and then rebelled at the predatory egoism which ruled its life to the destruction of all ethical integrity. At his best Jack London[487] wrote of the revolution, though later selling out to bigger and better royalties; while Upton Sinclair became the revolutionary sleuth spying upon the indecencies of the capitalist system. Perhaps these novelists were too seriously engaged in social criticism and reform propaganda to become great craftsmen, yet they were to Parrington important writers, because they were in touch with deep currents of American thought.
Still a third set of writers turned to a realistic technique appropriate to the times, yet avoided the weakness inherent in direct propaganda. The poets Masters,[488] Sandburg, Frost, and Robinson, Parrington chose for consideration as realists with an art, an underlying criticism of conditions, and a philosophy that set them above the other poets of the time. For the same reasons he had planned a section on Huneker. Theodore Dreiser,[489] because of his massive documentation, his deterministic philosophy, and his sense of the inevitable tragedy inherent in life, Parrington labeled a modern, meaning by this that Dreiser most adequately and most thoroughly represented modern America.
The last section of the book was to be a consideration of the post-war reaction to the liberalism of the preceding period. The economic democracy which liberals had marked for their goal was now attacked by the younger intellectuals. H. L. Mencken turned to farce and burlesque for methods adequate to express his contempt of American democracy. Biologists pointed to the inescapable laws of heredity as a refutation of the liberals’ hopes for social improvement; while some psychologists, discovering morons, ruled out all equalitarian Utopias. Parrington could find little sympathy in his heart for a return to the spirit of aristocracy. This narrow, doctrinaire biology, denied by the more careful biologists and the behaviorists who assert that environment is determining, cannot rule out all environmental changes. As long as the _milieu_ is an effective force in molding the organism, room is left for social betterment by social readjustments. A disputed psychology dealing in primitive sex drives, gland secretions, and intelligence scores is no more conclusive on the subject.
The attack on industrialism is nearer to the heart of Parrington’s ideals, because it proved to him that liberalism is not by any means dead. Such a comprehensive movement enlisting first-class minds--intellectuals, poets, novelists, dramatists--revealed clearly to him the increasing criticism of a dehumanized economics, and such criticism proceeds from an implicit liberalism.
The attack on the middle class is seen best in Zona Gale,[490] Evelyn Scott, and particularly in Sinclair Lewis,[491] whom Parrington rated the chief of our younger satirists. This satire is a searching criticism of the _bourgeois_ ideals and habitat, its tyrannical herd-mind, its poverty-stricken materialism. By its nature this satire clearly suggests a set of new ideals which grow out of a free individualism rather than a political or economic socialism. The emphasis is shifted by implication from externalities to things of the spirit. This is more clearly seen in the new philosophies just now arising, which deny the finality of economic law, turn in politics to the ideal of a decentralized state, and in science to new syntheses emphasizing the pragmatic and relative aspects of scientific law.
The latest literary fashions that Parrington intended to consider embody a psychological emphasis seen in the impressionism of biography, in the brutal but frank pacifism of war novels,[490] and most significantly of all in the impressionism and expressionism of Sherwood Anderson.[491] Parrington felt that there were rich potentialities latent in these new methods although the writers of the new school were themselves painfully at sea. In technique as well as in direct statement there was to be seen, though obscurely, a renewed emphasis upon individual integrity, the necessity for creative expression, and the reaffirmation of what some may choose to call spiritual values.
In effect he believed that all is not lost. Through the influence of science we are recovering the neglected realism of the past; we are not only reaffirming it but making its acquaintance more intimately than ever before. Weld that science to enlightened and humane aspirations (Parrington believed that there was nothing in the findings of science that prevented the union) and a revivified liberalism will make the world a fit place to live in. It is by no means an easy program, for it requires knowledge of fact, and ability to carry knowledge into the sphere of effective action. It is made doubly difficult by the untimely death of one of its chief proponents, yet in the young men and women whom he liked to have around him there must be, however obscurely, a feeling and a groping for the way out. They will be guided and inspired by such utterance as Parrington’s diagnosis of Sinclair Lewis, where he quarries out a vein of his own enduring liberalism.
