fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007 - Ethical Culture ...

the federalist papers #51 (1787).................................................................................173selected arguments of antifederalists (1780s)......................................................174document-based question - ....................................................................................... 175the constitution: ....................................................................................................... 175a democratic document?............................................................................................ 175charles beard: the constitution..............................................................................179a minority document (1913)........................................................................................179staughton lynd: ..........................................................................................................183the conflict over slavery..........................................................................................183henry steele commager: ............................................................................................188a constitution for all the people............................................................................188iv. the early republic: forging a national identity: 1791-1824.................................193alexander hamilton and thomas jefferson popular rule...................................195thomas jefferson: the importance of agriculture (1784).....................................196alexander hamilton, report on the subject of manufactures (1791).................196thomas jefferson: opinion on the constitutionality of the bank (1791)...........197alexander hamilton: opinion on the constitutionality of the bank (1791).....198hamiltonian federalists and jeffersonian republicans:views on the revolution.............................................................................................199the alien and sedition acts: intolerance and the search for order............... 200the revolution of 1800...............................................................................................201the kentucky resolutions of 1799.............................................................................203rhode island and new hampshire’sresponses to the virginia and kentucky resolutions (1799)................................ 204washington’s farewell address, september 17, 1796...............................................205thomas jefferson: first inaugural address........................................................... 206important decisions of the .......................................................................................208supreme court..............................................................................................................208the report and resolutions of the hartford convention january 4, 1815........210the monroe doctrine (1823)........................................................................................ 211v the disgusting spirit of equality:the age of jackson and antebellum reform: 1824-1860......................................... 213transcendentalism defined....................................................................................... 215ralph waldo emerson: poems (1803—1882)................................................................216henry david thoreau: civil disobedience.................................................................218martin luther king, jr.: .............................................................................................226letter from a birmingham jail.................................................................................226margaret fuller: ........................................................................................................232the great lawsuit (1810‐1850).....................................................................................232

andrew jackson: ..........................................................................................................238veto of maysville road bill (1830).............................................................................238south carolina ordinance of nullification (november 24,1832)..........................239john c. calhoun: ......................................................................................................... 240the fort hill address (1831)...................................................................................... 240andrew jackson: proclamation to the people of south carolina (1832)............ 240andrew jackson: ..........................................................................................................241veto of the bank bill (1832)........................................................................................241two documents on indian removal (1830s)...............................................................242cherokee nation vs. state of georgia (1831)............................................................ 244emily dickinson: poems (1830‐1886).............................................................................246kate chopin, at the ‘cadian ball...............................................................................249kate chopin: the storm...............................................................................................253kate chopin, desiree’s baby...........................................................................255edith wharton: the other two................................................................................257seneca falls declaration of sentiments and resolutions...................................266elizabeth cady stanton: address delivered at the seneca falls convention..267july 19, 1848...................................................................................................................267sojorner truth: ain’t i a woman?............................................................................. 269john l. o’sullivan: manifest destiny from democratic review (1839 and 1845)..270viewpoints of the mexican war ................................................................................271barbara welter: the cult of true womanhood (1820-1860)..................................272arlene hirschfelder: supreme court decisions affecting native americans....275vi. slavery, sectionalism and secession: 1830-1860.......................................................279charles w. chestnut: .................................................................................................. 281the passing of grandison............................................................................................ 281charles ball: slave testimony (1858)........................................................................288necessary evil to positive good................................................................................289abolitionist arguments............................................................................................. 290dred scott vs sanford (1857)......................................................................................291the lincoln-douglas debates (1858)..........................................................................293dbq: free soil, free labor, free men — the rise of the republican party.........295harriet beecher stowe: uncle tom’s cabin..............................................................297lincoln denies racial equality.................................................................................301interpreting the causes of the civil war...............................................................301nathaniel hawthorne: ..............................................................................................302young goodman brown................................................................................................302nathaniel hawthorne: ..............................................................................................308my kinsman, major molineux......................................................................................308 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Inventing An AmericaCrèvecoeur Discovers a New Man (c. 1770)Michel-Guillaume jean de Crèvcoeur, a young Frenchman of noblefamily, served with the French army in Canada from 1 758 to 1759. Finally reaching the English colonies in 1759, be traveledwidely, married a woman, and settled down to an idyllic existenceon his New York estate, “Pine Hill “ A born farmer, he introducedinto America a number of plants, including alfalfa. Probablyduring the decade before 1775, he wrote in English the classic seriesof essays known as Letters from an American Farmer (publishedin 1782). This glowing account was blamed for looting some fivehundred French families to the wilds of the Ohio Country, wherethey perished. What does Crèvecoeur reveal regarding the racialcomposition of the col onies? What did be regard as the most importantfactors creating the new American man?... Whence came all these people?They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch,Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, thatrace now called Americans have arisen. The Eastern [NewEngland] provinces must indeed be excepted, as being theunmixed descendants of Englishmen. I have heard many wishthat they had been more intermixed also. For my part, I amno wisher, and think it much better as it has happened. Theyexhibit a most conspicuous figure in this great and variegatedpicture; they too enter for a great share in the pleasingperspective displayed in these thirteen provinces. I know itis fashionable to reflect on them, but I respect them for whatthey have done; for the accuracy and wisdom with which theyhave settled their territory; for the decency of their manners;for their early love of letters; their ancient college, the first inthis hemisphere; for their industry, which to me, who am but afarmer, is the criterion of everything. There never was a people,situated as they are, who with so ungrateful a soil have donemore in so short a time....In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have bysome means met together, and in consequence of various causes;to what purpose should they ask one another what countrymenthey are? Alas, two-thirds of them had no country. Can awretch who wanders about, who works and starves, whoselife is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penurycanthat man call England or any other kingdom his country?A country that had no bread for him, whose fields procuredhim no harvest, who met with nothing but the frowns of therich, the severity of the laws, with jails and punishments; whoowned not a single foot of the extensive surface of this planet?No! Urged by a variety of motives, here they came. Everythinghas tended to regenerate them: new laws, a new mode of living,a new social system. Here are become men. In Europe theywere as so many useless plants, wanting vegetative mould,and refreshing showers; they withered, and were moweddown by want, hunger, and war. But now by the power oftransplantation, like all other plants, they have taken root andflourished! Formerly they were not numbered in any civil listsof their country, except in those of the poor. Here they rankas citizens.By what invisible power has this surprising metamorphosisbeen performed? By that of the laws and that of their industry.The laws, the indulgent laws, protect them as they arrive,stamping on them the symbol of adoption. They receive amplerewards for their labors; these accumulated rewards procurethem lands; those lands confer on them the title of freemen,and to that title every benefit is affixed which men can possiblyrequire....What then is the American, this new man? He is either anEuropean, or the descendant of an European; hence thatstrange mixture of blood, which you will find in no othercountry. I could point out to you a family whose grandfatherwas an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son marrieda French woman, and whose present four sons have now fourwives of different nations.He is an American who, leaving behind him all his ancientprejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new modeof life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and thenew rank he holds. He becomes an American by being receivedin the broad lap of our great alma mater. Here individuals ofall nations are melted into a new race of men whose laborsand posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying alongwith them the great mass of arts, sciences, vigor, and industrywhich began long since in the East. They will finish the greatcircle.The American ought therefore to love this country much betterthan that wherein either he or his forefathers were born. Herethe rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progressof his labor; his labor is founded on the basis of nature, selfinterest;can it want a stronger allurement? Wives and children,who before in vain demanded of him a morsel of bread, now,fat and frolicsome, gladly help their father to clear those fieldswhence exuberant crops are to arise to feed and to clothe themall; without any part being claimed, either by a despotic prince,a rich abbot, or a mighty lord. Here religion demands but littleof him: a small voluntary salary to the minister, and gratitudeto God. Can he refuse these?The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; hemust therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions.From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, anduseless labor, he has passed to toils of a very different nature,rewarded by ample subsistence.This is an American.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: I have a DreamDelivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.on August 28, 1963Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolicshadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Thismomentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope tomillions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flamesof withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end thelong night of captivity.But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact thatthe Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life ofthe Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregationand the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later,the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of avast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, theNegro is still languishing in the corners of American societyand finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have comehere today to dramatize an appalling condition.In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificentwords of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence,they were signing a promissory note to which every Americanwas to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men wouldbe guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and thepursuit of happiness.It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissorynote insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead ofhonoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negropeople a bad check which has come back marked “insufficientfunds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice isbankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficientfunds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So wehave come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upondemand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. Wehave also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of thefierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxuryof cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley ofsegregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the timeto open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children. Nowis the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racialinjustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of themoment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro.This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontentwill not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedomand equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but abeginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow offsteam and will now be content will have a rude awakening ifthe nation returns to business as usual. There will be neitherrest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted hiscitizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue toshake the foundations of our nation until the bright day ofjustice emerges.But there is something that I must say to my people who standon the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice.In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not beguilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirstfor freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane ofdignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protestto degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we mustrise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soulforce. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed theNegro community must not lead us to distrust of all whitepeople, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by theirpresence here today, have come to realize that their destinyis tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricablybound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall marchahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are askingthe devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” Wecan never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with thefatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of thehighways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfiedas long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghettoto a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro inMississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes hehas nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, andwe will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters andrighteousness like a mighty stream.I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out ofgreat trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh fromnarrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where yourquest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecutionand staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have beenthe veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with thefaith that unearned suffering is redemptive.Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia,go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of ournorthern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can andwill be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficultiesand frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is adream deeply rooted in the American dream.I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and liveout the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to beself-evident: that all men are created equal.”I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sonsof former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be ableto sit down together at a table of brotherhood.I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, adesert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression,will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.I have a dream that my four children will one day live in anation where they will not be judged by the color of their skinbut by the content of their character.I have a dream today.I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whosegovernor’s lips are presently dripping with the words ofinterposition and nullification, will be transformed into asituation where little black boys and black girls will be ableto join hands with little white boys and white girls and walktogether as sisters and brothers.And if America is to be a great nation this must become true.So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of NewHampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains ofNew York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Allegheniesof Pennsylvania!Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain ofGeorgia!Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi.From every mountainside, let freedom ring.When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every villageand every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be ableto speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men andwhite men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, willbe able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negrospiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we arefree at last!”I have a dream today.I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, everyhill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will bemade plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, andthe glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see ittogether.This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to theSouth. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountainof despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able totransform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautifulsymphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able towork together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go tojail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that wewill be free one day.This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able tosing with a new meaning, “My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet landof liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of thepilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

Inventors of America“The Englishmen who landed in Virginia in 1607, and on thebleaker shores of Massachusetts thirteen years later, did notbegin a new history, but continued a history which had begunmany centuries before.”Lord James Bryce, The Study of American History“Men, like plants cannot be rooted from their native soil andset again in some distant land without undergoing profoundchanges... In like manner the institutions, manners, morals,religious beliefs, and thoughts of the European settlersunderwent a change in the soil of America.”Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, The First AmericansMost of the big shore places were closed now and there werehardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboatacross the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessentialhouses began to melt away until gradually I became aware ofthe old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, thetrees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once panderedin whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for atransitory enchanted moment man must have held his breathin the presence of this continent, compelled into an aestheticcontemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to facefor the last time in history with something commensurate tohis capacity for wonder.And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, Ithought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the greenlight at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way tothis blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close thathe could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it wasalready behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyondthe city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled onunder one night.Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future thatyear by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s nomatter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our armsfarther. . . . And one fine morning— So we beat on, boatsagainst the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great GatsbyI mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud; for it is insuch little retired … valleys… that population, manners, andcustoms, remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration andimprovement, which is making such incessant change in otherparts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved. Theyare little nooks of still water which border a rapid stream…Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy HollowThe pastoral ideal it has been used to define the meaning ofAmerica ever since the age of discovery, and it has not yet lostits hold upon the native imagination. The reason is dear enough.The ruling motive of the good shepherd, leading figure of theclassic, Virgilian mode, was to withdraw from the great worldand begin a new life in a fresh, green landscape. And now herewas a virgin continent! Inevitably the European mind wasdazzled by the prospect. With an unspoiled hemisphere inview it seemed that mankind actually might realize what hadbeen thought a poetic fantasy. Soon the dream of a retreatto an oasis of harmony and joy was removed from its traditionalliterary context. It was embodied in various utopian schemesfor making America the site of a new beginning for Westernsociety. In both forms —one literary and the other in essencepolitical — the ideal has figured in the American view of lifewhich is, in the widest sense, the subject of this book.Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, Technology and thePastoral Ideal in AmericaFreedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek, -- the freedomof life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedomto love and aspire Work, culture, liberty, all these we need,not singly but together, not successively but together eachgrowing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vasterideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of humanbrotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; theideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of theNegro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, butrather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the AmericanRepublic, in order that some day on American soil two worldracesmay have each to each those characteristics both so sadlylack We the darker ones come even now not altogether emptyhanded:there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure humanspirit of the Declaration of Independence than the AmericanNegroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folk4oreare Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the soleoasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars andsmartness.W.E.B. duBois, The Souls of Black FolksThe need to establish difference stemmed not only from the OldWorld but from a difference in the New. What was distinctivein the New was, first of all, its claim to freedom and, second,the presence of the unfree within the heart of the democraticexperiment the critical absence of democracy, its echo, shadow,and silent force in the political and intellectual activity of somenot-Americans. The distinguishing features of the not-Americanswere their slave status, their social status and their color.It is conceivable that the first would have self-destructed in a varietyof ways had it not been for the last. These slaves, unlike manyothers in the world’s history, were visible to a fault. And they hadinherited, among other things, a long history in the meaning ofcolor. It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctivecolor; it was that this color meant something. That meaning hadbeen named and deployed by scholars from at least the moment,in the eighteenth century, when other and sometimes the samescholars started to investigate both the natural history and theinalienable rights of man that is to say, human freedom.Toni Morrison, Playing in the DarkOr will Americans of diverse races and ethnicities be able toconnect themselves to a larger narrative? Whatever happens, wecan be certain that much of our society’s future will be influencedby which mirror ‘ we choose to see ourselves. America does notbelong to one race or one group, the people in this study remindus, and Americans have been constantly redefining their nationalidentity from the moment of first contact on the Virginia shore. Bysharing their stories, they invite us to see ourselves in a differentmirror.As Americans, we originally came from many different shores,and our diversity has been at the center of the making of America.While our stories contain the memories of different communities,together they inscribe a larger narrative. Filled with what WaltWhitman celebrated as the “varied across” of America, ourhistory generously gives all of us our “mystic chords of memory.”Throughout our past of oppressions and struggles for equality,Americans of different races and ethnicities have been “singingwith open mouths their strong melodious songs” in the textilemills of Lowell, the cotton fields of Mississippi, on the Indianreservations of South Dakota, the railroad tracks high in theSierras of California, in the garment factories of the Lower EastSide, the canefields of Hawaii, and a thousand other places acrossthe country. Our denied history “bursts with telling.” As wehear America singing, we find ourselves invited to bring our richcultural diversity on deck, to accept ourselves. “Of every hue andcaste am I,” sang Whitman. “I resist any thing better than myown diversity.”Ronald Takaki, A Different MirrorReal soon, now, this is a turning point The hoop, the sacred hoopwas broken here at Wounded Knee, and it will come back again.The stake here that represents the tree of life, the tree will bloom,it will flower again, and all the people will rejoin and come backto the sacred road, the red road.Wallace Black Elk, Wounded Knee, 1973The idea shaped our politics, our institutions, and to some extentour national character, but it was never the only influence at work.Material circumstances exerted an opposing force. The openfrontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth ofnatural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waitingto be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism andan American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property,and power than was true of the Old World from which we hadfled. The human resources we drew upon were significant: Everywave of immigration brought here those people who had the extraenergy, gumption, or restlessness to uproot themselves and crossan unknown ocean to seek a better life. Two other factors enteredthe shaping process—the shadow of slavery and the destructionof the native Indian.The historical experience is…one of going back into the pastand returning to the present with a wider and more intenseconsciousness of the restrictions of our former outlook. We returnwith a broader awareness of the alternatives open to us and armedwith a sharper perceptiveness with which to make our choices. Inthis manner it is possible to loosen the clutch of the dead handof the past and transform it into a living tool for the presentand future.William Appleman Williams

DBQ GUIDELINESA DBQ is simply a document based question. Just aswe have been analyzing primary source documents in class, soyou will be asked to analyze a set of documents on your own.The difference is that you will be asked to answer a particularquestion, or discuss a particular thesis, using the documents asevidence.knowledge. Then state your thesis clearly and directly, beforemoving on to support it with a nice balance of informationfrom both the documents and outside sources.Typically, the DBQ:1.) contains documents, including maps, charts, and cartoons.These are often arranged chronologically. Note the dates.2.) focuses on topics we have discussed.3.) is specific about the information required, so read thequestion very carefully.TIPS FOR STUDENTS1.) Use a pen.2.) Remember that you have time to plan, so don’t panic.3.) Read the question and note the time period. Do not includeinformation unless it fits chronologically or is directly relevantto other events during the period.4.) List all the information about the time period that you canrecall-events, names, terms, etc.5.) Write a thesis sentence on top of a scratch sheet of paper.Make sure that it directly answers the DBQ question.6.) Outline your essay quickly without looking at thedocuments.7.) Now look at the documents and try to decide how you willfit them into your already planned essay.8.) Each document does different things, so try to use them all.Here is the format: As the map (document B) indicates.. Or:The cartoon (document D) shows that...9.) Analyze the documents. Why are they significant? What dothey show? Do quote extensively from them. Do not, however,be afraid to mention them briefly.10.) If possible, link brief descriptions to the names you use. Forexample: Alexander Stephens, a Whig senator from Georgia,noted in the Southern Literary Journal (document C) that..11.) Coverage of the documents is important, but the inclusionof outside information is critical. Strive for balance, becauseonly a balanced essay will receive the highest scores.12.) A possible approach: Write an introductory paragraphsetting the scene and demonstrating that you have some outside10 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

31.the encounterand north americasup to17631. the encounter and north americas up to 176311

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Native American PoetryWHEN SUN CAME TO RIVERWOMANthat timein the sunLeslie Marmon SilkoLAGUNA PUEBLOWHERE MOUNTAIN LIONLAY DOWN WITH DEERI climb the black rock mountainstepping from day to daysilently.I smell the wind for my ancestorspale blue leavescrushed wild mountain smell.Returningup the gray stone cliffwhere I descendeda thousand years ago.Returning to faded black stonewhere mountain lion lay down with deer.It is better to stay up herewatching wind’s reflection in tall yellow flowers.The old ones who remember me are gonethe old songs are all forgottenand the story of my birth.How I danced in snow‐frost moonlightdistant stars to the end of the Earth,How I swam awayin freezing mountain waternarrow mossy canyon tumbling downout of the mountainout of deep canyon stonedownthe memoryspilling outinto the world.beside the Rio Grande.voice of the mourning dove callslong ago long agoremembering the lost one remembering the love.Out of the dense green eternity of springtime willows rustle inthe blue wind timelessDESMET, IDAHO, MARCH 1969At my father’s wake,The old peopleKnew me,Though IKnew them not,And spoke to meIn our tribe’sAncient tongueIgnoringThe factThat IDon’t speakThe language,And soI listenedAs if I understoodWhat it was all about,And,Oh,Stirred meThat strange,SoftlyFlowingNative tongue,SoMy childhood ear.the year unknown unnamed.The muddy fast water warm around my feet you move into thecurrent slowlybrown skin thighs deep intensity flowing water.Your warmth penetrates13

Endless eyes shining always for green river moss for tiny waterspiders.Crying out the doveit is ordained in swirling brown waterman of Sunhe left hercame to riverwoman and in the sundown windto singyellow sand and sky.will not let me forgetand it carries you away, my lost one my love, the mountain.for rainclouds swelling in the northwest sky for rainsmell onpale blue winds from China.Janet Campbell HaleCOEUR D’ALENESALAD LA RAZAThe crisp Pale green Lettuce Caught the sunlight, Glistened,As I Broke the leaves For my salad, Lettuce I’d bought thatmorning at Safeway, Remembering how My family, For atime, And off and on, Lived in dumpy cabin camps, Movedaround, Picking berries beans, apples, cherries, Stripping hops.I remembered The dirt, And sweating Under a blazing sun Fornext to nothing, And The babbling, Laughing Mexican workers,Who called themselves “Spanish” (There were no Chicanosin those days) And looked down On Indians so much, “LosIndios” was enough of a dirty name In itself. Eating my crispand delicious Safeway salad, I tried not to think Of CaesarChavez.ON A CATHOL.IC CHILDHOODEven after Confession, Sister Mary Leonette told me (I was sixyears old at the time) My soul would be scarred by sin.This was during catechism.I had a question:“Can’t you make your guardian angel go awayNot even while you’re going to the toilet?”Mary Leonette glared at meAnd the children laughed.She was from Vermont and didn’tLike it in grubby old Omak, Washington, all that much.I thought guardian angels were creepyAnd sermons boring,And when I had to kneel during MassI prayed to GodTo make it pass quicklyBecause my knees ached.Padre Nostros De Ern ChalisSmelling incenseAnd having to look at a gorylife‐size painted statue ofthe crucified Christ,And think ofThe poor soulsIn purgatoryAnd a recent sin of my ownI’d never confess:I stole my sister’s plastic glows‐in‐the‐dark Virgin MaryAnd hid it deep within the lilac bush.God would never understand.14 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Pagans and Pilgrims in the Promised LandWhat should we do but sing his PraiseThat led us through the watry MazeUnto an Isle so kong unknownAnd yet far kinder than our own?He lands us on a grassy Stage;Safe from the Storms, and Prelat’s rage.He gave us this eternal SpringWhich here enamells every thing;And sends the Fowls to us in care,On daily visits through the Air.He hangs in shades the Orange bright,Like golden lamps in a green Night.“The islands were so terrible to all that ever touched on them,and such tempests, thunders, and other fearefull objects areseene and heard about them, that they be called commonly, TheDevil’s Ilands, and are feared and avoyded of all sea travellersalive, above any other place in the world.. Yet it pleased ourmercifull God, to make even this hideous and hated place,both the place of our safetie, and meanes of our deliverance.”—William Strachey, 1609Andrew Marvell, “Bermudas”“We found shole water, where we smelt so sweet, and so stronga smell, as if we had been in the midst of some delicate gardenabounding with all kinds of odiferous flowers. ..The placewhere we put ashore was so full of grapes, as the very beatingand surge of the Sea overflowed them, of which we found suchplentie, as well there as in all places else, both on the sand andon the greene soile of the hills, that I think in all the world likeabundance is not to be found: and my selfe having seene thoseparts of Europe that most abound, find such difference as wereincredible to be written. ..Virginia is a land of plentie. The soilis the most plentifull, sweete, fruitfull, and wholesome of allthe world; the virgin forest is not at all like the barren andfruitless woods of Europe, but is full of the highest and reddestCedars of the world.”—Captain Arthur Barlowe, 1584“...Hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wildmen. There are only dangerous shoulds and roaring breakers.Neither could they, as it were, goe up to the tope of Pigsah,to vew from this wilderness a more goodly cuntrie to feedtheir hops; fore which way soever they tumd their eys (saveupward to the heavens) they could have litle solace or contentin respecte of any outward objects. For summer being done,all things stand upon them with a wetherbeaten face; and thewhole countrie, full of woods and thickets, represented a wildand savege hiew. If they looked behind them, ther was themighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a mainebarre and goulf to separate them from all the civill parts of theworld.”—William Bradford, 162015

Native Americans: Nation v. Tribe?Primary SourcesNative American Creation MythsDocument A…Our legends tell us that it was hundreds and perhapsthousands of years ago since the first man sprang from thesoil in the midst of the great plains. The story says that onemorning long ago a lone man awoke, face to the sun, emergingfrom the soil . . . . Up and up the man drew himself until hefreed his body from the clinging soil . . . . the sun shone andever the man kept his face turned toward it. In time the raysof the sun hardened the face of the earth and strengthenedthe man and he bounded and leaped about, a free and joyouscreature. From this man sprang the Lakota nation . . . . So thisland of the great plains is claimed by the Lakotas as their veryown. We are the soil and the soil is us.Sioux GenesisDocument BWay beyond the earth, a part of the Osage lived in the sky.They wanted to know where they came from, so they wentto the sun. He told them that they were his children. Thenthey wandered still farther and came to the moon. She toldthem that she gave birth to them, and that the sun was theirfather. She said they must leave the sky, and go down to liveon the earth, so they wept and called out, but no answer camefrom anywhere. They floated about in the air seeking in everydirection for help from some god; but found none.Usage, Children of the SunEuropean perceptions of Native AmericansDocument CI gave to all I approached whatever articles I had about me,such as cloth and many other things, taking nothing of theirsin return: but they are naturally timid and fearful. As soonhowever as they see that they are safe, and have laid aside allfear, they are very simple and honest, and exceedingly liberalwith all they have; none of them refusing any thing he maypossess when he is asked for it, but on the contrary invitingus to ask them. They exhibit great love towards all others inpreference to themselves; they also give objects of great valuefor trifles, and content themselves with very little or nothingin return . . . . these people are so amiable and friendly thateven the King took a pride in calling me his brother . . . . Icould not clearly understand whether the people possess anyprivate property, for I observed that one man had the chargeof distributing various things to the rest, but especially meatand provisions and the like. I did not find, as some of us hadexpected, any cannibals amongst them, but on the contrary,men of great deference and kindness.Columbus, Letter of March 14, 1493.Document DThe Spanish have a perfect right to rule these barbarians of theNew World and the adjacent islands, who in prudence, skill,virtues, and humanity are as inferior to the Spanish as childrento adults, or women to men, for there exists between the twoas great a difference as between savage and cruel races and themost merciful, between the most intemperate and the moderateand temperate and, I might even say, between apes and men . .. . But see how they [the inhabitants of New Spain and Mexico]deceive themselves, and how much I dissent from such anopinion, seeing , on the contrary, in these very institutions aproof of the crudity, the barbarity, and the natural slavery ofthese people; for having houses and some rational way of lifeand some sort of commerce is a thing which the necessities ofnature itself induce, and only serves to prove that they are notbears of monkeys and are not totally lacking in reason. Buton the other hand, they have established their nation in sucha way that no one possesses anything individually, neither ahouse nor a field, which he can leave to his heirs in his will,for everything belongs to their masters whom, with impropernomenclature, they call kings, and by whose whims they live,more than by their own, ready to do the bidding and desire ofthese rulers and possessing no liberty. And the fulfillment ofall this, not under the pressure of arms but in voluntary andspontaneous way, is a definite sign of the servile and base soulof there barbarians . . . . Therefore, if you wish to reduce them,I do not say to our domination, but to a servitude a little lessharsh, it will not be difficult for them to change their masters,and instead of the one they had, who were barbarous andimpious and inhuman, to accept the Christians, cultivators ofhuman virtues and the true faith . . .Sepulveda, The Second Democrates (1547)Document ENow if we shall have shown that among our Indians of thewestern and southern shores (granting that we call thembarbarians and that they are barbarians) there are importantkingdoms, large numbers of people who live settled lives ina society, great cities, kings, judges and laws, persons whoengage in commerce, buying, selling, lending, and the othercontracts of the laws of nations, will it not stand proved that the16 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Reverend Doctor Sepulveda has spoken wrongly and viciouslyagainst peoples like these . . . The Indian race is not thatbarbaric, nor are they dull witted or stupid, but they are easyto teach and very talented in learning all the liberal arts, andvery ready to accept, honor, and observe the Christian religionand correct their sins (as experience has taught) once priestshave introduced them to the sacred mysteries and taught themthe word of God.Bartolome de Las Casas, Thirty Very JudicialPropositions (1552)Document FThe place they had thoughts on was some of those vast &unpeopled countries of America, which are fruitful & fitt forhabitation, being devoyd of all civill inhabitants, where thereare only savage & brutish men, which range up and downe,little otherwise then the wild beasts of the same . . . . Andalso those which should escape or overcome these difficulties,should yet be in continuall danger of the salvage people, whoare cruell, barbarous, & most trecherous, being contente onlyto kill, & take away life, but delight to tormente men in themost bloodie maner that may be; fleaing some alive with theshells of fishes, cutting of the members & joynts of others bypeesmeale, and broiling on the coles, eate the collops of theirflesh in their sight whilst they live; with other cruelties horribleto be related.William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620Document GThey have no Fence to part one anothers Lots in their Corn-Fields, but every Man knows his own, and it scarce ever happensthat they rob one another of so much as an Ear of Corn, whichif any is found to do, he is sentenced by the Elders to workand plant for him that was robbed, till he is recompensed forall the Damage he has suffered in his Corn-Field; and thisis punctually performed, and the Thief held in Disgrace thatsteals from any of his Country-Folks.On the Tuscaroras, John Lawson, History of NorthCarolina, circa 1700.Secondary SourceDocument HThe word “tribe” does not do justice to the extreme variety of[Native American] political organizations, methods of foodgathering,cultural and religious patterns, and population size. . . . native bands, tribelets, pueblo city states, nations andconfederacies were as culturally different from each other asthe nations of Europe.Peter Nabokov, Native American Testimony.Indians and Europeans MeetFive hundred years ago, residents of the Caribbean islands saw onthe horizon ships unlike any they had ever before seen or imagined.These vessels carried Christopher Columbus and his men, whosoon claimed the islands for Spain and who called the inhabitants“inditaos” because they thought that they had reached the East Indiesoff the’ coast of Asia. Columbus died believing devoutly in hisimmense geographical error, but his name for the native inhabitantsof the Western Hemisphere remains as an ironic monument toColumbus’s unrealized search for a shortcut to the riches ofScholars debate the meaning of the European conquest that Columbusinaugurated. And in 1992—the five-hundredth anniversary ofColumbus‘s first voyage— some Native Americans argued thatgenocide of native peoples was the principal legacy of the Colombianencounter and its aftermath. Certainly, the European conquest ofAmerica set off among the indigenous peoples of America’s viciouscycle of population that may have amounted to as much as a 90percent reduction. Most of the population losses came from the impactof epidemic diseases that Indians had not been exposed to before 1492.Smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, and other Old World maladiesswept off large numbers of Indians at a single stroke and left nativesweakened and vulnerable. Yet Indians did not merely fade awaywhen Europeans arrived. They adjusted to new conditions of lifeand, when conditions changed, asserted a measure of control in thenew world that Indians and Europeans together created.When Columbus arrived in America, he expected to find Asia andits riches. Instead, he encountered the Carib people on San Salvadorisland. In the first document, a letter to the Spanish monarchs,Columbus describes the Caribs, discusses their ignorance of Europeanweapons, and observes that they would make good servants. By1519 Spanish explorers were expanding their grip to the Americanmainland. Hernando Cortes who led the Spanish conquest ofMexico, found a formidable foe in the Aztec Empire that heldcontrol over central Mexico. In the second document, Aztec emperorMoctezuma (also spelled iWutezu,na or Montezumo) tells Cortesthat he believe that the Spanish have come to reclaim Mexico. inaccordance with Aztec history and prophecy Aztec compliance proveda great convenience for Cortes, who, in order to master the Aztecs,was more than willing to accept the part that Moctezuma assignedhim. The third document records in song the Aztec perspective onthe sad outcome of Cortes’s conquest. The account of Jacques Cartierin the fourth document contrasts sharply with those of Cortes’s andColumbus. Here we see Micmac Indians in the Gulf of St. Lawrenceregion clamoring to trade furs for French metaiware in 1534. Thefifth document is Arthur Barlowe’s description of hi hospitablereception by the Indians of Virginia. Friendship and trade seemedto mark this early encounter with the English. The final document is17

the Pilgrim Governor William Bradford’s account of the first treatyof peace with the Wampanoags of Massachusetts Bay.At first contact, European and Indian needs and expectationsvaried widely, but ultimately Europeans prevailed throughout thehemisphere. Could these early encounters have resulted in mutuallybeneficial relationships, or were Indians destined to be defeated fromthe start?Columbus on the Indians’ “Discovery”of the Spanish, 1492“I [Columbus wrote], in order that they might feel great amitytowards us, because I knew that they were a people to bedelivered and converted to our holy faith rather by love thanby force, gave to some among them some red caps and someglass beads, which they hung round their necks, and manyother things of little value. At this they were greatly pleasedand became so entirely our friends that it was a wonder to see.Afterwards they came swimming to the ships’ boats, wherewe were, and brought us parrots and cotton thread in balls,and spears and many other things, and we exchanged for themother things, such as small glass beads and hawks’ bells, whichwe gave to them. In fact, they took all and gave all, such asthey had, with good will, but it seemed to me that they were apeople very deficient in everything. They all go naked as theirmothers bore them, and the women also, although I saw onlyone very young girl. And all those whom I did see wereyouths, so that I did not see one who was over thirty years ofage; they were very well built, with very handsome bodies andvery good faces. Their hair is coarse almost like the hairs ofa horse’s tail and short; they wear their hair down over theireyebrows, except for a few strands behind, which they wearlong and never cut. Some of them are painted black, and theyare the colour of the people of the Canaries, neither blacknor white, and some of them are painted white and some redand some in any colour that they find. Some of them painttheir faces, some their whole bodies, some only the eyes, andsome only the nose. They do not bear arms or know them, forI showed to them swords and they took them by the blade andcut themselves through ignorance. They have no iron. Theirspears are certain reeds, without iron, and some of these havea fish tooth at the end, while others are pointed in variousways. They are all generally fairly tall, good looking and wellproportioned. I saw some who bore marks of wounds on theirbodies, and I made signs to them to ask how this came about,and they indicatedto me that people came from other islands, which are near,and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves.And I believed and still believe that they come here from themainland to take them for slaves. They should be good servantsand of quick intelligence, since I see that they very soon say allthat is said to them, and I believe that they would easily bemade Christians, for it appeared to me that they had no creed.Our Lord willing, at the time of my departure I will bringback six of them to Your Highnesses, that they may learn totalk. I saw no beast of any kind in this island, except parrots.”The Emperor Moctezuma Links the Spanishto the Fulfillment of the Aztecs’ Destiny, 1519Moctezuma explains Aztec origins to Cortes. For a long timewe have known from the writings of our ancestors that neitherI, nor any of those who dwell in this land, are natives of it, butforeigners who came from very distant parts; and likewise weknow that a chieftain, of whom they were all vassals, broughtour people to this region. And he returned to his native landand after many years came again, by which time all those whohad remained were married to native women and had builtvillages and raised children. And when he wished to lead themaway again they would not go nor even admit him as their chief;and so he departed. And we have always held that those whodescended from him would come and conquer this land andtake us as their vassals. So because of the place from whichyou claim to come, namely, from where the sun rises, and thethings you tell us of the great lord or king who sent you here,we believe and are certain that he is our natural lord, especiallyas you say that he has known of us for some time. So be assuredthat we shall obey you and hold you as our lord in place of thatgreat sovereign of whom you speak; and in this there shall beno offense or betrayal whatsoever. And in all the land that liesin my domain, you may command as you will, for you shallbe obeyed; and all that we own is for you to dispose of as youchoose. Thus, as you are in your own country and your ownhouse, rest now from the hardships of your journey and thebattles which you have fought, for I know full well of all thathas happened to you from Puntunchan to here, and I also knowhow those of Cempoal and Tascalteca have told you muchevil of me; believe only what you see with your eyes, for thoseare my enemies, and some were my vassals and have rebelledagainst me at your coming and said those things to gain favorwith you. I also know that they have told you the walls of myhouses are made of gold, and that the floor mats in my roomsand other things in my household are likewise of gold, and thatI was, and claimed to be, a god; and many other things besides.The houses as you see are of stone and lime and clay.”Then he raised his clothes and showed Cortes his body, saying,as he grasped his arms and trunk with his hands, “See that I amof flesh and blood like you and all other men, and I am mortaland substantial. See how they have lied to you’? It is true that Ihave some pieces of gold left to me by my ancestors; anything Imight have shall be given to you whenever you ask. Now I shallgo to other house where I live, but here you shall be providedwith all that you and your people require, and you shall receiveno hurt. for you are in your own land and our own house.”18 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Juan Gines de Sepulveda:“The Great Debate”Juan Gines De Sepulveda, a distinguished scholar of Aristotle,was official historian of the Spanish crown. In 1547 he wroteThe Second Democrates to defend the Spanish Conquest of theAmericas. He used the substance of that argument when he debatedBartolomede Las Casas three years later. Bartoleme de las Casas,a Spanish colonist, a priest, founder of a Utopian community andfirst Bishop of Chiapas, was a scholar, historian and 16th centuryhuman rights advocate. Las Casas has been called the Father of antiimperialismand anti-racism. Others take a more guarded or modestview of his achievements. What there is little or no dispute about isthat Las Casas was an early and energetic advocate and activistfor the rights of native peoples. Consider the arguments that areset forth by the two men. Which argument do you think is moreeffective? Why? How might these ideas shape the sentiments andmentalities of the colonizers for years to come?Sepulveda (1550 in the Spanish capital of Valladolid)Superior SpanishThe man rules over the woman, the adult over his children.That is to say, the most powerful and most perfect rule overthe weakest and most imperfect. The same relationship existsamong men, there being some who by nature are masters andothers who bynature are slaves.Those who surpass the rest in prudence and intelligence,although not in physical strength, are by nature the masters.On the other hand, those who are dim-witted and mentallylazy, although they may be physically strong enough to fulfillall the necessary tasks, are by nature slaves.It is just and useful that it be this way. We even see itsanctioned in the Book of Proverbs: “He who is stupid willserve the wise man” [11:29].And so it is with the barbarous and inhumane peoples [theIndians] who have no civil life and peaceful customs. It willalways be just and in conformity with natural law that suchpeople submit to the rule of the more cultured and humaneprinces and nations. Thanks to their virtues and the practicalwisdom of their laws, the latter [the Spanish] can destroybarbarism and educate these people to a more humane andvirtuous life. And if the latter [the Indians] reject such rule, itcan be imposed upon them by force of arms. Such a war willbe just, according to natural law....Barbaric IndiansUntil now we have mentioned their impious religion andtheir abominable sacrifices, in which they worship the Devil asGod, to whom they thought of offering no better tribute thanhuman hearts...They placed these hearts on their abominablealtars. With this ritual they believed that they had appeasedtheir gods. They also ate the flesh of sacrificed men.War against these barbarians can be justified not only onthe basis of their paganism but even more so because of theirabominable licentiousness, their prodigious sacrifice of humanvictims, the extreme harm that they inflicted on innocentpersons, their horrible banquets of human flesh, and theimpious cult of their idols....Merciful ForceSince the evangelical law of the New Testament is moreperfect and more gentle than the Mosiac law of the OldTestament, so also wars are now waged with more mercy andclemency. Their purpose is not so much to punish as to correctevils.What is more appropriate and beneficial for these barbariansthan to become subject to the rule those whose wisdom, virtue,and religion have converted them from barbarism into civilizedmen (insofar as they are capable of becoming so), from beingtorpid and licentious to becoming servants of the Devil tobecoming believers of the true God?For these barbarians, our rule ought to be even moreadvantageous than for our Spaniards, since virtue, humanity,and the true religion are more valuable than gold or silver. Andif they refuse our rule, they may be compelled by force of armsto accept it. Such a war will be just according to natural law.Bartolome de Las Casas (1550 in the Spanish capital ofValladolid)Human EqualityThere are no races in the world, however rude, uncultivated,barbarous, gross, or almost brutal they may be, who cannot bepersuaded and brought to a good order and way of life....Thus, the entire human race is one; all men are alike withrespect to their creation and the things of nature, and none isborn already taught. And so we all have the need, from thebeginning, to be guided and helped by those who have beenborn earlier.Thus, when some very rustic peoples are found in the world,they are like untilled land, which easily produces worthlessweeds and thorns, but has within itself so much naturalpower that when it is plowed and cultivated it gives useful andwholesome fruits....Noble IndiansAll the races of the world have understanding and will,and that which results from these two faculties in man--that is,free choice. And consequently, all have the power and abilityor capacity...to be instructed, persuaded, and attracted to orderand reason and laws and virtue and all goodness.They are very apt to receive our holy Catholic faith, tobe endowed with virtuous customs, and to behave in a godly19

fashion. And once they begin to hear the tidings of thefaith, they are so insistent on knowing more...that truly, themissionaries who are here need to be endowed by God withgreat patience to endure such eagerness. Some of the secularSpaniards who have been here for many years say that thegoodness of the Indians is undeniable, and that is this giftedpeople could be brought to know the onetrue God, they would be the most fortunate people in theworld.A method contrary to the one we have been defending wouldbe the following: Pagans should first be subjected, whetherthey wished to be or not, to the rule of Christian people, andthat once they were subjected, organized preaching wouldfollow.But if the pagans find themselves first injured, oppressed,saddened, and afflicted by the misfortunes of wars, throughloss of their children, their gods, and their own liberty...howcan they be moved voluntarily to listen to what is proposed tothem about faith, religion, justice, and truth...?Merciful PersuasionThe one and only method of teaching men the true religionwas established by Divine Providence for the whole world, andfor all times: that is, by persuading the understanding throughreasons, and by gently attracting or exhorting his will.Divine Wisdom moves rational creatures, that is, men, totheir actions or operates gently....Therefore, the method ofteaching men the true religion ought to be gentle, enticing,and pleasant. This method is by persuading the understandingand by attracting the will.Hearers, especially pagans, should understand that thepreachers of the faith have no intention of acquiring powerover them.... Preachers should be slow themselves so mild andhumble, courteous and...good-willed that the hearers eagerlywish to listen and hold their teaching in greater reverence.[Preachers must] posses that same love of charity by whichPaul was accustomed to love men in the world that they mightbe saved: “You are witnesses and God also, how holy andjust and blameless was our conduct towards you who havebelieved.”Powahtan’s Letter to Captain John SmithI am now grown old, and must soon die; and the succession mustdescend, in order, to my brothers, Opitchapan, Opekankanough,and Catataugh, and then to my two sisters, and their twodaughters. I wish their experience was equal to mine; and thatyour love to us might not be less than ours to you. Why shouldyou take by force that from us which you can have by love?Why should you destroy us, who have provided you with food?What can you get by war? We can hide our provisions, andfly into the woods; and then you must consequently famishby wronging your friends. What is the cause of your jealousy?You see us unarmed, and willing to supply your wants, if youwill come in a friendly manner, and not with swords and guns,as to invade an enemy. I am not so simple, as not to know itis better to eat good meat, lie well, and sleep quietly with mywomen and children; to laugh and be merry with the English;and, being their friend, to have copper, hatchets, and whateverelse I want, than to fly from all, to lie cold in the woods, feedupon acorns, roots, and such trash, and to be so hunted, that Icannot rest, eat, or sleep. In such circumstances, my men mustwatch, and if a twig should but break, all would cry out, “Herecomes Capt. Smith”; and so, in this miserable manner, to endmy miserable life; and, Capt. Smith, this might be soon yourfate too, through your rashness and unadvisedness. I, therefore,exhort you to peaceable councils; and, above all, I insist that theguns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy and uneasiness,be removed and sent away.20 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Nathaniel Bacon: Bacon’s Declaration inthe Name of the People July 30, 1676Gottlieb Mittelberger: On the Misfortuneof Indentured Servants (1754)1. For having upon specious pretenses of public works raisedgreat unjust taxes upon the Commonality for the advancementof private favorites and other Sinister ends, but no visibleeffects in any measure adequate, for not having during thislong time of his Government in any measure advanced thishopeful colony either by fortifications Townes or Trade.2. For having abused and rendered contemptible theMagistrates of Justice, by advancing to places of Judicature,scandalous and Ignorant favorites.3. For having wronged his Majesties prerogative and interest,by assuming Monopoly of the Beaver trade, and for having inthat unjust gain betrayed and sold his Majesties Country andthe lives of his loyal subjects to the barbarous heathen.4. For having protected, favored, and Imboldened the Indiansagainst his Majesties loyal subjects, never contriving, requiring,or appointing any due or proper means of satisfaction for theirmany Invasions, robberies, and murders committed upon us....Of this and the aforesaid articles we accuse Sir WilliamBerkeley as guilty of every one of the same, and as one whohas traitorously attempted, violated, and injured his Majestiesinterests here, by a loss of a great part of this his colony and manyof his faithful loyal subjects, by him betrayed in a barbarousand shameful manner exposed to the incursions and murder ofthe heathen, And we further do declare these ensuing personsin this list, to have been wicked and pernicious councellors,aiders, and assisters against the Commonality in these ourcivil commotions. And we do further demand that the SaidSir William Berkeley with all the persons in this list forthwithdelivered up or surrender themselves within four days afterthis notice hereof, or otherwise we declare as forthwith:That in whatsoever place, house, or ship, any of said personsshall reside, be his, or protected, we declare the owner, master,or inhabitor or said place traitors to the people, and the estatesof the aforesaid persons are to be confiscated, and this we theCommons of Virginia do declare, desiring a firm union amongourselves that we may jointly and with one accord defendourselves against the common enemy, and let not the faults ofthe guilty be reproach for the innocent, orthe faults or crimes of our oppressors divide and separate uswho have suffered by their oppressions.— Nathaniel Bacon General by Consent of the PeopleIndentured, or bonded, servants were an important source oflabor in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. The termgenerally refers to immigrants who, in return for passage fromEurope to America, had bound themselves to work in America for anumber of years, after which time they would become completely free.The practice was closely related to the tradition of apprenticeship, inwhich a youth was assigned to work for a master in a certain tradeand in return was taught the skills of the trade.Convicts were another important source of colonial labor; thousandsof English criminals were sentenced to labor in the colonies for aspecified period, after which time they were freed.Gottlieb Mittelberger came to Pennsylvania from Germany in1750. He returned to Europe four years later. Mittelberger’s ownfortunes were not so bleak as those of his shipmates. Mittelbergerserved as a schoolmaster and organist in Philadelphia for three years.He returned to Germany in 1754. Consider Miittelberger’s plightand reflect upon how indentured servitude reveals a certain classstructure in the colonies. How might such a “set-up” pose problemsfor the landed elite?Both in Rotterdam and in Amsterdam the people are packeddensely, like herrings so to say, in the large sea-vessels. Oneperson receives a place of scarcely 2 feet width and 6 feetlength in the bedstead, while many a ship carries four to sixhundred souls; not to mention the innumerable implements,tools, provisions, water-barrels and other things which likewiseoccupy much space.On account of contrary winds it takes the ships sometimes 2, 3and 4 weeks to make the trip from Holland to England. Butwhen the wind is good, they get there in 8 days or even sooner.Everything is examined there and the custom-duties paid, whenceit comes that the ships ride there 8, 10 to 14 days and even longerat anchor, till they have taken in their full cargoes. During thattime every one is compelled to spend his last remaining moneyand to consume his little stock of provisions which had beenreserved for the sea; so that most passengers, finding themselveson the ocean where they would be in greater need of them, mustgreatly suffer from hunger and want. Many suffer want alreadyon the water between Holland and Old England.When the ships have for the last time weighed their anchorsnear the city of Kaupp [Cowes] in Old England, the real miserybegins with the long voyage. For from there the ships, unlessthey have good wind, must often sail 8, 9, 10 to 12 weeks beforethey reach Philadelphia. But even with the best wind the voyagelasts 7 weeks.21

But during the voyage there is on board these ships terriblemisery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of seasickness,fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils,scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and the like, all of which come fromold and sharply salted food and meat, also from very bad andfoul water, so that many die miserably.Add to this want of provisions, hunger, thirst, frost, heat,dampness, anxiety, want, afflictions and lamentations, togetherwith other trouble, as . . . the lice abound so frightfully, especiallyon sick people, that they can be scraped off the body. The miseryreaches the climax when a gale rages for 2 or 3 nights and days,so that every one believes that the ship will go to the bottomwith all human beings on board. In such a visitation the peoplecry and pray most piteously.When in such a gale the sea rages and surges, so that the wavesrise often like high mountains one above the other, and oftentumble over the ship, so that one fears to go down with theship; when the ship is constantly tossed from side to side by thestorm and waves, so that no one can either walk, or sit, or lie,and the closely packed people in the berths are thereby tumbledover each other, both the sick and the well - it will be readilyunderstood that many of these people, none of whom had beenprepared for hardships, suffer so terribly from them that they donot survive it.I myself had to pass through a severe illness at sea, and I bestknow how I felt at the time. These poor people often long forconsolation, and I often entertained and comforted them withsinging, praying and exhorting; and whenever it was possible andthe winds and waves permitted it, I kept daily prayer-meetingswith them on deck. Besides, I baptized five children in distress,because we had no ordained minister on board. I also helddivine service every Sunday by reading sermons to the people;and when the dead were sunk in the water, I commended themand our souls to the mercy of God.Among the healthy, impatience sometimes grows so great andcruel that one curses the other, or himself and the day of hisbirth, and sometimes come near killing each other. Misery andmalice join each other, so that they cheat and rob one another.One always reproaches the other with having persuaded himto undertake the journey. Frequently children cry out againsttheir parents, husbands against their wives and wives againsttheir husbands, brothers and sisters, friends and acquaintancesagainst each other. But most against the soul-traffickers.Many sigh and cry: “Oh, that I were at home again, and if I had tolie in my pig-sty!” Or they say: “O God, if I only had a piece of goodbread, or a good fresh drop of water.” Many people whimper, sighand cry piteously for their homes; most of them get home-sick.Many hundred people necessarily die and perish in such misery,and must be cast into the sea, which drives their relatives, orthose who persuaded them to undertake the journey, to suchdespair that it is almost impossible to pacify and console them.No one can have an idea of the sufferings which women inconfinement have to bear with their innocent children on boardthese ships. Few of this class escape with their lives; many amother is cast into the water with her child as soon as she isdead. One day, just as we had a heavy gale, a woman in ourship, who was to give birth and could not give birth under thecircumstances, was pushed through a loop-hole [port-hole] inthe ship and dropped into the sea, because she was far in the rearof the ship and could not be brought forward.Children from 1 to 7 years rarely survive the voyage. I witnessedmisery in no less than 32 children in our ship, all of whom werethrown into the sea. The parents grieve all the more since theirchildren find no resting-place in the earth, but are devoured bythe monsters of the sea.That most of the people get sick is not surprising, because, inaddition to all other trials and hardships, warm food is servedonly three times a week, the rations being very poor and verylittle. Such meals can hardly be eaten, on account of being sounclean. The water which is served out on the ships is oftenvery black, thick and full of worms, so that one cannot drinkit without loathing, even with the greatest thirst. Toward theend we were compelled to eat the ship’s biscuit which had beenspoiled long ago; though in a whole biscuit there was scarcely a,piece the size of a dollar that had not been full of red worms andspiders nests.At length, when, after a long and tedious voyage, the ships comein sight of land, so that the promontories can be seen, which thepeople were so eager and anxious to see, all creep from belowon deck to see the land from afar, and they weep for joy, andpray and sing, thanking and praising God. The sight of the landmakes the people on board the ship, especially the sick and thehalf dead, alive again, so that their hearts leap within them;they shout and rejoice, and are content to bear their misery inpatience, in the hope that they may soon reach the land in safety.But alas!When the ships have landed at Philadelphia after their longvoyage, no one is permitted to leave them except those who payfor their passage or can give good security; the others, who cannotpay, must remain on board the ships till they are purchased,and are released from the ships by their purchasers. The sickalways fare the worst, for the healthy are naturally preferred andpurchased first; and so the sick and wretched must often remainon board in front of the city for 2 or 3 weeks, and frequently die,whereas many a one, if he could pay his debt and were permittedto leave the ship immediately, might recover and remain alive.22 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

The sale of human beings in the market on board the shipis carried on thus: Every day Englishmen, Dutchmen andHigh-German people come from the city of Philadelphia andother places, in part from a great distance, say 20, 30, or 40hours away, and go on board the newly arrived ship that hasbrought and offers for sale passengers from Europe, and selectamong the healthy persons such as they deem suitable for theirbusiness, and bargain with them how long they will serve fortheir passage money, which most of them are stiff in debt for.When they have come to an agreement, it happens that adultpersons bind themselves in writing to serve 3, 4, 5 or 6 years forthe amount due by them, according to their age and strength.But very young people, from 10 to 15 years, must serve till theyare 21 years old.Many parents must sell and trade away their children like somany head of cattle; for if their children take the debt uponthemselves, the parents can leave the ship free and unrestrained;but as the parents often do not know where and to what peopletheir children are going, it often happens that such parents andchildren, after leaving the ship, do not see each other again formany years, perhaps no more in all their lives.It often happens that being sold to different purchasers separateswhole families, husband, wife, and children, especially whenthey have not paid any part of their passage money.When a husband or wife has died at sea, when the ship hasmade more than half of her trip, the survivor must pay or servenot only for himself or herself, but also for the deceased.When both parents have died over half-way at sea, theirchildren, especially when they are young and have nothing topawn or to pay, must stand for their own and their parents’passage, and serve till they are 21 years old. When one hasserved his or her term, he or she is entitled to a new suit ofclothes at parting; and if it has been so stipulated, a man getsin addition a horse, a woman, a cow.When a serf has an opportunity to marry in this country, he orshe must pay for each year which he or she would have yet toserve, 5 to 6 pounds. But many a one who has thus purchasedand paid for his bride, has subsequently repented his bargain,so that he would gladly have returned his exorbitantly dearware, and lost the money besides.If some one in this country runs away from his master, whohas treated him harshly, he cannot get far. Good provision hasbeen made for such cases, so that a runaway is soon recovered.He who detains or returns a deserter receives a good reward.If such a runaway has been away from his master one day, hemust serve for it as a punishment a week, for a week a month,and for a month half a year.John Winthrop:A Model of Christian CharityA Model Hereof – 1630God Almighty, in his most holy and wise providence, hathso disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times somemust be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power anddignity, others mean and in subjection.THE REASON HEREOFFirst, to hold conformity with the rest of his works. Beingdelighted to show forth the glory of his wisdom in the varietyand difference of the creatures; and the glory of his power, inordering all these differences for the preservation and good ofthe whole; and the glory of his greatness, that as it is the gloryof princes to have many officers, so this great king will havemany stewards, counting himself more honored in dispensinghis gifts to man by man, than if he did it by his own immediatehands.Secondly, that he might have the more occasion to manifestthe work of his Spirit. First, upon the wicked, in moderatingand restraining them: so that the rich and mighty should noteat up the poor, nor the poor and despised rise up against theirsuperiors and shake off their yoke. Secondly, in the regenerate,in exercising his graces in them: as in the great ones, their love,mercy, gentleness, temperance etc.; in the poor and inferiorsort, their faith, patience, obedience etc.Thirdly, that every man might have need of other, and fromhence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bondof brotherly affection. From hence it appears plainly that noman is made more honorable than another, or more wealthyetc., out of any particular and singular respect to himself,but for the glory of his creator and the common good of thecreature, man. Therefore God still reserves the property ofthese gifts to himself, as Ezekiel, 16.17: he there calls wealthhis gold and his silver; Proverbs, 3.9: he claims their service ashis due: honor the Lord with thy riches etc. All men being thus(by divine providence) ranked into two sorts, rich and poor,under the first are comprehended all such as are able to livecomfortably by their own means duly improved; and all othersare poor, according to the former distribution....This law of the Gospel propounds likewise a difference ofseasons and occasions. There is a time when a Christian mustsell all and give to the poor, as they did in the apostles’ times.There is a time also when a Christian (though they give notall yet) must give beyond their ability, as they of Macedonia,II Corinthians, 8.8. Likewise community of perils calls for23

extraordinary liberality, and so doth community in somespecial service for the church. Lastly, when there is no othermeans whereby our Christian brother may be relieved in hisdistress, we must help him beyond our ability, rather than temptGod in putting him upon help by miraculous or extraordinarymeans....The definition which the scripture gives us of lave is this: ‘Love isthe bond of perfection.’ First, it is a bond, or ligament Secondly,it makes the work perfect There is nobody but consists of parts,and that which knits these parts together, gives the body itsperfection, is love....From hence we may frame these conclusions. First, all trueChristians are of one body in Christ, I Corinthians, 12.12.27:“Ye are the body of Christ and members of its parts”Secondly, the ligaments of this body which knit together arelove. Thirdly, no body can be perfect which wants it properligament. Fourthly, all the parts of this body, being thus united,are made so contiguous in a special relation as they must needspartake of each other’s strength and infirmity, joy and sorrow,weal and woe, I Corinthians, 12.26: “If one member suffers,all suffer with it, if one be in honor, all rejoice with it.” Fifthly,this sensibleness and sympathy of each other’s conditions willnecessarily infuse into each part a native desire and endeavorto strengthen, defend, preserve and comfort the other...It rests now to make some application of this discourse by thepresent design, which gave the occasion of writing of it. Hereinare four things to be propounded: first, the persons; secondly,the work; thirdly, the end; fourthly, the means.First, for the persons. We are a company professing ourselvesfellow members of Christ, in which respect only though wereabsent from each other many miles, and had our employmentsas far distant, yet we ought to account ourselves knit togetherby this bond of love, and live in the exercise of it, if we wouldhave comfort of our being in Christ. This was notorious in thepractice of the Christians in former times; as is testified of theWaldenses, from the mouth of one of the adversaries AeneasSylvius “mutuo [ament] pene antequam norunt”-they use[d] tolove any of their own religion even before they were acquaintedwith them.Secondly, for the work we have in hand. It is by a mutualconsent through a special overvaluing providence and a morethan an ordinary approbation of the churches of Christ, to seekout a place of cohabitation and consortship under a due formof government both civil and ecclesiastical. In such cases asthis, the care of the public must oversay all private respects, bywhich not only conscience, but mere civil policy, cloth bind us.For it is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in theruin of the public.Thirdly, the end is to improve our lives to do more service to theLord; the comfort and increase of the body of Christ whereofwe are members, that ourselves and posterity may be the betterpreserved from the common corruptions of this evil world, toserve the Lord and work out our salvation under the power andpurity of his holy ordinances.Fourthly, for the means whereby this must be effected. Theyare twofold, a conformity with the work and end we aim at.These we see are extraordinary, therefore we must not contentourselves with usual ordinary means: whatsoever we did, orought to have done, when we lived in England, the same mustwe do, and more also, where we go. That which the most intheir churches maintain as a truth in profession only, we mustbring into familiar and constant practice, as in this duty oflove. We must love brotherly without dissimulation, we mustlove one another with a pure heart fervently, we must bear oneanother’s burdens, we must not look only on our own things,but also on the things of our brethren. Neither must we thinkthat the Lord will bear with such failings at our hands as hecloth from those among whom we have lived, and that forthree reasons.First, in regard of the more near bond of marriage between himand us, wherein he hath taken us to be his after a most strictand peculiar manner, which will make him the more jealousof our love and obedience. So he tells the people of Israel, youonly have I known of all the families of the earth, thereforewill I punish you for your transgressions. Secondly, becausethe Lord will be sanctioned in them that come near him. Weknow that there were many that corrupted the service of theLord, some setting up altars before his own, others offeringboth strange fire and strange sacrifices also; yet there cameno fire from heaven or other sudden judgment upon them, asdid upon Nadab and Abihu, who yet we may think did not sinpresumptuously. Thirdly, when God gives a special commissionhe looks to have it strictly observed in every article. When hegave Saul a commission to destroy Amalek, he indented withhim upon certain articles, and because he failed in one of theleast, and that upon a fair pretense, it lost him the kingdomwhich should have been his reward if he had observed hiscommission.Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered intocovenant with him for this work, we have taken out a commission,the Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles, we haveprofessed to enterprise these actions, upon these and those ends, wehave hereupon besought him of favor and blessing. Now if the Lordshall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire,then hath he ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, [and]will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it. But ifwe shall neglect the observation of these articles, which re the endswe have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fallto embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions,24 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord willsurely break out in wrath against us, be revenged of such a perjuredpeople and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for ourposterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah: to do justly, to lovemercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knittogether in this work as one man, we must entertain each other inbrotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of oursuperfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities, we must upholda familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patienceand liberality; we must delight in each other, make others’ conditionsour own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together,always having before our eyes our commission and community in thework, our community as members of the same body. So shall we keepthe unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God,and delight to dwell among us as his own people, and will commanda blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more ofhis wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have beenacquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us,when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies: whenhe shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeedingplantations: “the Lord make it like that of New England.” For wemust consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill: The eyes of allpeople are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our Godin this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdrawhis present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-wordthrough the world: we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evilof the ways of God and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shamethe faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayersto be turned into curses upon us, till we be consumed out of the goodland whither we are going.And to shut up this discourse with that exhortation of Moses,that faithfull servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel,Deuteronomy, 30: beloved, there is now set before us life and good,death and evil, in that we are commanded this day to love the Lordour God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keephis commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articlesof our covenant with him, that we may live and be multiplied, andthat the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go topossess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will notobey, but shall be seduced, and worship other God-our pleasures andprofits-and serve them , it is propounded unto us this day, we shallsurely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast seato possess it: Therefore let us choose life, that we and our seed maylive by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him, for He is our life,and our prosperity.Jonathan Edwards:Sinners in the Hands of an Angry GodJonathan Edwards (1703-1758)Enfield, ConnecticutJuly 8, 1741ApplicationThe use of this awful subject may be for awakening unconvertedpersons in this congregation. This that you have heard is thecase of every one of you that are out of Christ. -- That world ofmisery, that take of burning brimstone, is extendedabroad under you. There is the dreadful pit of the glowingflames of the wrath of God; there is hell’s wide gaping mouthopen; and you have nothing to stand upon, nor any thing totake hold of; there is nothing between you and hell but theair; it is only the power and mere pleasure of God that holdsyou up.You probably are not sensible of this; you find you are keptout of hell, but do not see the hand of God in it; but lookat other things, as the good state of your bodily constitution,your care of your own life, and the means you use for yourown preservation. But indeed these things are nothing; if Godshould withdraw his hand, they would avail no more to keepyou from falling, than the thin air to hold up a person that issuspended in it.Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and totend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell;and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink andswiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and yourhealthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, andbest contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have nomore influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than aspider’s web would have to stop a falling rock. Were it not forthe sovereign pleasure of God, the earth would not bear youone moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groanswith you; the creature is made subject to the bondage of yourcorruption, not willingly; the sun does not willingly shineupon you to give you light to serve sin and Satan; the earthdoes not willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor isit willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon; the airdoes not willingly serve you for breath to maintain the flameof life in your vitals, while you spend your life in the service ofGod’s enemies. God’s creatures are good, and were made formen to serve God with, and do not willingly subserve to anyother purpose, and groan when they are abused to purposesso directly contrary to their nature and end. And the worldwould spew you out, were it not for the sovereign hand of himwho hath subjected it in hope. There are the black clouds of25

God’s wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of thedreadful storm, and big with thunder; and were it not for therestraining hand of God, it would immediately burst forthupon you. The sovereign pleasure of God, for the present, stayshis rough wind; otherwise it would come with fury, and yourdestruction would come like a whirlwind, and you would belike the chaff on the summer threshing floor.The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed forthe present; they increase more and more, and rise higher andhigher, till an outlet is given; and the longer the stream isstopped, the more rapid and mighty is its course, when once itis let loose. It is true, that judgment against your evil works hasnot been executed hitherto; the floods of God’s vengeance havebeen withheld; but your guilt in the mean time is constantlyincreasing, and you are every day treasuring up more wrath;the waters are constantly rising, and waxing more and moremighty; and there is nothing but the mere pleasure of God,that holds the waters back, that are unwilling to be stopped,and press hard to go forward. If God should only withdraw hishand from the flood-gate, it would immediately fly open, andthe fiery floods of the fierceness and wrath of God, would rushforth with inconceivable fury, and would come upon you withomnipotent power; and if your strength were ten thousandtimes greater than it is, yea, ten thousand times greater thanthe strength of the stoutest, sturdiest devil in hell, it would benothing to withstand or endure it.The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made readyon the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, andstrains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God,and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation atall, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunkwith your blood. Thus all you that never passed under a greatchange of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God uponyour souls; all you that were never born again, and made newcreatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new,and before altogether unexperienced light and life, are in thehands of an angry God. However you may have reformed yourlife in many things, and may have had religious affections, andmay keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, andin the house of God, it is nothing but his mere pleasure thatkeeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlastingdestruction. However unconvinced you may now be of thetruth of what you hear, by and by you will be fully convincedof it. Those that are gone from being in the like circumstanceswith you, see that it was so with them; for destruction camesuddenly upon most of them; when they expected nothing ofit, and while they were saying, Peace and safety: now they see,that those things on which they depended for peace and safety,were nothing but thin air and empty shadows.The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holdsa spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you,and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns likefire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be castinto the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in hissight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes,than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You haveoffended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel didhis prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds youfrom falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed tonothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that youwas suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed youreyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why youhave not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, butthat God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason tobe given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat herein the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinfulwicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there isnothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not thisvery moment drop down into hell.O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a greatfurnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire ofwrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whosewrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as againstmany of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread,with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and readyevery moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you haveno interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to saveyourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing ofyour own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that youcan do, to induce God to spare you one moment.And let every one that is yet out of Christ, and hanging overthe pit of hell, whether they be old men and women, or middleaged, or young people, or little children, now hearken to theloud calls of God’s word and providence. This acceptable yearof the Lord, a day of such great favour to some, will doubtlessbe a day of as remarkable vengeance to others. Men’s heartsharden, and their guilt increases apace at such a day as this, ifthey neglect their souls; and never was there so great danger ofsuch persons being given up to hardness of heart and blindnessof mind. God seems now to be hastily gathering in his electin all parts of the land; and probably the greater part of adultpersons that ever shall be saved, will be brought in now in alittle time, and that it will be as it was on the great out-pouringof the Spirit upon the Jews in the apostles’ days; the electionwill obtain, and the rest will be blinded. If this should be thecase with you, you will eternally curse this day, and will cursethe day that ever you was born, to see such a season of thepouring out of God’s Spirit, and will wish that you had diedand gone to hell before you had seen it. Now undoubtedly itis, as it was in the days of John the Baptist, the axe is in anextraordinary manner laid at the root of the trees, that everytree which brings not forth good fruit, may be hewn down andcast into the fire.26 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and flyfrom the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is nowundoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation.Let every one fly out of Sodom: “Haste and escape for yourlives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you beconsumed.”Excerpts from the Testimony of the Trialof Anne Hutchinson, 1637Court: This is a woman who has been the breeder and nourisherof distempers, one Mistress Hutchinson, wife of Mr. WilliamHutchinson of Boston, a very honest and peaceable man ofgood estate, and the daughter of Mr. Marbury, sometimes aPreacher in Lincolnshere, a woman of a haughty and fiercecarriage, of nimble wit and active spirit, and a very volubletongue, more bold than a man, though in understanding andjudgement, inferior to many women...Indeed it is a wonderupon what a sudden the whole church of Boston (some fewexcepted) were to become her new converts, and infected withher opinions... and also may profane persons became of heropinion, for it was a very easy, and acceptable way to heaven, tosee nothing, to have nothing, but wait for Christ to do all...Hutchinson: Therefore take heed what ye go about do unto me.You have power over my body, but the Lord Jesus hath powerover my body and soul; neither can you do me any harm, for Iam in the hands of the eternal Jehovah, my Savior. I am at hisappointment, for the bonds of my habitation are cat in heaven,and not further do I esteem of any mortal man than creaturesin His hand. I fear none but the great Jehovah, which hathforetold me of these things, and I do verily believe that Hewill deliver me out of your hands. Therefore take heed how youproceed against me; for I know that for this you go about dounto me, God will ruin you and your posterity.Mr. Nowell: How do you know that it was God that did revealthings to you, and not Satan?Hutchinson: How did Abraham know that it was God that bidhim offer his son, being a breach of the sixth Commandment?Deputy-Governor Dudley: By an immediate voice.Hutchinson: So to me by an immediate revelation.Deputy Governor: How! An immediate revelation!Hutchinson: By the voice of his own spirit to my soul.Governor Winthrop: Daniel was delivered by a miracle. Doyou think to be delivered so too?Hutchinson: I do here speak it before the court. I look that theLord should deliver me by his Providence...Court: Have you countenanced, of will you justify thoseseditious practices for which you have been censured here inthis court?27

Hutchinson: Do you ask me on a point of conscience?Court: No, your conscience you may keep to yourself, but ifin this cause you shall countenance and encourage those thattransgress the Law, you must be called into question for it, andthat is not for your conscience, but for your practice.Hutchinson: What have they and I transgressed? The Law ofGod?Court: Yes, the fifth Commandment, which commands usto honour Father and Mother, which includes all in authority,but these seditious practices of yours have cast reproach anddishonor upon the Fathers of the Commonwealth...Governor Winthrop: The court hath already declaredthemselves satisfied with the things you hear, concerning thetroublesomeness of her spirit, and the danger of her courseyou hear among us, which is not to be suffered. Therefore, ifit be the mind of the Court, that Mrs. Hutchinson, for thesethings that appear before us, is unfit for our society, and if itbe the mind of the Court that she shall be banished out of ourliberties, and imprisoned until she be sent away, let them holdup their hands.[All but three hold up their hands.]Governor Winthrop: All that are contrary minded, hold upyours.[Two men hold up their hands.]Mr. Jennisons: I cannot hold up my hand one way or another,and I shall give my reason if the Court require it.Governor Winthrop: Mrs. Hutchinson, you hear the sentenceof the Court. It is that you are banished from our jurisdictionas being a woman not fit for our society. And you are to beimprisoned till the Court send you away.Hutchinson: I desire to know wherefore I am banished.Governor Winthrop: Say no more. The Court knows wherefore,and is satisfied.Anne Bradstreet 1612—1672: PoemsAnne Bradstreet was the first notable poet in American literature,an authentic Puritan voice with a simplicity and force rarely foundin her contemporaries. She was born in England, and raised incomparative luxury on the estate of the Earl of Lincoln, where herfather, Thomas Dudley, was steward (manager of business affairs).She had a childhood common to Puritan children seized by the forceof Calvinist doctrine, but Thomas Dudley saw to it that his highspiritedyoung daughter was educated beyond the simple householdskills and the lessons in submission often given to women of her timeand station.At sixteen, she married Simon Bradstreet, a sturdy Puritan anda graduate of Cambridge University. Two years later, in 1630,she left England with her husband and her parents on the shipArabella, sailing to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In Massachusettsher father became one of the Colony’s leaders and succeeded JohnWinthrop as Governor. Anne and her husband settled on a farmnear the frontier village of Andover, on the Merrimac River. Thereshe confronted a primitive life at which her heart rebelled until she“was convinced it was the way at God and submitted. She became adutiful housewife and raised eight children, and, in the most of herhousehold tasks, stole time to read and write poetry. Verifiers werecommon enough in colonial New England, but few were women.Anne Bradstreet recognized that a Puritan community frowned onwriting as unseemly behavior for a woman, especially the daughterof the Governor:I am oblivious to each carping tongueWho says my hand a needle better fits.In 1647 her brother-in-law, John Woodbrulge, pastor of the Andoverchurch, sailed to England taking copies of her poems with him. There,in 1650, and without her knowledge, they were published underthe title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America or SeveralPoems, Compiled With a Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Fullof Delight . . . By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts. It was the firstpublished volume of poetry written by a settler in the Englishcolonies.The Tenth Muse was obviously imitative, filled with well-wornpoetic stock. In laboring and tedious couplets it dwelt on the vanityof worldly pleasures, the brevity of life, and resignation to God’swill. It reflected the influence of the Bible and the translations of theFrench poet Guillaume du Bartas (1544—1590), who had decoratedhis scriptural epics with an overabundance of strained metaphorsand conceits. When Anne Bradstreet saw her own imperfect poetryin print, she ca/led it an “ill-formed offspring,” “my rambling bratin print,” but in London her volume of poems was a success and soonwas listed among “the most venerable books” of the age.Little is known of the remaining years of her life except that in themidst of her daily routine of caring for her family in an isolated28 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

frontier village she revised her early work and composed new poems.Published posthumously in 1678, they were her best work, showingin greater depth the spiritual struggles of a Christian “on earthperplexed,” confronting doubt and skepticism. She had moved froma concern with historical events, philosophical lore, and fantasticliterary devices borrowed from Quarles, Herbert, and du Bartas,and she had achieved a simpler, more lyrical poetry expressing amind whose emotionalism struggled with the Puritan conscience ithad inherited.In the eighteenth century her poetry was considered, as CottonMather noted, a “grateful entertainment unto the ingenious.” In thenineteenth century it was dismissed as merely quaint and curious, a“relic of the earliest literature of our country.” Today her work standswith that of Edward Taylor as part of the true poetry of seventeenthcenturyNew England. She was one of the first women in Americato speak in her own behalf, and her lyrics remained unsurpassedby an American woman writer for 200 years until the nineteenthcentury and the coming of Emily Dickinson.TO MY DEAR AND LOVING HUSBANDIf ever two were one, then surely we.If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;If ever wife was happy in a man,Compare with me, ye women, if you can.I prize thy love more than whole mines of goldOr all the riches that the East doth hold.My love is such that rivers cannot quench,Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.Thy love is such I can no way repay,The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.Then while we live, in love let’s so persevereThat when we live no more, we may live ever.THE AUTHOR TO HER BOOKThou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,Who after birth didst by my side remain,Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge,Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).At thy return my blushing was not small,My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,I cast thee by as one unfit for light,Thy visage was so irksome in my sight;Yet being mine own, at length affection wouldThy blemishes amend, if so I could:I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;In better dress to trim thee was my mind,But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find.In this array ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.In critic’s hands beware thou dost not come,And take thy way where yet thou art not known;If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;And for thy mother, she alas is poor,Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.BEFORE THE BIRTH OF ONEOF HER CHILDRENAll things within this fading world hath end,Adversity doth still our joys attend;No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,But with death’s parting blow’ is sure to meet.The sentence past is most irrevocable,A common thing, yet oh, inevitable.How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,How soon’t may be thy lot to lose thy friend,We both are ignorant, yet love bids meThese farewell lines to recommend to thee,That when that knot’s untied that made us one,I may seem thine, who in effect am none.And if I see not half my days that’s due,What nature would, God grant to yours and you;The many faults that well you know I haveLet be interred in my oblivious grave;If any worth or virtue were in me,Let that live freshly in thy memoryAnd when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms.And when thy loss shall be repaid with gainsLook to my little babes, my dear remains.And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,These O protect from step-dame’s’ injury.And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,With some sad sighs honour my absent hearse;And kiss this paper for thy love’s dear sake,Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.29

UPON THE BURNING OF OUR HOUSEJULY 10th, 1661In silent night when rest I tookFor sorrow near I did not lookI wakened was with thund’ring noiseAnd piteous shrieks of dreadful voice.That fearful sound of “Fire!” and “Fire!”Let no man know is my desire.I, starting up, the light did spy,And to my God my heart did cryTo strengthen me in my distressAnd not to leave me succorless.Then, coming out, beheld a spaceThe flame consume my dwelling place.And when I could no longer look,I blest His name that gave and took,That laid my goods now in the dust.Yea, so it was, and so ‘twas just.It was His own, it was not mine,Far be it that I should repine;Then straight I ‘gin my heart to chide,And did thv wealth on earth abide?Didst fix thy hope on mold’ring dust?The arm of flesh didst make thy trust?Raise up thy thoughts above the skyThat dunghill mists away may fly.Thou hast an house on high erect,Framed by that mighty Architect,With glory richly furnished.Stands permanent though this be fled.It’s purchased and paid for tooBy Him who hath enough to do.A price so vast as is unknownYet by His gift is made thine own.There’s wealth enough, I need no more.Farewell, my pelf, farewell my store.The world no longer let me love,My hope and treasure lies above.He might of all justly bereftBut yet sufficient for us left.When by the ruins oft I pastMy sorrowing eyes aside did cast,And here and there the places spyWhere oft I sat and long did lie:Here stood that trunk, and there that chest,There lay that store I counted best.My pleasant things in ashes lie,And them behold no more shall I.Under thy roof no guest shall sit,Nor at thy table eat a bit.No pleasant tale shall e’er be told,Nor things recounted done of old.No candle e’er shall shine in thee,Nor bridegroom’s voice e’er heard shall be.In silence ever shall thou lie,Adieu, Adieu, all’s vanity.30 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Edward Taylor: Poems (1642—I729)Little in the external life of Edward Taylor suggests his achievementas a poet. He was an orthodox, even conservative, Puritan minister.He believed in the sinfulness and damnation of man. He believedin the salvation of an elect few who would be exalted in heaven. Hebelieved in the redeeming grace of an omnipotent God. He wanteda church purified of the embellishments of the Roman Catholic andAnglican liturgies. And, with other educated men of his time, heaccepted the existence of evil spirits, devils, and witches. A godly andobscure frontier parson in western Massachusetts, he devoted his lifeto a vain struggle against the weakening of church discipline and thedecline of the Puritan Way.Taylor was born in England and grew up during the PuritanCommonwealth and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. It is possiblethat he attended Cambridge University for a short time and servedas a schoolmaster. In his twenties, he left England and emigrated toMassachusetts, where he entered Harvard College to prepare himselffor the ministry. After graduating in 1671, he accepted a call toserve as pastor of the church at Westfield, a trading post and frontierfarming village 100 miles west of Boston. There, on the edge of a “vastand roaring” wilderness, he spent the remaining fifty-eight years ofhis life, serving both as minister and as town physician.His poetry was largely unknown to his contemporaries. Only afragment of a single poem was printed in his lifetime. Perhaps becausehe feared his poems would be considered too sensual for a clergyman,Taylor never published the remainder of his writings. As a result, hispoetry was forgotten until his manuscripts were rediscovered in theYale University Library and finally published in the 1930’s.The appearance of his poems, two centuries after his death, revealeda mind radically different from that commonly ascribed to Puritanpreachers. Their religious views were thought to be stern and sober.Their few artistic efforts seemed to smother in didactic purpose. ButTaylor had written in the tradition of such metaphysical poets asDonne and Herbert, expressing divine and elevated ideas in unrelated,homely terms that were sometimes erotic, even scatological. He hadcreated elaborate conceits and metaphors that used spinning wheels,bowling balls, excrement, and insects to give ingenious and oftengrotesque expression to his intense emotions.Taylor thought his poems were “ragged rhymes, “ the product ofa “tattered fancy. “ Some critics have since judged them a botch ofneedless archaisms, jigging meter, and clashing images. Others havefound them a frivolous union of lofty themes and earthy diction thatreveal an extravagant sense of sin and display a self- indulgentemotionalism. Taylor’s best work was not intended as public art butas a record of his private efforts to confirm a mystical union withGod, and at their best his poems have a tension, richness, and daringbeyond any other colonial American poetry. With their mystical,even occult, intensity, with their detonating metaphors, and withtheir expression of unity in divine diversity, they anticipate thepoetic art of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, and they standwith the finest literature of early America.HUSWIFERYMake me, O Lord, Thy spinning wheel completeThy Holy Word my Distaff make for meMake mine Affections Thy Swift Foleys neatAnd make my Soul Thy holy Spool to beMy conversation make to be Thy ReelAnd reel the yarn thereon spun of Thy Wheel.Make me Thy Loom then, knit therein this Twine:And make Thy Holy Spirit, Lord, wind quills:Then weave the Web Thyself. The yarn is fine.Thine Ordinances make my Fulling Mills.Then dye the same in Heavenly Colors Choice,All pinked with Varnished Flowers of Paradise.Then clothe therewith mine Understanding, Will,Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory,My Words, and Actions, that their shine may fillMy ways with glory and Thee glorify.Then mine apparel shall display before YeThat I am Cothed in Holy robes for glory..UPON A SPIDER CATCHING A FLYThou sorrow, venom elf. Is this thy play,To spin a web out of thyself To catch a fly?For why?I saw a pettish wasp Fall foul therein,Whom yet thy whorl pins did not claspLest he should flingHis sting.But as afraid, remote Didst stand hereatAnd with thy little fingers stroke And gently tapHis back.Thus gently him didst treat Lest he should pet,And in a froppish waspish heat Should greatly fretThy net.Whereas the silly fly, Caught by its leg,Thou by the throat took’st hastily, And ‘hind the headBite dead.This goes to pot, that not Nature doth call.Strive not above what strength bath got, Lest in the brawlThou fall.31

This fray seems thus to us:Hell’s spider getsHis entrails spun to whipcords thus, And wove to netsAnd sets,To tangle Adam’s race In’s stratagemsTo their destructions, spoiled, made base By venom things,Damned sins.But mighty, gracious Lord, CommunicateThy grace to break the cord; afford Us glory’s gateAnd stateBut oh! the torture, vomit, screechings, groans;And six weeks’ fever would pierce hearts like stones.Grief o’er doth flow; and nature fault would findWere not Thy will my spell, charm, joy, and gem;That as I said, I say, take, Lord, they’re Thine;I piecemeal pass to glory bright in them.I joy, may I sweet flowers for glory breed,Whether Thou get’st them green, or lets them seed.We’ll Nightingales sing like, When perched on highIn glory’s cage. Thy Glory bright, and Thankfully,For Joy.UPON WEDLOCK AND DEATH OFCHILDRENA curious knot God made in paradise, And drew it outenameled neatly fresh.It was the true-love knot, more sweet than spice,And set with all the flowers of grace’s dress.It’s wedding’s knot, that ne’er can he untied.No Alexander’s sword can it divide.’The slips here planted, gay and glorious grow,Unless an hellish breath do singe their plumes.Here primrose, cowslips, roses, lillies blow,With violets and pinks that void perfumes,Whose beauteous leaves o’erlaid with honey dew..And chanting birds chirp out sweet music trueWhen in this knot I planted was, my stockSoon knotted, and a manly flower outbrake.And after it my branch again did knot,Brought out another flower, its sweet-breath’d mate.One knot gave one tother the tother’s place.Whence chuckling smiles fought in each other’s face.But oh! a glorious hand from glory cameGuarded with angels, soon did crop this flower,Which almost tore the root up of the same,At that unlooked for, dolesome, darksome hour.In prayer to Christ perfumed it did ascend,And angels bright did it to heaven ‘tend.But pausing on’t, this sweet perfumed my thought,Christ would in glory have a flower, choice, prime,And having choice, chose this my branch forth brought.Lord, take’t. I thank.Thee, Thou tak’st ought of mine;It is my pledge in glory; part of meIs now in it, Lord, glorified with Thee.But praying o’er my branch, my branch did sproutAnd bore another manly flower, and gay,And after that another sweet broke out,The which the former hand soon got away.32 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

The Mayflower CompactNovember 11, 1620The Pilgrims who came on the Mayflower in 1620 accepted the ruleof James I, and the sovereignty of Great Britain. Why then did theyfeel a need to write this document? What is the significance of thisdocument? Who signed it? Who didn’t sign?In The Name of God, amen. We, whose names are underwritten,the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James,by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland,King, Defender of the Faith, &c. Having undertaken for theGlory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, andthe Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant thefirst colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by thesePresents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God andone another, covenant and combine ourselves together into acivil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation,and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid; And by Virtue hereofdo enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws,Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Offices, from time totime, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for thegeneral Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all dueSubmission and Obedience. In Witness whereof we havehereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the eleventh ofNovember, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King James ofEngland, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth and of Scotland,the fifty-fourth. Anno Domini, 1620.Mr. William WhiteMr. Richard WarrenJohn HowlandMr. Stephen HopkinsDigery PriestThomas WilliamsGilbert WinslowEdmund MargessonPeter BrownRichard BitteridgeGeorge SouleEdward TillyJohn TillyFrancis CookeThomas RogersThomas TinkerJohn RidgateEdward FullerRichard ClarkRichard GardinerMr. John AllertonThomas EnglishEdward DotenEdward LiesterMr. John CarverMr. William BradfordMr. Edward WinslowMr. William BrewsterIsaac AllertonMiles StandishJohn AldenJohn TurnerFrancis EatonJames ChiltonJohn CraxtonJohn BillingtonJoses FletcherJohn GoodmanMr. Samuel FullerMr. Christopher MartinMr. William Mullins33

Washington Irving:Rip Van WinkleA posthumous writing of Diedrich KnickerbockerBy Woden, God of saxons,From whence comes Wensday, that is Wodensday,Truth is a thing that ever I will keepUnto thylke day in which I creep intoMy sepulchre -- CartwrightThe following Tale was found among the papers of the late DiedrichKnickerbocker, an old gentleman of New York, who was verycurious in the Dutch history of the province, and the manners ofthe descendants from its primitive settlers. His historical researches,however, did not lie so much among books as among men; for theformer are lamentably scanty on his favorite topics; whereas hefound the old burghers, and still more their wives, rich in thatlegendary lore so invaluable to true history. Whenever, therefore, hehappened upon a genuine Dutch family, snugly shut up in its lowroofedfarmhouse under a spreading sycamore, he looked upon it asa little clasped volume of black-letter, and studied it with the zealof a book-worm.The result of all these researches was a history of the province duringthe reign of the Dutch governors, which he published some yearssince. There have been various opinions as to the literary characterof his work, and, to tell the truth, it is not a whit better than itshould be. Its chief merit is its scrupulous accuracy, which indeedwas a little questioned on its first-appearance, but has since beencompletely established; and it is now admitted into all historicalcollections as a book of unquestionable authority.The old gentleman died shortly after the publication of his work,and now that he is dead and gone, it cannot do much harm to hismemory to say that his time might have been much better employedin weightier labors. He, however, was apt to ride his hobby his ownway; and though it did now and then kick up the dust a little in theeyes of his neighbors, and grieve the spirit of some friends, for whomhe felt the truest deference and affection; yet his errors and folliesare remembered “more in sorrow than in anger,” and it begins to besuspected that he never intended to injure or offend. But howeverhis memory may be appreciated by critics, it is still held dear bymany folks whose good opinion is well worth having; particularlyby certain biscuit-bakers, who have gone so far as to imprint hislikeness on their new-year cakes; and have thus given him a chancefor immortality, almost equal to being stamped on a Waterloo Medalor a Queen Anne’s Farthing.Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must rememberthe Kaatskill Mountains. They are a dismembered branch ofthe great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west ofthe river, swelling up to a noble height, and lording it over thesurrounding country. Every change of season, every changeof weather, indeed, every hour of the day, produces somechange in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains,and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, asperfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, theyare clothed in blue and purple and print their bold outlineson the clear evening sky; but sometimes when the rest of thelandscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vaporsabout their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun,will glow and light up like a crown of glory.At the foot of these fairy mountains, the voyager may havedescried the light smoke curling up from a village whoseshingle-roofs gleam among the trees just where the blue tintsof the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearerlandscape. It is a little village of great antiquity, having beenfounded by some of the Dutch colonists in the early times ofthe province, just about the beginning of the government of thegood Peter Stuyvesant (may he rest in peace!),and there weresome of the houses of the original settlers standing within afew years, built of small yellow bricks brought from Holland,having latticed windows and gable fronts, surmounted withweather-cocks.In that same village, and in one of these very houses (which,to tell the precise truth, was sadly time-worn and weatherbeaten)there lived many years since, while the country wasyet a province of Great Britain, a simple good-natured fellow,of the name of Rip Van Winkle. He was a descendant ofthe Van Winkles who figured so gallantly in the chivalrousdays of Peter Stuyvesant, and accompanied him to the siegeof Fort Christina. He inherited, however, but little of themartial character of his ancestors. I have observed that he wasa simple good-natured man; he was, moreover, a kind neighbor,and an obedient, henpecked husband. Indeed, to the lattercircumstance might be owing that meekness of spirit whichgained him such universal popularity; for those men are mostapt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad who are underthe discipline of shrews at home. Their tempers, doubtless, arerendered pliant and malleable in the fiery furnace of domestictribulation; and a curtain lecture is worth all the sermonsin the world for teaching the virtues of patience and longsuffering.A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respectsbe considered a tolerable blessing; and if so, Rip Van Winklewas thrice blessed.Certain it is, that he was a great favorite among all the goodwives of the village, who, as usual with the amiable sex, tookhis part in all family squabbles; and never failed, wheneverthey talked those matters over in their evening gossipings, tolay all the blame on Dame Van Winkle. The children of thevillage, too, would shout with joy whenever he approached. Heassisted at their sports, made their playthings, taught them to34 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

fly kites and shoot marbles, and told them long stories of ghosts,witches, and Indians. Whenever he went dodging about thevillage, he was surrounded by a troop of them, hanging onhis skirts, clambering on his back, and playing a thousandtricks on him with impunity; and not a dog would bark at himthroughout the neighborhood.The great error in Rip’s composition was an insuperable aversionto all kinds of profitable labor. It could not be from the want ofassiduity or perseverance; for he would sit on a wet rock with arod as long and heavy as a Tartar’s lance and fish all day withouta murmur even though he should not be encouraged by a singlenibble. He would carry a fowlingpiece on his shoulder for hourstogether, trudging through woods and swamps and up hill anddown dale, to shoot a few squirrels or wild pigeons. He wouldnever refuse to assist a neighbor, even in the roughest toil, andwas a foremost man at all country frolics for husking Indiancorn, or building stone-fences; the women of the village, too,used to employ him to run their errands and do such little oddjobs as their less obliging husbands would not do for them. Ina word, Rip was ready to attend to anybody’s business but hisown; but as to doing family duty, and keeping his family inorder, he found it impossible.In fact, he declared it was of no use to work on his farm; it wasthe most pestilent little piece of ground in the whole country;every thing about it went wrong, and would go wrong, in spiteof him. His fences were continually falling to pieces; his cowwould either go astray or get among the cabbages; weeds weresure to grow quicker in his fields than anywhere else; the rainalways made a point of setting in just as he had outdoor workto do; so that though his patrimonial estate had dwindled awayunder his management, acre by acre, until there was little moreleft than a mere patch of Indian corn and potatoes, yet it wasthe worst-conditioned farm in the neighborhood.His children, too, were as ragged and wild as if they belongedto nobody. His son Rip, an urchin begotten in his own likeness,promised to inherit the habits, with the old clothes of his father.He was generally seen trooping like a colt at his mother’s heels,equipped in a pair of his father’s castoff galligaskins, which hehad much ado to hold up with one hand, as a fine lady does hertrain in bad weather.Rip Van Winkle, however, was one of those happy mortals,of foolish, welloiled dispositions, who take the world easy, eatwhite bread or brown, whichever can be got with least thoughtor trouble, and would rather starve on a penny than work for apound. If left to himself, he would have whistled life away inperfect contentment; but his wife kept continually dinning inhis ears about his idleness, his carelessness, and the ruin he wasbringing on his family. Morning, noon, and night, her tonguewas incessantly going, and everything he said or did was sure toproduce a torrent of household eloquence. Rip had but one wayof replying to all lectures of that kind, and that, by frequent use,had grown into a habit. He shrugged his shoulders, shook hishead, cast up his eyes, but said nothing. This, however, alwaysprovoked a fresh volley from his wife; so that he was fain todraw off his forces, and take to the outside of the house, theonly side which, in truth, belongs to a henpecked husband.Rip’s sole domestic adherent was his dog Wolf, who was as muchhenpecked as his master; for Dame Van Winkle regarded themas companions in idleness, and even looked upon Wolf withan evil eye, as the Cause of his master’s going so often astray.True it is, in all points of spirit befitting an honorable dog, hewas as courageous an animal as ever scoured the wood--butwhat courage can withstand the ever-during and all-besettlingterrors of a woman’s tongue? The moment Wolf entered thehouse his crest fell, his tail drooped to the ground, or curledbetween his legs, he sneaked about with a gallows air, castingmany a sidelong glance at Dame Van Winkle, and at the leastflourish of a broomstick or ladle, he would fly to the door withyelping precipitation.Times grew worse and worse with Rip Van Winkle as yearsof matrimony rolled on; a tart temper never mellows with age,and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keenerwith constant use. For a long while he used to console himself,when driven from home, by frequenting a kind of perpetualclub of the sages, philosophers, and other idle personages ofthe village, which held its sessions on a bench before a smallinn, designated by a rubicund portrait of His Majesty Georgethe Third. Here they used to sit in the shade through a longlazy summer day, talking listlessly over village gossip, ortelling endless sleepy stories about nothing. But it would havebeen worth any statesman’s money to have heard the profounddiscussions that sometimes took place when, by chance, an oldnewspaper fell into their hands from some passing traveller.How solemnly they would listen to the contents, as drawled outby Derrick Van Bummel, the schoolmaster, a dapper, learnedlittle man, who was not to be daunted by the most giganticword in the dictionary; and how sagely they would deliberateupon public events some months after they had taken place.The opinions of this junto were completely controlled byNicholas Vedder, a patriarch of the village, and landlord ofthe inn, at the door of which he took his seat from morningtill night, just moving sufficiently to avoid the sun and keep inthe shade of a large tree; so that the neighbors could tell thehour by his movements as accurately as by a sun-dial. It is truehe was rarely heard to speak, but smoked his pipe incessantly.His adherents, however (for every great man has his adherents),perfectly understood him and knew how to gather his opinions.When anything that was read or related displeased him, he wasobserved to smoke his pipe vehemently, and to send forth short,frequent, and angry puffs; but when pleased, he would inhale35

the smoke slowly and tranquilly, and emit it in light and placidclouds; and sometimes, taking the pipe from his mouth, andletting the fragrant vapor curl about his nose, would gravelynod his head in token of perfect approbation.From even this stronghold the unlucky Rip was at lengthrouted by his termagant wife, who would suddenly break inupon the tranquility of the assemblage and call the membersall to naught; nor was that august personage, Nicholas Vedderhimself, sacred from the daring tongue of this terrible virago,who charged him outright with encouraging her husband inhabits of idleness.Poor Rip was at last reduced almost to despair; and hisonly alternative, to escape from the labor of the farm andclamor of his wife, was to take gun in hand and stroll awayinto the woods. Here he would sometimes seat himself at thefoot of a tree and share the contents of his wallet with Wolf,with whom he sympathized as a fellow-sufferer in persecution.“Poor Wolf,” he would say, “thy mistress leads thee a dog’s lifeof it; but never mind, my lad, whilst I live thou shalt neverwant a friend to stand by thee!” Wolf would wag his tail, lookwistfully in his master’s face, and if dogs can feel pity, I verilybelieve he reciprocated the sentiment with all his heart.In a long ramble of the kind on a fine autumnal day, Rip hadunconsciously scrambled to one of the highest parts of theKaatskill Mountains. He was after his favorite sport of squirrelshooting, and the still solitudes had echoed and reechoed withthe reports of his gun. Panting and fatigued, he threw himself,late in the afternoon, on a green knoll, covered with mountainherbage, that crowned the brow of a precipice. From an openingbetween the trees he could overlook all the lower country formany a mile of rich woodland. He saw at a distance the lordlyHudson, far, far below him, moving on its silent but majesticcourse, with the reflection of a purple cloud, or the sail of alagging bark, here and there sleeping on its glassy bosom, andat last losing itself in the blue highlands.On the other side he looked down into a deep mountain glen,wild, lonely, and shagged, the bottom filled with fragmentsfrom the impending cliffs and scarcely lighted by the reflectedrays of the setting sun. For some time Rip lay musing on thisscene; evening was gradually advancing; the mountains beganto throw their long blue shadows over the valleys; he saw thatit would be dark long before he could reach the village, andhe heaved a heavy sigh when he thought of encountering theterrors of Dame Van Winkle.As he was about to descend, he heard a voice from a distance,hallooing, “Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!” He lookedround, but could see nothing but a crow winging its solitaryflight across the mountain. He thought his fancy must havedeceived him, and turned again to descend, when he heard thesame cry ring through the still evening air; “Rip Van Winkle!Rip Van Winkle! “At the same time Wolf bristled up his back,and giving a low growl, skulked to his master’s side, lookingfearfully down into the glen. Rip now felt a vague apprehensionstealing over him; he looked anxiously in the same direction,and perceived a strange figure slowly toiling up the rocks, andbending under the weight of something he carried on his back.He was surprised to see any human being in this lonely andunfrequented place; but supposing it to be someone of theneighborhood in need of his assistance, he hastened down toyield it.On nearer approach he was still more surprised at the singularityof the stranger’s appearance. He was a short, square-built oldfellow, with thick bushy hair, and a grizzled beard. His dresswas of the antique Dutch fashion -- a cloth jerkin strappedround the waist, several pair of breeches, the outer one ofample volume, decorated with rows of buttons down the sides,and bunches at the knees. He bore on his shoulder a stout keg,that seemed full of liquor, and made signs for Rip to approachand assist him with the load. Though rather shy and distrustfulof this new acquaintance, Rip complied with his usual alacrity;and mutually relieving one another, they clambered up anarrow gully, apparently the dry bed of a mountain torrent. Asthey ascended, Rip every now and then heard long rolling peals,like distant thunder, that seemed to issue out of a deep ravine,or rather cleft, between lofty rocks, toward which their ruggedpath conducted. He paused for an instant, but supposing it tobe the muttering of one of those transient thunder-showerswhich often take place in mountain heights, he proceeded.Passing through the ravine, they came to a hollow like a smallamphitheatre, surrounded by perpendicular precipices, overthe brinks of which impending trees shot their branches, sothat you only caught glimpses of the azure sky and the brightevening cloud. During the whole time Rip and his companionhad labored on in silence; for though the former marvelledgreatly what could be the object of carrying a keg of liquorup this wild mountain, yet there was something strange andincomprehensible about the unknown, that inspired awe andchecked familiarity.On entering the amphitheatre, new objects of wonder presentedthemselves. On a level spot in the center was a company of oddlookingpersonages playing at ninepins. They were dressed ina quaint outlandish fashion; some wore short doublets, othersjerkins, with long knives in their belts, and most of them hadenormous breeches of similar style with that of the guide’s. Theirvisages, too, were peculiar: one had a large beard, broad face,and small piggish eyes: the face of another seemed to consistentirely of nose, and was surmounted by a white sugarloafhat, set off with a little red cock’s tail. They all had beards, ofvarious shapes and colors. There was one who seemed to bethe commander. He was a stout old gentleman, with a weatherbeatencountenance; he wore a laced doublet, broad belt andhanger, high-crowned hat and feather, red stockings, and highheeledshoes, with roses in them. The whole group remindedRip of the figures in an old Flemish painting in the parlor of36 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Dominie Van Shaick, the village parson, and which had beenbrought over from Holland at the time of the settlement.What seemed particularly odd to Rip was, that though thesefolks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintainedthe gravest faces, the most mysterious silence, and were, withal,the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed.Nothing interrupted the stillness of the scene but the noiseof the balls, which, whenever they were rolled, echoed alongthe mountains like rumbling peals of thunder. As Rip and hiscompanion approached them, they suddenly desisted fromtheir play, and stared at him with such fixed, statue-like gaze,and such strange, uncouth, lack-lustre countenances, that hisheart turned within him, and his knees smote together. Hiscompanion now emptied the contents of the keg into largeflagons, and made signs to him to wait upon the company. Heobeyed with fear and trembling; they quaffed the liquor inprofound silence, and then returned to their game.By degrees Rip’s awe and apprehension subsided. He evenventured, when no eye was fixed upon him, to taste the beverage,which he found had much of the flavor of excellent Hollands.He was naturally a thirsty soul and was soon tempted to repeatthe draught. One taste provoked another; and he reiteratedhis visits to the flagon so often that at length his senses wereoverpowered, his eyes swam in his head, his head graduallydeclined, and he fell into a deep sleep.On waking, he found himself on the green knoll whence hehad first seen the old man of the glen. He rubbed his eyes.It was a bright, sunny morning. The birds were hopping andtwittering among the bushes, and the eagle was wheeling aloft,and breasting the pure mountain breeze. “Surely,” thought Rip,“I have not slept here all night.” He recalled the occurrencesbefore he fell asleep -- the strange man with a keg of liquor,the mountain ravine, the wild retreat among the rocks, thewoebegone party at ninepins, the flagon. “Oh! that flagon! thatwicked flagon!” thought Rip. “What excuse shall I make toDame Van Winkle?”He looked round for his gun, but in place of the clean, welloiledfowling-piece, he found an old firelock lying by him, thebarrel incrusted with rust, the lock falling off, and the stockworm-eaten. He now suspected that the grave roisterers ofthe mountain had put a trick upon him, and, having dosedhim with liquor, had robbed him of his gun. Wolf, too, haddisappeared, but he might have strayed away after a squirrel orpartridge. He whistled after him, and shouted his name, butall in vain; the echoes repeated his whistle and shout, but nodog was to be seen.He determined to revisit the scene of the last evening’s gambol,and if he met with any of the party, to demand his dog andgun. As he rose to walk, he found himself stiff in the joints,and wanting in his usual activity. “Those mountain beds do notagree with me,” thought Rip, “and if this frolic should lay meup with a fit of the rheumatism, I shall have a blessed time withDame Van Winkle.” With some difficulty he got down intotheglen: he found the gully up which he and his companionhad ascended the previous evening; but to his astonishmenta mountain stream was now foaming down it, leaping fromrock to rock, and filling the glen with babbling murmurs.He, however, made shift to scramble up its sides, working histoilsome way through thickets of birch, sassafras, and witchhazel,and sometimes tripped up or entangled by the wildgrapevines that twisted their coils or tendrils from tree to tree,and spread a kind of network in his path.At length he reached to where the ravine had opened throughthe cliffs to the amphitheatre; but no traces of such openingremained. The rocks presented a high, impenetrable wall, overwhich the torrent came tumbling in a sheet of feathery foam,and fell into a broad, deep basin, black from the shadows ofthe surrounding forest. Here, then, poor Rip was brought toa stand. He again called and whistled after his dog; he wasonly answered by the cawing of a flock of idle crows, sportinghigh in air about a dry tree that overhung a sunny precipice;and who, secure in their elevation, seemed to look down andscoff at the poor man’s perplexities. What was to be done? Themorning was passing away, and Rip felt famished for wantof his breakfast. He grieved to give up his dog and gun; hedreaded to meet his wife; but it would not do to starve amongthe mountains. He shook his head, shouldered the rustyfirelock, and, with a heart full of trouble and anxiety, turnedhis steps homeward.As he approached the village he met a number of people, butnone whom he knew, which somewhat surprised him, for hehad thought himself acquainted with everyone in the countryround. Their dress, too, was of a different fashion from that towhich he was accustomed. They all stared at him with equalmarks of surprise, and whenever they cast their eyes upon him,invariably stroked their chins. The constant recurrence of thisgesture induced Rip, involuntarily, to do the same, when, tohis astonishment, he found his beard had grown a foot long!He had now entered the skirts of the village. A troop of strangechildren ran at his heels, hooting after him, and pointing athis gray beard. The dogs, too, not one of which he recognizedfor an old acquaintance, barked at him as he passed. The veryvillage was altered; it was larger and more populous. Therewere rows of houses which he had never seen before, and thosewhich had been his familiar haunts had disappeared. Strangenames were over the doors—strange faces at the windows--everything was strange. His mind now misgave him; he beganto doubt whether both he and the world around him were notbewitched. Surely this was his native village, which he had leftbut the day before. There stood the Kaatskill Mountains. There37

an the silver Hudson at a distance. There was every hill anddale precisely as it had always been. Rip was sorely perplexed.“That flagon last night,” thought he, “has addled my poor headsadly!”It was with some difficulty that he found the way to his ownhouse, which he approached with silent awe, expecting everymoment to hear the shrill voice of Dame Van Winkle. Hefound the house gone to decay—the roof fallen in, the windowsshattered, and the doors off the hinges. A half-starved dogthat looked like Wolf was skulking about it. Rip called him byname, but the cur snarled, showed his teeth, and passed on.This was an unkind cut indeed. “My very dog,” sighed poor Rip,“has forgotten me!”He entered the house, which, to tell the truth, Dame VanWinkle had always kept in neat order. It was empty, forlorn,and apparently abandoned. This desolateness overcame all hisconnubial fears. He called loudly for his wife and children. Thelonely chambers rang for a moment with his voice, and then allagain was silence.He now hurried forth, and hastened to his old resort, the villageinn. But it, too, was gone. A large, rickety wooden buildingstood in its place, with great gaping windows, some of thembroken and mended with old hats and petticoats, and over thedoor was painted, “The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle.”Instead of the great tree that used to shelter the quiet littleDutch inn of yore, there now was reared a tall naked pole, withsomething on the top that looked like a red night-cap, and fromit was fluttering a flag on which was a singular assemblage ofstars and stripes. All this was strange and incomprehensible.He recognized on the sign, however, the ruby face of KingGeorge, under which he had smoked so many a peaceful pipe;but even this was singularly metamorphosed. The red coat waschanged for one of blue and buff, a sword was held in the handinstead of a sceptre, the head was decorated with a cockedhat, and underneath was painted in large characters, GeneralWashington.There was, as usual, a crowd of folk about the door, but nonethat Rip recollected. The very character of the people seemedchanged. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone aboutit, instead-of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility.He looked in vain for the sage Nicholas Vedder, with hisbroad face, double chin, and fair long pipe, uttering cloudsof tobacco smoke instead of idle speeches; or Van Bummel,the schoolmaster, doling forth the contents of an ancientnewspaper. In place of these, a lean, bilious-looking fellow,with his pockets full of handbills, was haranguing vehementlyabout rights of citizens, elections, members of Congress,liberty, Bunker’s Hill, heroes of Seventy-six, and other words,which were a perfect Babylonian jargon to the bewildered VanWinkle.The appearance of Rip, with his long grizzled beard, his rustyfowling-piece, his uncouth dress, and an army of women andchildren at his heels. soon attracted the attention of the tavernpoliticians. They crowded around him, eyeing him from headto foot with great curiosity. The orator bustled up to him, and,drawing him partly aside, inquired “which side he voted?” Ripstared in vacant stupidity. Another short but bus little fellowpulled him by the arm, and, rising on tiptoe, inquired in his ear,whether he was Federal or Democrat. Rip was equally at a lossto comprehend the question; when a knowing, self-importantold gentleman in a sharp cocked hat, made his way throughthe crowd, putting them to the right and left with his elbows ashe passed, and planting himself before Van Winkle, with onearm akimbo, the other resting on his cane, his keen eyes andsharp hat penetrating, as it were, into his very soul, demandedin an austere tone, what brought him to the election with a gunon his shoulder, and a mob at his heels, and whether he meantto breed a riot in the village.“Alas! gentlemen,” cried Rip, somewhat dismayed, “I am a poorquiet man, a native of the place, and a loyal subject of the King.God bless him!”Here a general shout burst from the bystanders. “A Tory! aTory! a spy! a refugee! hustle him! away with him!” It was withgreat difficulty that the self-important man in the cocked hatrestored order; and, having assumed a tenfold austerity of brow,demanded again of the unknown culprit what he came therefor, and whom he was seeking. The poor man humbly assuredhim that he meant no harm, but merely came there in search ofsome of his neighbors, who used to keep about the tavern.“Well, who are they? Name them.”Rip bethought himself a moment, and inquired, “Where’sNicholas Vedder?”There was a silence for a little while, when an old man replied,in a thin, piping voice, “Nicholas Vedder! why, he is dead andgone these eighteen years! There was a wooden tombstone inthe churchyard that used to tell all about him, but that’s rottenand gone too.”“Where’s Brom Dutcher?”“Oh, he went off to the army in the beginning of the war; somesay he was killed at the storming of Stony Point. Others say hewas drowned in a squall at the foot of Antony’s Nose. I don’tknow. He never came back again.”“Where’s Van Bummel, the schoolmaster?”“He went off to the wars, too, was a great militia general, andis now in Congress.”Rip’s heart died away at hearing of these sad changes in hishome and friends, and finding himself thus alone in the world.Every answer puzzled him, too, by treating such enormouslapses of time, and of matters which he could not understand:war, Congress, Stony Point; he had no courage to ask afterany more friends, but cried out in despair, “Does nobody hereknow Rip Van Winkle?”“Oh, Rip Van Winkle!” exclaimed two or three, “Oh, to besure! that’s Rip Van Winkle yonder, leaning against the tree.”Rip looked and beheld a precise counterpart of himself ashe went up the mountain, apparently as lazy and certainlyas ragged. The poor fellow was now completely confounded.He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or38 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

another man. In the midst of his bewilderment, the man in thecocked hat demanded who he was, and what was his name.“God knows,” exclaimed he, at wit’s end; “I’m not myself. I’msomebody else. That’s me yonder. No, that’s somebody elsegot into my shoes. I was myself last night, but I fell asleep onthe mountain, and they’ve changed my gun, and everything’schanged, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, orwho I am!”The bystanders began now to look at each other, nod, wink significantly,and tap their fingers against their foreheads. Therewas a whisper, also, about securing the gun and keeping theold fellow from doing mischief, at the very suggestion of whichthe self-important man in the cocked hat retired with someprecipitation. At this critical moment a fresh, comely womanpressed through the throng to get a peep at the gray-beardedman. She had a chubby child in her arms, which, frightened athis looks, began to cry. “Hush, Rip,” cried she, “hush, you littlefool; the old man won’t hurt you.The name of the child, the air of the mother, and tone of hervoice, all awakened a train of recollections in his mind. Whatis your name, my good woman?” asked he.“Judith Gardenier.”“And your father’s name?”“Ah, poor man, Rip Van Winkle was his name, but it’s twentyyears since he went away from home with his gun, and neverhas been heard of since. His dog came home without him; butwhether he shot himself, or was carried away by the Indians,nobody can tell. I was then but a little girl.”Rip had but one question more to ask; but he put it with afaltering voice, “Where’s your mother?”“Oh, she too died but a short time since; she broke a bloodvessel in a fit of passion at a New England peddler.”There was a drop of comfort, at least, in this intelligence. Thehonest man could contain himself no longer. He caught hisdaughter and her child in his arms. “I am your father!” criedhe. “Young Rip Van Winkle once--old Rip Van Winkle now!Does nobody know poor Rip Van Winkle. All stood amazeduntil an old woman, tottering out from among the crowd, puther hand to her brow, and peering under it in his face for amoment, exclaimed, “Sure enough! it is Rip Van Winkle. Itis himself! Welcome home again, old neighbor. Why, wherehave you been these twenty long years?”Rip’s story was soon told, for the whole twenty years hadbeen to him but as one night. The neighbors stared when theyheard it; some were seen to wink at each other and put theirtongues in their cheeks; and the self-important man in thecocked hat,who, when the alarm was over, had returned to thefield, screwed down the corners of his mouth and shook hishead—upon which there was a general shaking of the headthroughout the assemblage.It was determined, however, to take the opinion of old PeterVanderdonk, who was seen slowly advancing up the road. Hewas a descendant of the historian of that name, who wrote ofthe earliest accounts of the province. Peter was the most ancientinhabitant of the village and well versed in all the wonderfulevents and traditions of the neighborhood. He recollected Ripat once and corroborated his story in the most satisfactorymanner. He assured the company that it was a fact, handeddown from his ancestor the historian, that the Kaatskill Mountainshad always been haunted by strange beings. That it wasaffirmed that the great Hendrick Hudson, the first discovererof the river and country, kept a kind of vigil there every twentyyears with his crew of the Half Moon; being permitted in thisway to revisit the scenes of his enterprise and keep a guardianeye upon the river and the great city called by his name. Thathis father had once seen them in their old Dutch dressesplaying at ninepins in a hollow of the mountain; and that hehimself had heard, one summer afternoon, the sound of theirballs, like distant peals of thunder.To make a long story short, the company broke up and returnedto the more important concerns of the election. Rip’s daughtertook him home to live with her; she had a snug, well-furnishedhouse, and a stout, cheery farmer for a husband, whom Riprecollected for one of the urchins that used to climb upon hisback. As to Rip’s son and heir, who was the ditto of himself,seen leaning against the tree, he was employed to work onthe farm, but evinced an hereditary disposition to attend toanything else but his business.Rip now resumed his old walks and habits; he soon foundmany of his former cronies, though all rather the worse forwear and tear of time, and preferred making friends amongthe rising generation, with whom he soon grew into greatfavor. Having nothing to do at home, and being arrived atthat happy age when a man can be idle with impunity, hetook his place once more on the bench at the inn door andwas reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village and achronicler of the old times “before the war.” It was some timebefore he could get into the regular track of gossip or could bemade to comprehend the strange events that had taken placeduring his torpor. How that there had been a revolutionarywar, that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England,and that, instead of being a subject of His Majesty Georgethe Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip,in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empiresmade but little impression on him, but there was one speciesof despotism under which he had long groaned, and that waspetticoat government. Happily that was at an end; he had gothis neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and outwhenever he pleased without dreading the tyranny of DameVan Winkle. Whenever her name was mentioned, however, he39

shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and cast up his eyes;which might pass either for an expression of resignation to hisfate, or joy at his deliverance.He used to tell his story to every stranger that arrived at Mr.Doolittle’s hotel. He was observed, at first, to vary on somepoints every time he told it, which was doubtless owing to hishaving so recently awaked. It at last settled down precisely tothe tale I have related, and not a man, woman, or child in theneighborhood but knew it by heart. Some always pretendedto doubt the reality of it, and insisted that Rip had been outof his head, and that this was one point on which he alwaysremained flighty. The old Dutch inhabitants, however, almostuniversally gave it full credit. Even to this day they never heara thunderstorm of a summer afternoon about the Kaatskill, butthey say Hendrick Hudson and his crew are at their game ofninepins; and it is a common wish of all henpecked husbands inthe neighborhood, when life hangs heavy on their hands, thatthey might have a quieting draught out of Rip Van Winkle’sflagon.NoteThe foregoing Tale, one would suspect, had been suggested to Mr.Knickerbocker by a little German superstition about the EmperorFrederick der Rothbart, and the Kypphauser mountain: thesubjoined note, however, which he had appended to the tale, showsthat it is an absolute fact, narrated with his usual fidelity.‘The story of Rip Van Winkle may seem incredible to many, butnevertheless I give it my full belief, for I know the vicinity of our oldDutch settlements to have been very subject to marvellous eventsand appearances. Indeed, I have heard many stranger stories thanthis, in the villages along the Hudson, all of which were too wellauthenticated to admit of a doubt. I have even talked with Rip VanWinkle myself who, when last I saw him, was a very venerableold man, and so perfectly rational and consistent on every otherpoint, that I think no conscientious person could refuse to take thisinto the bargain; nay, I have seen a certificate on the subject takenbefore a country justice and signed with a cross, in the justice’s ownhandwriting. The story, therefore, is beyond the possibility of doubt.“D. K.”ruled by an old squaw spirit, said to be their mother. She dwelt onthe highest peak of the Catskills, and had charge of the doors of dayand night to open and shut them at the proper hour. She hung up thenew moons in the skies, and cut up the old ones into stars. In times ofdrought, if properly propitiated, she would spin light summer cloudsout of cobwebs and morning dew, and send them off from the crestof the mountain, flake by flake, like flakes of carded cotton, to floatin the air; until, dissolved by the heat of the sun, they would fall ingentle showers, causing the grass to spring, the fruits to ripen, andthe corn to grow an inch an hour. If displeased, however, she wouldbrew up clouds black as ink, sitting in the midst of them like a bottlebelliedspider in the midst of its web; and when these clouds broke,woe betide the valleys!In old times, say the Indian traditions, there was a kind of Manitouor Spirit, who kept about the wildest recesses of the CatskillMountains, and took a mischievous pleasure in wreaking all kindsof evils upon the red men. Sometimes he would assume the form of abear, a panther, or a deer, lead the bewildered hunter a weary chasethrough tangled forests and among ragged rocks; and then spring offwith a loud ho! ho! leaving him aghast on the brink of a beetlingprecipice or raging torrent.The favorite abode of this Manitou is still shown. It is a great rock orcliff on the loneliest part of the mountains, and, from the floweringvines which clamber about it, and the wild flowers which aboundin its neighborhood, is known by the name of the Garden Rock. Nearthe foot of it is a small cliff. The Indians held this place in great awe,insomuch that the boldest hunter would not pursue his game withinits precincts. Once upon a time, however, a hunter who had lost hisway, penetrated to the Garden Rock, where he beheld a number ofgourds placed in the crotches of trees. One of these he seized and madeoff with it, but in the hurry of his retreat he let it fall among therocks, when a great stream gushed forth, which washed him awayand swept him down precipices, where he was dashed to pieces, andthe stream made its way to the Hudson, and continues to flow to thepresent day; being the identical stream known by the name of theKaaters Kill.Rip Van WinklePostscriptThe following are travelling notes from a memorandum-book of Mr.Knickerbocker.The Kaatsberg, or Catskill Mountains, have always been a regionfull of fable. The Indians considered them the abode of spirits, whoinfluenced the weather, spreading sunshine or clouds over thelandscape, and sending good or bad hunting-seasons. They were40 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Washington Irving:The Legend of Sleepy HollowIn the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indentthe eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion ofthe river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators theTappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail,and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed,there lies a small market-town or rural port, which by some iscalled Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properlyknown by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, weare told, in former days, by the good housewives of the adjacentcountry, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands tolinger about the village tavern on market days. Be that as itmay, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it, for thesake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village,perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley, or rather lapof land, among high hills, which is one of the quietest placesin the whole world. A small brook glides through it, withjust murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasionalwhistle of a quail, or tapping of a woodpecker, is almost theonly sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrelshootingwas in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades oneside of the valley. I had wandered into it at noon time, whenall nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar ofmy own gun, as it broke the Sabbath stillness around, andwas prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever Ishould wish for a retreat, whither I might steal from the worldand its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of atroubled life, I know of none more promising than this littlevalley.From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiarcharacter of its inhabitants, who are descendants from theoriginal Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long beenknown by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rusticlads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all theneighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hangover the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some saythat the place was bewitched by a high German doctor, duringthe early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indianchief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwowsthere before the country was discovered by Master HendrickHudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the swayof some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds ofthe good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie.They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs; are subject totrances and visions; and frequently see strange sights, and hearmusic and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood aboundswith local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; starsshoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in anyother part of the country, and the nightmare, with her wholenine fold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchantedregion, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powersof the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback without ahead. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper,whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in somenameless battle during the revolutionary war; and who is everand anon seen by the country folk, hurrying along in thegloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts arenot confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacentroads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no greatdistance. Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians ofthose parts, who have been careful in collecting and collatingthe floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the bodyof the trooper, having been buried in the church-yard, theghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of hishead; and that the rushing speed with which he sometimespasses along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to hisbeing belated, and in a hurry to get back to the church-yardbefore daybreak.Such is the general purport of this legendary superstition,which has furnished materials for many a wild story in thatregion of shadows; and the spectre is known, at all the countryfiresides, by the name of the Headless Horseman of SleepyHollow.It is remarkable that the visionary propensity I havementioned is not confined to the native inhabitants of thevalley, but is unconsciously imbibed by every one who residesthere for a time. However wide awake they may have beenbefore they entered that sleepy region, they are sure, in a littletime, to inhale the witching influence of the air, and begin togrow imaginative- to dream dreams, and see apparitions.I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud; for itis in such little retired Dutch valleys, found here and thereembosomed in the great State of New York, that population,manners, and customs, remain fixed; while the great torrent ofmigration and improvement, which is making such incessantchanges in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by themunobserved. They are like those little nooks of still waterwhich border a rapid stream; where we may see the straw andbubble riding quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in theirmimic harbor, undisturbed by the rush of the passing current.Though many years have elapsed since I trod the drowsy shadesof Sleepy Hollow, yet I question whether I should not still findthe same trees and the same families vegetating in its shelteredbosom.In this by-place of nature, there abode, in a remote periodof American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a41

worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane; who sojourned, or,as he expressed it, “tarried,” in Sleepy Hollow, for the purposeof instructing the children of the vicinity. He was a native ofConnecticut; a State which supplies the Union with pioneersfor the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearlyits legions of frontier woodsmen and country schoolmasters.The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. Hewas tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, longarms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves,feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole framemost loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top,with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose,so that it looked like a weather-cock, perched upon his spindleneck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him stridingalong the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothesbagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistakenhim for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, orsome scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.His school-house was a low building of one large room,rudely constructed of logs; the windows partly glazed, andpartly patched with leaves of old copy-books. It was mostingeniously secured at vacant hours, by a withe twisted in thehandle of the door, and stakes set against the window shutters;so that, though a thief might get in with perfect ease, he wouldfind some embarrassment in getting out; an idea most probablyborrowed by the architect, Yost Van Houten, from the mysteryof an eel-pot. The school-house stood in a rather lonely butpleasant situation, just at the foot of a woody hill, with abrook running close by, and a formidable birch tree growingat one end of it. From hence the low murmur of his pupils’voices, conning over their lessons, might be heard of a drowsysummer’s day, like the hum of a beehive; interrupted now andthen by the authoritative voice of the master, in the tone ofmenace or command; or, peradventure, by the appalling soundof the birch, as he urged some tardy loiterer along the flowerypath of knowledge. Truth to say, he was a conscientious man,and ever bore in mind the golden maxim, “Spare the rod andspoil the child.”- Ichabod Crane’s scholars certainly were notspoiled.I would not have it imagined, however, that he was oneof those cruel potentates of the school, who joy in the smartof their subjects; on the contrary, he administered justice withdiscrimination rather than severity; taking the burden off thebacks of the weak, and laying it on those of the strong. Yourmere puny stripling, that winced at the least flourish of the rod,was passed by with indulgence; but the claims of justice weresatisfied by inflicting a double portion on some little, tough,wrong-headed, broad-skirted Dutch urchin, who sulked andswelled and grew dogged and sullen beneath the birch. Allthis he called “doing his duty by their parents;” and he neverinflicted a chastisement without following it by the assurance,so consolatory to the smarting urchin, that “he would rememberit, and thank him for it the longest day he had to live.”When school hours were over, he was even the companionand playmate of the larger boys; and on holiday afternoonswould convoy some of the smaller ones home, who happenedto have pretty sisters, or good housewives for mothers, notedfor the comforts of the cupboard. Indeed it behooved him tokeep on good terms with his pupils. The revenue arising fromhis school was small, and would have been scarcely sufficientto furnish him with daily bread, for he was a huge feeder, andthough lank, had the dilating powers of an anaconda; but tohelp out his maintenance, he was, according to country customin those parts, boarded and lodged at the houses of the farmers,whose children he instructed. With these he lived successivelya week at a time; thus going the rounds of the neighborhood,with all his worldly effects tied up in a cotton handkerchief.That all this might not be too onerous on the purses of hisrustic patrons, who are apt to consider the costs of schoolinga grievous burden, and schoolmasters as mere drones, he hadvarious ways of rendering himself both useful and agreeable.He assisted the farmers occasionally in the lighter labors oftheir farms; helped to make hay; mended the fences; took thehorses to water; drove the cows from pasture; and cut wood forthe winter fire. He laid aside, too, all the dominant dignity andabsolute sway with which he lorded it in his little empire, theschool, and became wonderfully gentle and ingratiating. Hefound favor in the eyes of the mothers, by petting the children,particularly the youngest; and like the lion bold, which whilomso magnanimously the lamb did hold, he would sit with a childon one knee, and rock a cradle with his foot for whole hourstogether.In addition to his other vocations, he was the singingmasterof the neighborhood, and picked up many brightshillings by instructing the young folks in psalmody. It was amatter of no little vanity to him, on Sundays, to take his stationin front of the church gallery, with a band of chosen singers;where, in his own mind, he completely carried away the palmfrom the parson. Certain it is, his voice resounded far above allthe rest of the congregation; and there are peculiar quavers stillto be heard in that church, and which may even be heard halfa mile off, quite to the opposite side of the mill-pond, on a stillSunday morning, which are said to be legitimately descendedfrom the nose of Ichabod Crane. Thus, by diverslittle make-shifts in that ingenious way which is commonlydenominated “by hook and by crook,” the worthy pedagogue goton tolerably enough, and was thought, by all who understoodnothing of the labor of headwork, to have a wonderfully easylife of it.The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importancein the female circle of a rural neighborhood; being considered42 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

a kind of idle gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superiortaste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and,indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson. His appearance,therefore, is apt to occasion some little stir at the tea-tableof a farmhouse, and the addition of a supernumerary dish ofcakes or sweetmeats, or, peradventure, the parade of a silvertea-pot. Our man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happyin the smiles of all the country damsels. How he would figureamong them in the church-yard, between services on Sundays!gathering grapes for them from the wild vines that overrunthe surrounding trees; reciting for their amusement all theepitaphs on the tombstones; or sauntering, with a whole bevyof them, along the banks of the adjacent mill-pond; while themore bashful country bumpkins hung sheepishly back, envyinghis superior elegance and address.From his half itinerant life, also, he was a kind of travellinggazette, carrying the whole budget of local gossip from houseto house; so that his appearance was always greeted withsatisfaction. He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as aman of great erudition, for he had read several books quitethrough, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s historyof New England Witchcraft, in which, by the way, he mostfirmly and potently believed.He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness andsimple credulity. His appetite for the marvellous, and hispowers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and bothhad been increased by his residence in this spellbound region.No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow.It was often his delight, after his school was dismissed in theafternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover, borderingthe little brook that whimpered by his school-house, and therecon over old Mather’s direful tales, until the gathering duskof the evening made the printed page a mere mist before hiseyes. Then, as he wended his way, by swamp and stream andawful woodland, to the farmhouse where he happened tobe quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour,fluttered his excited imagination: the moan of the whip-poorwillfrom the hillside; the boding cry of the tree-toad, thatharbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screech-owl, orthe sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened fromtheir roost. The fire-flies, too, which sparkled most vividlyin the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one ofuncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if,by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging hisblundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to giveup the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch’stoken. His only resource on such occasions, either to drownthought, or drive away evil spirits, was to sing psalm tunes andthe good people of Sleepy Hollow, as they sat by their doorsof an evening, were often filled with awe, at hearing his nasalmelody, “in linked sweetness long drawn out,” floating fromthe distant hill, or along the dusky road.Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was, to pass longwinter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinningby the fire, with a row of apples roasting and spluttering alongthe hearth, and listen to their marvellous tales of ghostsand goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted brooks, andhaunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particularly of theheadless horseman, or galloping Hessian of the Hollow, asthey sometimes called him. He would delight them equallyby his anecdotes of witchcraft, and of the direful omens andportentous sights and sounds in the air, which prevailed inthe earlier times of Connecticut; and would frighten themwoefully with speculations upon comets and shooting stars;and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turnround, and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!But if there was a pleasure in all this, while snugly cuddlingin the chimney corner of a chamber that was all of a ruddyglow from the crackling wood fire, and where, of course, nospectre dared to show his face, it was dearly purchased by theterrors of his subsequent walk homewards. What fearful shapesand shadows beset his path amidst the dim and ghastly glareof a snowy night!- With what wistful look did he eye everytrembling ray of light streaming across the waste fields fromsome distant window!- How often was he appalled by someshrub covered with snow, which, like a sheeted spectre, besethis very path!- How often did he shrink with curdling awe atthe sound of his own steps on the frosty crust beneath his feet;and dread to look over his shoulder, lest he should behold someuncouth being tramping close behind him!- and how oftenwas he thrown into complete dismay by some rushing blast,howling among the trees, in the idea that it was the GallopingHessian on one of his nightly scourings!All these, however, were mere terrors of the night,phantoms of the mind that walk in darkness; and though hehad seen many spectres in his time, and been more than oncebeset by Satan in divers shapes, in his lonely perambulations,yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he would havepassed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the devil and all hisworks, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causesmore perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and thewhole race of witches put together, and that was--a woman.Among the musical disciples who assembled, one eveningin each week, to receive his instructions in psalmody, wasKatrina Van Tassel, the daughter and only child of a substantialDutch farmer. She was a blooming lass of fresh eighteen;plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and rosy cheeked asone of her father’s peaches, and universally famed, not merelyfor her beauty, but her vast expectations. She was withal a littleof a coquette, as might be perceived even in her dress, whichwas a mixture of ancient and modern fashions, as most suitedto set off her charms. She wore the ornaments of pure yellow43

gold, which her great-great-grandmother had brought overfrom Saardam; the tempting stomacher of the olden time; andwithal a provokingly short petticoat, to display the prettiestfoot and ankle in the country round.Ichabod Crane had a soft and foolish heart towards the sex;and it is not to be wondered at, that so tempting a morsel soonfound favor in his eyes; more especially after he had visited herin her paternal mansion. Old Baltus Van Tassel was a perfectpicture of a thriving, contented, liberal-hearted farmer. Heseldom, it is true, sent either his eyes or his thoughts beyondthe boundaries of his own farm; but within those every thingwas snug, happy, and well-conditioned. He was satisfied withhis wealth, but not proud of it; and piqued himself upon thehearty abundance, rather than the style in which he lived. Hisstronghold was situated on the banks of the Hudson, in oneof those green, sheltered, fertile nooks in which the Dutchfarmers are so fond of nestling. A great elm-tree spread itsbroad branches over it; at the foot of which bubbled up a springof the softest and sweetest water, in a little well, formed ofa barrel; and then stole sparkling away through the grass, toa neighboring brook, that bubbled along among alders anddwarf willows. Hard by the farm-house was a vast barn, thatmight have served for a church; every window and crevice ofwhich seemed bursting forth with the treasures of the farm;the flail was busily resounding within it from morning tonight; swallows and martins skimmed twittering about theeaves; and rows of pigeons, some with one eye turned up, as ifwatching the weather, some with their heads under their wings,or buried in their bosoms, and others swelling, and cooing, andbowing about their dames, were enjoying the sunshine on theroof. Sleek unwieldy porkers were grunting in the repose andabundance of their pens; whence sallied forth, now and then,troops of sucking pigs, as if to snuff the air. A stately squadronof snowy geese were riding in an adjoining pond, convoyingwhole fleets of ducks; regiments of turkeys were gobblingthrough the farm-yard, and guinea fowls fretting about it, likeill-tempered housewives, with their peevish discontented cry.Before the barn door strutted the gallant cock, that patternof a husband, a warrior, and a fine gentleman, clapping hisburnished wings, and crowing in the pride and gladness ofhis heart- sometimes tearing up the earth with his feet, andthen generously calling his ever-hungry family of wives andchildren to enjoy the rich morsel which he had discovered.The pedagogue’s mouth watered, as he looked upon thissumptuous promise of luxurious winter fare. In his devouringmind’s eye, he pictured to himself every roasting-pig runningabout with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth;the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, andtucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming intheir own gravy; and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes, likesnug married couples, with a decent competency of onion sauce.In the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon,and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey but he beheld daintilytrussed up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure,a necklace of savory sausages; and even bright chanticleerhimself lay sprawling on his back, in a side-dish, with upliftedclaws, as if craving that quarter which his chivalrous spiritdisdained to ask while living.As the enraptured Ichabod fancied all this, and as he rolledhis great green eyes over the fat meadow-lands, the richfields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, andthe orchards burdened with ruddy fruit, which surroundedthe warm tenement of Van Tassel, his heart yearned after thedamsel who was to inherit these domains, and his imaginationexpanded with the idea, how they might be readily turnedinto cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wildland, and shingle palaces in the wilderness. Nay, his busy fancyalready realized his hopes, and presented to him the bloomingKatrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the topof a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots andkettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding apacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky,Tennessee, or the Lord knows where.When he entered the house the conquest of his heart wascomplete. It was one of those spacious farmhouses, with highridged,but lowly-sloping roofs, built in the style handeddown from the first Dutch settlers; the low projecting eavesforming a piazza along the front, capable of being closed upin bad weather. Under this were hung flails, harness, variousutensils of husbandry, and nets for fishing in the neighboringriver. Benches were built along the sides for summer use; anda great spinning-wheel at one end, and a churn at the other,showed the various uses to which this important porch mightbe devoted. From this piazza the wondering Ichabod enteredthe hall, which formed the centre of the mansion and the placeof usual residence. Here, rows of resplendent pewter, rangedon a long dresser, dazzled his eyes. In one cornerstood a huge bag of wool ready to be spun; in another a quantityof linsey-woolsey just from the loom; ears of Indian corn, andstrings of dried apples and peaches, hung in gay festoons alongthe walls, mingled with the gaud of red peppers; and a doorleft ajar gave him a peep into the best parlor, where the clawfootedchairs, and dark mahogany tables, shone like mirrors;andirons, with their accompanying shovel and tongs, glistenedfrom their covert of asparagus tops; mock-oranges and conchshellsdecorated the mantel-piece; strings of various coloredbirds’ eggs were suspended above it: a great ostrich egg washung from the centre of the room, and a corner cupboard,knowingly left open, displayed immense treasures of old silverand well-mended china.From the moment Ichabod laid his eyes upon these regions ofdelight, the peace of his mind was at an end, and his only studywas how to gain the affections of the peerless daughter of Van44 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Tassel. In this enterprise, however, he had more real difficultiesthan generally fell to the lot of a knight-errant of yore, whoseldom had any thing but giants, enchanters, fiery dragons,and such like easily-conquered adversaries, to contend with;and had to make his way merely through gates of iron andbrass, and walls of adamant, to the castle keep, where the ladyof his heart was confined; all which he achieved as easily as aman would carve his way to the centre of a Christmas pie; andthen the lady gave him her hand as a matter of course. Ichabod,on the contrary, had to win his way to the heart of a countrycoquette, beset with a labyrinth of whims and caprices, whichwere for ever presenting new difficulties and impediments;and he had to encounter a host of fearful adversaries of realflesh and blood, the numerous rustic admirers, who beset everyportal to her heart; keeping a watchful and angry eye uponeach other, but ready to fly out in the common cause againstany new competitor.Among these the most formidable was a burly, roaring,roystering blade, of the name of Abraham, or, according to theDutch abbreviation, Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the countryround, which rang with his feats of strength and hardihood.He was broad-shouldered and double-jointed, with short curlyblack hair, and a bluff, but not unpleasant countenance, havinga mingled air of fun and arrogance. From his Herculean frameand great powers of limb, he had received the nickname ofBROM BONES, by which he was universally known. He wasfamed for great knowledge and skill in horsemanship, beingas dexterous on horseback as a Tartar. He was foremost at allraces and cock-fights; and, with the ascendancy which bodilystrength acquires in rustic life, was the umpire in all disputes,setting his hat on one side, and giving his decisions with anair and tone admitting of no gainsay or appeal. He was alwaysready for either a fight or a frolic; but had more mischiefthan ill-will in his composition; and, with all his overbearingroughness, there was a strong dash of waggish good humor atbottom. He had three or four boon companions, who regardedhim as their model, and at the head of whom he scouredthe country, attending every scene of feud or merriment formiles round. In cold weather he was distinguished by a furcap, surmounted with a flaunting fox’s tail; and when the folksat a country gathering descried this well-known crest at adistance, whisking about among a squad of hard riders, theyalways stood by for a squall. Sometimes his crew would beheard dashing along past the farmhouses at midnight, withwhoop and halloo, like a troop of Don Cossacks; and the olddames, startled out of their sleep, would listen for a momenttill the hurry-scurry had clattered by, and then exclaim, “Ay,there goes Brom Bones and his gang!” The neighbors lookedupon him with a mixture of awe, admiration, and good will;and when any madcap prank, or rustic brawl, occurred in thevicinity, always shook their heads, and warranted Brom Boneswas at the bottom of it.This rantipole hero had for some time singled out theblooming Katrina for the object of his uncouth gallantries, andthough his amorous toyings were something like the gentlecaresses and endearments of a bear, yet it was whispered thatshe did not altogether discourage his hopes. Certain it is, hisadvances were signals for rival candidates to retire, who feltno inclination to cross a lion in his amours; insomuch, thatwhen his horse was seen tied to Van Tassel’s paling, on aSunday night, a sure sign that his master was courting, or, asit is termed, “sparking,” within, all other suitors passed by indespair, and carried the war into other quarters.Such was the formidable rival with whom Ichabod Cranehad to contend, and, considering all things, a stouter man thanhe would have shrunk from the competition, and a wiser manwould have despaired. He had, however, a happy mixture ofpliability and perseverance in his nature; he was in form andspirit like a supple-jack- yielding, but tough; though he bent,he never broke; and though he bowed beneath the slightestpressure, yet, the moment it was away- jerk! he was as erect,and carried his head as high as ever.To have taken the field openly against his rival would havebeen madness; for he was not a man to be thwarted in hisamours, any more than that stormy lover, Achilles. Ichabod,therefore, made his advances in a quiet and gently-insinuatingmanner. Under cover of his character of singing-master, hemade frequent visits at the farmhouse; not that he had anything to apprehend from the meddlesome interference ofparents, which is so often a stumbling-block in the path oflovers. Balt Van Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved hisdaughter better even than his pipe, and, like a reasonable manand an excellent father, let her have her way in everything. Hisnotable little wife, too, had enough to do to attend to herhousekeeping and manage her poultry; for, as she sagelyobserved, ducks and geese are foolish things, and must belooked after, but girls can take care of themselves. Thus whilethe busy dame bustled about the house, or plied her spinningwheelat one end of the piazza, honest Balt would sit smokinghis evening pipe at the other, watching the achievements of alittle wooden warrior, who, armed with a sword in each hand,was most valiantly fighting the wind on the pinnacle of thebarn. In the meantime, Ichabod would carry on his suit withthe daughter by the side of the spring under the great elm, orsauntering along in the twilight, that hour so favorable to thelover’s eloquence.I profess not to know how women’s hearts are wooed and won.To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration.Some seem to have but one vulnerable point, or door of access;while others have a thousand avenues, and may be captured ina thousand different ways. It is a great triumph of skill to gainthe former, but a still greater proof of generalship to maintainpossession of the latter, for the man must battle for his fortress45

at every door and window. He who wins a thousand commonhearts is therefore entitled to some renown; but he who keepsundisputed sway over the heart of a coquette, is indeed a hero.Certain it is, this was not the case with the redoubtable BromBones; and from the moment Ichabod Crane made his advances,the interests of the former evidently declined; his horse was nolonger seen tied at the palings on Sunday nights, and a deadlyfeud gradually arose between him and the preceptor of SleepyHollow.Brom, who had a degree of rough chivalry in his nature,would fain have carried matters to open warfare, and havesettled their pretensions to the lady, according to the mode ofthose most concise and simple reasoners, the knights-errantof yore- by single combat; but Ichabod was too conscious ofthe superior might of his adversary to enter the lists againsthim: he had overheard a boast of Bones, that he would “doublethe schoolmaster up, and lay him on a shelf of his own schoolhouse;”and he was too wary to give him an opportunity. Therewas something extremely provoking in this obstinately pacificsystem; it left Brom no alternative but to draw upon the fundsof rustic waggery in his disposition, and to play off boorishpractical jokes upon his rival. Ichabod became the object ofwhimsical persecution to Bones, and his gang of rough riders.They harried his hitherto peaceful domains; smoked out hissinging school, by stopping up the chimney; broke into theschool-house at night, in spite of its formidable fastenings ofwithe and window stakes, and turned every thing topsy-turvy:so that the poor schoolmaster began to think all the witches inthe country held their meetings there. But what was still moreannoying, Brom took all opportunities of turning him intoridicule in presence of his mistress, and had a scoundrel dogwhom he taught to whine in the most ludicrous manner, andintroduced as a rival of Ichabod’s to instruct her in psalmody.In this way matters went on for some time, withoutproducing any material effect on the relative situation of thecontending powers. On a fine autumnal afternoon, Ichabod,in pensive mood, sat enthroned on the lofty stool whence heusually watched all the concerns of his little literary realm. Inhis hand he swayed a ferrule, that sceptre of despotic power;the birch of justice reposed on three nails, behind the throne,a constant terror to evil doers; while on the desk before himmight be seen sundry contraband articles and prohibitedweapons, detected upon the persons of idle urchins; such ashalf-munched apples, popguns, whirligigs, fly-cages, andwhole legions of rampant little paper gamecocks. Apparentlythere had been some appalling act of justice recently inflicted,for his scholars were all busily intent upon their books, or slylywhispering behind them with one eye kept upon the master;and a kind of buzzing stillness reigned throughout the schoolroom.It was suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a negro,in tow-cloth jacket and trowsers, a round-crowned fragment ofa hat, like the cap of Mercury, and mounted on the back of aragged, wild, half-broken colt, which he managed with a ropeby way of halter. He came clattering up to the school door withan invitation to Ichabod to attend a merry-making or “quiltingfrolic,” to be held that evening at Mynheer Van Tassel’s; andhaving delivered his message with that air of importance, andeffort at fine language, which a negro is apt to display on pettyembassies of the kind, he dashed over the brook, and was seenscampering away up the hollow, full of the importance andhurry of his mission.All was now bustle and hubbub in the late quiet school-room.The scholars were hurried through their lessons, withoutstopping at trifles; those who were nimble skipped overhalf with impunity, and those who were tardy, had a smartapplication now and then in the rear, to quicken their speed,or help them over a tall word. Books were flung aside withoutbeing put away on the shelves, inkstands were overturned,benches thrown down, and the whole school was turned loosean hour before the usual time, bursting forth like a legion ofyoung imps, yelping and racketing about the green, in joy attheir early emancipation.The gallant Ichabod now spent at least an extra half hour at histoilet, brushing and furbishing up his best, and indeed onlysuit of rusty black, and arranging his looks by a bit of brokenlooking-glass, that hung up in the school-house. That he mightmake his appearance before his mistress in the true style of acavalier, he borrowed a horse from the farmer with whom hewas domiciliated, a choleric old Dutchman, of the name ofHans Van Ripper, and, thus gallantly mounted, issued forth,like a knight-errant in quest of adventures. But it is meet Ishould, in the true spirit of romantic story, givesome account of the looks and equipments of my hero andhis steed. The animal he bestrode was a broken-down ploughhorse,that had outlived almost every thing but his viciousness.He was gaunt and shagged, with a ewe neck and a head likea hammer; his rusty mane and tail were tangled and knottedwith burrs; one eye had lost its pupil, and was glaring andspectral; but the other had the gleam of a genuine devil init. Still he must have had fire and mettle in his day, if we mayjudge from the name he bore of Gunpowder. He had, in fact,been a favorite steed of his master’s, the choleric Van Ripper,who was a furious rider, and had infused, very probably, someof his own spirit into the animal; for, old and broken-down ashe looked, there was more of the lurking devil in him than inany young filly in the country.Ichabod was a suitable figure for such a steed. He rode withshort stirrups, which brought his knees nearly up to the pommelof the saddle; his sharp elbows stuck out like grasshoppers’; hecarried his whip perpendicularly in his hand, like a sceptre,and, as his horse jogged on, the motion of his arms was notunlike the flapping of a pair of wings. A small wool hat rested46 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

on the top of his nose, for so his scanty strip of forehead mightbe called; and the skirts of his black coat fluttered out almostto the horse’s tail. Such was the appearance of Ichabod and hissteed, as they shambled out of the gate of Hans Van Ripper,and it was altogether such an apparition as is seldom to be metwith in broad daylight.It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day, the sky was clearand serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery whichwe always associate with the idea of abundance. The forests hadput on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of thetenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyesof orange, purple, and scarlet. Streaming files of wild ducksbegan to make their appearance high in the air; the bark of thesquirrel might be heard from the groves of beech and hickorynuts, and the pensive whistle of the quail at intervals from theneighboring stubble-field.The small birds were taking their farewell banquets. In thefullness of their revelry, they fluttered, chirping and frolicking,from bush to bush, and tree to tree, capricious from the veryprofusion and variety around them. There was the honest cockrobin,the favorite game of stripling sportsmen, with its loudquerulous note; and the twittering blackbirds flying in sableclouds; and the golden-winged woodpecker, with his crimsoncrest, his broad black gorget, and splendid plumage; and the cedarbird, with its red-tipt wings and yellow-tipt tail, and its littlemonteiro cap of feathers; and the blue jay, that noisy coxcomb,in his gay light-blue coat and white underclothes; screaming andchattering, nodding and bobbing and bowing, and pretendingto be on good terms with every songster of the grove.As Ichabod jogged slowly on his way, his eye, ever open toevery symptom of culinary abundance, ranged with delightover the treasures of jolly autumn. On all sides he beheld vaststores of apples; some hanging in oppressive opulence on thetrees; some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market;others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press. Farther on hebeheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peepingfrom their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakesand hasty pudding; and the yellow pumpkins lying beneaththem, turning up their fair round bellies to the sun, and givingample prospects of the most luxurious of pies; and anon hepassed the fragrant buckwheat fields, breathing the odor of thebee-hive, and as he beheld them, soft anticipations stole overhis mind of dainty slapjacks, well buttered, and garnished withhoney or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of KatrinaVan Tassel.Thus feeding his mind with many sweet thoughts and “sugaredsuppositions,” he journeyed along the sides of a range of hillswhich look out upon some of the goodliest scenes of the mightyHudson. The sun gradually wheeled his broad disk down intothe west. The wide bosom of the Tappan Zee lay motionlessand glassy, excepting that here and there a gentle undulationwaved and prolonged the blue shadow of the distant mountain.A few amber clouds floated in the sky, without a breath of airto move them. The horizon was of a fine golden tint, changinggradually into a pure apple green, and from that into the deepblue of the mid-heaven. A slanting ray lingered on the woodycrests of the precipices that overhung some parts of the river,giving greater depth to the dark-gray and purple of their rockysides. A sloop was loitering in the distance, dropping slowlydown with the tide, her sail hanging uselessly against the mast;and as the reflection of the sky gleamed along the still water, itseemed as if the vessel was suspended in the air.It was toward evening that Ichabod arrived at the castleof the Herr Van Tassel, which he found thronged with thepride and flower of the adjacent country. Old farmers, a spareleathern-faced race, in homespun coats and breeches, bluestockings, huge shoes, and magnificent pewter buckles. Theirbrisk withered little dames, in close crimped caps, longwaistedshortgowns, homespun petticoats, with scissors andpincushions, and gay calico pockets hanging on the outside.Buxom lasses, almost as antiquated as their mothers, exceptingwhere a straw hat, a fine ribbon, or perhaps a white frock, gavesymptoms of city innovation. The sons, in short square-skirtedcoats with rows of stupendous brass buttons, and their hairgenerally queued in the fashion of the times, especially if theycould procure an eel-skin for the purpose, it being esteemed,throughout the country, as a potent nourisher and strengthenerof the hair.Brom Bones, however, was the hero of the scene, having cometo the gathering on his favorite steed Daredevil, a creature,like himself, full of mettle and mischief, and which no one buthimself could manage. He was, in fact, noted for preferringvicious animals, given to all kinds of tricks, which kept therider in constant risk of his neck, for he held a tractable wellbrokenhorse as unworthy of a lad of spirit.Fain would I pause to dwell upon the world of charms thatburst upon the enraptured gaze of my hero, as he entered thestate parlor of Van Tassel’s mansion. Not those of the bevy ofbuxom lasses, with their luxurious display of red and white;but the ample charms of a genuine Dutch country tea-table,in the sumptuous time of autumn. Such heaped-up plattersof cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds, knownonly to experienced Dutch housewives! There was the doughtydoughnut, the tender oly koek, and the crisp and crumblingcruller; sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honeycakes, and the whole family of cakes. And then there wereapple pies and peach pies and pumpkin pies; besides slicesof ham and smoked beef; and moreover delectable dishes ofpreserved plums, and peaches, and pears, and quinces; notto mention broiled shad and roasted chickens; together withbowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy, pretty47

much as I have enumerated them, with the motherly tea-potsending up its clouds of vapor from the midst- Heaven blessthe mark! I want breath and time to discuss this banquet as itdeserves, and am too eager to get on with my story. Happily,Ichabod Crane was not in so great a hurry as his historian, butdid ample justice to every dainty.He was a kind and thankful creature, whose heart dilated inproportion as his skin was filled with good cheer; and whosespirits rose with eating as some men’s do with drink. He couldnot help, too, rolling his large eyes round him as he ate, andchuckling with the possibility that he might one day be lordof all this scene of almost unimaginable luxury and splendor.Then, he thought, how soon he’d turn his back upon the oldschool-house; snap his fingers in the face of Hans Van Ripper,and every other niggardly patron, and kick any itinerantpedagogue out of doors that should dare to call him comrade!Old Baltus Van Tassel moved about among his guests witha face dilated with content and good humor, round and jollyas the harvest moon. His hospitable attentions were brief, butexpressive, being confined to a shake of the hand, a slap on theshoulder, a loud laugh, and a pressing invitation to “fall to, andhelp themselves.”And now the sound of the music from the common room, orhall, summoned to the dance. The musician was an old grayheadednegro, who had been the itinerant orchestra of theneighborhood for more than half a century. His instrumentwas as old and battered as himself. The greater part of thetime he scraped on two or three strings, accompanying everymovement of the bow with a motion of the head; bowingalmost to the ground, and stamping with his foot whenever afresh couple were to start.Ichabod prided himself upon his dancing as much as uponhis vocal powers. Not a limb, not a fibre about him was idle;and to have seen his loosely hung frame in full motion, andclattering about the room, you would have thought Saint Vitushimself, that blessed patron of the dance, was figuring beforeyou in person. He was the admiration of all the negroes; who,having gathered, of all ages and sizes, from the farm and theneighborhood, stood forming a pyramid of shining black facesat every door and window, gazing with delight at the scene,rolling their white eye-balls, and showing grinning rows ofivory from ear to ear. How could the flogger of urchins beotherwise than animated and joyous? the lady of his heart washis partner in the dance, and smiling graciously in reply to allhis amorous oglings; while Brom Bones, sorely smitten withlove and jealousy, sat brooding by himself in one corner.When the dance was at an end, Ichabod was attracted to aknot of the sager folks, who, with old Van Tassel, sat smokingat one end of the piazza, gossiping over former times, anddrawing out long stories about the war.This neighborhood, at the time of which I am speaking, wasone of those highly-favored places which abound with chronicleand great men. The British and American line had run near itduring the war; it had, therefore, been the scene of marauding,and infested with refugees, cow-boys, and all kinds of borderchivalry. Just sufficient time had elapsed to enable each storytellerto dress up his tale with a little becoming fiction, and, inthe indistinctness of his recollection, to make himself the heroof every exploit.There was the story of Doffue Martling, a large blue-beardedDutchman, who had nearly taken a British frigate with an oldiron nine-pounder from a mud breastwork, only that his gunburst at the sixth discharge. And there was an old gentlemanwho shall be nameless, being too rich a mynheer to be lightlymentioned, who, in the battle of White Plains, being anexcellent master of defence, parried a musket ball with a smallsword, insomuch that he absolutely felt it whiz round the blade,and glance off at the hilt: in proof of which, he was ready at anytime to show the sword, with the hilt a little bent. There wereseveral more that had been equally great in the field, not oneof whom but was persuaded that he had a considerable hand inbringing the war to a happy termination.But all these were nothing to the tales of ghosts and apparitionsthat succeeded. The neighborhood is rich in legendary treasuresof the kind. Local tales and superstitions thrive best in thesesheltered long-settled retreats; but are trampled under foot bythe shifting throng that forms the population of most of ourcountry places. Besides, there is no encouragement for ghostsin most of our villages, for they have scarcely had time to finishtheir first nap, and turn themselves in their graves, before theirsurviving friends have travelled away from the neighborhood;so that when they turn out at night to walk their rounds, theyhave no acquaintance left to call upon. This is perhaps thereason why we so seldom hear of ghosts except in our longestablishedDutch communities.The immediate cause, however, of the prevalence ofsupernatural stories in these parts, was doubtless owing tothe vicinity of Sleepy Hollow. There was a contagion in thevery air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forthan atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land.Several of the Sleepy Hollow people were present at VanTassel’s, and, as usual, were doling out their wild and wonderfullegends. Many dismal tales were told about funeral trains, andmourning cries and wailings heard and seen about the greattree where the unfortunate Major Andre was taken, and whichstood in the neighborhood. Some mention was made also ofthe woman in white, that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock,and was often heard to shriek on winter nights before a storm,having perished there in the snow. The chief part of the stories,48 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

however, turned upon the favorite spectre of Sleepy Hollow,the headless horseman, who had been heard several times oflate, patrolling the country; and, it was said, tethered his horsenightly among the graves in the church-yard.The sequestered situation of this church seems always tohave made it a favorite haunt of troubled spirits. It stands on aknoll, surrounded by locust-trees and lofty elms, from amongwhich its decent whitewashed walls shine modestly forth, likeChristian purity beaming through the shades of retirement. Agentle slope descends from it to a silver sheet of water, borderedby high trees, between which, peeps may be caught at theblue hills of the Hudson. To look upon its grass-grown yard,where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would thinkthat there at least the dead might rest in peace. On one sideof the church extends a wide woody dell, along which ravesa large brook among broken rocks and trunks of fallen trees.Over a deep black part of the stream, not far from the church,was formerly thrown a wooden bridge; the road that led toit, and the bridge itself, were thickly shaded by overhangingtrees, which cast a gloom about it, even in the daytime; butoccasioned a fearful darkness at night. This was one of thefavorite haunts of the headless horseman; and the place wherehe was most frequently encountered. The tale was told of oldBrouwer, a most heretical disbeliever in ghosts, how he met thehorseman returning from his foray into Sleepy Hollow, andwas obliged to get up behind him; how they galloped over bushand brake, over hill and swamp, until they reached the bridge;when the horseman suddenly turned into a skeleton, threw oldBrouwer into the brook, and sprang away over the tree-topswith a clap of thunder.This story was immediately matched by a thrice marvellousadventure of Brom Bones, who made light of the gallopingHessian as an arrant jockey. He affirmed that, on returningone night from the neighboring village of Sing Sing, he hadbeen overtaken by this midnight trooper; that he had offeredto race with him for a bowl of punch, and should have won ittoo, for Daredevil beat the goblin horse all hollow, but, justas they came to the church bridge, the Hessian bolted, andvanished in a flash of fire.All these tales, told in that drowsy undertone with whichmen talk in the dark, the countenances of the listeners onlynow and then receiving a casual gleam from the glare of a pipe,sank deep in the mind of Ichabod. He repaid them in kindwith large extracts from his invaluable author, Cotton Mather,and added many marvellous events that had taken place in hisnative State of Connecticut, and fearful sights which he hadseen in his nightly walks about Sleepy Hollow.The revel now gradually broke up. The old farmers gatheredtogether their families in their wagons, and were heardfor some time rattling along the hollow roads, and over thedistant hills. Some of the damsels mounted on pillionsbehind their favorite swains, and their light-hearted laughter,mingling with the clatter of hoofs, echoed along the silentwoodlands, sounding fainter and fainter until they graduallydied away- and the late scene of noise and frolic was all silentand deserted. Ichabod only lingered behind, according to thecustom of country lovers, to have a tete-a-tete with the heiress,fully convinced that he was now on the high road to success.What passed at this interview I will not pretend to say, forin fact I do not know. Something, however, I fear me, musthave gone wrong, for he certainly sallied forth, after no verygreat interval, with an air quite desolate and chapfallen.- Ohthese women! these women! Could that girl have been playingoff any of her coquettish tricks?- Was her encouragement ofthe poor pedagogue all a mere sham to secure her conquestof his rival?- Heaven only knows, not I!- Let it suffice to say,Ichabod stole forth with the air of one who had been sackinga henroost, rather than a fair lady’s heart. Without looking tothe right or left to notice the scene of rural wealth, on whichhe had so often gloated, he went straight to the stable, andwith several hearty cuffs and kicks, roused his steed mostuncourteously from the comfortable quarters in which he wassoundly sleeping, dreaming of mountains of corn and oats, andwhole valleys of timothy and clover.It was the very witching time of night that Ichabod, heavyheartedand crest-fallen, pursued his travel homewards, alongthe sides of the lofty hills which rise above Tarry Town, andwhich he had traversed so cheerily in the afternoon. The hourwas as dismal as himself. Far below him, the Tappan Zee spreadits dusky and indistinct waste of waters, with here and therethe tall mast of a sloop, riding quietly at anchor under the land.In the dead hush of midnight, he could even hear the barkingof the watch dog from the opposite shore of the Hudson; butit was so vague and faint as only to give an idea of his distancefrom this faithful companion of man. Now and then, too, thelong-drawn crowing of a cock, accidentally awakened, wouldsound far, far off, from some farm-house away among the hillsbutit was like a dreaming sound in his ear. No signs of lifeoccurred near him, but occasionally the melancholy chirp ofa cricket, or perhaps the guttural twang of a bullfrog, from aneighboring marsh, as if sleeping uncomfortably, and turningsuddenly in his bed.All the stories of ghosts and goblins that he had heard in theafternoon, now came crowding upon his recollection. The nightgrew darker and darker; the stars seemed to sink deeper in thesky, and driving clouds occasionally hid them from his sight.He had never felt so lonely and dismayed. He was, moreover,approaching the very place where many of the scenes of theghost stories had been laid. In the centre of the road stoodan enormous tulip-tree, which towered like a giant above allthe other trees of the neighborhood, and formed a kind oflandmark. Its limbs were gnarled, and fantastic, large enough49

to form trunks for ordinary trees, twisting down almost to theearth, and rising again into the air. It was connected with thetragical story of the unfortunate Andre, who had been takenprisoner hard by; and was universally known by the name ofMajor Andre’s tree. The common people regarded it with amixture of respect and superstition, partly out of sympathy forthe fate of its ill-starred namesake, and partly from the tales ofstrange sights and doleful lamentations told concerning it.As Ichabod approached this fearful tree, he began to whistle:he thought his whistle was answered- it was but a blastsweeping sharply through the dry branches. As he approacheda little nearer, he thought he saw something white, hanging inthe midst of the tree- he paused and ceased whistling; but onlooking more narrowly, perceived that it was a place where thetree had been scathed by lightning, and the white wood laidbare. Suddenly he heard a groan- his teeth chattered and hisknees smote against the saddle: it was but the rubbing of onehuge bough upon another, as they were swayed about by thebreeze. He passed the tree in safety, but new perils lay beforehim.About two hundred yards from the tree a small brook crossedthe road, and ran into a marshy and thickly-wooded glen,known by the name of Wiley’s swamp. A few rough logs, laidside by side, served for a bridge over this stream. On that sideof the road where the brook entered the wood, a group of oaksand chestnuts, matted thick with wild grape-vines, threw acavernous gloom over it. To pass this bridge was the severesttrial. It was at this identical spot that the unfortunate Andrewas captured, and under the covert of those chestnuts and vineswere the sturdy yeomen concealed who surprised him. This hasever since been considered a haunted stream, and fearful arethe feelings of the schoolboy who has to pass it alone afterdark.As he approached the stream his heart began to thump; hesummoned up, however, all his resolution, gave his horse half ascore of kicks in the ribs, and attempted to dash briskly acrossthe bridge; but instead of starting forward, the perverse oldanimal made a lateral movement, and ran broadside againstthe fence. Ichabod, whose fears increased with the delay, jerkedthe reins on the other side, and kicked lustily with the contraryfoot: it was all in vain; his steed started, it is true, but it wasonly to plunge to the opposite side of the road into a thicketof brambles and alder bushes. The schoolmaster now bestowedboth whip and heel upon the starveling ribs of old Gunpowder,who dashed forward, snuffling and snorting, but came to astand just by the bridge, with a suddenness that had nearlysent his rider sprawling over his head. Just at this moment asplashy tramp by the side of the bridge caught the sensitive earof Ichabod. In the dark shadow of the grove, on the margin ofthe brook, he beheld something huge, misshapen, black andtowering. It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom,like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon the traveller.The hair of the affrighted pedagogue rose upon his head withterror. What was to be done? To turn and fly was now too late;and besides, what chance was there of escaping ghost or goblin,if such it was, which could ride upon the wings of the wind?Summoning up, therefore, a show of courage, he demandedin stammering accents- “Who are you?” He received no reply.He repeated his demand in a still more agitated voice. Stillthere was no answer. Once more he cudgelled the sides of theinflexible Gunpowder, and, shutting his eyes, broke forth withinvoluntary fervor into a psalm tune. Just then the shadowyobject of alarm put itself in motion, and, with a scramble anda bound, stood at once in the middle of the road. Thoughthe night was dark and dismal, yet the form of the unknownmight now in some degree be ascertained. He appeared to be ahorseman of large dimensions, and mounted on a black horse ofpowerful frame. He made no offer of molestation or sociability,but kept aloof on one side of the road, jogging along on theblind side of old Gunpowder, who had now got over his frightand waywardness.Ichabod, who had no relish for this strange midnightcompanion, and bethought himself of the adventure of BromBones with the Galloping Hessian, now quickened his steed, inhopes of leaving him behind. The stranger, however, quickenedhis horse to an equal pace. Ichabod pulled up, and fell into awalk, thinking to lag behind- the other did the same. His heartbegan to sink within him; he endeavored to resume his psalmtune, but his parched tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, andhe could not utter a stave. There was something in the moodyand dogged silence of this pertinacious companion, that wasmysterious and appalling. It was soon fearfully accounted for.On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of hisfellow-traveller in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, andmuffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck, on perceivingthat he was headless!- but his horror was still more increased,on observing that the head, which should have rested on hisshoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of the saddle:his terror rose to desperation; he rained a shower of kicks andblows upon Gunpowder, hoping by a sudden movement, togive his companion the slip- but the spectre started full jumpwith him. Away then they dashed, through thick and thin;stones flying, and sparks flashing at every bound. Ichabod’sflimsy garments fluttered in the air, as he stretched his longlank body away over his horse’s head, in the eagerness of hisflight.They had now reached the road which turns off to SleepyHollow; but Gunpowder, who seemed possessed with a demon,instead of keeping up it, made an opposite turn, and plungedheadlong down hill to the left. This road leads through a sandyhollow, shaded by trees for about a quarter of a mile, where itcrosses the bridge famous in goblin story, and just beyond swells50 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

the green knoll on which stands the whitewashed church.As yet the panic of the steed had given his unskillful rideran apparent advantage in the chase; but just as he had got halfway through the hollow, the girths of the saddle gave way, andhe felt it slipping from under him. He seized it by the pommel,and endeavored to hold it firm, but in vain; and had just time tosave himself by clasping old Gunpowder round the neck, whenthe saddle fell to the earth, and he heard it trampled underfoot by his pursuer. For a moment the terror of Hans VanRipper’s wrath passed across his mind- for it was his Sundaysaddle; but this was no time for petty fears; the goblin washard on his haunches; and (unskillful rider that he was!) he hadmuch ado to maintain his seat; sometimes slipping on one side,sometimes on another, and sometimes jolted on the high ridgeof his horse’s backbone, with a violence that he verily fearedwould cleave him asunder.An opening in the trees now cheered him with the hopesthat the church bridge was at hand. The wavering reflectionof a silver star in the bosom of the brook told him that he wasnot mistaken. He saw the walls of the church dimly glaringunder the trees beyond. He recollected the place where BromBones’s ghostly competitor had disappeared. “If I can but reachthat bridge,” thought Ichabod, “I am safe.” Just then he heardthe black steed panting and blowing close behind him; he evenfancied that he felt his hot breath. Another convulsive kickin the ribs, and old Gunpowder sprang upon the bridge; hethundered over the resounding planks; he gained the oppositeside; and now Ichabod cast a look behind to see if his pursuershould vanish, according to rule, in a flash of fire and brimstone.Just then he saw the goblin rising in his stirrups, and in the veryact of hurling his head at him. Ichabod endeavored to dodgethe horrible missile, but too late. It encountered his craniumwith a tremendous crash- he was tumbled headlong into thedust, and Gunpowder, the black steed, and the goblin rider,passed by like a whirlwind.The next morning the old horse was found without his saddle,and with the bridle under his feet, soberly cropping the grassat his master’s gate. Ichabod did not make his appearanceat breakfast- dinner-hour came, but no Ichabod. The boysassembled at the school-house and strolled idly about thebanks of the brook; but no schoolmaster. Hans Van Ripper nowbegan to feel some uneasiness about the fate of poor Ichabod,and his saddle. An inquiry was set on foot, and after diligentinvestigation they came upon his traces. In one part of the roadleading to the church was found the saddle trampled in thedirt; the tracks of horses’ hoofs deeply dented in the road, andevidently at furious speed, were traced to the bridge, beyondwhich, on the bank of a broad part of the brook, where thewater ran deep and black, was found the hat of the unfortunateIchabod, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin.The brook was searched, but the body of the schoolmasterwas not to be discovered. Hans Van Ripper, as executor of hisestate, examined the bundle which contained all his worldlyeffects. They consisted of two shirts and a half; two stocks forthe neck; a pair or two of worsted stockings; an old pair ofcorduroy small-clothes; a rusty razor; a book of psalm tunes,full of dogs’ ears; and a broken pitchpipe. As to the books andfurniture of the school-house, they belonged to the community,excepting Cotton Mather’s History of Witchcraft, a NewEngland Almanac, and a book of dreams and fortune-telling;in which last was a sheet of foolscap much scribbled and blottedin several fruitless attempts to make a copy of verses in honorof the heiress of Van Tassel. These magic books and the poeticscrawl were forthwith consigned to the flames by Hans VanRipper; who from that time forward determined to send hischildren no more to school; observing, that he never knew anygood come of this same reading and writing. Whatever moneythe schoolmaster possessed, and he had received his quarter’spay but a day or two before, he must have had about his personat the time of his disappearance.The mysterious event caused much speculation at the churchon the following Sunday. Knots of gazers and gossips werecollected in the church-yard, at the bridge, and at the spotwhere the hat and pumpkin had been found. The stories ofBrouwer, of Bones, and a whole budget of others, were calledto mind; and when they had diligently considered them all, andcompared them with the symptoms of the present case, theyshook their heads, and came to the conclusion that Ichabodhad been carried off by the galloping Hessian. As he was abachelor, and in nobody’s debt, nobody troubled his head anymore about him. The school was removed to a different quarterof the hollow, and another pedagogue reigned in his stead.It is true, an old farmer, who had been down to New Yorkon a visit several years after, and from whom this accountof the ghostly adventure was received, brought home theintelligence that Ichabod Crane was still alive; that he hadleft the neighborhood, partly through fear of the goblin andHans Van Ripper, and partly in mortification at having beensuddenly dismissed by the heiress; that he had changed hisquarters to a distant part of the country; had kept school andstudied law at the same time, had been admitted to the bar,turned politician, electioneered, written for the newspapers,and finally had been made a justice of the Ten Pound Court.Brom Bones too, who shortly after his rival’s disappearanceconducted the blooming Katrina in triumph to the altar, wasobserved to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story ofIchabod was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh atthe mention of the pumpkin; which led some to suspect that heknew more about the matter than he chose to tell.The old country wives, however, who are the best judges ofthese matters, maintain to this day that Ichabod was spirited51