“Some lingering faith in our poor human nature he still clings to. In the great American mass that human nature is certainly foolish and unlovely enough. It is too often blown up with flatulence, corroded with lust, on familiar terms with chicanery and lying; it openly delights in hocus pocus and discovers its miracle-workers in Comstocks and Aimee Semple McPhersons. But for all its pitiful flabbiness human nature is not wholly bad, nor is man so helpless a creature of circumstance as the cynics would have us believe. There are other and greater gods than Mumbo Jumbo worshiped in America, worthier things than hocus pocus; and in rare moments even Babbitt dimly perceives that the feet of his idol are clay. There are Martin Arrowsmiths as well as Elmer Gantrys, and human nature, if it will, can pull itself out of the trap. Bad social machinery makes bad men. Put the banker in the scullery instead of the drawing-room; exalt the test-tube and deflate the cash register; rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class; and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected. For all his modernity and disillusion learned from Pullman-car philosophers, Sinclair Lewis is still an echo of Jean Jacques and the golden hopes of the Enlightenment--thin and far-off, no doubt, but still an authentic echo.”
“Thin and far-off, no doubt,” is this contemporary liberalism, yet Parrington found hints of it in the midst of the war fiasco that culminated in reaction and despair. Death did not grant him the opportunity to show what he found, but the young men who learned from him the love of sound craftsmanship, who were inspired by his enlightened dreams, will some day complete the monument. In the meantime Vernon Louis Parrington would like to be held in memory as he held his friend, J. Allen Smith--as a “scholar, teacher, democrat, gentleman.”
E. H. Eby
_University of Washington Seattle, Washington March, 1930_
Footnotes
[477] Vol. I, p. 65.
[478] _Ibid._, p. 343.
[479] See Addenda for notes on these men.
[480] See Addenda for lecture notes on these writers.
[481] See Addenda for brief notes on these writers.
[482] See Addenda for brief notes on these writers.
[483] See Addenda for magazine article on Cabell.
[484] “A Chapter in American Liberalism,” which is included in the Addenda, deals with this subject, with the muckraking movement, and with post-war realism.
[485] See Addenda, “A Chapter in American Liberalism.”
[486] See “The Problem Novel and the Diversion from Naturalism,” in the Addenda.
[487] See Addenda for notes on London.
[488] See Addenda, “Ole Rölvaag’s _Giants in the Earth_.”
[489] See Addenda for lecture notes on Dreiser.
[490] See Addenda for brief notes.
[491] See Addenda, “Sherwood Anderson: a Psychological Naturalist.”
Foreword
With the present volume I bring to a close my studies in the main currents in American thought. The broad drifts of American opinion, as I interpret that opinion, should now be sufficiently clear. The volume immediately preceding the present one dealt with the romantic revolution in America--one of the most stimulating experiences the American mind has undergone--which was traced to twin forces: the influence upon an expansive generation of French romantic thought, and the spirit of robust individualism resulting from a fluid economics; and the creative result was the spontaneous emergence in America of a buoyant spirit of hopefulness that expressed itself in democratic programs and faith in a benevolent progress. The present volume deals with the slow decay of this romantic optimism in more thoughtful minds, and the cause of that decay is traced to three sources: the stratifying of economics under the pressure of centralization; the rise of a mechanistic science; and the emergence of a spirit of skepticism which, under the pressure of industrialism, the teachings of the physical sciences, and the lessons of European intellectuals, is resulting in the questioning of the ideal of democracy as it has been commonly held hitherto, and the spread of a spirit of pessimism. The custodianship of America by the middle class has brought unsuspected consequences in its train.
Thus after three hundred years’ experience we have returned, intellectually, to the point from which we set out, and the old philosophy brought to the new world from the compact societies of Europe, with its doctrine of determinism and its mood of pessimism, has come back in changed form to color the thinking of our generation. Emersonian optimism, that was the fullest expression of the romantic faith, is giving way to Dreiserian pessimism, and the traditional doctrine of progress is being subjected to analysis by a growing skepticism. Our intellectual history thus conceived falls into three broad phases: Calvinistic pessimism, romantic optimism, and mechanistic pessimism. Between the first and the last lies the America of yesterday that shaped the American mind and American institutions; and with the submergence of that native world we are in the way of repeating here the familiar history of Europe, with its coercive regimentations reproduced on a larger scale and in more mechanical fashion. Once more a gloomy philosophy stands on the threshold of the American mind. Whether it will enter and take possession of the household, no one can predict as yet. This much nevertheless is clear: an industrialized society is reshaping the psychology fashioned by an agrarian world; the passion for liberty is lessening and the individual, in the presence of creature comforts, is being dwarfed; the drift of centralization is shaping its inevitable tyrannies to bind us with. Whether the quick concern for human rights, that was the noble bequest of our fathers who had drunk of the waters of French romantic faith, will be carried over into the future, to unhorse the machine that now rides men and to leaven the sodden mass that is industrial America, is a question to which the gods as yet have given no answer. Yet it is not without hope that intelligent America is in revolt. The artist is in revolt, the intellectual is in revolt, the conscience of America is in revolt.