away by supernatural means; and it is a favorite story often toldabout the neighborhood round the winter evening fire. Thebridge became more than ever an object of superstitious awe,and that may be the reason why the road has been altered oflate years, so as to approach the church by the border of themill-pond. The school-house being deserted, soon fell to decay,and was reported to be haunted by the ghost of the unfortunatepedagogue; and the ploughboy, loitering homeward of a stillsummer evening, has often fancied his voice at a distance,chanting a melancholy psalm tune among the tranquil solitudesof Sleepy Hollow.Diedrich Knickerbocker:History of New York - Chapter VAmong many Surprising and Curious Matters, theUnutterable Ponderings of WALTER THE DOUBTER,the Disastrous Projects of WILLIAM THE TESTY,and the Chivalric Achievements of PETER THEHEADSTRONG,the three Dutch Governors of NEW AMSTERDAM;being the only Authentic History of the Times that everhas been, or ever will be Published.BOOK I, CHAPTER V.In which the Author puts a mighty Question to the rout, by theassistance of the Man in the Moon – which not only deliversthousands of people from great embarrassment, but likewiseconcludes this introductory book.The writer of a history may, in some respects, be likenedunto an adventurous knight, who having undertaken a perilousenterprize, by way of establishing his fame, feels bound inhonour and chivalry, to turn back for no difficulty nor hardship,and never to shrink or quail whatever enemy he may encounter.Under this impression, I resolutely draw my pen and fall to,with might and main, at those doughty questions and subtleparadoxes, which, like fiery dragons and bloody giants, besetthe entrance to nay history, and would Erin repulse me fromthe very threshold. And at this moment a gigantic question hasstarted up, which I must take by the beard and utterly subdue,before I can advance another step in my historick undertaking– but I trust this will be the last adversary I shall have to contendwith, and that in the next book, I shall be enabled to conductmy readers in triumph into the body of nay work.The question which has thus suddenly arisen, is, what right hadthe first discoverers of America to land, and take possessionof a country, without asking the consent of its inhabitants, oryielding them an adequate compensation for their territory?My readers shall now see with astonishment, how easily I willvanquish this gigantic doubt, which has so long been the terrorof adventurous writers; which has withstood so many fierceassaults, and has given such great distress of mind to multitudesof kind-hearted folks. For, until this mighty question is totallyput to rest, the worthy people of America can by no meansenjoy the soil they inhabit, with clear right and title, and quiet,unsullied consciences.The first source of right, by which property is acquired in acountry, is DISCOVERY. For as all mankind have an equalright to any thing, which has never before been appropriated,52 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

so any nation, that discovers an uninhabited country, and takespossession thereof, is considered as enjoying full property, andabsolute, unquestionable empire therein.* [* Grotius. Puffendoff,b. 4. c. 4, Vattel, b. I. c. 18. et alii. – Irving’s note.]This proposition being admitted, it follows clearly, that theEuropeans who first visited America, were the real discoverersof the same; nothing being necessary to the establishment ofthis fact, but simply to prove that it was totally uninhabited byman. This would at first appear to be a point of some difficulty,for it is well known, that this quarter of the world abounded withcertain animals, that walked erect on two feet, had somethingof the human countenance, uttered certain unintelligiblesounds, very much like language, in short, had a marvellousresemblance to human beings. But the host of zealous andenlightened fathers, who accompanied the discoverers, for thepurpose of promoting the kingdom of heaven, by establishingfat monasteries and bishopricks on earth, soon cleared up thispoint, greatly to the satisfaction of his holiness the pope, andof all Christian voyagers and discoverers.They plainly proved, and as there were no Indian writers aroseon the other side, the fact was considered as fully admittedand established, that the two legged race of animals beforementioned, were mere cannibals, detestable monsters, andmany of them giants – a description of vagrants, that sincethe times of Gog, Magog and Goliath, have been consideredas outlaws, and have received no quarter in either history,chivalry or song; indeed, even the philosopher Bacon, declaredthe Americans to be people proscribed by the laws of nature,inasmuch as they had a barbarous custom of sacrificing men,and feeding upon man’s flesh.Nor are these all the proofs of their utter barbarism: amongmany other writers of discernment, the celebrated Ulloa tells us“their imbecility is so visible, that one can hardly form an ideaof them different from what one has of the brutes. Nothingdisturbs the tranquillity of their souls, equally insensible todisasters, and to prosperity. Though half naked, they are ascontented as a monarch in his most splendid array. Fear makesno impression on them, and respect as little.” – All this isfurthermore supported by the authority of M. Bouguer. “It isnot easy,” says he, “to describe the degree of their indifferencefor wealth and all its advantages. One does not well know whatmotives to propose to them when one would persuade them toany service’ It is vain to offer them money, they answer that theyare not hungry.” And Vanegas confirms the whole, assuring usthat “ambition, they have none, and are more desirous of beingthought strong, than valiant. The objects of ambition with us,honour, fame, reputation, riches, posts and distinctions areunknown among them. So that this powerful spring of action,the cause of so much seeming good and real evil in the worldhas no power over them. In a word, these unhappy mortalsmay be compared to children, in whom the developement ofreason is not completed.”Now all these peculiarities, though in the unenlightened statesof Greece, they would have entitled their possessors to immortalhonour, as having reduced to practice those rigid and abstemiousmaxims, the mere talking about which, acquired certain oldGreeks the reputation of sages and philosophers; – yet werethey clearly proved in the present instance, to betoken amost abject and brutified nature, totally beneath the humancharacter. But the benevolent fathers, who had undertakento turn these unhappy savages into dumb beasts, by dint ofargument, advanced still stronger proofs; for as certain divinesof the sixteenth century, and among the rest Lullus affirm– the Americans go naked, and have no beards! – “They havenothing,” says Lullus, “of the reasonable animal, except themask.” –And even that mask was allowed to avail them butlime, for it was soon found that they were of a hideous coppercomplexion – and being of a copper complexion, it was all thesame as if they were negroes – and negroes are black, “andblack” said the pious fathers, devoutly crossing themselves, “isthe colour of the Devil? Therefore so far from being able toown property, they had no right even to personal freedom, forliberty is too radiant a deity, to inhabit such gloomy temples.All which circumstances plainly convinced the righteousfollowers of Cortes and Pizarro, that these miscreants had notitle to the soil that they infested – that they were a perverse,illiterate, dumb, beardless, bare-bottomedblack-seed – merewild beasts of the forests, and like them should either besubdued or exterminated.From the foregoing arguments therefore, and a host of othersequally conclusive, which I forbear to enumerate, it was dearlyevident, that this fair quarter of the globe when first visited byEuropeans, was a howling wilderness, inhabited by nothingbut wild beasts; and that the trans-atlantic visitors acquired anincontrovertable property therein, by the right of Discovery.This right being fully established, we now come to the next,which is the right acquired by cultivation. “The cultivation ofthe soil” we are told “is an obligation imposed by nature onmankind. The whole world is appointed for the nourishmentof its inhabitants; but it would be incapable of doing it, was ituncultivated. Every nation is then obliged by the law of natureto cultivate the ground that has fallen to its share. Those peoplelike the ancient Germans and modern Tartars, who havingfertile countries, disdain to cultivate the earth, and choose tolive by rapine, are wanting to themselves, and deserve to beexterminated as savage and pernicious beasts.”* [* Vattel – B.i, ch.17. See likewise Grotius, Puffendorff, et alii. – Irving’s note.]Now it is notorious, that the savages knew nothing ofagriculture, when first discovered by the Europeans, but riveda most vagabond, disorderly, unrighteous life, – rambling fromplace to place, and prodigally rioting upon the spontaneous53

luxuries of nature, without tasking her generosity to yieldthem any thing more; whereas it has been most unquestionablyshewn, that heaven intended the earth should be ploughed andsown, and manured, and laid out into cities and towns andfarms, and country seats, and pleasure grounds, and publicgardens, all which the Indians knew nothing about – thereforethey did not improve the talents providence had bestowedon them – therefore they were careless stewards – thereforethey had no right to the soil – therefore they deserved to beexterminated.It is true the savages might plead that they drew all the benefitsfrom the land which their simple wants required – they foundplenty of game to hunt, which together with the roots anduncultivated fruits of the earth, furnished a sufficient varietyfor their frugal table; – and that as heaven merely designedthe earth to form the abode, and satisfy the wants of man; solong as those purposes were answered, the will of heaven wasaccomplished. – But this only proves how undeserving theywere of the blessings around them – they were so much themore savages, for not having more wants; for knowledge is insome degree an increase of desires, and it is this superiority bothin the number and magnitude of his desires, that distinguishesthe man from the beast. Therefore the Indians, in not havingmore wants, were very unreasonable animals; and it was butjust that they should make way for the Europeans, who hada thousand wants to their one, and therefore would turnearth to more account, and by cultivating it, more truly fulfilthe will of heaven. Besides – Grotius and Lauterbach, andPuffendorff and Titius and a host of wise men besides, whohave considered the matter properly, have determined, that theproperty of a country cannot be acquired by hunting, cuttingwood, or drawing water in it – nothing but precise demarcationof limits, and the intention of cultivation, can establish thepossession. Now as the savages (probably from never havingread the authors above quoted) had never complied with any ofthese necessary forms, it plainly follows that they had no rightto the soil, but that it was completely at the disposal of thefirst comers, who had more knowledge and more wants thanthemselves – who would portion out the soil, with churlishboundaries; who would torture nature to pamper a thousandfantastic humours and capricious appetites; and who of coursewere far more rational animals than themselves. In enteringupon a newly discovered, uncultivated country therefore, thenew comers were but taking possession of what, accordingto the aforesaid doctrine, was their own property – thereforein opposing them, the savages were invading their just fights,infringing the immutable laws of nature and counteracting thewill of heaven – therefore they were guilty of impiety, burglaryand trespass on the case, – therefore they were hardenedoffenders against God and man – therefore they ought to beexterminated.But a more irresistible right then either that I have mentioned,and one which will be the most readily admitted by my reader,provided he is blessed with bowels of charity and philanthropy,is the right acquired by civilization. All the world knows thelamentable state in which these poor savages were found. Notonly deficient in the comforts of life, but what is still Worse,most piteously and unfortunately blind to the miseries of theirsituation. But no sooner did the benevolent inhabitants ofEurope behold their sad condition than they immediately wentto work to ameliorate and improve it. They introduced amongthem the comforts of life, consisting of rum, gin and brandy –and it is astonishing to read how soon the poor savages learnt toestimate these blessings – they likewise made known to thema thousand remedies, by which the most inveterate diseasesare alleviated and healed, and that they might comprehendthe benefits and enjoy the comforts of these medicines, theypreviously introduced among them the diseases, which theywere calculated to cure. By these and a variety of other methodswas the condition of these poor savages, wonderfully improved;they acquired a thousand wants, of which they had before beenignorant, and as he has most sources of happiness, who hasmost wants to be gratified, they were doubtlessly rendered amuch happier race of beings.But the most important branch of civilization, and which hasmost strenuously been extolled, by the zealous and pious fathersof the Roman Church, is the introduction of the Christianfaith. It was truly a sight that might well inspire horror, tobehold these savages, stumbling among the dark mountains ofpaganism, and guilty of the most horrible ignorance of religion.It is true, they neither stole nor defrauded, they were sober,frugal, continent, and faithful to their word; but though theyacted right habitually, k was all in vain, unless they acted sofrom precept. The new comers therefore used every method, toinduce them to embrace and practice the true religion – exceptthat of setting them the example.But notwithstanding all these complicated labours for theirgood, such was the unparalleled obstinacy of these stubbornwretches, that they ungratefully refused, to acknowledge thestrangers as their benefactors, and persisted in disbelievingthe doctrines they endeavoured to inculcate; most insolentlyalledging, that from their conduct, the advocates of Christianitydid not seem to believe in it themselves. Was not this toomuch for human patience? – would not one suppose, that theforeign emigrants from Europe, provoked at their incredulityand discouraged by their stiff-necked obstinacy, would foreverhave abandoned their shores, and consigned them to theiroriginal ignorance and misery? – But no – so zealous werethey to effect the temporal comfort and eternal salvation ofthese pagan infidels, that they even proceeded from the mildermeans of persuasion, to the more painful and troublesomeone of persecution – Let loose among them, whole troopsof fiery monks and furious blood-hounds – purified them byfire and sword, by stake and faggot; in consequence of which54 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

indefatigable measures, the cause of Christian love and charitywere so rapidly advanced, that in a yen, few years, not one fifthof the number of unbelievers existed in South America, thatwere found there at the time of its discovery.Nor did the other methods of civilization remain uninforced.The Indians improved daily and wonderfully by theirintercourse with the whites. They took to drinking rum, andmaking bargains. They learned to cheat, to lie, to swear, togamble, to quarrel, to cut each others throats, in short, to excelin all the accomplishments that had originally marked thesuperiority of their Christian Visitors. And such a surprisingaptitude have they shewn for these acquirements, that there isvery little doubt that in a century more, provided they surviveso long, the irresistible effects of civilization; they will equalin knowledge, refinement, knavery, and debauchery, the mostenlightened, civilized and orthodox nations of Europe.What stronger right need the European settlers advance tothe country than this. Have not whole nations of uninformedsavages been made acquainted with a thousand imperiouswants and indispensible comforts of which they were beforewholly ignorant – Have they not been literally;,, hunted andsmoked out of the dens and lurking places of ignorance andinfidelity, and absolutely scourged into the right path. Havenot the temporal things, the vain baubles and filthy lucre of thisworld, which were too apt to engage their worldly and selfishthoughts, been benevolently taken from them and have theynot in lieu thereof, been taught to set their affections on thingsabove – And finally, to use the words of a reverend Spanishfather, in a letter to his superior in Spain – “Can any one havethe presumption to say, that these savage Pagans, have yieldedany thing more than an inconsiderable recompense to theirbenefactors; in surrendering to them a little pitiful tract of thisdirty sublunary planet, in exchange for a glorious inheritancein the kingdom of Heaven!”Here then are three complete and undeniable sources of rightestablished, any one of which was more than ample to establisha property in the newly discovered regions of America. Now,so it has happened in certain parts of this delightful quarter ofthe globe, that the right of discovery has been so strenuouslyasserted – the influence of cultivation so industriously extended,and the progress of salvation and civilization so zealouslyprosecuted, that, what with their attendant wars, persecutions,oppressions, diseases, and other partial evils that often hang onthe skirts of great benefits – the savage aborigines have, somehow or another, been utterly annihilated – and this all at oncebrings me to a fourth right, which is worth all the others puttogether – For the original claimants to the soil being all deadand buried, and no one remaining to inherit or dispute thesoil, the Spaniards as the next immediate occupants enteredupon the possession, as clearly as the hang-man succeeds tothe clothes of the malefactor – and as they have Blackstone,*[*Black. Com. B. II, c. i. – Irving’s note.] and all the learnedexpounders of the law on their side, they may set all actions ofejectment at defiance – and this last right may be entitled, theRIGHT BY EXTERMINATION, or in other words, theRIGHT BY GUNPOWDER.But lest any scruples of conscience should remain on this head,and to settle the question of right forever, his holiness PopeAlexander VI, issued one of those mighty bulls, which beardown reason, argument and every thing before them; by whichhe generously granted the newly discovered quarter of the globe,to the Spaniards and Portuguese; who, thus having law andgospel on their side, and being inflamed with great spiritualzeal, shewed the Pagan savages neither favour nor affection,but prosecuted the work of discovery, colonization, civilization,and extermination, with ten times more fury than ever.Thus were the European worthies who first discovered America,clearly entitled to the soil; and not only entitled to the soil,but likewise to file eternal thanks of these infidel savages,for having come so far, endured so many perils by sea andland, and taken such unwearied pains, for no other purposeunder heaven but to improve their forlorn, uncivilized andheathenish condition – for having made them acquainted withthe comforts of life, such as gin, rum, brandy, and the smallpox;for having introduced among them the light of religion,and finally – for having hurried them out of the world, to enjoyits reward!But as argument is never, so well understood by us selfishmortals, as when it comes home to ourselves, and as I amparticularly anxious that this question should be put to restforever, I will suppose a parallel case, by way of arousing thecandid attention of my readers.Let us suppose then, that the inhabitants of the moon, byastonishing advancement in science, and by a profound insightinto that ineffable lunar philosophy, the mere flickerings ofwhich, have of late years, dazzled the feeble optics, and addledthe shallow brains of the good people of our globe – let ussuppose, I say, that the inhabitants of the moon, by thesemeans, had arrived at such a command of their energies, suchan enviable state of perfectability, as to controul the elements,and navigate the boundless regions of space. Let us suppose aroving crew of these soaring philosophers, in the course of anærial voyage’ of discovery among the stars, should chance toalight upon this outlandish planet.And here I beg my readers will not have the impertinence tosmile, as is too frequently the fault of volatile readers, whenperusing the grave speculations of philosophers. I am far fromindulging in any sportive vein at present, nor is the suppositionI have been making so wild as many may deem it. It has longbeen a very serious and anxious question with me, and many55

a time, and oft, in the course of my overwhelming cares .andcontrivances for the welfare and protection of this my nativeplanet, have I lain awake whole nights, debating in my mindwhether it was most probable we should first discover andcivilize the moon, or the moon discover and civilize ourglobe. Neither would the prodigy of sailing in the air andcruising among the stars be a whit more astonishing andincomprehensible to us, than was the European mystery ofnavigating floating castles, through the world of waters, to thesimple savages. We have already discovered the art of coastingalong the ærial shores of our planet, by means of balloons, asthe savages had, of venturing along their sea coasts in canoes;and the disparity between the former, and the aerial vehidesof the philosophers from the moon, might not be greater, thanthat, between the bark canoes of the savages, and the mightyships of their discoverers. I might here pursue an endless chainof very curious, profound and unprofitable speculations; but asthey would be unimportant to my subject, I abandon them tomy reader, particularly if he is a philosopher, as matters wellworthy his attentive consideration.To return then to my supposition – let us suppose that theaerial visitants I have mentioned, possessed of vastly superiorknowledge to ourselves; that is to say, possessed of superiorknowledge in the art of extermination – riding on Hypogriffs,defended with impenetrable armour – armed with concentratedsun beams, and provided with vast engines, to hurl enormousmoon stones: in short, let us suppose them, if our vanity willpermit the supposition, as superior to us in knowledge, andconsequently in power, as the Europeans were to the Indians,when they first discovered them. All this is very possible, it isonly our self-sufficiency, that makes us think otherwise; andI warrant the poor savages, before they had any knowledgeof the white men, armed in all the terrors of glittering steeland tremendous gun-powder, were as perfectly convincedthat they themselves, were the wisest, the most virtuous,powerful and perfect of created beings, as are, at this presentmoment, the lordly inhabitants of old England, the volatilepopulace of France, or even the self-satisfied citizens of thismost enlightened republick.Let us suppose, moreover, that the aerial voyagers, finding thisplanet to be nothing but a howling wilderness, inhabited by us,poor savages and wild beasts, shall take formal possession ofit, in the name of his most gracious and philosophic excellency,the man in the moon. Finding however, that their numbersare incompetent to hold it in complete subjection, on accountof the ferocious barbarity of its inhabitants, they shall takeour worthy President, the King of England, the Emperor ofHayti, the mighty little Bonaparte, and the great King ofBantam, and returning to their native planet, shall carry themto court, as were file Indian chiefs led about as spectacles in thecourts of Europe.Then making such obeisance as the etiquette of the courtrequires, they shall address the puissant man in the moon, in,as near as I can conjecture, the following terms:“Most serene and mighty Potentate, whose dominions extendas far as eye can reach, who rideth on the Great Bear, useththe sun as a looking glass and maintaineth unrivalled controulover tides, madmen and sea-crabs. We thy liege subjects havejust returned from a voyage of discovery, in the course of whichwe have landed and taken possession of that obscure littlescurvy planet, which thou beholdest rolling at a distance. Thefive uncouth monsters, which we have brought into this augustpresence, were once very important chiefs among their fellowsavages; for the inhabitants of the newly discovered globeare totally destitute of the common attributes of humanity,inasmuch as they cart’), their heads upon their shoulders,instead of under their arms – have two eves instead of one– are utterly destitute of tails, and of a variety of unseemlycomplexions, particularly of a horrible white-ness – whereasall the inhabitants of the moon are pea green!We have moreover found these miserable savages sunk into a stateof the utmost ignorance and depravity, every man shamelesslyliving with his own wife, and rearing his own children,instead of indulging in that community of wives, enjoined bythe law of nature, as expounded by the philosophers of themoon. In a word they have scarcely a gleam of true philosophyamong them, but are in fact, utter heretics, ignoramuses andbarbarians. Taking compassion therefore on the sad conditionof these sublunary wretches, we have endeavoured, while weremained on their planet, to introduce among them the lightof reason – and the comforts of the moon. – We have treatedthem to mouthfuls of moonshine and draughts of nitrous oxyde,which they swallowed with incredible voracity, particularlythe females; and we have likewise endeavoured to instil intothem the precepts of lunar Philosophy. We have insisted upontheir renouncing the contemptible shackles of religion andcommon sense, and adoring the profound, omnipotent, andall perfect energy, and the extatic, immutable, immoveableperfection. But such was the unparalleled obstinacy of thesewretched savages, that they persisted in cleaving to their wivesand adhering to their religion, and absolutely set at naught thesublime doctrines of the moon – nay, among other abominableheresies they even went so far as blasphemously to declare, thatthis ineffable planet was made of nothing more nor less thangreen cheese!”At these words, the great man in the moon (being a veryprofound philosopher) shall fall into a terrible passion, andpossessing equal authority over things that do not belong tohim, as did while his holiness the Pope, shall forthwith issuea formidable bull, – specifying, “That – whereas a certain crewof Lunatics have lately discovered and taken possession of thatlittle dirty planet, called the earth – and that whereas it isinhabited by none but a race of two legged animals, that carry56 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

their heads on their shoulders instead of under their arms;cannot talk the lunatic language; have two eyes instead of one;are destitute of tails, and of a horrible whiteness, instead of peagreen – therefore and for a variety of other excellent reasons –they are considered incapable of possessing any property in theplanet they infest, and the right and title to it are confirmed toits original discoverers. – And furthermore, the colonists whoare now about to depart to the aforesaid planet, are authorizedand commanded to use every means to convert these infidelsavages from the darkness of Christianity, and make themthorough and absolute lunatics.”In consequence of this benevolent bull, our philosophicbenefactors go to work with hearty zeal. They seize upon ourfertile territories, scourge us from our rightful possessions,relieve us from our wives, and when we are unreasonableenough to complain, they will turn upon us and say – miserablebarbarians! ungrateful wretches! – have we not comethousands of miles to improve your worthless planet – havewe not fed you with moon shine – have we not intoxicatedyou with nitrous-oxide – does not our moon give you lightevery night and have you the baseness to murmur, when weclaim a pitiful return for all these benefits? But finding thatwe not only persist in absolute contempt to their reasoning anddisbelief in their philosophy, but even go so fir as daringly todefend our property, their patience shall be exhausted, andthey shall resort to their superior powers of argument – huntus with hypogriffs, transfix us with concentrated sun-beams,demolish our cities with moonstones; until having by mainforce, converted us to the true faith, they shall graciously permitus to exist in the torrid deserts of Arabia, or the frozen regionsof Lapland, there to enjoy the blessings of civilization and thecharms of lunar philosophy – in much the same manner as filereformed and enlightened savages of this country, are kindlysuffered to inhabit the inhospitable forests of the north, or theimpenetrable wildernesses of South America.Thus have I clearly proved, and I hope strikingly illustrated, theright of the early colonists to file possession of this country – andthus is this gigantic question, completely knocked in the head– so having manfully surmounted all obstacles, and subdued allopposition, what remains but that I should forthwith conductmy impatient and way-worn readers, into the renowned city,which we have so long been in a manner besieging. – But hold,before I proceed another step, I must pause to take breathand recover from the excessive fatigue I have undergone, inpreparing to begin this most accurate of histories. And inthis I do but imitate the example of the celebrated Hans VonDunderbottom, who took a start of three miles for the purposeof jumping over a hill, but having been himself out of breath bythe time he reached the foot, sat himself quietly down for a fewmoments to blow, and then walked over it at his leisure.Phillis Wheatley: PoemsWhen she was a child, Phillis Wheatley was taken from her homeby African slave traders and brought to America, where she wassold on the Boston slave market. Because she was shedding her frontteeth, she was judged to be about seven years old. She was bought asa house servant for Susannah Wheatley, the wife of John Wheatley,and a Boston tailor. Given the name Phillis Wheatley, she waskindly treated in the Wheatley home, and under the tutoring of theWheatleys’ daughter, Phillis quickly learned to read the Bible and towrite. When she was about thirteen, she began to show a precocioustalent for versifying. The Wheatleys encouraged her to studyastronomy, geography, and history. She learned to read classicalwriters, both in translation and in the original. She learned Latinto be able to read Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. She read the RomanTerence because he too was born in Africa.In Boston the achievements of “the sooty prodigy” attracted muchattention, and she was often called upon to write public poemsrecording the events of the day. Her first published poem appearedin 1767, when she was little more than thirteen, and, thereafter,many of her occasional poems appeared in popular broadside sheetsto be sold on the streets of Boston. In 1773 she accompanied one ofthe Wheatleys on a trip to England. In London a collection of thirtynineof her poems was published as Poems on Various Subjects,Religious and Moral (1773). It was probably the first book everpublished by a black American.Phillis Wheatley’s work received favorable notice from British critics,and she became the rage of London. Benjamin Franklin, America’scolonial agent in Britain, came to visit her. The Lord Mayor ofLondon presented her with a copy of Paradise Lost, and evenVoltaire read her poems and praised them as “very good Englishverse. Shortly afterward she returned to America, where she gainedher freedom, left the Wheatleys, and married John Peters, anotherfree Negro. Her last years, however, were marred by illness, familydisruptions, and the deaths of her children. She died in Boston inobscure poverty when she was around thirty.Phillis Wheatley’s poetic subjects were derived from the Bible, fromcelebrated public events, and from the religion she had absorbedfrom her pious owners. She dealt with the conventional themesof neoclassicism and styled her poetic couplets after the AugustanEnglish poets—Pope’s translation of Homer was her favoritesecular English book. But, though her work was derivative andlimited, and though it relied on a repeated store of classical allusions,it was remarkable in the eighteenth century when few women in thecolonies could read and write, and it was astonishing for a Negroslave with no formal education.Phillis Wheatley was the first important Afro-American poet, butonly rarely does her poetry reveal an awareness of the problems ofblackness. Her apparent concern was not for freedom from slaverybut for abstract liberty, the patriotic theme of the years before theRevolution. She had firmly adopted the devout religion of NewEngland and thanked Christians for bringing her from “the heathenshore, “ the “dark abodes” of her native Africa, a “land of errorsand Egyptian gloom. “It was the conventional wisdom of the dayin a New England society comforted by the glib assumption thatslavery brought the blessings of Christianity to pagans. Later, in thenineteenth century, her work was reprinted. And during the rise ofthe abolition movement in New England of the l830’s and l840’s,her poems were used as strong evidence to bolster the emergingphilanthropic creed that Negroes possessed “intellectual powers byno means inferior to any other portion of mankind, “ for she herselfhad written:57

Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain,May be refin’d and join th’ angelic train.ON BEING BROUGHT FROM AFRICA TOAMERICATwas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,‘Taught my benighted soul to understandThat there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.Some view our sable race with scornful eye,“Their color is a diabolic dye.”Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain.May be refined and join the angelic train.TO S. M., A YOUNG AFRICAN PAINTER, ON SEEINGHIS WORKSTo show the lab’ring bosom’s deep intent,And thought in living characters to paint,When first thy pencil did those beauties give,And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,How did those prospects give my soul delight,A new creation rushing on my sight?Still, wound’rous youth! each noble path pursue,On deathless glories fix thine ardent view;Still may the painter’s and the poet’s fireTo aid thy pencil, and thy verse conspire!And may the charms of each seraphic themeConduct thy footsteps to Immortal fame!High to the blissful wonder of the skiesElate thy soul, and raise thy wishful eyes.Thrice happy, when exalted to surveyThat splendid city, crowned with endless day,Whose twice six gates on radiant hinges ring:Celestial Sa/em blooms in endless spring.Calm and serene thy moments glide along,And may the muse inspire each future song!Still, with the sweets of contemplation bless’d,May peace with balmy wings your soul invest!But when these shades of time are chased awav,And darkness ends in everlasting day,On what seraphic pinions shall we move,And view the landscapes in the realms above?There shall thy tongue in heav’nly murmurs flow.And there my muse with heav’nly transport glow:No more to tell of Damon’s tender sighs,Or rising radiance of Aurora’s eyes,For nobler themes demand a nobler strain,And purer language on th’ ethereal plain.Cease, gentle muse! the solemn gloom of nightNow seals the fair creation from my sight.HIS EXCELLENCY GENERAL WASHINGTONCelestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light,Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.While freedom’s cause her anxious breast alarms,She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms.See mother earth her offspring’s fate bemoan,And nations gaze at scenes before unknown!See the bright beams of heaven’s revolving lightinvolved in sorrows and the veil of night!The goddess comes, she moves divinely fair,Olive and laurel binds her golden hair:Wherever shines this native of the skies,Unnumber’d charms and recent graces rise.Muse! bow propitious while my pen relatesHow pour her armies through a thousand gates;As when Eolus heaven’s fair face deforms,Enwrapped in tempest and a night of storms;Astonish’d ocean feels the wild uproar,The refluent surges beat the sounding shore,Or thick as leaves in Autumn’s golden reign,Such, and so many, moves the warrior’s train.In bright array they seek the work of war,Where high unfurl’d the ensign waves in air.Shall I to Washington their praise recite?Enough thou know’st them in the fields of fight.Thee, first in place and honors--we demandThe grace and glory of thy martial band.Fam’d for thy valour, for thy virtues more,Here every tongue thy guardian aid implore!One century scarce performed its destin’d round,When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found;And so may you, whoever dares disgraceThe land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!Fix’d are the eyes of nations on the scales,For in their hopes Columbia’s arm prevails.Anon Britannia droops the pensive head,While round increase the rising hills of dead.Ah! cruel blindness to Columbia’s state!Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late.Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,Thy every action let the goddess guide.A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine.58 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Metacomet Cries Out for RevengeIn the summer of l675, Metacomet, leader of the WampanoagIndians, attacked New England settlements to prevent the colonistsfrom occupying more land. The resulting conflict, called King Philip’sWar (from the name the colonists gave Metocomet), lasted until1678 and was marked by great brutality on both sides. Estimates ofcasualties vary widely, but clearly thousands of settlers and Indiansmust hove died. Metacomet himself was ambushed and killed in1676. The following two readings present the conflict from both theIndians’ and the settlers’ perspectives. The first reading is composedof two excerpts from on address in praise of Metacomet deliveredat Boston in 1836 by William Apes, a direct descendant of theIndian leader. In the first excerpt, Apes reported a speech deliveredby Metacomet to rally his people; in the second excerpt, he describedthe Indian leader’s death. What image of Metacomet emerges fromApes’s speech?AT COUNCIL IT APPEARS THAT PHILIP made thefollowing speech to his chiefs, counselors, and warriors:“Brothers, you see this vast country before us, which the GreatSpirit gave to our fathers and us; you see the buffalo and deerthat now are our support. Brothers, you see these little ones,our wives and children, who are looking to us for food andraiment; and you now see the foe before you, that they havegrown insolent and bold; that all our ancient customs aredisregarded; the treaties made by our fathers and us are broken,and all of us insulted; our council fires put out, our brothersmurdered before our eyes, and their spirits cry to us for revenge.Brothers, these people from the unknown world will cut downour groves, spoil our hunting and planting grounds, and driveus and our children from the graves of our fathers, and ourwomen and children will be enslaved.”This famous speech of Philip was calculated to rouse them toarm, to do the best they could in protecting and defending theirrights. . . . Philip’s young men were eager to do exploits, andto lead captive their haughty lords. It does appear that everyIndian heart had been lighted up at the council fires, at Philip’sspeech, and that the forest was literally alive with this injuredrace. And now town after town fell before them. The Pilgrimswith their forces were ever marching in one direction, whilePhilip and his forces were marching in another, burning allbefore them, until Middleborough, Taunton, and Dartmouth[towns in southeastern Massachusetts] were laid in ruins andforsaken by their inhabitants...it was now easy surrounding him. Therefore, upon the 12th ofAugust, Captain Church [settlers’ military leader] surroundedthe swamp where Philip and his men had encamped, early in themorning, before they had risen, doubtless led on by an Indianwho was either compelled or hired to turn traitor. Church hadnow placed his guard so that it was impossible for Philip toescape without being shot. It is doubtful, however, whetherthey would have taken him if he had not been surprised. Sufficeit to say, however, this was the case. A sorrowful morning tothe poor Indians, to lose such a valuable man. When comingout of the swamp, he was fired upon by an Indian, and killeddead upon the spot.I rejoice that it was even so, that the Pilgrims did not have thepleasure of tormenting him. The white man’s gun missing fire,he lost the honor of killing the truly great man, Philip. Theplace where Philip fell was very muddy. Upon this news, thePilgrims gave three cheers; then Church ordering his body tobe pulled out of the mud, while one of those tender-heartedChristians exclaims, “What a dirty creature he looks like.”...Captain Church now orders [Philip’s body] to be cut up.Accordingly, he was quartered and hung up upon four trees; hishead and one hand given to the Indian who shot him, to carryabout to show. At which sight it so overjoyed the Pilgrims, thatthey would give him money for it; and in this way obtained aconsiderable sum. After which, his head was sent to Plymouth,and exposed upon a gibbet....exhibited in savage triumph; andhis mangled body denied a resting place in the tomb.I think that as a matter of honor, that I can rejoice that nosuch evil conduct is recorded of the Indians; that they neverhung up any of the white warriors, who were head men. Andwe add the famous speech of Dr. Increase Mather [famousPuritan clergyman]: he says, during the bloody contest, thepious fathers wrestled hard and long with their God, in prayer,that he would prosper their arms, and deliver their enemiesinto their hands. . . . The Doctor closes thus:“Nor could they, the Pilgrims, cease crying to the Lord againstPhilip, until they had prayed the bullet through his heart.”However, if this is the way they pray, that is, bullets throughpeople’s hearts, I hope they will not pray for me; I should ratherbe excused.Philip’s FORCES HAD NOW BECOME VERY SMALL,so many having been duped away by the whites, and killed, that59

Mary RowlinsonThe second reading is an excerpt from A True History of theCaptivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlinson first publishedat Boston in 1682. Mary Rowlinson was captured during an attackon the English settlement of Lancaster, Massachusetts by a band ofMetacomet’s warriors on February 20, 1 676. Her baby, Sarah, waswounded in the attack held prisoner by the Indians. Rowlinson wasreleased after a ransom was paid by her husband. Soon afterwardher children were also released. In the following passage, Rowlinsondescribed crossing the Connecticut River with her captors, enteringan area that lies today in southeastern Vermont. There she met withMetacomet himself. How does Rowlinson’s and died soon after. Hertwo other children were also taken captive, but she seldom saw themduring the 11 weeks she was captive of the Indian leader.THEN I CAME ASHORE, [THE INDIANS] gathered allabout me, I sitting alone in their midst. I observed they askedone another questions, and laughed, and rejoiced over theirgains and victories. Then my heart began to fail, and I fell aweeping which was the first time to my remembrance, that Iwept before them. Although I had met with so much affliction,and my heart was many times ready to break, yet could I notshed one tear in their sight, but rather had been all this whilein a maze, and like one astonished. But now I may say as weptwhen we remembered Zion [the Promised Land].There one of them asked me, why I wept, I could hardly tellwhat to say. Yet I answered, they would kill me. No, he said,none will hurt you.Then came one of them and gave me two spoonfuls of corn[meal] to comfort me, and another gave me half a pint of pease,which was more worth than many bushels at another time.Then I went to see King Philip, he bade me come in andsit down, and asked me whether I would smoke it (a usualcompliment nowadays amongst saints and sinners) but this noway suited me.[New England women often smoked pipes in colonial times.]For though I had formerly used tobacco, yet I had left it eversince I was first taken [prisoner]. It seems to be a bait, the devillays to make men lose their precious time. I remember withshame, how formerly, when I had taken two or three pipes, Iwas presently ready for another, such a bewitching thing it is.But I thank God, he has now given me power over it. Surelythere are many who may be better employed than to lie suckinga stinking tobacco-pipe.Now the Indians gather their forces to go against North-Hampton [Massachusetts]. Overnight one went about yellingand hooting to give notice of the design. Whereupon they fellto boiling of groundnuts, and parching of corn (as many as hadit) for their provision, and in the morning away they went.During my abode in this place, Philip spake to me to make ashirt for his boy, which I did, for which he gave me a shilling. Ioffered the money to my master [the Indian who had purchasedRowlinson from those who captured her], but he bade me keepit, and with it I bought a piece of horseflesh. Afterwards heasked me to make a cap for his boy, for which he invited meto dinner. I went, and he gave me a pancake, about as big astwo fingers; it was made of parched wheat, beaten, and friedin bear’s grease, but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat[food] in my life.There was a squaw who spake to me to make a shirt for her[husband], for which she gave me a piece of bear. Anotherasked me to knit a pair of stockings, for which she gave me aquart of pease. I boiled my pease and bear together, and invitedmy master and mistress to dinner, but the proud gossip becauseI served them both in one dish, would eat nothing, except onebit that he gave her upon the point of his knife.60 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Gustavus Vassa: The Interesting Narrativeof the Life of Oloudah EquianoGustavus Vassa (Oloudah Equiano) 1745—180lGustavus Vassa’s Narrative reminds us that not all colonial Americanwritings represent the New World as a pastoral Eden, as a NewEnglish Israel of the chosen people, or (in John Adams’s term) as a“grand Design in Providence for the illumination of all mankind.”Vassa’s America is a slave state encountered through “the violence ofthe African trader, the pestilential stench of a Guinea [slave] ship,and the lash and lust of a brutal and unrelenting overseer. Vassa’sNarrative, published in England, understandably was recognizedon both sides of the Atlantic as a valuable antislavery polemic.Vassa was born in Benin, west of the lower Niger River in westernAfrica. At age eleven he was kidnapped, enslaved, and soldrepeatedly to different African tribal families. Reaching the coast,he saw “the sea and a slave ship” and succumbed to the most brutaltreatment of his young life as a captive of “nominal Christians”transporting their human cargo to America. For a time Vassa servedon a Virginia plantation; from there he was sold to a British navalofficer, who helped to educate him. Subsequently he became the slaveof a Philadelphia merchant and worked on vessels bound for the WestIndies. His last owner helped him purchase his freedom, after whichVassa traveled as a ship’s steward, became converted to Methodism,and settled permanently in England to work for the abolition ofslavery. In 1790 Vassa presented to Parliament a petition calling forthe end of the slave trade. The Interesting Narrative of the Life ofOloudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa was published in two volumesin London in 1789. In the next five years, eight editions of thissuccessful work appeared. In its own day the Narrative interestedsome readers as an exciting travel book, others as an antislaverytract. In American literature it is a minority report on human rights.Held for comparison against the Declaration of Independence andPaine’s Common Sense, it becomes a scathing commentary on thegulf between American ideals and actualities.CHAPTER IThe author’s account of his country, and their manners and customs—Administration of justice—Embrenche—Marriage ceremony, andpublic entertainments— Mode of living—Dress—ManufacturesBuildings—Commerce—Agriculture— War and religion—Superstition of the natives—Funeral ceremonies of the priests ormagicians—Curious mode of discovering poison—Some hints concerningthe origin of the author’s countrymen, with the opinions ofdifferent writers on that subject.I BELIEVE it is difficult for those who publish their ownmemoirs to escape the imputation of vanity; nor is this theonly disadvantage under which they labour: it is also for theirmisfortune, that what is uncommon is rarely, if ever, believed,and what is obvious we are apt to turn from with disgust, andto charge the writer with impertinence. People generally thinkthose memoirs only worthy to be read or remembered whichabound in great or striking events, those, in short, which ina high degree excite either admiration or pity: all others theyconsign to contempt and oblivion. It is therefore, I confess,not a little hazardous in a private and obscure individual,and a stranger too, thus to solicit the indulgent attention ofthe public; especially when I own I offer here the history ofneither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant. I believe there are fewevents in my life, which have not happened to many: it is truethe incidents of it are numerous; and, did I consider myself anEuropean, I might say my sufferings were great: but when Icompare my lot with that of most o£ my countrymen, I regardmyself as a particular favourite of Heaven, and acknowledge themercies of Providence in every occurrence of my life. If thenthe following narrative does not appear sufficiently interestingto engage general attention, let my motive be some excuse forits publication. I am not so foolishly vain as to expect fromit either immortality or literary reputation. If it affords anysatisfaction to my numerous friends, at whose request it hasbeen written, or in the smallest degree promotes the interestsof humanity, the ends for which it was undertaken will be fullyattained, and every wish of my heart gratified. Let it thereforebe remembered, that, in wishing to avoid censure, I do notaspire to praise.That part of Africa, known by the name of Guinea, to whichthe trade for slaves is carried on, extends along the coast above3400 miles, from the Senegal to Angola, and includes a varietyof kingdoms. Of these the most considerable is the kingdomof Benen, both as to extent and wealth, the richness and cultivationof the soil, the power of its king, and the number andwarlike disposition of the inhabitants. It is situated nearly underthe line, 87 and extends along the coast about 170 miles, butruns back into the interior part of Africa to a distance hitherto Ibelieve unexplored by any traveller; and seems only terminatedat length by the empire of Abyssinia, 88 near 1500 miles fromits beginning.89 This kingdom is divided into many provincesor districts: in one of the most remote and fertile of which,called Eboe, 90 I was born, in the year 1745, in a charmingfruitful vale, named Essaka.9~ The distance of this provincefrom the capital of Benin and the sea coast must be veryconsiderable; for I had never heard of white men or Europeans,nor of the sea: and our subjection to the king of Benin was littlemore than nominal; for every transaction of the government,as far as my slender observation extended, was conducted bythe chiefs or elders of the place. The manners and governmentof a people who have little commerce with other countries aregenerally very simple; and the history of what passes in onefamily or village may serve as a specimen of a nation. My fa-61

ther was one of those elders or chiefs I have spoken of, andwas styled Embrenche; a term, as I remember, importing thehighest distinction, and signifying in our language a mark ofgrandeur. This mark is conferred on the person entitled to it, bycutting the skin across at the top of the forehead, and drawingit down to the eye‐brows; and while it is in this situationapplying a warm hand, and rubbing it until it shrinks up intoa thick weal across the lower part of the forehead. Most ofthe judges and senators were thus marked; my father had longborn it: I had seen it conferred on one of my brothers, and Iwas also destined to receive it by my parents. Those Embrenche,or chief men, decided disputes and punished crimes; for whichpurpose they always assembled together. The proceedingswere generally short; and in most cases the law of retaliationprevailed. I remember a man was brought before my father,and the other judges, for kidnapping a boy; and, although hewas the son of a chief or senator, he was condemned to makerecompense by a man or woman slave. Adultery, however,was sometimes punished with slavery or death; a punishmentwhich I believe is inflicted on it throughout most of the nationsof Africa, so sacred among them is the honour of the marriagebed, and so jealous are they of the fidelity of their wives. Ofthis I recollect an instance -- a woman was convicted beforethe judges of adultery, and delivered over, as the custom was,to her husband to be punished. Accordingly he determined toput her to death: but it being found, just before her execution,that she had an infant at her breast; and no woman beingprevailed on to perform the part of a nurse, she was spared onaccount of the child. The men, however, do not preserve thesame constancy to their wives, which they expect from them;for they indulge in a plurality, though seldom in more thantwo. Their mode of marriage is thus: —both parties are usuallybetrothed when young by their parents, (though I have knownthe males to betroth themselves). On this occasion a feast isprepared, and the bride and bridegroom stand up in the midstof all their friends, who are assembled for the purpose, whilehe declares she is thenceforth to be looked upon as his wife,and that no other person is to pay any addresses to her. Thisis also immediately proclaimed in the vicinity, on which thebride retires from the assembly. Sometime after she is broughthome to her husband, and then another feast is made, to whichthe relations of both parties are invited: her parents thendeliver her to the bridegroom, accompanied with a numberof blessings, and at the same time they tie round her waist acotton string of the thickness of a goose‐quill, which none butmarried women are permitted to wear: she is now consideredas completely his wife; and at this time the dowry is given tothe new married pair, which generally consists of portions ofland, slaves, and cattle, household goods, and implements ofhusbandry. These are offered by the friends of both parties;besides which the parents of the bridegroom present gifts tothose of the bride, whose property she is looked upon beforemarriage; but after it she is esteemed the sole property of herhusband. The ceremony being now ended the festival begins,which is celebrated with bonfires, and loud acclamations of joy,accompanied with music and dancing.We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets. Thusevery great event, such as a triumphant return from battle, orother cause of public rejoicing is celebrated in public dances,which are accompanied with songs and music suited to theoccasion. The assembly is separated into four divisions, whichdance either apart or in succession, and each with a characterpeculiar to itself. The first division contains the married men,who in their dances frequently exhibit feats of arms, andthe representation of a battle. To these succeed the marriedwomen, who dance in the second division. The young menoccupy the third; and the maidens the fourth. Each representssome interesting scene of real life, such as a great achievement,domestic employment, a pathetic story, or some rural sport;and as the subject is generally founded on some recent event, itis therefore ever new. This gives our dances a spirit and varietywhich I have scarcely seen elsewhere. We have many musicalinstruments, particularly drums of different kinds, a piece ofmusic which resembles a guitar, and another much like a stickado.93These last are chiefly used by betrothed virgins, whoplay on them on all grand festivals.As our manners are simple, our luxuries are few. The dress ofboth sexes is nearly the same. It generally consists of a longpiece of calico, or muslin, wrapped loosely round the body,somewhat in the form of a highland plaid. This is usually dyedblue, which is our favourite colour. It is extracted from a berry,and is brighter and richer than any I have seen in Europe.Besides this, our women of distinction wear golden ornaments;which they dispose with some profusion on their arms and legs.When our women are not employed with the men in tillage,their usual occupation is spinning and weaving cotton, whichthey afterwards dye, and make it into garments. They alsomanufacture earthen vessels, of which we have many kinds.Among the rest tobacco pipes, made after the same fashion,and used in the same manner, as those in Turkey.Our manner of living is entirely plain; for as yet the natives areunacquainted with those refinements in cookery which debauchthe taste: bullocks, goats, and poultry, supply the greatest partof their food. These constitute likewise the principal wealth ofthe country, and the chief articles of its commerce. The flesh isusually stewed in a pan; to make it savoury we sometimes usealso pepper, and other spices, and we have salt made of woodashes. Our vegetables are mostly plantains, eadas, yams, beans,and Indian corn. The head of the family usually eats alone; hiswives and slaves have also their separate tables. Before we tastefood we always wash our hands: indeed our cleanliness on alloccasions is extreme; but on this it is an indispensable ceremony.After washing, libation is made, by pouring out a small portionof the food,95 in a certain place, for the spirits of departedrelations, which the natives suppose to preside over their con-62 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

duct, and guard them from evil. They are totally unacquaintedwith strong or spirituous liquours; and their principal beverageis palm wine. This is gotten from a tree of that name by tappingit at the top, and fastening a large gourd to it; and sometimesone tree will yield three or four gallons in a night. When justdrawn it is of a most delicious sweetness; but in a few days itacquires a tarnish and more spirituous flavour: though I neversaw any one intoxicated by it. The same tree also produces nutsand oil. Our principal luxury is in perfumes; one sort of these isan odoriferous wood of delicious fragrance: the other a kind ofearth; a small portion of which thrown into the fire diffuses amost powerful odour. We beat this wood into powder, and mixit with palm oil; with which both men and woman perfumethemselves.In our buildings we study convenience rather than ornament.Each master of a family has a large square piece of ground,surrounded with a moat or fence, or enclosed with a wallmade of red earth tempered; which, when dry, is as hardas brick. Within this are his houses to accommodate hisfamily and slaves; which, if numerous, frequently present theappearance of a village. In the middle stands the principalbuilding, appropriated to the sole use of the master, andconsisting of two apartments; in one of which he sits in theday with his family, the other is left apart for the receptionof his friends. He has besides these a distinct apartment inwhich he sleeps, together with his male children. On each sideare the apartments of his wives, who have also their separateday and night houses. The habitations of the slaves and theirfamilies are distributed throughout the rest of the enclosure.These houses never exceed one story in height: they are alwaysbuilt of wood, or stakes driven into the ground, crossed withwattles, and neatly plastered within, and without. The roof isthatched with reeds. Our day‐houses are left open at the sides;but those in which we sleep are always covered, and plasteredin the inside, with a composition mixed with cow‐dung, tokeep off different insects, which annoy us during the night.The walls and floors also of these are generally covered withmats. Our beds consist of a platform, raised three or four feetfrom the ground, on which are laid skins, and different partsof a spungy tree called plantain. Our covering is calico ormuslin, the same as our dress. The usual seats are a few logsof wood; but we have benches, which are generally perfumed,to accommodate strangers: these compose the greater part ofour household furniture. Houses so constructed and furnishedrequire but little skill to erect them. Every man is a sufficientarchitect for the purpose. The whole neighbourhood affordtheir unanimous assistance in building them and in return receive,and expect no other recompense than a feast.As we live in a country where nature is prodigal of herfavours, our wants are few and easily supplied; of course wehave few manufactures. They consist for the most part ofcalicoes, earthenware, ornaments, and instruments of warand husbandry. But these make no part of our commerce, theprincipal articles of which, as I have observed, are provisions.In such a state money is of little use; however we have somesmall pieces of coin, if I may call them such. They are madesomething like an anchor; but I do not remember either theirvalue or denomination. We have also markets, at which I havebeen frequently with my mother. These are sometimes visitedby stout mahogany‐coloured men from the south west of us:we call them Oye‐Eboe, which term signifies red men livingat a distance. They generally bring us fire‐arms, gunpowder,hats, beats and dried fish. The last we esteemed a great rarity,as our waters were only brooks and springs. These articles theybarter with us for odoriferous woods and earth, and our saltof wood ashes. They always carry slaves through our land; butthe strictest account is exacted of their manner of procuringthem before they are suffered to pass. Sometimes indeed wesold slaves to them, but they were only prisoners of war, or suchamong us as had been convicted of kidnapping, or adultery, andsome other crimes, which we esteemed heinous. This practiceof kidnapping induces me to think, that, notwithstandingall our strictness, their principal business among us was totrepan96 our people. I remember too they carried great sacksalong with them, which not long after I had an opportunity offatally seeing applied to that infamous purpose.Our land is uncommonly rich and fruitful, and produces allkinds of vegetables in great abundance. We have plenty ofIndian corn, and vast quantities of cotton and tobacco. Ourpineapples grow without culture; they are about the size ofthe largest sugar‐loaf, and finely flavoured. We have also spicesof different kinds, particularly pepper; and a variety of deliciousfruits which I have never seen in Europe; together with gumsof various kinds, and honey in abundance. All our industry isexerted to improve those blessings of nature. Agriculture isour chief employment; and every one, even the children andwomen, are engaged in it. Thus we are all habituated to labourfrom our earliest years. Every one contributes something tothe common flock; and as we are unacquainted with idleness,we have no beggars. The benefits of such a mode of living areobvious. The West India planters prefer the slaves of Benin orEboe to those of any other part of Guinea, for their hardiness,intelligence, integrity, and zeal. Those benefits are felt by usin the general healthiness of the people, and their vigour andactivity; I might have added too in their comeliness. Deformityis indeed unknown almost us, I mean that of shape. Numbersof the natives of Eboe now in London might be brought insupport of this assertion: for, in regard to complexion, ideas ofbeauty are wholly relative. I remember while in Africa to haveseen three negro children, who were tawny, and another quitewhite, who were universally regarded by myself, and the nativesin general, as far as related to their complexions, as deformed.Our women too were in my eyes at least uncommonly graceful,alert, and modest to a degree of bashfulness; nor do Iremember to have ever heard of an instance of incontinence63

amongst them before marriage. They are also remarkablycheerful. Indeed cheerfulness and affability are two of the leadingcharacteristics of our nation.Our tillage is exercised in a large plain or common, some hourswalk from our dwellings, and all the neighbors resort thitherin a body. They use no beasts of husbandry; and their onlyinstruments are hoes, axes, shovels, and beaks, or pointed ironto dig with. Sometimes we are visited by locusts, which comein large clouds, so as to darken the air, and destroy our harvest.This however happens rarely, but when it does, a famine isproduced by it. I remember an instance or two wherein thishappened. This common is often the theatre of war; andtherefore when our people go out to till their land, they notonly go in a body, but generally take their arms with themfor fear of a surprise; and when they apprehend an invasionthey guard the avenues to their dwellings, by driving sticksinto the ground, which are so sharp at one end as to piercethe foot, and are generally dipt in poison. From what I canrecollect of these battles, they appear to have been irruptionsof one little state or district on the other, to obtain prisoners orbooty. Perhaps they were incited to this by those traders whobrought the European goods I mentioned amongst us. Such amode of obtaining slaves in Africa is common; and I believemore are procured this way, and by kidnapping, than any other.When a trader wants slaves, he applies to a chief for them, andtempts him with his wares. It is not extraordinary, if on thisoccasion he yields to the temptation with as little firmness, andaccepts the price of his fellow creatures liberty with as littlereluctance as the enlightened merchant. Accordingly he fallson his neighbours, and a desperate battle ensures. If he prevailsand takes prisoners, he gratifies his avarice by selling them;but, if his party be vanquished, and he falls into the handsof the enemy, he is put to death: for, as he has been knownto foment their quarrels, it is thought dangerous to let himsurvive, and no ransom can save him, though all other prisonersmay be redeemed. We have firearms, bows and arrows, broadtwo-edged swords and javelins; we have shields also whichcover a man from head to foot. All are taught the use of theseweapons; even our women are warriors, and march boldly outto fight along with the men. Our whole district is a kind ofmilitia; on a certain signal given, such as the firing of a gunat night, they all rise in arms and rush upon their enemy. It isperhaps something remarkable, that when our people march tothe field a red flag or banner is borne before them. I was oncea witness to a battle in our common. We had been all at workin it one day as usual, when our people were suddenly attacked.I climbed a tree at some distance, from which I beheld thefight. There were many women as well as men on both sides;among others my mother was there, and armed with a broadsword. After fighting for a considerable time with great fury,and after many had been killed our people obtained the victory,and took their enemy’s Chief prisoner. He was carried off ingreat triumph, and, though he offered a large ransom for hislife, he was put to death. A virgin of note among our enemieshad been slain in the battle, and her arm was exposed in ourmarket‐place, where our trophies were always exhibited. Thespoils were divided according to the merit of the warriors.Those prisoners which were not sold or redeemed we kept asslaves: but how different was their condition from that of theslaves in the West Indies! With us they do no more work thanother members of the community, even their masters; theirfood, clothing and lodging were nearly the same as theirs,(except that they were not permitted to eat with those whowere free‐born); and there was scarce any other differencebetween them, than a superior degree of importance whichthe head of a family possesses in our state, and that authoritywhich, as such, he exercises over every part of his household.Some of these slaves have even slaves under them as their ownproperty, and for their own use.As to religion, the natives believe that there is one Creator of allthings, and that he lives in the sun, and is girted round with abelt that he may never eat or drink; but, according to some, hesmokes a pipe, which is our own favourite luxury. They believehe governs events, especially our deaths or captivity; but, as forthe doctrine of eternity, I do not remember to have ever heardof it; some however believe in the transmigration of souls in acertain degree. Those spirits,which are not transmigrated, such as our dear friends or relations,they believe always attend them, and guard them fromthe bad spirits or their foes. For this reason they always beforeeating, as I have observed, put some small portion of themeat, and pour some of their drink, on the ground for them;and they often make oblations of the blood of beasts or fowlsat their graves. I was very fond of my mother, and almostconstantly with her. When she went to make these oblations ather mother’s tomb, which was a kind of small solitary thatchedhouse, I sometimes attended her. There she made her libations,and spent most of the night in cries and lamentations. I havebeen often extremely terrified on these occasions. The lonelinessof the place, the darkness of the night, and the ceremony oflibation, naturally awful and gloomy, were heightened by mymother’s lamentations; and these, concurring with the cries ofdoleful birds, by which these places were frequented, gave aninexpressible terror to the scene.We compute the year from the day on which the sun crossesthe line, and on its setting that evening there is a generalshout throughout the land; at least I can speak from my ownknowledge throughout our vicinity. The people at the sametime make a great noise with rattles, not unlike the basketrattles used by children here, though much larger, and holdup their hands to heaven for a blessing. It is then the greatestofferings are made; and those children whom our wise menforetell will be fortunate are then presented to different people.I remember many used to come to see me, and I was carriedabout to others for that purpose. They have many offerings,64 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

particularly at full moons; generally two at harvest beforethe fruits are taken out of the ground: and when any younganimals are killed, sometimes they offer up part of them as asacrifice. These offerings, when made by one of the heads ofa family, serve for the whole. I remember we often had themat my father’s and my uncle’s, and their families have beenpresent. Some of our offerings are eaten with bitter herbs. Wehad a saying among us to any one of a cross temper, ‘That ifthey were to be eaten, they should be eaten with bitter herbs.’We practiced circumcision like the Jews, and made offeringsand feasts on that occasion in the same manner as they did.Like them also, our children were named from some eventsome circumstance, or fancied foreboding at the time of theirbirth. I was named Olaudah, which, in our language, signifiesvicissitude or fortune also, one favoured, and having a loudvoice and well spoken. I remember we never polluted the nameof the object of our adoration; on the contrary, it was alwaysmentioned with the greatest reverence; and we were totallyunacquainted with swearing, and all those terms of abuse andreproach which find their way so readily and copiously intothe languages of more civilized people. The only expressions ofthat kind I remember were ‘May you rot, or may you swell, ormay a beast take you.’I have before remarked that the natives of this part of Africaare extremely cleanly. This necessary habit of decency was withus a part of religion, and therefore we had many purificationsand washings, indeed almost as many, and used on the sameoccasions, if my recollection does not fail me, as the Jews.Those that touched the dead at any time were obliged to washand purify themselves before they could enter a dwelling‐house.Every woman too, at certain times, was forbidden to come intoa dwelling‐house, or touch any person, or any thing we ate. Iwas so fond of my mother I could not keep from her, or avoidtouching her at some of those periods, in consequence of whichI was obliged to be kept out with her, in a little house madefor that purpose, till offering was made, and then we werepurified.Though we had no places of public worship, we had priestsand magicians, or wise men. I do not remember whetherthey had different offices, or whether they were united inthe same persons, but they were held in great reverence bythe people. They calculated our time, and foretold events, astheir name imported, for we called them Ah‐affoe‐way‐cah,which signifies calculators or yearly men, our year being calledAh‐affoe. They wore their beards, and when they died theywere succeeded by their sons. Most of their implements andthings of value were interred along with them. Pipes andtobacco were also put into the grave with the corpse, which wasalways perfumed and ornamented, and animals were offered insacrifice to them. None accompanied their funerals but thoseof the same profession or tribe. These buried them after sunset,and always returned from the grave by a different way fromthat which they went.These magicians were also our doctors or physicians. Theypracticed bleeding by cupping; and were very successful inhealing wounds and expelling poisons. They had likewisesome extraordinary method of discovering jealousy, theft, andpoisoning; the success of which no doubt they derived fromtheir unbounded influence over the credulity and superstitionof the people. I do not remember what those methods were,except that as to poisoning: I recollect an instance or two,which I hope it will not be deemed impertinent here to insert,as it may serve as a kind of specimen of the rest, and is stillused by the negroes in the West Indies. A virgin had beenpoisoned, but it was not known by whom: the doctors orderedthe corpse to be taken up by some persons, and carried to thegrave. As soon as the bearers had raised it on their shoulders,they seemed seized with some^99 sudden impulse, and ran toand fro unable to stop themselves. At last, after having passedthrough a number of thorns and prickly bushes unhurt, thecorpse fell from them close to a house, and defaced it in thefall; and, the owner being taken up, he immediately confessedthe poisoningThe natives are extremely cautious about poison. Whenthey buy any eatable the seller kisses it all round before thebuyer, to shew him it is not poisoned; and the same is done whenany meat or drink is presented, particularly to a stranger. Wehave serpents of different kinds, some of which are esteemedominous when they appear in our houses, and these we nevermolest. I remember two of those ominous snakes, each ofwhich was as thick as the calf of a man’s leg, and in colourresembling a dolphin in the water, crept at different times intomy mother’s night‐house, where I always lay with her, andcoiled themselves into folds, and each time they crowed likea cock. I was desired by some of our wise men to touch these,that I might be interested in the good omens, which I did, forthey were quite harmless, and would tamely suffer themselvesto be handled; and then they were put into a large open earthenpan, and set on one side of the highway. Some of our snakes,however, were poisonous: one of them crossed the road oneday when I was standing on it, and passed between my feetwithout offering to touch me, to the great surprise of manywho saw it; and these incidents were accounted by the wisemen, and therefore by my mother and the rest of the people, asremarkable omens in my favour.Such is the imperfect sketch my memory has furnished me withof the manners and customs of a people among whom I firstdrew my breath. And here I cannot forbear suggesting what haslong struck me very forcibly, namely, the strong analogy whicheven by this sketch, imperfect as it is, appears to prevail in themanners and customs of my countrymen and those of the Jews,before they reached the Land of Promise, and particularly the65

patriarchs while they were yet in that pastoral state which isdescribed in Genesis—an analogy, which alone would induceme to think that the one people had sprung from the other.Indeed this is the opinion of Dr. Gill, who, in his commentaryon Genesis, very ably deduces the pedigree of the Africansfrom Afer and Afra, the descendants of Abraham by Keturahhis wife and concubine (for both these titles are applied to her).It is also conformable to the sentiments of Dr. John Clarke,formerly Dean of Sarum, in his Truth of the Christian Religionboth these authors concur in ascribing to us this original. Thereasoning of these gentlemen are still further confirmed bythe scripture chronology; and if any further corroborationwere required, this resemblance in so many respects is a strongevidence in support of the opinion. Like the Israelites in theirprimitive state, our government was conducted by our chiefsor judges, our wise men and elders; and the head of a familywith us enjoyed a similar authority over his household withthat which is ascribed to Abraham and the other patriarchs.The law of retaliation obtained almost universally with us aswith them: and even their religion appeared to have shed uponus a ray of its glory, though broken and spent in its passage, oreclipsed by the cloud with which time, tradition, and ignorancemight have enveloped it; for we had our circumcision (a rule Ibelieve peculiar to that people:) we had also our sacrifices andburnt‐offerings, our washings and purlfications, on the sameoccasions as they had.As to the difference of colour between the Eboan Africans andthe modern Jews, I shall not presume to account for it. It isa subject which has engaged the pens of men of both geniusand learning, and is far above my strength. The most able andReverend Mr. T. Clarkson, however, in his much admiredEssay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species,has ascertained the cause, in a manner that at once solvesevery objection on that account, and, on my mind at least, hasproduced the fullest conviction. I shall therefore refer to thatperformance for the theory, contenting myself with extractinga fact as related by Dr. Mitchell. “The Spaniards, who haveinhabited America, under the torrid zone, for any time, arebecome as dark coloured as our native Indians of Virginia;of which I myself have been a witness.” There is also anotherinstance of a Portuguese settlement at Mitomba, a river inSierra Leona; where the inhabitants are bred from a mixtureof the first Portuguese discoverers with the natives, and arenow become in their complexion, and in the wooly quality oftheir hair, perfect negroes, retaining however a smattering of thePortuguese language.These instances, and a great many more which might beadduced, while they shew how the complexions of the samepersons vary in different climates, it is hoped may tend also toremove the prejudice that some conceive against the natives ofAfrica on account of colour. Surely the minds of the Spaniardsdid not change with their complexions! Are there not causesenough to which the apparent inferiority of an African may beascribed, without limiting the goodness of God, and supposinghe forbore to stamp understanding on certainly his own image,because “carved in ebony.” Might it not naturally be ascribed totheir situation? When they come among Europeans, they areignorant of their language, religion, manners, and customs. Areany pains taken to teach them these? Are they treated as men?Does not slavery itself depress the mind, and extinguish all itsfire and every noble sentiment? But, above all, what advantagesdo not a refined people possess over those who are rude anduncultivated. Let the polished and haughty European recollectthat his ancestors were once, like the Africans, uncivilized, andeven barbarous. Did Nature make them inferior to their sons?and should they too have been made slaves? Every rationalmind answers, No. Let such reflections as these melt the prideof their superiority into sympathy for the wants and miseriesof their sable brethren, and compel them to acknowledge, thatunderstanding is not confined to feature or colour. If, when theylook round the world, they feel exultation, let it be temperedwith benevolence to others, and gratitude to God, “who hathmade of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all theface of the earth and whose wisdom is not our wisdom, neitherare our ways his ways.”’Chapter II - Kidnapping and EnslavementI hope the reader will not think I have trespassed on hispatience in introducing myself to him, with some accountof the manners and customs of my country. They had beenimplanted in me with great care, and made an impressionon my mind which time could not erase, and which all theadversity and variety of fortune I have since experienced servedonly to rivet and record; for, whether the love of one’s countrybe real or imaginary, or a lesson of reason, or an instinct ofnature, I still look back with pleasure on the first scenes of mylife, though that pleasure has been for the most part mingledwith sorrow.I have already acquainted the reader with the time and placeof my birth. My father, besides many slaves, had a numerousfamily, of which seven lived to grow up, including myself and asister, who was the only daughter. As I was the youngest of thesons, I became, of course, the greatest favorite with my mother,and was always with her; and she used to take particular painsto form my mind. I was trained up from my earliest years inthe arts of agriculture and war: my daily exercise was shootingand throwing javelins; and my mother adorned me withemblems, after the manner of our greatest warriors. In thisway I grew up till I was turned the age of eleven, when an endwas put to my happiness in the following manner: Generally,when the grown people in the neighborhood were gone far inthe fields to labour, the children assembled together in someof the neighbors’ premises to play; and commonly some of usused to get up a tree to look out for any assailant or kidnapper66 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

that might come upon us; for they sometimes took thoseopportunities of our parents absence, to attack and carry off asmany as they could seize. One day, as I was watching at the topof a tree in our yard, I saw one of those people come into theyard of our next neighbor but one, to kidnap, there being manystout young people in it. Immediately, on this, I gave the alarmof the rogue, and he was surrounded by the stoutest of them,who entangled him with cords, so that he could not escape tillsome of the grown people came and secured him.But alas, ere long, it was my turn to be attacked and to becarried off when none of our grown people were nigh. One day,when all our people were gone out to their works as usual, andonly I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two menand a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized usboth; and without giving us time to cry out, or make resistance,they stopped our mouths and ran off with us into the nearestwood. Here they tied our hands, and continued to carry us asfar as they could, till night came on, when we reached a smallhouse, where the robbers halted for refreshment, and spentthe night. We were then unbound, but were unable to takeany food; and, being quite overpowered by fatigue and grief,our only relief was some sleep, which allayed our misfortunefor a short time. The next morning we left the house, andcontinued traveling all the day. For a long time we had keptthe woods, but at last we came into a road which I believedI knew. I now had some hopes of being delivered; for we hadadvanced but a little way when I discovered some people at adistance, on which I began to cry out for their assistance; butmy cries had no other effect than to make them tie me fasterand stop my mouth, and then they put me into a large sack.They also stopped my sister’s mouth and tied her hands; and inthis manner we proceeded till we were out of the sight of thesepeople. When we went to rest the following night they offeredus some victuals, but we refused them; and the only comfortwe had was in being in one another’s arms all that night, andbathing each other with our tears.But alas! we were soon deprived of even the small comfort ofweeping together. The next day proved a day of greater sorrowthan I had yet experienced; for my sister and I were thenseparated, while we lay clasped in each other’ s arms: it was invain that we besought them not to part us; she was torn fromme, and immediately carried away, while I was left in a state ofdistraction not to be described. I cried and grieved continually;and for several days did not eat any thing but what they forcedinto my mouth. At length, after many days traveling, duringwhich I had often changed masters, I got into the hands of achieftain, in a very pleasant country. This man had two wivesand some children, and they all used me extremely well, anddid all they could to comfort me; particularly the first wife,who was something like my mother. Although I was a greatmany days journey from my father’s house, yet these peoplespoke exactly the same language with us. This first masterof mine, as I may call him, was a smith...They were in somerespects not unlike the stoves here in gentlemen’s kitchens;and were covered over with leather; and in the middle of thatleather a stick was fixed, and a person stood up, and workedit, in the same manner as is done to pump water out of a caskwith a hand pump. I believe it was gold he worked, for it wasof a lovely bright yellow colour, and was worn by the womenon their wrists and ankles. I was there I suppose about a month,and they at last used to trust me some little distance from thehouse. This liberty I used in embracing every opportunity toinquire the way to my own home: and I also sometimes, forthe same purpose, went with the maidens, in the cool of theevenings, to bring pitchers of water from the springs for theuse of the house.I had also remarked where the sun rose in the morning, andset in the evening, as I had travelled along; and I had observedthat my father’s house was towards the rising of the sun. Itherefore determined to seize the first opportunity of makingmy escape, and to shape my course for that quarter; for I wasquite oppressed and weighed down by grief after my motherand friends; and my love of liberty, ever great, was strengthenedby the mortifying circumstance of not daring to eat with thefree-born children, although I was mostly their companion.—While I was projecting my escape one day, an unlucky eventhappened, which quite disconcerted my plan, and put an endto my hopes. I used to be sometimes employed in assisting anelderly woman slave to cook and take care of the poultry; andone morning while I was feeding some chickens, I happened totoss a small pebble at one of them, which hit it on the middle,and directly killed it. The oldslave, having soon after missed the chicken, inquired afterit; and on my relating the accident, (for I told her the truth,because my mother would never suffer me to tell a lie), sheflew into a violent passion, threatened that I should suffer forit; and, my master being out, she immediately went and toldher mistress what I had done. This alarmed me very much, andI expected an instant flogging, which to me was uncommonlydreadful; for I had seldom been beaten at home.I therefore resolved to fly; and accordingly I ran into a thicketthat was hard by, and hid myself in the bushes. Soon afterwardsmy mistress and the slave returned, and, not seeing me, theysearched all the house, but not finding me, and I not makinganswer when they called to me, they thought I had run away,and the whole neighborhood was raised in the pursuit of me. Inthat part of the country (as well as ours) the houses and villageswere skirted with woods or shrubberies, and the bushes wereso thick, that a man could readily conceal himself in them,so as to elude the strictest search. The neighbors continuedthe whole day looking for me, and several times many ofthem came within a few yards of the place where I lay hid. Iexpected every moment, when I heard a rustling among thetrees, to be found out, and punished by my master; but theynever discovered me, though they were often so near that I67

even heard their conjectures as they were looking about for me;and I now learned from them that any attempt to return homewould be hopeless. Most of them supposed I had fled towardshome; but the distance was so great, and the way so intricate,that they thought I could never reach it, and that I should belost in the woods. When I heard this I was seized with a violentpanic, and abandoned myself to despair. Night too began toapproach, and aggravated all my fears. I had before entertainedhopes of getting home, and had determined when it should bedark to make the attempt; but I was now convinced that it wasfruitless, and began to consider that, if possibly I could escapeall other animals, I could not those of the human kind; andthat, not knowing the way, I must perish in the woods.— Thuswas I like the hunted deer:“Ev’ry leaf, and e’v’ry whisp’ring breath “Convey’d a foe, andev’ry foe a death.”I heard frequent rustlings among the leaves; and being prettysure they were snakes, I expected every instant to be stungby them. This increased my anguish; and the horror of mysituation became now quite insupportable. I at length quittedthe thicket, very faint and hungry, for I had not eaten or drankanything all the day, and crept to my master’s kitchen, fromwhence I set out at first, and which was an open shed, andlaid myself down in the ashes with an anxious wish for deathto relieve me from all my pains. I was scarcely awake in themorning, when the old woman slave, who was the first up,came to light the fire, and saw me in the fireplace. She was verymuch surprised to see me, and could scarcely believe her owneyes. She now promised to intercede for me, and went for hermaster, who soon after came, and having lightly reprimandedme, ordered me to be taken care of, and not ill treated.Soon after this my master’s only daughter and child by his firstwife sickened and died, which affected him so much that forsome time he was almost frantic, and really would have killedhimself, had he not been watched and prevented. However, in asmall time afterwards he recovered and I was again sold. I wasnow carried to the left of the sun’s rising, through many drearywastes and dismal woods, amidst the hideous roaring of wildbeasts.—The people I was sold to used to carry me very often,when I was tired, either on their shoulders or on their backs. Isaw many convenient well-built sheds along the road, at properdistances, to accommodate the merchants and travellers, wholay in those buildings along with their wives, who often accompanythem; and they always go well armed.From the time I left my own nation I always found somebodythat understood me till I came to the sea coast. The languagesof different nations did not totally differ, nor were they socopious as those of the Europeans, particularly the English.They were therefore easily learned; and while I was journeyingthus through Africa, I acquired two or three different tongues.In this manner I had been travelling for a considerable time,when one evening to my great surprise, whom should I seebrought to the house where I was but my dear sister? As soonas she saw me she gave a loud shriek, and ran into my arms.I was quite overpowered: neither of us could speak, but, fora considerable time, clung to each other in mutual embraces,unable to do anything but weep. Our meeting affected all whosaw us; and indeed I must acknowledge, in honour of thosesable destroyers of human rights, that I never met with any illtreatment, or saw any offered to their slaves, except tying them,when necessary to keep them from running away. When thesepeople knew we were brother and sister, they indulged us to betogether; and the man, to whom I supposed we belonged, laywith us, he in the middle, while she and I held one another bythe hands across his breast all night; and thus for awhile weforgot our misfortunes in the joy of being together; but eventhis small comfort was soon to have an end; for scarcely had thefatal morning appeared, when she was again torn from me forever! I was now more miserable, if possible, than before. Thesmall relief which her presence gave me from pain was gone,and the wretchedness of my situation was redoubled by myanxiety after her fate, and my apprehensions lest her sufferingsshould be greater than mine, when I could not be with her toalleviate them. Yes, thou dear partner of my childish sports!thou sharer of my joys and sorrows! happy should I have everesteemed myself to encounter every misery for you, and toprocure your freedom by the sacrifice of my own! Though youwere early forced from my arms, your image has been alwaysriveted in my heart, from which neither time nor fortune havebeen able to remove it: so that, while the thoughts of yoursuffering have dampened my prosperity, they have mingledwith adversity and increased its bitterness.—To that Heavenwhich protects the weak from the strong, I commit the careof your innocence and virtue, if they have not already receivedtheir full reward, and if your youth and delicacy have not longsince fallenvictims to the violence of the African trader, the pestilentialstench of a Guinea ship, the seasoning in the European colonies,or the lash and lust of a brutal and unrelenting overseer.I did not long remain after my sister. I was again sold, andcarried through a number of places, till after travelling aconsiderable time, I came to a town called TinmTh, in the mostbeautiful country I had yet seen in Africa. It was extremelyrich, and there were many rivulets which flowed through it,and supplied a large pond in the centre of the town, where thepeople washed. Here I first saw and tasted cocoa nuts, whichI thought superior to any nuts I had ever tasted before; andthe trees which were loaded were also interspersed among thehouses, which had commodious shades adjoining, and were inthe same manner as ours, the insides being neatly plasteredand whitewashed. Here I also saw and tasted for the first time,sugar cane. Their money consisted of little white shells, the68 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

size of the finger nail. I was sold here for one hundred andseventy-two of them, by a merchant who lived and brought methere. I had been about two or three days at his house, when awealthy widow, a neighbor of his, came there one evening, andbrought with her an only son, a young gentleman about myown age and size. Here they saw me; and having taken a fancyto me, I was bought of the merchant, and went home withthem. Her house and premises were situated close to one ofthose rivulets I have mentioned, and were the finest I ever sawin Africa: they were very extensive, and she had a number ofslaves to attend her. The next day I was washed and perfumed,and when meal time came, I was led into the presence of mymistress, and ate and drank before her with her son. This filledme with astonishment; and I could scarce help expressingmy surprise that the young gentleman should suffer me, whowas bound, to eat with him who was free; and not only so butthat he would not at any time either eat or drink till I hadtaken first, because I was the eldest, which was agreeable toour custom. Indeed, everything here, and all their treatment ofme, made me forget that I was a slave. The language of thesepeople resembled ours so nearly, that we understood each otherperfectly. They had also the same customs as we. There werelikewise slaves daily to attend us, while my young master and I,with other boys, sported with our darts and bows and arrows,as I had been used to do at home. In this resemblance to myformer happy state, I passed about two months; and I nowbegan to think I was to be adopted into the family, and wasbeginning to be reconciled to my situation, and to forget bydegrees my misfortunes, when all at once the delusion vanished;for, without the least previous knowledge, one morning early,while my dear master and companion was still asleep, I wasawakened out of my reverie to fresh sorrow, and hurried awayeven amongst the uncircumcised.Thus at the very moment I dreamed of the greatest happiness,I found myself most miserable; and it seemed as if fortunewished to give me this taste of joy only to render the reversemore poignant.—The change I now experienced, was as painfulas it was sudden and unexpected. It was a change indeed, froma state of bliss to a scene which is inexpressible by me, as itdiscovered to me an element I had never before beheld, and tillthen had no idea of, and wherein such instances of hardshipand cruelty occurred, as I can never reflect on but with horror.All the nations and people I had hitherto passed through,resembled our own in their manners, customs and language;but I came at length to a country, the inhabitants of whichdiffered from us in all those particulars. I was very much struckwith this difference, especially when I came among a peoplewho did not circumcise, and ate without washing their hands.They cooked also in iron pots, and had European cutlassesand cross bows, which were unknown to us, and fought withtheir fists among themselves. Their women were not so modestas ours, for they ate and drank, and slept with their men.But, above all, I was amazed to see no sacrifices or offeringsamong them. In some of these places the people ornamentedthemselves with scars, and likewise filed their teeth very sharp.They wanted sometimes to ornament me in the same manner,but I would not suffer them; hoping that I might some timebe among a people who did not thus disfigure themselves,as I thought they did. At last I came to the banks of a largeriver which was covered with canoes, in which the peopleappeared to live with their household utensils, and provisionsof all kinds. I was beyond measure astonished at this, as I hadnever before seen any water larger than a pond or a rivulet: andmy surprise was mingled with no small fear when I was putinto one of these canoes, and we began to paddle and movealong the river. We continued going on thus till night, whenwe came to land, and made fires on the banks, each family bythemselves; some dragged their canoes on shore, others stayedand cooked in theirs, and laid in them all night. Those on theland had mats, of which they made tents, some in the shapeof little houses; in these we slept; and after the morning meal,we embarked again and proceeded as before. I was often verymuch astonished to see some of the women, as well as the men,jump into the water, dive to the bottom, come up again, andswim about.—Thus I continued to travel, sometimes by land.sometimes by water, through different countries and variousnations, till, at the end of six or seven months after I had beenkidnapped, I arrived at the sea coast. It would be tedious anduninteresting to relate all the incidents which befell me duringthis journey, and which I have not yet forgotten; of the varioushands I passed through, and the manners and customs of allthe different people among whom I lived. I shall thereforeonly observe, that in all the places where I was, the soil wasexceedingly rich; the pumpkins, eadas, plaintains, yams, etc.,were in great abundance, and of incredible size. There werealso vast quantities of different gums, though not used for anypurpose, and every where a great deal of tobacco. The cottoneven grew quite wild, and there was plenty of red-wood. I sawno mechanics whatever in all the way, except such as I havementioned. The chief employment in all these countries wasagriculture, and both the males and females, as with us, werebrought up to it, and trained in the arts of war.The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on thecoast, was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then ridingat anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me withastonishment, which was soon converted into terror, when Iwas carried on board. I was immediately handled, and tossedup to see if I were sound, by some of the crew; and I was nowpersuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and thatthey were going to kill me. Their complexions, too, differing somuch from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke,(which was very different from any I had ever heard) unitedto confirm me in this belief. Indeed, such were the horrors69

of my views and fears at the moment, that, if ten thousandworlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with themall to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanestslave in my own country. When I looked round the ship too,and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a multitude ofblack people of every description chained together, every oneof their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I nolonger doubted of my fate; and quite overpowered with horrorand anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. WhenI recovered a little, I found some black people about me, whoI believed were some of those who had brought me on board,and had been receiving their pay; they talked to me in orderto cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to beeaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces andlong hair. They told me I was not: and one of the crew broughtme a small portion of spirituous liquor in a wine glass, but,being afraid of him, I would not take it out of his hand. One ofthe blacks, therefore, took it from him and gave it to me, and Itook a little down my palate, which, instead of reviving me, asthey thought it would, threw me into the greatest consternationat the strange feeling it produced, having never tasted any suchliquor before. Soon after this, the blacks who brought me onboard went off, and left me abandoned to despair.I now saw myself deprived of all chance of returning to mynative country, or even the least glimpse of hope of gaining theshore, which I now considered as friendly; and I even wishedfor my former slavery in preference to my present situation,which was filled with horrors of every kind, still heightened bymy ignorance of what I was to undergo. I was not long sufferedto indulge my grief, I was soon put down under the decks,and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I hadnever experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomenessof the stench and crying together, I became so sick and lowthat I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to tasteany thing. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieveme; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered meeatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fastby the hands, and laid me across, I think the windlass, andtied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. I had neverexperienced any thing of this kind before, and although notbeing used to the water, I naturally feared that element thefirst time I saw it, yet, nevertheless, could I have got over thenettings, I would have jumped over the side, but I could not;and besides, the crew used to watch us very closely who werenot chained down to the decks, lest we should leap into thewater; and I have seen some of these poor African prisonersmost severely cut, for attempting to do so, and hourly whippedfor not eating. This indeed was often the case with myself. In alittle time after, amongst the poor chained men, I found someof my own nation, which in a small degree gave ease to mymind. I inquired of these what was to be done with us? Theygave me to understand, we were to be carried to these whitepeople’s country to work for them. I then was a little revived,and thought, if it were no worse than working, my situationwas not so desperate; but still I feared I should be put to death,the white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage amanner; for I had never seen among any people such instancesof brutal cruelty; and this not only shown towards us blacks,but also to some of the whites themselves. One white manin particular I saw, when we were permitted to be on deck,flogged so unmercifully with a large rope near the foremast,that he died in consequence of it; and they tossed him over theside as they would have done a brute. This made me fear thesepeople the more; and I expected nothing less than to be treatedin the same manner. I could not help expressing my fears andapprehensions to some of my countrymen; I asked them ifthese people had no country, but lived in this hollow place? (theship) they told me they did not, but came from a distant one.“Then,” said I, “how comes it in all our country we never heardof them?” They told me because they lived so very far off. I thenasked where were their women? had they any like themselves?I was told they had. “And why,” said I, “do we not see them?”They answered, because they were left behind. I asked how thevessel could go? they told me they could not tell; but that therewas cloth put upon the masts by the help of the ropes I saw,and then the vessel went on; and the white men had some spellor magic they put in the water when they liked in order tostop the vessel. I was exceedingly amazed at this account, andreally thought they were spirits. I therefore wished much to befrom amongst them, for I expected they would sacrifice me;but my wishes were vain, for we were so quartered that it wasimpossible for any of us to make our escape.While we stayed on the coast I was mostly on deck; and one day,to my great astonishment, I saw one of these vessels coming inwith the sails up. As soon as the whites saw it, they gave a greatshout, at which we were amazed; and the more so, as the vesselappeared larger by approaching nearer. At last, she came to ananchor in my sight, and when the anchor was let go, I and mycountrymen who saw it, were lost in astonishment to observethe vessel stop, and were now convinced it was done by magic.Soon after this the other ship got her boats out, and they cameon board of us, and the people of both ships seemed very gladto see each other.—Several of the strangers also shook handswith us black people, and made motions with their hands,signifying, I suppose, we were to go to their country, but wedid not understand them.At last, when the ship was loaded with all her cargo, they madeready with many fearful noises, and we were all putunder deck, so that we could not see how they managed thevessel. But this disappointment was the least of my sorrow.The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so70 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain therefor any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay onthe deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargowere confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. Thecloseness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to thenumber in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcelyroom to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This producedcopious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit forrespiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought ona sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus fallingvictims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of theirpurchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated bythe falling of the chains, now become insupportable; and thefilth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell,and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, andthe groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horroralmost inconceivable. Happily perhaps, for myself, I was soonreduced so low here that it was thought necessary to keep mealmost always on deck; and from my extreme youth I was notput in fetters. In this situation I expected every hour to sharethe fate of my companions, some of whom were almost dailybrought upon the deck at the point of death, which I beganto hope would soon put an end to my miseries. Often did Ithink many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happythan myself. I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and asoften wished I could change my condition for theirs. Everycircumstance I met with, served only to render my state morepainful, and heightened my apprehensions, and my opinion ofthe cruelty of the whites.One day they had taken a number of fishes; and when they hadkilled and satisfied themselves with as many as they thoughtfit, to our astonishment, who were on deck, rather than giveany of them to us to eat, as we expected, they tossed theremaining fish into the sea again, although we begged andprayed for some as well as we could, but in vain; and someof my countrymen, being pressed by hunger, took an opportunity,when they thought no one saw them, of trying to geta little privately; but they were discovered, and the attemptprocured them some very severe floggings. One day, whenwe had a smooth sea and moderate wind, two of my weariedcountrymen who were chained together, (I was near them at thetime,) preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow madethrough the nettings and jumped into the sea: immediately,another quite dejected fellow, who, on account of his illness,was suffered to be out of irons, also followed their example;and I believe many more would very soon have done the same,if they had not been prevented by the ship’s crew, who wereinstantly alarmed. Those of us that were the most active, werein a moment put down under the deck, and there was such anoise and confusion amongst the people of the ship as I neverheard before, to stop her and get the boat out to go after theslaves. However, two of the wretched were drowned, but theygot the other, and afterwards flogged him unmercifully, forthus attempting to prefer death to slavery. In this manner wecontinued to undergo more hardships than I can now relate,hardships which are inseparable from this accursed trade.Many a time we were near suffocation from the want of freshair, which we were often without for whole days together. Thisand the stench of the necessary tubs, carried off many.During our passage, I first saw flying fishes, which surprisedme very much; they used frequently to fly across the ship, andmany of them fell on the deck. I also now first saw the use ofthe quadrant; I had often with astonishment seen the marinersmake observations with it, and I could not think what it meant.They at last took notice of my surprise; and one of them,willing to increase it, as well as to gratify my curiosity, mademe one day look through it. The clouds appeared to me to beland, which disappeared as they passed along. This heightenedmy wonder; and I was now more persuaded than ever, thatI was in another world, and that every thing about me wasmagic. At last, we came in sight of the island of Barbadoes,at which the whites on board gave a great shout, and mademany signs of joy to us. We did not know what to think of this;but as the vessel drew nearer, we plainly saw the harbor, andother ships of different kinds and sizes, and we soon anchoredamongst them, off Bridgetown. Many merchants and plantersnow came on board, though it was in the evening. They putus in separate parcels, and examined us attentively. They alsomade us jump, and pointed to the land, signifying we were togo there. We thought by this, we should be eaten by these uglymen, as they appeared to us; and, when soon after we were allput down under the deck again, there was much dread andtrembling among us, and nothing but bitter cries to be heardall the night from these apprehensions, insomuch that at lastthe white people got some old slaves from the land to pacifyus. They told us we were not to bc eaten, but to work, and weresoon to go on land, where we should see many of our countrypeople. This report eased us much. And sure enough, soon afterwe were landed, there came to us Africans of all languages.We were conducted immediately to the merchant’s yard, wherewe were all pent up together, like so many sheep in a fold,without regard to sex or age. As every object was new to me,everything I saw filled me with surprise. What struck me first,was that the houses were built with bricks and stories, and inevery other respect different from those I had seen in Africa;but I was still more astonished on seeing people on horseback.I did not know what this could mean; and, indeed, I thoughtthese people were full of nothing but magical arts. While Iwas in this astonishment, one of my fellow—prisoners spoketo a countryman of his, about the horses, who said they werethe same kind they had in their country. I understood them,though they were from a distant part of Africa; and I thoughtit odd I had not seen any horses there; but afterwards, when71

I came to converse with different Africans, I found they hadmany horses amongst them, and much larger than those Ithen saw. We were not many days in the merchant’s custody,before we were sold after their usual manner, which isthis:—On a signal given, (as the beat of a drum,) the buyersrush at once into the yard where the slaves are confined, andmake choice of that parcel they like best. The noise and clamorwith which this is attended, and the eagerness visible in thecountenance of the buyers, serve not a little to increase theapprehension of terrified Africans, who may well be supposedto consider them as the ministers of that destruction to whichthey think themselves devoted. In this manner, withoutscruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them neverto see each other again. I remember in the vessel in which Iwas brought over, in the men’s apartment, there were severalbrothers, who, in the sale, were sold in different lots; and itwas very moving on this occasion, to see and hear their criesat parting. 0, ye nominal Christians! might not an African askyou—Learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Dounto all men as you would men should do unto you? Is it notenough that we are torn from our country and friends, to toilfor your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling belikewise sacrificed to your avarice? Are the dearest friends andrelations, now rendered more dear by their separation fromtheir kindred, still to be parted from each other, and thusprevented from cheering the gloom of slavery, with the smallcomfort of being together, and mingling their sufferings andsorrows? Why are parents to lose their children, brothers theirsisters, or husbands their wives? Surely, this is a new refinementin cruelty, which, while it has no advantage to atone for it,thus aggravates distress, and adds fresh horrors even to thewretchedness of slavery.Crèvecoeur: Letter IX Description ofCharles-Town; Thoughts on SlaveryThe following scene will I hope account for these melancholyreflections, and apologize for the gloomy thoughts with whichI have filled this letter: my mind is, and always has been,oppressed since I became a witness to it. I was not long sinceinvited to dine with a planter who lived three miles from-----,where he then resided. In order to avoid the heat of the sun, Iresolved to go on foot, sheltered in a small path, leading througha pleasant wood. I was leisurely travelling along, attentivelyexamining some peculiar plants which I had collected, whenall at once I felt the air strongly agitated; though the day wasperfectly calm and sultry. I immediately cast my eyes towardthe cleared ground, from which I was but at a small distance,in order to see whether it was not occasioned by a suddenshower; when at that instant a sound resembling a deep roughvoice, uttered, as I thought, a few inarticulate monosyllables.Alarmed and surprised, I precipitately looked all round, whenI perceived at about six rods distance something resembling acage, suspended to the limbs of a tree; all the branches of whichappeared covered with large birds of prey, fluttering about, andanxiously endeavoring to perch on the cage. Actuated by aninvoluntary motion of my hands, more than by any design ofmy mind, I fired at them; they all flew to a short distance, witha most hideous noise: when, horrid to think and painful torepeat, I perceived a negro, suspended in the cage, and left thereto expire! I shudder when I recollect that the birds had alreadypicked out his eyes, his cheek bones were bare; his arms hadbeen attacked in several places, and his body seemed coveredwith a multitude of wounds. From the edges of the hollowsockets and from the lacerations with which he was disfigured,the blood slowly dropped, and tinged the ground beneath. Nosooner were the birds flown, than swarms of insects coveredthe whole body of this unfortunate wretch, eager to feed on hismangled flesh and to drink his blood. I found myself suddenlyarrested by the power of affright and terror; my nerves wereconvulsed; I trembled, I stood motionless, involuntarilycontemplating the fate of this negro, in all its dismal latitude.The living spectre, though deprived of his eyes, could stilldistinctly hear, and in his uncouth dialect begged me to givehim some water to allay his thirst. Humanity herself would haverecoiled back with horror; she would have balanced whether tolessen such reliefless distress, or mercifully with one blow toend this dreadful scene of agonizing torture! Had I had a ballin my gun, I certainly should have dispatched him; but findingmyself unable to perform so kind an office, I sought, thoughtrembling, to relieve him as well as I could. A shell ready fixedto a pole, which had been used by some negroes, presenteditself to me; I filled it with water, and with trembling hands Iguided it to the quivering lips of the wretched sufferer. Urgedby the irresistible power of thirst, he endeavoured to meet it,72 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

as he instinctively guessed its approach by the noise it madein passing through the bars of the cage. “Tanke’, you white’man, tanke’ you, pute’ some’ poyson and give’ me.” How longhave you been hanging there? I asked him. “Two days, andme no die; the birds, the birds; aaahh me!” Oppressed withthe reflections which this shocking spectacle afforded me, Imustered strength enough to walk away, and soon reached thehouse at which I intended to dine. There I heard that the reasonfor this slave being thus punished, was on account of his havingkilled the overseer of the plantation. They told me that the lawsof self-preservation rendered such executions necessary; andsupported the doctrine of slavery with the arguments generallymade use of to justify the practice; with the repetition of whichI shall not trouble you at present.Adieu.DBQ: Comparing the New England andChesapeake RegionsAlthough New England and the Chesapeake region wereboth settled largely by people of English origin, by 1700 theregions had evolved into two distinct societies. Why did thisdifference in development occur?Use the documents AND your knowledge of the colonialperiod up to 1700 to develop your answer.Document ASource: John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity (Writtenon board the Arabela on the Atlantic Ocean, 1630)God Almighty in his most holy and wise providence hathso disposed of the condition of mankind, [that] in all timessome must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent powerand dignity, other mean and in subjection.... [Yet] we mustbe knit together in this work as one man. We must entertaineach other in brotherly affection, we must be willing toabridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together inall meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We mustdelight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoicetogether, mourn together, labor and suffer together, alwayshaving before our eyes our commission and community in thework, our community as members of the same body. So shallwe keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.... Wemust consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyesof all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely withour God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause himto withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a storyand a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouthsof enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, . . . shall shamethe faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause theirprayers to be turned into curses upon us.73

Document BSource: Ship’s List of Emigrants Bound for New EnglandWeymouth, the 20th of March, 16351. Joseph Hull, of Somerset, a minister, aged 40 years2. Agnes Hull, his wife, aged 25 years3. Joan Hull, his daughter, aged 15 years4. Joseph Hull, his son, aged 13 years5. Tristram, his son, aged I I years6. Efinbeth Hull, his daughter, aged 7 years7. Temperance, his daughter, aged 9 years8. Grissel Hull, his daughter, aged 5 years9. Dorothy Hull, his daughter, aged 3 years10. Judith French, his servant, aged 20 years11. John Wood, his servant, aged 20 years12. Robert Dabyn, his servant, aged 28 years13. Musachiell Bernard, of Batcombe, clothier in the countyof Somerset, 2414. Mary Bernard, his wife, aged 28 years15. John Bernard, his son, aged 3 years16. Nathaniel, his son, aged I year21. Timothy Tabor, in Somerset of Batcombe, tailor,aged 35 years22. Jane Tabor, his wife, aged 35 years23. Jane Tabor, his daughter, aged 10 years24. Anne Tabor, his daughter, aged 8 years25. Sarah Tabor, his daughter, aged 5 years26. William Fever, his servant, aged 20 years27. John Whitmarke, aged 39 years28. Alice Whitmarke, his wife, aged 35 years29. James Whitmarke, his son, aged 5 years30. Jane, his daughter, aged 7 years31. Onseph Whitmarke, his son, aged 5 years32. Rich. Whitmarke, his son, aged 2 years74. Robert Lovell, husbandman, aged 40 years75. Elizabeth Lovell, his wife, aged 35 years76. Zacheus Lovell, his son, aged 15 years77. Anne Lovell, his daughter, aged 16 years78. John Lovell, his son, aged 8 years79. Ellyn, his daughter, aged I year80. James, his son, aged I year81. Joseph Chickin, his servant, 16 years82. Alice Kinham, aged 22 years83. Angell Hollard, aged 21 years84. Katheryn, his wife, 22 years85. George Land, his servant, 22 years86. Sarah Land, his kinswoman, 18 years103. John Hoble, husbandman, 13104. Robert Huste, husbandman, 40John Porter, Deputy Clerk (o Edward ThoroughgoodDocument CSource: Ship’s List of Emigrants Bound for Virginia UltimoJuly 1635These underwritten names are to be transported to Virginia,embarked in the Merchant’s Hope, Hugh Weston, Master,per examination by the minister of Gravesend touching theirconformity to the Church discipline of England, and havetaken the oaths of allegiance and supremacy:Edward Towers 26 Allin King 19Henry Woodman 22 Rowland Sadler 19Richard Seems 26 Jo. Phillips 28Vyncent Whatter 17 Daniel Endick 16James Whithedd 14 Jo. Chalk 25Jonas Watts 21 Jo. Vynall 20Peter Loe 22 Edward Smith 20Geo. Brocker 17 Jo. Rowfidge 19Henry Eelcs 26 Wm. Westlie 40Jo. Dennis 22 Jo. Smith 18Tho. Swayne 23 Jo. Saunders 22Charles Rinsden 27 Tho. Bartcherd 16Jo. Exston 17 Tho. Dodderidge 19Wm. Luck 14 Richard Williams 18Jo. Thomas 19 Jo. Ballance 19Jo. Archer 21 Wm. Baidin 21Richard Williams 25 Wm. Pen 26Francis Hutton 20 Jo. Gerie 24Savill Gascoyne 29 Henry Baylie 18Rich. Bulfell 29 Rich. Anderson 50Rich. Jones 26 Robert Kelum 51Tho. Wynes 30 Richard Fanshaw 22Humphrey Williams 22 Tho. Bradford 40Edward Roberts 20 Wm. Spencer 16Martin Atkinson 32 Martnaduke Ella 22Edward Atkinson 28Wm. Edwards 30 WomenNathan Braddock 31 Ann Swayne 22Jeffrey Gurrish 23 Eliz. Cote 22Henry Carrell 16 Ann Rice 23Tho. Tyle 24 Kat. Wilson 23Gamahel White 24 Maudlin Lloyd 24Richard Marks 19 Mabell Busher 14Tho. Clever 16 Annis Hopkins 24Jo. Kitchin 16 Ann Mason 24Edmond Edwards 20 Bridget Crompe 18Lewes Miles 19 Mary Hawkes 19Jo. Kennedy 20 Ellin Hawkes 18Sam Jackson 2474 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Document DSource: Articles of Agreement, Springfield, Massachusetts,1636We whose names are underwritten, being by God’s providenceengaged together to make aplantation ... do mutually agree to certain articles and orders tobe observed and kept by us and by our successors....1. We intend by God’s grace, as soon as we can, with allconvenient speed, to procure some Godly and faithful ministerwith whom we purpose to join in church covenant to walk inall the ways of Christ.2. We intend that our town shall be composed of fortyfamilies.... rich and poor.3. That every inhabitant shall have a convenient proportionfor a house lot, as we shall see [fit] for everyone’s quality andestate....5. That everyone shall have a share of the meadow or plantingground....Documemt ESource: Wage and Price Regulations in Connecticut, 1676Whereas a great cry of oppression is heard among us, and thatprincipally pointed at workmen and traders, which is hardto regulate without a standard for pay, it is therefore orderedthat ... [prices and wages] be duly set at each of our GeneralCourts annually, . . . [All breaches of this order to be punishedproportional to the value of the oppression.... This court ... in theinterim recommends [that] all tradesmen and laborers considerthe religious end of their callings, which is that receiving suchmoderate profit as may enable them to serve God and theirneighbors with their arts and trades comfortably, they do notenrich themselves suddenly and inordinately (by oppressingprices and wages to the impoverishing [of] their neighbors ...live in the practice of that crying sin of oppression, but avoid it.Document FSource: Captain John Smith, History of Virginia, 1624When the [large ship] departed, . . . those of us that had money,spare clothes, credit to give bills of payment, gold rings, fur,or any such commodities, were ever welcome to [purchasesupplies. The rest of us patiently obeyed our] vile commandersand [bought] our provisions at fifteen times the value, . . . yetdid not repine but fasted, lest we should incur the censure of[being] factious and seditious persons.... Our ordinary [food]was but meal and water so that this ... little relieved our wants,whereby with the extremity of the bitter cold frost ... morethan half of us died.The worst [among us were the gold seekers who] with theirgolden promises made all men their slaves in hope ofrecompenses. There was no talk ... but dig gold, wash gold,refine gold, load gold.... Smith, perceiving [we lived] fromhand to mouth, caused the pinnace [small ship] to be providedwith things fitting to get provision for the year following.[Two councilors] Wingfield and Kendall, . . . strengthenedthemselves with the sailors and other confederates [andplanned to go] aboard the pinnace to alter her course and togo for England.Smith had the plot discovered to him. Much trouble he had toprevent it, till with store of musket shot he forced them tostay or sink in the river; which action cost the life of CaptainKendall. These brawls are so disgusting, as some will say, theywere better forgotten.Document GSource: Governor Berkeley and His Council on Their Inabilityto Defend Virginia Against a Dutch Attack, December 1673We thought it our duty ... to set forth in this our Declaration,the true state and condition of this country in general andour particular ... disability to ... [engage in] war at the timeof this invasion [by the Dutch].... [We] therefore do mosthumbly beseech your majesty and your most honorable councilto consider that Virginia is intersected by so many vast riversas makes more miles to defend than we have men of trust todefend them. For by our nearest computation we leave at ourbacks as many servants (besides Negroes) as there are freemento defend the shores and all our frontiers [against] the Indians....[This] gives men fearful apprehensions of the danger they leavetheir estates and families in, while they are drawn from theirhouses to defend the borders. Also at least one third [of thefreemen available for defense] are single freemen (whose laborwill hardly maintain them) or men much in debt, . . . [whom] we75

may reasonably expect upon any small advantage the enemy maygain upon us, . . . [to defect] to them in hopes of bettering theircondition by sharing the plunder of the country with them.Document HSource: Bacon’s “Manifesto,” justifying his rebellion againstVirginia Governor Berkeley in 1676We (cannot in our hearts find one single spot of rebellion ortreason or that we have in any manner aimed at subvertingthe settled government.... All people in all places where wehave yet been can attest our civil, quiet, peaceable behavior fardifferent from that of rebellion.... Let truth be bold and all theworld know the real foundations of pretended guilt.... Let ustrace ... [the] men in authority and favor to whose hands thedispensation of the country’s] wealth has been committed. Letus observe the sudden rise of their estates ... [compared] withthe quality in which they first entered this country. Let usconsider their sudden advancement. And let us also considerwhether any public work for our safety and defense or for theadvancement and propagation of trade, liberal arts or sciencesis in any [way) adequate to our vast charge. Now let us comparethese things together and see what sponges have sucked up thepublic treasure and whether it has not been privately contrivedaway by unworthy favorites and juggling parasites whosetottering fortunes have been repaired and supported at thepublic charge.The Quest for Gentility inPre-Revolutionary AmericaDocument A - Excerpts from John Locke, “Some ThoughtsConcerning Education”...The other part of ill-breeding lies in the appearance of toolittle care of pleasing or showing respect to those we have to dowith. To avoid this two things are requisite: first, a dispositionof mind not to offend others; and secondly, the most acceptableand agreeable way of expressing that disposition. From the one,men are called civil; from the other, well-fashioned. The latterof these is that decency and gracefulness of looks, voice, words,motions, gestures, and of all the whole outward demeanor,which takes in company, and makes those with whom weconverse easy and well pleased. This is, as it were, the languagewhereby that internal civility of the mind is expressed; which,as other languages are, being much governed by the fashionand custom of every country, must, in the rules and practice ofit, be learned chiefly of observation, and the carriage of thosewho are allowed to be exactly well-bred. ...I shall take note offour qualities, that are most directly opposite to this first andmost taking of all the social virtues...The first is, a natural roughness, which makes a manuncomplaisant to others, so that he has not deference for theirinclinations, tempers, or conditions. It is the sure badge of aclown, not to mind what pleases those he is with; and yet onemay often find a man, in fashionable clothes, give an unboundedswing to his own humor, and suffer it to jostle or over-runanyone that stands in his way, with a perfect indifference howthey take it. This is a brutality that everyone sees and abhors,and nobody can be easy with: and therefore this finds no placein anyone, who would be thought to have the least tincture ofgood breeding. For the end and the business of good breedingis to supple the natural stiffness, and so soften men’s tempers,that they may bend to a compliance, and accommodatethemselves to those they have to do with.(§143)I say that, when you consider the breeding of your son, and arelooking for a schoolmaster, or tutor, you would not have (as isusual) Latin and logic only in your thoughts. Learning mustbe had, but in the second place, as subservient only to greaterqualities. Seek out somebody, that may know how discreetlyto frame his manners: place him in hands, where you may, amuch as possible, secure his innocence, cherish and nurse upthe good, and gently correct and weed out any bad inclinations,and settle him in good habits....(§147)Document B - Earl of Chesterfield, “Letters to His Son on theFine Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman,”an etiquette book popular in 18th Century America76 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Next to manners are the exterior graces of person and address,which adorn manners, as manners adorn knowledge. To saythat they please, engage, and charm, as they most indisputablydo, is saying that one should do everything possible to acquirethem. The graceful manner of speaking is, particularly, what Ishall always holler in your ears, as Hotspur hollered Mortimerto Herny IV, and, like him too, I have simmer to have a starlingtaught to say, speak distinctly and gracefully...(p. 86)If care and applications are necessary are necessary to theacquiring of those qualifications, without which you can neverbe considerable, or make a figure in the world, they are not lessnecessary with regard to the lesser accomplishments, whichare requisite to making you agreeable and pleasing in society.In truth, whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well;and nothing can be done well without attention; I thereforecarry the necessity of attention down to the lowest things, evento dancing and to dress. Custom has made dancing sometimesnecessary for a young man,; therefore, mind it while you learnit that you may learn to do it well, and not be ridiculous, thoughin a ridiculous act. Dress is of the same nature; you must dress;therefore attend to it; not in order to rival or to excel a fop init, but in order to avoid singularity, and consequently ridicule.Take great care to be dressed like reasonable people of yourown age, in the place where you are; whose dress is neverspoken of in one way or another, as either too negligent or toomuch studied.(p 2-3)I am most affected to letters upon your subject; the one fromMadame St. Germain, and the other from Monsieur Pampigne;they both give so good an account of you...They write that youare not only decorous, but tolerably well-bred, and that theEnglish crust of awkward bashfulness, shyness, and roughness(of which , by the bye, you had your share) is pretty well rubbedoff. I am most heartily glad of it, for, as I have often told you,those lesser talents, of an engaging, insinuating manner, aneasy good breeding, a genteel behavior and address, are ofinfinitely more advantage than they are generally thought tobe...Virtue and learning, like gold, have their intrinsic value,but if they are not polished, they certainly lose a great dealof their luster; and even polished brass will pass upon morepeople than rough gold.( p. 10)I send you here enclosed the draft of the letter which I wouldhave you write to her. I would hope that you will not be offendedat my offering you my assistance upon this occasion; becauseI presume, as yet, you are not much used to write to ladies. Apropos of letter writing, the best models that you can formyourself upon are, Cicero, Cardinal D’Ossar, Madame Sevigne,and Comte Bussy Rebutin. Cicero’s epistles to Atticus, and tohis familiar friends, are the nest examples that you can imitate,in the friendly and familiar style. The simplicity and clearnessof Cardinal D’Ossat’s letters show how letters of businessought to be written; no affected turns, no attempts at wit...For gay and amusing letters, there are none that equal CompteBussy’s and Madame Sevigne’s. They are so natural, that theyseem to be the extempore conversations of two people of wit,rather than letters which are commonly studied.(p. 17 ). . . I remind you, that it will be to a very little purpose foryou to frequent good company, if you do not conform to, andlearn their manners; if you are not attentive to please, and wellbred, with the easiness of a man of fashion. As you must attendto your manners, you must not neglect your person; but takecare to be very clean, well-dressed, and genteel; to have nodisagreeable attitudes, nor awkward tricks...Do take care tokeep your teeth very clean, by washing them constantly everymorning, and after every meal?...Do you dress well, and nottoo well? Do you consider your air and manner of presentingyourself enough, and not too much? Neither negligent or stiff?All these things deserve a degree of care; they give an additionallustre to real merit...A pleasing figure is the perpetual letterof recommendation. It certainly is an agreeable forerunner ofmerit, and smoothes the way for it. (p. 18)Have a real reserve with almost everybody; have a seemingreserve with almost nobody; for it is very disagreeable to seemreserved, and very dangerous not to be so. Few people find thetrue medium; many are ridiculously mysterious and reservedupon trifles; and many imprudently communicative of allthey know. The next thing to your choice of friends, is thechoice of your company. Endeavor, as much as you can, to keepcompany with those above you: there you rise, as much as yousink with people below you; for you are whatever the companyyou keep is...What I mean by low company, which should byall means be avoided, is the company of those, who, absolutelyinsignificant and contemptible in themselves, think they arebeing honored by being in your company, an who flatter everyvice and every folly that you have, in order to engage you toconverse with them. . . (p. 25)The art of pleasing is a very necessary one to possess, but a verydifficult one to acquire. It can hardly be reduced to rules; andyour own good sense and observation will teach you more of itthan I can...Observe carefully what pleases you in others. andprobably the same thing in you will please others...Take thetone of the company you are in, and do not pretend to give it;be serious, gay, or even trifling, as you find the present humorof your company; this is an attention due from every individualto the majority. Do not tell stories in company; there is nothingmore tedious and disagreeable; if by chance you know a shortstory, and exceedingly applicable to the present subject ofconversation, tell it in as few words as possible; and even then,throw out that you do not love to tell stories; but that theshortness of it tempted you. Of all things, banish egotism outof your conversation, and never think of entertaining peoplewith your own personal concerns, or private affairs; thoughthey are interesting to you, they are tedious and impertinent77

to everybody else...Avoid the silly preamble, ‘I will tell you anexcellent thing,’ or, ‘I will tell you the best thing in the world.’This raises expectations, which when absolutely disappointed,make the relater of this excellent thing look, very deservedly,like a fool. If you would particularly people, whether men orwomen, endeavor to find the predominant excellency, if theyhave one, and their prevailing weakness, which everybody has,and do justice to the one, and something more than justice tothe other. Men have various objects in which they may excel,or at least would be thought to excel, and though they love tohear justice done to them, where they know that they excel,yet they are most and best flattered upon those points wherethey wish to excel, and yet are doubtful whether they do ornot...Women have but one object in general, which is theirbeauty; upon which, scarce any flattery is too gross for them toswallow. Nature has hardly formed a woman ugly enough to beinsensible to flattery upon her person. . .( p. 28)There is another species of learned men, whom though lessdogmatical and supercilious, are not less impertinent. Theseare the communicative and shining pedants, who adorn theirconversation by happy quotations of Greek and Latin, and whohave contracted such a familiarity with Greek and Romanauthors, that they call them by certain names or epithetsdenoting intimacy...These can be imitated by coxcombs, whichhave no learning at all, but who have got some names and somescraps of ancient authors by heart, which they improperly andimpertinently retail in all companies, in hopes of passing forscholars. If, therefore, you hope to avoid the accusation ofpedantry on the one hand, or the suspicion of ignorance on theother, abstain from learned ostentation. Speak the languageof the company that you are in; speak it purely, and unlardedwith any other. Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than thepeople you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in aprivate pocket: and do not pull it and strike it, merely to showthat you have one. If you are asked what o’clock it is, tell it; butdo not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman.(p.53)Having mentioned laughing, I must particularly warn youagainst it; and I could heartily wish, they you may often beseen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live. Frequentand loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and in manners;it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy atsilly things, and they call it being merry. In my mind, there isnothing so illiberal, and so ill bred, as audible laughter. Truewit, or sense, never yet made anybody laugh; they are above it...I know a man of very good parts, Mr. Waller, who cannot saythe commonest thing without laughing; which makes thosewho do not know him, take him at first for a natural fool...Theyare ashamed in his company, and so disconcerted that they donot know what to do...These (vulgar habits and awkwardness),though not criminal indeed, are most carefully to be guardedagainst, as they are great bars in the way of the art of pleasing.Remember that to please is almost to prevail, or at least anecessary pervious step to it. You, who have your fortune tomake, should more particularly study this art.( p. 58)I do not doubt that you are improved in your manners by theshort visit that you have made at Dresden, and the other courts,which I intend that you should be better acquainted with, willgradually smooth you up to the highest polish...The manner ofdoing things is often more important than the things themselves;and the very same thing may either be pleasing or offensive, bythe manner of your saying or doing it. Materiam superabat opus,is often said of works of sculpture...(p. 72)People of low, obscure education cannot stand the rays ofgreatness, they are frightened out of their wits when kings andgreat men speak to them; they are awkward, ashamed, anddon’t know what to answer; whereas les honnetes gens are notdazzled by superior rank: they know, and pay all the respectthat is due to it, but they do it without being disconcerted, andcan converse just as easily with a king as with any one of hissubjects...The characteristic of a well-bred man is to conversewith his inferiors without insolence, and with his superiors withrespect and ease. He talks to kings without concern, without theleast concern of mind or awkwardness of body. Awkwardness ofcarriage is very alienating; and a total negligence of dress and airis an impertinent insult to custom and fashion. Your exercisesof riding, fencing, and dancing, will civilize and fashion yourbodies and limbs, and give you, an air of the gentlemen. (p. 74)Document C - Excerpt from Edmund Burke, “A PhilosophicalEnquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and theBeautiful”The next property constantly observable in such objects isSmoothness. A quality so essential to beauty, that I do not nowrecollect anything beautiful that is not smooth. In trees andflowers, smooth leaves are beautiful; smooth slopes of earth ingardens; smooth streams in the landscape; smooth coats of birdsand beasts, in fine women, in smooth skins; and in several sortsof ornamental furniture, in its smooth and polished surfaces. Avery considerable part of the effect of beauty is owing to thisquality; indeed the most considerable. For take any beautifulobject, and give it a broken and rugged surface, and however wellformed it may be in other respects, it pleases no longer. Whereaslet it want ever so many of the other constituents, if it wants notthis, it becomes more pleasing than almost all others withoutit. This seems to me so evident, that I am a good deal surprised,that not who have handled the subject have made any mentionof the quality of smoothness in the enumeration of those thatgo to the forming of beauty. For indeed any ruggedness, anysudden projection, any sharp angle, is in the highest degreecontrary to that idea.78 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Howard Zinn: Columbus, the Indians, andHuman ProgressArawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder,emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches andswam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. WhenColumbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords,speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought themfood, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and manyother things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’bells. They willingly traded everything they owned.... They werewell-built, with good bodies and handsome features. . . . They donot bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword,they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. Theyhave no iron. Their spears are made of cane. They would make fineservants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and makethem do whatever we want.These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indianson the mainland, who were remarkable (Europeans observerswere to say again and again) for their hospitality, their beliefin sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe ofthe Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes,the government of kings, the frenzy for money that markedWestern civilization and its first messenger to the Americas,Christopher Columbus.Columbus wrote:As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which Ifound, I took some of the natives by force in order that theymight learn and might give me information of whatever thereis in these parts.The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where isthe gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain tofinance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expectedwould be on the other side of the Atlantic--the Indies and Asia,gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his time, heknew the world was round and he could sail west in order toget to the Far East.Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states,like France, England, and Portugal. Its population, mostlypoor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent ofthe population and owned 95 percent of the land. Spain hadtied itself to the Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews, drivenout the Moors. Like other states of the modern world, Spainsought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth,more useful than land because it could buy anything.There was gold in Asia, it was thought, and certainly silks andspices, for Marco Polo and others had brought back marvelousthings from their overland expeditions centuries before. Nowthat the Turks had conquered Constantinople and the easternMediterranean, and controlled the land routes to Asia, a searoute was needed. Portuguese sailors were working their wayaround the southern tip of Africa. Spain decided to gamble ona long sail across an unknown ocean.In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promisedColumbus 10 percent of the profits, governorship over newfoundlands, and the fame that would go with a new title:Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He was a merchant’s clerk fromthe Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver (the son of a skilledweaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three sailing ships,the largest of which was the Santa Maria. perhaps 100 feetlong, and thirty-nine crew members.Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which wasthousands of miles farther away than he had calculated,imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed bythat great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of theway there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land that laybetween Europe and Asia--thc Americas. It was early October1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left theCanary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they sawbranches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks ofbirds. These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailorcalled Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining on whitesands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, theCaribbean sea. The first man to sight land was supposed toget a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigonever got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the eveningbefore. He got the reward.So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians,who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in villagecommunes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava.They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or workanimals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornamentsin their ears.This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus totake some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insistedthat they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailedto what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island whichtoday consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There,bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented toColumbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of goldfields.On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, whichhad run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first Europeanmilitary base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad(Christmas) and left thirty-nine crewmembers there, withinstructions to find and store the gold. He took more IndianPrisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. Atone part of the island he got into a fight with Indians whorefused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his menwanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death.79

Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain.When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die.Columbus’s report to the Court in Madrid was extravagant.He insisted he had reached Asia (it was Cuba) and an islandoff the coast of China (Hispaniola). His descriptions were partfact, part fiction:Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains andpastures, are both fertile and beautiful, the harbors areunbelievably good and there are many wide rivers of which themajority contain gold. . . . There are many spices, and greatmines of gold and other metals.The Indians, Columbus reported, “are so naive and so freewith their Possessions that no one who has not witnessed themwould believe it. When you ask for something they have, theynever say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.. ..“ He concluded his report by asking for a little help from theirMajesties, and in return he would bring them from his nextvoyage “as much gold as they need and as many slaves as theyask.” He was full of religious talk: “Thus the eternal God, ourLord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparentimpossibilities.”Because of Columbus’s exaggerated report and promises, hisSecond expedition was given seventeen ships and more thantwelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. Theywent from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indiansas captives. But as word spread of the Europeans’ intent theyfound more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they foundthat the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed ina battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island ingangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slavesfor sex and labor.Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition afterexpedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, buthad to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kindof dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid,rounded up fifteen hundred Anawak men, women, and children,put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then pickedthe five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of thosefive hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alivein Spain and were put up for sail by the archdeacon of the town,who reported that, although the slaves were “naked as the daythey were born,” they showed “no more embarrassment thananimals. Columbus later wrote: “Let us in the name of theHoly Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus,desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, hadto make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In theprovince of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imaginedhuge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteenyears or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every threemonths. When they brought it, they were given copper tokensto hang around their necks. Indians found without a coppertoken had their hands cut off and bled to death.The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only goldaround was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So theyfled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks facedSpaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When theSpaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them todeath. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassavapoison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards.In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half ofthe 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indianswere taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later asencomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and diedby the thousands.By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indiansleft. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendantsleft on the island.The chief source and, on many matters the only sourceof information about what happened on the islands afterColumbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a youngpriest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time heowned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gavethat up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. LasCasas transcribed Columbus’s journal and, in his fifties, begana multi-volume History of the Indies. In it he describes theIndians. They are agile, he says, and can swim long distances,especially the women. They are not completely peaceful,because they do battle from time to time with other tribes,but their casualties seem small, and they fight when they areindividually moved to do so because of some grievance, not onthe Orders of captains or kings.Women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle theSpaniards Las Casas describes sex relations:Marriage laws are non-existent: men and women alikechoose their mates and leave them as they please withoutoffense, jealousy or anger. They multiply in great abundance,pregnant women work to the last minute and give birth almostpainlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the river and are asclean and healthy as before giving birth. If they tire of theirmen, they give themselves abortions with herbs that forcestillbirths, covering their shameful parts with leaves or cottoncloth; although on the whole, Indian men and women lookupon total nakedness with as much casualness as we look upona man’s head or at his hands.The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion, at least notemples. They live in large communal bell-shaped buildings,housing up to 600 people at one time ... made of very strongwood and roofed with palm leaves.... They prize bird feathersof various colors, beads made of fishbones, and green and whiteStones with which they adorn their ears and lips, but theyput no value on gold and other precious things. They lack allmanner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and relyexclusively on their natural environment for maintenance.They are extremely generous with their possessions and by the80 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

same token covet the possessions of their friend: and expectthe same degree of liberality.In Book Two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at firsturged replacing Indians by black slaves, thinking they werestronger and would survive, but later relented when he saw theeffects on blacks) tells about the treatment of the Indians bythe Spaniards. It is a unique account and deserves to be quotedat length:Endless testimonies. . prove the mild and pacific temperamentof the natives. . . But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill,mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to killone of us now and then. . The admiral, it is true, was blind asthose who came after him, and he was so anxious to please theKing that he committed reparable crimes against the Indians.Las Casas tells how the Spaniards “grew more conceited everyday” and after a while refused to walk any distance. They “rodethe back of Indians if they were in a hurry” or were carried onhammocks by Indians running in relays. “In this case they alsohad Indians carry large leaves to shade them from the sun andoften to fan them with goose wings.”Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards “thoughtnothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cuttingslices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.’ Las Cassastells how “two of these so-called Christians met two Indianboys one day, each carryinga parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.”The Indians’ attempts to defend themselves failed. And whenthey ran off into the hills they were found and killed. So, LasCassas reports, “they suffered and died in the mines and otherlabors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world towhom they could turn for help.” He describes their work inthe mines:Mountains are stripped from top to bottom and bottom to topa thousand times; they dig & split rocks, move stones and carrydirt on their backs to wash it in the rivers, while those whowash gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bentso constantly it breaks them; and when water invades the mines,the most arduous task of all is to dry the mines by scooping uppans-full of water and throwing it up outside.After each six or eight months’ work in the mines, which wasthe time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting,up to a third of the men died.While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, thewives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating jobof digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eightor ten months and when they met they were so exhausted anddepressed on both sides . . . they ceased to procreate. As for thenewly born, they died early because their mothers, overworkedand famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason,while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Somemothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation. . .In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work,and children died from lack of milk. . . and in a short timethis land which was so great, so powerful and fertile. . . wasdepopulated.. . . My eyes have seen these acts so foreign tohuman nature, and now I tremble as I write.When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says,“there were 60,000 people living on this island, includingthe Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three millionpeople had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Whoin future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as aknowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it...Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of theEuropean invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas.That beginning, when you read Las Casas -- even if his figuresare exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians to begin with,as he says, or 250,000, as modern historians calculate?)--isconquest, slavery, death. When we read the history booksgiven to children in the United States, it all starts with heroicadventure--there is no bloodshed—and Columbus Day is acelebration.Past the elementary and high schools, there are only occasionalhints of something else. Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvardhistorian, was the most distinguished writer on Columbus, theauthor of a multi-volume biography, and was himself a sailorwho retraced Columbus’s route across the Atlantic. In hispopular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954,he tells about the enslavement and the killing:“The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by hissuccessors resulted in complete genocide.”That is on one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grandromance. In the book’s last paragraph, Morison sums up hisview of Columbus:He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely thedefects of the qualities that made him great—his indomitablewill, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as theChrist-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistencedespite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was noflaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of allhis qualities --his seamanship.One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit factswhich might lead to unacceptable conclusions. Morison doesneither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omitthe story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with theharshest word one can Use: genocide.But he does something else--he mentions the truth quicklyand goes on to other things more important to him.Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discoverywhich, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against thewriter. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in amass of other information is to say to the reader with a certaininfectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not thatimportant-it should weigh very little in our final judgments; itshould affect very little what we do in the world.81

It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts andnot of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who,in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes,must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, thenchoose out of the bewildering mass of geographic informationthose things needed for the purpose of this or that particularmap. My argument cannot be against selection. Simplification,emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers andhistorians. But the mapmaker’s distortion is a technicalnecessity for a common purpose shared by all people who needmaps. The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it isideological; it is released into a world of contending interests,where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historianmeans to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic orpolitical or racial or national or sexual.Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressedin the way a mapmaker’s technical interest is obvious (“Thisis a Mercator projection for long-range navigation—forshort-range, you’d better use a different projection”). No, it ispresented as if all readers of history had a common interestwhich historians serve to the best of their ability. This is notintentional deception; the historian has been trained in asociety in which education and knowledge are put forward astechnical problems of excellence and not as tools for contendingsocial classes, races, nations.To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors asnavigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide,is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves--unwittingly— to justify what was done.My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse,judge, condemn Columbus in absenia. It is too late for that;it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But theeasy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary priceto pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Westerncivilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclearproliferation, to save us all)--that is still with us. One reasonthese atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to burythem in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buriedin containers in the earth. We have learned to give themexactly the same proportion of attention that teachers andwriters often give them in the most respectable of classroomsand textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, comingfrom the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted moreeasily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences.It is therefore more deadly.The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)--thequiet acceptance of conquest and murder in thename of progress--is only one aspect of a certain approach tohistory, in which the past is told from the point of view ofgovernments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they,like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they—theFounding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt,Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justicesof the Supreme Court—represent the nation as a whole.The pretense is that there really is such a thing as “the UnitedStates,” subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, butfundamentally a community--people with common interests.It is as if there really is a “national interest” represented inthe Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passedby Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development ofcapitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.“History is the memory of states,” wrote Henry Kissinger in hisfirst book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell thehistory of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint ofthe leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions whosuffered from those statesmen’s policies. From his standpoint,the “peace” that Europe had before the French Revolutionwas “restored” by the diplomacy of a few natiornal leaders. Butfor factory workers in England, farmers in France, old peoplein Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere in theupper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger,exploitation--a world not restored but disintegrated.My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, isdifferent: that we must not accept the memory of states as ourown. Nations are not communities and never have been. Thehistory of any country, presented as the history of a family,conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding,most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered,masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators anddominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict,a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinkingpeople, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side ofthe executioners.Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes fromselection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell thestory of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of theArawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves,of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil Waras seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen bythe deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialismas seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of theSpanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest ofthe Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the GildedAge as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seenby socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, theNew Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar Americanempire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to thelimited extent that any one person, however he or she strains,can “see” history from the standpoint of others.My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce theexecutioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, depleteour moral energy for the present. And the lines are not alwaysclear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In theshort run (and so far, human history has consisted only of shortruns), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with theculture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.Still, understanding the complexities, this book will beskeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics82 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web ofnationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try notto overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one anotheras they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. Idon’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in roughparaphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is notalways just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never knowwhat justice is.”I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements. Butto think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulatethe failures that dominate the past is to make historianscollaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is tobe creative, to anticipate a possible future without denyingthe past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities bydisclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even ifin brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to jointogether, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps onlyhoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitivemoments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries ofwarfare.That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history ofthe United States. The reader may as well know that beforegoing on what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas,Cortes did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas ofPeru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusettsto the Powhatans and the Pequots.The Aztec civilization of Mexico came out of the heritageof Mayan, Zapotec, and Toltec cultures. It built enormousconstructions from stone tools and human labor, developeda writing system and a priesthood. It also engaged in (let usnot overlook this) the ritual killing of thousands of people assacrifices to the gods. The cruelty of the Aztecs, however, didnot erase a certain innocence, and when a Spanish armadaappeared at Vera Cruz, and a bearded white man came ashore,with strange beasts (horses), clad in iron, it was thoughtthat he was the legendary Aztec man-god who had diedthree hundred years before, with the promise to return—themysterious Quetzalcoatl. And so they welcomed him, withmunificent hospitality.That was Hernando Cortes, come from Spain with anexpedition financed by merchants and landowners and blessedby the deputies of God, with one obsessive goal: to find gold.In the mind of Montezuma, the king of the Aztecs, there musthave been a certain doubt about whether Cortes was indeedQuetzalcoatl, because he sent a hundred runners to Cortes,bearing enormous treasures, gold and silver wrought Intoobjects of fantastic beauty, but at the same time begging himto go back. (The painter Dürer a few years later described whathe saw just arrived in Spain from that expedition—a sun ofgold, a moon of silver, worth a fortune.)Cortes then began his march of death from town to town,using deception, turning Aztec against Aztec, killing withthe kind of deliberateness that accompanies a strategy—toparalyze the will of the population by a sudden frightful deed.And so, in Cholulu, he invited the headmen of the Cholulanation to the square. And when they came, with thousandsof unarmed retainers, Cortes’s small army of Spaniards,posted around the square with cannon, armed with crossbows,mounted on horses, massacred them, down to the last man.Then they looted the city and moved on. When their cavalcadeof murder was over they were in Mexico City, Montezuma wasdead, and the Aztec civilization, shattered, was in the handsof the Spaniards.All this is told in the Spaniards’ own accounts.In Peru, that other Spanish conquistador Pizarro, used thesame tactics, and for the same reason--the frenzy in the earlycapitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for productsof the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of theexpeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies risingin Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new moneyeconomy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what KarlMarx would later call “the primitive accumulation of capital.”These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system oftechnology, business, politics, and culture that would dominatethe world for the next five centuries.In the North American English colonies, the pattern was setearly, as Columbus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas.In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlementin Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven ships.The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one of themstole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the wholeIndian village.Jamestown itself was set up inside the territory of an Indianconfederacy, led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watchedthe English settle on his people’s land, but did not attack,maintaining a posture of coolness. When the English weregoing through their “starving time” in the winter of 1610, someof them ran off to join the Indians, where they would at least befed. When the summer came, the governor of the colony sent amessenger to ask Powhatan to return the runaways, whereuponPowhatan, according to the English account, replied with “noeother than prowde and disslaynefull Answers.” Some soldierswere therefore sent out “to take Revendge.” They fell upon anIndian settlement, killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned thehouses, cut down the corn growing around the village, tookthe queen of the tribe and her children into boats, then endedup throwing the children overboard “and shoteinge owtt theirBraynes in the water.” The queen was latertaken off and stabbed to death.Twelve years later, the Indians, alarmed as the Englishsettlements kept growing in numbers, apparently decided totry to wipe them out for good. They went on a rampage andmassacred 347 men, women, and children. From then on itwas total war.Not able to enslave the Indians, and not able to live with them,the English decided to exterminate them. Edmund Morgan83

writes, in his history of early Virginia, American Slavery,American Freedom:Since the Indians were better woodsmen than the English andvirtually impossible to track down, the method was to feignpeaceful intentions, let them settle down and plant their cornwherever they chose, and then, just before harvest, fall uponthem, killing as many as possible and burning the corn.... .Within two or three years of the massacre the English hadavenged the deaths of that day many times over.In that first year of the white man in Virginia, 1607, Powhatanhad addressed a plea to John Smith that turned out prophetic.How authentic it is may be in doubt, but it is so much likeso many Indian statements that it may be taken as, if not therough letter of that first plea, the exact spirit of it:I have seen two generations of my people die.. . .I know the differencebetween peace and war better than any man in my country. I amnow grown old, and must die soon; my authority must descend tomy brothers, Opitchapan, Opechancanough and Catatough—thento my two sisters, and then to my two daughters. I wish them toknow as much as I do, and that your love to them may be like mineto you. Why will you take by force what you may have quietly bylove? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What canyou get by war? We can hide our provisions and run into the woods;then you will starve for wronging your friends. Why are you jealousof us? We are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if youcome in a friendly manner, and not so simple as not to know that itis much better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly withmy wives and children, laugh and be merry with the English, andtrade for their copper and hatchets, than to run away from them,and to lie cold in the woods, feed on acorns, roots and such trash, andbe so hunted that I can neither eat nor sleep. In these wars, my menmust sit up watching, and if a twig break, they all cry out “Herecomes Captain Smith!” So I must end my miserable life. Take awayyour guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may alldie in the same manner.When the Pilgrims came to New England they too werecoming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribesof Indians. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indian land bydeclaring the area legally a “vacuum.” The Indians, he said, hadnot “subdued” the land, and therefore had a “natural” right toit, but not a “civil right.” A “natural right” did not have legalstanding.The Puritans also appealed the Bible, Psalms 2:8: “Ask of me,and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, andthe uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” And tojustify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans13:2: “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteththe ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive tothemselves damnation.”The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians,who occupied what is now southern Connecticut and RhodeIsland. But they wanted them out of the way; they wantedtheir land. And they seemed to want also to establish theirrule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area. The murderof a white trader, Indian-kidnapper, and troublemaker becamean excuse to make war on the Pequots in1636.A punitive expedition left Boston to attack the NarragansettIndians on Block Island, who were lumped with the Pequots.As Governor Winthrop Wrote:They had Commission to put to death the men of Block Island,but to spare the women and children, and to bring them away,and to take possession of the island; and from thence to goto the Pequods to demand the murderer of Captain Stoneand other English, and one thousand fathom of wampom fordamages, etc and some of their children as hostages, which ifthey should refuse, they were to Obtain by force.The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hidin the thick forests of the island and the English went fromone deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then theysailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages alongthe coast, destroying crops again. One of the officers of thatexpedition, in his account, gives some insight into the Pequotsthey encountered: “The Indians spying of us came running inmultitudes along the water side, crying, What cheer, Englishmen,what cheer, what do you come for? They not thinking weintended war, went on cheerfully. . .”So, the war with the Pequots began. Massacres took placeon both sides. The English developed a tactic of warfare usedearlier by Cortes and later, in the twentieth century, even moresystematically: deliberate attacks on noncombatants for thepurpose of terrorizing the enemy. This is ethnohistorian FrancisJennings’s interpretation of Captain John Mason’s attack on aPequot village on the Mystic River near Long Island Sound:“Mason proposed to avoid attacking Pequot warriors, whichwould have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle,as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the waysto destroy an enemy’s will to fight. Massacre can accomplishthe same end with less risk, and Mason had determined thatmassacre would be his objective.”So the English set fire to the wigwams of the village. By theirown account: “The Captain also said, We must Burn Them;and immediately stepping into the Wigwam . . . brought out a84 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Fire Brand, and putting it into the Matts with whichthey were covered, set the Wigwams on Fire.” WilliamBradford, in his History of the Plymouth Plantation written atthe time, describes John Mason’s raid on the Pequot village:Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewedto peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they werequickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived theythus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to seethem thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenchingthe same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but thevictory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereofto God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclosetheir enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory overso proud and insulting an enimie.As Dr. Cotton Mather, Puritan theologian, put it: “It wassupposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were broughtdown to hell that day.”The war continued. Indian tribes were used against one another,and never seemed able to join together in fighting the English.Jennings sums up:The terror was very real among the Indians, but in time theycame to meditate upon its foundations. They drew three lessonsfrom the Pequot War:(1) that the Englishmen’s most solemn pledge would be brokenwhenever obligation confficted with advantage; (2) that theEnglish way of war had no limit of scruple or mercy; and (3)that weapons of Indian making were almost useless againstweapons of European manufacture. These lessons the Indianstook to hcart.A footnote in Virgil Vogel’s book This Land Was Ours (1972)says: “The official figure on the number of Pequots now inConnecticut is twenty-one persons.”Forty years after the Pequot War, Puritans and Indians foughtagain. This time it was the Wampanoags, occupying the southshore of Massachusetts Bay, who were in the way and alsobeginning to trade some of their land to people outside theMassachusetts Bay Colony.Their chief, Massasoit, was dead. His son Wamsutta had beenkilled by Englishmen and Wamsutta’s brother Metacom (laterto be called King Philip by the English) became chief. TheEnglish found their excuse, a murder which they attributedto Metacom, and they began a war of conquest against theWampanoags, a war to take their land. They were clearly theaggressors, but claimed they attacked for preventive purposes.As Roger Williams, more friendly to the Indians than most,put it: “All men of conscience or prudence ply to windward, tomaintain their wars to be defensive.”Jennings says the elite of the Puritans wanted the war; theordinary white Englishman did not want it and often refusedto fight. The Indians certainly did not want war, but theymatched atrocity with atrocity. When it was over, in 1676,the English had won, but their resources were drained; theyhad lost six hundred men. Three thousand Indians were deadincluding Metacom himself. Yet the Indian raids did not stop.For a while, the English tried softer tactics. But ultimately, itwas back to annihilation. The Indian population of 10 millionthat was in North America when Columbus came wouldultimately be reduced to less than a million. Huge numbersof Indians would die from diseases, introduced by the whites.A Dutch traveler in New Netherland wrote in 1656 that “theIndians ....affirm, that before the arrival of the Christians andbefore the smallpox broke out amongst them, they were tentimes as numerous as they now are, and that their populationhad been melted down by this disease, whereof nine-tenthsof them have died.” When the English first settled Martha’sVineyard in 1642, the Wampanoags there numbered perhapsthree thousand. There were no wars on that island, but by 1764,only 313 Indians were left there.Block Island Indians numbered perhaps 1,200 to 1,500 in1662, and by 1774 were reduced to fifty-one.Behind the English invasion of North America, behind theirmassacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was thatspecial powerful drive born in civilizations based on privateproperty. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need forspace, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions ofscarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition,this human need was transformed into the murder of wholepeoples. Roger Williams said, “it was a depraved appetite afterthe great vanities, dreams and shadows of this vanishing life,great portions of land, land in this wilderness, as if men werein as great necessity and danger for want of great portions ofland, as poor, hungry, thirsty seamen have, after a sick andstormy, a long and starving passage. This is one of the godsof New England, which the living and most high Eternal willdestroy and famish.”Was all this bloodshed and deceit—from Columbus to Cortes,Pizarro, the Puritans—a necessity for the human race toprogress from savagery to civilization? Was Morison right inburying the story of genocide inside a more important story ofhuman progress? Perhaps a persuasive argument can be madeas it was made by Stalin when he killed peasants for industrialprogress in the Soviet Union, as it was made by Churchillexplaining the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, andTruman explaining Hiroshima. But how can the judgment bemade if the benefits and losses cannot be balanced because thelosses are either unmentioned or mentioned quickly?That quick disposal might be acceptable (“Unfortunate, yes,but it had to be done”) to the middle and upper classes of theconquering and “advanced” countries. But is it acceptable tothe poor of Asia, Africa, Latin America, or to the prisonersin Soviet labor camps, or the blacks in urban ghettos, or theIndians on reservation to the victims of that progress which85

enefits a privileged minority in the world? Was it acceptable (orjust inescapable?) to the miners and railroaders of America, thefactory hands, the men and women who died by the hundredsof thousands from accidents or sickness, where they worked orwhere they lived--casualties of progress? And even the privilegedminority—must it not reconsider, with that practicalitywhich even privilege cannot abolish, the value of its privileges,when they become threatened by the anger of the sacrificed,whether in organized rebellion, unorganized riot, or simplythose brutal individual acts of desperation labeled crimes bylaw and the state?If there are necessary sacrifices to be made for human progress,is it not essential to hold to the principle that those to besacrificed must make the decision themselves? We can alldecide to give up something of ours, but do we have the rightto throw into the pyre the children of others, or even our ownchildren, for a progress which is not nearly as clear or presentas sickness or health, life or death?What did people in Spain get out of all that death and brutalityvisited on the Indians of the Americas? For a brief period inhistory, there was the glory of a Spanish Empire in the WesternHemisphere. As Hans Koning sums it up in his book Columbus:His Enterprise:For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did notmake the Spanish people richer. It gave their kings an edgein the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire moremercenary soldiers for their wars. They ended up losing thosewars anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, astarving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and aruined peasant class.Beyond all that, how certain are we that what was destroyedwas inferior? Who were these people who came out on thebeach and swam to bring presents to Columbus and hiscrew, who watched Cortes and Pizarro ride through theircountryside, who peered out of the forests at the first whitesettlers of Virginia and Massachusetts?Columbus called them Indians, because he miscalculated thesize of the earth. In this book we too call them Indians, withsome reluctance, because it happens too often that people aresaddled with names given them by their conquerors.And yet, there is some reason to call them Indians, becausethey did come, perhaps 25,000 years ago, from Asia, acrossthe land bridge of the Bering Straits (later to disappear underwater) to Alaska. Then they moved southward, seeking warmthand land, in a trek lasting thousands of years that took theminto North America, then Central and South America. InNicaragua, Brazil, and Ecuador their petrified footprints canstill be seen, along with the print of bison, who disappearedabout five thousand years ago, so they must have reached SouthAmerica at least that far back.Widely dispersed over the great land mass of the Americas,they numbered 15 or 20 million people by the time Columbuscame, perhaps 5 million in North America. Responding tothe different environments of soil and climate, they developedhundreds of different tribal cultures, perhaps two thousanddifferent languages. They perfected the art of agriculture, andfigured out how to grow maize (corn), which cannot grow byitself and must be planted, cultivated, fertilized, harvested,husked, shelled. They ingeniously developed a variety of othervegetables and fruits, as well as peanuts and chocolate andtobacco and rubber.On their own, the Indians were engaged in the greatagricultural revolution that other peoples in Asia, Europe,and Africa were going through about the same time. Whilemany of the tribes remained nomadic hunters and food gatherersin wandering, egalitarian communes, others began tolive in more settled communities where there was more food,larger populations, more divisions of labor among men andwomen, more surplus to feed chiefs and priests, more leisuretime for artistic and social work, for building houses. About athousand years before Christ, while comparable constructionswere going on in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Zuni and HopiIndians of what is now New Mexico had begun to build villagesconsisting of large terraced buildings, nestled in among cliffsand mountains for protection from enemies, with hundredsof rooms in each village. Before the arrival of the Europeanexplorers, they were using irrigation canals, dams, were doingceramics, weaving baskets, making cloth out of cotton.By the time of Christ and Julius Caesar, there had developedin the Ohio River Valley a culture of so-called Moundbuilders,Indians who constructed thousands of enormous sculpturesout of earth, sometimes in the shapes of huge humans, birds, orserpents, sometimes as burial sites, sometimes as fortifications.One of them was 3 miles long, enclosing 100 acres. TheseMoundbuilders seem to have been part of a complex tradingsystem of ornaments and weapons from as far off as the GreatLakes, the Far West, and the Gulf of Mexico.About A.D. 500, as this Moundbuilder culture of the OhioValley was beginning to decline, another culture was developingwestward, in the valley of the Mississippi, centered on whatis now St. Louis. It had an advanced agriculture, includedthousands of villages, and also built huge earthen mounds asburial and ceremonial places near a vast Indian metropolis thatmay have had thirty thousand people. The largest mound was100 feet high, with a rectangular base larger than that of theGreat Pyramid of Egypt. In the city, known as Cahokia, weretoolmakers, hide dressers, potters, jewelrymakers, weavers,saltmakers, copper engravers, and magnificent ceramists. Onefuneral blanket was made of twelve thousand shell beads.From the Adirondacks to the Great Lakes, in what is nowPennsylvania and upper New York, lived the most powerfulof the northeastern tribes, the League of the Iroquois, which86 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

included the Mohawks (People Of the Flint), Oneidas (Peopleof the Stone), Onondagas (People of the Mountain), Cayugas(People at the Landing), and Senecas (Great Hill People),thousands of people bound together by a common Iroquoislanguage.In the vision of the Mohawk chief Hiawatha, the legendaryDekaniwidah spoke to the Iroquois: “We bind ourselves togetherby taking hold of each other’s hands so firmly and forming acircle so strong that If a tree should fall upon it, it could notshake nor break it, so that our people and grandchildren shallremain in the circle in security, peace and happiness.”In the villages of the Iroquois, land was owned in commonand worked in common. Hunting was done together, andthe catch was divided among the members of the village.Houses were considered common property and were sharedby several families. The concept of private ownership of landand homes was foreign to the Iroquois. A French Jesuit priestwho encountered them in the 1650s wrote: “No poorhouses areneeded among them, because they are neither mendicants norpaupers.... . Their kindness, humanity and courtesy not onlymakes them liberal with what they have, but causes them topossess hardly anything except in common.”Women were important and respected in Iroquois society.Families were matrilineal. That is, the family line wentdown through the female members, whose husbands joinedthe family, while sons who married then joined their wives’families. Each extended family lived in a “long house.” Whena woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband’s things outsidethe door.Families were grouped in clans, and a dozen or more clansmight make up a village. The senior women in the villagenamed the men who represented the clans at village and tribalcouncils. They also named the forty-nine chiefs who were theruling council for the Five Nation confederacy of the Iroquois.The women attended clan meetings, stood behind the circle ofmen who spoke and voted, and removed the men from office ifthey strayed too far from the wishes of the women.The women tended the crops and took general charge of villageaffairs while the men were always hunting or fishing. And sincethey supplied the moccasins and food for warring expeditions,they had some control over military matters. As Gary B. Nashnotes in his fascinating study of early America, Red, White,and Black: “Thus power was shared between the sexes and theEuropean idea of male dominancy and female subordination inall things was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.”Children in Iroquois society, while taught the cultural heritageof their people and solidarity with the tribe, were also taught tobe independent, not to submit to overbearing authority. Theywere taught equality in status and the sharing of possessions.The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on children; theydid not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, butgradually allowed the child to learn self-care.All of this was in sharp contrast to European values as broughtover by the first colonists, a society of rich and poor, controlledby priests, by governors, by male heads of families. Forexample, the pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thusadvised his parishioners how to deal with their children: “Andsurely there is in all children a stubbornness, and stoutnessof mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the firstplace, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation oftheir education being laid in humility and tractable-ness, othervirtues may, in their time, be built thereon.”Gary Nash describes Iroquois culture:No laws and ordinances,sheriffs and constables, judges and juries, or courts or jails—the apparatus of authority in European societies—were to befound in the northeast woodlands prior to European arrival.Yet boundaries of acceptable behavior were firmly set. Thoughpriding themselves on the autonomous individual, the Iroquoismaintained a strict sense of right and wrong. . . . He who stoleanother’s food or acted invalourously in war was “shamed” byhis people and ostracized from their company until he hadatoned for his actions and demonstrated to their satisfactionthat he had morally purified himself.Not only the Iroquois but other Indian tribes behaved the sameway. In 1635, Maryland Indians responded to the governor’sdemand that if any of them killed an Englishman, the guiltyone should be delivered up for punishment according toEnglish law. The Indians said:It is the manner amongst us Indians, that if any such accidenthappen, wee doe redeeme the life of a man that is so slaine,with a 100 armes length of Beades and since that you are heerestrangers, and come into our Countrey, you should ratherconform yourselves to the Customes of our Countrey, thanimpose yours upon us. .So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into anempty wilderness, but into a world which in some places wasas densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture wascomplex, where human relations were more egalitarian than inEurope, and where the relations among men, women, children,and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps anyplace in the world.They were people without a written language, but with theirown laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory andpassed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe’s,accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial drama. They paidcareful attention to the development of personality, intensityof will, independence and flexibility, passion and potency, totheir partnership with one another and with nature.87

John Collier, an American scholar who lived among Indians inthe 1920s and l930s in the American Southwest, said of theirspirit:“ Could we make it our own, there would be an eternallyinexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace.”Perhaps there is some romantic mythology in that. But theevidence from European travelers in the sixteenth, seventeenth,and eighteenth centuries, put together recently by an Americanspecialist on Indian life, William Bruadon, is overwhelminglysupportive of much of that myth.” Even allowing for theimperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, forthat time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilationof races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of theconquerors and leaders of Western civilization.Edmund Morgan: Slavery and Freedom- The American Paradox (1972)The following are excerpts from an article by historian and professorEdmund Morgan published in 1972. In the article, Morgandiscusses the relationship between the rise of slavery and the riseof democracy in the colonial Chesapeake. As you read, notice whatfactors Morgan highlights as leading to the rise of racial slaveryin the Chesapeake. And, think about how the conditions of theChesapeake region during colonial times could have simultaneouslygiven rise to both slavery and democracy.American historians interested in tracing the rise of liberty,democracy, and the common man have been challenged in thepast two decades by other historians, interested in tracing thehistory of oppression, exploitation, and racism. The challenge...made us examine more directly than historians hitherto havebeen willing to do, the role of slavery in our early history.Colonial historians, in particular, when writing about theorigin and development of American institutions have foundit possible until recently to deal with slavery as an exceptionto everything they had to say...We owe a debt of gratitude tothose who have insisted that slavery was something more thanan exception, that one fifth of the American population at thetime of the Revolution is too many people to be treated as anexception.We shall not have met the challenge simply by studyingthe history of that one fifth, fruitful as such studies may be,urgent as they may be. Nor shall we have met the challengeif we merely execute the familiar maneuver of turning ourold interpretations on their heads. The temptation is alreadyapparent to argue that slavery and oppression were the dominantfeatures of American history and that efforts to advance libertyand equality were the exception, indeed no more than a deviceto divert the masses while their chains were being fastened. Todismiss the rise of liberty and equality in American historyas a mere sham is not only to ignore hard facts, it is also toevade the problem presented by those facts. The rise of libertyand equality in this country was accompanied by the rise ofslavery. That two such contradictory developments were takingplace simultaneously over a long period of history, from theseventeenth century to the nineteenth, is the central paradoxof American history.The challenge, for a colonial historian at least, is to explain howa people could have developed the dedication to human libertyand dignity exhibited by the leaders of the American Revolutionand at the same time have developed and maintained a systemof labor that denied human liberty and dignity every hour ofthe day...88 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

It has been tempting to dismiss Jefferson and the whole Virginiadynasty as hypocrites. But to do so is to deprive the termhypocrisy of useful meaning. If hypocrisy means, as I thinkit does, deliberately to affirm a principle without believing it,then hypocrisy requires a rare quality of mind combined withan unscrupulous intention to deceive. To attribute such anintention, even to attribute such clarity of mind in the matter,to Jefferson, Madison, or Washington is to once again evadethe challenge. What we need to explain is how such men couldhave arrived at beliefs and actions so full of contradiction...Put the challenge another way: how did England, a countrypriding itself on the liberty of its citizens, produce colonieswhere most of the inhabitants enjoyed still greater liberty,greater opportunities, greater control over their own livesthan most men in the mother country, while the remainder,one fifth of the total, were deprived of virtually all liberty,all opportunities, all control over their own lives? We mayadmit that the Englishmen who colonized America andtheir revolutionary descendants were racists, that consciouslyor unconsciously they believed liberties and rights should beconfined to persons of light complexion. When we have said asmuch, even when we have probed the depths of racial prejudice,we will not have fully accounted for the paradox. Racismwas certainly an essential element in it, but I should like tosuggest another element, that I believe to have influenced thedevelopment of both slavery and freedom as we have knownthem in the United States...Virginians poor had reason to be envious and angry and againstthe men who owned the land and imported the servants andran the government... The nervousness of those who hadproperty worth plundering continued throughout the century...[One solution] was to extend the terms of service for servantsentering the colony... but [as] the ranks of freedmen grew, sodid poverty and discontent...[But, there was a] solution whichallowed Virginiains magnates to keep their lands, yet arrestedthe discontent and the repression of other Englishmen [livingin Virginia]... the rights of Englishmen were preserved bydestroying the rights of Africans.Slaves could be deprived of the opportunity for association andrebellion. They could be kept unarmed and unorganized... Andsince color disclosed their probable status, the rest of societycould keep close watch on them...[The freedman] was no longer a man to be feared. This fact,together with the presence of a growing mass of alien slaves,tended to draw the white settlers closer together and to reducethe importance of class difference between yeoman farmer andlarge plantation owner.One development was crucial, and that was the appearancein Virginia of a growing number of freemen who had servedtheir terms but who were now unable to afford land of theirown except on the frontiers... By 1676 it was estimated thatone fourth of Virginia’s freemen were without land of theirown... The presence of this growing class of poverty-strickenVirginians was not a little frightening to the planters whohad made it to the top...They wanted the [indentured servant]immigrants who kept pouring in every year. Indeed, theyneeded them...but as more [indentured servants] turned freeevery year Virginia seemed to have inherited the problem thatshe was helping England to solve. Virginia, complained...[the]secretary of the colony, was sinke to drayen England of herfilth and scum.The men who worried the uppercrust looked even moredangerous in Virginia than they had in England. They were,to begin with, young...and the young have always seemedimpatient of control by their elders and superiors, if notdownright rebellious. They were also predominantly singlemen...Finally, what made these wild young men particularlydangerous was that they were armed and had to be armed...89

Carol F. Karlsen: Excerpts – Devil in theShape of a WomanEunice Cole was first tried for witchcraft crimes in Boston inthe fall of 1656. It was not her first court appearance; she hadbeen brought before local magistrates in Essex and Norfolkcounties on several occasions for lesser crimes, the first timein 1645, when she was charged with making “slanderousspeeches.” Her reckless speech also figured strongly in theevidence presented in her witchcraft trial. Goodwife Marstonand Susanna Palmer testified “that goodwife Cole said sheewas sure there was a witche in the towne, and she knew wherehee dwelt” and that Cole had also said that she had knownsomebody years before who was “bewitched as good-wifemarston’s childe was.” Thomas Philbrick, who had lost twocalves, deposed that Goody Cole had let him know that if hiscalves ate “any of hir grass she wished it might poyson them orchoke them.” Richard Ormsby, constable of Salisbury, said thatwhen he had stripped Cole for whipping he saw “under one ofhir brests... a bleu thing like unto a teate hanging downewardabout thre quarters of an inche longe ... [with] some blood withother moystness [which she said] was a sore.”On this and other like testimony, Cole was apparently convicted.The magistrates were reluctant to execute her, however. Instead,they sentenced her to what she afterwards called a “duble”punishment: both to be whipped and to be imprisoned “during[her] life or the pleasure of the court.” She spent most of thenext twelve to fifteen years incarcerated in the Boston jail.Probably within the first year of her imprisonment, EuniceCole petitioned the General Court for her release, pleadingher own “aged and weake ...condition” and the infirmities ofher husband, William Cole, who, “being 88 yeeres of Age,”needed the kind of care that “none but a wife would” provide.She also asked the magistrates to consider the conditionof “that little estate” she and her husband had accumulatedin Hampton, which, she averred, she had been “the greatestinstrument under God to get us” but which “all goes to ruine”in her absence. Alluding to the criminal behavior that hadbrought her to her present straits, she promised “for the future... to behave [herself] both in word and deed towards thoseamongst whom” she dwelt. Although the magistrates’ responseto Cole’s plea has not survived, they were evidently unwillingto release her at this time.In 1659, William Cole sent a petition of his own to theGeneral Court, describing the predicament both he and thetown of Hampton were in because of his wife’s imprisonment,and asking the magistrates for “some relief in the case.” Hecould not farm the land alone, he said, and could not affordto hire someone to assist him because he had signed his estateover to his wife sometime previously, “to keep her from goingaway from him.” Unable to eke out a subsistence and on theverge of perishing, he had had to call upon the town for relief,which had been supplied. But, he added, “without recourse toa lawsuit..., the town could recover nothing for the assistancerendered.”Goodman Cole does not seem to have been disingenuous abouthis or the town’s plight. He and his wife had no children toassist them with the farm labor, and in 1658, at least the townapparently provided him with some aid. In 1656, moreover,the same year that Goodwife Cole was tried for witchcraft, hehad signed a deed of gift, transferring “all his estate” to hiswife -- though years later witnesses testified that the transferwas to occur “at his death.” Whatever significance this 1656deed had for William Cole or his community, the GeneralCourt invalidated it in 1659. In response to William Cole’spetition, they ordered “that the town of Hampton should takeinto their possession all the estate belonging to the said Cole,or his wife -- as was pretended -- and out of said estate, orotherwise, as they should see cause, supply the said Cole’s andhis wife’s necessities during their lives.”If William Cole specifically requested his wife’s liberty inhis 1659 petition, his words went unrecorded. But within ayear, Eunice Cole was back in Hampton. Despite her earlierpromise to watch her tongue, she was soon presented at thecounty court for “unseemly speeches.” By 1662 , whether forthis reason or some other, she had been returned to the Bostonprison. In that year, her husband died and she petitioned againfor her freedom.Shortly before his death, William Cole had written a will thatvoided his earlier transfer of his property to his wife and left his£59 estate [minus debts] to his neighbor Thomas Webster, withthe stipulation that Webster provide for him “Comfortably”for the duration of his life. The Hampton selectmen, whoofficially controlled the Cole estate, were not happy with thiswill; nor were they pleased with the possibility that EuniceCole might be allowed to return again to their town. Bostonjailer William Salter, who had not been paid, at least not infull, by the selectmen for Eunice Cole’s prison maintenance,was also upset. When the General Court met on 8 October1662, they had to consider not only Eunice Cole’s petition butone from Salter and one from the town of Hampton. In answerto all three, the magistrates ordered “that the said Unice Colepay what is due on arreares to the keeper, and be released theprison, on condition that she depart, within one month afterher release, out of this jurisdiction, and not to returne againeon poenalty of hir former sentence being executed against hir.”Cole was released at this time, but she did not leave the colonywithin the month. Almost immediately upon her return toHampton, witchcraft suspicions resurfaced and before long90 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

she found herself back in prison. Meanwhile, William Cole’sestate was being settled; by October 1663, the county courthad divided the remaining Cole property between ThomasWebster and Eunice Cole, but arranged for Cole’s share - bynow only £8 - to be paid to the Hampton selectmen “for her use.”Evidently, the town had still not completely paid the costs ofkeeping her in prison, because in 1664 William Salter had oneof the Hampton selectmen arrested for ignoring his demand forCole’s fees. In 1665, Cole petitioned yet another time for herrelease. And again the court consented, this time stipulatingonly that she give security for her permanent departure from thecolony. With little or nothing left of her estate, she could notmeet the requirements and remained in jail.At some point between 1668 and 1671, Eunice Cole wasdischarged from the Boston prison, but by 1671 she was backin Hampton, completely destitute. The selectmen arranged forher maintenance by providing her with what, according to thefolklore of the region, was a “hut” along the Hampton River,and by requiring that a different family supply her with foodand fuel each week. In 1673, however, she was back in front ofthe Boston court facing another witchcraft charge. This timeshe was accused of appearing in various human and animalshapes to entice a young girl “to come to live with her,” of“inchanting [the] oven” of the constable who was responsiblefor bringing her the provisions her neighbors supplied, and ofcommiting many other crimes, both recent and longstanding.She was acquitted of all specific charges, but with the strongreservations of the court: “in the case of unis cole now prisoneratt the Bar -- not Legally guilty according to Inditementbutt just ground of vehement suspissyon of her having hadfamillyarryty with the devill.” In spite of the court’s reluctance,Cole was allowed to return again to Hampton.There is little information on how Cole fared the next severalyears, but clearly her reputation as a witch did not diminish.By 1680, she was in prison again, awaiting the decision ofthe Hampton court as to whether she should be tried a thirdtime. After hearing testimony, the court decided the evidencewas insufficient for indictment -- but not for punishment. Thepresiding magistrate allowed that there was “not full proofe”that she was a witch, but, he added, “the Court vehementlysuspects her so to be.” He ordered her imprisoned again “untilthis Court take further order,” this time “with a lock to be kepton her legg” to prevent her escape.Little else about Cole’s life can be verified. According to locallegend, she was released from prison one more time and livedout her last days in the hovel by the river, completely ostracizedby the community. When she died, it is said, her body wasdragged outdoors, pushed into a shallow grave, and a stakedriven through it “in order to exorcise the baleful influence shewas supposed to have possessed.”91

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John Locke: of Civil Government (1688)John Locke was a Scot who wrote “Of Civil Government” in 1688in response to the Glorious Revolution in Britain. In this bloodlesscoup, the authoritarian King James II was deposed and replaced byKing William and Queen Mary who agreed to grant Parliamentsovereignty over some matters. Locke wrote in support of theGlorious Revolution – he opposed absolute monarchy and favoredgovernment by a representative legislature. Nearly a centurylater, Americans would use Locke’s words to justify their revolutionagainst British rule.As you read, think about what Locke means by a “state of nature.”Why would man leave such a state of “perfect freedom”? What is thepurpose of society according to Locke? What recourse do individualshave if the leaders of a society abuse their power or fail to fulfillthose goals for which the society was established. Also, think aboutwhy Americans would have found Locke’s words in support of theBritish government useful in their eventual rebellion against theBritish government.Chapter II: Of the State of NatureWe must consider what state all men are naturally [originally]in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actionsand dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit...without depending on the will of any other man.A state also of equality wherein all the power and jurisdictionis reciprocal, no one having more than another....Chapter VII: Of Political or Civil SocietyWhenever... any number of men are so united into one society,as to quit everyone his executive power of the law of nature,and to resign it to the public, there and there only is a political,or civil society. And this is done, wherever any number of men,in the state of nature, enter into society to make one people, onebody politic, under one supreme government; or else when anyone join himself to... any government already made: for herebyhe authorizes the society [and its legislature]... to make laws forhim, as the public good of the society shall require.... And thisputs men out of a state of nature into that of a commonwealth,by setting up a judge on earth, with authority to determine allthe controversies, and redress the injuries that may happen toany member of the commonwealth....Hence, it is evident, that absolute monarchy, which by somemen is counted the only government in the world, is indeedinconsistent with civil society, and so can be no form ofcivil government at all.... For he being supposed to have all,both legislative and executive power in himself alone, thereis no judge to be found, no appeal lies open to any one, whomay fairly and indifferently, and with authority decide, andfrom whose decision relief and redress may be expected ofany injury or inconveniency that may be suffered from the[absolute monarch].... For whenever any two men... have no...common judge [to] appeal to on earth, for the determination ofcontroversies of right betwixt them, there they are still in thestate of nature [and not part of a civil society].... [A commonman] the subject, or rather slave of an absolute prince... wheneverhis property is invaded by the will and order of the [absolute]monarch, he has not only no appeal, as those in society oughtto have... [but he is also] denied a liberty to... defend his right;and so is exposed to all the misery and inconveniences, that aman can fear....Chapter VIII: Of the Beginning of Political SocietiesMen being, as has been said, by nature [in a state of nature],all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of thisestate, and subjected to the political power of another, withouthis own consent. The only way, whereby any one divestshimself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bond of civilsociety, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into acommunity, for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable livingone amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties,and a greater security....When any number of men have, by the consent of everyindividual, made a community, they have thereby made thatcommunity one body, with a power to act as one body, whichis only by the will and determination of the majority.... Itbeing necessary for that which is one body to move one way...;it is necessary the body should move that way whither thegreater force [the majority] carries it.... And therefore we see...the act of the majority passes for the act of the whole....And thus every man, by consenting with others to makeone body politic under one government, puts himself underan obligation, to every one of that society, to submit to thedetermination of the majority....Chapter IX: Of the Ends of Political Society andGovernmentIf man in the state of nature be so free, as has been said; if hebe absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal tothe greatest and subject to nobody, why will he part with hisfreedom? Why will he... subject himself to the dominion andcontrol of any other power? To which it is obvious to answer,95

that though in a state of nature he hath such right, yet theenjoyment of it is very uncertain, and constantly exposed to theinvasion of others; for... every man his equal, and the greaterpart no strict observers of equity and justice, the enjoyment ofthe property he has in this state [of nature] is very unsafe, veryinsecure. This makes him willing to quit a condition, whichhowever free, is full of fears and continual dangers; and it isnot without reason, that he seeks out, and is willing to joinin society with others... for the mutual preservation of theirlives, liberties, and estates, which I call by the general name,property.Their great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting intocommonwealths, and putting themselves under government,is the preservation of their property. To which in a state ofnature there are many things wanting.First, [in a state of nature] there wants an established, settled,known law, received and allowed by common consent to bethe standard of right and wrong, and the common measure todecide all controversies between them....Secondly, in the state of nature there wants a known andindifferent judge, with authority to determine all differencesaccording to the established law: for every one in that statebeing both judge and executioner of the law of nature, menbeing partial to themselves, passion and revenge is very apt tocarry them too far, and with too much heat in their own cases;as well as negligence and underconcernedness, to make themtoo remiss in other men’s.Thirdly, in the state of nature, there often wants power toback and support the sentence when right, and to give it dueexecution....that made the state of nature so unsafe and uneasy....Chapter XIX: Of the Dissolution of GovernmentThe reason why men enter into society, is the preservation oftheir property; and the end why they choose and authorize alegislature is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, asguards and fences to the property of all the members of society:to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every partand member of society.... Whenever the legislators endeavor totake away and destroy the property of the people, or to reducethem to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselvesinto a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolvedfrom any farther obedience.... Whensoever therefore thelegislature shall transgress this fundamental rule of society;and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption, endeavor tograsp themselves... an absolute power over the lives, liberties,and estates of the people, by this breach of trust they forfeit thepower the people had put into their hands... and it devolves tothe people, who have a right to resume their original liberty,and... provide for their own safety and security, which is theend for which they are in society.... What I have said here,concerning the legislative in general holds true also concerningthe [executive]... when he goes about to set up his own arbitrarywill as the law of the society.Whosoever uses force without right, as every one does insociety who does it without law, puts himself into a state ofwar with those against whom he so used it; and in that state allformer ties are canceled, all other rights cease, and every onehas a right to defend himself, and to resist the aggressor....Thus mankind, notwithstanding all the privileges of the state ofnature... are quickly driven into society.... The inconveniencesthat [men] are therein exposed to [in a state of nature], by theirregular and uncertain exercise of the power every man hasof punishing the transgressions of others, make them takesanctuary under the established laws of government, andtherein seek the preservation of their property.... And in thiswe have the original right of... governments and societiesthemselves....But though men, when they enter into society, give up theequality, liberty, and executive power they had in the state ofnature, into the hands of society, to be so far disposed of by thelegislature, as the good of society shall require; yet it being onlywith an intention in every one the better to preserve himself,his liberty and property... the power of the society, or legislativeconstituted by them can never be supposed to extend fartherthan the common good; but it is obliged to secure every one’sproperty, by providing against those... defects above mentioned,96 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Daniel Dulany: “Considerations” (1765)... The notion of a virtual representation of the colonies mustfail, which, in Truth, is a mere cob-web, spread to catch theunwary, and tangle the weak...There is not that intimate and inseparable relation between thecolonies and Great Britain and the inhabitants of the colonies,which may inevitably involve both in the same taxation; onthe contrary, not a single actual elector in England, might beimmediately affected by taxation in America, imposed by astatute which would have a general effect on the propertiesand inhabitants of the colonies...It appears to me that there is a clear and necessary distinctionbetween an act imposing a tax for the simple purpose of revenue,and those acts which have been made for the regulation oftrade, and have produced some revenue in consequence of theireffect and operation as regulations of trade.The subordination of the colonies, and the authority ofParliament to preserve it, have been fully acknowledged. Notonly the welfare, but perhaps the existence of the mothercountry, as an independent kingdom, may depend on her tradeand navigation, and these so far upon her intercourse with hercolonies, that if this should be neglected, there would soon bean end to that commerce whence her greatest wealth is derived.From these considerations, the right of British Parliament toregulate the trade of the colonies may be justly deduced... It is acommon, and frequently the most popular method to regulatetrade by duties on imports and exports... The authority of themother country to regulate the trade of the colonies beingunquestionable, what regulations are the most proper, are tobe of course to the determination of Parliament...Resolutions of the Stamp Act Congress(1765)In response to the Stamp Act, issued by Parliament in March of 1765,waves of protest swept the Britishcolonies, involving everyone from street mobs to civic leaders, oftenorganized by secret organizationscalled the Sons of Liberty. In October, a Stamp Act Congress held inNew York City (representing ninecolonies) petitioned Parliament for repeal. What are the mainarguments made by the Stamp ActCongress? How do the colonies perceive their relationship withGreat Britain? What is the tone of thedocument?THE members of this Congress, sincerely devoted with thewarmest sentiments of affection and duty toHis majesty’s person and Government, inviolably attached tothe present happy establishment of theProtestant succession, and with minds deeply impressed by asense of the present and impendingmisfortunes of the British colonies on this continent; havingconsidered as maturely as time will permitthe circumstances of the said colonies, esteem it ourindispensable duty to make the followingdeclarations of our humble opinion respecting the mostessential rights and liberties of the colonists,and the grievances under which they labour, by reason ofseveral late Acts of Parliament.I. That His Majesty’s subjects in theses colonies owe thesame allegiance to the Crown of GreatBritain that is owing from his subjects born within the realm,and all due subordination to that august body the Parliamentof Great Britain.II. That His Majesty’s liege subjects in these colonies areinstilled to all the inherent rights andLiberties of his natural born subjects within thekingdom of Great Britain.III. That it is inseparably essential to the freedom of apeople, and the undoubted right ofEnglishmen, that no taxes are imposed on them butwith their own consent, given personally or by theirrepresentatives.IV. That the people of these colonies are not, and fromtheir local circumstances cannot be,represented in the House of Commons in GreatBritain.V. That the only representatives of the people of thesecolonies are persons chosen therein bythemselves, and that no taxes ever have been, or can be97

constitutionally imposed on them, but by their respectivelegislatures.VI. That all supplies to the Crown being free gifts to thepeople, it is unreasonable andinconsistent with the principles and spirit of the BritishConstitution, for the people of Great Britain to grant HisMajesty the property of the colonists.VII. That trial by jury is the inherent and invaluable rightof every British subject in theseColonies.VIII. That the late Act of Parliament entitled An Act forgranting and applying certain stampduties, and other duties in the British colonies andplantations in America, etc., byimposing taxes onthe inhabitants of these colonies; and the said Act, and severalotherActs, by extending the jurisdiction of the courts ofAdmiralty beyond its ancient limits, have amanifest tendency to subvert the rights and liberties of thecolonists...XI. That the restrictions imposed by several late Acts ofParliament on the trade of thesecolonies will render them unable to purchase themanufactures of Great Britain.XII. That the increase, prosperity, and happiness of thesecolonies depend on the full and freeEnjoyments of their rights and liberties, and anintercourse with Great Britain mutuallyaffectionate and advantageous.XIII. That it is the right of the British subjects in thesecolonies to petition the King or eitherHouse of Parliament.Lastly, That it is the indispensable duty of these colonies to thebest of sovereigns, to themother country, and to themselves, to endeavor by a loyal anddutiful address to His Majesty, and humble applications toboth Houses of Parliament, to procure the repeal of the Actfor granting and applying certain stamp duties, of all clauses ofany other Acts of Parliament, whereby the jurisdiction of theAdmiralty is extended as aforesaid, and of the other late Actsfor the restriction of American commerce.Declaratory ActAn act for the better securing the dependency of his Majesty’sdominions in America upon the crown and parliament ofGreat Britain.WHEREAS several of the houses of representatives in hisMajesty’s colonies and plantations; and have of late, againstlaw, claimed themselves, or to the general assemblies of thesame, the sole and exclusive right of imposing duties and taxesupon his Majesty’s subjects in the said colonies and plantations;and have in pursuance of such claim, passed certain votes,resolutions, and orders, derogatory to the legislative authorityof parliament, and inconsistent with the dependency of the saidcolonies and plantations upon the crown of Great Britain…beit declared…that the said colonies and plantations in Americahave been, are, and of right out to be, subordinate unto, anddependent upon the imperial crown and parliament of GreatBritain; and that the King’s majesty, by and with the adviceand consent of the lords spiritual and temporal, and commonsof Great Britain, in parliament assembled, had, hath, and ofright ought to have, full power and authority to make laws andstatutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies andpeople of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, inall cases whatsoever.II. And be it further declared…. That all resolutions, votes,orders, and proceedings, in any of the said colonies or plantations,whereby the power and authority of the parliament of GreatBritain, to make laws and statutes as aforesaid, is denied, ordrawn into questions, are hereby declared to be, utterly nulland void to all intents and purposes whatsoever.98 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