* * * * *
It ought not to be necessary to add that in these volumes I have not essayed to write a history of American literature--that rather difficult task for which no scholar is as yet equipped. But I have suffered so many gentle reproofs for failing to do what I did not set out to do, that it may be well to repeat what I said in the Foreword to Volume I, that I have been concerned in the present study with the total pattern of American thought--the broad drift of major ideas--and not with vagrant currents or casual variations. In particular I have been repeatedly taken to task for a seeming slight put upon certain of our artists, and it has been inferred that I slighted them because I chose to ignore whatever did not fit into a rigid scheme of economic determinism. Let me say in rebuttal that I hold no brief for a rigid scheme of economic determinism. I recognize the rich culture potentialities that inhere in individual variation from type, and I realize that the arts are likely to receive their noblest gifts from men who should be classed biologically as cultural sports or variations from the cultural type. But in such a study as I have undertaken, individual variation is significant not for its own sake, but rather for the help it may offer in determining the type. After due consideration I see no cause to apologize for my treatment of Poe, for example, if indeed I have done so. I am content to have placed him historically and culturally in relation to the whole, leaving the fascinating problem of his variation from type to those who deal with such problems.
V. L. P.
Introduction[492]
In the second volume of my studies I laid down the thesis that at the beginning of our national existence two rival philosophies contended for supremacy in America: the humanitarian philosophy of the French Enlightenment, based on the conception of human perfectibility and postulating as its objective an equalitarian democracy in which the political state should function as the servant to the common well-being; and the English philosophy of _laissez faire_, based on the assumed universality of the acquisitive instinct and postulating a social order answering the needs of an abstract “economic man,” in which the state should function in the interests of trade. And I pointed out further, with adequate backing up, I hope, that the first of these antagonistic philosophies was accepted by the agrarian leaders of America and found issue in the Jeffersonian program; that the second came to dominate the thinking of the mercantile, capitalistic America and took form in Hamiltonian Federalism. Unfortunately this logical alignment of diverse economic groups was obscured by the needs of practical politics, and in passing through the explosive Jacksonian revolution both philosophies underwent subtle changes. Jacksonianism imposed upon America the ideal of democracy to which all must thereafter do lip service, but it lost its realistic basis in a Physiocratic economics and wandered in a fog of political equalitarianism; and the Whiggery that issued from Federalism turned to the work of converting the democratic state into the servant of property interests. Both political parties contented themselves with an egoistic individualism that took no account of social ends, forgetful of the humanitarian spirit that underlay the earlier democratic program. The finer spirit of the Enlightenment was lost, and in consequence the major parties chose to follow the economic interests of master groups, heedless of all humanitarian issues.
But the spirit awakened by the earlier democratic enthusiasm could not be kept in political strait-jackets. The Jacksonian revolution overflowed all narrow party dikes, expressing itself in diverse humanitarian and reform movements and quickening the minds of ardent Americans with larger democratic aspirations. The noble idealism of successive third parties that have sprung up reasserted the democratic principles flouted by the major parties. The Locofoco movement, the Free-soil Party, the early Republican Party, the Greenback Party, the Populist Party, the Progressive Party, have had a common objective, namely to carry further the movement inaugurated by the Jeffersonians to make of America a land of democratic equality and opportunity--to make government in America serve man rather than property. The third-party movements have always been democratic movements, and though they have failed in their immediate objectives they have served the purpose of reminding the major parties--oftentimes rudely--that America presumes to be a democratic country. Thus interpreted the history of the political struggle in America since 1790 falls into three broad phases: the Jeffersonian movement that asserted the ideal of political democracy; the Jacksonian movement that established it crudely in practice; and the successive third-party movements that attempted to regain such ground as had been lost, to extend the field, and to perfect the machinery of democratic government.
As a result of the long struggle the abstract principle of democracy--during the period under consideration--was firmly established in the popular mind; but as it fell under the successive custodianship of different economic groups it came to receive strangely diverse interpretations. Interpreted by the coonskin Jacksonians it meant political equalitarianism; by the slave economy it meant a Greek democracy; by the industrial economy it meant the right of exploitation. It has changed service with each new master. Always the principles of Jeffersonianism--of democracy as a humane social order, serving the common well-being--have been lost out of the reckoning, and except in so far as the tendency has been checked by the third-party threat, democratic professions have been only a thin cover under which the old class warfare has gone forward vigorously. In the decades immediately following the Civil War democracy passed under the custodianship of the middle class, who were busily engaged in creating a plutocracy, and the major ideas of the earlier movement took on a characteristic middle-class coloring. The idea of a beneficent progress, which was the flower of the doctrine of human perfectibility, came to be interpreted as material expansion with constantly augmenting profits; and the idea of democracy came to be interpreted as the right to use the government of the whole for the benefit of the few.