First Continental Congress, Declarationand Resolves (1774)Representatives of twelve of the thirteen colonies met in Philadelphiain September and October of 1774 to develop a common response tothe Coercive (Intolerable) Acts. Play close attention to the grievancesthat the Congress cites. Also note the tone of the document and therelationship it outlines between the American colonies and GreatBritain.Whereas, since the close of the [French and Indian] war, theBritish Parliament, claiming a power to bind the people ofAmerica, by statute in all cases whatsoever, hath, in some actsexpressly imposed taxes on them, and in others, under variouspretenses, but in fact for the purpose of raising a revenue, hathimposed rates and duties payable in these colonies, establisheda board of commissioners with unconstitutional powers, andextended the jurisdiction of the courts of admiralty, not onlyfor collecting the said duties, but for the trial of causes merelyarising within the body of a county.... [and] colonists may betransported to England, and there be tried upon accusations....And whereas, in the last session of Parliament, three statutes weremade [The Boston Port Act, the Massachusetts GovernmentAct and the Administration of Justice Act] and another statutewas then made [The Quebec Act].... All of which statutes areimpolitic, unjust and cruel, as well as unconstitutional, andmost dangerous and destructive of American rights.And whereas [colonial] Assemblies have been frequentlyresolved, contrary to the rights of the people, when theyattempt to deliberate on their grievances; and their dutiful,humble, loyal and reasonable petitions to the court for redress,have been repeatedly treated with contempt...The good people of the several colonies... justly alarmed atthese arbitrary proceedings of Parliament and administration,have... appointed deputies [to this Congress] in order to obtainsuch establishment, as that their religion, laws and liberties,may not be subverted:Whereupon the deputies [to this Congress]... in a full and freerepresentation of these Colonies, taking into their most seriousconsideration, the best means of attaining the aforesaid, do, asEnglishmen, their ancestors in like cases have usually done, forasserting and vindicating their rights and liberties, declare,That the inhabitants of the English Colonies in North America,by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the EnglishConstitution, have the following rights:1. That there are entitled to life, liberty and property, and theyhave never ceded to any sovereign power whatever, a right todispose of either without their consent.2. That our ancestors, who first settled these colonies, wereat the time of their emigration from their mother country,entitled to all the rights, liberties and immunities of free andnatural-born subjects, within the realm of England.3. That by such emigration they by no means forfeited,surrendered or lost any of those rights and their descendantsnow are, entitled to the exercise and enjoyment of all of them.4. That the foundation of English liberty, and of all freegovernment, is a right in the people to participate in theirlegislative council: and as the English colonists are notrepresented, and from their local circumstances cannot beproperly represented in the British Parliament, they areentitled to a free and exclusive power of legislation in theirseveral [Colonial] Legislatures. But, from the necessity of thecase, and a regard to the mutual interest of both countries,we cheerfully consent to the operation of such acts of BritishParliament, as are bona fide, restrained to the regulation ofour external commerce, for the purposes of securing thecommercial advantages of the whole empire to the mothercountry. excluding every idea of taxation, internal or external,for the purposes of raising a revenue on the subjects of America,without their consent.5. That the respective colonies are entitled to the common lawof England, and more especially to the great privilege of beingtried by their peers, according to... that law....8. That they have the right peaceably to assemble, considerof their grievances, and petition the King and that allprosecutions... and comments for the same, are illegal....9. That the keeping of a standing army in these colonies, intimes of peace, without the consent of the legislature of thatcolony, is against the law....All... in behalf of themselves and their constituents, doclaim, demand, and insist on, [each of the aforesaid] as theirindubitable rights and liberties, which cannot be legally takenaway from them, altered or abridged by any power whatever,without their consent....In the course of our inquiry, we find many infringementsand violations of the foregoing rights, which, from an ardentdesire that harmony and mutual intercourse of affection andinterest may be restored... that the repeal of them is essentiallynecessary in order to restore harmony between Great Britainand the American colonies....99

To these grievous acts and measures Americans cannot submit,but in hopes that their fellow subjects in Great Britain will, ona revision of them, restore us to a state in which both countriesfound happiness and prosperity, we have for the present onlyresolved to pursue the following measures: First, To enter intoa non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportationagreement or association; Second, To prepare an address tothe people of Great Britain... Third, To prepare a loyal addressto his Majesty....Second Continental Congress,“Declaration of the Causes of the Necessityof Taking Up Arms,” (1775)By the time the Second Continental Congress convened inPhiladelphia, fighting had already taken place at Lexington andConcord. In this document, the Congress explains its reasons forresorting to violence against the British, and the conditions underwhich they would be willing to put down their arms. As you read,see if you can pinpoint how this document differs, in tone and inpurpose, from previous petitions to the Crown. By July, 1775, howdo the colonists perceive themselves and their relationship withGreat Britain?A reverence for our great Creator, principles of humanity, andthe dictates of common sense, must convince all who reflectupon the subject, that government was instituted to promotethe welfare of mankind, and ought to be administered forthe attainment of that end. The legislature of Great Britain,however, stimulated by an inordinate passion for power, notonly unjustifiable, but which they know to be peculiarlyreprobated by the very constitution of that kingdom, anddeparture of success in any mode of contest, where regardshould be had to truth, law, or right, have at length, desertingthose, attempted to affect their cruel and impolitic purpose ofenslaving those colonies by violence, and have thereby renderedit necessary for us to close with their last appeal from Reasonto Arms. Yet, however blinded that assembly may be, by theirintemperate rage for unlimited domination, so to slight justiceand the opinion of mankind, we esteem ourselves bound, byobligations of respect to the rest of the world, to make knownthe justice of our cause.Our forefathers, inhabitants of the island of Great Britain,left their native land, to seek on these shores a residence forcivil and religious freedom. At the expense of their blood, atthe hazard of their fortunes, without the least charge to thecountry from which they removed, by unceasing labour, and anunconquerable spirit, they effected settlements in the distantand inhospitable wilds of America, then filled with numerouswarlike nations of barbarians. Societies or governments, vestedwith perfect legislatures, were formed under charters from thecrown, and an harmonious intercourse was established betweenthe colonies and the kingdom from which they derived theirorigin. The mutual benefits of this of this union became soextraordinary, as to excite astonishment. It is universallyconfessed, that the amazing increase of the wealth, strength,and navigation of the realm, arose from this source, and theminister, who so wisely and successfully directed the measuresof Great Britain in the late war, publicly declared, that these100 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

colonies enabled her to triumph over her enemies...The uninterrupted tenor of their peaceable and respectfulbehavior from the beginning of colonization, their dutiful,zealous, and useful services during the war, though so recentlyand amply acknowledged in the most honorable manner by thelate king, his Majesty, and by Parliament, could not save themfrom the mediated innovations...They have undertaken to give and grant our money withoutour consent, though we have ever exercised an exclusive rightto dispose of our own property; statutes have been passedfor extending the jurisdiction of courts of Admiralty beyondtheir ancient limits; for depriving us of the accustomed andinestimable privilege of trial by jury, in cases affecting bothlife and property; for suspending the legislature of one of thecolonies... for quartering soldiers upon the colonists in timesof peace. It has also been resolved in Parliament, that colonistscharged with certain offenses, shall be transported to Englandto be tried.But why should we enumerate our injuries in detail? By onestatute it is declared that Parliament can, “of right make lawsto bind us IN ALL CASES WHATSOEVER.” What is todefend us against so enormous, so unlimited a power? Not asingle man of those who assume it, is chosen by us, or is subjectto our control or influence... We saw the misery to which suchdespotism would reduce us. We for ten years incessantly andineffectually besieged the throne as supplicants; we reasoned,we remonstrated with Parliament, in the most mild and decentlanguage. But administration... sent over fleets and armiesto enforce these oppressive measures. The indignation of theAmericans was roused, it is true; but it wasthe indignation of a virtuous, loyal, and affectionate people...We have pursued every temperate, every respectable measure;we have even proceeded to break off our commercial intercoursewith our fellow subjects, as the last peaceable admonition, thatour attachment to no nation on earth should supplant ourattachment to liberty. This, we flattered ourselves... how vainwas this hope of finding moderation in our enemies...the world, declare that, exerting the utmost energy of ourpowers, with our beneficent Creator had graciously bestowedupon us, the arms we have been compelled by our enemies toassume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabatingfirmness and perseverance, employ for the preservation of ourliberties; being with our one mind resolved to die freemenrather than to live like slaves.Lest this declaration should disquiet the minds of our friendsand fellow-subjects in any part of the empire, we assure themthat we mean not to dissolve this Union which has so long andhappily subsisted between us, and, which we sincerely wish tosee restored. Necessity has not yet driven us to that desperatemeasure, or induced us to excite any other nation to war againstthem. We have not raised armies with ambitious designs ofseparating from Great Britain, and establishing independentstates. We fight not for glory or for conquest. We exhibit tomankind the remarkable spectacle of peopleattacked by unprovoked enemies, without any imputationor even suspicion of offense... We shall lay down [our arms]when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, andall danger of their being renewed shall be removed, and notbefore...Fruitless were all the entreaties, arguments, and eloquence ofan illustrious band of the most distinguished peers, who noblyand strenuously asserted the justice of our cause, to mitigate theheedless fury with which these accumulated and unexpectedoutrages were hurried on...Our cause is just. Our union is perfect. Our internal resourcesare great, and, if necessary, foreign assistance is undoubtedlyattainable. We gratefully acknowledge, as signal instances ofthe Divine favour towards us, that his Providence would notpermit us to be called into this severe controversy, until we weregrown up to our present strength... With hearts fortified withthese animating reflections, we most solemnly, before Godand101

Thomas Paine, “Common Sense”(January 10, 1776)Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was born in England to a poor Quakerfather and Anglican mother. After meeting Benjamin Franklinin London, he emigrated to the colonies late in 1774 and got a jobediting the Pennsylvania Magazine. Tensions between Englandand the colonies were high, and Paine soon leapt into the fray. Afterthe Battle of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, Paineconcluded that the American colonial revolt should be aimed notagainst unjust taxation but towards full independence from GreatBritain. Paine’s arguments were spelled out in Common Sense, afifty-page pamphlet that was published in January, 1776. It wasan immediate sensation. Close to 150,000 copies were sold withinthree months. and possibly as many as 500,000 copies all together,to a colonial population of but two and half million people. Morethan any other single publication, Paine’s Common Sense persuadedpublic opinion of the case for independence from Great Britain. Whatare Paine’s main arguments for colonial independence? What kindsof language and imagery does he use to express these arguments?How do Paine’s ideas and tone differ from those expressed in theContinental Congresses? Why might his pamphlet held such wideappeal?Volumes have been written on the subject of the strugglebetween England and America. Men of all ranks haveembarked in the controversy, from different motives, and withvarious designs: but all have been ineffectual...I have heard it asserted by some, that as America hath flourishedunder her former connection with Great Britain, the sameconnection is necessary towards her future happiness, and willalways have the same effect. Nothing can be more fallaciousthan this kind of argument. We may as well assert that becausea child has thriven upon milk, that it is never to have meat, orthat the first twenty years of our lives is to become a precedentfor the next twenty. But even this is admitting more than istrue; for I answer roundly, that America would have flourishedas much, and probably much more, had no European powertaken any notice of her. The commerce by which she hathenriched herself are the necessaries of life, and will alwayshave a market while eating is the custom of Europe.But she has protected us, say some. That she hath engrossedus is true, and defended the continent at our expense as wellas her own is admitted; and she would have defended Turkeyfrom the same motive... for the sake of trade and dominion.Alas! we have long led away by ancient prejudices, and madelarge sacrifices to superstition. We have boasted the protectionof Great Britain without considering that her motive wasinterest, not attachment; and that she did not protect us fromour enemies on our account, but from her enemies on her ownaccount, from those who had no quarrel with us on any otheraccount, but who will always be our enemies on the sameaccount. Let Britain waive her pretensions to the continent,or the continent throw off her een , and we should be at peacewith France and Spain were they at war with Britain...But Britain is the parent country, say some. Then the moreshame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour theiryoung, nor savages make war upon their families; wherefore,the assertion, if true, turns to her reproach; but it happens notto be true, or only partly so, and the phrase parent or mothercountry hath been Jesuitically adopted by the king and hisparasites, with a low, papistical design of gaining an unfair biason the credulous weakness of our minds. Europe, not England,is the parent country of America. This new world hath been theasylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious libertyfrom every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from thetender embraces of a mother, but fromthe cruelty of a monster; and it is so far true of England, thatthe same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home,pursues their descendants still...I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation to showa single advantage that this continent can reap, by beingconnected to Great Britain... Our corn will fetch its price inany market in Europe, and our imported goods must be paidfor, buy them where we will.But the injuries and disadvantages we sustain by thatconnection are without number; and our duty to mankindat large, as well as to ourselves, instructs us to renounce thealliance: because any submission to, or dependence on, GreatBritain tends directly to involve this continent in Europeanwars and quarrels, and sets us at variance with nations whowould otherwise seek our friendship, and against whom wehave neither anger nor complaint. As Europe is our market fortrade, we ought to form no partial connection with any part ofit. ‘Tis the true interest of America to steer clear of Europeancontentions, which she never can do while by her dependenceon Britain she is made the makeweight in the scale of Britishpolitics.Europe is too thickly planted with kingdoms to be long atpeace, and whenever a war breaks out between England and aforeign power, the trade of America goes to ruin, because of herconnection with Britain. The next war may not turn out likethe last, and should it not, the advocates for reconciliation nowwill be wishing for separation then, because neutrality in thatcase would be a safer convoy than a man of war. Everythingthat is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of theslain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘TIS TIME TO PART.Even the distance at which the Almighty hath placed England102 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

and America is a strong and natural proof that the authority ofone over the other was never the design of heaven...It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene ofpresent sorrow. The evil is not sufficiently brought to their doorsto make them feel the precariousness with which all Americanproperty is possessed. But let our imaginations transport us fora few moments to Boston; that seat of wretchedness will teachus wisdom, and instruct us to forever renounce a power in whomwe can have no trust. The inhabitants of that unfortunate city,who but a few months ago were in ease and affluence, havenow no other alternative than to stay and starve, or turn outto beg. Endangered by the fire of their friends if they continuewithin the city, and plundered by the soldiery if they leave it,in their present situation they are prisoners without the hopeof redemption...But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then Iask, Hath your house been burnt? Hath your property beendestroyed before your face? Are your wife and childrendestitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Hath you losta parent or child by their hands, and yourself the ruined andwretched survivor? If you have not, then you are not a judge ofthose who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands withthe murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband,father, friend, or lover; and whatever might be your rank ortitle in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of asycophant...Every quiet method for peace hath been ineffectual. Ourprayers have been rejected with disdain; and have tended toconvince us that nothing flatters vanity or confirms obstinacyin kings more than repeated petitioning – and nothing hathcontributed more than that very measure to make the kings ofEurope absolute... Wherefore, since nothing but blows will do,for God’s sake let us come to a final separation, and to leavethe next generation to be cutting throats under the violatedunmeaning names of parent and child...As to government matters, it is not in the power of Britain todo this continent justice... for if they cannot conquer us, theycannot govern us. To be always running three or four thousandmiles with a tale or petition, waiting four or five months for ananswer, which, which, when obtained, requires five or six moreto explain it in, will in a few years be looked upon as folly andchildishness. There was a time when it was proper, and there isa proper time for it to cease.Small islands not capable of protecting themselves are theproper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; butthere is something very absurd in supposing a continent tobe perpetually governed by an island. In no instance hathnature made the satellite larger than its primary planet; andas England and America, with respect to each other, reversethe common order of nature, it is evident that they belong todifferent systems. England to Europe: America to itself...[The king] hath shown himself to be an inveterate enemy toliberty, and discovered such a thirst for arbitrary power. Is he,or is he not, a proper person to say to these colonies, You shallmake no laws but what I please! And is there any inhabitantin America so ignorant as not to know, that according to whatis called the present constitution, this continent can make nolaws but what the King gives leave to; and there is any man sounwise as not to see, that (considering what has happened) hewill suffer no law to be made but such as suits his purpose?...[C]an there be any doubt but the whole power of the Crownwill be exerted to keep this continent as low and as humble aspossible? Instead of going forward we will go backward... Weare already greater than the King wishes us to be, and will henot hereafter endeavor to make us less? To bring the matterto one point, is the power jealous of our prosperity, a properpower to govern us? Whosoever says No to this question isan independent, for independency means no more than this,whether we shall make our own laws, or whether the king, thegreatest enemy which this continent hath, or can have, shalltell us, There shall be no laws but such as I like.But where, say some, is the king of America? I’ll tell you,friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankindlike the Royal Brute of Great Britain... [L]et it be broughtforth placed on the divine law, the Word of God; let a crownbe placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so faras we approve of monarchy, that in America THE LAW ISKING. For in absolute governments the king is law, so in freecountries the law ought to BE king, and there ought to be noother. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crownat the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished...A government of our own is our natural right; and when a manseriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, hewill become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer toform a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner,while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interestingevent to time and chance...Ye that tell us of harmony and reconciliation, can ye restore tous the time that is passed? Can ye give to prostitution its formerinnocence? Neither can ye reconcile Britain and America. Thelast cord is now broken... There are injuries which naturecannot forgive; she would cease to be nature if she did. Aswell can the lover forgive the ravisher of his mistress, as thecontinent forgive the murders of Britain. The Almighty hathimplanted in us these unextinguishable feelings for good andwide purposes. They are the guardians of his image in ourhearts. They distinguish us from the herd of common animals.The social compact would dissolve, and justice be extirpatedfrom the earth, or have only a casual existence, were we callous103

to the touches of affection. The robber and the murdererwould often escape unpunished, did not the injuries which ourtempers sustain, provoke us into justice.O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only thetyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the oldworld is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been huntedround the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her.Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given herwarning to depart. O receive the fugitive, and prepare in timean asylum for all mankind.Ben Franklin:Promoting the Abolition of SlaveryAn Address to the Publicfrom the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery,and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in BondageIt is with peculiar satisfaction we assure the friends ofhumanity, that, in prosecuting the design of our association,our endeavours have proved successful, far beyond our mostsanguine expectations.Encouraged by this success, and by the daily progress of thatluminous and benign spirit of liberty, which is diffusing itselfthroughout the world, and humbly hoping for the continuanceof the divine blessing on our labours, we have ventured to makean important addition to our original plan, and do thereforeearnestly solicit the support and assistance of all who can feelthe tender emotions of sympathy and compassion, or relish theexalted pleasure of beneficence.Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, thatits very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, maysometimes open a source of serious evils.The unhappy man, who has long been treated as a brute animal,too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of thehuman species. The galling chains, that bind his body, do alsofetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affectionsof his heart. Accustomed to move like a mere machine, by thewill of a master, reflection is suspended; he has not the powerof choice; and reason and conscience have but little influenceover his conduct, because he is chiefly governed by the passionof fear. He is poor and friendless; perhaps worn out by extremelabour, age, and disease.Under such circumstances, freedom may often prove amisfortune to himself, and prejudicial to society.Attention to emancipated black people, it is therefore to behoped, will become a branch of our national policy; but, asfar as we contribute to promote this emancipation, so far thatattention is evidently a serious duty incumbent on us, andwhich we mean to discharge to the best of our judgment andabilities.To instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restoredto freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty,to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them withemployments suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances,and to procure their children an education calculatedfor their future situation in life; these are the great outlinesof the annexed plan, which we have adopted, and which weconceive will essentially promote the public good, and thehappiness of these our hitherto too much neglected fellowcreatures.A plan so extensive cannot be carried into execution without104 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

considerable pecuniary resources, beyond the present ordinaryfunds of the Society. We hope much from the generosity ofenlightened and benevolent freemen, and will gratefully receiveany donations or subscriptions for this purpose, which may bemade to our treasurer, James Starr, or to James Pemberton,chairman of our committee of correspondence.by Order of the Society,of your Knuckle. At this Key the Phial may be charg’d; andfrom Electric Fire thus obtain’d, Spirits may be kindled, andall the other Electric Experiments be perform’d, which areusually done by the Help of a rubbed Glass Globe or Tube;and thereby the Sameness of the Electric Matter with that ofLightning compleatly demonstrated.B. FRANKLINB.FRANKLIN, President.Philadelphia, 9th ofNovember, 1789.Letters to Peter Collinson[October 19, 1752: The Kite Experiment]Philadelphia, October ‘9As frequent Mention is made in the News Papers from Europe,of the Success of the Philadelphia Experiment for drawingthe Electric Fire from Clouds by Means of pointed Rods ofIron erected on high buildings, &c. it may be agreeable tothe Curious to be inform’d, that the same Experiment hassucceeded in Philadelphia, tho’ made in a different and moreeasy Manner, which any one may try, as follows.Make a small Cross of two light Strips of Cedar, the Armsso long as to reach to the four Corners of a large thin SilkHandkerchief when extended; tie the Corners of theHandkerchief to the Extremities of the Cross, so you have theBody of a Kite; which being properly accommodated with aTail, Loop and String, will rise in the Air, like those made ofPaper;but this being of Silk is fitter to bear the Wet and Wind of aThunder Gust without tearing. To the Top of the upright Stickof the Cross is to be fixed a very sharp pointed Wire, rising aFoot or more above the Wood. To the End of the Twine, nextthe Hand, is to be tied a silk Ribbon, and where the Twineand the silk join, a Key may be fastened. This Kite is to beraised when a Thunder Gust appears to be coming on, andthe Person who holds the String must stand within a Door,or Window, or under some Cover, so that the Silk Ribbonmay not be wet; and Care must be taken that the Twine doesnot touch the Frame of the Door or Window. As soon as anyof the Thunder Clouds come over the Kite, the pointed Wirewill draw the Electric Fire from them, and the Kite, withall the Twine, will be electrified, and the loose Filaments ofthe Twine will stand out every Way, and be attracted by anapproaching Finger. And when the Rain has wet the Kite andTwine, so that it can conduct the Electric Fire freely, you willfind it stream out plentifully from the Key on the Approach105

The Declaration of Independence(July 4, 1776)Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration as part of acommittee that included Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. TheContinental Congress made significant revisions to Jefferson’s draftand approved the document on July 4, 1776. In the Declaration, theContinental Congress asserts American independence from Britainand justifies its decision to do so by citing a series of alleged violationsof American rights. In its most famous passages, the Declarationcites the natural rights of men and asserts that governments “derivetheir just powers from the consent of the governed.” The Declarationalso startlingly declares that “all men are created equal.” As you read,think carefully about what these key phrases mean. And, thinkabout whether the Declaration is an extension of or a departurefrom British tradition.In Congress, July 4, 1776,The Unanimous Declaration of the thirteen unitedStates of America,When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary forone people to dissolve the political bands which have connectedthem with another, and to assume among the Powers of theearth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws ofNature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect tothe opinions of mankind requires that they should declare thecauses which impel them to the separation.We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men arecreated equal, that they are endowed by their Creator withcertain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Libertyand the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights,Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their justpowers from the consent of the governed, That whenever anyForm of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it isthe Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institutenew Government, laying its foundation on such principles andorganizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem mostlikely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed,will dictate that Governments long established should not bechanged for light and transient causes; and accordingly allexperience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed tosuffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves byabolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But whena long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariablythe same Object evinces a design to reduce them underabsolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throwoff such Government, and to provide new Guards for theirfuture security. – Such has been the patient suffering of theseColonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains themto alter their former systems of Government. The history of thepresent King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuriesand usurpations, all having in direct object the establishmentof an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, letFacts be submitted to a candid world.He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome andnecessary for the public good.He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediateand pressing importance, unless suspended in their operationtill his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, hehas utterly neglected to attend to them.He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation oflarge districts of people, unless those people would relinquishthe Right of Representation in the Legislature, a rightinestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual,uncomfortable, and distant from the depositories of theirPublic Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them intocompliance with his measures.He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to causeothers to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapableof Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for theirexercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to allthe dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States;for that Purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization ofForeigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrationhither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations ofLands.He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusinghis Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.He has made Judges dependent upon his Will alone, for thetenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of theirsalaries.He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hitherswarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out theirsubstance.He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armieswithout the Consent of our legislature.He has affected to render the Military independent of andsuperior to the Civil Power.106 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdictionforeign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws;giving his Assent to their acts of pretended legislation:For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment forany Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants ofthese States:For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:For imposing taxes on us without our Consent:For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial byJury:For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretendedoffenses:For abolishing the free System of English Laws in aneighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrarygovernment, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it atonce an example and fit instrument for introducing the sameabsolute rule into these Colonies:For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuableLaws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of ourGovernments:For suspending our own Legislature, and declaring themselvesinvested with Power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of hisProtection and waging War against us.He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt ourtowns, and destroyed the lives of our people.He is at this time transporting large armies of foreignmercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation andtyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty andperfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, andtotally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on thehigh Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become theexecutioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselvesby their Hands.He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and hasendeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, themerciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is anundistinguished destruction of all ages sexes and conditions.In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned forRedress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitionshave been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whosecharacter is thus marked by every act which may define aTyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People.Nor have We been wanting in attention to our British brethren.We have warned them from time to time of attempts by theirlegislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. Wehave reminded them of the circumstances of our emigrationand settlement here. We have appealed to their native justiceand magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of ourcommon kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, wouldinevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. Theytoo have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denouncesour Separation, and hold them, a we hold the rest of mankind,Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States ofAmerica, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to theSupreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of theseColonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these UnitedColonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and IndependentStates; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the BritishCrown, and that all political connection between them and theState of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; andthat as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levyWar, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce,and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent Statesmay of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, witha firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, wemutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and oursacred Honor.John Hancock.New HampshireJosiah Bartlett, Wm. Whipple, Matthew Thornton.Massachusetts-BaySaml. Adams, John Adams, Robt. Treat Paine, ElbridgeGerry.Rhode IslandStep. Hopkins, William Ellery.ConnecticutRoger Sherman, Sam’el Huntington, Wm. Williams, OliverWalcott.New York107

Wm. Floyd, Phil. Livingston, Frans. Lewis, Lewis Morris.PennsylvaniaRobt. Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benja. Franklin, John Morton,Geo. Clymer, Jas. Smith, Geo. Taylor, James Wilson, Geo.Ross.DelawareCaesar Rodney, Geo. Read, Tho. M’Kean.GeorgiaButton Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, Geo. Walton.MarylandSamuel Chase, Wm. Paca, Thos. Stone, Charles Carroll ofCarrollton.and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or toincur miserable death in their transportation hither. Thispiratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is thewarfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determinedto keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,he has prostituted his negative [royal veto] for suppressingevery legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrablecommerce.... He is now exciting those very people to rise inarms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he hasdeprived them by murdering the people upon whom he alsoobtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committedagainst the liberties of one people with crimes which he urgesthem to commit against the lives of another.VirginiaGeorge Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Th. Jefferson, Benja.Harrison, Ths. Nelson Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, CarterBraxton.North CarolinaWm. Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn.South CarolinaEdward Rutledge, Thos. Heyward Junr., Thomas Lynch Junr.,Arthur Middleton.New JerseyRichd. Stockton, Jno. Witherspoon, Fras. Hopkinson, JohnHart, Abra. Clark.Thomas Jefferson, Paragraph from Jefferson’sOriginal Draft of the Declaration ofIndependence - Eliminated from the Final Draftby the Continental Congress (1776)The following paragraph on slavery was part of Jefferson’s draft ofthe Declaration. The Continental Congress decided to omit it fromthe final version. Think carefully about why the Congress chose toexclude this paragraph.He [George III] has waged cruel war against human natureitself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in thepersons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating108 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Mary Beth Norton:Women in the RevolutionMost narratives of the Revolutionary War concentrate upondescribing a series of pitched battles between uniformed armies.Yet the impact of the conflict can more accurately be assessedif it is interpreted as a civil war with profound consequencesfor the entire population. Every movement of troops throughthe American countryside brought a corresponding flight ofrefugees, an invasion of epidemic disease, the expropriation offoodstuffs, firewood, and livestock, widespread plundering ordestruction of personal property, and occasional incidents ofrape. In addition to bearing these common burdens of warfare,Americans who remained loyal to the Crown had to contendwith persecution, property confiscation, and forced exile, as didpatriots who lived in areas controlled by the British, althoughfor them such reverses were only temporary.The disruption of normal patterns of life that resulted from allthese seldom studied aspects of the conflict had an especiallynoticeable effect upon women, whose prewar experienceshad been confined largely to the domestic realm. With theirmen folk away serving in the armies for varying lengths oftime, white female Americans had to venture into new fieldsof endeavor. In the midst of wartime trials, they alone hadto make crucial decisions involving not only household andfamily but also the “outdoor affairs” from which they hadformerly been excluded. After initially expressing hesitationabout their ability to assume these new responsibilities, manywhite women gained a new appreciation of their own capacityand of the capability of their sex in general as they learned tohandle unfamiliar tasks.For black women, too, the war brought changes. Most notably,the British policy of offering freedom to runaway slavesencouraged a significant percentage of them to abandon theirhome plantation in order to seek refuge with the redcoats. Intimes of peace, the vast majority of runaways were youthfulmales, but ready access to the British army in the South duringthe later years of the war enabled even mothers encumberedwith many children to take advantage of the opportunity towin freedom for themselves and their offspring. Of the manyironies of black‐white relations in the revolutionary era, oneof the most striking was the fact that while American whiteswere struggling against British attempts to “enslave” them,American blacks correctly regarded those same redcoats asliberators.1White women’s experiences with wartime disruptions variedaccording to the region in which they lived, for the war did notaffect all Americans equally at all times. New Englanders hadto cope with turmoil first, but after the British evacuated Bostonin 1776, the northern section of the country was relatively freeof armed conflict, with the exception of coastal areas, whichremained continually open to attack from the sea. In the middlestates, by contrast, the continuing presence of the British armyin New York City and environs from July 1776 to November1783 and the redcoats’ brief occupation of Philadelphia in1777-1778 meant that many families had no respite from thedangers of warfare for a period of years. Although the South,on the other hand, was little touched by the war before 1778,subsequent British army movements and the internecine guerrillaconflict that raged incessantly through the backcountryhad a devastating impact on the economy and society. Eachof these regional patterns had different consequences for thefemale population.Yet there was also similarity among women’s experiences.Northerners and southerners responded alike to such stimuli asthe looming threat of invasion by enemy troops, the incidenceof disease, or the opportunity to accompany their husbands tothe army....When news of the British sortie from Boston spread rapidlythrough New England towns on April 19, 1775, panic strucka civilian population awakened from “benign Slumbers” bythe “beat of drum and ringing of Bell.” Sixty‐seven years later,Susan Mason Smith, who was thirteen in 1775, still vividlyremembered that night of terror. Although her family decidednot to leave their Salem home because they did not know whereto find safety, she did not remove her shoes for several daysthereafter, afraid to be unprepared for the next alarm. Manyother families made the opposite choice, for on the morningof April 20 an observer found the roads around Boston “filledwith frighted women and children, some in carts with theirtattered furniture, others on foot fleeing into the woods.” Inthe months that followed such scenes became commonplace inNew England. After the battle of Bunker Hill, during whichmuch of Charlestown was destroyed by fire, James Warrenreported from Watertown that “it is Impossible to describe theConfusion in this place, Women and Children flying into theCountry, armed Men Going to the field, and wounded Menreturning from there fill the Streets.”Even though no other major clashes occurred in the area,life did not soon return to normal, especially for those whoresided near the coast. “We live in continual Expectation ofHostilities,” Abigail Adams told her husband shortly after thedestruction of Charlestown. A month earlier four British shipshad dropped anchor nearby in search of forage, creatinganother panic. “People women children from the Iron Worksflocking down this way—every woman and child above orfrom below my Fathers,” she wrote then, conveying a sense of109

distraction even in her prose. “My Fathers family flying, theDrs. in great distress,. . . my Aunt had her Bed thrown into acart, into which she got herself, and ordered the boy to driveher of[f].”The same images of disorder reverberated through laterdescriptions of similar scenes. “I arrived here late last nightand found people in the utmost confusion, Familys, Women,Children, & Luggage all along the road as I came, moovingdifferent ways,” reported a Georgian in 1776 after an Indianraid. Rumors that the British were sailing up the Chesapeakethat same year elicited an identical reaction in Annapolis, “whatwith the darkness of the night, thunder, lightning, and rain,cries of women and children, people hurrying their effects intothe country, drums beating to arms, etc.” Many of the refugeesmust have felt like Helena Kortwright Brasher, who, when sheand her family fled the British attack on Esopus, New York,asked, “Where God can we fly from danger? All places appearequally precarious,” or like Ann Eliza Bleecker of Tomhanick,New York, whose friends and relatives “scattered like a flock offrighted birds” before the “hurricane” of Burgoyne’s invasionin the fall of 1777. Mrs. Bleecker, who never recovered heremotional equilibrium after the death of her baby daughter onthat wild flight, wrote of how she and her children had wandered“solitary through the dark woods, expecting every moment tomeet the bloody ally of Britain the Indians],” before reachingthe safety of Albany. Over two years later Mrs. Bleecker tolda friend, “Alas! the wilderness is within: I muse so long onthe dead until I am unfit for the company of the living.” Theeighty‐six‐year‐old widow of a revolutionary soldier obviouslyspoke for many when she observed in 1840, “There was somuch Suffering, and so many alarms in our neighborhood inthose hard times, that it has always been painful for me todwell upon them.”Faced with the uncertain dangers of flight, some, like theMason family of Salem before them, decided to remain wherethey were. In 1777 a Pennsylvanian told John Adams resolutelythat “if the two opposite Armys were to come here alternatelyten times, she would stand by her Property until she shouldbe kill’d. If she must be a Beggar, it should be where she wasknown.” Hannah Iredell’s sister Jean Blair made the samechoice in 1781 when the redcoats neared her North Carolinahome. “The English are certainly at Halifax but I suppose theywill be every where & I will fix myself here it is as safe as anywhere else & I can be no longer tossed about,” she declared.The Philadelphian Elizabeth Farmer also decided to stay inher house, despite the fact that it lay between the lines duringthe occupation of the city in 1777‐1778. As a result, she, herhusband, and their daughter were endangered by frequentgunfire, had difficulty obtaining adequate food supplies, andsuffered “manny cold days” that winter because the Britishconfiscated their firewood. “Notwithstanding we thoughtourselves well of[f] in comparison to some,” she remarked in1783. “Most of the houses near us have been either burnt orpulled down as would have been the case with us if we had notstayed in it even at the hasard of our lives.”.Even after the redcoats’ long‐awaited departure, Boston, saidone resident, was not “that agreeable place it once was—Almostevery thing here, appears Gloomy & Mallancholy.” One of thechief reasons for the Bostonians’ gloom was the presence ofepidemic disease in their midst. The unhealthy conditions inthe besieged city had helped to incubate both smallpox anddysentery, and an epidemic of the latter had already sweptthe Massachusetts countryside the preceding fall, killingAbigail Adams’s mother and niece, among many others. “Thedesolation of War is not so distressing as the Havock made bythe pestilence,” Abigail remarked then. She could do nothingto prevent the deaths from dysentery, but smallpox was anothermatter. After it became clear that the disease would probablyspread across New England, carried by soldiers returning fromthe army that had invaded Canada as well as by Bostonians, shebegan making arrangements to have herself and her childreninoculated.Abigail Adams and other eighteenth‐century Americans couldnot reach such a decision lightly, for inoculation required beingdeliberately infected with the disease. Waiting to take smallpox“in the natural way” was to court death, yet no parents wantedto place their children knowingly into mortal danger or torisk their serious disfigurement. Accordingly, adults usuallypostponed inoculation for themselves and their offspring aslong as possible. The war forced them to face the issue directly,since smallpox followed the armies so inevitably that someAmericans charged the British with the “hellish Pollicy” ofintentionally spreading the disease. Therefore, whenever alarge number of soldiers from either side arrived in a givenarea, parents had to make life‐or‐death decisions. indeed,like Abigail Adams, many wives were forced to reach thosedecisions on their own in the absence of their husbands....In addition to carrying smallpox, the armies brought a specificterror to American women: the fear of rape. The only femaleNew Englanders who personally confronted this problem ona large scale were residents of Fairfield and New Haven, theConnecticut towns raided by English and Hessian troops inearly July 1779. Shortly after the raid, the Continental Congresscollected depositions from women who had been attacked bythe redcoats. Two local residents declared that they had foughtoff sexual assaults with the help of passersby, but ChristianaGatter was not so fortunate. Herhusband, who had been severely beaten by the British earlierin the day, ran away when a group of soldiers broke into theirhome at half past two in the morning. “Two of them laid holdof me and threw me on the Bed and swore if I made any noiseor Resistance they would kill me in a moment,” Mrs. Gatter110 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

testified, so “I was obliged to Submit” to each of them inturn. Her fate was hardly enviable, yet far worse were the circumstancesof girls living on Staten Island and in New Jersey,who during the fall and winter of 1776 were subjected torepeated rapes by British troops stationed in the area. Whereasthe Connecticut incidents and other similar occurrences tookplace in the context of brief excursions in search of plunder, the1776 rapes were both systematic and especially brutal....Depositions collected by the Continental Congress gave themost vivid accounts of the experiences of women in New Jerseyin late 1776. Particularly revealing are those that pertain to aseries of incidents at the home of Edmund Palmer, an elderlyHunterdon County farmer. One December day, a number ofBritish soldiers from a nearby camp came to the house. Oneof them dragged Palmer’s thirteen‐year‐old granddaughter,Abigail, into a back room. She “Scream’d & begged of himto let her alone, but some of Said Soldiers said they wou’dknock her Eyes out if she did not hold her Tongue.” Over theineffectual pleas of her grandfather and her aunt Mary Phillips,Abigail was raped three rimes. Abigail testified that “for threeDays successively, Divers Soldiers wou’d come to the House &Treat her in the Same manner.” On one of those days, her auntMary was raped in the barn and her friend Sarah Cain, whohad come to comfort her, was also assaulted. Finally, on theevening of the third day two soldiers demanded that Abigail andSarah’s younger sister Elisabeth, who was fifteen, accompanythem to their camp. “One of them Said he had come for hisGirl, & Swore he wou’d have her, & Seiz’d hold of her Hand& told her to Bundle up her Cloaths for she shou’d go withthem,” Abigail recounted. She and Elisabeth were then forcedinto another room despite the efforts of Edmund Palmer andElisabeth’s father, Thomas. Elisabeth recalled that “the saidSoldiers Ravished them both and then took them away to theirCamp, where they was both Treated by some others of theSoldiers in the same cruel manner,” until they were rescued byan officer. After spending the night at a nearby farmhouse, thegirls went home—not to Palmer’s, but to Thomas Cain’s. Andthere they were evidently safe, for they told the investigators ofno further attacks....What distinguished the war in Virginia, Georgia, and theCarolinas from that in the North was its length and ferociousintensity. From the invasion of Georgia in 1778 to the ratificationof the peace treaty in 1783, the South was the main theater ofwar, and there battles were not confined to the formal clashesbetween armies that had characterized the northern phase ofthe conflict. A prolonged guerrilla war, coupled with sporadicnonpartisan plundering and the wanderings of the Britisharmy through North Carolina and Virginia in 1780‐1781, leftmuch of the South devastated. David Ramsay’s assessment ofSouth Carolina can accurately be applied to the entire region:“]here was scarcely an inhabitant of the State, however obscurein character or remote in situation, whether he remained firmto one party or changed with the times, who did not partakeof the general distress.”Thus Georgians and South Carolinians universally complainedof the “Banditti” who raided, pillaged, and looted throughtheir states. “Property of every kind has been taken from usInhabitants, their Negroes, Horses & Cattle drove & carriedaway,” declared a Georgian in 1779. That same year a SouthCarolinian commented that the “Havoc” caused by the robbers“is not to be described. Great Numbers of Women and Childrenhave been left without a 2nd Shift of Clothes. The furniturewhich they could not carry off they wantonly broke, burnt, anddestroyed.” Fifteen months later Eliza Lucas Pinckney observedthat “the plantations have been some quite, some nearly windand all with very few exceptions great sufferers!. T]heir Crops,stock, boats, Carts etc. all gone taken or destroyed and theCrops made this year must be very small by the desertion ofthe Negroes in planting and hoeing time.” Virginia was notso seriously affected as its neighboring states to the south,but there too the distress was great in the months before theAmerican victory at Yorktown. Eliza Wilkinson’s account of herlife in the South Carolina Sea Islands during the 1780 Britishinvasion dramatically conveys the sense of fear and uncertaintyshe felt. The area was completely at the mercy of the redcoats,she noted, with “nothing but women, a few aged gentlemen,and (shame to tell) some skulking varlets” to oppose them. Onone “day of terror” in early June, she recounted, a British troopaccompanied by armed blacks robbed her home of clothes andjewelry, using “the most abusive language imaginable, whilemaking as if to hew us to pieces with their swords.” After thelooters had left, “I trembled so with terror, that I could notsupport myself,” she wrote two years later, recalling that shehad “indulged in the most melancholy reflections. The wholeworld appeared to me as a theatre, where nothing was actedbut cruelty, bloodshed, and oppression; where neither agenor sex escaped the horrors of injustice and violence; wherethe lives and property of the innocent and inoffensive were incontinual danger, and the lawless power ranged at large.” Inthe aftermath of the attack, Mrs. Wilkinson revealed, ‘’[Wecould neither eat, drink, nor sleep in peace; for as we lay inour clothes every night, we could not enjoy the little sleep wegot.... Our nights were wearisome and painful; our days spentin anxiety and melancholy.”But what to Eliza Wilkinson and her fellow whites was atime of trouble and distress was for their slaves a period ofunprecedented opportunity. The continuing presence of theBritish army in the South held out to black men and womenalike the prospect of winning their freedom from bondage,for in an attempt to disrupt the Americans’ labor supply andacquire additional manpower, British commanders offeredliberty to slaves who would flock to the royal standard. No sex111

or age restrictions limited the offer to adult men alone, and sowomen fled to the redcoat encampments, often taking theirchildren with them.The detailed plantation records kept by Thomas Jefferson andJohn Ball make it possible to identify the family relationshipsof runaways from their lands. Among the twenty‐three slaveswho abandoned Jefferson’s Virginia holdings were ten adultwomen and three girls. Of the five female adults who can betraced with certainty, two left with their husbands, one ofthem accompanied by children as well; another fled with threeof her four offspring; and the remaining two, one of whom wasmarried, ventured forth by themselves. The fifty‐three blackswho fled John Ball’s plantation in 1780 included eighteenwomen, among them eight mothers with children, some of thelatter still infants. Charlotte, a childless woman whose familyconnections are unknown, probably led a mass escape fromBall’s Kensington quarter. She originally left the plantation onMay 10, in company with Bessy and her three children, butshe was soon recaptured. A week later she ran away again, thistime along with (and perhaps as a guide for) what Ball termed“Ping’s gang.” This fifteen‐member group, which escaped viaBall’s flatboat, was composed of Pino, his wife, their youngestdaughter, and one of their two granddaughters; their daughter,Jewel, her husband, Dicky, and son, Little Pino; Dicky’s sister,her husband, and their daughter; and Eleanor Lawrence, herhusband, Brutus, and their two daughters. Although it is notclear whether Eleanor was related to the Pino clan, her sisterFlora had also absconded to the British, along with an infantson, two weeks previously.The impressions one receives from such fragmentary evidence—both of large numbers of female runaways and of familiesleaving together—are confirmed by an examination of recordskept at the evacuation of New York City. Each time the Britishleft an American port in the later years of the war, they carriedlarge numbers of former slaves away with them, approximatelyten thousand from Savannah and Charleston alone. Because thepreliminary peace terms accepted in November 1782 includeda clause requiring the British to return slaves to Americanowners, Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander, ordered theenumeration of all blacks who claimed the protection of thearmy. Crude biographical details were obtained from formerslaves then ˇ.within the lines in order to ascertain whetherthey should be allowed to embark with the troops for Englandand Nova Scotia. Blacks who had belonged to loyalists wereexcluded from the promise of freedom offered by the Britishduring the war, as were any who had joined the British afterNovember 1782. But Carleton believed himself obliged toensure the liberty of all the others.Of the 2,863 persons whose sex is specified on the survivingembarkation lists (119 small children were not differentiated bysex), 1,211 (or 42.3 percent) were female and 1,652 (57.7 percent)were male. The substantial proportion of female runawaysreflects the ease with which even a woman with children couldseek freedom when the British army was encamped only a fewmiles from her home. Further, the analysis of the age structureof those on the New York City lists indicates that women oftenbrought children with them into the lines. Nearly 17 percentof the refugees were nine years of age or younger, and fully 32percent were under twenty. Slightly more than a quarter of themature women were explicitly identified as being accompaniedby children, and the addition of other likely cases brings thatproportion to 40 percent. Disregarding the 96 children whohad been born free in British‐held territory, each maturewoman who joined the royal forces had an average of 1.6children at her side.An examination of familial relationships from the standpointof 605 children (503 of them nine years old or under) listed onthe embarkation rolls shows that 3 percent were accompaniedsolely by fathers, 17 percent were with both parents, 56.2percent with mothers alone, and 24.3 percent with otherrelatives, some of whom may have been parents but who are notexplicitly noted as such on the occasionally incomplete records.These families included such groups as Prince Princes, agedfifty‐three, his forty‐year‐old wife, Margaret, their twentyyear‐olddaughter, Elizabeth, and her “small child,” and theirson, Erick, who was eleven; “Jane Thompson 70 worn out wta grand child 5 y[r] old”; and Hannah Whitten, thirty, withher five children, ages eight, seven, six, five, and one. Thefive‐member Sawyer clan of Norfolk, Virginia, evidently usedthe opportunity to seek freedom with the British as a meansof reuniting. Before they all ran away in 1776, the family wasdivided among three owners: the mother and a child in onelocation, two children in another, and the father in a third. Inall, despite the preponderance among the refugees of young,single adults, 40 percent of the total, like the Sawyers and theothers just noted, appear to have been accompanied by relativesof some kind.To arrive at New York City, the blacks listed on the Britishrecords had had to survive many dangers and hardships, not theleast of which was the prevalence of epidemic diseases in theencampments to which they had fled. Yet they were not entirelysafe even in British‐occupied Manhattan. The minutes of thejoint Anglo‐American board established to adjudicate claimsunder the peace treaty reveal liberty lost on legal technicalitiesimportant to the presiding officers but of little meaning to theblacks involved. Mercy and her three children were returned toher master because, as a resident of Westchester County, NewYork, she had not lived outside the British lines and so couldnot have come within them voluntarily to earn the protectionof the freedom proclamation. Elizabeth Truant remained theproperty of a New Jerseyite because she had not joined theBritish until April 1783, after the signing of the preliminary112 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

peace terms. And, tragically, Samuel Doson, who in 1778 hadkidnapped his two children from the house of their owner inorder to bring them with him into New York, lost them to thatsame man in 1783, after he and his youngsters had alreadyboarded a ship bound for Nova Scotia. He himself was likewisereclaimed by his loyalist master.When enslaved men and women decided whether to run awaythey could not see into the future and understand the fullimplications of British policy for their ultimate fate. But manyundoubtedly heard the tales of disease in the refugee camps,and others (like some belonging to Eliza Lucas Pinckney)were undoubtedly so “attatched to their homes and the littlethey have there [that they] have refused to remove.” Indeed,amid the chaos of war, plantation life sometimes bore littleresemblance to that of peacetime. Remaining at home in aknown environment, surrounded by friends and relatives,could seem an attractive alternate to an uncertain future asa refugee, especially when white owners and overseers couldno longer control the situation. For her part, Mrs. Pinckneysimply surrendered to the inevitable. Speaking of her slaves, sheobserved to her son Thomas in the spring of 1779 that “they alldo now what they please every where.” The blacks on Thomas’sAshepoo plantation were no less troublesome. They “pay noAttention” to the overseer’s orders, he told his mother; and thepregnant women and small children were “now perfectly free& live upon the best produce of the Plantation. “If black women chose to run away to the redcoats, they riskedtheir lives and those of their children, but they gained thepossibility of freedom in Canada, the United States, or evenAfrica as a reward. If they decided to stay at home, theycontinued in bondage but kept all their family ties intact. Itmust have been a wrenching decision, regardless of whichchoice they made. The Revolutionary War brought blacks afull share of heartbreak and pain, even as it provided themwith an unprecedented opportunity to free themselves fromservitude.11The experiences of white women during the RevolutionaryWar were affected by the extent of their husbands’ politicalactivism as well as by the region in which their families lived.Wives of ardent patriots and loyalists alike were left alonefor varying lengths of time while their spouses served in thearmy or, in the case of loyalists, took refuge behind the Britishlines. Although women could stay with their soldier husbandsand earn their own keep by serving as army cooks, nurses, orlaundresses, most did not find this an attractive alternative.Life in the military camps was hard, and army commanders,while recognizing that female laborers did essential work,tended to regard them as a hindrance rather than an asset.113

Clinton Rossiter: England in the Wilderness- The Colonists and Their WorldIn the year 1765 there lived along the American seaboard1,450,000 white and 400,000 Negro subjects of King GeorgeIII of England. The area of settlement stretched from thePenobscot to the Altamaha and extended inland, by no meanssolidly, to the Appalachian barrier. Within this area flourishedthirteen separate political communities, subject immediatelyor ultimately to the authority of the Crown, but enjoying in butlarge powers of self‐government. Life was predominantly rural,the economy agrarian, religion Protestant, descent English,and politics the concern of men of property.To the best of the average man’s knowledge, whether his point ofobservation was in the colonies or England, all but a handful ofthese Americans were contented subjects of George III. It washard for them to be continually enthusiastic about a sovereignor mother country so far away, yet there were few signs that theimperial bonds were about to chafe so roughly. Occasionallystatements appeared in print or official correspondence accusingthe colonists of republicanism, democracy, and a hankering forindependence, but these could be written off as the scoldingsof overfastidious travelers or frustrated agents of the royal will.Among the ruling classes sentiments of loyalty to the Crownwere strongly held and eloquently expressed, while the attitudeof the mass of men was not much different from thee of theplain people of England: a curious combination of indifferenceand obeisance. Benjamin Franklin, who had more firsthandinformation about the colonies than any other man, could laterwrite in all sincerity, “I never had heard in any Conversationfrom any Person drunk or sober, the least Expression of a wishfor a Separation, or Hint that such a Thing would be advantageousto America.”Yet in the summer and fall of this same year the colonistsshook off their ancient habits of submission in the twinklingof an eye and stood revealed as almost an alien people. Thepassage of the Stamp Act was greeted by an overwhelmingrefusal to obey, especially among colonial leaders who saw ruinin its provisions—lawyers, merchants, planters, printers, andministers. Although the flame of resistance was smothered byrepeal of the obnoxious act, the next ten years were at best asmoldering truce. In 1775 the policies of Lord North forceda final appeal to arms, and enough Americans answered it tobring off a successful war of independence.Dozens of able historians have inquired into the events andforces that drove this colonial people to armed rebellion.Except among extreme patriots and equally extreme economicdeterminists, fundamental agreement now prevails on theimmediate causes of the American Revolution. Less attentionhas been devoted to thc question: What made this peopleripe for rebellion, or, more exactly, what was there about thecontinental colonies in ‘76 that made them so willing to engagein open defiance of a major imperial policy?One answer, perhaps the best and certainly the best‐known,was volunteered in 1818 by John Adams, himself a cause ofthe American Revolution: “The Revolution was effected beforethe war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds andhearts of the people.... This radical change in the principles,opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the realAmerican Revolution.” What Adams seems to have arguedwas that well before Lexington and Concord there existed acollective outlook called the American mind, a mind whosechief characteristics, so we learn in other parts of his writings,were self‐reliance, patriotism, practicality, and love of liberty,with liberty defined as freedom from alien dictation. It was thealien dictation of North, Townshend, Grenville, and the othershortsighted ministers of a shortsighted king that forced theAmerican mind to assert itself boldly for the first time.Adams did not find it necessary to describe in detail thelong‐range forces that had produced this mind, perhaps becausethat extraordinary student of political realities, EdmundBurke, had already given so perceptive a description. In hismagnificent speech on conciliation with the colonies March::, ‘75, Burke singled out “six capital sources” to account for theAmerican “love of freedom,” that “fierce spirit of liberty” whichwas “stronger in the English colonies probably than in anyother people of the earth”: their English descent; their popularforms of government; “religion in the northern provinces”;“manners in the southern”; education, especially in the law;and “the remoteness of the situation from the first mover ofgovernment. Implicit in Burke’s praise of the American spirit ofliberty, as in Adams’s recollection of it, w as a recognition thatthis liberty rested on firm and fertile ground, that the colonistsenjoyed in fact as well as in spirit a measure of opportunity andself‐direction almost unique in the annals of mankind.The grand thesis of American history toward which Adamsand Burke were groping, not altogether blindly, was roundedoff by Alexis de Tocqueville a half‐century after the Revolution.With one of his most brilliant flashes of insight De Tocquevillerevealed the unique nature of the American Republic: “Thegreat advantage of the Americans is that they have arrived ata state of democracy without having to endure a democraticrevolution” or, to state the thesis in terms of ‘76, the Americans,unlike most revolutionists in history, already enjoyed the libertyfor which they were fighting. The “real American Revolution”was over and done with before the Revolution began. The firstrevolution alone made the second possible.My purpose in writing this book is to provide an extendedcommentary in support of Adams, Burke, and de Tocqueville—114 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

not that this glorious threesome needs support from anyone.I accept with practically no reservations the notion that theAmerican Revolution was wholly different in character andpurpose from the French, Russian, and almost all otherrevolutions, and I ascribe this difference largely to the plaintruth that the Americans had no need and thus no intentionto “make the world over.” By 1765 their world had already beenmade over as thoroughly as most sensible men—most sensiblewhite men, to be sure—could imagine or expect. Americanshad never known or had long since begun to abandon feudaltenures, a privilege‐ridden economy, centralized and despoticgovernment, religious intolerance, and hereditary stratification.Americans had achieved and were prepared to defend with theirblood a society more open, an economy more fluid, a religionmore tolerant, and a government more popular than anythingEuropeans would know for decades to come. The goal of therebellious colonists was largely to consolidate, then expand bycautious stages, the large measure of liberty and prosperity thatwas already ‐part of their way of life.This, then, is an account of the American way of life in 1765 anda reckoning of the historical forces that had helped to createa people devoted to liberty and qualified for independence.I wish to make clear that I hold no unusual ideas about theinfluence of environment on either the institutions or ethicsof human freedom. Certainly I would not attempt to weigheach of the many physical and human‐directed forces thatshaped the destiny of the American colonies, or to establisha precise cause‐and‐effect relationship between any one forceor set of forces and any one value or set of values. What Iplan to do is simply to describe the total environment as oneoverwhelmingly favorable to the rise of liberty and to singleout those forces which seemed most influential in creating thisenvironment. Before I proceed to examine these forces and thenew world they were shaping, I think it necessary to point tofour all‐pervading features of the colonial experience that werehastening the day of liberty, independence, and democracy.Over only one of these massive forces did the colonists orEnglish authorities have the slightest degree of control, andthe political wisdom that was needed to keep it in tight reinsimply did not exist in empires of that time.IThe first ingredient of American liberty was the heritage fromEngland. Burke acknowledged this “capital source” in wordsthat his countrymen could understand but apparently not actupon.The people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen.England, Sir, is a nation which still I hope respects, andformerly adored, her freedom. The colonists emigrated fromyou when this part of your character was most predominant;and they took this bias and direction the moment they partedfrom your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty,but to liberty according to English ideas, and on Englishprinciples.“Wee humbly pray,” wrote the General Assembly of RhodeIsland to the Board of Trade in ‘73, “that their Lordships willbelieve wee have a Tincture of the ancient British Blood in ourveines.” The colonists had considerably more than a tincture:at least seven in ten were English in blood, and virtually alltheir institutions, traditions, ideas, and laws were English inorigin and inspiration. The first colonists had brought overboth the good and evil of seventeenth century England. Thegood had been toughened and in several instances improved;much of the bad had been jettisoned under frontier conditions.As a result of this interaction of heredity and environment, theeighteenth‐century American was simply a special brand ofEnglishman. When it pleased him he could be more Englishthan the English, and when it pleased him most was anyoccurrence in which questions of liberty and self‐governmentwere at issue. In a squabble over the question of a fixed salarybetween Governor Joseph Dudlev and the MassachusettsAssembly, the latter could state without any sense of pretension:It hath been the Priviledge from Henry the third & confirmedby Edward the first, & in all Reigns unto this Day, granted,& is now allowed to be the just & unquestionable Right ofthe Subject, to raise when & dispose of how they see Cause,any Sums of money by Consent of Parliament, the whichPriviledge We her Majesty’s Loyal and Dutiful Subjects havelived in the Enjoymt of, & do hope always to enjoy the same,under Our most gracious Queen Ann & Successors, & shallever endeavour to discharge the Duty incumbent on us; Buthumbly conceive the Stating of perpetual Salaries not agreableto her Majesty’s Interests in this Province, but prejudicial toher Majesty’s good Subjects.Southerners were, if anything, more insistent. In 1767 theSouth Carolina legislature resolved:That His Majesty’s subjects in this province are entitled to allthe liberties and privileges of Englishmen . . . [and] that theCommons House of Assembly in South Carolina, by the lawsof England and South Carolina, and ancient usage and custom,have all the rights and privileges pertaining to Money billsthat are enjoyed by the British House of Commons.And the men of the frontier, who were having the same troublewith assemblies that assemblies were having with governors,made the echo ring.1st. We apprehend, as Free‐Men and English Subjects, we havean indisputable Title to the same Privileges and Immunities115

with his Majesty’s other Subjects, who reside in the interiorCounties of Philadelphia, Chester and Bucks, and thereforeought not to be excluded from an equal Share with them in thevery important Privilege of Legislation.These were the words of men who made much of the Englishtie, even when, as in the last of these instances, most of themwere Scotch‐Irish or German. Their traditions—representativegovernment, supremacy of law, constitutionalism, liberty of thesubject— belonged to them as Englishmen. Their institutions,especially the provincial assembly, were often looked upon assound to the extent that they conformed to English models,or at least to colonial interpretations or recollections of thosemodels. The rights for which they contended were not thenatural rights of all men but the ancient rights of Englishmen.“It is no Little Blessing of God,” said Cotton Mather to theMassachusetts Assembly in ‘700, “that we are a part of theEnglish Nation.”Throughout the colonial period the English descent andattitudes of the great majority of Americans gave impetus totheir struggles for liberty. It is a momentous fact of Americanhistory that until 1776 it was a chapter in English history aswell. Just as England in 1776 was ahead of the Continent inthe struggle for law and liberty, so America, this extraordinarypart of England, was even further ahead, not least because mostof its leading inhabitants thought of themselves as Englishmen.Such men would not easily be cheated or argued out of theirheritage—a truth that Burke did his best to advertise:The temper and character which prevail in our colonies are, Iam afraid, unalterable by any human art. We cannot, I fear,falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade themthat they are nor sprung from a nation in whose veins theblood of freedom circulates. The language in which they wouldhear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition; yourspeech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfitest personon earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.The clash of imperial policy and colonial self‐reliance is almostalways productive of the spirit of liberty. This is especially trueif the policy of the parent stare is conceived purely in its owninterests, and if the colonists are men of high political aptitudeand proud descent. Such was the pattern of Anglo‐Americanrelations in the colonial period. From the time of the earliestsettlement, which like all the important settlements was theresult of private initiative, English and American opinions onthe political and economic status of the colonies were in sharpconflict.The conduct of colonial affairs by the English governmentrested on these assumptions: The colonies were dependentsof the parent state. Since their interests were subordinate tothose of England, the welfare of the latter was to be the oneconcern of all agencies charged with governing them. Theywere therefore to serve, apparently forever, as a source ofwealth and support for the land out of which their inhabitantshad departed. If the English government had acted on theseassumptions consistently throughout the colonial period, thecontrasting ideas of the colonists would have had less chanceto strike deep root. But confusion at the beginning, domestictroubles in the middle, and “salutary neglect” throughout mostof this period permitted thc colonists to build not only a theorybut a condition of self‐government. And it was this condition, ofcourse, as some perceptive Englishmen were aware, that helpedthe colonies develop into prizes worth retaining by force of arms.The interests of England were, in this important sense, fatallyself‐contradictory.The views of the colonists on their place in the imperial structurewere somewhat mixed, ranging from the arrogant independenceasserted by Massachusetts in the seventeenth century to theabject dependence argued by a handful of Tory apologists in theeighteenth. In general, the colonial attitude was one looking tonear‐equality in the present and some sort of full partnership inthe future, all within the confines of a benevolent and protectingempire. The colonist acknowledged that for certain diplomaticand commercial purposes his destiny would rest for some timeto come in the hands of men in London. But in all other matters,especially in that of political self‐determination, he consideredhimself a “freeborn subject of the Crown of England.” Theoriesof the origin and nature of the colonial assemblies are a goodexample of these divergent views. In English eyes the assemblieswere founded by royal grant and existed at royal pleasure; inAmerican eyes they existed as a matter of right. The Board ofTrade looked upon them as inferior bodies enjoying rule‐makingpowers under the terms of their charters; the men of Virginiaand Massachusetts looked upon them as miniature Houses ofCommons with power to make all laws they could get awaywith in practice. The struggle between these assemblies and theroyal governors sent to control them was the focus of conflict ofcolonial and imperial interests.Had Parliament not decided to intrude its authority intocolonial affairs, the old‐fashioned imperial views of the Englishauthorities and the prophetic self‐governing claims of theAmerican colonists might have coexisted for decades withoutproducing a violent break. Thc tardy policies of stem control initiatedby the Grenville ministry brought this longstanding conflictfully into the open. In the years before ‘76 the push‐and‐pull ofimperialism and home rule had been a spur to the growth ofliberty in the colonies. In the next decade it ignited a rebellionIILet us hear again from the member for Bristol.The last cause of this disobedient spirit in the colonies is hardly116 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

less powerful than the rest, as it is nor merely moral, but laiddeep in the natural constitution of things. Three thousand milesof ocean lie between you and them. No contrivance can preventthe effect of this distance in weakening government. Seas roll,and months pass, between the order and the execution; andthe want of a speedy explanation of a single point is enoughto defeat a whole system.... In large bodies, the circulation ofpower must be less vigorous at the extremities. Nature hassaid it.... This is the immutable condition, the eternal law, ofextensive and detached empire.This harsh fact of geography, the remoteness of the colonies,squared the difference between imperial purpose and colonialaspiration. The early colonists thrown willy‐nilly on theirown devices, developed habits of self‐government and passedthem on to their descendants. The descendants, still just asfar if not farther from London, fell naturally into an attitudeof provincialism well suited to their condition but corrosive ofempire. The lack of contact between one colony and another, theresult of distance and unbelievably bad roads, allowed each todevelop on its own. The diversity in character of the key coloniesof Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania madea mockery of any notion of uniform imperial policy.Worst of all from the imperial point of view, the ill effects of theinconsistency, inefficiency, corruption, stupidity, arrogance, andignorance displayed to some degree at all times and to a perilousdegree at some times by the English authorities were doubledand redoubled by the rolling seas and passing months. Englishlaxity in enforcing the Navigation Acts and colonial habits ofdisobeying them were one instance of the extent to which threethousand miles of ocean could water down a policy of strictcontrol. The technique of royal disallowance, which seemed soperfectly designed to keep the colonial assemblies in check, waslikewise weakened by the mere fact of distance. For example, thedisallowance in ‘76 of two New Hampshire judiciary acts passedin ‘69 and ‘70 was never reported properly to the province, andthe judiciary in that colony continued to function under theselaws for a half century. And the royal governor, the linchpinof empire, was a far more accommodating fellow in Boston orCharleston than he appeared in his commissions and instructionsissued from London. A governor like Sir Matthew Johnsonof North Carolina, whose reports to the Board of Trade wentastray four years in a row, could not have been much of a bufferagainst colonial urges to independence. When we realize thatno regular mail‐service of any kind existed until ‘75, and thatwar disrupted communications more than one‐third of the timebetween ‘68 and ‘76, we can understand how the ocean was atonce a highway to freedom and a barrier to imperialism. Rarelyin history have the laws of geopolitics worked so powerfully forliberty.Had Burke ever lived in the colonies, he might have listedstill another “capital source” to explain the rise of liberty inAmerica, and thus have anticipated Frederick .Jackson Turnerand his celebrated thesis. We need not go all the way withTurner—”American democracy is fundamentally the outcomeof the experiences of the American people in dealing withthe West”—to acknowledge the significance of the frontier inearly American history. Whatever the extent of that influencein the nineteenth century, in the seventeenth and eighteenthcentury - when America was one vast frontier and perhaps onein three Americans a frontiersman at some time in his life—itwas clearly of the first importance. If we may take the word“frontier” to mean not only the line of farthest settlement tothe west, but also the primitive conditions of life and thoughtwhich extended throughout the colonies in the seventeenthcentury and continued to prevail in many areas east of theAppalachians during most of the eighteenth, we may pointto at least a half‐dozen indications of the influence of theAmerican environment.First, the frontier impeded the transfer to America of outwornattitudes and institutions. The wilderness frustrated completelysuch attempts to plant feudalism in America as the schemesof Sir Ferdinando Georges and the stillborn FundamentalConstitutions of Carolina, and everywhere archaic laws andcustoms were simplified, liberalized, or rudely abandoned. Inthe matter of church‐state relations the frontier was especiallyinfluential as a decentralizing and democratizing force. Thepositive result of this process of sloughing off the old wayswas an increase in mobility, experimentation, and self‐relianceamong the settlers.The wilderness demanded of those who would conquer it thatthey spend their lives in unremitting toil. Unable to devoteany sizable part of their energies to government, the settlersinsisted that government let them alone and perform itsseverely limited tasks at the amateur level. The early Americandefinition of liberty as freedom from government was givenadded popularity and meaning by frontier conditions. It wasa new and invigorating experience for tens of thousands ofEnglishmen, Germans, and Scotch‐lrish to be able to build ahome where they would at last be “let alone.”The frontier produced, in ways that Turner and his followershave made clear, a new kind of individual and new doctrinesof individualism. The wilderness did not of itself createdemocracy; indeed, it often encouraged the growth of ideasand institutions hostile to it. But it did help produce some ofthe raw materials of American democracy—self‐reliance, socialfluidity, simplicity, equality, dislike of privilege, optimism,and devotion to liberty. At the same time, it emphasized theimportance of voluntary co‐operation. The group, too, hadits uses on the frontier, whether for defense or barn‐raisingor cornhusking. The phrases “free association,” “mutualsubjection,” and “the consent of the governed” were given newcontent in the wilderness.117

Next, the fact that wages were generally higher and workingconditions better in the colonies than in England did much toadvance the cause of liberty. The reason for this happy conditionwas a distinct shortage of labor, and a prime reason for theshortage was land for the asking. The frontier population wasmade up of thousands of men who had left the seaboard to toilfor themselves in the great forest. The results of this constantmigration were as important for the seaboard as they were forthe wilderness.From the beginning the frontier was an area of protest andthus a nursery of republican notions. Under‐represented inassemblies that made a habit of overtaxing them, scornful of theprivileges and leadership assumed by the tidewater aristocracy,resentful of attempts to saddle them with unwanted ministersand officials, the men of the back country were in fact if notin print the most determined radicals of the colonial period.If their quaint and strangely deferential protests contributedvery little to the literature of a rising democracy, they neverthelessmade more popular the arguments for liberty andself‐government.Finally, all these factors combined to give new force to theEnglish heritage of law, liberty, and self-government. Theover‐refined and often archaic institutions that the settlersbrought along as part of their intellectual baggage werethrust once again into the crucible of primitive conditions. Ifthese institutions emerged in shapes that horrified royal governors,they were nevertheless more simple, workable, andpopular than they had been for several centuries in England.The laws and institutions of early Rhode Island or NorthCarolina would not have worked in more civilized societies,but they had abandoned most of their outworn features andwere ready to develop along American lines. The hardworking,long‐suffering men and women of the frontier—”People alisle willful Inclined to doe when and how they please or notat al” were themselves a primary force in the rise of colonialself‐government.The English descent and heritage of the colonists, theconflict of imperial and colonial interests, the rollingocean, the all‐pervading frontier—these were the“forces‐behind‐the‐forces” that shaped the history of thecolonies and spurred the peaceful revolution that preceded thebloody one of ‘76. Of these forces we shall speak or think onalmost every page of this book.IIIThe colonists were not completely at the mercy of theirenvironment. Much of the environment was of their ownmaking; and if circumstances were favorable to the rise ofliberty, they did not relieve the colonists of the formidable taskof winning it for themselves. The condition of liberty in ‘76 wasin large part the work of men determined to be free, and thequestions thus arise: Who were these men who talked so muchof their rights and privileges? Whence came they to America,and how did they fare?The attempt of historians and genealogists to decipher thenational origins of the colonists has led to confusion andcontroversy, first, because of a manifest lack of statistics, andsecond, because of the temptation, apparently too strong evenfor some of our best‐intentioned scholars, to magnify the numbersand accomplishments of one nationality at the expenseof all others. Nevertheless, the development of more reliablehistorical techniques and a more equitable historical spirithas created a broad area of consensus on the composition anddistribution of the population.It is now generally agreed that almost all immigrants to thecolonies came from the middle and lower classes. “The richstay in Europe,” wrote Crevecoeur; “is only the middling andthe poor that emigrate.” The myths of aristocratic lineage diehard, especially in Cavalier country, but diaries, shipping lists,and court minutes tell us in no uncertain terms of the simpleorigins of even the most haughty families of New York andVirginia. This does not mean that early America was a landof rogues and poor servant‐girls. England and the Continentsent over thousands upon thousands of substantial, intelligent,propertied men and women. Yet fully half the people whocame to the colonies could not pay their own passage, andgentleman immigrants, even in the seventeenth century, wereamazingly few.As a matter of fact, those twentieth century Americans wholike to go searching for an ancestor among the gentry of EastAnglia may wind up with three or four among the riffraff ofOld Bailey. Probably thirty to forty thousand convicts w ereshipped from England to the colonies in the eighteenth century,a fact that inspired Dr. Johnson’s famous growl: “Sir,they are a race of convicts, and ought to be content withanything we allow them short of hanging.” Their behavior inthe colonies, especially in unhappy Virginia and Maryland,moved Franklin to offer America’s rattlesnakes to England asthe only appropriate return. Not only did transported convictscommit a large proportion of the crimes in eighteenth centuryAmerica, but their presence did much to degrade the servantclass and make a callous society even more callous. The mothercountry’s insistence on dumping “the dregs, the excrescenceof England” in the colonies was a major item in the catalogueof American grievances, especially since the Privy Councilvetoed repeatedly the acts through which the colonies soughtto protect themselves.Well before 1976 the colonies had begun to take on a pattern ofnational origins that was “characteristically American”: Theylooked to one country for their language, institutions, and118 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

paramount culture, but to many for their population. Americanswere predominantly English in origin, but they were alsoScotch, Irish, German, French, Swiss, Dutch, Swedish, andAfrican. It is impossible to fix precisely the proportions of eachnationality in the total white population of 1976; the necessarystatistics are simply not available. These general percentagesare about as accurate as can be expected: English, 65 to 70 percent; Scots and Scotch‐lrish, 12 to 15 per cent; Germans, 6 to9 per cent; Irish, 3 to 5 per cent; Dutch 3 per cent; all others 3to 5 per cent. Out of a total population of 1,850,000 probably400,000 were Negroes and mulattoes.What was the total effect on society, culture, and governmentof this influx of nationalities into the American settlement?First, the melting pot had only just begun to heat up in the latterpart of the eighteenth century. Crevecocur’s example of theEnglish‐French‐Dutch family “whose present four sons havenow four wives of four different nations” was a phenomenonmore prophetic of the Republic than typical of the colonies.The great process of national fusion had made little progressby 1765. Assimilation into the English stock rather than thecreation of a new people was the result of such intermarriageas took place in colonial times. Nor were all the ingredients yetin the pot; the essential racial (Teutonic‐Celtic) and religious(Protestant) unity of the population must not be overlooked.The arrival of non‐English immigrants did much to weakenthe hold of the mother country. The newcomer wanted to beas loyal as anyone else, but his allegiance to the Crown couldhave little real emotional content. The Germans were inclinedto be conservatively neutral about English dominion; the Scotsand Irish were, for all the loyal humility that oozed from theirpetitions, innately hostile to the Georges and their agents.They lacked, as one traveler put it, the “same filial attachment”to England “which her own immediate offspring have.”Next, the influx of aliens did much to strengthen the Protestant,dissenting, individualistic character of colonial religion. ThePresbyterian, Lutheran, Baptist, and German Pietist churcheswere the chief beneficiaries of this immigration. The numbersand enthusiasm of these dissenting groups gave a tremendouslift to the cause of religious liberty in the colonies south ofPennsylvania.The eighteenth‐century immigrants helped democratize thepolitical institutions that had been brought over from Englandand put to work in the wilderness. This was especially true ofthe Scotch-Irish, whose only quarrel with the representativegovernments of their adopted colonies was that they werenot representative enough. The Germans were inclined tobe politically passive; their major contribution to the comingdemocracy was the support they brought to the middle‐classcreed of industry, frugality, and self‐reliance. The Scotch‐Irish,on the other hand, were more politically conscious. If thecontrolling groups of the coastal counties refused to honor theirlegitimate claims to participation in public life, this rebuff servedonly to make their radicalism more insistent. They had littleintention of altering the English‐American scheme of government,but they did mean to show the world how democraticit could be. The sentiments of “leveling republicanism” wereespecially active on the Scotch-Irish frontier; here the “realAmerican Revolution” went on apace.Finally, the mere volume of immigration from Germany andIreland had a pronounced effect on colonial life. The swarmingof these industrious peoples made possible the remarkableexpansion in territory and population that marked theeighteenth century in America. If the Scotch‐Irishman wasAmerica’s typical frontiersman, the German was its typicalfarmer; and between them they made it possible for cities likePhiladelphia and towns like Lancaster to grow and flourish.Though they were men of different natures, both sought thesame blessing. “And what but LIBERTY, charming LIBERTY,is the resistless Magnet that attracts so many different Nationsinto that flourishing Colony?”The Second American Revolution Succeeds theFirstOn March 22, 1765, George III gave his royal assent tothe Stamp Act, a stick of imperial dynamite so harmless inappearance that it had passed both houses of Parliament aseffortlessly as “a common Turnpike Bill.” Eleven years later,July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress resolved after “thegreatest and most solemn debate”:That these United Colonies are, and, of right, ought to be,Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from allallegiance to the British crown, and that all political connectionbetween them, and the state of Great Britain, is, and ought tobe totally dissolved.In the tumultuous years between these two fateful acts theAmerican colonists, at least a sufficient number of them,stumbled and haggled their way to a heroic decision: to found anew and independent nation upon political and social principlesthat were a standing reproach to almost every other nation inthe world. Not for another seven y ears could they be certain thattheir decision had been sound as well as bold; only then wouldthe mother country admit reluctantly that the new nation wasa fact of life rather than an act of treason. The colonists wereto learn at Brooklyn and Valley Forge that it was one thing toresolve for independence and another to achieve it.119

Yet the resolution for independence, the decision to fight as a“separate and equal” people rather than as a loose association ofremonstrating colonials, was as much the climax of a revolutionas the formal beginning of one, and it is this revolution—the“real American Revolution”—that I have sought to describe inthis book. By way of conclusion, I would think it useful topoint briefly to those developments in the decade after 1765that speeded up and brought to bloody conclusion “this radicalchange in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections”of the hitherto loyal American subjects of George III.The progress of the colonies in these years was nothing short ofastounding. Thanks to the fecundity of American mothers andthe appeal of the American land, population increased from1,850,000 in 1976 to more than 2,500,000 in 1776. America’stroubles seemed only to make America more alluring;immigrants arrived in especially large numbers between 1770and 1773. The westward pressure of 650,000 new colonists was,of course, enormous, and many new towns and settlements wereplanted in frontier lands east of the proclamation line of 1763.The sharp increase in population of the continental colonieslent support to arguments, especially popular after 1774, thatAmericans would some day outnumber Englishmen, and thatthere was “something absurd in supposing a continent to beperpetually governed by an island.” Signs of increased wealthand well being inspired other Americans to sing the glories of“a commerce out of all proportion to our numbers.”Far more significant than this material progress was thequickened influence of the “forces- behind‐the-forces” Isingled out in Chapter I. The English heritage, the ocean, thefrontier, and imperial tension never worked so positively forpolitical liberty as in this decade of ferment. Until the lastdays before independence the colonists continued to argue asEnglishmen demanding English rights. The more they actedlike Americans, the more they talked like Englishmen. Heirsof a tradition that glorified resistance to tyranny, they movedinto political combat as English Whigs rather than Americandemocrats, reminding the world that “it is the peculiar Rightof Englishman to complain when injured.” The other basicforces were no less favorable to the swift advance of the spiritof liberty. In a situation that called desperately for accurateinformation, firm decisions, and resolute administration, thevery distance between London and Boston frustrated thedevelopment of a viable imperial policy. In a situation thatcalled no less desperately for colonial understanding of theimperial difficulties facing Crown and Parliament, the pushto the frontier weakened the bonds of loyalty to an alreadytoo‐distant land. And the Stamp Act and Townshend Actsforced most articulate colonists to reduce the old conflict ofEnglish and American interests to the simplest possible terms.Since some Englishmen proposed to consign other Englishmento perpetual inferiority, was it not simply a question of libertyor slavery?The forces that had long been working for political freedomunderwent a sharp increase in influence. The ancient strugglebetween royal governor and popular assembly took on newvigor and meaning. The depths of ill feeling were plumbedin the maneuvers and exchanges of Governors Bernard andHutchinson and the Massachusetts legislature. The colonialpress engaged in more political reporting and speculation in thesingle year between June 1765, and June 1, 1766, than in all thcsixty‐odd years since the founding of the Boston News‐Letter. Inearly 1765 there were twenty‐three newspapers in the colonies,only two or three of which were politically conscious; in early1775 there were thirty‐eight, only two or three of which werenot. The spirit of constitutionalism and the demand for writtenconstitutions also quickened in the course of the far‐rangingdispute over the undetermined boundaries of imperial powerand colonial rights. The word “unconstitutional,” an essentialadjunct of constitutionalism, became one of America’s favoritewords. Most important, the Stamp Act was a healthy spurto political awareness among all ranks of men. Wrote JohnAdams in 1766:The people, even to the lowest ranks, have become more attentiveto their liberties, more inquisitive about them, and moredetermined to defend them, than they were ever before knownor had occasion to be; innumerable have been the monumentsof Wit, humor, sense, learning, spirit, patriotism, and heroism,erected in the several provinces in the course of this year. Theircounties, towns, and ever private clubs and sodalities havevoted and determined; their merchants have agreed to sacrificeeven their bread to the cause of liberty; their legislatures haveresolved; the united colonies have remonstrated; the presseshave everywhere groaned; and the pulpits have thundered.120 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

James Kirby Martin: Protest and Defiancein the Continental RanksThe following is a series of excerpts about class tensions in Americaduring the Revolutionary War from a book by James Kirby Martin,an historian. According to Martin, how did the composition andtreatment of the Continental Army reflect class tensions in largersociety during the Revolutionary War? What might this suggestabout the Revolution and what it symbolized to Americans ofvarious classes?A sequence of events inconceivable to Americans raised onpatriotic myths about the Revolution occurred in New Jerseyduring the spring of 1779. For months the officers of theJersey brigade had been complaining loudly about everythingfrom lack of decent food and clothing to pay arrearages andlate payments in rapidly depreciating currency. They hadpetitioned their assembly earlier, but nothing had happened.They petitioned again in mid‐April 1779, acting on the beliefthat the legislature “should be informed that our pay is nowonly minimal, not real, that four months pay of a private willnot procure his wretched wife and children a single bushel ofwheat.” Using the most plain and unambiguous terms, theystressed that “unless a speedy and ample remedy be provided,the total dissolution of your troops is inevitable.” The Jerseyassembly responded to this plea in its usual fashion ‐‐itforwarded the petition to the Continental Congress withoutcomment...The assembly’s behavior only funkier angered the officers, andsome of them decided to demonstrate their resolve...Theyagain admonished the assembly about pay and supply issues.While they stated that they would prepare the regiment for theupcoming campaign, they themselves would resign as a groupunless the legislators addressed their demands. Complaintshad now turned into something more than gentlemanly protest.Protest was on the verge of becoming nothing less that opendefiance of civil authority, and the Jersey officers were deadlyserious. They had resorted to their threatened resignations toinsure that the assembly would give serious attention to theirdemands for a change.When George Washington learned about the situation, hewas appalled. “Nothing, which has happened in the course ofthe war, has given me so much pain,” the commander in chiefstated anxiously. It upset him that the officers seemingly hadlost sight of the “principles” that governed the cause. Whatwould happen, he asked rhetorically, “if their example shouldbe followed and become general?” The result would be the “ruin”and “disgrace” of the rebel cause, all because these officers had“reasoned wrong about the means of obtaining a good end.”So developed a little known but highly revealing confrontation.Washington told Congress that he would have actedaggressively toward the recalcitrant officers, except that the“causes of discontent are too great and too general and theties that bind the officers to the service too feeble” to forcethe issue...The assembly thus provided an immediate paymentof £200 to each officer and $40 each soldier. Accepting thecompromises settlement as better than nothing, the brigademoved out of their Jersey encampment...Seemingly, all nowhad returned to normal.The confrontation between the New Jersey officers and the stateassembly serves to illuminate some key points about protest anddefiance in the Continental ranks during the years 1776‐83.Most important here, it underscores the mounting anger feltby Washington’s regulars as a result of their perceived (andno doubt very real) lack of material and psychological supportfrom the society that had spawned the Continental army. Itis common knowledge that Washington’s regulars sufferedfrom serious supply and pay shortages throughout the war.Increasingly, historians are coming to realize that officers andcommon soldiers alike received very little moral support fromthe general populace...The army’s command, as well as many delegates in Congress,wanted soldiers who could stand up against the enemy withmore than notions of exalted virtue and moral superiority toupgird them. They called for able‐bodied men who could andwould endure for the long‐term fight in a contest that all leadersknew could not be sustained by feelings of moral superiorityand righteousness alone.To assist in overcoming manpower shortages, Congress andthe states enhanced financial promises made to potentialenlistees. Besides guarantees about decent food and clothing,recruiters handed out bounty money and promises of free landat the war’s end (normally only for long‐term service). Despitethese great financial incentives, there was no great rush to theContinental banner. For the remainder of the war, the army’scommand, Congress, and the states, struggled to maintainminimal numbers of Continental soldiers in the ranks.In fact, all began to search diligently for new recruits. Insteadof relying on propertied free‐holders and tradesmen of theideal soldier‐citizen type, they broadened the definition ofwhat constituted an “able-bodied and effective” recruit. Forexample, New Jersey in early 1777 started granting exemptionsto all those who hired substitutes for long‐term Continentalservice and to masters who would enroll indentured servantsand slaves. The following year Maryland permitted the virtualimpressment of vagrants for nine months of regular service...The vast majority of Continentals who fought with Washingtonafter 1776 were representative of the very poorest and most121

epressed persons in Revolutionary society. A number ofrecent studies have verified that a large proportion of theContinentals...represented ner-do-wells, drifters, unemployedlaborers, captured British soldiers, indentured servants, andslaves. Some of these regulars were in such desperate economicstraits that states had to pass laws prohibiting creditors frompulling them from the ranks and having them thrown in jailfor petty debts.The most important point to be derived from this dramaticshift in the social composition of the Continental army is thatfew of these new common soldiers had enjoyed anything closeto the economic prosperity or full political (or legal) libertybefore the war. As a group, they had something to gain fromservice. If they could survive the rigors of camp life, killingdiseases that so often ravaged the armies of their times, andthe carnage of skirmishes and full‐scale battles, they could lookforward to a better life for themselves at the end of the war...Recruiters conveyed a message of personal upward mobilitythrough service...To debate whether these new Continentals were motivated toenlist because of crass materialism or benevolent patriotism isto sidetrack the issue... We must understand that respectablyestablished citizens after 1775 and 1776 preferred to let othersperform the dirty work of regular, long‐term service ontheir behalf... Their legislators promised bounties and manyother incentives. Increasingly, as the war lengthened, thecivilian population and its leaders did a less effective job ofkeeping their pan of the agreement. One significant outcomeof this obvious civilian ingratitude, if not utter disregard forcontractual promises, was protest and defiance coming fromWashington’s beleaguered soldiers and officers.are among the foremost to despise our poverty and laugh atour distress....”It must be remembered that middle and upper‐class civiliansconsidered Washington’s new regulars to be representative ofthe “vulgar herd” in a society that still clung to deferentialvalues. The assumption was that the most fit in terms of wealthand community social standing were to lead while the least fitwere to follow, even when that means becoming little morethan human cannon fodder...As befit the deferential nature of their times as well as theirconcern for maintaining sharp distinctions in rank as a keyto a disciplined fighting force, officers, many of whom weredrawn from the “better son” in society, expected nothingless that steady, if not blind obedience to their will from therank and file. In their commitment to pursuing the goals ofthe Revolution, the officers were anything but social levelers.Indeed, many of them feared that the Revolution might get outof hand and lead to actual internal social upheaval, particularlyif the “vulgar herd” gained too much influence and authority,whether in or out of the army.Private Joseph Plumb Manin captured the feelings of hiscomrades when he reflected back on support for the army in1780. He wrote: “We therefore kept upon our parade in groups,venting our spleen at our country and government, then at ourofficers, and then at ourselves for our imbecility in staying hereand starving... for an ungrateful people who did not care whatbecame of us, so they could enjoy themselves while we werekeeping a cruelty from them.” General John Paterson, whospoke out in March 1780, summarized the feelings of manyofficers when he said, “It really gives me great pain to think ofour public affairs; where is the public spirit of the year 1775?Where are those flaming patriots who were ready to risk theirlives, their fortunes, their all, for the public?” Such thoughtswere not dissimilar from those of a “Jersey Soldier” who pouredhis sentiments into an editorial during May 1779 in support ofthose regimental officers who were trying to exact some formof financial justice from their state legislature. [He wrote,] “Itmust be truly mortifying to the virtuous soldier to observemany, at this day, displaying their cash, and sauntering inidleness and luxury,” he went on, including “the gentry... [who]122 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

3111.developing a frameworkfor government:from articles of confederationto the constitution:1777–1791iii. developing a framework for government: from articles of confederation tothe constitution: 1777-1791123

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The Articles of Confederation (1777)In 1777 with war raging between Britain and the United States,the Continental Congress agreed to the Articles of Confederation, aframe of government outlining the relationship between the thirteenstates. The Articles were ratified by each state individually. Theyformally went into effect in 1781 after being ratified by all thirteenstates of the United States. As you read the document think abouthow you might characterize the power of the central governmentcreated by the Articles. Also think about the relationship the Articlescreate between the central government and the several states.We the undersigned Delegates of the States... agree to certainarticles of Confederation and perpetual Union....engage in war... nor enter into any treaties or alliances, norcoin money, nor regulate the value thereof, nor ascertain thesums and expences necessary for the defence and welfare of theunited states, nor any of them, emit bills, nor borrow moneyon the credit of the united states, nor appropriate money, noragree upon the vessels of war, to be built or purchased, or thenumber of land and sea forces to be raised, unless nine statesascent to the same...Article XIII. Every state shall abide by the determinations ofthe united states in congress assembled, on all questions whichby this confederation are submitted to them. And the articlesof this confederation shall be inviolably observed in every state,and the union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at anytime hereafter be made in any of them; unless such alteration beagreed to in a congress of the united states, and be afterwardsconfirmed by the legislatures of every state.Article I. The Stile of this confederacy shall be “The UnitedStates of America.”Article II. Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom andindependence and every Power, Jurisdiction and right whichis not by this confederation expressly delegated to the UnitedStates, in Congress assembled.Article III. The said states hereby severally enter into a firmleague of friendship with each other, for their common defence,the security of their Liberties, and their mutual and generalwelfare, binding themselves to assist each other against allforce offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them,on account of religion, sovereignty, trade or any other pretencewhatever.Article V. For the more convenient management of the generalinterests of the united states, delegates shall be annuallyappointed in such manner as the legislature of each state shalldirect, to meet in Congress... with a power reserved to eachstate to recall its delegates, or any of them, at any time withinthe year, and to send others in their stead, for the remainderof the year...In determining questions in the united states, in Congressassembled, each state shall have one vote.Article VIII. All charges of war, and all other expenses thatshall be incurred for the common defence or general welfare,and allowed by the united states in congress assembled, shallbe defrayed out of a common treasury, which shall be suppliedby the several states... The taxes for paying that proportionshall be laid and levied by the authority and direction of thelegislatures of the several states...Article IX. The united states in congress assembled shall never125

Excerpts from the Iroquois Constitution1. I am Dekanawidah and with the Five Nations ConfederateLords I plant the Tree of Great Peace. I plant it in your territory,Adodarhoh and the Onondaga Nation, in the territory of youwho are Firekeepers.I name the tree the Tree of the Great Long Leaves. Under theshade of this Tree of the Great Peace we spread the soft whitefeathery down of the globe thistle as seats for you, Adodarhoh,and your cousin Lords.We place you upon those seats, spread soft with the featherydown of the globe thistle, there beneath the shade of thespreading branches of the Tree of Peace. There shall you sit andwatch the Council Fire of the Confederacy of the Five Nations,and all the affairs of the Five Nations shall be transacted at thisplace before you, Adodarhoh, and your cousin Lords, by theConfederate Lords of the Five Nations.2. Roots have spread out from the Tree of the Great Peace, oneto the north, one to the east, one to the south and one to thewest. The name of these roots is The Great White Roots andtheir nature is Peace and Strength.If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall obeythe laws of the Great Peace and make known their dispositionto the Lords of the Confederacy, they may trace the Roots tothe Tree and if their minds are clean and they are obedient andpromise to obey the wishes of the Confederate Council, theyshall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree of the LongLeaves.We place at the top of the Tree of the Long Leaves an Eaglewho is able to see afar. If he sees in the distance any evilapproaching or any danger threatening he will at once warnthe people of the Confederacy.3. To you Adodarhoh, the Onondaga cousin Lords, I and theother Confederate Lords have entrusted the caretaking andthe watching of the Five Nations Council Fire.When there is any business to be transacted and the ConfederateCouncil is not in session, a messenger shall be dispatchedeither to Adodarhoh, Hononwirehtonh or Skanawatih, FireKeepers, or to their War Chiefs with a full statement of thecase desired to be considered. Then shall Adodarhoh call hiscousin (associate) Lords together and consider whether or notthe case is of sufficient importance to demand the attentionof the Confederate council If so, Adodarhoh shall dispatchmessengers to summon all the Confederate Lords to assemblebeneath the Tree of the Long Leaves.When the Lords are assembled the Council Fire shall bekindled, but not with chestnut wood, and Adodarhoh shallformally open the Council.[ed note: chestnut wood throws out sparks in burning, therebycreating a disturbance in the council]Then shall Adodarhoh and his cousin Lords, the Fire Keepers,announce the subject for discussion. The Smoke of theConfederate Council Fire shall ever ascend and pierce the skyso that other nations who may be allies may see the CouncilFire of the Great Peace. Adodarhoh and his cousin Lords areentrusted with the Keeping of the Council Fire.4. You, Adodarhoh, and your thirteen cousin Lords, shallfaithfully keep the space about the Council Fire clean and youshall allow neither dust nor dirt to accumulate. I lay a LongWing before you as a broom. As a weapon against a crawlingcreature I lay a staff with you so that you may thrust it awayfrom the Council Fire. If you fail to cast it out then call the restof the United Lords to your aid.5. The Council of the Mohawk shall be divided into threeparties as follows: Tekarihoken, Ayonhwhathah andShadekariwade are the first party; Sharenhowaneh,Deyoenhegwenh and Oghrenghrehgowah are the secondparty, and Dehennakrineh, Aghstawenserenthah andShoskoharowaneh are the third party. The third party is tolisten only to the discussion of the first and second parties andif an error is made or the proceeding is irregular they are tocall attention to it, and when the case is right and properlydecided by the two parties they shall confirm the decision ofthe two parties and refer the case to the Seneca Lords for theirdecision. When the Seneca Lords have decided In accord withthe Mohawk Lords, the case or question shall be referred to theCayuga and Oneida Lords on the opposite side of the house.6.1, Dekanawidah, appoint the Mohawk Lords the heads andthe leaders of the Five Nations Confederacy. The MohawkLords are the foundation of the Great Peace and it shall,therefore, be against the Great Binding Law to pass measuresin the Confederate Council after the Mohawk Lords haveprotested against them.No council of the Confederate Lords shall be legal unless allthe Mohawk Lords are present.126 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

7. Whenever the Confederate Lords shall assemble for thepurpose of holding a council, the Onondaga Lords shallopen it by expressing their gratitude to their cousin Lordsand greeting them, and they shall make an address and offerthanks to the earth where men dwell, to the streams of water,the pools, the springs and the lakes to the maize and the fruits,to the medicinal herbs and frees, to the forest trees for theirusefulness, to the animals that serve as food and give theirpelts for clothing, to the great winds and the lesser winds, tothe Thunderers, to the Sun, the mighty warrior, to the moon,to the messengers of the Creator who reveal his wishes and tothe Great Creator who dwells in the heavens above, who givesall the things useful to men, and who is the source and theruler of health and life.Then shall the Onondaga Lords declare the council open. Thecouncil shall not sit after darkness has set in.8. The Firekeepers shall formally open and close all councilsof the Confederate Lords, and they shall pass upon all mattersdeliberated upon by the two sides and render their decision.Every Onondaga Lord (or his deputy) must be present at everyConfederate Council and must agree with the majoritywithout unwarrantable dissent, so that a unanimous decisionmay be rendered.If Adodarhoh or any of his cousin Lords are absent from aConfederate Council, any other Firekeeper may open andclose the Council, but the Firekeepers present may not giveany decisions, unless the matter is of small importance.9. All the business of the Five Nations Confederate Councilshall be conducted by the two combined bodies of ConfederateLords First the question shall be passed upon by the Mohawkand Seneca Lords, then it shall be discussed and passed by.The next day the Council shall appoint another speaker, butthe first speaker may be reappointed if there is no objection,but a speaker’s term shall not be regarded more than for theday.15. No individual or foreign nation interested in a case, questionor proposition shall have any voice in the Confederate Councilexcept to answer a question put to him or them by the speakerfor the Lords.16. If the conditions which shall arise at any future time call foran addition to or change of this law, the case shall be carefullyconsidered and if a new beam seems necessary or beneficial,the proposed change shall be voted upon and if adopted it shallbe called, “Added to the Rafters.”Rights, Duties and Qualifications of Lords17. A bunch of a certain number of shell (wampum) stringseach two spans in length shall be given to each of the femalefamilies in which the Lordship titles are vested. The right ofbestowing the title shall be hereditary in the family of thefemales legally possessing the bunch of shell strings and thestrings shall be the token that the females of the family havethe proprietary right to the Lordship title for all time to come,subject to certain restrictions hereinafter mentioned.18. If any Confederate Lord neglects or refuses to attend theConfederate Council, the other Lords of the Nation of whichhe is a member shall require their War Chief to request thefemale sponsors of the Lord so guilty of defection to demandhis attendance of the Council. If he refuses, the womenholding the title shall immediately select another candidate forthe title.No Lord shall be asked more than once to attend theConfederate Council.19. If at any time It shall be manifest that a Confederate Lordhas not in mind the welfare of the people or disobeys the rules ofthis Great Law, the men or women of the Confederacy, or bothjointly, shall come to the Council and upbraid the erring Lordthrough his War Chief. If the complaint of the people throughthe War Chief is not heeded the first time it shall be utteredagain and then if no attention is given a third complaint andwarning shall be given. If the Lord is contumacious the mattershall go to the council of War Chiefs. The War Chiefs shallthen divest the erring Lord of his title by order of the Oneidaand Cayuga Lords, Their decisions shall then be referred to theOnondaga Lords, (Fire Keepers) for final judgement.The same process shall obtain when a question is brought beforethe council by an individual or a War Chief10. In all cases the procedure must be as follows: when theMohawk and Seneca Lords have unanimously agreed upon aquestion, they shall report their decision to the Cayuga andOneida Lords who shall deliberate upon the question andreport a unanimous decision to the Mohawk Lords. TheMohawk Lords will then report the standing of the case to theFirekeepers, who shall render a decision as they see fit in caseof a disagreement by the two bodies, or confirm the decisionsof the two bodies if they are identical. The Fire Keepers shall127

then report their decision to the Mohawk Lords who shallannounce it to the open council.11. If through any misunderstanding or obstinacy on the partof the Fire Keepers, they render a decision at variance with thatof the Two Sides, the Two Sides shall reconsider the matterand if their decisions are jointly the same as before they shallreport to the Fire Keepers who are then compelled to confirmtheir joint decision.12 When a case comes before the Onondaga Lords (FireKeepers) for discussion and decision, Adodarho shall introducethe matter to his comrade Lords who shall then discuss it intheir two bodies. Every Onondaga Lord except Hononwiretonhshall deliberate and he shall listen only. When a unanimousdecision shall have been reached by the two bodies of FireKeepers, Adodarho shall notify Hononwiretonh of the factwhen he shall confirm it He shall refuse to confirm a decisionif it is not unanimously agreed upon by both sides of the FireKeepers.13. No Lord shall ask a question of the body of ConfederateLords when they are discussing a case, question orproposition He may only deliberate in a low tone with theseparate body of which he is a member.14. When the Council of the Five Nation Lords shall convenethey shall appoint a speaker for the day. He shall be a Lord ofeither the Mohawk, Onondaga or Seneca Nation.Edgar Allan Poe: PoemsSonnet: To ScienceScience! true daughter of Old Time thou art!Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,Who wouldst not leave him in his wanderingTo seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?And driven the Hamadryad from the woodTo seek a shelter in some happier star?Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,The Elfin from the green grass, and from meThe summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?The RavenOnce upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak andweary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came atapping,As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber doorOnly this, and nothing more.”Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon thefloor.Eagerly I wished the morrow;-vainly I had sought to borrowFrom my books surcease of sorrows-sorrow for the lostLenoreFor the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels nameLenore-Nameless here for evermore.And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtainThrilled me-filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating“ ‘Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door-Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;-This it is, and nothing more.”Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;But the fact is I was napping, and so gently, you came rapping,And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,That I scarce was sure I heard you”-here I opened wide thedoor;-128 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Darkness there, and nothing more.Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering,fearing,Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dreambefore;But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,And the only word there spoken was the whispered word,“Lenore!”This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word,“Lenore!”Merely this, and nothing more.Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within meburning,Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.“Surely,” said 1, “surely that is something at my window lattice;Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore-Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;-‘Tis the wind and nothing more!”Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt andflutter,In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.Not the least obeisance made he; not an instant stopped orstayed he;But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamberdoor-Perched upon a bust of Pallas’ just above my chamber door-Perched, and sat, and nothing more.Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou:’ I said, “art surenocraven,Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the NightlyshoreTell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonianshore!Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse soplainly,Though its answer little meaning-little relevancy bore;For we cannot help agreeing that no living human beingEver yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door-Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamberdoor,With such name as “Nevermore.”But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke onlyThat one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.Nothing further then he uttered-not a feather then hefluttered-Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flownbefore-On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flownbefore.”Then the bird said “Nevermore.”Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store,Caught from some unhappy master whom unmercifulDisasterFollowed fast and followed faster till his songs one burdenbore-Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden boreOf Never-nevermore,But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bustand door;Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linkingFancy unto fancy, -thinking what this ominous bird of yore-What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous birdof yoreMeant in croaking “Nevermore.”This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressingTo the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’score;This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease recliningOn the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloatingo’er,She shall press, ah, nevermore!Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from anunseencenserSwung by angels whose faint foot-falls tinkled on the tuftedfloor.“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee-by these angels hehathsent theeRespite-respite and nepenthe’ from thy memories of Lenore!Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lostLenore!”Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”“Prophet” said I, “thing of evil!-prophet still, if bird or devil!-Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee hereashore,Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted-On this home by Horror haunted-tell me truly, I implore-129

Is there is there balm in Gilead” tell me-tell me. I implore!”Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil-prophet still, if bird or devil!By that Heaven that bends above us-by that God we bothadore-Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,’It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore-Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels nameLenore?”Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked,upstarting-“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonianshore!Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hathspoken!Leave my loneliness unbroken! -quit the bust above my door!Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from offmy door!Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”And the raven, never flitting, still is sifting, still is sittingOn the pallid bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door;And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that isdreaming,And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow onthe floor;And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on thefloorShall be lifted-nevermore!My beautiful ANNABEL LEE;So that her highborn kinsmen cameAnd bore her away from me,To shut her up in a sepulchreIn this kingdom by the sea.The angels, not half so happy in heaven,Went envying her and me-Yes! -that was the reason (as all men know,In this kingdom by the sea)That the wind came out of the cloud by night,Chilling and killing my ANNABEL LEE.But our love it was stronger by far than the loveOf those who were older than we-Of many far wiser than we-And neither the angels in heaven above,Nor the demons down under the sea,Can ever dissever my soul from the soulOf the beautiful ANNABEL LEE:For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreamsOf the beautiful ANNABEL LEE;And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyesOf the beautiful ANNABEL LEE;And so, the all night-tide, I lie down by the sideOf my darling,-my darling,-my life and my bride,In her sepulchre there by the sea,In her tomb by the side of the sea.Annabel LeeIt was many and many a year ago,In a kingdom by the sea,That a maiden there lived whom you may knowBy the name of ANNABEL LEE;And this maiden she lived with no other thoughtThan to love and be loved by me.I was a child and she was a child,In this kingdom by the sea:But we loved with a love that was more than love-I and my ANNABEL LEE;With a love that the winged seraphs of heavenCoveted her and me.And this was the reason that, long ago,In this kingdom by the sea,A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling130 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Edgar Allen Poe:The Fall of the House of UsherSon coeur est un luth suspendu;Sitot qu’on le touche il resonne.DE BERANGERDuring the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in theautumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low inthe heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, througha singularly dreary tract of country; and at length foundmyself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view ofthe melancholy House of Usher . I know not how it was -- but,with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferablegloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feelingwas unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic,sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even thesternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I lookedupon the scene before me -- upon the mere house, and thesimple landscape features of the domain -- upon the bleakwalls--upon the vacant eye-like windows-- upon a few ranksedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees -- withan utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthlysensation more properly than to the after-dream of the revellerupon opium -- the bitter lapse into everyday life -- the hideousdropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, asickening of the heart -- an unredeemed dreariness of thoughtwhich no goading of the imagination could torture into aughtof the sublime. What was it -- I paused to think -- what wasit that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House ofUsher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple withthe shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. Iwas forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, thatwhile, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simplenatural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, stillthe analysis of this power lies among considerations beyondour depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere differentarrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the detailsof the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps toannihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, actingupon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of ablack and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling,and gazed down -- but with a shudder even morethrilling than before -- upon the remodelled and invertedimages of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and thevacant and eye-like windows .Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed tomyself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher,had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but manyyears had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, hadlately reached me in a distant part of the country -- a letter fromhim-- which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admittedof no other than a personal reply. The MS gave evidence ofnervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness-- ofa mental disorder which oppressed him -- and of an earnestdesire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personalfriend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of mysociety, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner inwhich all this, and much more, was said -- it was the apparentheart that went with his request -- which allowed me no roomfor hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I stillconsidered a very singular summons.Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yetI really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been alwaysexcessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his veryancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiarsensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through longages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, inrepeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as wellas in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps evenmore than to the orthodox and easily recognizable beauties,of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkablefact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured asit was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; inother words, that the entire family lay in the direct line ofdescent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporaryvariation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, whilerunning over in thought the perfect keeping of the characterof the premises with the accredited character of the people,and while speculating upon the possible influence which theone, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised uponthe other -- it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue,and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire toson, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length,so identified the two as to merge the original title of theestate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the ‘Houseof Usher’ -- an appellation which seemed to include, in theminds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and thefamily mansion.I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childishexperiment -- that of looking down within the tarn--had beento deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubtthat the consciousness of the rapid increase of my suspersition-- for why should I not so term it? -- served mainly to acceleratethe increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxicallaw of all sentiments having decayed trees, and the grey wall,and the silent tarn -- a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull,sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued .Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, Iscanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Itsprincipal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity.131

The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungioverspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangledweb-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from anyextraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry hadfallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency betweenits still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling conditionof the individual stones. In this there was much that remindedme of the specious totality of old woodwork which has rottedfor long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbancefrom the breath of the external air. Beyond this indicationof extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token ofinstability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer mighthave discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extendingfrom the roof of the building in front, made its way down thewall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullenwaters of the tarn.Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house.A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothicarchway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conductedme, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in myprogress to the studio of his master. Much that I encounteredon the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten thevague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While theobjects around me -- while the carvings of the ceilings, thesombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors,and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as Istrode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I hadbeen accustomed from my infancy -- while I hesitated not toacknowledge how familiar was all this -- I still wondered tofind how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary imageswere stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the physicianof the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingledexpression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted mewith trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open adoor and ushered me into the presence of his master.The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty.The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vasta distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogetherinaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned lightmade their way through the trellised panes, and served torender sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around;the eye ,however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of thechamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling.Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniturewas profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many booksand musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to giveany vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphereof sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hungover and pervaded all.Upon my entrance, Usher rose from a sofa on which he hadbeen lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivaciouswarmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdonecordiality -- of the constrained effort of the ennuyé man of theworld. A glance, however, at his countenance, convinced meof his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some moments,while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half ofpity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terriblyaltered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It waswith difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identityof the wan being before me with the companion of my earlyboyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all timesremarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large,liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thinand very pallid, but of a surpassing beautiful curve; a nose of adelicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusualin similar formations; a finely-moulded chin, speaking, in itswant of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a morethan web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with aninordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made upaltogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And nowin the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of thesefeatures, and of the expression they were wont to convey, layso much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The nowghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of theeye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silkenhair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in itswild gossamer texture , it floated rather than fell about the face,I could not, even with effort, connect its arabesque expressionwith any idea of simple humanity.In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with anincoherence -- an inconsistency; and I soon found this toarise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcomean habitual trepidancy -- an excessive nervous agitation. Forsomething of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less byhis letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and byconclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformationand temperament. His action was alternately vivacious andsullen . His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision(when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to thatspecies of energetic concision -- that abrupt, weighty, unhurried,and hollow-sounding enunciation -- that leaden, self- balancedand perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may beobserved in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater ofopium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnestdesire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to affordhim. He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to bethe nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional anda family evil , and one for which he despaired to find a remedy-- a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, whichwould undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host132 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them,interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms,and the general manner of the narration had their weight. Hesuffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses ; the mostinsipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garmentsof certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive;his eyes were tortured by even a faint light ; and there were butpeculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, whichdid not inspire him with horror.To an anomalous species of terror I found him a boundenslave. ‘I shall perish,’ said he, ‘I must perish in this deplorablefolly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread theevents of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. Ishudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident,which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. Ihave, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absoluteeffect -- in terror. In this unnerved--in this pitiable condition-- I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I mustabandon life and reason together, in some struggle with thegrim phantasm, FEAR.’I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken andequivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition.He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regardto the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years,he had never ventured forth -- in regard to an influence whosesupposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy hereto be re-stated -- an influence which some peculiarities in themere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dintof long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit -- an effectwhich the physique of the grey walls and turrets, and of the dimtarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, broughtabout upon the morale of his existence.He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much ofthe peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be tracedto a more natural and far more palpable origin -- to the severeand long-continued illness -- indeed to the evidentlyapproaching dissolution -- of a tenderly beloved sister--his solecompanion for long years -- his last and only relative on earth.‘Her decease,’ he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget,‘would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of theancient race of the Ushers.’ While he spoke, the Lady Madeline(for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portionof the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence,disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment notunmingled with dread -- and yet I found it impossible toaccount for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressedme, as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door, atlength, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively andeagerly the countenance of the brother -- but he had buriedhis face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far morethan ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingersthrough which trickled many passionate tears.The disease of the Lady Madeline had long baffled the skill ofher physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of theperson, and frequent although transient affections of a partiallycataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hithertoshe had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady,and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but, on the closingin of the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed (asher brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) tothe prostrating power of the destroyer ; and I learned that theglimpse I had obtained of her person would thus probably bethe last I should obtain -- that the lady, at least while living,would be seen by me no more.For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by eitherUsher or myself; and during this period I was busied in earnestendeavours to alleviate the melancholy of my friend. Wepainted and read together; or I listened, as if in a dream, tothe wild improvisations of his speaking guitar . And thus, as acloser and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedlyinto the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceivethe futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from whichdarkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth uponall objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasingradiation of gloom.I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hoursI thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher . Yet Ishould fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact characterof the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me,or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered idealitythrew a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improviseddirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, Ihold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion andamplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber.From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded,and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which Ishuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowingnot why; -- from these paintings (vivid as their images noware before me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more thana small portion which should lie within the compass of merelywritten words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of hisdesigns, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortalpainted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me atleast -- in the circumstances then surrounding me -- therearose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriaccontrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerableawe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation ofthe certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend,partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be133

shadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A small picturepresented the interior of an immensely long and rectangularvault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and withoutinterruption or device . Certain accessory points of the designserved well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at anexceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet wasobserved in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or otherartificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intenserays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly andinappropriate splendour.I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditorynerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, withthe exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was,perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himselfupon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to thefantastic character of the performances. But the fervid facilityof his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They musthave been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of hiswild fantasies (for he not unfrequently accompanied himselfwith rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intensemental collectedness and concentration to which I havepreviously alluded as observable only in particular momentsof the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of theserhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the moreforcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the underor mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, andfor the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, ofthe tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses,which were entitled ‘The Haunted Palace’ , ran very nearly, ifnot accurately, thus:IIn the greenest of our valleys,By good angels tenanted,Once a fair and stately palace --Radiant palace -- reared its head.In the monarch Thought’s dominion --It stood there!Never seraph spread a pinionOver fabric half so fair.IIBanners yellow, glorious, golden,On its roof did float and flow;(This — all this—was in the olden Time long ago)And every gentle air that dallied,In that sweet day,Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,A winged odour went away.IIIWanderers in that happy valleyThrough two luminous windows sawSpirits moving musicallyTo a lute’s well tuned law,Round about a throne, where sitting(Porphyrogene!)In state his glory well befitting,The ruler of the realm was seen.IVAnd all with pearl and ruby glowingWas the fair palace door,Through which came flowing, flowing, flowingAnd sparkling evermore,A troop of Echoes whose sweet dutyWas but to sing,In voices of surpassing beauty,The wit and wisdom of their king.VBut evil things, in robes of sorrow,Assailed the monarch’s high estate;(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrowShall dawn upon him, desolate!)And, round about his home, the gloryThat blushed and bloomedIs but a dim-remembered story,Of the old time entombed.VIAnd travellers now within that valley,Through the red-litten windows, seeVast forms that move fantasticallyTo a discordant melody;While, like a rapid ghastly river,Through the pale door,A hideous throng rush out forever,And laugh -- but smile no more.I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad, ledus into a train of thought wherein there became manifest anopinion of Usher’s which I mention not so much on accountof its novelty (for other men have thought thus), as on accountof the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion,in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetablethings. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed amore daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions,upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express134 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. Thebelief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted)with the grey stones of the home of his forefathers. Theconditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined,fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones -- in theorder of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungiwhich overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stoodaround -- above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of thisarrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of thetarn. Its evidence -- the evidence of the sentience--was to beseen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke) in the gradual yetcertain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about thewaters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, inthat silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which forcenturies had moulded the destinies of his family, and whichmade him what I now saw him -- what he was. Such opinionsneed no comment, and I will make none.Our books -- the books which, for years, had formed nosmall portion of the mental existence of the invalid -- were,as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character ofphantasm. We pored together over such works as the Ververt etChartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heavenand Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of NicholasKlimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of JeanD’Indagine, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the BlueDistance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun by Campanella. Onefavourite volume was a small octavo edition of the DirectoriumInquisitorum, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; andthere were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old AfricanSatyrs and Aegipans, over which Usher would sit dreamingfor hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusalof an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic --the manual of a forgotten church -- the Vigiliae MortuorumChorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae.I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, andof its probable influence upon the hypochondriac , when, oneevening, having informed me abruptly that the Lady Madelinewas no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpsefor a fortnight (previously to its final interment), in one of thenumerous vaults within the main walls of the building. Theworldly reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding,was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The brotherhad been led to his resolution (so he told me) by considerationof the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, ofcertain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medicalmen, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burialgroundof the family. I will not deny that when I called tomind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met uponthe staircase, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had nodesire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, andby no means an unnatural, precaution.At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in thearrangements for the temporary entombment. The body havingbeen encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault inwhich we placed it (and which had been so long unopenedthat our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere,gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp,and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, atgreat depth, immediately beneath that portion of the buildingin which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used,apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purpose of adonjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder,or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion ofits floor, and the whole interior of a long archway throughwhich we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. Thedoor, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Itsimmense weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as itmoved upon its hinges.Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels withinthis region of horror, we partially turned aside the yetunscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of thetenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sisternow first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps,my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which Ilearned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and thatsympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existedbetween them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon thedead -- for we could not regard her unawed. Thedisease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity ofyouth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly catalepticalcharacter, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and theface, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip whichis so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid,and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toil,into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portionof the house.And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, anobservable change came over the features of the mentaldisorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished.His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. Heroamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, andobjectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, ifpossible, a more ghastly hue -- but the luminousness of his eyehad utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tonewas heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extremeterror, habitually characterized his utterance. There weretimes, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mindwas labouring with some oppressive secret, to divulge whichhe struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I wasobliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries ofmadness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours,in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to135

some imaginary sound?. It was no wonder that his conditionterrified -- that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slowyet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yetimpressive superstitions.It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of theseventh or eighth day after the placing of the Lady Madelinewithin the donjon, that I experienced the full power ofsuch feelings. Sleep came not near my couch -- while thehours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off thenervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavouredto believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to thebewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room --of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motionby the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and froupon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations ofthe bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremorgradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat uponmy very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shakingthis off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon thepillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darknessof the chamber, hearkened -- I know not why, except that aninstinctive spirit prompted me -- to certain low and indefinitesounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at longintervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intensesentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threwon my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no moreduring the night), and endeavoured to arouse myself from thepitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly toand fro through the apartment.I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light stepon an adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presentlyrecognized it as that of Usher. In an instant afterwards herapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered, bearinga lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan --but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes-- an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanour. Hisair appalled me -- but anything was preferable to the solitudewhich I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presenceas a relief.‘And you have not seen it?’ he said abruptly, after having staredabout him for some moments in silence -- ‘you have not thenseen it? -- but, stay! you shall.’ Thus speaking, and havingcarefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements,and threw it freely open to the storm.The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us fromour feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautifulnight, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. Awhirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity;for there were frequent and violent alterations in the directionof the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (whichhung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did notprevent our perceiving the lifelike velocity with which they flewcareering from all points against each other, without passingaway into the distance. I say that even their exceeding densitydid not prevent our perceiving this -- yet we had no glimpseof the moon or stars -- nor was there any flashing forth ofthe lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses ofagitated vapour, as well as all terrestrial objects immediatelyaround us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintlyluminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hungabout and enshrouded the mansion.‘You must not -- you shall not behold this!’ said I, shudderingly,to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the windowto a seat. ‘These appearances, which bewilder you, are merelyelectrical phenomena not uncommon -- or it may be that theyhave their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn . Letus close this casement; -- the air is chilling and dangerous toyour frame. Here is one of your favourite romances. I will read,and you shall listen; -- and so we will pass away this terriblenight together. The antique volume which I had taken up wasthe Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called ita favourite of Usher’s more in sad jest than in earnest; for, intruth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixitywhich could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual idealityof my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately athand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement whichnow agitated the hypochondriac , might find relief (for thehistory of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even inthe extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I havejudged, indeed, by the wild overstrained air of vivacity withwhich he hearkened, or apparently hearkened, to the wordsof the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon thesuccess of my design.I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story whereEthelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain forpeaceable admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceedsto make good an entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered,the words of the narrative run thus:‘And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, andwho was now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulnessof the wine which he had drunken, waited no longer to holdparley with the hermit, who, in sooth, was of an obstinate andmaliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, andfearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright,and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of thedoor for his gauntleted hand; and now pulling therewithsturdily, he so cracked, and ripped , and tore all asunder, thatthe noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarmed andreverberated throughout the forest.’At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment,136 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concludedthat my excited fancy had deceived me) -- it appeared to methat, from some very remote portion of the mansion, therecame, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have been, in itsexact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dullone certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound whichSir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyonddoubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention;for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and theordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm ,the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should haveinterested or disturbed me. I continued the story:‘But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within thedoor, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of themaliceful hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scalyand prodigious demeanour, and of a fiery tongue, which sate inguard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver; and uponthe wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legendenwritten --Who entered herein, a conquerer hath bin;Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win;and Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head ofthe dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath,with a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, thatEthelred had fain to close his ears with his hands against thedreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never before heard.’Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wildamazement -- for there could be no doubt whatever that, inthis instance, I did actually hear (although from what directionit proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparentlydistant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screamingor grating sound -- the exact counterpart of what my fancyhad already conjured up for the dragon’s unnatural shriek asdescribed by the romancer.Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of thesecond and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousandconflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terrorwere predominant, I still retained sufficient presence of mind toavoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness ofmy companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticedthe sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange alterationhad, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanour.From a position fronting my own, he had gradually broughtround his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of thechamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features,although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuringinaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast -- yet I knewthat he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of theeye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body,too, was at variance with this idea -- for he rocked from sideto side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Havingrapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of SirLauncelot, which thus proceeded:And now, the champion, having escaped from the terriblefury of the dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield,and of the breaking up of the enchantment which was uponit, removed the carcass from out of the way before him, andapproached valorously over the silver pavement of the castleto where the shield was upon the wall; which in sooth tarriednot for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silverfloor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound.No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than - as if ashield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavilyupon a floor of silver - I became aware of a distinct, hollow,metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation.Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measuredrocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to thechair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him,and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stonyrigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there camea strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quiveredabout his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, andgibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bendingclosely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import ofhis words.Not hear it ? - yes, I hear it, and -have- heard it. Long - long- long - many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heardit - yet I dared not - oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! - I dared not - I -dared- not speak ! -We have put her livingin the tomb !- Said I not that my senses were acute ? I -nowtellyou that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollowcoffin. I heard them - many, many days ago - yet I dared not- -I dared not speak !- And now - to night - Ethelred - ha ! ha! - the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of thedragon, and the clangor of the shield ! - say, rather, the rendingof her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison,and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly ? Will she not be here anon ? Is shenot hurrying to upbraid me for my haste ? Have I not heardher footstep on the stair ? Do I not distinguish that heavy andhorrible beating of her heart ? Madman ! - here he sprangfuriously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in theeffort he were giving up his soul - -Madman ! I tell you thatshe now stands without the door !-As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there hadbeen found the potency of a spell - the huge antique pannelsto which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon theinstant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of137

the rushing gust - but then without those doors there -didstandthe lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline ofUsher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidenceof some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciatedframe. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling toand fro upon the threshold - then, with a low moaning cry,fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in herviolent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor acorpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. Thestorm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossingthe old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wildlight, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could haveissued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me.The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon,which now shone vividly through that once barely-discerniblefissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from theroof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While Igazed, this fissure rapidly widened - there came a fierce breathof the whirlwind - the entire orb of the satellite burst at onceupon my sight - my brain reeled as I saw the mighty wallsrushing asunder - there was a long tumultuous shouting soundlike the voice of a thousand waters - and the deep and danktarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragmentsof the House of Usher.138 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Walt Whitman:Poetry Crossing Brooklyn FerryI1 Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!2 Clouds of the west -- sun there half an hour high -- I seeyou also face to face.3 Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,how curious you are to me!4 On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross,returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,5 And you that shall cross from shore to shore years henceare more to me, and more in my meditations, than you mightsuppose.II6 The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at allhours of the day,7 The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myselfdisintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,8 The similitudes of the past and those of the future,9 The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights andhearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over theriver,10 The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with mefar away,11 The others that are to follow me, the ties between me andthem,12 The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing ofothers.13 Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross fromshore to shore,14 Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,15 Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north andwest, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,16 Others will see the islands large and small;17 Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, thesun half an hour high,18 A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred yearshence, others will see them,19 Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide,the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.III20 It avails not, time nor place -- distance avails not,21 I am with you, you men and women of a generation, orever so many generations hence,22 Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so Ifelt,23 Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of acrowd,24 Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river andthe bright flow, I was refresh’d,25 Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with theswift current, I stood yet was hurried,26 Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and thethick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.27 I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old,28 Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them highin the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating theirbodies,29 Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodiesand left the rest in strong shadow,30 Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edgingtoward the south,31 Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,32 Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,33 Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round theshape of my head in the sunlit water,34 Look’d on the haze on the hills southward and southwestward,35 Look’d on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged withviolet,36 Look’d toward the lower bay to notice the vesselsarriving,37 Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,38 Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the shipsat anchor,39 The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,40 The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, theslender serpentine pennants,41 The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots intheir pilot-houses,42 The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulouswhirl of the wheels,43 The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,44 The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups,the frolicsome crests and glistening,45 The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the graywalls of the granite storehouses by the docks,46 On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closelyflank’d on each side by the barges, the hay-boat, the belatedlighter,47 On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundrychimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,48 Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red andyellow light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts ofstreets.IV49 These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,50 I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapidriver,51 The men and women I saw were all near to me,52 Others the same -- others who look back on me because Ilook’d forward to them,53 (The time will come, though I stop here to-day and tonight.)139

V54 What is it then between us?55 What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?56 Whatever it is, it avails not -- distance avails not, and place avails not,57 I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,58 I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,59 I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,60 In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,61 In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,62 I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,63 I too had receiv’d identity by my body,64 That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body.VI65 It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,66 The dark threw its patches down upon me also,67 The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,68 My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?69 Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,70 I am he who knew what it was to be evil,71 I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,72 Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,73 Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,74 Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,75 The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,76 The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,77 Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,78 Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,79 Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,80 Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,81 Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word,82 Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,83 Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,84 The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,85 Or as small as we like, or both great and small.VII86 Closer yet I approach you,87 What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you -- I laid in my stores in advance,88 I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born. 89 Who was to know what should come home to me?90 Who knows but I am enjoying this?91 Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?VIII92 Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan?93 River and sunset and scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide?94 The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?95 What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighestname as I approach?96 What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?97 Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?98 We understand then do we not?99 What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?100 What the study could not teach -- what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not?IX140 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

101 Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!102 Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!103 Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me!104 Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!105 Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!106 Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!107 Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!108 Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly!109 Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name!110 Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!111 Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one makes it!112 Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you;113 Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current;114 Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;115 Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all downcast eyes have time to take it from you!116 Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sunlit water!117 Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d schooners, sloops, lighters!118 Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset!119 Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of thehouses!120 Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,121 You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,122 About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung out divinest aromas,123 Thrive, cities -- bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers,124 Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual,125 Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.126 You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,127 We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,128 Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,129 We use you, and do not cast you aside -- we plant you permanently within us,130 We fathom you not -- we love you -- there is perfection in you also,131 You furnish your parts toward eternity,132 Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.Beat! Beat! Drums!1 Beat! beat! drums! -- blow! bugles! blow!2 Through the windows -- through doors -- burst like a ruthless force,3 Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,4 Into the school where the scholar is studying;5 Leave not the bridegroom quiet -- no happiness must he have now with his bride,6 Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,7 So fierce you whirr and pound you drums -- so shrill you bugles blow.8 Beat! beat! drums! -- blow! bugles! blow!9 Over the traffic of cities -- over the rumble of wheels in the streets;10 Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds,11 No bargainers’ bargains by day -- no brokers or speculators -- would they continue?12 Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?13 Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?14 Then rattle quicker, heavier drums -- you bugles wilder blow.15 Beat! beat! drums! -- blow! bugles! blow!16 Make no parley -- stop for no expostulation,17 Mind not the timid -- mind not the weeper or prayer,141

18 Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,19 Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,20 Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,21 So strong you thump O terrible drums -- so loud you bugles blow.Song of Myself11 I celebrate myself, and sing myself,2 And what I assume you shall assume,3 For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.4 I loafe and invite my soul,5 I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.6 My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,7 Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,8 I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,9 Hoping to cease not till death.10 Creeds and schools in abeyance,11 Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,12 I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,13 Nature without check with original energy.14 Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,15 I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,16 The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.17 The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,18 It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,19 I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,20 I am mad for it to be in contact with me.21 The smoke of my own breath,22 Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,23 My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,24 The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,25 The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,26 A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,27 The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,28 The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,29 The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.30 Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?31 Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?32 Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?33 Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,34 You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)35 You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on thespectres in books,36 You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,37 You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.338 I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,39 But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.40 There was never any more inception than there is now,142 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

41 Nor any more youth or age than there is now,42 And will never be any more perfection than there is now,43 Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.44 Urge and urge and urge,45 Always the procreant urge of the world.46 Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,47 Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.48 To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so.49 Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,50 Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,51 I and this mystery here we stand.52 Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.53 Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,54 Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.55 Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,56 Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.57 Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,58 Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.59 I am satisfied -- I see, dance, laugh, sing;60 As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day withstealthy tread,61 Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,62 Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,63 That they turn from gazing after and down the road,64 And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,65 Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?466 Trippers and askers surround me,67 People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,68 The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,69 My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,70 The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,71 The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,72 Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;73 These come to me days and nights and go from me again,74 But they are not the Me myself.75 Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,76 Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,77 Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,78 Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,79 Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.80 Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,81 I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.582 I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,83 And you must not be abased to the other.84 Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,85 Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,86 Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.87 I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,143

88 How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,89 And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,90 And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.91 Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,92 And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,93 And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,94 And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,95 And that a kelson of the creation is love,96 And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,97 And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,98 And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.699 A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;100 How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.101 I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.102 Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,103 A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,104 Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?105 Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.106 Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,107 And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,108 Growing among black folks as among white,109 Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.110 And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.111 Tenderly will I use you curling grass,112 It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,113 It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,114 It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,115 And here you are the mothers’ laps.116 This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,117 Darker than the colorless beards of old men,118 Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.119 O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,120 And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.121 I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,122 And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.123 What do you think has become of the young and old men?124 And what do you think has become of the women and children?125 They are alive and well somewhere,126 The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,127 And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,128 And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.129 All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,130 And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.7131 Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?132 I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.133 I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots,134 And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,135 The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.144 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

136 I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,137 I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,138 (They do not know how immortal, but I know.)139 Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,140 For me those that have been boys and that love women,141 For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,142 For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,143 For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,144 For me children and the begetters of children.145 Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,146 I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,147 And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.8148 The little one sleeps in its cradle,149 I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.150 The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,151 I peeringly view them from the top.152 The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,153 I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen.154 The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,155 The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,156 The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,157 The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs,158 The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,159 The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,160 The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd,161 The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,162 What groans of over-fed or half-starv’d who fall sunstruck or in fits,163 What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,164 What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum,165 Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,166 I mind them or the show or resonance of them -- I come and I depart.9167 The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,168 The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,169 The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,170 The armfuls are pack’d to the sagging mow.171 I am there, I help, I came stretch’d atop of the load,172 I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other,173 I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy,174 And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.10175 Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,176 Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,177 In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,178 Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill’d game,179 Falling asleep on the gather’d leaves with my dog and gun by my side.180 The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud,145

181 My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck.182 The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,183 I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time;184 You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.185 I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl,186 Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking, they had moccasins to their feet and large thickblankets hanging from their shoulders,187 On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held hisbride by the hand,188 She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to herfeet.189 The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,190 I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,191 Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,192 And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,193 And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,194 And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,195 And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,196 And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;197 He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north,198 I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.11199 Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,200 Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;201 Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.202 She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,203 She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.204 Which of the young men does she like the best?205 Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.206 Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,207 You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.208 Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,209 The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.210 The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,211 Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.212 An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,213 It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.214 The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,215 They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,216 They do not think whom they souse with spray.12217 The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market,218 I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down.219 Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,220 Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire.221 From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements,222 The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,223 Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,224 They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.146 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

13225 The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain,226 The negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and tall he stands pois’d on one leg on the string-piece,227 His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hip-band,228 His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead,229 The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of his polish’d and perfect limbs.230 I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there,231 I go with the team also.232 In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as forward sluing,233 To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing,234 Absorbing all to myself and for this song.235 Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes?236 It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.237 My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble,238 They rise together, they slowly circle around.239 I believe in those wing’d purposes,240 And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,241 And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,242 And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,243 And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,244 And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.14245 The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,246 Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,247 The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close,248 Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.249 The sharp-hoof’d moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the chickadee, the prairie-dog,250 The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats,251 The brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings,252 I see in them and myself the same old law.253 The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,254 They scorn the best I can do to relate them.255 I am enamour’d of growing out-doors,256 Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods,257 Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses,258 I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.259 What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,260 Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,261 Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,262 Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,263 Scattering it freely forever.15264 The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,265 The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,266 The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,267 The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,268 The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,269 The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,270 The deacons are ordain’d with cross’d hands at the altar,147

271 The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,272 The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at the oats and rye,273 The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case,274 (He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bed-room;)275 The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,276 He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;277 The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table,278 What is removed drops horribly in a pail;279 The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove,280 The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass,281 The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;)282 The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,283 The western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs,284 Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece;285 The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee,286 As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle,287 The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other,288 The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof’d garret and harks to the musical rain,289 The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,290 The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm’d cloth is offering moccasins and bead-bags for sale,291 The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways,292 As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for the shore-going passengers,293 The young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots,294 The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne her first child,295 The clean-hair’d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the factory or mill,296 The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter’s lead flies swiftly over the note-book, the sign-painter islettering with blue and gold,297 The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread,298 The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him,299 The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions,300 The regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white sails sparkle!)301 The drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray,302 The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling about the odd cent;)303 The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly,304 The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open’d lips,305 The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,306 The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,307 (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;)308 The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries,309 On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms,310 The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold,311 The Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle,312 As the fare-collector goes through the train he gives notice by the jingling of loose change,313 The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the roof, the masons are calling for mortar,314 In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;315 Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather’d, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannonand small arms!)316 Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground;317 Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface,318 The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe,319 Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees,320 Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through those drain’d by the Tennessee, or through those of theArkansas,321 Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,148 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

322 Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them,323 In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day’s sport,324 The city sleeps and the country sleeps,325 The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,326 The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;327 And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,328 And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,329 And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.16330 I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,331 Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,332 Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,333 Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine,334 One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,335 A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live,336 A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,337 A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,338 A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;339 At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland,340 At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking,341 At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch,342 Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving their big proportions,)343 Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat,344 A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,345 A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,346 Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,347 A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,348 Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.349 I resist any thing better than my own diversity,350 Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,351 And am not stuck up, and am in my place.352 (The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,353 The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,354 The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)17355 These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,356 If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,357 If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,358 If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.359 This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,360 This the common air that bathes the globe.18361 With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,362 I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer’d and slain persons.363 Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?364 I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.365 I beat and pound for the dead,366 I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.149

367 Vivas to those who have fail’d!368 And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!369 And to those themselves who sank in the sea!370 And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!371 And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!19372 This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,373 It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all,374 I will not have a single person slighted or left away,375 The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,376 The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;377 There shall be no difference between them and the rest.378 This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair,379 This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,380 This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,381 This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.382 Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?383 Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has.384 Do you take it I would astonish?385 Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods?386 Do I astonish more than they?387 This hour I tell things in confidence,388 I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.20389 Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;390 How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?391 What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?392 All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,393 Else it were time lost listening to me.394 I do not snivel that snivel the world over,395 That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.396 Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d,397 I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.398 Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?399 Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with doctors and calculated close,400 I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.401 In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,402 And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.403 I know I am solid and sound,404 To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,405 All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.406 I know I am deathless,407 I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,408 I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.409 I know I am august,410 I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,411 I see that the elementary laws never apologize,412 (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)413 I exist as I am, that is enough,414 If no other in the world be aware I sit content,150 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

415 And if each and all be aware I sit content.416 One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,417 And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,418 I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.419 My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,420 I laugh at what you call dissolution,421 And I know the amplitude of time.21422 I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,423 The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,424 The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.425 I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,426 And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,427 And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.428 I chant the chant of dilation or pride,429 We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,430 I show that size is only development.431 Have you outstript the rest? are you the President?432 It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.433 I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,434 I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.435 Press close bare-bosom’d night -- press close magnetic nourishing night!436 Night of south winds -- night of the large few stars!437 Still nodding night -- mad naked summer night.438 Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!439 Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!440 Earth of departed sunset -- earth of the mountains misty-topt!441 Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!442 Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!443 Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!444 Far-swooping elbow’d earth -- rich apple-blossom’d earth!445 Smile, for your lover comes.446 Prodigal, you have given me love -- therefore I to you give love!447 O unspeakable passionate love.22448 You sea! I resign myself to you also -- I guess what you mean,449 I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,450 I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,451 We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,452 Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,453 Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.454 Sea of stretch’d ground-swells,455 Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,456 Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,457 Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,458 I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.459 Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,460 Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others’ arms.461 I am he attesting sympathy,462 (Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?)151

463 I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.464 What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?465 Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,466 My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait,467 I moisten the roots of all that has grown.468 Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?469 Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified?470 I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance,471 Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,472 Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.473 This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,474 There is no better than it and now.475 What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such a wonder,476 The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.23477 Endless unfolding of words of ages!478 And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.479 A word of the faith that never balks,480 Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.481 It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,482 That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.483 I accept Reality and dare not question it,484 Materialism first and last imbuing.485 Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!486 Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,487 This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of the old cartouches,488 These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas.489 This is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.490 Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!491 Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,492 I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.493 Less the reminders of properties told my words,494 And more the reminders they of life untold, and of freedom and extrication,495 And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully equipt,496 And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that plot and conspire.24497 Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,498 Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,499 No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,500 No more modest than immodest.501 Unscrew the locks from the doors!502 Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!503 Whoever degrades another degrades me,504 And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.505 Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.506 I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,507 By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.508 Through me many long dumb voices,509 Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,510 Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,152 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

511 Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,512 And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,513 And of the rights of them the others are down upon,514 Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,515 Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.516 Through me forbidden voices,517 Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,518 Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.519 I do not press my fingers across my mouth,520 I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,521 Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.522 I believe in the flesh and the appetites,523 Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.524 Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,525 The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,526 This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.527 If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it,528 Translucent mould of me it shall be you!529 Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!530 Firm masculine colter it shall be you!531 Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!532 You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!533 Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!534 My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!535 Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!536 Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!537 Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!538 Sun so generous it shall be you!539 Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!540 You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!541 Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!542 Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you!543 Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d, mortal I have ever touch’d, it shall be you.544 I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,545 Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,546 I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,547 Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again.548 That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,549 A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.550 To behold the day-break!551 The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,552 The air tastes good to my palate.553 Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising freshly exuding,554 Scooting obliquely high and low.555 Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,556 Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.557 The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction,558 The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head,559 The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!25560 Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,561 If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.153

562 We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,563 We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.564 My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,565 With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.566 Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,567 It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,568 Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?569 Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation,570 Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?571 Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,572 The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,573 I underlying causes to balance them at last,574 My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things,575 Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.)576 My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,577 Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,578 I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.579 Writing and talk do not prove me,580 I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,581 With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.26582 Now I will do nothing but listen,583 To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.584 I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,585 I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,586 I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,587 Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,588 Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals,589 The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,590 The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence,591 The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters,592 The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles andcolor’d lights,593 The steam whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,594 The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two,595 (They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)596 I hear the violoncello, (‘tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)597 I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,598 It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.599 I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,600 Ah this indeed is music -- this suits me.601 A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,602 The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.603 I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)604 The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,605 It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them,606 It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent waves,607 I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,608 Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,609 At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,610 And that we call Being.154 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

27611 To be in any form, what is that?612 (Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)613 If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.614 Mine is no callous shell,615 I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,616 They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.617 I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,618 To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.28619 Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,620 Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,621 Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,622 My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself,623 On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,624 Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,625 Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,626 Depriving me of my best as for a purpose,627 Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,628 Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields,629 Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,630 They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me,631 No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,632 Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,633 Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.634 The sentries desert every other part of me,635 They have left me helpless to a red marauder,636 They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.637 I am given up by traitors,638 I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor,639 I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.640 You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,641 Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.29642 Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch!643 Did it make you ache so, leaving me?644 Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,645 Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.646 Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,647 Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.30648 All truths wait in all things,649 They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,650 They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,651 The insignificant is as big to me as any,652 (What is less or more than a touch?)653 Logic and sermons never convince,155

654 The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.655 (Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,656 Only what nobody denies is so.)657 A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,658 I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,659 And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,660 And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,661 And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,662 And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.31663 I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,664 And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,665 And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest,666 And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,667 And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,668 And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,669 And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.670 I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,671 And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,672 And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,673 But call any thing back again when I desire it.674 In vain the speeding or shyness,675 In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,676 In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder’d bones,677 In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,678 In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,679 In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,680 In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,681 In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,682 In vain the razor-bill’d auk sails far north to Labrador,683 I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.32684 I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,685 I stand and look at them long and long.686 They do not sweat and whine about their condition,687 They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,688 They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,689 Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,690 Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,691 Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.692 So they show their relations to me and I accept them,693 They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.694 I wonder where they get those tokens,695 Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?696 Myself moving forward then and now and forever,697 Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,698 Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,699 Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,700 Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms.701 A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,156 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

702 Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,703 Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,704 Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.705 His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,706 His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return.707 I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,708 Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?709 Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.33710 Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess’d at,711 What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass,712 What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed,713 And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning.714 My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,715 I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,716 I am afoot with my vision.717 By the city’s quadrangular houses -- in log huts, camping with lumbermen,718 Along the ruts of the turnpike, along the dry gulch and rivulet bed,719 Weeding my onion-patch or hoeing rows of carrots and parsnips, crossing savannas, trailing in forests,720 Prospecting, gold-digging, girdling the trees of a new purchase,721 Scorch’d ankle-deep by the hot sand, hauling my boat down the shallow river,722 Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the buck turns furiously at the hunter,723 Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the otter is feeding on fish,724 Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou,725 Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tail;726 Over the growing sugar, over the yellow-flower’d cotton plant, over the rice in its low moist field,727 Over the sharp-peak’d farm house, with its scallop’d scum and slender shoots from the gutters,728 Over the western persimmon, over the long-leav’d corn, over the delicate blue-flower flax,729 Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with the rest,730 Over the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze;731 Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low scragged limbs,732 Walking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the brush,733 Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot,734 Where the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve, where the great gold-bug drops through the dark,735 Where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to the meadow,736 Where cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous shuddering of their hides,737 Where the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen, where andirons straddle the hearth-slab, where cobwebs fall in festoons fromthe rafters;738 Where trip-hammers crash, where the press is whirling its cylinders,739 Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes under its ribs,740 Where the pear-shaped balloon is floating aloft, (floating in it myself and looking composedly down,)741 Where the life-car is drawn on the slip-noose, where the heat hatches pale-green eggs in the dented sand,742 Where the she-whale swims with her calf and never forsakes it,743 Where the steam-ship trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke,744 Where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water,745 Where the half-burn’d brig is riding on unknown currents,746 Where shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupting below;747 Where the dense-starr’d flag is borne at the head of the regiments,748 Approaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island,749 Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance,750 Upon a door-step, upon the horse-block of hard wood outside,751 Upon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of base-ball,157

752 At he-festivals, with blackguard gibes, ironical license, bull-dances, drinking, laughter,753 At the cider-mill tasting the sweets of the brown mash, sucking the juice through a straw,754 At apple-peelings wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find,755 At musters, beach-parties, friendly bees, huskings, house-raisings;756 Where the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles, screams, weeps,757 Where the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard, where the dry-stalks are scatter’d, where the brood-cow waits in the hovel,758 Where the bull advances to do his masculine work, where the stud to the mare, where the cock is treading the hen,759 Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks,760 Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,761 Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near,762 Where the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding,763 Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her near-human laugh,764 Where bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by the high weeds,765 Where band-neck’d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads out,766 Where burial coaches enter the arch’d gates of a cemetery,767 Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees,768 Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs,769 Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon,770 Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well,771 Through patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves,772 Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs,773 Through the gymnasium, through the curtain’d saloon, through the office or public hall;774 Pleas’d with the native and pleas’d with the foreign, pleas’d with the new and old,775 Pleas’d with the homely woman as well as the handsome,776 Pleas’d with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously,777 Pleas’d with the tune of the choir of the whitewash’d church,778 Pleas’d with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, impress’d seriously at the camp-meeting;779 Looking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon, flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate glass,780 Wandering the same afternoon with my face turn’d up to the clouds, or down a lane or along the beach,781 My right and left arms round the sides of two friends, and I in the middle;782 Coming home with the silent and dark-cheek’d bush-boy, (behind me he rides at the drape of the day,)783 Far from the settlements studying the print of animals’ feet, or the moccasin print,784 By the cot in the hospital reaching lemonade to a feverish patient,785 Nigh the coffin’d corpse when all is still, examining with a candle;786 Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure,787 Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any,788 Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him,789 Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while,790 Walking the old hills of Judæa with the beautiful gentle God by my side,791 Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,792 Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles,793 Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest,794 Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly,795 Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,796 Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing,797 I tread day and night such roads.798 I visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product,799 And look at quintillions ripen’d and look at quintillions green.800 I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul,801 My course runs below the soundings of plummets.802 I help myself to material and immaterial,803 No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me.804 I anchor my ship for a little while only,805 My messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me.158 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

806 I go hunting polar furs and the seal, leaping chasms with a pike-pointed staff, clinging to topples of brittle and blue.807 I ascend to the foretruck,808 I take my place late at night in the crow’s-nest,809 We sail the arctic sea, it is plenty light enough,810 Through the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty,811 The enormous masses of ice pass me and I pass them, the scenery is plain in all directions,812 The white-topt mountains show in the distance, I fling out my fancies toward them,813 We are approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to be engaged,814 We pass the colossal outposts of the encampment, we pass with still feet and caution,815 Or we are entering by the suburbs some vast and ruin’d city,816 The blocks and fallen architecture more than all the living cities of the globe.817 I am a free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires,818 I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,819 I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.820 My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,821 They fetch my man’s body up dripping and drown’d.822 I understand the large hearts of heroes,823 The courage of present times and all times,824 How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm,825 How he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights,826 And chalk’d in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you;827 How he follow’d with them and tack’d with them three days and would not give it up,828 How he saved the drifting company at last,829 How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the side of their prepared graves,830 How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men;831 All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine,832 I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.833 The disdain and calmness of martyrs,834 The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on,835 The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat,836 The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and the bullets,837 All these I feel or am.838 I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,839 Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,840 I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,841 I fall on the weeds and stones,842 The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,843 Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.844 Agonies are one of my changes of garments,845 I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,846 My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.847 I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken,848 Tumbling walls buried me in their debris,849 Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,850 I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,851 They have clear’d the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.852 I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake,853 Painless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy,854 White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared of their fire-caps,855 The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.856 Distant and dead resuscitate,857 They show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock myself.858 I am an old artillerist, I tell of my fort’s bombardment,859 I am there again.159

860 Again the long roll of the drummers,861 Again the attacking cannon, mortars,862 Again to my listening ears the cannon responsive.863 I take part, I see and hear the whole,864 The cries, curses, roar, the plaudits for well-aim’d shots,865 The ambulanza slowly passing trailing its red drip,866 Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs,867 The fall of grenades through the rent roof, the fan-shaped explosion,868 The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air.869 Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general, he furiously waves with his hand,870 He gasps through the clot Mind not me -- mind -- the entrenchments.34871 Now I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth,872 (I tell not the fall of Alamo,873 Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,874 The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,)875 ‘Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men.876 Retreating they had form’d in a hollow square with their baggage for breastworks,877 Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy’s, nine times their number, was the price they took in advance,878 Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone,879 They treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv’d writing and seal, gave up their arms and march’d back prisoners of war.880 They were the glory of the race of rangers,881 Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship,882 Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate,883 Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters,884 Not a single one over thirty years of age.885 The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and massacred, it was beautiful early summer,886 The work commenced about five o’clock and was over by eight.887 None obey’d the command to kneel,888 Some made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight,889 A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead lay together,890 The maim’d and mangled dug in the dirt, the new-comers saw them there,891 Some half-kill’d attempted to crawl away,892 These were despatch’d with bayonets or batter’d with the blunts of muskets,893 A youth not seventeen years old seiz’d his assassin till two more came to release him,894 The three were all torn and cover’d with the boy’s blood.895 At eleven o’clock began the burning of the bodies;896 That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men.35897 Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?898 Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?899 List to the yarn, as my grandmother’s father the sailor told it to me.900 Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)901 His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be;902 Along the lower’d eve he came horribly raking us.903 We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch’d,904 My captain lash’d fast with his own hands.905 We had receiv’d some eighteen pound shots under the water,906 On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire, killing all around and blowing up overhead.907 Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark,160 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

908 Ten o’clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain, and five feet of water reported,909 The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after-hold to give them a chance for themselves.910 The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels,911 They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust.912 Our frigate takes fire,913 The other asks if we demand quarter?914 If our colors are struck and the fighting done?915 Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,916 We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting.917 Only three guns are in use,918 One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy’s mainmast,919 Two well serv’d with grape and canister silence his musketry and clear his decks.920 The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially the main-top,921 They hold out bravely during the whole of the action.922 Not a moment’s cease,923 The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder-magazine.924 One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking.925 Serene stands the little captain,926 He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low,927 His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns.928 Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us.36929 Stretch’d and still lies the midnight,930 Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,931 Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we have conquer’d,932 The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet,933 Near by the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin,934 The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl’d whiskers,935 The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below,936 The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,937 Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars,938 Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves,939 Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent,940 A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining,941 Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors,942 The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,943 Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan,944 These so, these irretrievable.37945 You laggards there on guard! look to your arms!946 In at the conquer’d doors they crowd! I am possess’d!947 Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering,948 See myself in prison shaped like another man,949 And feel the dull unintermitted pain.950 For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,951 It is I let out in the morning and barr’d at night.952 Not a mutineer walks handcuff’d to jail but I am handcuff’d to him and walk by his side,953 (I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.)954 Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.955 Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,161

956 My face is ash-color’d, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.957 Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,958 I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.38959 Enough! enough! enough!960 Somehow I have been stunn’d. Stand back!961 Give me a little time beyond my cuff’d head, slumbers, dreams, gaping,962 I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.963 That I could forget the mockers and insults!964 That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers!965 That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning.966 I remember now,967 I resume the overstaid fraction,968 The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves,969 Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.970 I troop forth replenish’d with supreme power, one of an average unending procession,971 Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines,972 Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth,973 The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years.974 Eleves, I salute you! come forward!975 Continue your annotations, continue your questionings.39976 The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?977 Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it?978 Is he some Southwesterner rais’d out-doors? is he Kanadian?979 Is he from the Mississippi country? Iowa, Oregon, California?980 The mountains? prairie-life, bush-life? or sailor from the sea?981 Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,982 They desire he should like them, touch them, speak to them, stay with them.983 Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb’d head, laughter, and naivetè,984 Slow-stepping feet, common features, common modes and emanations,985 They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers,986 They are wafted with the odor of his body or breath, they fly out of the glance of his eyes.40987 Flaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask -- lie over!988 You light surfaces only, I force surfaces and depths also.989 Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands,990 Say, old top-knot, what do you want?991 Man or woman, I might tell how I like you, but cannot,992 And might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot,993 And might tell that pining I have, that pulse of my nights and days.994 Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,995 When I give I give myself.996 You there, impotent, loose in the knees,997 Open your scarf’d chops till I blow grit within you,998 Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets,999 I am not to be denied, I compel, I have stores plenty and to spare,1000 And any thing I have I bestow.162 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

1001 I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me,1002 You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.1003 To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean,1004 On his right cheek I put the family kiss,1005 And in my soul I swear I never will deny him.1006 On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes.1007 (This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.)1008 To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door.1009 Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,1010 Let the physician and the priest go home.1011 I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will,1012 O despairer, here is my neck,1013 By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me.1014 I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,1015 Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force,1016 Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.1017 Sleep -- I and they keep guard all night,1018 Not doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you,1019 I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,1020 And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.411021 I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,1022 And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.1023 I heard what was said of the universe,1024 Heard it and heard it of several thousand years;1025 It is middling well as far as it goes -- but is that all?1026 Magnifying and applying come I,1027 Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,1028 Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,1029 Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson,1030 Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha,1031 In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved,1032 With Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image,1033 Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more,1034 Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days,1035 (They bore mites as for unfledg’d birds who have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves,)1036 Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself, bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see,1037 Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house,1038 Putting higher claims for him there with his roll’d-up sleeves driving the mallet and chisel,1039 Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand just as curious asany revelation,1040 Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than the gods of the antique wars,1041 Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction,1042 Their brawny limbs passing safe over charr’d laths, their white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames;1043 By the mechanic’s wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for every person born,1044 Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels with shirts bagg’d out at their waists,1045 The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and to come,1046 Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery;1047 What was strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod about me, and not filling the square rod then,1048 The bull and the bug never worshipp’d half enough,1049 Dung and dirt more admirable than was dream’d,1050 The supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes,163

1051 The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best, and be as prodigious;1052 By my life-lumps! becoming already a creator,1053 Putting myself here and now to the ambush’d womb of the shadows.421054 A call in the midst of the crowd,1055 My own voice, orotund sweeping and final.1056 Come my children,1057 Come my boys and girls, my women, household and intimates,1058 Now the performer launches his nerve, he has pass’d his prelude on the reeds within.1059 Easily written loose-finger’d chords -- I feel the thrum of your climax and close.1060 My head slues round on my neck,1061 Music rolls, but not from the organ,1062 Folks are around me, but they are no household of mine.1063 Ever the hard unsunk ground,1064 Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever the air and the ceaseless tides,1065 Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real,1066 Ever the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn’d thumb, that breath of itches and thirsts,1067 Ever the vexer’s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides and bring him forth,1068 Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,1069 Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.1070 Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,1071 To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,1072 Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going,1073 Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving,1074 A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.1075 This is the city and I am one of the citizens,1076 Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools,1077 The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate.1078 The little plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail’d coats,1079 I am aware who they are, (they are positively not worms or fleas,)1080 I acknowledge the duplicates of myself, the weakest and shallowest is deathless with me,1081 What I do and say the same waits for them,1082 Every thought that flounders in me the same flounders in them.1083 I know perfectly well my own egotism,1084 Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,1085 And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.1086 Not words of routine this song of mine,1087 But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring;1088 This printed and bound book -- but the printer and the printing-office boy?1089 The well-taken photographs -- but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?1090 The black ship mail’d with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets -- but the pluck of the captain and engineers?1091 In the houses the dishes and fare and furniture -- but the host and hostess, and the look out of their eyes?1092 The sky up there -- yet here or next door, or across the way?1093 The saints and sages in history -- but you yourself?1094 Sermons, creeds, theology -- but the fathomless human brain,1095 And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?431096 I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,1097 My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,1098 Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern,164 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

1099 Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years,1100 Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun,1101 Making a fetich of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in the circle of obis,1102 Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,1103 Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and austere in the woods a gymnosophist,1104 Drinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran,1105 Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum,1106 Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine,1107 To the mass kneeling or the puritan’s prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew,1108 Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me,1109 Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land,1110 Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits.1111 One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk like a man leaving charges before a journey.1112 Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,1113 Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten’d, atheistical,1114 I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief.1115 How the flukes splash!1116 How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!1117 Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,1118 I take my place among you as much as among any,1119 The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,1120 And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same.1121 I do not know what is untried and afterward,1122 But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.1123 Each who passes is consider’d, each who stops is consider’d, not a single one can it fail.1124 It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried,1125 Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side,1126 Nor the little child that peep’d in at the door, and then drew back and was never seen again,1127 Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with bitterness worse than gall,1128 Nor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad disorder,1129 Nor the numberless slaughter’d and wreck’d, nor the brutish koboo call’d the ordure of humanity,1130 Nor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in,1131 Nor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the earth,1132 Nor any thing in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of myriads that inhabit them,1133 Nor the present, nor the least wisp that is known.441134 It is time to explain myself -- let us stand up.1135 What is known I strip away,1136 I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.1137 The clock indicates the moment -- but what does eternity indicate?1138 We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,1139 There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.1140 Births have brought us richness and variety,1141 And other births will bring us richness and variety.1142 I do not call one greater and one smaller,1143 That which fills its period and place is equal to any.1144 Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?1145 I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,1146 All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,1147 (What have I to do with lamentation?)1148 I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an encloser of things to be.1149 My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,165

1150 On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,1151 All below duly travel’d, and still I mount and mount.1152 Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,1153 Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,1154 I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,1155 And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.1156 Long I was hugg’d close -- long and long.1157 Immense have been the preparations for me,1158 Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.1159 Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,1160 For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,1161 They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.1162 Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,1163 My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.1164 For it the nebula cohered to an orb,1165 The long slow strata piled to rest it on,1166 Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,1167 Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.1168 All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me,1169 Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.451170 O span of youth! ever-push’d elasticity!1171 O manhood, balanced, florid and full.1172 My lovers suffocate me,1173 Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin,1174 Jostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at night,1175 Crying by day Ahoy! from the rocks of the river, swinging and chirping over my head,1176 Calling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush,1177 Lighting on every moment of my life,1178 Bussing my body with soft balsamic busses,1179 Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine.1180 Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days!1181 Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows after and out of itself,1182 And the dark hush promulges as much as any.1183 I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,1184 And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.1185 Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,1186 Outward and outward and forever outward.1187 My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,1188 He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,1189 And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.1190 There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,1191 If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, itwould not avail in the long run,1192 We should surely bring up again where we now stand,1193 And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.1194 A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient,1195 They are but parts, any thing is but a part.1196 See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,1197 Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.1198 My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,1199 The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,166 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

1200 The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.461201 I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured.1202 I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)1203 My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,1204 No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,1205 I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,1206 I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,1207 But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,1208 My left hand hooking you round the waist,1209 My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.1210 Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,1211 You must travel it for yourself.1212 It is not far, it is within reach,1213 Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,1214 Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.1215 Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,1216 Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.1217 If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,1218 And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,1219 For after we start we never lie by again.1220 This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded heaven,1221 And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them,shall we be fill’d and satisfied then?1222 And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.1223 You are also asking me questions and I hear you,1224 I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.1225 Sit a while dear son,1226 Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,1227 But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for youregress hence.1228 Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,1229 Now I wash the gum from your eyes,1230 You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.1231 Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,1232 Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,1233 To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.471234 I am the teacher of athletes,1235 He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,1236 He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.1237 The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power, but in his own right,1238 Wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear,1239 Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak,1240 Unrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts,1241 First-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull’s eye, to sail a skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo,1242 Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with small-pox over all latherers,1243 And those well-tann’d to those that keep out of the sun.1244 I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?1245 I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,167

1246 My words itch at your ears till you understand them.1247 I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat,1248 (It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you,1249 Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d.)1250 I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,1251 And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air.1252 If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore,1253 The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key,1254 The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words.1255 No shutter’d room or school can commune with me,1256 But roughs and little children better than they.1257 The young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me well,1258 The woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall take me with him all day,1259 The farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the sound of my voice,1260 In vessels that sail my words sail, I go with fishermen and seamen and love them.1261 The soldier camp’d or upon the march is mine,1262 On the night ere the pending battle many seek me, and I do not fail them,1263 On that solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek me.1264 My face rubs to the hunter’s face when he lies down alone in his blanket,1265 The driver thinking of me does not mind the jolt of his wagon,1266 The young mother and old mother comprehend me,1267 The girl and the wife rest the needle a moment and forget where they are,1268 They and all would resume what I have told them.481269 I have said that the soul is not more than the body,1270 And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,1271 And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,1272 And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,1273 And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,1274 And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,1275 And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,1276 And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,1277 And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.1278 And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,1279 For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,1280 (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)1281 I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,1282 Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.1283 Why should I wish to see God better than this day?1284 I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,1285 In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,1286 I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,1287 And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,1288 Others will punctually come for ever and ever.491289 And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.1290 To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes,1291 I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,1292 I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,1293 And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.168 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

1294 And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,1295 I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,1296 I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons.1297 And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,1298 (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)1299 I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,1300 O suns -- O grass of graves -- O perpetual transfers and promotions,1301 If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?1302 Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest,1303 Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight,1304 Toss, sparkles of day and dusk -- toss on the black stems that decay in the muck,1305 Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.1306 I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night,1307 I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected,1308 And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small.501309 There is that in me -- I do not know what it is -- but I know it is in me.1310 Wrench’d and sweaty -- calm and cool then my body becomes,1311 I sleep -- I sleep long.1312 I do not know it -- it is without name -- it is a word unsaid,1313 It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.1314 Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,1315 To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.1316 Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.1317 Do you see O my brothers and sisters?1318 It is not chaos or death -- it is form, union, plan -- it is eternal life -- it is Happiness.511319 The past and present wilt -- I have fill’d them, emptied them,1320 And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.1321 Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?1322 Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,1323 (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)1324 Do I contradict myself?1325 Very well then I contradict myself,1326 (I am large, I contain multitudes.)1327 I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.1328 Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?1329 Who wishes to walk with me?1330 Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?521331 The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.1332 I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,1333 I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.1334 The last scud of day holds back for me,1335 It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,1336 It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.1337 I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,1338 I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.169

1339 I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,1340 If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.1341 You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,1342 But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,1343 And filter and fibre your blood.1344 Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,1345 Missing me one place search another,1346 I stop somewhere waiting for you.O Captain! My Captain!1 O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,2 The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,3 The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,4 While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;5 But O heart! heart! heart!6 O the bleeding drops of red,7 Where on the deck my Captain lies,8 Fallen cold and dead.9 O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;10 Rise up -- for you the flag is flung -- for you the bugle trills,11 For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths -- for you the shores a-crowding,12 For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;13 Here Captain! dear father!14 This arm beneath your head!15 It is some dream that on the deck,16 You’ve fallen cold and dead.17 My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,18 My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,19 The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,20 From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;21 Exult O shores, and ring O bells!22 But I with mournful tread,23 Walk the deck my Captain lies,24 Fallen cold and dead.I Hear America SingingI hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it would be blithe and strong,The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,The woodcutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,The day what belongs to the day --- at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.170 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

James Madison:The Federalist Papers #10 (1787)To promote the ratification of the new Constitution, AlexanderHamilton, John Jay, and James Madison teamed up to write aseries of newspaper articles under the name, “Publius.” These articles,eighty-five in all, are known together as The Federalist Papers andhave become justly famous not only as high-class propaganda, but asbrilliant commentary on the principles underlying the Constitution.Among the numerous advantages promised by a wellconstructedunion, none deserves to be more accuratelydeveloped than its tendency to break and control the violenceof faction. The friend of popular governments never findshimself so much alarmed for their character and fate as whenhe contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. Hewill not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan, which,without violating the principles to which he is attached,provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, andconfusion introduced into the public councils have, in truth,been the diseases under which popular governments haveeverywhere perished... Complaints are everywhere heard fromour most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally friendsof public and private faith and of public and personal liberty,that our governments are too unstable, that the public good isdisregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measuresare too often decided, not according to the rules of justice andthe rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of aninterested and overbearing majority... [I]t will be found... thatprevailing and increasing distrust of our public engagementsand alarm for private rights are echoed from one end of thecontinent to the other. These must be chiefly, if not wholly,effects of the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factiousspirit has tainted our public administration...As long as the reason of man continues to be fallible, and heis at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.As long as the connection subsists between his reason and hisself-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocalinfluence on each other; and the former will be objects to whichthe latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the facultiesof men, from which the rights of property originate, is notless an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. Theprotection of these faculties is the first object of government.From the protection of different and unequal faculties ofacquiring property, the possession of different degrees andkinds of property immediately results; and from the influence ofthese on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietorsensues a division of society into different interests and parties.The latent causes of faction are thus sown into the nature of man;and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees ofactivity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerninggovernment, and many other points... an attachment todifferent leaders ambitiously contending for preeminence andpower; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes havebeen interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, dividedmankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity,and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress eachother than to cooperate for the common good. So strong is thispropensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities that...most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient tokindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violentconflicts. But the most common and durable source of factionshas been the various and unequal distribution of property.Those who hold and those who are without property have everformed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors,and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. Alanded interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest,a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up ofnecessity in civilized nations, and divided them into differentclasses, actuated by different sentimentsand views. The regulation of these various and interferinginterests forms the principal task of modern legislation andinvolves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary andordinary operations of government.No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because hisinterest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably,corrupt his integrity. With greater reason, a body of men areunfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet, whatare many of the most important acts of legislation but so manyjudicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights ofsingle persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies ofcitizens? And what are the different classes of legislators butadvocates and parties to the causes which they determine?Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a questionto which creditors are parties on one side and debtors on theother. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet theparties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the mostnumerous party, or in other words, the most powerful faction,must be expected to prevail...When a majority is included in a faction... the form of populargovernment enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passions orinterest both the public good and private rights of other citizens.To secure the public good and the private rights171

against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time topreserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is thenthe great object to which our inquiries are directed...By what means is this object attainable? Either the existence ofthe same passion or interest in a majority at the same time mustbe prevented, or the majority, having such coexistent passion orinterest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation,unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression...From this view of the subject it may be concluded that apure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of asmall number of citizens, who assemble and administer thegovernment in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefsof faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost everycase, be felt by the majority of the whole; a communication andconcert results from the form of government itself, and thereis nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weakerparty... Hence it is that such democracies have ever beenspectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been foundincompatible with personal security or the rights of property;and have been in general short in their lives as they have beenviolent in their deaths...A republic, by which I mean a government in which the schemeof representation takes place, opens a different prospect andpromises the cure for which we are seeking...The two great points of difference between a democracy anda republic are: first, the delegation of the government in thelatter to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly,the greater number of citizens and greater sphere of countryover which the latter may be extended.The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refineand enlarge the public views by passing them through themedium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may bestdiscern the true interest of their country and whose patriotismand love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporaryor partial considerations. Under such a regulation it may wellhappen that the public voice, pronounced by the representativesof the people, will be more consonant to the public good than ifpronounced by the people themselves... The question resultingis, whether small or extensive republics are most favorable tothe election of proper guardians of the public weal; it is clearlydecided in favor of the latter...It must be confessed that... By enlarging too much the numberof electors, you render the representative too little acquaintedwith the all their local circumstances and lesser interests; byreducing it too much,you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit tocomprehend and pursue great and national objects. The federalConstitution forms a happy combination in this respect; thegreat and aggregate interests being referred to the national, thelocal and particular to the State legislatures.The other point of difference is the greater number of citizensand extent of territory which may be brought within thecompass of republican than of democratic government; and itis this circumstance which renders factious combinations tobe less dreaded in the former than in the latter. The smallerthe society, the fewer probably will be the distinct partiesand interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties andinterests, the more frequently will a majority be found of thesame party; and the smaller number of individuals composinga majority, and the smaller the compass within which theyare placed, the more easily will they concert and execute theirplans of oppression. Extend the sphere and you take in a greatervariety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that amajority of the whole will have a common motive to invade therights of the other citizens; or, if such a common motive exists,it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their ownstrength and act in unison with each other...The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame withintheir particular States but will be unable to spread a generalconflagration through the other States. A religious sect maydegenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy;but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it mustsecure the national councils against any danger from thatsource. A rage of paper money, for an abolition of debts, foran equal division of property, or any other improper or wickedproject, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Unionthan a particular member of it, in the same proportion thatsuch a malady is more likely to taint a particular county ordistrict than an entire State...[T]herefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseasesmost incident to republican government. And according tothis degree of pleasure and pride we feel in being republicansought to be our zeal in cherishing the spirit and supporting thecharacter of federalists.PUBLIUS[A]s each representative will be chosen by a greater number ofcitizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be moredifficult for unworthy candidates to practise with success...172 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