* * * * *
Considered historically perhaps the chief contribution of the Progressive movement to the democratic cause is to be found in its discovery of the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the federal Constitution. That so obvious a fact so long escaped recognition was due to political causes easily understood. For a century the Constitution had been a symbol of national unity, a cohesive force amidst the drift of expansion, a counter influence to the disintegrations of states-rights particularisms; and as such it had appealed to the national loyalties of men in every commonwealth. To criticize it was reckoned disloyal. The long process of interpretation had remained in the hands of the lawyers and had been wholly legalistic and antiquarian. In all this earlier commentary--except for a small group of left-wing Abolitionists who repudiated the entire instrument--no question as to the democratic spirit of the Constitution was raised, no doubts as to its sufficiency as a fundamental democratic law were suggested. The class divisions that presided at its making were ignored, and the aristocratic spirit of its creators was forgotten. But with the rising revolt against the custodianship of government by financial and industrial interests came a new critical interest in the fundamental law. Discovering that its hands were tied the democracy began to question the reason for the bonds that constrained its movements. The latent distrust was quickened by what was regarded by many as judicial usurpations of power, such as the act of the Supreme Court in declaring unconstitutional the federal income-tax law, and the question of the desirability of an eighteenth-century document that by its complexity unduly impeded the functioning of the democratic will, was thrust into the foreground of political debate. It was the struggle of 1789 over again.
The new school of criticism was historical rather than legalistic. It was concerned primarily with origins--and it must take into account the political theories and class interests of the eighteenth-century gentlemen who framed the document. It refused to look upon the Fathers as supermen, devoted unselfishly to high patriotic duty, but chose to regard them as capable statesmen, saturated with aristocratic prejudices, who fearful of losing control of the new venture in republicanism, took care to shape an instrument that threw sharp restrictions about the majority will.
* * * * *
The theme of the present volume is the industrialization of America under the leadership of the middle class, and the consequent rise of a critical attitude towards the ideals and handiwork of that class. It concerns itself primarily with the spirit of realism that under the constrictions of industrialism and with the spread of scientific modes of thought emerged to question the ardent romanticisms of an earlier age, and bring under doubt the excellence of a social order created by the Industrial Revolution.
The field to be traversed is thus predetermined. The interpretation of our literature since 1860 must be fitted into the broad lines of our national experience and will follow the main divisions of development.
I. The conquest of America by the middle class and its custodianship of democracy. The philosophy of the middle class.
II. The challenge of that overlordship by:
1. The older democratic agrarianism as expressed chiefly in the third-party movements.
2. The new proletarian philosophy that came likewise out of the ferment of the French Revolution, but that traveled a different course--through Europe and the earlier continental Industrial Revolution, and thence to America.
III. The intellectual revolution brought about by science with the results:
1. The recovery of a spirit of realism.
2. The appropriation of science by the middle class.
IV. The rise of a detached criticism by the younger intellectuals.
In dealing with this material it will be necessary to follow sectional lines in the earlier decades until the encompassing movement of centralization finally obliterated them and produced a common national spirit and purpose.
In the welter that is present-day America militant philosophies with their clear-cut programs and assured faiths are wanting, and many feel, as Matthew Arnold felt fourscore years ago, that they are dwelling between worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. The old buoyant psychology is gone and in the breakdown and disintegration of the traditional individualism no new philosophies are rising. Builders of Utopias are out of a job. Political and economic theory is in charge of paymasters and is content with the drab rim of the familiar landscape. Retainer-fees have blotted out for it the lovelier horizons that earlier thinkers contemplated. Academic political scientists and economists have largely joined the Swiss guards, and abdicated the high prerogative of speculative thought. It is the men of letters--poets and essayists and novelists and dramatists, the eager young intellectuals of a drab generation--who embody the mind of present-day America; not the professional custodians of official views. They at least decline to block the path to the Promised Land with retainer-fees; they at least are free souls, and in the measure of their abilities, free thinkers. It is to them therefore that one must turn to discover the intellectual currents of later America--to their aspirations as well as to their criticisms. Literature at last has become the authentic voice of this great shapeless America that means so much to western civilization. Not theologians any longer, nor political philosophers, nor industrial masters, nor bankers, are the spokesmen of this vibrant life of a continent, but the intellectuals, the dreamers, the critics, the historians, the men of letters, in short; and to them one may turn hopefully for a revelation of American life.