James Madison:The Federalist Papers #51 (1787)To promote the ratification of the new Constitution, AlexanderHamilton, John Jay, and James Madison teamed up to write aseries of newspaper articles under the name, ‘Publius.” These articles,eighty-five in all, are known together as The Federalist Papers andhave become justly famous not only as high-class propaganda, but asbrilliant commentary on the principles underlying the Constitution.One of the most famous of the Federalist Papers, Number Fiftyone, explains the Constitutional principle of checks and balances.According to Madison, what are some of problems faced by the newrepublic? How does the proposed Constitution protect against theproblems Madison has noted?To what expedient, then, shall we finally resort, for maintainingin practice the necessary partition of power among the severaldepartments, as laid down in the Constitution? It is evident thatthe members of each department should be as little dependentas possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexedto their offices...But the great security against a gradual concentration of thoseseveral powers in the same department consists in giving to thosewho administer each department the necessary constitutionaland personal motives to resist the encroachments of the others.The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases,be made commensurate to the danger of the attack. Ambitionmust be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the manmust be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devicesshould be necessary to control the abuses of government. Butwhat is government itself, but the greatest of all reflectionson human nature? If men were angels, no government wouldbe necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither externalnor internal controls on government would be necessary. Inframing a government which is to be administered by menover men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enablethe government to control the governed; and in the next placeoblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, nodoubt, the primary control on the government; but experiencehas taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions...There are... two considerations particularly applicable to thefederal system of America, which place that system in a veryinteresting point of view...First. In a single republic all the power surrendered bythe people is submitted to the administration of a singlegovernment, and the usurpations are guarded against bya division of the government into distinct and separatedepartments. In the compound republic of America the powersurrendered by the people is first divided between two distinctgovernments [federal and state], and then the portion allottedto each subdivided among distinct and separate departments.Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. Thedifferent governments will control each other, at the same timethat each will be controlled by itself.Second. It is of great importance in a republic not only toguard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but toguard one part of society against the injustice of the otherpart. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes ofcitizens. If a majority be united by common interest, the rightsof the minority will be insecure. There are but two methodsof providing against this evil: the one by creating a will inthe community independent of the majority... the other bycomprehending in the society so many separate descriptions ofcitizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority ofthe whole very improbable, if not impracticable... The secondmethod will be exemplified in the federal republic of theUnited States. Whilst all authority in it will be derived fromand dependent on the society, the society itself will be brokeninto so many parts, interests and classes of citizens, that therights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little dangerfrom interested combinations of the majority.In a free government the security for civil rights might be thesame as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case inthe multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicityof sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on thenumber of interests and sects; and this may presume to dependon the extent of country and number of people comprehendedunder the same government...Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. Itever has and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or untilliberty is lost in the pursuit. In a society under the forms ofwhich the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress theweaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state ofnature, where the weaker individual is not secured against theviolence of the stronger...In the extended republic of the United States, and among thegreat variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces,a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldomtake place on any other principles than those of justice andgeneral good.... It is no less certain than it is important... thatthe larger the society... the more duly capable it will be of selfgovernment. And happily for the republican cause.173

Selected Arguments of Antifederalists(1780s)The Antifederalists were persons who opposed the ratification of theU.S. Constitution in 1787-1788. They conceded that the centralgovernment needed more power than it had under the Articles ofConfederation, but they argued that the Framers of the Constitutionhad gone too far, and, deeply suspicious of political power, feared thatthe centralized government proposed by the Framers would lead to anew kind of tyranny. As you read, look for the main arguments thatthese Antifederalists put forth against the proposed Constitution.Melancton Smith. “Representation in Government” (1788)[W]hen we speak of representatives... they resemble thosethey represent. They should be a true picture of the people,possess a knowledge of their circumstances and their wants,sympathize in all their distresses, and be disposed to seek theirtrue interests. The knowledge necessary for the representativeof a free people not only comprehends extensive politicaland commercial information, such as is acquired by men ofrefined education, who have leisure to attain to high degreesof improvement, but it should also comprehend that kind ofacquaintance with the common concerns and occupations ofthe people, which men of the middling class of life are, ingeneral, more competent to than those of a superior class. Tounderstand the true commercial interests of a country notonly requires just ideas of the general commerce of the world,but also, and principally, a knowledge of the productions ofyour own country, and their value, what your soil is capable ofproducing, the nature of your manufactures, the capacity of thecountry to increase both. To exercise the power of laying taxes,duties, exercises, with discretion, requires something morethan an acquaintance with the abstruse parts of the systemof finance. It calls for a knowledge of the circumstances andability of the people in general a discernment how the burdensimposed will bear upon the different classes.The number of representatives should be so large, as that, whileit embraces the men of the first class, it should admit those ofthe middling class of life. I am convinced that this governmentis so constituted that the representatives will generally becomposed of the first class in the community, which I shalldistinguish by the name of the natural aristocracy of thecountry...From these remarks, it appears that the government willfall into the hands of the few and the great. This will be agovernment of oppression....A system of corruption is known to be the system ofgovernment in Europe...[and] it will be attempted among us.The most effectual as well as natural security against this is astrong democratic branch in the legislature, frequently chosen,including in it a number of the substantial, sensible, yeomanryof the country. Do the House of Representatives answer thisdescription? I confess, to me they hardly wear the complexionof a democratic branch; they appear the mere shadow ofrepresentation.George Clinton. “In Opposition to Destruction of States’Rights”(1788)The... premises on which the new form of government is erected,declares a consolidation or union of all thirteen parts, or states,into one great whole, under the firm of the United States... Butwhoever seriously considers the immense extent of territorycomprehended within the limits of the United States, togetherwith the variety of its climates, productions, and commerce,the difference of extent, and number of inhabitants in all; thedissimilitude of interests, morals, and politics in almost everyone, will receive it as an intuitive truth, that a consolidatedrepublican form of government therein, can never form aperfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity,promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings ofliberty to you and your posterity, for to these objects it mustbe directed: this unkindred legislature therefore, composed ofinterests opposite and dissimilar in nature, will in its exercise,emphatically be like a house divided against itself..From this picture, what can you promise yourself, on the scoreof consolidation of the United States into one government?Impracticability in the just exercise of it, your freedominsecure... you risk much, by indispensably placing trusts ofthe greatest magnitude, into the hands of individuals whoseambition for power, and aggrandizement, will oppress andgrind you - where from the vast extent of your territory, andthe complication of interests, the science of government willbecome intricate and perplexed, and too mysterious for you tounderstand and observe; and by which you are to be conductedinto a monarchy, either limited or despPatrick Henry. “Need for a Bill of Rights”This proposal of altering our federal government is of a mostalarming nature’ You ought to be watchful, jealous of yourliberty; for, instead of securing your rights, you may lose themforever... I beg gentlemen to consider that a wrong step madenow will plunge us into misery, and our republic will be lost,and tyranny must and will arise...The necessity of a Bill of Rights appears to me to be greater inthis government than ever it was in any government before...All rights not expressly and unequivocally reserved to the174 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

people are impliedly and incidentally relinquished to rulers, asnecessarily inseparable from the delegated powers...This is the question. If you intend to reserve your unalienablerights, you must have the most express stipulation; for, ifimplication be allowed, you are ousted of those rights. If thepeople do not think it necessary to reserve them, they will besupposed to be given up.[W]ithout a Bill of Rights, you will exhibit the most absurdthing to mankind that ever the world saw a government [i.e.state governments] that has abandoned all its powers - thepowers of taxation, the sword, and the purse. You have disposedof them to Congress, without a Bill of Rights - without check,limitation, or control... You have Bill of Rights to defendagainst a state government, which is bereaved of all its power,and yet you have none against Congress, thought in full andexclusive possession of all power!Document-Based Question -The Constitution:A Democratic Document?Historians traditionally depicted the framers of the Constitutionas great liberals, defenders of the rights of man, and the creatorsof a democratic society. But beginning in the early 20th century,revisionists began to challenge this view of the framers. Somehistorians, led by Charles Beard argued that the ConstitutionalConvention was dominated by an elite and that the Constitutionitself is an instrument written to protect elite interests. As youexamine the following primary source documents consider what itindicates about the framers - were they democrats or elitists?As you read the following documents, pay close attention to what isbeing said and how each document might be used to defend or refutethe following statement. Be sure to note the source of each document- often who is speaking is as important as what is being said.The Constitution was an undemocratic document designedto protect a minority of wealthy men from the potentialtyranny of the masses.You may defend this statement, refute this statement, or defend it inpart and refute it in part.Document ASource: Constitution, Article I, sections 2 and 3The House of Representatives shall be composed of Memberschosen every second year by the People of the Several States.The Senate of the United States shall be composed by twosenators from each state, chosen by the Legislature thereof, forsix years, and each senator shall have one vote.Document BSource: Constitution, Article I, section 9No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: Andno person holding any office of Profit or Trust under them,shall, without the consent of Congress, accept of any present,Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatsoever, from anyKing, Prince, or foreign states.Document CSource: Constitution, Article IV, section 4The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union175

a Republican form of government, and shall protect each ofthem against invasion; and on Application of the Legislature,or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened)against domestic violence.Document DSource: Constitution, Article VI, section 9[N]o religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification toany office of public Trust under the United States.Document ESource: Constitution, Article II, section 1The Executive power shall be vested in a President of the UnitedStates of America. He shall hold his office during the Term offour years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen forthe same term, be elected, as follows:Each state shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislaturethereof may direct, a Number of electors, equal to the wholeNumber of Senators and Representatives to which the Statemay be entitled in the Congress... The electors shall meet intheir respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons... theVotes shall be counted. The Person having the greatest numberof votes shall be President, if such a number shall be a majorityof the whole number of electors appointed...Document FSource: Constitution, Article I, section 2Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned tothe several states which may be included within this union,according to their respective numbers, which shall bedetermined by adding to the whole number of free persons,including those bound to service for a number of years, andexcluding Indians not taxed, and three-fifths of all otherpersons.Document GSource: Constitution, Article IV, section 2No person held to Service or Labor in one state, under the lawsthereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of anyLaw or Regulation therein, be discharged from such serviceor labor, but shall be delivered up on the claim of the party towhom such service or labor may be due.Document HSource: Constitution, Article III, section 1The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in oneSupreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congressmay time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both ofthe Supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their officesduring good behavior, and shall, at stated times, receive fortheir services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminishedduring their Continuance in office.Document ISource: Constitution, Article I, section 9The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended,unless when in classes of rebellion or invasion the public safetymay require it.No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed.No capitation, or other direct tax shall be laid, unless inproportion to the Census or Enumeration herein beforedirected to be taken.No tax or duty shall be laid on Articles exported from anystate.Document JSource: Gouverneur MorrisThe time is not distant, when this country shall abound withmechanics [artisans] and manufacturers [industrial workers]who will receive bread from their employers. Will such men bethe secure and faithful guardians of liberty?... Children do notvote. Why? Because they want [lack] prudence, because theyhave no will of their own. The ignorant and dependent can beas little trusted with the public interest.Document KSource: Constitution, Article I, section 8The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect Taxes,duties, and imposts, to pay the debts and provide for thecommon defence...To regulate commerce with foreign nations...To coin money, regulate the value thereof...To raise and support Armies...To provide for the calling forth of the militia to executethe Laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repelinvasions...Document LSource: John JayThe natural aristocracy...are defenders of the worthy, the better176 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

sort of people, who are orderly and industrious, who are contentwith their situations and not uneasy in their circumstances...[There is a fear that] republican equality which deadensthe motives of industry, and places Demerit on a footingwith Virtue... The proper amount of inequality and naturaldistinctions should be recognized. Is there no distinction ofcharacter? Surely persons possessed of knowledge, judgment,information, integrity, and having extensive connections, arenot to be classed with persons void of reputation or character.Document MSource: Constitution, Article I, section 8Congress has the power to... make all laws which shall benecessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoingpowers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in theGovernment of the United States...Document NSource: Constitution, Article VIThis Constitution, and laws of the United States which shall bemade in pursuance thereof, shall be the Supreme Law of theLand; and the Judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrarywithstanding.Document OSource: Bill of Rights, Amendment XThe powers not delegated to the United States by theConstitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved tothe states respectively, or to the people.Document PSource: Melancton SmithThe knowledge necessary for the representative of a free peoplenot only comprehends extensive political and commercialinformation, such as is acquired by men of refined education,who have leisure to attain to high degrees of improvement, butit should also comprehend that kind of acquaintance with thecommon concerns and occupations of the people, which menof the middling class of life are, in general, more competentto than those of a superior class. To understand the truecommercial interests of a country, not only requires just ideasof the general commerce of the world, but also, and principally,a knowledge of the productions of your own country... I amconvinced that the government is so constituted that therepresentatives will generally be composed of the first class inthe community, which I shall distinguish by the name of thenatural aristocracy of the country...Document QSource: Abraham YatesThe influence of the great [among the ordinary people] is tooevident to be denied... The people are too apt to yield an implicitassent to the opinions of those characters whose abilities areheld in the highest esteem, and to those in whose integrity andpatriotism they can confide, not considering that the love ofdomination is generally in proportion to talents, abilities, andsuperior requirements.”Document RSource: James Madison, Federalist #10But the most common and durable source of factions has beenthe various and unequal distribution of property. Those whohold and those who are without property have ever formeddistinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and thosewho are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landedinterest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, amoneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up ofnecessity in civilized nations, and divided them into differentclasses, actuated by different sentiments and views. Theregulation of these various and interfering interests forms theprincipal task of modern legislation....A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in apart of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed overthe entire face of it must secure the national councils againstany danger from that source. A rage of paper money, for anabolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or anyother improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervadethe whole body of the Union than a particular member of it, inthe same proportion that such a malady is more likely to tainta particular county or district than an entire State...Document SSource: from Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of theConstitution, 1913A majority of the members [of the Constitutional convention]were lawyers by profession.Most of the members came from towns, on or near the coast...Not one member represented in his immediate and personaleconomic interests the small farming or mechanic [artisan]classes.The overwhelming majority of the members [of the Constitutional177

convention], at least five-sixths, were immediately, directly,and personally interested in the outcome of their labors atPhiladelphia, and were to a greater or lesser extent economicbeneficiaries from the adoption of the Constitution.[Of the 54 delegates:]40 were holders of public securities (holders of Continentaland state debt)24 were creditors (lenders of money)15 were southern slaveholders14 were involved in land speculation11 were involved in manufacturing, commerce, and shippingSource: Amos Singletary , 1788These lawyers, and men of learning, and moneyed men, thattalk so finely and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make uspoor illiterate people swallow down the pill, expect to getinto Congress themselves. They expect to be managers of theConstitution, and to get all the power and money into theirown hands. And then they will swallow up all those little folks,and the states, like the great Leviathan...Document TSource: Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #35The idea of an actual representation of all classes of the peopleis altogether visionary. Unless it were expressly provided for inthe Constitution that each different occupation should send oneor more members, the thing would never take place in practice.Mechanics and manufacturers will always be inclined, withfew exceptions, to give their votes to merchants in preferenceto persons of their own professions or trades. Those discerningcitizens are well aware that the mechanic and manufacturingarts furnish the materials of mercantile enterprise and industry.Many of them are, indeed, connected with the operations ofcommerce. They know that the merchant is their natural patronand friend; they are aware that however great the confidencethey may justly feel in their own good sense, their interestscan more effectually be promoted by the merchant than bythemselves. They are sensible that their habits in life have notbeen such as to give them those acquired endowments, withoutwhich in a deliberative assembly the greatest natural abilitiesare for the most part useless; and that the influence andweight of the superior acquirements of the merchants renderthem more equal to a contest with any spirit which mighthappen to infuse itself into the public councils, unfriendlyto the manufacturing and trading interests... [A]rtisans andmanufactures will commonly be disposed to bestow theirvotes upon the merchants whom they recommend. We musttherefore consider merchants as the natural representatives ofall these classes of the community.With regard to the learned professions, little need be observed;they truly form no distinct interest in society, and accordingto their situation and talents, will be indiscriminately be theobjects of the confidence and choice of each other and ofother parts of the community... They will feel a neutrality tothe rivalships between different branches of industry, and...thus more likely to be an impartial arbiter among the diverseinterests of the society...Document U178 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Charles Beard: The ConstitutionA Minority Document (1913)The Economic Interests of Members of the ConventionA survey of the economic interests of the members of theConvention present certain conclusions:A majority of the members were lawyers by profession.Most of the members came from towns, on or near the coast,that is, from the regions in which personalty was largelyconcentrated.Not one member represented in his immediate personaleconomic interests the small farming or mechanic classes.The overwhelming majority of members, at least five-sixths,were immediately, directly, and personally interested in theoutcome of their labors at Philadelphia, and were to a greateror less extent economic beneficiaries from the adoption of theConstitution.1. Public security interests were extensively represented inthe Convention. Of the fifty-five members who attendedno less than forty appear on the Records of the TreasuryDepartment for sums varying from a few dollars up to morethan one hundred thousand dollars. . . .It is interesting to note that, with the exception of New York,and possibly Delaware, each state had one or more prominentrepresentatives in the Convention who held more than anegligible amount of securities, and who could therefore speakwith feeling and authority on the question of providing in thenew Constitution for the full discharge of the public debt....2. Personalty invested in lands for speculation was representedby at least fourteen members....3. Personalty in the form of money loaned at interest wasrepresented by at least twenty-four members. . . .4. Personalty in mercantile, manufacturing, and shippinglines was represented by at least eleven members. . . .5. Personalty in slaves was represented by at least fifteenmembers....It cannot be said, therefore, that the members of theConvention were “disinterested.” On the contrary, we areforced to accept the profoundly significant conclusion that theyknew through their personal experiences in economic affairsthe precise results which the new government that they weresetting up was designed to attain. As a group of doctrinaires,like the Frankfort assembly of 1848, they would have failedmiserably; but as practical men they were able to build the newgovernment upon the only foundations which could be stable:fundamental economic interests.The Constitution as an Economic DocumentIt is difficult for the superficial student of the Constitution,who has read only the commentaries of the legists, to conceiveof that instrument as an economic document. It places noproperty qualifications on voters or officers; it gives no outwardrecognition of any economic groups in society; it mentions nospecial privileges to be conferred upon any class. It betraysno feeling, such as vibrates through the French constitution of1791; its language is cold, formal, and severe.The true inwardness of the Constitution is not revealed by anexamination of its provisions as simple propositions of law; butby a long and careful study of the voluminous correspondenceof the period, contemporary newspapers and pamphlets, therecords of the debates in the Convention at Philadelphiaand in the several state conventions, and particularly, TheFederalist, which was widely circulated during the struggle overratification. The correspondence shows the exact character ofthe evils which the Constitution was intended to remedy; therecords of the proceedings in the Philadelphia Conventionreveal the successive steps in the building of the frameworkof the government under the pressure of economic interests;the pamphlets and newspapers disclose the ideas of thecontestants over the ratification; and The Federalist presents thepolitical science of the new system as conceived by three of theprofoundest thinkers of the period, Hamilton, Madison, andJay.Doubtless, the most illuminating of these sources on theeconomic character of the Constitution are the records of thedebates in the Convention, which have come down to us infragmentary form; and a thorough treatment of material forcesreflected in the several clauses of the instrument of governmentcreated by the grave assembly at Philadelphia would require arewriting of the history of the proceedings in the light of thegreat interests represented there. But an entire volume wouldscarcely suffice to present the results of such a survey, and anundertaking of this character is accordingly impossible here.The Federalist, on the other hand, presents in a relativelybrief and systematic form an economic interpretation of theConstitution by the men best fitted, through an intimateknowledge of the ideals of the framers, to expound thepolitical science of the new government. This wonderful pieceof argumentation by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay is in fact thefinest study in the economic interpretation of politics whichexists in any language; and whoever would understand theConstitution as an economic document need hardly go beyondit. It is true that the tone of the writers is somewhat modifiedon account of the fact that they are appealing to the voters toratify the Constitution, but at the same time they are, by theforce of circumstances, compelled to convince large economicgroups that safety and strength lie in the adoption of the newsystem.Indeed, every fundamental appeal in it is to some material andsubstantial interest. Sometimes it is to the people at large in179

the name of protection against invading armies and Europeancoalitions. Sometimes it is to the commercial classes whosebusiness is represented as prostrate before the follies of theConfederation. Now it is to creditors seeking relief againstpaper money and the assaults of the agrarians in general; nowit is to the holders of federal securities which are depreciatingtoward the vanishing point. But above all, it is to the ownersof personalty anxious to find a foil against the attacks oflevelling democracy, that the authors of The Federalist addresstheir most cogent arguments in favor of ratification. It is truethere is much discussion of the details of the new frameworkof government, to which even some friends of reform tookexceptions; but Madison and Hamilton both knew that thesewere incidental matters when compared with the sound basisupon which the superstructure rested.In reading the pages of this remarkable work, a study in politicaleconomy, it is important to bear in mind that the system, whichthe authors are describing, consisted of two fundamental partsonepositive, the other negative:I. A government endowed with certain positive powers, butso constructed as to break the force of majority rule and preventinvasions of the property rights of minorities.II. Restrictions on the state legislatures which had been sovigorous in their attacks on capital.Under some circumstances, action is the immediate interestof the dominant party; and whenever it desires to make aneconomic gain through governmental functioning, it musthave, of course, a system endowed with the requisite powers.Examples of this are to be found in protective tariffs, inship subsidies, in railway land grants, in river and harborimprovements, and so on through the catalogue of so-called“paternalistic” legislation. Of course it may be shown that the“general good” is the ostensible object of any particular act;but the general good is a passive force, and unless we knowwho are the several individuals that benefit in its name, it hasno meaning. When it is so analyzed, immediate and remotebeneficiaries are discovered; and the former are usually foundto have been the dynamic element in securing the legislation.Take for example, the economic interests of the advocates whoappear in tariff hearings at Washington.On the obverse side, dominant interests quite as oftenbenefit from the prevention of governmental action as frompositive assistance. They are able to take care of themselvesif let alone within the circle of protection created by the law.Indeed, most owners of property have as much to fear frompositive governmental action as from their inability to secureadvantageous legislation. Particularly is this true where thefield of private property is already extended to cover practicallyevery form of tangible and intangible wealth. This was clearlyset forth by Hamilton:It may perhaps be said that the power of preventing bad lawsincludes that of preventing good ones. . . . but this objectionwill have little weight with those who can property estimate themischiefs of that inconstancy and mutability in the laws whichform the greatest blemish in the character and genius of ourgovernments. They will consider every institution calculatedto restrain the excess of lawmaking, and to keep things in thesame state in which they happen to be at any given period, asmore likely to do good than harm.... The injury which maypossibly be done by defeating a few good laws will be amplycompensated by the advantage of preventing a number of badones.”The Underlying Political Science of the ConstitutionBefore taking up the economic implications of the structure ofthe federal government, it is important to ascertain what, inthe opinion of The Federalist, is the basis of all government. Themost philosophical examination of the foundations of politicalscience is made by Madison in the tenth number. Here he laysdown, in no uncertain language, the principle that the first andelemental concern of every government is economic.1. “The first object of government,” he declares, is theprotection of “the diversity in the faculties of men, fromwhich the rights of property originate.” The chief business ofgovernment, from which, perforce, its essential nature mustbe derived, consists in the control and adjustment of conflictingeconomic interests. After enumerating the variousforms of propertied interests which spring up inevitably inmodern society, he adds: “The regulation of these variousand interfering interests forms the principal task of modernlegislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in theordinary operations of the government.”2. What are the chief causes of these conflicting politicalforces with which the government must concern itself?Madison answers. Of course fanciful and frivolous distinctionshave sometimes been the cause of violent conflicts”; but themost common and durable source of factions has been thevarious and unequal distribution of property. Those who holdand those who are without property have ever formed distinctinterests in society. Those who are creditors, and those whoare debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest,a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyedinterest, with many lesser interests grow up of necessity incivilized nations, and divide them into different classes actuatedby different sentiments and views.”3. The theories of government which men entertain areemotional reactions to their property interests. “From theprotection of different and unequal faculties of acquiringproperty, the possession of different degrees and kinds ofproperty immediately results; and from the influence of theseon the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors,ensues a division of society into different interests and parties.”180 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Legislatures reflect these interests. “What,” he asks, “are thedifferent classes of legislators but advocates and parties to thecauses which they determine.” There is no help for it. “Thecauses of faction cannot be removed,” and “we well know thatneither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as anadequate control.”4. Unequal distribution of property is inevitable, and fromit contending factions will rise in the state. The governmentwill reflect them, for they will have their separate principlesand “sentiments”; but the supreme danger will arise from thefusion of certain interests into an overbearing majority, whichMadison, in another place, prophesied would be the landlessproletariat, -- an overbearing majority which will make its“rights” paramount, and sacrifice the “rights” of the minority.“To secure the public good,” he declares, “and private rightsagainst the danger of such a faction and at the same timepreserve the spirit and the form of popular government is thenthe great object to which our inquiries are directed.”5. How is this to be done? Since the contending classescannot be eliminated and their interests are bound to bereflected in politics, the only way out lies in making it difficultfor enough contending interests to fuse into a majority, and inbalancing one over against another. The machinery for doingthis is created by the new Constitution and by the Union. (a)Public views are to be refined and enlarged “by passing themthrough the medium of a chosen body of citizens.” (b) The verysize of the Union will enable the inclusion of more interestsso that the danger of an overbearing majority is not so great.“The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinctparties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct partiesand interests, the more frequently will a majority be found ofthe same party. . . . Extend the sphere, and you take in a greatervariety of parties and interests; you make it less probable thata majority of the whole will have a common motive to invadethe rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists,it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover theirstrength and to act in unison with each other.”Q.E. D., “inthe extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, webehold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident torepublican government.”The Structure of Government or the Balance of PowersThe fundamental theory of political economy thus stated byMadison was the basis of the original American conceptionof the balance of powers which is formulated at length in fournumbers of The Federalist and consists ofthe following elements:1. No mere parchment separation of departments ofgovernment will be effective. “’The legislative department iseverywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawingall power into its impetuous vortex. The founders of ourrepublic ... seem never for a moment to have turned theireyes from the danger to liberty from the overgrown and allgraspingprerogative of an hereditary magistrate, supportedand fortified by an hereditary branch of the legislative authority.They seem never to have recollected the danger from legislativeusurpations, which, by assembling all power in the same hands,must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by executiveusurpations.”2. Some sure mode of checking usurpations in the governmentmust be provided, other than frequent appeals to the people.“’There appear to be insuperable objections against the proposedrecurrence to the people as a provision in all cases for keepingthe several departments of power within their constitutionallimits.” In a contest between the legislature and the otherbranches of the government the former would doubtless bevictorious on account of the ability of the legislators to pleadtheir cause with the people.3. What then can be depended upon to keep thegovernment in close rein? “The only answer that can begiven is, that as all these exterior provisions are found tobe inadequate, the defect must be supplied by so contrivingthe interior structure of the government as that its severalconstituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the meansof keeping each other in their proper places.... It is of greatimportance in a republic not only to guard the society againstthe oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the societyagainst the injustice of the other part. Different interestsnecessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majoritybe united by a common interest, the rights of the minority willbe insecure.” There are two ways of obviating this danger: oneis by establishing a monarch independent of popular will, andthe other is by reflecting these contending interests (so far astheir representatives may be enfranchised) in the very structureof the government itself so that a majority cannot dominatethe minority which minority is of course composed of thosewho possess property that may be attacked. “Society itself willbe broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens,that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be inlittle danger from interested combinations of the majority.”4. The structure of the government as devised atPhiladelphia reflects these several interests and makesimprobable any danger to the minority from the majority. “TheHouse of Representatives being to be elected immediately bythe people, the Senate by the State legislatures, the Presidentby electors chosen for that purpose by the people, there wouldbe little probability of a common interest to cement thesedifferent branches in a predilection for any particular class ofelectors.”5. All of these diverse interests appear in the amendingprocess but they are further reinforced against majorities. Anamendment must receive a two-thirds vote in each of the twohouses so constituted and the approval of three-fourths of thestates.6. The economic corollary of this system is as follows:Property interests may, through their superior weight in powerand intelligence, secure advantageous legislation whenever181

necessary, and they may at the same time obtain immunityfrom control by parliamentary majorities.If we examine carefully the delicate instrument by whichthe framers sought to check certain kinds of positive actionthat might be advocated to the detriment of established andacquired rights, we cannot help marvelling at their skill. Theirleading idea was to break up the attacking forces at the startingpoint: the source of political authority for the several branchesof the government. This disintegration of positive action atthe source was further facilitated by the differentiation in theterms given to the respective departments of the government.And the crowning counterweight to “an interested and overbearingmajority,” as Madison phrased it, was secured in thepeculiar position assigned to the judiciary, and the use of thesanctity and mystery of the law as a foil to democratic attacks.Conclusions:At the close of this long and arid survey--partaking of thenature of catalogue--it seems worth while to bring togetherthe important conclusions for political science which the datapresented appear to warrant.The movement for the Constitution of the United States wasoriginated and carried through principally by four groupsof personalty interests which had been adversely affectedunder the Articles of Confederation: money, public securities,manufactures, and trade arid shipping.The first firm steps toward the formation of the Constitutionwere taken by a small and active group of men immediatelyinterested through their personal possessions in the outcomeof their labors.No popular vote was taken directly or indirectly on theproposition to call the Convention which drafted theConstitution.A large propertyless mass was, under the prevailing suffragequalifications, excluded at the outset from participation (throughrepresentatives) in the work of framing the Constitution.The members of the Philadelphia Convention which draftedthe Constitution were, with a few exceptions, immediately,directly, and personally interested in, and derived economicadvantages from, the establishment of a new system.The Constitution was essentially an economic documentbased upon the concept that the fundamental private rights ofproperty are anterior to government and morally beyond thereach of popular majorities.The major portion of the members of the Convention are onrecord as recognizing the claim of property to a special anddefensive position in the Constitution.In the ratification of the Constitution, about three-fourths ofthe adult males failed to vote on the question, having abstainedfrom the elections at which delegates to the state conventionswere chosen, either on account of their indifference or theirdisfranchisement by property qualifications.The Constitution was ratified in a vote of probably not morethan one-sixth of the adult males.It is questionable whether a majority of the voters participatingin the elections for the state conventions in New York,Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia, and South Carolina,actually approved the ratification of the Constitution.The leaders who supported the Constitution in the ratifyingconventions represented the same economic groups as themembers of the Philadelphia Convention; and in a largenumber of instances they were also directly and personallyinterested in the outcome of their efforts.In the ratification, it became manifest that the line of cleavagefor and against the Constitution was between substantialpersonality interests on the one hand and the small farmingand debtor interest on the other,The Constitution was not created by “the whole people” as thejurists have said; neither was it created by “the states” as theSouthern nullifiers long contended; but it was the work of aconsolidated group whose interests knew no state boundariesand were truly national in their scope.182 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Staughton Lynd:The Conflict Over SlaveryAccording to the abolitionist critique, slavery helped to shape theConstitution because slavery was the basis of conflict betweenNorth and South, and compromising that conflict was the mainwork of the Constitutional Convention.Both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one line ofargument against the significance of slavery in the genesis ofthe Constitution has stressed the fact that the words “slave” and“slavery” do not appear in the Constitution, and contended that,to quote Farrand, “there was comparatively little said on thesubject [of slavery] in the convention.” This might be called theargument from silence.But we know why the Founders did not use the words “slave”and “slavery in the Constitution. Paterson of New Jersey statedin the Convention that when, in 1783, the Continental Congresschanged its eighth Article of Confederation so that slaves wouldhenceforth be included in apportioning taxation among the States,the Congress “had been ashamed to use the term ‘Slaves’ andhad substituted a description.” Iradell, in the Virginia ratifyingconvention, said similarly that the fugitive slave clause of theproposed Constitution did not use the word “slave” because ofthe “particular scruples” of the “northern delegates”; and in 1798Dayton of New Jersey, who had been a member of the Convention,told the House of Representatives that the purpose was to avoidany “stain” on the new government. If for Northern delegates themotive was shame, for Southern members of the Convention itwas prudence. Madison wrote to Lafayette in 1830, referring toemancipation: “I scarcely express myself too strongly in saying,that any allusion in the Convention to the subject you have somuch at heart would have been a spark to a mass of gunpowder.”Madison’s metaphor hardly suggests that the subject of slavery wasof secondary importance to the Convention.Farrand’s own magnificent edition of the Convention recordsamply refutes his contention that the subject of slavery waslittle discussed. The South Carolinians in particular wereoften on their feet demanding security for what one of themcalled “this species of property.” And yet the role of slavery inthe Convention went much further than this. For we have iton Madison’s authority that it was “pretty well understood” thatthe “institution of slavery and its consequences formed the lineof discrimination” between the contending groups of statesin the Convention. Slavery, that is to say, was recognized asthe basis of sectionalism; and it is not a difficult task to showthat sectional conflict between North and South was the majortension in the Convention.According to Franklin, debate in the Convention proceededpeaceably (“with great coolness and temper”) until on June 11,the rule of suffrage in the national legislature was discussed.Farrand would have us believe that the three-fifths ratio whichresulted was not a compromise in the Convention, that it hadbeen recommended by Congress in 1783, adopted by elevenstates before the Convention met, and was part of the originalNew Jersey Plan. Farrand’s statement is misleading, however, forall the above remarks refer to counting three-fifths of the slavesin apportioning taxation. What was at issue in Convention wasthe extension of this rati o to representation: what George TicknorCurtis called “the naked question whether the slaves shouldbe included as persons, and in the proportion of three fifths,in the census for the future apportionment of representativesamong the States.” The two applications were very different.As Luther Martin told the Maryland legislature, taxing slavesdiscouraged slavery, while giving them political representationencouraged it. Thus tempers rose in the Convention from themoment that Rutledge and Butler of South Carolina assertedthat representation in the House should be according to quotasof contribution; years later Rufus King observed that the threefifthsclause “was, at the time, believed to be a great concession,and has proved to have been the greatest which was made tosecure the adoption of the constitution.”On June 25 there occurred the first perfectly sectional vote of theConvention, the five states from Maryland to Georgia voting topostpone consideration of the election of the Senate until thethree-fifths clause regarding elections for the House had beensettled. On June 29, Madison made the first of many statementsas to the sectional nature of the issue:If there was real danger, I would give the smaller states the defensiveweapons. But there is none from that quarter. The great danger to ourgeneral government is the great southern and northern interests of thecontinent being opposed to each other. Look to the votes in congress,and most of them stand divided by the geog raphy of the country, notaccording to the size of the states.The next day Madison reiterated that “the States were dividedinto different interests not by their difference of size, but byother circumstances; the most material of which resulted partlyfrom climate, but principally from their having or not havingslaves.” Farrand comments on these observations that “Madisonwas one of the very few men who seemed to appreciate the realdivision of interests in the country.” Yet Madison’s emphasis onsectional conflict at the Convention was echoed by Pinckneyon July 2, by King on July 10, by Mason on July 11, and, withreluctance, by Gouverneur Morris on July 13; and when on July14 Madison once more asserted that slavery, not size, formedthe line of discrimination between the States, as previouslyremarked, he said that this was “pretty well understood” by theConvention. Slavery was thus the basis of the great Conventioncrisis, when, as Gouverneur Morris later said, the fate of Americawas suspended by a hair.But this crisis, and the crisis which followed over the import ofslaves, cannot be understood from the records of the Conventionalone. The great Convention compromises involving slaverywere attempts to reconcile disputes which had been boiling upfor years in the Continental Congress.183

IISectional conflict, like the ghost in Hamlet, was there from thebeginning. When in September 1774 at the first ContinentalCongress Patrick Henry made his famous declaration “I amnot a Virginian, but an American,” the point he was makingwas that Virginia would not insist on counting slaves inapportioning representation; Henry’s next sentence was:“Slaves are to be thrown out of the Question, and if the freemencan be represented according to their Numbers I am satisfyed.”The next speaker, Lynch of South Carolina, protested, and thequestion was left unsettled. Thus early did South Carolinianintransigence overbear Virginian liberalism.Again in July 1776, the month of the Declaration ofIndependence, the problem of slave representation was broughtbefore Congress in the debate over the proposed Articles ofConfederation. The Dickinson draft of the Articles producedthree controversies, strikingly similar to the three greatcompromises of the subsequent Constitutional Convention:“The equal representation of all the states in Congress arousedthe antagonism of the larger states. The apportionment ofcommon expenses according to total population aroused thebitter opposition of the states with large slave populations.The grant to Congress of broad powers over Western landsand boundaries was resisted stubbornly by the states whosecharters gave them large claims to the West.” In its ten-yearexistence the Continental Congress succeeded in solving onlythe last of these controversies, the question of Western lands,and accordingly emphasis has tended to fall on it in historiesof the Confederation. But the other two problems were just ashotly debated, in much the same language as in 1787; and onthese questions, as Charming observes, there was a “differentalignment in Congress” than on the matter of Western lands:a sectional alignment.The eleventh Article of the Dickinson draft stated that moneycontributions from the States should be “in Proportion to theNumber of Inhabitants of every Age, Sex and Quality, exceptIndians not paying Taxes.” On July 30, 1776, Samuel Chaseof Maryland (later a prominent Antifederalist) moved theinsertion of the word “white,” arguing that “if Negroes aretaken into the Computation of Numbers to ascertain Wealth,they ought to be in settling the Representation”; GouverneurMorris would use this same formula in July 1787 to resolve thedeadlock over representation in the House. In the debate whichfollowed the changes were rung upon several themes of theConstitutional Convention. Wilson of Pennsylvania said thatto exempt slaves from taxation would encourage slaveholding;in response to the observation that if slaves were counted,Northern sheep should also be counted, Benjamin Franklinremarked that “sheep will never make any Insurrections”;Rutledge of South Carolina anticipated the August 1787 debateon navigation laws by warning that “the Eastern Colonieswill become the Carriers for the Southern. They will obtainWealth for which they will not be taxed”; and his colleagueLynch again threw down a South Carolina ultimatum: “if itis debated, whether their Slaves are their Property, there is anend of the Confederation.”The war had scarcely ended when the sectional debate resumed.We tend to think of Thomas Jefferson as a national statesman,and of the controversy over whether new states would be slaveor free as something subsequent to 1820. How striking, then,to find Jefferson writing from Congress to Governor BenjaminHarrison of Virginia in November 1783 about the NorthwestTerritory: “if a state be first laid off on the [Great] lakes it willadd a vote to the Northern scale, if on the Ohio it will add oneto the Southern.” This concern would never be out of the mindsof Southern politicians until the Civil War. Jefferson did, ofcourse, attempt to exclude slavery from the Territories. But onthe ninth anniversary of Lexington and Concord, Congress,on motion of Spaight of North Carolina, seconded by Readof South Carolina, struck this provision from Jefferson’s draftproposals.A principal issue between North and South in these first yearsof the Critical Period was financial. Southern resistance toNorthern financial manipulations did not wait until the 1790’s:it began, if one must choose a date, when Delaware, Maryland,Virginia, and both the Carolinas voted against the devaluationplan of March 18, 1780, with every Northern state exceptdivided New Hampshire voting Aye. After the war the issuebecame still more intense. The Revolutionary campaigns inthe South took place largely in the last three years of the war“when neither Congress nor the states,” in the words of E. JamesFerguson, “had effective money and the troops were supportedby impressment.” The result was that of the three majorcategories of public debt – Quartermaster and Commissarycertificates issued to civilians; loan certificates; and finalsettlement certificates issued to the Continental army -- theSouth held only 16 percent. The public debt of the South was astate debt, while the various kinds of Federal debt were held byNortherners: as Spaight of North Carolina put it, “the Eastern[i.e., Northern] States ... have got Continental Securities forall monies loaned, services done or articles impressed, whileto the southward, it has been made a State debt.” Hence whenCongress sought to tax all the states to repay the Federal debt,the South protested; and when Congress further provided thatNorthern states could meet their Congressional requisitionswith securities, so that only the South need pay coin, theSouth was furious. Madison told Edmund Randolph in1783 that unless the public accounts were speedily adjustedand discharged “a dissolution of the Union will be inevitable.”“The pious New-Englanders,” Read of South Carolina wrotein April 1785, “I think tis time to carry their long projectedScheme into Execution and make the southern states bear theburthen of furnishing all the actual money.”Sectional considerations underlay many an action of the early1780’s where they might not, at first glance, seem evident.Jefferson’s appointment as United States representative in184 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

France is an example. Jefferson had been appointed to thecommission to negotiate a peace, as had Laurens of SouthCarolina; but Jefferson did not go and Laurens was capturedby the British en route to Europe, so that three Northerners-- John Jay, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin -- carriedthe burden of the peace talks. The treaty completed, the samethree men stayed on in Europe to represent American intereststhere, and it was this that aroused Southern concern. JamesMonroe expressed it in March 1784, writing to GovernorHarrison. Monroe pointed out that Virginia owed Britishmerchants 2,800,000 in debts, which according to the peacetreaty must now be paid. “It is important to the southernStates to whom the negotiation of these treaties are committed;for except the fishery and the fur-trade (the latter of w’h Mr.Jeff’n thinks ... may be turn’d down the Potow’k); the southernStates, are as States, almost alone interested in it.” In May,with Jefferson’s appointment achieved, the Virginia delegatesin Congress wrote the governor: “It was an object with us, inorder to render the Commission as agreable as possible to theSouthern States to have Mr. Jefferson placed in the room ofMr. Jay.” The previous arrangement, the Virginians went on,involved “obvious inequality in the Representation of theseStates in Europe”; had it continued, it would have presented“an insurmountable obstacle” to giving the commission suchgreat powers.Here in microcosm was the problem of the South until itsvictory at the 1787 Convention: recognizing the need forstronger Federal powers, it feared to create them until it wasassured that the South could control their use.IIIEven as early as the 1780’s the South felt itself to be a consciousminority. This was evident, for example, in the comment ofVirginia delegates as to the location of the national capital.“The votes in Congress as they stand at present,” wrote thedelegates from the Old Dominion, “are unfavorable to aSouthern situation and untill the admission of Western Statesinto the Union, we apprehend it will be found impracticable toretain that Body [Congress], any length of time, Southwardof the middle States.” In the fall of 1786, when the clash overshutting the Mississippi to American commerce was at itsheight, Timothy Bloodworth of North Carolina remarkedthat “it is well known that the ballance of Power is now in theEastern States, and they appear determined to keep it in thatDirection.” This was why such Southerners as Richard HenryLee, later the nation’s leading Antifederalist pamphleteer, werealready opposing stronger Federal powers in 1785. “It seemsto me clear, beyond doubt,” Lee wrote to Madison, “that thegiving Congress a power to Legislate over the Trade of theUnion would be dangerous in the extreme to the 5 Southern orStaple States, whose want of ships and seamen would exposetheir freightage and their produce to a most pernicious anddestructive Monopoly.” This was a strong argument, whichwould be heard throughout the South till 1861; it was this fearwhich in all probability caused George Mason and EdmundRandolph of Virginia to refuse to sign the Constitution in1787. Recognizing the force of Lee’s argument, Madisonwrote to Jefferson in the summer and fall of 1785 thatcommercial distress was causing a call for stronger powersin Congress throughout the North, but that the South wasdivided. Lee was “an inflexible adversary, Grayson [WilliamGrayson, another Virginia Antifederalist in 1788] unfriendly.”Animosity against Great Britain would push the South towardcommercial regulation, but the high price of tobacco wouldwork against it. “S. Carolina I am told is deliberating on thedistresses of her commerce and will probably concur in somegeneral plan; with a proviso, no doubt against any restraintfrom importing slaves, of which they have received from Africasince the peace about twelve thousand.”Madison concluded by telling his comrade in France that hetrembled to think what would happen should the South notjoin the other states in strengthening Congress.Others beside Madison trembled at this thought: the possibilityof disunion was openly and seriously discussed in the 1780’s,particularly by those who knew of the fiercely sectional debatesin Congress. And if disunion was only the speculation of afew in 1785, the great controversy over the Mississippi in 1786shook many more from their complacence.The Mississippi question of the 1780’s was a part of the largerquestion of the destiny of the West which, ultimately, wouldbe the immediate cause of the Civil War. Farrand is lessthan accurate in his attempt to disengage the question of theadmission of new states at the Constitutional Convention fromsectional strife. For if there is a single key to the politics ofCongress and the Convention in the Critical Period, it is thatthe South expected the West to be slave rather than free and totilt the balance of power southward, while in Bancroft’s words“an ineradicable dread of the coming power of the Southwestlurked in New England, especially in Massachusetts.” Thatgroup in Congress recognized as “the Southern interest” (1786)“the Southern party” (1787) or “the Southern Delegation”(1788) fought throughout the 1780’s to forestall the admissionof Vermont until at least one Southern state could be addedsimultaneously, to hasten the development of the West, and toremove all obstacles to its speedy organization into the largestpossible number of new states. It was here that the Mississippiquestion entered. What was feared if America permittedSpain to close New Orleans to American commerce was notonly a separation of the Western states, but a slackening ofthe southwestward migration which Southerners counted onto assure their long-run predominance in the Union.“The southern states,” wrote the French minister to his superiorin Europe,are not in earnest when they assert that without the navigationof the Mississippi the inhabitants of the interior will seek an outlet185

y way of the lakes, and will throw themselves into the arms ofEngland.... The true motive of this vigorous oppo sition is to be foundin the great Preponderance of the northern states, eager to incline thebalance toward their side; the southern neglect no opportunity ofincreas ing the population and importance of the western territory,and of drawing thither by degrees the inhabitants of New England. .. . These new territories will gradually form themselves into separategovernments; they will have their representatives in congress, andwill augment greatly the mass of the southern states.Otto is abundantly confirmed by the debates of theVirginia ratifying convention, and still more by Monroe’scorrespondence of late 1786. On August 12, 1786, Monroewrote from Congress to Patrick Henry:P.S. The object in the occlusion of the Mississippi on the part of thesepeople so far as it is extended to the interest of their States (for thoseof a private kind gave barb to it): is to break up so far as this willdo it, the settlements on the western waters, prevent any in future,and thereby keep the States Southward as they now are -- or ifsettlements will take place, that they shall be on such principles as tomake it the interest of the people to separate from the Confederacy, soas effectually to exclude any new State from it. To throw the weightof population eastward and keep it there....Like many another Southerner in the next seventy-five years,Monroe ended by saying that, if it came to separation, it wasessential that Pennsylvania join the South. So forceful was theeffect of his letter on Henry, Madison wrote Washington inDecember, that Henry, who had hitherto advocated a strongerUnion, began to draw back. By 1788 he, like Lee, Grayson,and Monroe, would be an Antifederalist.The upshot of the Mississippi squabble was that the long effortsto vest Congress with power over commerce were threatenedwith failure at the very brink of success. As delegates madetheir way to the Annapolis Convention in the fall of 1786,Bloodworth of North Carolina wrote that because of theMississippi controversy “all other Business seems out of View atpresent.” “Should the measure proposed be pursued,” Graysontold the Congress, “the Southern States would never grantthose powers which were acknowledged to be essential to theexistence of the Union.” When Foreign Secretary Jay attemptedto have instructions, authorizing him to give up Americaninsistence on using the river, adopted by a simple Congressionalmajority of seven states, it stirred in many Southern breasts thefear of being outvoted. Even before the Mississippi questioncame before Congress Southerners like Monroe had insistedthat, if Congress were to regulate commerce, commercial lawsshould require the assent of nine or even eleven states. Jay’sattempt (as Southerners saw it) to use a simple majority topush through a measure fundamentally injurious to the Southgreatly intensified this apprehension. When the ConstitutionalConvention met, the so-called Pinckney Plan suggested a twothirdsCongressional majority for commercial laws, and boththe Virginia ratifying convention (which voted to ratify by asmall majority) and the North Carolina convention (whichrejected ratification) recommended the same amendment.In the midst of the Mississippi controversy, men hopeful forstronger government saw little prospect of success. Madisonwrote Jefferson in August 1786 that he almost despaired ofstrengthening Congress through the Annapolis Convention orany other; in September, Otto wrote to Vergennes: “It is to befeared that this discussion will cause a great coolness betweenthe two parties, and may be the germ of a future separation ofthe southern states.”IVWhy then did the South consent to the ConstitutionalConvention? If the South felt itself on the defensive in the1780’s, and particularly so in the summer and fall of 1786, whydid its delegates agree to strengthen Federal powers in 1787?If a two-thirds majority for commercial laws seemed essentialto Southerners in August of one year, why did they surrenderit in August of the next? Were Madison and Washington, asthey steadfastly worked to strengthen the national government,traitors to the interests of their section, or was there some viewof the future which nationalist Southerners then entertainedwhich enabled them to be good Southerners and goodFederalists at the same time?It is Madison, once more, who provides the clue. He saw thatif the South were to agree in strengthening Congress, the planwhich gave each state one vote would have to be changed infavor of the South. And in letters to Jefferson, to Randolph,and to Washington in the spring of 1787 he foretold in asentence the essential plot of the Convention drama. The basisof representation would be changed to allow representationby numbers as well as by states, because a change was “recommendedto the Eastern States by the actual superiority oftheir populousness, and to the Southern by their expectedsuperiority.”So it fell out. Over and over again members of the Conventionstated, as of something on which all agreed, that “as soon as theSouthern & Western population should predominate, whichmust happen in a few years, the South would be compensatedfor any advantages wrung from it by the North in the meantime.”When Northerners insisted on equality of votes in the Senate,it was partly because they feared what would happen when theSouth gained its inevitable (as they supposed) majority. “Hemust be short sighted indeed,” declared King on July 12,who does not foresee that whenever the Southern States shall bemore numerous than the Northern, they can & will hold a languagethat will awe the North ern States] into justice. If they threaten toseparate now in case injury shall be done them, will their threats beless urgent or effectual, when force shall back their demands?Gouverneur Morris echoed this gloomy prophecy the next day.“The consequence of such a transfer of power from the maritime186 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

to the interior & landed interest,” Madison quoted him,will he foresees be such an oppression of commerce, that he shall beobliged to vote for ye. vicious principle of equality in the 2d. branchin order to provide some defence for the N. States agst. it.“It has been said,” Morris added, “that N.C. [,] S.C. and Georgiaonly will in a little time have a majority of the people in America.They must in that case include the great interior Country, andevery thing was to be apprehended from their getting the powerinto their hands.”This false expectation explains why Georgia and the Carolinaswho (as Gunning Bedford noted) should by present populationhave been “small” states, considered themselves “large” states atthe Convention. This expectation clarifies, it seems to me, whythe South gave way in its demand that commercial laws require atwo-thirds majority; for would not time and the flow of migrationsoon provide such a majority without written stipulation? At thecrucial Virginia ratifying convention no one questioned that theSouth would soon be the most populous section of the country.The difference lay between those who thought this inevitableevent made it safe to strengthen the Federal government now,and those, like Henry and Mason, who counseled waiting untilthe Southern Congressional majority made absolutely safe atransfer of power.The irony, of course, was that the expectation was completelyerroneous. The expected Southern majority in the House nevermaterialized, and the Senate, not the House, became the bulwarkof the South. In 1790, the population of the South had beengrowing more rapidly than the North’s population for severaldecades, and was within 200,000 of the population north of thePotomac. True to the general expectation in 1787, the Southwestfilled up more rapidly than the area north of the Ohio River. In1820, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan contained a populationof almost 800,000, but Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee,Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas held over1,300,000 persons. Nevertheless, in the original thirteen statesthe Northern population pulled so far ahead of the Southern thatin 1820 the white population of Northern states and territorieswas almost twice that of Southern states and territories. Thusthe South never obtained the Congressional majority whichstatesmen of both sections had anticipated at the time of theConstitutional Convention.When the dream of a Southern majority in Congress and thenation collapsed, there fell together with it the vision of a Southerncommercial empire, drawing the produce of the West down thePotomac and the James to “a Philadelphia or a Baltimore” on theVirginia coast. It was not, as it so often seems, an accident thatthe Convention of 1787 grew from the Annapolis Convention,or that Virginians were the prime movers in calling both.Throughout the 1780’s Madison, Jefferson, Monroe, and to analmost fanatical degree, Washington, were intent on strengtheningthe commercial ties between Virginia and the West. Asearly as 1784, Jefferson suggested to Madison cooperation withMaryland in opening communication to the West, and duringthat year and the next both Washington and Monroe toured theWestern country with their grand plan in mind. Jefferson andMonroe pushed a Potomac location for the national capital partlywith the hope that it would “cement us to our Western friendswhen they shall be formed into separate states” and help Virginiato beat out Pennsylvania and New York in the race for Westerntrade. Virginia had given up its claims to Western land, but itsleaders hoped for a commercial dominion just as satisfactory: asJefferson put it, “almost a monopoly of the Western and Indiantrade.” “But smooth the road once,” wrote the enrapturedWashington, “and make easy the way for them, and then seewhat an influx of articles will be poured upon us; how amazinglyour exports will be increased by them, and how amply we shallbe compensated for any trouble and expense we may encounterto effect it.” The West, then, would not only give the Southpolitical predominance but also, as Madison wrote Jefferson,“double the value of half the land within the Commonwealth ...extend its commerce, link with its interests those of the WesternStates, and lessen the immigration of its Citizens.” This was thecastle-in-the-air which Virginians pictured as they worked tobring about the Constitutional Convention, this was the plan foreconomic development so abruptly and traumatically shatteredby Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton.In the Spring and Summer of 1788, however, as the South withthe North moved to ratify the Constitution, few foresaw theclouds on the horizon. The Constitutional Convention, with aSouthern majority (in Bancroft’s words) “from its organizationto its dissolution,” seemed to have wrought well for the South.Madison alone, from his vantage-point in Congress, frettedabout that body’s continued preoccupation with sectional issues.After wrangling all Spring about the admission of Kentucky,Congress turned to that old favorite, the location of the capital.“It is truly mortifying,” Madison wrote to Washington, to seesuch “a display of locality,” of “local and state considerations,”at the very “outset of the new Government.” The behavior ofCongress would give “the most popular arguments which havebeen inculcated countenance to some of federalists,” and “beregarded as at once a proof by the southern antipreponderancyof the Eastern strength.” “I foresee contentions,” he wrote thenext Spring, “first between federal and anti-federal parties, andthen between northern and southern parties.” Before long hewould be leading the opposition.VEven this sampling of the printed sources suggests thatsectional conflict based (to quote Madison once more) on “theinstitution of slavery and its consequences” was a potent forcein the shaping of the Constitution. The conclusion seemsinescapable that any interpretation of the Convention whichstresses realty and personalty, large states and small states,or monarchy and democracy, but leaves slavery out, is aninadequate interpretation.187

Henry Steele Commager:A Constitution for All the PeopleBy June 26, 1787, tempers in the Federal Convention werealready growing short, for gentlemen had come to the explosivequestion of representation in the upper chamber. Two days laterFranklin moved to invoke divine guidance, and his motion wasshunted aside only because there was no money with which topay a chaplain and the members were unprepared to appealto Heaven without an intermediary. It was not surprising thatwhen James Madison spoke to the question of representationin the proposed legislature he was conscious of the solemnityof the occasion. “We are,” he said, “framing a system which wewish to last for ages” and one that might “decide forever thefate of Republican Government.”It was an awful thought, and when, a few days later, GouverneurMorris spoke to the same subject he felt the occasion a mostsolemn one --- even the irrepressible Morris could be solemn.“He came here,” he observed (so Madison noted),As a Representative of America; he flattered himself. He came herein some degree as a Representative of the whole human race, forthe whole human race will be affected by the proceedings of thisConvention. He wished gentlemen to extend their views beyond thepresent moment of time; beyond the narrow limits ... from whichthey derive their political origin.Much has been said of the sentiments of the people. They wereunknown. They could not be known. All that we can infer is thatif the plan we recommend be reasonable & right, all who havereasonable minds and sound intentions will embrace it.These were by no means occasional sentiments only. Theywere sentiments that occurred again and again throughoutthe whole of that long hot summer, until they received theirfinal, eloquent expression from the aged Franklin in thatcomment on the rising, not the setting, sun. Even during themost acrimonious debates members were aware that they wereframing a constitution for ages to come; that they were creatinga model for people everywhere on the globe; there was a livelysense of responsibility and even of destiny. Nor can we now, aswe contemplate that Constitution which is the oldest writtennational constitution, and that federal system which is one ofthe oldest and the most successful in history --- regard theseappeals to posterity as merely rhetorical.That men are not always conscious either of what they do or ofthe motives that animate them is a familiar rather than a cynicalobservation. Some 45 years ago Charles A. Beard propoundedan economic interpretation‐ an interpretation which submittedthat the Constitution was essentially (that is a crucial word)an economic document and that it was carried through theConvention and the state ratifying conventions by interestedeconomic groups for economic reasons. “The Constitution,”Mr. Beard concluded, “was essentially an economic documentbased upon the concept that the fundamental private rights ofproperty are anterior to government and morally beyond thereach of popular majorities.”At the time it was pronounced, that interpretation causedsomething of a sensation, and Mr. Beard was himself eventuallyto comment with justifiable indignation on the meannessand the vehemence of the attacks upon it‐and him. Yet theremarkable thing about the economic interpretation is not thecriticism it inspired but the support it commanded. For withina few years it had established itself as the new orthodoxy,and those who took exception to it were stamped either asprofessional patriots --- perhaps secret Sons or Daughters ofthe Revolution --- naive academicians who had never learnedthe facts of economic life.The attraction that the economic interpretation had for thegeneration of the twenties and thirties and that it still exertseven into the fifties is one of the curiosities of our culturalhistory, but it is by no means an inexplicable one. To ageneration of materialists Beard’s thesis made clear that thestuff of history was material. To a generation disillusioned bythe exploitations of big business it discovered that the past,too, had been ravaged by economic exploiters. To a generationthat looked with skeptical eyes upon the claims of Wilsonianidealism and all but rejoiced in their frustration, it suggestedthat all earlier idealisms and patriotisms ‐ even the idealismand patriotism of the framers had been similarly flawed byselfishness and hypocrisy.Yet may it not be said of An Economic Interpretation of theConstitution that it is not a conclusion but a point of departure?It explains a great deal about the forces that went into makingthe Constitution, and a great deal, too, about the men whoassembled in Philadelphia in 1787, but it tells us extraordinarilylittle about the document itself. And it tells us even less aboutthe historical meaning of that document.What were the objects of the Federal Convention? Theimmediate objects were to restore order; to strengthen thepublic credit; to enable the United States to make satisfactorycommercial treaties and agreements; to provide conditionsin which trade and commerce could flourish; to facilitatemanagement of the western lands and of Indian affairs. Allfamiliar enough. But what, in the light of history, were thegrand objects of the Convention? What was it that gaveMadison and Morris and Wilson and King and Washingtonhimself a sense of destiny?There were two grand objects, objects inextricably interrelated.188 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

The first was to solve the problem of federalism, that is, theproblem of the distribution of powers among governments.Upon the wisdom with which members of the Conventiondistinguished between powers of a general and powers of a localnature, and assigned these to their appropriate governments,would depend the success or failure of the new experiment.But it was impossible for the children of the eighteenth centuryto talk or think of powers without thinking of power, andthis was a healthy realism. No less troublesome and morefundamental than the problem of the distribution of powers, wasthe problem of sanctions. How were they to enforce the termsof the distribution and impose limits upon all the governmentsinvolved? It was one thing to work out the most ideal distributionof general and local powers. It was another thing to see to it thatthe states abided by their obligations under the Articles of Unionand that the national government respected the autonomy of thestates and the liberty of individuals.Those familiar with the Revolutionary era know that the secondof these problems was more difficult than the first. Americanshad, indeed, learned how to limit government: the writtenconstitutions, the bills of rights, the cheeks and balances, andso forth. They had not yet learned (nor had anyone) how to“substitute the mild magistracy of the law for the cruel andviolent magistracy of force.” The phrase is Madison’s.Let us return to the Economic Interpretation. The correctnessof Beard’s analysis of the origins and backgrounds of themembership of the Convention, of the arguments in theConvention, and of the methods of assuring ratification, neednot be debated. But these considerations are in a sense, irrelevantand immaterial. For though they are designed to illuminate thedocument itself, in fact they illuminate only the processes of itsmanufacture.The idea that property considerations were paramount inthe minds of those assembled in Philadelphia is misleadingand unsound and is borne out neither by the evidence of thedebates in the Convention nor by the Constitution itself. TheConstitution was not essentially an economic document. It was,and is, essentially a political document. It addresses itself to thegreat and fundamental question of the distribution of powersbetween governments. The Constitution was and is a documentthat attempts to provide sanctions behind that distribution, adocument that sets up, through law, a standing rule to live byand provides legal machinery for the enforcement of that rule.These are political, not economic functionsNot only were the principles that consumed the framers politicalrather than economic, the solutions that they formulated to thegreat questions that confronted them were dictated by political,not by economic considerations.Here are two fundamental challenges to the Beard interpretation.First, the Constitution is primarily a document in federalism; andsecond, the Constitution does not in fact confess or display thecontrolling influence of those who held that “the fundamentalprivate rights of property are anterior to government and morallybeyond the reach of popular majorities.”Let us look more closely at these two contentions. The firstrequires little elaboration or vindication, for it is clear to allstudents of the Revolutionary era that the one pervasive andoverbranching problem of that generation was the problemof Imperial organization. How to get the various parts of anyempire to work together for common purposes? How to getcentral control over war, for example, or commerce or moneywithout impairing local autonomy? How, on the other hand,to preserve personal liberty and local self-government withoutimpairing the effectiveness of the central government? This wasone of the oldest problems in political science, and it is one of thefreshest as old as the history of the Greek city‐states.The British failed to solve the problem of imperial order; whenpushed to the wall they had recourse to the hopelessly doctrinaireDeclaratory Act, which was, in fact, a declaration of politicalbankruptcy. As Edmund Burke observed, no people are going tobe argued into slavery. The Americans then took up the vexatiousproblem. The Articles of Confederation were set up satisfactorilyenough as far as the distribution of powers was concerned butwholly wanting in sanctions. The absence of sanctions spelledthe failure of the Articles and this failure led to the PhiladelphiaConvention.Now it will be readily conceded that many, if not most, of thequestions connected with federalism were economic in character.Involved were such practical matters as taxation, the regulationof commerce, coinage, western lands, slavery and so forth. Yetthe problem that presented itself to the framers was not whethergovernment should exercise authority over such matters as these;it was which government should exercise such authority‐andhow should it be exercised?There were, after all, no anarchists at the Federal Convention.Everyone agreed that some government had to have authorityto tax, raise armies, regulate commerce, coin money, controlcontracts, enact bankruptcy legislation, regulate westernterritories, make treaties, and do all the things that governmentmust do. But where should these authorities be lodged‐with thestate governments or with the national government they wereabout to erect, or with both?This question was a political, not an economic one. Andthe solution at which the framers arrived was based upon asound understanding of politics, and need not be explained byreference to class attachments or security interests.189

Certainly if the framers were concerned primarily or evenlargely with protecting property against popular majorities,they failed signally to carry out their purposes. It is at thispoint in our consideration of the Economic Interpretationof the Constitution that we need to employ what our literaryfriends call explication du texte. For the weakest link in theBeard interpretation is precisely the crucial one, the documentitself. Mr. Beard makes amply clear that those who wrote theConstitution were members of the propertied classes, and thatmany of them were personally involved in the outcome of whatthey were about to do; he makes out a persuasive case that thedivision over the Constitution was along economic lines. Whathe does not make clear is how or where the Constitution itselfreflects all these economic influences.Much is made of the contract clause and the paper moneyclause of the Constitution. No state may impair the obligationsof a contract whatever those words mean, and they apparentlydid not mean to the framers quite what Chief Justice Marshalllater said they meant in Fletcher v. Peck or Dartmouth CollegeWoodward. No state may emit bills of credit or make anythingbut gold and silver coin legal tender in payment of debts.These are formidable prohibitions, and clearly reflect theimpatience of men of property with the malpractice of thestates during the Confederation. Yet quite aside from what thestates may or may not have done, who can doubt that theselimitations upon the states followed a sound principle‐theprinciple that control of coinage and money belonged to thecentral, not the local governments, and the principle thatlocal jurisdictions should not be able to modify or overthrowcontracts recognized throughout the Union?What is most interesting in this connection is what is so oftenover‐looked --- that the framers did not write any comparableprohibitions upon the United States government. The UnitedStates was not forbidden to impair the obligation of its contracts,not at least in the Constitution as it came from the hands ofits property‐conscious framers. Possibly the Fifth Amendmentmay have squinted toward such a prohibition; we need notdetermine that now, for the Fifth Amendment was added bythe states after the Constitution had been ratified. So, too, theemission of bills of credit and the making of other than gold andsilver legal tender were limitations on the states, but not on thenational government. There was, in fact, a lively debate over thequestion of limiting the authority of the national governmentin the matter of bills of credit. When the question came up onAugust 16, Gouverneur Morris threatened that “The moniedinterest will oppose the plan of Government, if paper emissionsbe not prohibited.” In the end the Convention dropped outa specific authorization to emit bills of credit, but pointedlydid not prohibit such action. Just where this left the situationtroubled Chief Justice Chase’s Court briefly three‐quartersof a century later; the Court recovered its balance, and thesovereign power of the government over money was not againsuccessfully challenged.Nor were there other specific limitations of an economic characterupon the powers of the new government that was being erectedon the ruins of the old. The framers properly gave the Congresspower to regulate commerce with foreign nations and amongthe states. The term commerce as Hamilton and Adair (andCrosskey, too) have made clear was broadly meant, and thegrant of authority, too, was broad. The framers gave Congressthe power to levy taxes and, again, wrote no limitations intothe Constitution except as to the apportionment of direct taxes;it remained for the most conservative of Courts to reverse itself,and common sense, and discover that the framers had intendedto forbid an income tax! Today, organizations that invoke thevery term “constitutional” are agitating for an amendmentplacing a quantitative limit upon income taxes that may belevied. Fortunately, Madison’s generation understood betterthe true nature of governmental power.The framers gave Congress in ambiguous terms, to besure authority to make “all needful Rules and Regulationsrespecting the Territory or other Property” of the United States,and provided that “new states may be admitted.” These evasivephrases gave little hint of the heated debates in the Conventionover western lands. Those who delight to find narrow andundemocratic sentiments in the breasts of the framers nevercease to quote a Gouverneur Morris or an Elbridge Gerry onthe dangers of the West. And it is possible to compile a horridcatalogue of such statements. But what is significant is notwhat framers said, but what they did. They did not place anylimits upon the disposition of western territory, or establishany barriers against the admission of western states.The fact is that we look in vain at the Constitution itself for anyreally effective guarantee for property or any effective barriersagainst what Beard calls “the reach of popular majorities.” Itwill be argued, however, that what the framers feared was thestates, and that the specific prohibitions against state action,together with the broad transfer of economic powers from stateto nation, were deemed sufficient guarantee against state attacksupon property. As for the national government, care was takento make that sufficiently aristocratic, sufficiently representativeof the propertied classes, and sufficiently checked and limitedso that it would not threaten basic property interests.It is at this juncture that the familiar principle of limitationon governmental authority commands our attention. Grantedthe wisest distribution of powers among governments, whatguarantee was there that power would be properly exercised?What guarantees were there against the abuse of power?What assurance was there that the large states would not rideroughshod over the small, that majorities would not crushminorities or minorities abuse majorities? What protection was190 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

there against mobs, demagogues, and dangerous combinations ofinterests or of states? What protection was there for the commercialinterest, the planter interest, the slave interest, the securitiesinterests, the land speculator interests?It was Madison who most clearly saw the real character of thisproblem and who formulated its solution. It was not that the peopleas such were dangerous; “The truth was,” he said on July 11, “thatall men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.”Long before Lord Acton coined the aphorism, the Revolutionaryleaders had discovered that power corrupts. They understood, too,the drive for power on the part of individuals and groups. All thisis familiar to students of The Federalist, No. 10. It should be familiarto students of the debates in Philadelphia, for there, too, Madisonset forth his theory and supported it with a wealth of argument.Listen to him on one of the early days of the Convention, June6, when he is discussing the way to avoid abuses of republicanliberty abuses which “prevailed in the largest as well as the smalleststates:And were we not thence admonished [he continued] to enlarge the sphereas far as the nature of the Government would admit. This was the onlydefense against the inconveniences of democracy consistent with thedemocratic form of Government [our emphasis]. All civilized Societieswould be divided in to different Sects. Factions & interests, as theyhappened to consist of rich & poor, debtors and creditors, the landed, themanufacturing, the commercial interests, the inhabitants of this districtor that district, the followers of this political leader or that politicalleader, the disciples of this religions Sect or that religious Sect. In all caseswhere a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rightsof the minority are in danger.... In a Republican Govt. the Majority ifunited have always an opportunity [to oppress the minority. What is theremedy?] The only remedy is to enlarge the sphere, & thereby divide theCommunity into so great a number of interests & parties. That in thefirst place a majority will not be likely at the same moment to have acommon interest separate from that of the whole or of the minority; andin the second place, that in case they should have such an interest, theymay not be apt to unite in the pursuit of it. It was incumbent on us thento try this remedy, and . . . to frame a republican system on such a scale &in such a form as will control all the evils which have been experienced.This long quotation is wonderfully eloquent of the attitude of themost sagacious of the framers. Madison, Wilson, Mason, Franklin,as well as Gerry, Morris, Pinckney, and Hamilton feared power.They feared power whether exercised by a monarch, an aristocracy,an army, or a majority, and they were one in their determinationto write into fundamental law limitations on the arbitrary exerciseof that power. To assume, as Beard so commonly does, that thefear of the misuse of power by majorities was either peculiar to theFederalists or more ardent with them than with their opponents,is mistaken. Indeed it was rather the anti‐Federalists who weremost deeply disturbed by the prospect of majority rule; they, ratherthan the Federalists, were the “men of little faith.” Thus it wasJohn Lansing, Jr., of New York (he who left the Convention ratherthan have any part in its dangerous work) who said that “all freeconstitutions are formed with two views to deter the governedfrom crime, and the governors from tyranny.” And the ardentPatrick Henry, who led the attack on the Constitution in theVirginia Convention and almost defeated it complained not of toolittle democracy in that document, but too much.The framers, to be sure, feared the powers of the majority, as theyfeared all power unless controlled. But they were insistent that,in the last analysis, there must be government by majority; evenconservatives like Morris and Hamilton made this clear. Listento Hamilton, for example, at the very close of the Convention.Elbridge Gerry, an opponent of the Constitution, had askedfor a reconsideration of the provision for calling a constitutionalconvention, alleging that this opened the gate to a majoritythat could “bind the union to innovations that may subvert theState‐Constitutions altogether.” To this Hamilton replied thatThere was no greater evil in subjecting the people of the U.S. to the majorvoice than the people of a particular State.... It was equally desirablenow that an easy mode should be established for supplying defects whichwill probably appear in the New System.... There could be no danger ingiving this power, as the people would finally decide in the case.And on July 13, James Wilson, another staunch Federalist, observedthat “The majority of people wherever found ought in all questionsto govern the minority.”But we need not rely upon what men said; there is too much ofmaking history by quotation anyway. Let us look rather at whatmen did. We can turn again to the Constitution itself. Grantedthe elaborate system of checks and balances: the separation ofpowers, the bicameral legislature, the executive veto, and so forthchecks found in the state constitutions as well, and in our owndemocratic era as in the earlier one what provision did the framersmake against majority tyranny? What provisions did they writeinto the Constitution against what Randolph called “democraticlicentiousness”?They granted equality of representation in the Senate. If this meantthat conservative Delaware would have the same representationin the upper chamber as democratic Pennsylvania, it also meantthat democratic Rhode Island would have the same representationas conservative South Carolina. But the decision for equalityof representation was not dictated by considerations eithereconomic or democratic, but rather by the recalcitrance of thesmall states. Indeed, though it is difficult to generalize here, onthe whole it is true that it was the more ardent Federalists whofavored proportional representation in both houses.They elaborated a most complicated method of electing a ChiefExecutive, a method designed to prevent the easy expression ofany majority will. Again the explanation is not simple. The factwas that the framers did not envision the possibility of direct votes191

for presidential candidates which would not conform to state linesand interests and thus lead to dissension and confusion. Somemethod, they thought, must be designated to overcome the forceof state prejudices (or merely of parochialism) and get an election;the method they anticipated was a preliminary eliminationcontest by the electoral college and then eventual election by theHouse. This, said George Mason, was what would occur nineteentimes out of twenty. There is no evidence in the debates that thecomplicated method finally hit upon for electing a President wasdesigned either to frustrate popular majorities or to protect specialeconomic interests; its purpose was to overcome state pride andparticularism.Senators and Presidents, then, would not be the creatures ofdemocracy. But what guarantee was there that senators wouldbe representatives of property interests, or that the Presidenthimself would recognize the “priority of property”? Most stateshad property qualifications for office holding, but there are none inthe Federal Constitution. As far as the Constitution is concerned,the President, congressmen, and Supreme Court justices can allbe paupers.Both General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and his young cousinCharles, of South Carolina, were worried about this. The latterproposed a property qualification of $100,000 (a tidy sum in thosedays) for the Presidency, half that for the judges, and substantialsums for members of Congress. Franklin rebuked him. He wasdistressed, he said, to hear anything “that tended to debase thespirit of the common people.” More surprising was the rebuke fromthat stout conservative, John Dickinson. “He doubted,” Madisonreports, “the policy of interweaving into a Republican constitution aveneration for wealth. He had always understood that a venerationfor poverty & virtue were the objects of republican encouragement.”Pinckney’s proposal was overwhelmingly rejected.What of the members of the Lower House? When Randolphopened “the main business” on May 29 he said the remedy for thecrisis that men faced must be “the republican principle,” and twodays later members were discussing the fourth resolution, whichprovided for election to the Lower House by the people. RogerSherman of Connecticut thought that the people should have aslittle to do as may be about the Government,” and Gerry hastenedto agree in words now well worn from enthusiastic quotation that“The evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy.” Thesevoices were soon drowned out, however. Mason “argued stronglyfor an election by the people. It was to be the grand depositoryof the democratic principle of the Govt. “ And the learned JamesWilson, striking the note to which he was to recur again andagain, made clear that he was for raising the federal pyramid to aconsiderable altitude, and for that reason wished to give it as broada basis as possible. He thought that both branches of the legislatureand the President as well for that matter‐ should be elected by thepeople. “The Legislature,” he later observed, “ought to be the mostexact transcript of the whole Society.”...Was the Constitution designed to place private property beyondthe reach of majorities? If so, the framers did a very bad job.They failed to write into it the most elementary safeguards forproperty. They failed to write into it limitations on the tax power,or prohibitions against the abuse of the money power. They failedto provide for rule by those whom Adams was later to call the wiseand the rich and the well‐born. What they did succeed in doingwas to create a system of cheeks and balances and adjustments andaccommodations that would effectively prevent the suppressionof most minorities by majorities. They took advantage of thecomplexity, the diversity, and the pluralism, of American societyand economy to encourage a balance of interests. They workedout sound and lasting political solutions to the problems of class,interest, section, race, and religion, party.Perhaps the most perspicacious comment on this whole questionof the threat from turbulent popular majorities against propertyand order came, mirabile dictu, from the dashing young CharlesPinckney of South Carolina he of the “lost” Pinckney Plan. OnJune 25 Pinckney made a major speech and thought it importantenough to write out and give to Madison. The point of departurewas the hackneyed one of the character of the second branch ofthe legislature, but the comments were an anticipation of DeTocqueville and Lord Bryce. We need not, Pinckney asserted, fearthe rise of class conflicts in America, nor take precautions againstthem.The genius of the people, their mediocrity of situation & theprospects which are afforded their industry in a Country whichmust be a new one for centuries are unfavorable to the rapiddistinction of ranks. . . If equality is . . . the leading feature ofthe U. States [he asked], where then are the riches & wealthwhose representation & protection is the peculiar province of thispermanent body [the Senate]. Are they in the hands of the fewwho may be called rich; in the possession of less than a hundredcitizens? Certainly not. They are in the great body of the people....[There was no likelihood that a privileged body would ever developin the United States, he added, either from the landed interest, themoneyed interest, or the mercantile.] Besides, Sir, I apprehend thaton this point the policy of the U. States has been much mistaken.We have unwisely considered ourselves as the inhabitants of anold instead of a new country. We have adopted the maxims of aState full of people.... The people of this country are not only verydifferent from the inhabitants of any State we are acquainted within the modern world; but I assert that their situation is distinctfrom either the people of Greece or of Rome.Not a government cunningly contrived to protect the interestsif capable of extending to its citizens the blessings of liberty andhappiness was that not, after all, what the framers created?192 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

3iv.the early republic: forging anational identity:1791-1824IV. The Early Republic: Forging a National Identity:1791-1824193

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Alexander Hamilton and Thomas JeffersonPopular RuleThough both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson servedas members of President Washington’s cabinet, the two held verydifferent views on the newly founded U.S. government and the roleof the masses in that government. During the 1790s the views ofHamilton and Jefferson would develop into two competing politicalideologies and eventually form the basis of the first political partiesin the U.S. The following are excerpts of Hamilton and Jefferson’sviews on popular rule. Notice each man’s view of the elite and themasses. What role does each man see for the elite and the masses ingovernment? Why?Excerpts from Alexander Hamilton:All communities divide themselves into the few and the many.The first are rich and well born; the other, the mass of thepeople. The voice of the people has been said to be the voiceof God; and however generally this maxim has been quotedand believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulentand changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Givetherefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in thegovernment. They will check the unsteadiness of the second;and as they cannot receive any advantage by change, they willtherefore maintain good government.Can a democratic assembly who annually [through annualelections] revolve in the mass of the people, be supposedsteadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanentbody can check the imprudence of democracy. Their turbulentand changing disposition requires checks. (1787)Take mankind in general, they are vicious, their passions maybe operated upon... Take mankind as they are, and what arethey governed by? There may be in every government a fewchoice spirits, who may act from more worthy motives. Onegreat error is that we suppose mankind more honest than theyare. Our prevailing passions are ambition and interest; and itwill be the duty of a wise government to avail itself of thosepassions, in order to make them subservient to the public good.(1787)(1792)Excerpts from Thomas Jefferson:Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, ifever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made hisparticular deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. (1784)Men... are naturally divided into two parties. Those who fearand distrust the people... Those who identify themselves withthe people, have confidence in them, cherish and considerthem as the most honest and safe... depository of the publicinterest. (1824)The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on theirbacks, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ridethem legitimately, by the grace of God. (1826)I have such reliance on the good sense of the body of the peopleand the honesty of their leaders that I am not afraid of theirletting things go wrong to any length in any cause. (1788)Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trustedwith their own government; whenever things get so far wrongas to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them torights. (1789)I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not therich, are our dependence for continued freedom. (1876)I have great confidence in the common sense of mankind ingeneral. (1800)My most earnest wish is to see the republican element ofpopular control pushed to the maximum of its practicableexercise. I shall then believe that our government may be pureand perpetual. (1816)Your people, sir, is a great beast. (1792)I have an indifferent [low] opinion of the honesty of thiscountry, and ill foreboding as to its future system. (1783)I said that I was affectionately attached to the republicantheory... I add that I have strong hopes for the success of thattheory; but in candor I ought also to add that I am far frombeing without doubts. I consider its success as yet a problem.195

Thomas Jefferson: The Importance ofAgriculture (1784)Alexander Hamilton, Report on theSubject of Manufactures (1791)In this famous passage, Jefferson voices his confidence in yeomenfarmers and his fear of the influence of industry. As you read,consider why Jefferson has confidence in yeomen and why he isfearful of industry.The political economists of Europe have established it asa principle that every state should endeavor to manufacturefor itself; and this principle, like many others, we transfer toAmerica, without calculating the difference of circumstancewhich should often produce a difference of result.In Europe the lands are either cultivated, or locked up againstthe cultivator. Manufacture must therefore be resorted to ofnecessity, not of choice, to support the surplus of their people.But we have an immensity of land courting the industry ofthe husbandman. Is it best then that all our citizens shouldbe employed in its improvement, or that one half should becalled off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraftarts for the other? Those who labor in the earth are the chosenpeople of God, if he ever had a chosen people, whose breastshe has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuinevirtue.... Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators isa phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished anexample. It is the mark set on those who, not looking up toheaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandmen,for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and capriceof customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality,suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for thedesigns of ambition....Generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate ofthe other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of itshusbandmen is the proportion of its unsound to its healthyparts, and is a... barometer whereby to measure its degree ofcorruption. While we have land to labor then, led us never wishto see our citizens occupied at a workbench, or twirling a distaff.Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry; but,for the general operations of manufacture, let our workshopsremain in Europe. It is better to carry provisions and materialsto workmen there than bring them to the provisions andmaterials, and with them their manners and principles. Theloss by the transportation of commodities across the Atlanticwill be made up in happiness and permanence of government.The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of puregovernment, as sores do to the strength of the human body.It is the manners and the spirit of a people which preserve arepublic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which sooneats to the hearts of its laws and constitution.In the following report to Congress, Alexander Hamilton, PresidentWashington’s Secretary of the Treasury, sets forth the advantages of amanufacturing system, and he forecasts the changes which later camewith the growth of industry. Compare Hamilton’s report to Jefferson’sviews outlined in his “Importance of Agriculture.”The expediency of encouraging manufactures in the United States...appears at this time to be generally admitted. The embarrassmentswhich have obstructed the progress of our external trade, have ledto serious reflections on the necessity of enlarging the sphere ofour domestic commerce.... [Other nations’ regulations against ouragricultural produce] beget an earnest desire that a more extensivedemand for that surplus may be created at home...[Both the manufacturer and the farmer] furnishes a certainportion of produce of his labor to the other, and each destroys acorresponding portion of the produce of the labor of the other. Inthe meantime, the maintenance of two citizens, instead of one,is going on; the State has two members instead of one; and they,together, consume twice the value of what is produced from theland....It may be inferred that manufacturing establishments not onlyoccasion a positive augmentation of the produce and revenue of thesociety, but that they contribute essentially to rendering them greaterthan they could possibly be without those establishments....[Increasing manufacturing encourages all of the followingbenefits]....As to the division of labor:It has justly been observed, that there is scarcely any thing of greatermoment in the economy of a nation than the proper division oflabor. The separation of occupations causes each to be carried toa much greater perfection.... This arises principally from... thegreater skill and dexterity naturally resulting from a constant andundivided application to a single object....1. As to an extension of the use of machinery...The employment of machinery... is an artificial force brought in aidof the natural force of man; and, to all the purposes of labor, is anincrease of hands, an accession of strength.... May it not, therefore,be fairly inferred, that those occupations which give greatest scopeto the use of this auxiliary, contribute most to the general stock ofindustrious effort, and, in consequence to the general product ofindustry....2. As to additional employment of classes of the community notoriginally engaged in the particular business...[Manufacturing institutions] afford occasional and extra196 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

employment to industrious individuals and families, who arewilling to devote... [their leisure time] as a resource for multiplyingtheir acquisitions or their enjoyments. The husbandman himselfexperiences a new source of profit and support from the increasedindustry of his wife and daughters, invited and stimulated bythe demands of the neighboring manufactories....Women andchildren are rendered more useful, and the latter more early useful,by manufacturing establishments....4. As to the promotion of emigration from foreign countries...[Many] would probably flock from Europe to the United States topursue their own trades and professions....5. As to the furnishing greater scope for the diversity of talentsand dispositions which discriminate men from each other...There is, in the genius... of this country, a particular aptitude formechanic improvements, it would operate as a forcible reason forgiving opportunities to the exercise of that species of talent, by thepropagation of manufactures.6. As to the affording of a more ample and various field forenterprise. The spirit of enterprise... must necessarily be contractedand expanded in proportion to the simplicity or variety of theoccupations and productions which are to be found in a society.It must be less in a nation of mere cultivators than in a nationof cultivators and merchants; less in a nation of cultivatorsand merchants, than in a nation of cultivators, artificers andmerchants.7. As to the creating... and securing... a more steady demand forthe surplus produce of the soil...[This] is the principle means by which the establishment ofmanufactures contributes to an augmentation of produce orrevenue of a country, and has an immediate and direct relation tothe prosperity of agriculture.It is evident that the exertions of thehusbandman will be steady or fluctuating, vigorous or feeble, inproportion to... the adequateness or inadequateness, of the marketson which he must depend....This idea of an extensive domestic market for the surplus produceof the soil, is of the first consequence. It is, of all things, that whichmost effectually conduces to a flourishing state of agriculture....[it will] cause the lands which were in cultivation to be betterimproved and more productive....The foregoing considerations seem sufficient to establish, asgeneral propositions, that it is the interest of nations to diversifythe industrious pursuits of the individuals who compose them;that the establishment of manufactures is calculated not onlyto increase the general stock of useful and productive labor, butto improve the state of agriculture in particular, - certainly toadvance the interests of those who are engaged in it....Thomas Jefferson: Opinion on theConstitutionality of the Bank (1791)There were only three banks in the entire country when AlexanderHamilton, in 1790, proposed the Bank of the United States to bemodeled on the Bank of England. It would be a private institutionunder strict governmental supervision, and it would be useful to theUnited States Treasury in issuing notes, in safeguarding surplus taxmoney, and in facilitating numerous public financial transactions.President Washington questioned whether creating a bank wasconstitutional or whether it was an unconstitutional abuse ofCongressional powers. Before signing the bank bill, Washingtonsolicited the views of some of his cabinet members. The opinion ofJefferson, given below, elicited a rebuttal from Hamilton, which isthe following document. As you read Jefferson’s opinion think abouthow his belief that the bank was not constitutional reflected hisDemocratic-Republican political ideology.I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on thisground -- that all powers not delegated to the United Statesby the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, arereserved to the states, or to the people. (10th Amendment).To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specificallydrawn around the powers of Congress is to take possessionof a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of anydefinition.The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by thisbill, have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the UnitedStates by the Constitution.The second general phrase is “to make all laws necessary andproper for carrying into execution the enumerated powers.” Butthey can all be carried into execution without a bank. A banktherefore is not necessary, and consequently not authorized bythis phrase.It has been much urged that a bank will give great facilityor convenience in the collection of taxes. Suppose this weretrue; yet the Constitution allows only the means whichare “necessary,” not those which are merely “convenient,”for effecting the enumerated powers. If such a latitude ofconstruction be allowed to this phrase as to give it any nonnumeratedpower, it [the latitude] will go to for every one; forthere is not one [power] which ingenuity may not torture intoa convenience, in some instance or another, to some one of solong a list of enumerated powers. It would swallow up all thedelegated powers [of the states], and reduce the whole to onepower...197