The period dealt with in the present study marks the complete triumph of the middle class and the final defeat of the traditional agrarianism. The disintegration of the earlier romanticisms, both native and imported, has run its course. The philosophy of Jefferson and John Taylor, with its physiocratic bias, its antipathy to a money economy, its love of local autonomy, has been buried in the potter’s field.
* * * * *
Amidst all the turmoil and vague subconscious tendencies, certain ideas slowly clarified: first, that the earlier democratic aspirations had somehow failed, that an equalitarian philosophy adapted to frontier conditions could not easily be carried over into a centralizing and stratifying America and was doomed to eventual defeat; second, that even in the supposed heyday of our democracy, we had never achieved a democracy, but rather a careless individualism that left society at the mercy of a rapacious middle class; third, that we must take our bearings afresh and set forth on a different path to the goal. As these convictions slowly rose into consciousness, a quick suspicion of our earlier philosophies arose to trouble us. With the growing realism of the times came a belief that our French romantic theories were mainly at fault and we must somehow go back to the rationalistic eighteenth century and start once more to recreate a democratic philosophy. The crux of the matter seemed to lie in the romantic conception of human nature. Rousseau and Godwin were the false prophets who led us astray, and we must return to the solid realism of John Locke. In the light of a realistic psychology, with its discovery of morons, and its study of mob tendencies, it was no longer possible to take seriously that attractive figment of the romantic imagination--man in the state of nature, perfectible by following the light of reason, seeking justice. Morons do not fit nicely into the older theory--they jar one’s faith in human perfectibility. In the light of intelligence tests perhaps the whole romantic theory of democracy was only a will-o’-the-wisp. With the very foundations of our traditional philosophy turning to quicksand under our feet, no wonder we are bedeviled by doubts and uncertainties. Utopias no longer seem so near at hand as they did; plans and specifications of the ideal commonwealth no longer seem simple matters to be drawn by any competent social carpenter. Our jauntiness is gone, speculation is less important than investigation, and in the spirit of sober realism we are setting about the serious business of thinking.
In this thinking two major forces are at hand: economics and psychology. In our economic realism we are returning to the spirit of the eighteenth century, and adapting the determinism that marked political thought from Harrington and John Adams to Webster and Calhoun; but we are equipped with a psychological knowledge that those earlier thinkers lacked. Wedding the new psychology to the older economic determinism, we may hope in a spirit of sober realism to make some progress in our thinking.
Yet not too hastily should we abandon our earlier faith: the eighteenth-century conception of environment as a creative influence in determining character is a vital idea not yet adequately explored. Even morons may be traced back to adenoids or diets of salt pork and whisky or to later machine labor, and aristocracies are still seen to be economic. And aristocratic albinos may well breed mobs and morons. Jefferson was not as foolish as many of his disciples have been, and Jeffersonian democracy still offers hope. Education begins to fail--except education to individualize and to summon forth the potential intelligence of the younger generation.
Footnotes
[492] The Introduction, as will be readily seen by the reader, is not complete, yet it undoubtedly contains the gist of what Professor Parrington intended to include in it. He wrote several forms of some parts, from which the Introduction as it stands has been pieced together in logical order. It is probable that the last words he wrote were the significant closing words here--“to summon forth the potential intelligence of the younger generation.”--_Publisher._
Contents[493] [Volume Three]
Introduction: The Great Revolution xxiii
I. [A New America in the Making: Rise of capitalistic industrialism submerging the older agrarianism, the Enlightenment, the Jacksonian frontier]
II. [Aristocracy Dead: The principle of democracy accepted, yet driving toward a plutocracy. A middle-class, urban civilization]
III. [Cleavages: Western agrarianism; Eastern capitalism. The South confused, bitter, hesitant. Expansion of the frontier and the cities. The swift extension of the psychology of the city]
IV. [Changing Patterns of Thought: (1) From the frontier came the doctrine of preëmption, exploitation, progress; (2) From the impact of science came the dissipation of the Enlightenment and a spirit of realism; (3) From European proletarian philosophies came a new social theory]
V. [Certain Drifts: to unity, to realism, to criticism]
Book I: Changing America
Changes in traditional economies after the Civil War. The rise of American industrialism and the conquest of nature by science. The age of the middle class. The last flare-up of the spirit of the frontier 3