Alexander Hamilton: Opinion on theConstitutionality of the Bank (1791)Hamilton supported the bank and defended its constitutionality fromJefferson’s attacks. Think carefully about how Hamilton’s positionon the constitutionality of the bank reflected Federalist ideology.If the end be clearly comprehended within any of the specifiedpowers, and if the measure have an obvious relation to that end,and is not forbidden by any provision of the Constitution, itmay safely be deemed to come within the compass of nationalauthority.There is also this further criterion, which may materially assistthe decision: Does the proposed measure abridge a preexistingright of any state or of any individual? If it does not, there is astrong presumption in favor of its constitutionality...“Necessary” often means no more than needful, requisite,incidental, useful, or conducive to... [A] restrictive interpretationof the word unnecessary is also contrary to the sound maximof construction, namely, that the powers contained in aconstitution... ought to be construed liberally in advancementof the public good.A hope is entertained that it has, by this time, been made toappear to the satisfaction of the President, that a bank hasa natural relation to the power of collecting taxes--to thatof regulating trade -- to that of providing for the commondefense--and that, as the bill under consideration contemplatesthe government in the light of a joint proprietor of the stock ofthe bank, it brings the case within the provision of the clauseof the Constitution which immediately respects [relates to]the property of the United States [Evidently Article IV, Sec.III, para. 2: The Congress shall have the power to... make allneedful rules and regulations respecting the territory or otherproperty belonging to the United States.]198 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Hamiltonian Federalists and JeffersonianRepublicans: Views on the RevolutionDuring the 1790s Hamilton and Jefferson’s competing theories of therole of government and the specific policies of the U. S. governmentled to the creation of two political parties - the Federalist Party,founded by supporters of Hamilton, and the Republican Party,founded by the supporters of Jefferson. What common themes can youfind that underlie Hamilton and Jefferson’s views of the followingevents?The French RevolutionDocument ASource: Alexander Hamilton“The cause of France is compared with that of America duringits late revolution. Would to heaven that the comparison werejust. Would to heaven we could discern in the mirror of Frenchaffairs, the same humanity, the same decorum, the samegravity, the same order, the same dignity, the same solemnity,which distinguished the cause of the American Revolution....All still unite that the troubles of France may terminate inthe establishment of a free and good government.... None candeny that the cause of France has been stained by the excessesand extravagances for which it is not easy, if possible to find aparallel in the history of human affairs, and from which reasonand humanity recoil.”Document BSource: Thomas Jefferson“You will have heard... of the peril into which the FrenchRevolution is brought by the flight of their King. Such arethe fruits of that form of government which heaps importanceon idiots... I still hope that the French Revolution will issuehappily. I feel that the permanence of our own leans in somedegree on that; and that a failure there would be a powerfulargument to prove there must be a failure here.... The liberty ofthe whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, andwas ever such a prize won with such little innocent blood....Rather than it should have failed I would have seen half theearth desolated; were there but an Adam and an Eve left inevery country, and left free, it would be better then it now is.”Source: Alexander Hamilton“I believe the British government forms the best model theworld ever produced, and such has been its progress in theminds of the many that this truth gradually gains ground.”Document DSource: Thomas Jefferson“It is [Britain’s] government which is so corrupt... it was certainlythe most corrupt and unprincipled government on earth.The Whiskey RebellionDocument ESource: Alexander Hamilton“Shall the majority govern or be governed? Shall the nationrule or be ruled? Shall the general will prevail, or the will ofa faction? Shall there be government or no government? It isimpossible to deny that this is the true and whole question....The Constitution... contains this express clause: ‘The Congressshall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts andexcises.....” Your representatives in Congress, pursuant to thecommission derived from you, and with your full knowledge...have laid an excise.... But the four western counties ofPennsylvania undertake to rejudge and reverse your decrees....[Citizens of these counties] say, ‘It shall not be collected. Wewill punish, expel and banish the officers who shall attemptthe collection. We will do the same by every other personwho shall dare to comply with your decree expressed in theconstitutional charter.... The sovereignty shall not reside withyou, but with us....”’Document FSource: Thomas Jefferson“The excise law is an infernal one. The first error was to admitit by the Constitution; the second, to act on that admission....The information of our militia [in Pennsylvania is]... thatthough the people there let them pass quietly, they were objectsof their laughter, not of their fear.... [The people of WesternPennsylvania’s] detestation of the excise law is universal, andhas now associated to it a detestation of the government;and that separation, which perhaps was a very distant andproblematic event, is now near... and determined in the mindof every man.”The British GovernmentDocument CDocument GSource: Thomas Jefferson199

“A little rebellion now and again is a good thing, and asnecessary in the political world as storms in the physical.... It isthe medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”The Alien and Sedition Acts: Intoleranceand the Search for OrderDocument ASource: Jedediah Morse, “The Present Dangers and ConsequentDuties,” 1799“Our dangers are of two kinds, those which affect our religion,and those which affect our government. They are, however, soclosely allied that they cannot, with propriety, be separated.The foundations which support the interests of Christianity,are also necessary to support a free and equal governmentlike our own. In all those countries where there is little or noreligion, or a very gross and corrupt one, as in Pagan countries,there you will find, with scarcely a single exception, arbitraryand tyrannical governments, gross ignorance and wickedness,and deplorable wretchedness among the people. To kindlyinfluence Christianity we owe the degree of civil freedom, andpolitical and social happiness which mankind now enjoy. In theproportion as the genuine effects of Christianity are diminishedin any nation, either through unbelief, or the corruption of anyof its doctrines, or the neglect of its institutions, in the sameproportion will the people from that nation recede from thetrue blessings of genuine freedom, and assume the miseries ofgenuine despotism...It has long been suspected that secret societies, under theinfluence and direction of France, holding principles subversiveof our religion and government, exist somewhere in thiscountry. Evidence of this suspicion is well‐founded, and sincethen, proof has been accumulating, I have, my brethren anofficial, authenticated list of the names, ages, places of nativity,professions, etc. of the officers of this secret society, which isinstituted in Virginia... The members are chiefly emigrantsfrom France, with the addition of a few Americans... You willperceive, my brethren, from this concise statement of facts, thatwe have in truth secret enemies, not a few, scattered throughour dear country... enemies whose professed design is to subvertand overturn our holy religion and our free and excellentgovernment... And the pernicious fruits of their insidiousand secret efforts, must be visible to every eye not obstinatelyclosed... Among these fruits may be reckoned our unhappy andthreatening political divisions, the virulent opposition to someof the laws of this country, the Pennsylvania insurrection, theindustrious circulation of baneful and corrupting books, andconsequently the wonderful spread of infidelity, impiety, andimmorality...”Document BSource: Professor David Tappan, “A Warning to HarvardSeniors,” 1798200 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

“As the present crisis of human affairs is very solemn, as we, incommon with our fellow citizens, feel a lively interest in it, andas this University is soon to resign a considerable number ofher sons to the service of their country and mankind, I cannothelp but seize this opportunity to address these students as tosome large observations and counsels, suggested chiefly by thepresent state of the world...There is a society...which under the mask of universalphilanthropy has been aiming at the complete dominion oftheminds and bodies of mankind... A proposition was madeat the last convention for abolishing the altars of God, andhave been artfully contrived to destroy the observationand even the memory of the Christian sabbath. They alsodecreed that death was an everlasting sleep... So extensive aconspiracy against government and religion easily accountsfor the rapid progress of disorganizing principles, and thewonderful success of French arms and intrigues... the zealouscirculation of certain newspapers which are uniformly devotedto malignant falsehood and sedition, which aim to directlytend to undermine the religious, moral, and civil institutionsof this country... In this way you may effectively counterworkthe subtle policy of the common enemies of God and man.While they are seeking to brutalize the world, you are invited,indeed, have been summoned, to oppose this infernal artificeby supporting the great pillars of social order. While they areoutraging female modesty and dignity, reducing both men andwomen to brutal impurity and barbarism, while this be theboasted work of modern reformers, be it yours to assert thedignity of man, to guard and preserve the worth of the femalecharacter...”The Revolution of 1800Document ASource: James Madison, 1819“The Revolution of 1800...was as real a revolution in theprinciples of our government as that of 1776 was in its form; noteffected by the sword, indeed, as that, but by the rational andpeaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.”Document B Source: Abraham Bishop, ConnecticutRepublicanism, 1801“Every country is divided into two classes of men‐‐one whichlives by the labor of the head, and the other by the labor ofhands; each claims that its services are the hardest and mostimportant; the first professes great zeal for the public good,and means nothing by it; the last does his days work, makesno professions, but brings his produce to the best markets. Thefirst always governs the last either by deceit or by force. Deceitis the mildest way, but it requires great labor and management;force is surest.It will not be easy to break through the thick folds of error andimposture with which the friends of order keep the great partof mankind encompassed...You have been taught to reverenceyour friends of order...That humiliation that ordinary peoplefeel in the presence of wealth and power has been a leadingcause of all the slavery on earth...All your feelings of inferiorityand humiliation, all that makes you bow your heads and doffyour caps in front of gentlemen, that indeed, the whole culturethat sustained rule by the gentry elite are delusions fabricatedby all the great, the wise, the rich, and mighty men of theworld, those well‐fed, well‐dressed, chariot‐rolling, caucuskeeping, levee reveling federalists...These are the agentsof delusion, these so‐called gentlemen, that one‐tenth ofsociety who claim superiority over the rest...Why shouldnine‐tenths of ordinary people look up with fear and awe tothese deceiving few?...These self‐styled friends of order have,in all nations, been the cause of all the convulsions and thedistress, which have agitated the world...They fool people withtheir charming outsides, engaging manners, powerful address,and inexhaustible argument. They know well the force andpower of every word; the east, west, north, and south of everysemi‐colon; and can extract power from every dash...They areable to say more and argue better on the wrong side of thequestion than the people are on either side of it....The [subjects of the gentry’s guile are] the laboring andsubordinate people throughout the world. Their toil goes tosupport the splendor, luxury, and vices of the deluders, ortheir blood flows to satiate lawless ambition...[Imagine] theluxurious courtier who must have his peas and salmon before201

the frost has left the earth, or the ice the river, and who loathesthe sight of vegetable or animal food in the season of it; whorides in a gig with half a dozen lackeys behind him; who cursesevery taverner, excommunicates every cook, and hecks over thetable because his eggs were not brought to him in a preexistentstate...Such a man can never have any opinion of the plebeianswho are toiling to furnish the means of his splendor.”Document CSource: William Manning, The Key of Liberty, 1790’s“[The struggle] is between the many and the few, based on aconceived difference of interest between those that labor for aliving and those that git a living without bodily labor; Thosewho do not have to do bodily work are the merchant, physician,lawyer, and divine, the philosopher and school master thejudicial and executive officers, and many others. These ordersof men, once they have attained their life of ease and rest thatat once creates a sense of superiority, tend to associate togetherand look down with two much contempt on those who labor...Although the hole of them do not amount to one eighth part ofthe people, these gentry have the spare time and the arts andschemes to combine and consult with one another, and havethe power to control the government in a variety of ways.”Document DSource: Benjamin Rush, Autobiography, 1792“A man who has been bred a gentleman cannot work...andtherefore he lives by borrowing without intending to pay,or upon the public or his friends. A gentleman cannot waitupon himself, and therefore his hands and his legs are oftenas useless to him as if they were paralytic. If a merchant bea gentleman he would sooner lose 50 customers than be seento carry a piece of goods across the street. If a Doctor shouldchance to be a gentleman he would rather let a patient die thanassist in giving him a glyster or in bleeding him...”those arts and refinements, and elegance’s which require richesand leisure to their production, are not to be found among themajority of our citizens...The want of learning and of science inthe majority is one of the things which strikes foreigners whovisit us very forcibly. Our representatives to all our Legislativebodies, National, as well as of the States, are elected by themajority unlearned. For instance from Philadelphia and itsenvirons we send to congress not one man of letters. One ofthem indeed is a lawyer but of no eminence, another a goodMathematician, but when elected he was a Clerk in a bank.The others are just plain farmers. From the next county issent a Blacksmith, and from just over the river a Butcher. Outstate legislature does not contain one individual of superiortalents. The fact is, that superior talents excite distrust, andthe experience of the world perhaps does not encourage thepeople to trust men of genius...This government of what maybe called, an unlettered majority, has put down that idealrank which manners had established, excepting in our greatcities depending on commerce and crowded with foreigners,where the distinction between what is called the Gentlemen,and others still subsists, and produces circles of associationseparate from each other...in Philadelphia even this distinctionhas almost disappeared, those who expect it having earlyexcluded themselves from the present race of well-dressedmen and women. Of this state of society the solid and generaladvantages are undeniable; but to a cultivated mind, to a man ofletters to a lover of the arts it presents a very unpleasant picture.The importance attached to wealth, and the freedom whichopens every legal avenue to wealth to every one individuallyhas two effects, which are unfavorable to morals: It weakensthe ties that binds individuals to each other, by making allcitizens rivals in the pursuit of riches; and it renders the meansby which they are attained more indifferent...In this kind ofsociety, the public good is best promoted by the exertion ofeach individual seeking his own good in his own way.”Document ESource: Benjamin Latrobe, (architect and engineer) Letter toPhilip Mazzei,.1806“After the adoption of the federal constitution, the extension ofthe right of suffrage in all the states to the majority of all theadult male citizens, planted a germ which has gradually evolved,and has spread actual and practical democracy and politicalequality over the whole union. There is no doubt whatsoeverbut that this state of things in our country produces the greatestsum of happiness that perhaps any nation ever enjoyed...But thecost has been high. Most men have to labor, and consequently202 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

The Kentucky Resolutions of 1799The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of I 798-99 were a seriesof resolutions passed by the legislatures of these states protestingthe Alien and Sedition Acts. The Kentucky Resolutions weredrafted by Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Resolutions byJames Madison. They are a democratic protest against whatJefferson, Madison and other Republicans considered to bea dangerous usurpation of power by the federal government.The Kentucky Resolution of 1799 was the most radical of theresolutions and asserted that states had the power to nullify thelaws of the federal government.As you read, think about how the Kentucky Resolutionsreflected Democratic-Republican ideology and why it makessense that Democratic-Republicans like Jefferson and Madisonwould have opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts.be the measure of their powers: That the several states whoformed that instrument [the Constitution] being sovereignand independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of theinfraction; and, That a nullification of those sovereignties, ofall unauthorized acts done under the color of that instrument isthe rightful remedy: That this commonwealth does, under themost deliberate reconsideration, declare, that the said Alienand Sedition laws are, in their opinion, palpable violations ofthe said Constitution.... although this commonwealth, as aparty to the federal compact, will bow to the laws of the Union,yet, it does at the same time declare, that it will not now, orever hereafter, cease to oppose in a constitutional manner,every attempt at what quarter soever offered, to violate thatcompact.... This commonwealth does now enter against [theAlien and Sedition Acts] in solemn PROTEST.The representatives of the good people of this commonwealth[of Kentucky], in General Assembly convened, have maturelyconsidered the answers of sundry states in the Union, to [theongoing debate and discussion of]... certain unconstitutionallaws of Congress, commonly called the Alien and SeditionLaws, would be faithless, indeed, to themselves and to thosethey represent, were they silently to acquiesce in the principlesand doctrines attempted to be maintained.... Our opinions ofthese alarming measures of the general government, togetherwith our reasons for those opinions, were detailed with decency,and with temper and submitted to the discussion and judgmentof our fellow citizens throughout the Union.... Faithful tothe true principles of the federal Union, unconscious of anydesigns to disturb the harmony of that Union, and anxiousonly to escape the fangs of despotism, the good people of thiscommonwealth are regardless of censure or calumniation.Lest, however, the silence of this commonwealth should beconstrued into an acquiescence in the doctrines and principlesadvanced... therefore,Resolved, That this commonwealth considers the federalUnion, upon the terms and for the purposes specified in...[the Constitution], conducive to the liberty and happinessof the several states: That it does now unequivocally declareits attachment to the Union, and to that compact... and willbe among the last to seek its dissolution: That if those whoadminister the general government be permitted to transgressthe limits fixed by that compact [the Constitution], by a totaldisregard to the special delegations of power therein contained,an annihilation of the state governments... will be the inevitableconsequence: [That the construction of the Constitution arguedfor by many) state legislatures, that the general government isthe exclusive judge of the extant of the powers delegated to it,stop not short of despotism — since the discretion of those whoadminister the government, and not the Constitution, would203

Rhode Island and New Hampshire’sResponses to the Virginia and KentuckyResolutions (1799)Every State from Maryland north replied to the Virginia andKentucky Resolutions, rejecting the constitutional principlesset forth by Jefferson and Madison. The following are briefexcerpts of the responses of the legislatures of Rhode Islandand New Hampshire. As you read, consider Rhode Island andNew Hampshire’s response to the “doctrine of nullification”proposed in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Whywould Rhode Island and New Hampshire have felt compelledto respond to Kentucky’s assertion that states have the powerto rule federal Laws unconstitutional?domestic....The state legislatures are not the proper tribunals to determinethe constitutionality of the laws of the general government...the duty of such decision is properly and exclusively confidedin the judicial department.If the legislature of NewHampshire, for mere speculative purposes were to express anopinion on the...Alien and Sedition Bills, that opinion would unreservedly bethat those acts are constitutional.The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations(February 1799):1. Resolved, That, in the opinion of this legislature, thesecond section of the third article of the Constitution of theUnited States, in these words, to wit, -” The judicial powershall extend to all cases arising under the laws of the UnitedStates,” - vests in the Federal Courts, exclusively, and in theSupreme Court of the United States, ultimately, the authorityon the constitutionality of any act or law of the Congress ofthe United States.2. Resolved, That for any state legislature to assume thatauthority would be -1st. Blending together legislative and judicial powers;2nd. Hazarding an interruption of the peace of the states bycivil discord, in a case of a diversity of opinions among thestate legislatures; each state having, in that case, no resort forvindicating its own opinions, but the strength of its own arm;3rd. Submitting most important questions of law to lesscompetent tribunals; and4th. An infaction of the Constitution of the United States....3. Resolved, That, although, for the above reasons, thislegislature... do not feel themselves authorized to consider anddecide on the constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition laws...[do] declare that in their private opinions, these laws are withinthe powers delegated to Congress.New Hampshire Resolution on the Kentucky and VirginiaResolutions (Tune 1799):The legislature of New Hampshire unequivocally expresses afirm resolution to maintain and defend the Constitution ofthe United States... against every aggression, either foreign or204 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Washington’s Farewell Address,September 17, 1796Friends and Fellow-Citizens:The period for a new election of a citizen to administer theExecutive Government of the United States being not fardistant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts mustbe employed in designating the person who is to be clothedwith that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially asit may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice,that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formedto decline being considered among the number of those out ofwhom a choice is to be made....Here, perhaps, I ought to stop. But a solicitude for yourwelfare, which cannot end with my life1 and the apprehensionof danger natural to that solicitude, urge me on an occasionlike the present to offer to your solemn contemplation and torecommend to your frequent review some sentiments which arethe result of much reflection, of no inconsiderable observation,and which appear to me all important to the permanency ofyour felicity as a people. These will be offered to you with themore freedom as you can only see in them the disinterestedwarnings of a parting friend, who can possibly have no personalmotive to bias his counsel....The unity of government which constitutes you one people isalso now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillarin the edifice of your real independence, the support of yourtranquillity at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of yourprosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But asit is easy to foresee that from different causes and from differentquarters much pains will be taken, many artifices employed, toweaken in your minds the conviction of this truth, as this isthe point in your political fortress against which the batteriesof internal and external enemies will be most constantly andactively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, itis of infinite moment that you should properly estimate theimmense value of your national Union to your collective andindividual happiness... The name of AMERICAN, whichbelongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt thejust pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived fromlocal discriminations....The North, in an unrestrained intercourse with the South,protected by the equal laws of a common government, findsin the productions of the latter great additional resources ofmaritime and commercial enterprise and precious materials ofmanufacturing industry. The South, in the same intercourse,benefiting by the agency of the North, sees its agriculture growand its commerce expand... .The East, in a like intercourse withthe West, already finds, and in the progressive improvement ofinterior communications by land and water will more and morefind, a valuable vent for the commodities which it brings fromabroad or manufactures at home. The West derives from theEast supplies requisite to its growth and comfort, and, whatis perhaps of still greater consequence, it must of necessityowe the secure enjoyment of indispensable outlets for its ownproductions to the weight, influence, and the future maritimestrength of the Atlantic side of the Union, directed by anindissoluble community of interest as one nation....While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediateand particular interest in union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greaterstrength, greater resource, proportionately greater security fromexternal danger, and less frequent interruption of their peaceby foreign nations; and what is of inestimable value, they mustderive from union an exemption from those broils and warsbetween themselves, which so frequently afflict neighboringcountries not tied together by the same government, whichtheir own rivalships alone would be sufficient to produce, butwhich opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigueswould stimulate and embitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoidthe necessity of those overgrown military establishments which,under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, andwhich are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republicanliberty....Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivatepeace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin thisconduct. And can it be that good policy does not equally enjoinit? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distantperiod a great nation to give to mankind the magnanimousand too novel example of a people always guided by an exaltedjustice and benevolence....In the execution of such a plan nothing is more essential thanthat permanent, inveterate antipathies against particularnations and passionate attachments for others should beexcluded, and that in place of them just and amicable feelingstoward all should be cultivated. The nation which indulgestoward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness isin some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to itsaffection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from itsduty and its interest....Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure youto be1ieve me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free peopleought to be constantly awake, since history and experienceprove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes ofrepublican government....The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is,in extending our commercial relations to have with them as205

little political connection as possible. So far as we have alreadyformed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect goodfaith. Here let us stop.Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none, ora very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequentcontroversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign toour concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us toimplicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudesof her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions ofher friendships or enmities.Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us t6pursue a different course. if we remain one people, under anefficient government, the period is not far off when we may defymaterial injury from external annoyance; when we may takesuch an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any timeresolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerentnations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions uponus, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when wemay choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice,shall counsel.Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part ofEurope, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils ofEuropean ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances withany portion of the foreign world, so far, I mean, as we are nowat liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable ofpatronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold themaxim no less applicable to public than to private affairsthat honesty is always the best policy. I repeat, therefore, letthose engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But inmy opinion it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extendthem....Thomas Jefferson: First Inaugural AddressThis address, one of Jefferson’s most felicitous works, is memorable asa consummation of eighteenth-century elegance in style, as well asfor its conciliatory tone and its restatement of republican principles.To the seventy-eight year old revolutionary leader, Samuel Adams,Jefferson wrote a few weeks after its delivery:“I addressed a letter to you, my very dear and ancient friend, on the4th of March: not indeed to you by name, but through the mediumof some of my fellow citizens, whom occasion called on me to address.In meditating the matter of that address, I often asked myself, isthis exactly in the spirit of the patriarch, Samuel Adams? is it as hewould express it? Will he approve of it?”Friends and Fellow-Citizens:Called upon to undertake the duties of the first executive officeof our country, I avail myself of the presence of that portion of myfellow-citizens which is here assembled to express my gratefulthanks for the favor with which they have been pleased to looktoward me, to declare a sincere consciousness that the task isabove my talents, and that I approach it with those anxious andawful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and theweakness of my powers so justly inspire. A rising nation, spreadover a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with therich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce withnations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly todestinies beyond the reach of mortal eye when I contemplatethese transcendent objects, and see the honor, the happiness,and the hopes of this beloved country committed to the issueand the auspices of this day, I shrink from the contemplation,and humble myself before the magnitude of the undertaking.Utterly, indeed, should I despair did not the presence of manywhom I here see remind me that in the other high authoritiesprovided by our Constitution I shall find resources of wisdom,of virtue, and of zeal on which to rely under all difficulties.To you, then, gentlemen, who are charged with the sovereignfunctions of legislation, and to those associated with you, Ilook with encouragement for that guidance and support whichmay enable us to steer with safety the vessel in which we are allembarked amidst the conflicting elements of a troubled world.During the contest of opinion through which we have passedthe animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimesworn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused tothink freely and to speak and to write what they think; butthis being now decided by the voice of the nation, announcedaccording to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course,arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite incommon efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear inmind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majorityis in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must bereasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which206 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Letus, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind.Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affectionwithout which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.And let us reflect that, having banished from our land thatreligious intolerance under which mankind so long bled andsuffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a politicalintolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter andbloody persecutions. During the throes and convulsions ofthe ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriatedman, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty,it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows shouldreach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should bemore felt and feared by some and less by others, and shoulddivide opinions as to measures of safety. But every differenceof opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called bydifferent names brethren of the same principle. We are allRepublicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any amongus who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change itsrepublican form, let them stand undisturbed as monumentsof the safety with which error of opinion may be toleratedwhere reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, thatsome honest men fear that a republican government can not bestrong, that this Government is not strong enough; but wouldthe honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment,abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firmon the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, theworld’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserveitself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongestGovernment on earth. I believe it the only one where every man,at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, andwould meet invasions of the public order as his own personalconcern. Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted withthe government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with thegovernment of others? Or have we found angels in the forms ofkings to govern him? Let history answer this question.Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our ownFederal and Republican principles, our attachment to unionand representative government. Kindly separated by natureand a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarterof the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations ofthe others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough forour descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation;entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our ownfaculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor andconfidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth,but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened bya benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in variousforms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance,gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring anoverruling Providence, which by all its dispensations provesthat it delights in the happiness of man here and his greaterhappiness hereafter with all these blessings, what more isnecessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Stillone thing more, fellow-citizen a wise and frugal Government,which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leavethem otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industryand improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of laborthe bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government,and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties whichcomprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is properyou should understand what I deem the essential principlesof our Government, and consequently those which ought toshape its Administration. I will compress them within thenarrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle,but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men,of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace,commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entanglingalliances with none; the support of the State governmentsin all their rights, as the most competent administrationsfor our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks againstanti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the GeneralGovernment in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheetanchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous careof the right of election by the people a mild and safe correctiveof abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution wherepeaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence inthe decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics,from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle andimmediate parent of despotism; a well-disciplined militia, ourbest reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, tillregulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over themilitary authority; economy in the public expense, that labormay be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debtsand sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement ofagriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusionof information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of thepublic reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, andfreedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus,and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles formthe bright constellation which has gone before us and guidedour steps through an age of revolution and reformation. Thewisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devotedto their attainment. They should be the creed of our politicalfaith, the text of civic instruction, thc touchstone by which totry the services of those we trust; and should we wander fromthem in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retraceour steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace,liberty, and safety.I repair, then, fellow-citizens, to the post you have assigned me.With experience enough in subordinate offices to have seen thedifficulties of this the greatest of all, I have learnt to expect thatit will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from thisstation with the reputation and the favor which bring him into207

it. Without pretensions to that high confidence you reposed inour first and greatest revolutionary character, whose preiminentservices had entitled him to the first place in his country’s loveand destined for him the fairest page in the volume of faithfulhistory, I ask so much confidence only as may give firmnessand effect to the legal administration of your affairs. I shalloften go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, Ishall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will notcommand a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgencefor my own errors, which will never be intentional, and yoursupport against the errors of others, who may condemn whatthey would not if seen in all its parts. The approbation impliedby your suffrage is a great consolation to me for the past, andmy future solicitude will be to retain the good opinion of thosewho have bestowed it in advance, to conciliate that of others bydoing them all the good in my power, and to be instrumentalto the happiness and freedom of all.Relying, then, on the patronage of your good will, I advancewith obedience to the work, ready to retire from it wheneveryou become sensible how much better choice it is in your powerto make. And may that Infinite Power which rules the destiniesof the universe lead our councils to what is best, and give thema favorable issue for your peace and prosperity.Important Decisions of theSupreme Court1. MARBURY V. MADISON (1803)William Marbury was one of the federal judges appointed byPresident Adams under the Judiciary Act of 1801, an act whichwas repealed by the newly elected Republican controlled a yearafter it was passed. Marbury’s commission had been signed byPresident Adams but it had not been delivered; and the newSecretary of State1 James Madison, under the instructionsof President Thomas Jefferson1 refused to give Marbury hiscommission Marbury asked the Supreme Court for a writ ofmandamus ordering Madison to deliver his commission as ajustice of the peace for Washington, D.C. Section 13 of theJudiciary Act of 1789 empowered the Supreme Court to issuesuch a writ.DECISION: Marbury had a right to the appointment, but theSupreme Court had no power to issue the writ for him sincethis would have been an exercise of original jurisdiction. notwarranted by the Constitution. Congress had no power toadd to the original jurisdiction granted the Supreme Courtby the Constitution. In an obiter dictum the Supreme Courtstated that “The particular phraseology of the Constitutionof the United States confirms and strengthens the principle,supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a lawrepugnant to the constitution is void, and that courts, as wellas other departments, are bound by that instrument.”IMPORTANCE: This was the first time the Supreme Courtdeclared a law of Congress unconstitutional (Section 13 of theJudiciary Act of 1789), the first instance of judicial review. TheCourt did not declare another act of Congress unconstitutionaluntil Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). As of 1979 only 105 actsof Congress have been declared unconstitutional in whole or inpart, although thousands of laws are passed every year.2. McCULLCH V. MARYLAND (1819)Congress incorporated the Bank of the United States, andestablished a branch in. Baltimore, Maryland. The State ofMaryland required all banks not chartered by the state to pay atax on each issuance of bank notes. McCulloch, the cashier ofthe Baltimore branch of the Bank of the United States, issuednotes without complying with the state law. Maryland suedfor the taxes due it.DECISION: The Constitution empowers the governmentwith the right to lay and collect taxes, to borrow money, toregulate commerce, to declare and conduct war, and to raiseand support armies and navies. In the “elastic clause,” Art.208 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

I sec.8, Congress has also been granted the power “to makeall laws which shall be necessary and power for carrying intoexecution” the expressed powers in the Constitution. Therefore,by incorporating a bank, Congress is creating the means toattain the goals of the powers entrusted to it. “let the end belegitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, andall means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted tothat end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letterand spirit of the Constitution, are constitutional.” The powerto tax involves the power to destroy, and a state cannot havethis power over legitimate constitutional rights exercised by thefederal government. The tax levied by Maryland was thereforeunconstitutional.IMPORTANCE: This was the first time the SupremeCourt declared that an act passed by a state legislature wasunconstitutional. The Supreme Court also accepted thedoctrine of implied powers.JOHN MARSHALL EXPOUNDS THECONSTITUTIONIf any one proposition could command the universal assent ofmankind, we might expect it to be this: that the government ofthe Union, though limited in its powers, is supreme within itssphere of action. This would seem to result necessarily from itsnature. It is the government of all; its powers are delegated byall; it represents all, and acts for all. Though any one State maybe willing to control its operations, no State is willing to allowothers to control them. The nation, on those subjects on whichit can act, must necessarily bind its component parts. But thisquestion is not left to mere reason: the people have, in expressterms, decided it, by saying, “this Constitution, and the laws ofthe United States, which shall be made in pursuance thereof,”“shall be the supreme law of the land,” and by requiring thatthe members of the State legislatures, and the officers of theexecutive and judicial departments of the States, shall take theoath of fidelity to it.The government of the United States, then, though limited inits powers, is supreme; and its laws, when made in pursuance ofthe Constitution, form the supreme law of the land, “anythingin the constitution or laws of any State to the contrarynotwithstanding.”McCulloch V. Maryland, 18193. DARTMOUTH COLLEGE V. WOODWARD (1819)In 1769 Dartmouth College was chartered by the Englishmonarch. In 1816 the state legislature of New Hampshirepassed a law completely reorganizing the government of thecollege and changing the name to Dartmouth University.The former trustees of the college brought an action againstWoodward, who was secretary and treasurer of the college.The state decided against the former trustees and they appealedthe case to the Supreme Court.DECISION: The original charter granted by England was acontract, “a contract for the security and disposition of property....It is then a contract within the letter of the Constitution, andwithin its spirit also.” The act of 1816 by the New Hampshirelegislature substantially impaired the operations of the collegeas originally intended by the founders, and thereby violatesArt.I, sec.l0. It is therefore unconstitutional.IMPORTANCE: Charters are contracts, and the Constitutionprotected contracts against state encroachments. Thus businessenterprises (which are chartered by the states) are protectedby their charters. This made it easy for business to grow, butdifficult for states to regulate abuses by business. Since thestates lacked adequate power the federal government steppedinto this area, starting with control of the railroads in 1886.4. GIBBONS v. OGDEN (1824)New York State gave exclusive navigation rights to all waterwithin the jurisdiction of the state to R.R. Livingston andR. Fulton, who in turn assigned Ogden the right to operatebetween New York City and New Jersey ports. Gibbonsowned two steamships running between Elizabethtown andNew York, which were licensed under Act of Congress. Ogdenobtained an injunction against Gibbons, who appealed.DECISION: Only the Federal Government can regulatecommerce between two states (in this case, on the HudsonRiver), as stated in Art.I, sec.8. When state law and federallaw come into conflict, federal law must be supreme.IMPORTANCE: “commerce” was interpreted broadly,to mean both goods and people. States were limited in theirrights to control commerce because the Constitution delegatedthat power to Congress. This was the first case to go to theCourt under the commerce clause.JOHN MARSHALL EXPOUNDS THECONSTITUTIONThis instrument contains an enumeration of powers expresslygranted by the people to their government. It has been saidthat these powers ought to be construed strictly. But whyought they to be so construed? Is there one sentence in theConstitution which gives contenance to this rule? In the last ofthe enumerated powers, that which grants, expressly, the meansfor carrying all others into execution, Congress is authorized“to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper” for thepurpose. But this limitation on the means which may be usedis not extended to the powers which are conferred; nor is thereone sentence in the Constitution, which has been pointed out209

y the gentlemen of the bar or which we have been able todiscern, that prescribes this rule. We do not, therefore, thinkourselves justified in adopting it. What do the gentlemenmean by a strict construction? It they contend only againstthat enlarged construction which would extend words beyondtheir natural and obvious import, we might question theapplication of the term, but should not controvert the principle.If they contend for that narrow construction which, in supportof some theory not to be found in the Constitution, woulddeny to the government those powers which the words of thegrant, as usually understood, import, and which are consistentwith the general views and objects of the instrument; for thatnarrow construction, which would cripple the government, andrender it unequal to the objects for which it is declared to beinstituted, and to which the powers given, as fairly understood,render it competent; then we cannot perceive the propriety ofthis strict construction, nor adopt it as the rule by which theConstitution is to be expounded. As men whose intentionsrequire no concealment generally employ the words whichmost directly and aptly express the ideas they intend to convey,the enlightened patriots who framed our Constitution, and thepeople who adopted it, must be understood to have employedwords in their natural sense, and to have intended what theyhave said....The Report and Resolutions of theHartford Convention January 4, 1815The dissatisfaction of the New England Federalists with Republicanpolicies and the War of 1812 culminated in the Hartford Conventionon December 1814. The Convention was attended by delegatesfrom Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island andNew Hampshire. The resolutions of the convention arrived inWashington, D.C. just after the news of General Andrew Jackson’svictory at N~ Orleans and the Treaty of Ghent. As you read, considerthe complaints and proposals of the New England Federalists whomet at Hartford. Why do they support such proposals? And, thinkabout how these proposals might have been viewed by an Americanpeople proud of their victory in the War of 1812.First - ... [certain states have collectively acted] by excitinglocal jealousies and ambition so as to secure popular leaders inone section of the Union, the control of public affairs. . .Fourthly - The abolition of existing taxes, requisite to preparethe country for those changes to which nations are alwaysexposed.Fifthly - the influence of patronage in the distribution of offices,which in these states has been almost invariably made amongmen the least entitled to such distinction. . . .Sixthly - The admission of new states into the Union formedat pleasure in the western region, has destroyed the balance ofpower which existed among the original States....Seventhly - The easy admission of naturalized foreigners, toplaces of trust, honor or profit, operating as an inducement tothe malcontent subjects on the Old World to come to theseStates....Eighthly -Hostility to Great Britain, and partiality to the lategovernment of France....Lastly and principally - A visionary and superficial theoryin regard to commerce, accompanied by a real hatred but afeigned regard to its interests, and a ruinous perseverance inefforts to render it an instrument of coercion and war....Therefore resolved...That it be and is hereby recommended... to authorize animmediate and earnest application to be made to thegovernment of the United States, requesting their consent tosome arrangement, whereby the said states may separately or inconcert, be empowered to assume upon themselves the defenseof their territory against the enemy.210 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

That the following amendments of the constitution of theUnited States be recommended to the states....First. Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportionedamong the several states... according to their respective numberof free persons... excluding Indians not taxed, and all otherpersons....Second. No new state shall be admitted into the Union byCongress... without the concurrence of two thirds of bothhouses.Third. Congress shall not have the power to lay any embargoon the ships or vessels of the citizens of the United States... formore than sixty days....Fifth. Congress shall not make or declare war... without theconcurrence of two thirds of both houses....Seventh. The same person shall not be elected president of theUnited States a second time; nor shall the president be electedfrom the same state two terms in succession....The Monroe Doctrine (1823)... At the proposal of the Russian Imperial Government,made through the minister of the Emperor residing here, afull power and instructions have been transmitted to theminister of the United States at St. Petersburg to arrange byamicable negotiation the respective rights and interests ofthe two nations on the northwest coast of this continent. Asimilar proposal had been made by his Imperial Majesty to theGovernment of Great Britain, which has likewise been accededto. The Government of the United States has been desirous bythis friendly proceeding of manifesting the great value whichthey have invariably attached to the friendship of the emperorand their solicitude to cultivate the best understanding withhis Government. In the discussions to which this interesthas given rise and in the arrangements by which they mayterminate the occasion has been judged proper for asserting,as a principle in which the rights and interests of the UnitedStates are involved, that the American continents, by the freeand independent condition which they have assumed andmaintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects forfuture colonization by any European powers.It was stated at the commencement of the last session that agreat effort was then making in Spain and Portugal to improvethe condition of the people of those countries, and that itappeared to be conducted with extraordinary moderation. Itneed scarcely be remarked that the result has been so far verydifferent from what was then anticipated. Of events in thatquarter of the globe, with which we have so much intercourseand from which we derive our origin, we have always beenanxious and interested spectators. The citizens of the UnitedStates cherish sentiments the most friendly in favor of theliberty and happiness of their fellowmen on that side of theAtlantic. In the wars of the European powers in mattersrelating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor doesit comport with our policy so to do. It is only when our rightsare invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries ormake preparation for our defense with the movements in thishemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected,and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened andimpartial observers. The political system of the allied powers isessentially different in this respect from that of America. Thisdifference proceeds from that which exists in their respectiveGovernments and to the defense of our own, which has beenachieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, andmatured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens, andunder which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this wholenation is devoted. We owe it, therefore, to candor and amicablerelations existing between the United States and those powersto declare that we should consider any attempt on their partto extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere asdangerous to our peace and safety with the existing colonies211

or dependencies of any European power we have not interferedand shall not interfere. But with the Governments who havedeclared their independence and maintained it, and whoseindependence we have, on great consideration and on justprinciples, acknowledged, we could not view any interpositionfor the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any othermanner their destiny, by any European power in any otherlight than as the manifestation of an unfriendly dispositiontoward the United States. In the war between those newGovernments and Spain we declared our neutrality at the timeof their recognition, and to this we have adhered, and shallcontinue to adhere, provided no change shall occur which, inthe judgment of the competent authorities of this Government,shall make a corresponding change on the part of the UnitedStates indispensable to their security.The late events in Spain and Portugal shew that Europe isstill unsettled. Of this important fact no stronger proof canbe adduced than that the allied powers should have thoughtit proper, any principle satisfactory to themselves, to haveinterposed by force in the internal concerns of Spain. Towhat extent such interposition may be carried, on the sameprinciple is a question in which all independent powers whosegovernments differ from theirs are interested, even those mostremote, and surely none more so than the United States. Ourpolicy in regard to Europe which was adopted at an early stageof the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of theglobe, never the less remains the same, which is, not to interferein the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider thegovernment de facto as the legitimate government for us;to cultivate friendly relations with it, and to preserve thoserelations by a frank, firm, and manly policy, meeting in allinstances the just claims of every power, submitting to injuriesfrom none. But in regard to these continents circumstancesare eminently and conspicuously different. It is impossible thatthe allied powers should extend their political system to anyportion of either continent without endangering our peace andhappiness; nor can anyone believe that our southern brethren,if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord. Itis equally impossible, therefore, that we should behold suchinterposition in any form with indifference. If we look to thecomparative strength and resources of Spain and those newGovernments, and their distance from each other, it must beobvious that she can never subdue them. It is still the truepolicy of the United States to leave the parties to themselves,in the hope that other powers will pursue the same course.212 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

3v.the disgusting spirit ofequality: the age of jacksonand antebellum reform:1824-1860VThe Disgusting Spirit of Equality: The Age of Jackson and AntebellumReform: 1824-1860213

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Transcendentalism DefinedThough closely related to the English and European Romanticmovement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.the philosophy called Transcendentalism that gained a largefollowing in New England during the early 1830’s was notmerely an American restatement of Romantic ideas. Rather,it was the combining of these ideas with existing elements ofAmerican belief, The result was a philosophical movement inmany ways similar to that which had occurred in Englandand Germany, but at the same time different. The Romanticmovement, in holding with the individual worth and goodnessof humanity, glorifying the pleasures of communion withnature, condemning society for its distracting and corruptingmaterialism, and urging individual freedom of expressionfreedomfrom the rules and constraints of earlier philosophiesand theologies— appealed to a country beginning to chafe atthe restrictions of an already declining Puritanism.The term Transcendentalism is not itself an invention of theNew England Transcendentalists; the German philosopherImmanuel Kant (1724—1804) had used it In his writing. Toits New England advocates the term came to embody thecentral idea of their philosophy.’ that there is some knowledgeof reality, or truth, that man grasps not through logic orthe laws of science but through the intuition of his divineintellect. Because of this inherent, extra-intellectual ability,the Transcendentalists believed that each person should followthe sway of his own beliefs and ideas, however divergentfrom the social norm they might be. They believed that theindividual’s intuitive response to any given situation wouldbe the right thing for him to do. Closely related to this ideais that of the integrity of the individual, the belief that eachperson is inherently good, capable of making his own decisions,and worthy of the respect of every other human being. Theseideas found a sympathetic response among a people who hadlong held in high regard the democratic and individualisticprinciples of the early settler, statesman, and citizen.Inevitably, these ideas were to clash with the doctrinesof organized religion. An earlier group of New Englandintellectuals broke away from Puritanism and founded theUnitarian Church during the late eighteenth century. Theirspilt with the established church was in a large part due tothe intellectual and commercial trends of the age. In a daywhen commerce and science had become predominant,where material comfort and social mobility were becomingincreasingly accessible to more and more people, the oldreligion—Puritanism-must have indeed seemed irrelevant.By the 1830’s the Unitarians, yesterday’s rebels, had becomeBoston’s establishment, dominating the city’s intellectualcenters, both the church and Harvard UniversityIronically, Emerson as well as many other earlyTranscendentalists began their careers as divinity students.studying at the latter institution for the Unitarian minister.Many of these people were, in fact, the children of influentialmembers of the Unitarian church. The former rebels, Boston’seconomic, social, political, and cultural elite, found themselvesby the early 1830’s embroiled in yet another intellectualinsurrection, though this time it was they who were underattack.Transcendentalists like Emerson did not limit their attackssolely to questions of theology, but went beyond churchissues to the very fabric of society itself. To them, sterility inreligion had its analogues in both public and private life. Theybelieved that rationalism, the philosophy from which modernscience had sprung, denied the profound sense of mysterythat these thinkers found in both nature and humanity. Theyfelt that current thought had reduced God to a watchmakerwho once having built and wound the Universe now sat backand detachedly observed, The individual in this scheme waslikewise reduced, as Thoreau said, “to a cog” or wheel in thisuniversal machine, Social conformity, materialism, and whatthey believed to be a lack of moral commitment angered theseyoung men and women. In addition to their writings, theirbeliefs found expression in various movements: feminism,abolitionism, utopianism and communalism, and even thebeginnings of labor unionism.In their opposition to the rationalistic tendencies of their age,the Transcendentalists adopted a type of philosophy besttermed Idealism, Actually, Transcendentalism incorporatesrates elements from many philosophies and religions; NeoPlatonism, Puritan mysticism, Hinduism, Pantheism, andEuropean Romanticism, to name but a few, Unlike therationalists, idealists believe that material objects do nothave a real existence of their own. Rather, these objects arediffused parts or aspects of God, the Over-Soul, Materialobjects therefore mirror or reflect an ideal world. Thus, bycontemplating objects in nature, the individual can transcendthis world and discover union with God and the Ideal. The keyinnate quality used by the individual to achieve this state ofunion is his intuition, Intuition is granted every soul at birth.Tangential to this belief is reincarnation, for at death idealistsbelieve that the individual’s soul returns to its source, God,where it maybe again dispatched to this world as another life.Transcendentalism greatly influenced the course of Americanliterature, affecting the writings of both those who adhered toits principles and those who reacted against them.215

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Poems(1803—1882)Emerson was nineteenth-century America’s most notable prophetand sage. He was an apostle of progress and optimism, andhis dedication to self-reliant individualism inspired his fellowTranscentialist Bronson Alcott to observe, “Emerson’s church consistsof one member—himself; He waits for the world to agree with him.“Emerson was born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian minister and thedescendents of a long line of distinguished New England clergymen.He was educated at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard. Afterhis graduation from college in 1821 Emerson taught in a Bostonschool for young ladies. In 1825 he entered the Harvard DivinitySchool, where he absorbed the liberal, intellectualized Christianityof Unitarianism. It rejected the Calvinist ideas of predestinationand Iota/depravity, substituting instead a faith in the saving graceof divine love and a belie! in the eventual brotherhood of man in aKingdom of Heaven on earth.In 1829 Emerson was ordained the Unitarian minister of the SecondChurch of Boston. He was a popular and successful preacher, butafter three years he had come to doubt the efficacy of the sacrament ofthe Lord’s Supper, and his growing objections to even the remnantsof Christian dogma surviving in early nineteenth-centuryUnitarianism led him to conclude that “to be a good minister it wasnecessary to leave the ministers.”After preaching his farewell sermon Emerson went on a tour ofEurope, where he met Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth and wasstrongly influenced by the ideas of European Romanticism. Uponreturning to America, he began his lifelong career as a public lecturer,which took him to meeting halts and lyceums in cities and villagesthroughout much of the nation. He bought a house in Concord,Massachusetts, and there he associated with Thoreau, Hawthorne,Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and others who belonged to theinformal Transcendentalist Club, organized for the “exchange ofthought among those interested in the new views in philosophy,theology, and literature.”In Concord, Emerson became the chief spokesman oftranscendentalism in America. His philosophy was a compound ofYankee Puritanism and Unitarianism merged with the teachings ofEuropean romanticism. The word “transcendental” had long beenused in philosophy to describe truths that were beyond the reach ofman’s limited senses, and as a transcendentalist, Emerson arguedfor intuition as a guide to universal truth. He believed that God isall-loving and all-pervading, that His presence in men made themdivine and assured their salvation. Emerson believed that there isan essential unity in apparent variety, that there is a correspondencebetween the world and the spirit, that nature is an image in whichman can perceive the divine.Emerson’s beliefs were a balance of skepticism and faith, stirredby moral fervor. To many of his readers they have seemed neithercoherent nor complete. His early writings were rejected as “the latestform of infidelity. “He has been called “St. Ralph, the Optimist”and charged with having a serene ignorance of the true nature ofevil. His exaltation of intuition over reason has been dismissed as ajustification of infantile enthusiasms; his celebration of individualismhas been judged an argument for mindless self-assertiveness.Emerson was a seer and poet, not a man of cool logic. In his letters,essays, and poems he sought to inspire a cultural rejuvenation, totransmit to his listeners and readers his own lofty perceptions. Hisappeal lay in his rejection of outworn traditions and in his faithin goodness and inevitable progress. His words both dazzled andpuzzled his audience. Like his philosophy, his writing seemed tolack organization, but it swarmed with epigrams and memorablepassages. The nineteenth century found him a man who had“something capital to say about everything, “ and his ideas influencedAmerican writers from Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, and EmilyDickinson in the nineteenth century to E. A. Robinson, RobertFrost, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens in the twentieth century.Emerson’s perceptions of man and nature as symbols of universaltruth encouraged the development of the symbolist movement inAmerican writing. His assertion that even the commonplaces ofAmerican the were worthy of the highest art helped to establish anational literature. His repudiation of established traditions andinstitutions encouraged a literary revolution; his ideas, expressedin his own writing and in the works of others, have been takenas an intellectual foundation for movements of social changethat have profoundly altered modern America. Emerson wasno political revolutionary. He preached harmony in a discordantage, and he recognized the needs of human society as incompatiblewith unrestrained individualism. As he grew older he becameincreasingly conservative, but he remained a firm advocate of selfreliantidealism, and in his writings and in the example of his lifeEmerson has endured as a guide for those who would shun al/foolishconsistencies and escape blind submission to fate.EACH AND ALLLittle thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clownOf thee from the hill-top looking down;The heifer that lows in the upland farm,Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;The sexton, tolling his hell at noon,Deems not that great NapoleonStops his horse, and lists with delight,Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;Nor knowest thou what argumentThy life to thy neighbor’s creed has lent.216 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

All are needed by each one;Nothing is fair or good alone.I thought the sparrow’s note from heaven,Singing at dawn on the alder bough;I brought him home, in his nest, at even;He sings the song, but it cheers not now,For I did not bring home the river and sky;He sang to my ear,—they sang to my eye.The delicate shells lay on the shore;The bubbles of the latest waveFresh pearls to their enamel gave,And the bellowing of the savage seaGreeted their safe escape to me.I wiped away the weeds and foam,I fetched my sea-born treasures home;But the poor, unsightly, noisome thingsHad left their beauty on the shoreWith the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.The lover watched his graceful maid,As ‘mid the virgin train she strayed,Nor knew her beauty’s best attireWas woven still by the snow-white choir.At last she came to this hermitage,Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage;—The gay enchantment was undone,A gentle wife, but fairy none.Then I said, “I covet truth;Beauty is unripe childhood’s cheat;—I leave it behind with the games of youth:”As I spoke, beneath my feetThe ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,Running over the club-moss burrs;I inhaled the violet’s breath;Around me stood the oaks and firs;Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground undo;Over me soared the eternal sky,Full of light and of deity;Again I saw, again I heard,The rolling river, the morning bird;—Beauty through my senses stole;I yielded myself to the perfect whole.CONCORD HYMNSUNG AT THE COMPLETION OF THE BATTLEMONUMENT, JULY 4, 1837By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood.And fired the shot heard round the world.The foe long since in silence slept;Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;And Time the ruined bridge has sweptDown the dark stream which seaward creeps.On this green bank, by this soft stream,We set today a votive stone;That memory may their deed redeem,When, like our sires, our sons are gone.Spirit, that made those heroes dareTo die, and leave their children free,Bid Time and Nature gently spareThe shaft we raise to them and thee.FABLE1837The mountain and the squirrelHad a quarrel,And the former called the latter “Little Prig”;Bunt replied,“You are doubtless very big;But all sorts of things and weatherMust be taken in together,To make up a yearAnd a sphere.And I think it no disgraceTo occupy my place.If I’m not so large as you,You are not so small as I,And not half so spry.I’ll not deny you makeA very pretty squirrel track;Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;If I cannot carry forests on my back,Neither can you crack a nut.”DAYSDaughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,’And marching single in an endless file,Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.To each they offer gifts after his will,Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,217

Forgot my morning wishes, hastilyTook a few herbs and apples, and the DayTurned and departed silent. I, too late,Under her solemn fillet saw scorn.from “NATURE”I BECOME A TRANSPARENT EYEBALLCrossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under aclouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence ofspecial good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.I am glad to the brink of fearIn the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake hisslough, and at what period soever of life is always a child.In the woods is perpetual youth.Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign,a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how heshould tire of them in a thousand years.In the woods, we return to reason and faith.There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, nocalamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair.Standing on the bare ground,-my head bathed by the blithe airand uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes.I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing;I see all;the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I ampart or parcel of God.The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign andaccidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master orservant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connatethan in streets or villages.In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line ofthe horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his ownnature.Henry David Thoreau: Civil DisobedienceI heartily accept the motto, “That government is best whichgoverns least”; and I should like to see it acted up to morerapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts tothis, which also I believe--”That government is best whichgoverns not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that willbe the kind of government which the will have. Government isat best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, andall governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objectionswhich have been brought against a standing army, and theyare many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at lastbe brought against a standing government. The standing armyis only an arm of the standing government. The governmentitself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen toexecute their will, is equally liable to be abused and pervertedbefore the people can act through it. Witness the presentMexican war, the work of comparatively a few individualsusing the standing government as their tool; for in the outset,the people would not have consented to this measure.This American government--what is it but a tradition, thougha recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired toposterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It hasnot the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single mancan bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the peoplethemselves. But it is not the less necessary for this; for thepeople must have some complicated machinery or other, andhear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have.Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposedupon, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. Itis excellent, we must all allow. Yet this government never ofitself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with whichit got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It doesnot settle the West. It does not educate. The characterinherent in the American people has done all that has beenaccomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if thegovernment had not sometimes got in its way. For governmentis an expedient, by which men would fain succeed in letting oneanother alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient,the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, ifthey were not made of india-rubber, would never manage tobounce over obstacles which legislators are continually puttingin their way; and if one were to judge these men wholly bythe effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions,they would deserve to be classed and punished with thosemischievious persons who put obstructions on the railroads.But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those whocall themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at one nogovernment, but at once a better government. Let every manmake known what kind of government would command hisrespect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.After all, the practical reason why, when the power is oncein the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for218 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

a long period continue, to rule is not because they are mostlikely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to theminority, but because they are physically the strongest. But agovernment in which the majority rule in all cases can not bebased on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can therenot be a government in which the majorities do not virtuallydecide right and wrong, but conscience?--in which majoritiesdecide only those questions to which the rule of expediency isapplicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the leastdegree, resign his conscience to the legislator? WHy has everyman a conscience then? I think that we should be men first,and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respectfor the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation whichI have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience;but a corporation on conscientious men is a corporation witha conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, bymeans of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are dailymade the agents on injustice. A common and natural resultof an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file ofsoldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys,and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale tothe wars, against their wills, ay, against their common senseand consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed,and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubtthat it is a damnable business in which they are concerned;they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men atall? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service ofsome unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, andbehold a marine, such a man as an American government canmake, or such as it can make a man with its black arts--a mereshadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out aliveand standing, and already, as one may say, buried under armswith funeral accompaniment, though it may be,“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, As his corse to therampart we hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shotO’er the grave where out hero was buried.”The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but asmachines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, andthe militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In mostcases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement orof the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level withwood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhapsbe manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Suchcommand no more respect than men of straw or a lump ofdirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers,and office-holders--serve the state chiefly with their heads;and, as the rarely make any moral distinctions, they are aslikely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A veryfew--as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense,and men--serve the state with their consciences also, and sonecessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonlytreated as enemies by it. A wise man will only be useful as aman, and will not submit to be “clay,” and “stop a hole to keepthe wind away,” but leave that office to his dust at least:“I am too high born to be propertied, To be a second at control,Or useful serving-man and instrument To any sovereign statethroughout the world.”He who gives himself entirely to his fellow men appears tothem useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially tothem in pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.How does it become a man to behave toward the Americangovernment today? I answer, that he cannot without disgracebe associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize thatpolitical organization as my government which is the slave’sgovernment also.All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the rightto refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, whenits tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. Butalmost all say that such is not the case now. But such was thecase, they think, in the Revolution of ‘75. If one were to tell methat this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreigncommodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that Ishould not make an ado about it, for I can do without them.All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enoughgood to counter-balance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evilto make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have itsmachine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, letus not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when asixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to bethe refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustlyoverrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected tomilitary law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men torebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgentis that fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but oursis the invading army.Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, inhis chapter on the “Duty of Submission to Civil Government,”resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds tosay that “so long as the interest of the whole society requires it,that it, so long as the established government cannot be resistedor changed without public inconveniencey, it is the will of God.. .that the established government be obeyed--and no longer.This principle being admitted, the justice of every particularcase of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity ofthe danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probabilityand expense of redressing it on the other.” Of this, he says,every man shall judge for himself. But Paley appears never tohave contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediencydoes not apply, in which a people, as well and an individual,must do justice, cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested aplank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though Idrown myself. This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient.But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. Thispeople must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico,though it cost them their existence as a people.219

In their practice, nations agree with Paley; but does anyonethink that Massachusetts does exactly what is right at thepresent crisis?“A drab of stat, a cloth-o’-silver slut, To have her train borne up,and her soul trail in the dirt.”Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform inMassachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at theSouth, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here,who are more interested in commerce and agriculture thanthey are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice tothe slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not withfar-off foes, but with those who, neat at home, co-operate with,and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom thelatter would be harmless. We are accustomed to say, that themass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, becausethe few are not as materially wiser or better than the many.It is not so important that many should be good as you, asthat there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that willleaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are in opinionopposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothingto put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves childrenof Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands intheir pockets, and say that they know not what to do, anddo nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom tothe question of free trade, and quietly read the prices-currentalong with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, itmay be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-currentof an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and theyregret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing inearnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for otherto remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. Atmost, they give up only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenanceand Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are ninehundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuousman. But it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thingthan with the temporary guardian of it.All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon,with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong,with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. Thecharacter of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance,as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that rightshould prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Itsobligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Evenvoting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressingto men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise manwill not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it toprevail through the power of the majority. There is but littlevirtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shallat length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be becausethey are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but littleslavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be theonly slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slaverywho asserts his own freedom by his vote.I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, forthe selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chieflyof editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but Ithink, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectableman what decision they may come to? Shall we not have theadvantage of this wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can wenot count upon some independent votes? Are there not manyindividuals in the country who do not attend conventions? Butno: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediatelydrifted from his position, and despairs of his country, whenhis country has more reasons to despair of him. He forthwithadopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only availableone, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposesof the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that ofany unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may havebeen bought. O for a man who is a man, and, and my neighborsays, has a bone is his back which you cannot pass your handthrough! Our statistics are at fault: the population has beenreturned too large. How many men are there to a squarethousand miles in the country? Hardly one. Does not Americaoffer any inducement for men to settle here? The Americanhas dwindled into an Odd Fellow--one who may be knownby the development of his organ of gregariousness, and amanifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance; whose firstand chief concern, on coming into the world, is to see that thealmshouses are in good repair; and, before yet he has lawfullydonned the virile garb, to collect a fund to the support of thewidows and orphans that may be; who, in short, ventures tolive only by the aid of the Mutual Insurance company, whichhas promised to bury him decently.It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himselfto the eradication of any, even to most enormous, wrong; hemay still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it ishis duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it nothought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devotemyself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see,at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’sshoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue hiscontemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated.I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to havethem order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves,or to march to Mexico--see if I would go”; and yet these verymen have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly,at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. The soldier isapplauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those whodo not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makesthe war; is applauded by those whose own act and authorityhe disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitentto that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned,but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment.Thus, under the name of Order and Civil Government, weare all made at last to pay homage to and support our ownmeanness. After the first blush of sin comes its indifference;and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and notquite unnecessary to that life which we have made.220 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the mostdisinterested virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to whichthe virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble aremost likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove ofthe character and measures of a government, yield to it theirallegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientioussupporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles toreform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union,to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they notdissolve it themselves--the union between themselves and theState--and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? Do notthey stand in same relation to the State that the State does tothe Union? And have not the same reasons prevented the Statefrom resisting the Union which have prevented them fromresisting the State?How can a man be satisfied to entertain and opinion merely,and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion isthat he is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollarby your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing youare cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even withpetitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectualsteps at once to obtain the full amount, and see to it that youare never cheated again. Action from principle, the perceptionand the performance of right, changes things and relations; itis essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly withanything which was. It not only divided States and churches,it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating thediabolical in him from the divine.Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shallwe endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we havesucceeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men, generally,under such a government as this, think that they ought to waituntil they have persuaded the majority to alter them. Theythink that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worsethan the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself thatthe remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is itnot more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does itnot cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist beforeit is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to put outits faults, and do better than it would have them? Why doesit always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus andLuther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial ofits authority was the only offense never contemplated by itsgovernment; else, why has it not assigned its definite, itssuitable and proportionate, penalty? If a man who has noproperty refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State,he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that Iknow, and determined only by the discretion of those who puthim there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillingsfrom the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again.If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machineof government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wearsmooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injusticehas a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively foritself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy willnot be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that itrequires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say,break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop themachine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do notlend myself to the wrong which I condemn.As for adopting the ways of the State has provided forremedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take toomuch time, and a man’s life will be gone. I have other affairsto attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make thisa good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. Aman has not everything to do, but something; and becausehe cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should bepetitioning the Governor or the Legislature any more than itis theirs to petition me; and if they should not hear my petition,what should I do then? But in this case the State has providedno way: its very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to beharsh and stubborn and unconcilliatory; but it is to treat withthe utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that canappreciate or deserves it. So is all change for the better, likebirth and death, which convulse the body.I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselvesAbolitionists should at once effectually withdraw theirsupport, both in person and property, from the governmentof Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majorityof one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. Ithink that it is enough if they have God on their side, withoutwaiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right thanhis neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.I meet this American government, or its representative, theState government, directly, and face to face, once a year--no more--in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the onlymode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it;and it then says distinctly, Recognize me; and the simplest,the most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, theindispensablest mode of treating with it on this head, ofexpressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to denyit then. My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man Ihave to deal with--for it is, after all, with men and not withparchment that I quarrel--and he has voluntarily chosen to bean agent of the government. How shall he ever know well thathe is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, untilhe is obliged to consider whether he will treat me, his neighbor,for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposedman, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if hecan get over this obstruction to his neighborlines without aruder and more impetuous thought or speech correspondingwith his action. I know this well, that if one thousand, if onehundred, if ten men whom I could name--if ten honest menonly--ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts,ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership,and be locked up in the county jail therefor, itwould be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters221

not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once welldone is done forever. But we love better to talk about it: that wesay is our mission. Reform keeps many scores of newspapersin its service, but not one man. If my esteemed neighbor, theState’s ambassador, who will devote his days to the settlementof the question of human rights in the Council Chamber,instead of being threatened with the prisons of Carolina, wereto sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts, that State which isso anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister--thoughat present she can discover only an act of inhospitality to bethe ground of a quarrel with her--the Legislature would notwholly waive the subject of the following winter.Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true placefor a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the onlyplace which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and lessdespondent spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked outof the State by her own act, as they have already put themselvesout by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, andthe Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to pleadthe wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate butmore free and honorable ground, where the State places thosewho are not with her, but against her--the only house in a slaveState in which a free man can abide with honor. If any thinkthat their influence would be lost there, and their voices nolonger afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as anenemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truthis stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently andeffectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a littlein his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of papermerely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless whileit conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but itis irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternativeis to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, theState will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men werenot to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violentand bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enablethe State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. Thisis, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any suchis possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asksme, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “Ifyou really wish to do anything, resign your office.” When thesubject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned fromoffice, then the revolution is accomplished. But even supposeblood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through thiswound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, andhe bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.I have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender, ratherthan the seizure of his goods--though both will serve thesame purpose--because they who assert the purest right, andconsequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonlyhave not spent much time in accumulating property. To suchthe State renders comparatively small service, and a slight taxis wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if they are obliged toearn it by special labor with their hands. If there were one wholived wholly without the use of money, the State itself wouldhesitate to demand it of him. But the rich man--not to make anyinvidious comparison--is always sold to the institution whichmakes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the lessvirtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, andobtains them for him; it was certainly no great virtue to obtainit. It puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise betaxed to answer; while the only new question which it puts isthe hard but superfluous one, how to spend it. Thus his moralground is taken from under his feet. The opportunities of livingare diminished in proportion as that are called the “means” areincreased. The best thing a man can do for his culture whenhe is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which heentertained when he was poor. Christ answered the Herodiansaccording to their condition. “Show me the tribute-money,”said he--and one took a penny out of his pocket--if you usemoney which has the image of Caesar on it, and which he hasmade current and valuable, that is, if you are men of the State,and gladly enjoy the advantages of Caesar’s government, thenpay him back some of his own when he demands it. “Rendertherefore to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God thosethings which are God’s”--leaving them no wiser than before asto which was which; for they did not wish to know.When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive that,whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness ofthe question, and their regard for the public tranquillity, thelong and the short of the matter is, that they cannot spare theprotection of the existing government, and they dread theconsequences to their property and families of disobedience toit. For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever relyon the protection of the State. But, if I deny the authority of theState when it presents its tax bill, it will soon take and waste allmy property, and so harass me and my children without end.This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly,and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. It willnot be worth the while to accumulate property; that wouldbe sure to go again. You must hire or squat somewhere, andraise but a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live withinyourself, and depend upon yourself always tucked up and readyfor a start, and not have many affairs. A man may grow rich inTurkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of theTurkish government. Confucius said: “If a state is governedby the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjectsof shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason,riches and honors are subjects of shame.” No: until I want theprotection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in somedistant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or untilI am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peacefulenterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts,and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in everysense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than itwould to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the Church, andcommanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a222 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never Imyself. “Pay,” it said, “or be locked up in the jail.” I declined topay. But, unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. I did notsee why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest,and not the priest the schoolmaster; for I was not the State’sschoolmaster, but I supported myself by voluntary subscription.I did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax bill,and have the State to back its demand, as well as the Church.However, as the request of the selectmen, I condescended tomake some such statement as this in writing: “Know all menby these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to beregarded as a member of any society which I have not joined.”This I gave to the town clerk; and he has it. The State, havingthus learned that I did not wish to be regarded as a member ofthat church, has never made a like demand on me since; thoughit said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time.If I had known how to name them, I should then have signedoff in detail from all the societies which I never signed on to;but I did not know where to find such a complete list.I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was put into a jail onceon this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering thewalls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of woodand iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained thelight, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of thatinstitution which treated my as if I were mere flesh and bloodand bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should haveconcluded at length that this was the best use it could put meto, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in someway. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me andmy townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb orbreak through before they could get to be as free as I was. Idid nor for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed agreat waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all mytownsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how totreat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In everythreat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for theythought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of thatstone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously theylocked the door on my meditations, which followed them outagain without let or hindrance, and they were really all thatwas dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolvedto punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at someperson against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. Isaw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lonewoman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know itsfriends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it,and pitied it.Thus the state never intentionally confronts a man’s sense,intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is notarmed with superior with or honesty, but with superior physicalstrength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after myown fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force hasa multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher lawthan I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hearof men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men.What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a governmentwhich says to me, “Your money our your life,” why should I bein haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, andnot know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself;do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I amnot responsible for the successful working of the machineryof society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that,when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one doesnot remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey theirown laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can,till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If aplant cannot live according to nature, it dies; and so a man.The night in prison was novel and interesting enough. Theprisoners in their shirtsleeves were enjoying a chat and theevening air in the doorway, when I entered. But the jailersaid, “Come, boys, it is time to lock up”; and so they dispersed,and I heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollowapartments. My room-mate was introduced to me by thejailer as “a first-rate fellow and clever man.” When the doorwas locked, he showed me where to hang my hat, and howhe managed matters there. The rooms were whitewashedonce a month; and this one, at least, was the whitest, mostsimply furnished, and probably neatest apartment in town.He naturally wanted to know where I came from, and whatbrought me there; and, when I had told him, I asked him in myturn how he came there, presuming him to be an honest an, ofcourse; and as the world goes, I believe he was. “Why,” said he,“they accuse me of burning a barn; but I never did it.” As nearas I could discover, he had probably gone to bed in a barn whendrunk, and smoked his pipe there; and so a barn was burnt. Hehad the reputation of being a clever man, had been there somethree months waiting for his trial to come on, and would haveto wait as much longer; but he was quite domesticated andcontented, since he got his board for nothing, and thought thathe was well treated.He occupied one window, and I the other; and I saw that ifone stayed there long, his principal business would be to lookout the window. I had soon read all the tracts that were leftthere, and examined where former prisoners had broken out,and where a grate had been sawed off, and heard the history ofthe various occupants of that room; for I found that even therethere was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyondthe walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the townwhere verses are composed, which are afterward printed in acircular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long listof young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape,who avenged themselves by singing them.I pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as I could, for fear I shouldnever see him again; but at length he showed me which was mybed, and left me to blow out the lamp.It was like travelling into a far country, such as I had neverexpected to behold, to lie there for one night. It seemed to methat I never had heard the town clock strike before, not the223

evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the windowsopen, which were inside the grating. It was to see my nativevillage in the light of the Middle Ages, and our Concord wasturned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castlespassed before me. They were the voices of old burghers that Iheard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditorof whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacentvillage inn--a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was acloser view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I neverhad seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiarinstitutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend whatits inhabitants were about.In the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole inthe door, in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit, andholding a pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and an ironspoon. When they called for the vessels again, I was greenenough to return what bread I had left, but my comrade seizedit, and said that I should lay that up for lunch or dinner. Soonafter he was let out to work at haying in a neighboring field,whither he went every day, and would not be back till noon; sohe bade me good day, saying that he doubted if he should seeme again.When I came out of prison--for some one interfered, and paidthat tax--I did not perceive that great changes had taken placeon the common, such as he observed who went in a youth andemerged a gray-headed man; and yet a change had come to myeyes come over the scene--the town, and State, and country,greater than any that mere time could effect. I saw yet moredistinctly the State in which I lived. I saw to what extent thepeople among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighborsand friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only;that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they werea distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions,as the Chinamen and Malays are that in their sacrifices tohumanity they ran no risks, not even to their property; thatafter all they were not so noble but they treated the thief as hehad treated them, and hoped, by a certain outward observanceand a few prayers, and by walking in a particular straightthrough useless path from time to time, to save their souls.This may be to judge my neighbors harshly; for I believe thatmany of them are not aware that they have such an institutionas the jail in their village.It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtorcame out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, lookingthrough their fingers, which were crossed to represent the jailwindow, “How do ye do?” My neighbors did not this saluteme, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I hadreturned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was goingto the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mender. When I waslet out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and,having put on my mended show, joined a huckleberry party,who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; andin half an hour--for the horse was soon tackled--was in themidst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, twomiles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.This is the whole history of “My Prisons.”I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am asdesirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject;and as for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educatemy fellow countrymen now. It is for no particular item in thetax bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegianceto the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. Ido not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till itbuys a man a musket to shoot one with--the dollar is innocent--but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. In fact,I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, thoughI will still make use and get what advantages of her I can, as isusual in such cases.If others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a sympathywith the State, they do but what they have already done intheir own case, or rather they abet injustice to a greater extentthan the State requires. If they pay the tax from a mistakeninterest in the individual taxed, to save his property, or preventhis going to jail, it is because they have not considered wiselyhow far they let their private feelings interfere with the publicgood.This, then is my position at present. But one cannot be toomuch on his guard in such a case, lest his actions be biased byobstinacy or an undue regard for the opinions of men. Let himsee that he does only what belongs to himself and to the hour.I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well, they are onlyignorant; they would do better if they knew how: why giveyour neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not inclinedto? But I think again, This is no reason why I should do as theydo, or permit others to suffer much greater pain of a differentkind. Again, I sometimes say to myself, When many millionsof men, without heat, without ill will, without personal feelingsof any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, without thepossibility, such is their constitution, of retracting or alteringtheir present demand, and without the possibility, on your side,of appeal to any other millions, why expose yourself to thisoverwhelming brute force? You do not resist cold and hunger,the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you quietly submitto a thousand similar necessities. You do not put your head intothe fire. But just in proportion as I regard this as not whollya brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that Ihave relations to those millions as to so many millions of men,and not of mere brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal ispossible, first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker ofthem, and, secondly, from them to themselves. But if I put myhead deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or tothe Maker for fire, and I have only myself to blame. If I couldconvince myself that I have any right to be satisfied with menas they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according,in some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of whatthey and I ought to be, then, like a good Mussulman andfatalist, I should endeavor to be satisfied with things as theyare, and say it is the will of God. And, above all, there is this224 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

difference between resisting this and a purely brute or naturalforce, that I can resist this with some effect; but I cannot expect,like Orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks and trees andbeasts.I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not wishto split hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set myself up asbetter than my neighbors. I seek rather, I may say, even anexcuse for conforming to the laws of the land. I am but tooready to conform to them. Indeed, I have reason to suspectmyself on this head; and each year, as the tax-gatherer comesround, I find myself disposed to review the acts and position ofthe general and State governments, and the spirit of the peopleto discover a pretext for conformity.“We must affect our country as our parents, And if at any timewe alienate Out love or industry from doing it honor, We mustrespect effects and teach the soul Matter of conscience andreligion, And not desire of rule or benefit.”I believe that the State will soon be able to take all my workof this sort out of my hands, and then I shall be no betterpatriot than my fellow-countrymen. Seen from a lower pointof view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good; thelaw and the courts are very respectable; even this State and thisAmerican government are, in many respects, very admirable,and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many havedescribed them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, whoshall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at orthinking of at all?However, the government does not concern me much, and Ishall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. It is not manymoments that I live under a government, even in this world. Ifa man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-free, that whichis not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwiserulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.I know that most men think differently from myself; but thosewhose lives are by profession devoted to the study of these orkindred subjects content me as little as any. Statesmen andlegislators, standing so completely within the institution,never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of movingsociety, but have no resting-place without it. They may be menof a certain experience and discrimination, and have no doubtinvented ingenious and even useful systems, for which wesincerely thank them; but all their wit and usefulness lie withincertain not very wide limits. They are wont to forget that theworld is not governed by policy and expediency. Webster nevergoes behind government, and so cannot speak with authorityabout it. His words are wisdom to those legislators whocontemplate no essential reform in the existing government;but for thinkers, and those who legislate for all tim, he neveronce glances at the subject. I know of those whose serene andwise speculations on this theme would soon reveal the limitsof his mind’s range and hospitality. Yet, compared with thecheap professions of most reformers, and the still cheaperwisdom an eloquence of politicians in general, his are almostthe only sensible and valuable words, and we thank Heaven forhim. Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, aboveall, practical. Still, his quality is not wisdom, but prudence.The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistentexpediency. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is notconcerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist withwrong-doing. He well deserves to be called, as he has beencalled, the Defender of the Constitution. There are really noblows to be given him but defensive ones. He is not a leader, buta follower. His leaders are the men of ‘87. “I have never madean effort,” he says, “and never propose to make an effort; I havenever countenanced an effort, and never mean to countenancean effort, to disturb the arrangement as originally made, bywhich various States came into the Union.” Still thinking ofthe sanction which the Constitution gives to slavery, he says,“Because it was part of the original compact--let it stand.”Notwithstanding his special acuteness and ability, he is unableto take a fact out of its merely political relations, and behold itas it lies absolutely to be disposed of by the intellect--what, forinstance, it behooves a man to do here in American today withregard to slavery--but ventures, or is driven, to make somesuch desperate answer to the following, while professing tospeak absolutely, and as a private man--from which what newand singular of social duties might be inferred? “The manner,”says he, “in which the governments of the States where slaveryexists are to regulate it is for their own consideration, underthe responsibility to their constituents, to the general laws ofpropriety, humanity, and justice, and to God. Associationsformed elsewhere, springing from a feeling of humanity, or anyother cause, have nothing whatever to do with it. They havenever received any encouragement from me and they neverwill. [These extracts have been inserted since the lecture wasread -HDT]They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have tracedup its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bibleand the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverenceand humanity; but they who behold where it comes tricklinginto this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, andcontinue their pilgrimage toward its fountainhead.No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America.They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators,politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but thespeaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capableof settling the much-vexed questions of the day. We loveeloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it mayutter, or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators have notyet learned the comparative value of free trade and of freed,of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no geniusor talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation andfinance, commerce and manufactures and agriculture. If wewere left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress forour guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience andthe effectual complaints of the people, America would not longretain her rank among the nations. For eighteen hundred years,though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament225

has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdomand practical talent enough to avail himself of the light whichit sheds on the science of legislation.The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submitto--for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do betterthan I, and in many things even those who neither know norcan do so well--is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it musthave the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have nopure right over my person and property but what I concede toit. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, froma limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a truerespect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher waswise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire.Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvementpossible in government? Is it not possible to take a step furthertowards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? Therewill never be a really free and enlightened State until the Statecomes to recognize the individual as a higher and independentpower, from which all its own power and authority are derived,and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining aState at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treatthe individual with respect as a neighbor; which even wouldnot think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were tolive aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it,who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow men. AState which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop offas fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still moreperfect and glorious State, which I have also imagined, but notyet anywhere seen.Martin Luther King, Jr.:Letter from a Birmingham JailIn the spring of 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conferenceand Martin Luther King, Jr., joined Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth’sBirmingham movement to demand the desegregation of what wasknown as the most racist and segregated city in America. Theopposition was strident and brutal, with Bull Connor’s policeusing fire hoses and billy clubs to repel the African-Americandemonstrators. Even when SCLC mobilized the young people ofBirmingham to lead the marches downtown, police terrorized thechildren, police dogs on them. The pictures from those demonstrationshelped galvanize Americans every-where in support of civil rightslegislation and eventually forced the Kennedy administration totake a more activist stance in support of civil rights.In the midst of these demonstrations, King was arrested. While injail, he responded in this letter to a statement of “moderate” whiteministers in Birmingham who had asked that the demonstrations becurtailed, and who seemed to blame the victims of violence as muchas not more than the perpetrators. Here, King eloquently preacheshis own sermon to those ministers, calling into question a positionthat would use “moderation” as a means of reinforcing oppression.King’s sermon is similar to an Old Testament ‘ jeremiad” where theprophets of Israel insisted on declaring the truth about their people.MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came acrossyour recent statement calling my present activities “unwise anduntimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my workand ideas. . . . But since I feel that you are men of genuine goodwill and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want totry to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient andreasonable terms.I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham,since you have been influenced by the view which arguesagainst “outsiders coming in.” . . . I am here because I haveorganizational ties here. . . . But more basically, I am inBirmingham because injustice is here.Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communitiesand states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not beconcerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injusticeanywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught inan inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garmentof destiny.Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Neveragain can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outsideagitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States cannever be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham.But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a226 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

similar concern for the conditions that brought about thedemonstrations.I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with thesuperficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effectsand does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunatethat demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it iseven more unfortunate that the city’s white power structureleft the Negro community with no alternative. In anynonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection ofthe facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation;self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through allthese steps in Birmingham.There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injusticeengulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the mostthoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly recordof brutality is widely know. Negroes have experienced grosslyunjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolvedbombing of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham thanin any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal factsof the case. . .On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiatewith the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused toen-gage in good-faith negotiation. Then, last September, camethe opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economiccommunity. In the course of the negotiations, certain promiseswere made by the merchants for example, to remove the stores’humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, theRevered Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the AlabamaChristian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratoriumon all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, werealized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A fewsigns, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted,and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. Wehad no alternative except to prepare for direct action, wherebywe would present our very bodies as a means of laying ourcase before the conscience of the local and the nationalcommunity.Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertakethe process of self-purification. We began a series of workshopson nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: “Are youable to accept blows without retaliation?” “Are you able toendure the ordeal of jail?” .You may well ask, “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches,and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quiteright in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purposeof direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create sucha crisis and foster such a tension that a community whichhas constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront theissue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longerbe ignored.My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolentresister may sound rather shocking. But I must confessthat I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestlyopposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive,nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.Just as Socrates felt that is was necessary to create a tensionin the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondageof myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creativeanalysis and objective appraisal, s~ must we see the need fornonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society thatwill help men rise from the darkdepths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understandingand brotherhood.The purpose of our direct-action program is to create asituation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open thedoor to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your callfor negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland beenbogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather thandialogue.One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that Iand my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Somehave asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administrationtime to act?” The only answer that I can give to this queryis that the new Birmingham administration must be proddedabout as much as the outgoing one, before it will act.We have not made a single gain in civil rights withoutdetermined legal and nonviolent pressure. . . . Lamentably,it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give uptheir privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral lightand voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as ReinholdNiebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoralthan individuals.We know through painful experience that freedom is nevervoluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded bythe oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-actioncampaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have notsuffered unduly from the disease of segregation.For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in theear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait!” hasalmost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with oneof our distinguished jurists, that justice too long delayed isjustice denied.”We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutionaland God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are movingwith jet like speed toward gaining political independence, butwe still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup ofcoffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who havenever felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.”But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers andfathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim;when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick andeven kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vastmajority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering inan airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society;when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speechstammering as you seek to explain to your six-yea-old daughter227

why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has justbeen advertised on television, and see tears welling up inher eyes when she is told that Flintown is closed to coloredchildren, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning toform in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distorther personality by developing an unconscious bitternesstoward white people; when you have to concoct an answerfor a five-year-old son who is asking, “Daddy, why do whitepeople treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a crosscountrydrive and find it necessary to sleep night after nightin the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because nomotel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in andday out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; whenyour first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name be-comes“boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,”and your wife and mother are never given the respected title“Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night bythe fact that you are a Negro, living-constantly at tiptoe stance,never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plaguedwith inner fears and outer resentments; when you are foreverfighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you willunderstand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a timewhen the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longerwilling to be plunged into the abyss of despair. hope, sirs, youcan understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness tobreak laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we sodiligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glanceit may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws.One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some lawsand obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that thereare two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first toadvocate obeying just laws One has not only a legal but a moralresponsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moralresponsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St.Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”Now, what is the difference between the two? How does onedetermine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a manmadecode that squares with the moral law or the law of God.An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the morallaw.To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law isa human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law thatdegrades human personality is unjust.All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distortsthe soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregatora false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense ofinferiority. .Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws.An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majoritygroup compels a minority group to obey but does not makebinding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the sametoken, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minorityto follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is samenessmade legal.Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflictedon a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote,had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say thatthe legislature of Alabama which set up that state’s segregationlaws was democratically elected?Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used toprevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and thereare some counties in which, even though Negroes constitutea majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered.Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considereddemocratically structured?Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application.For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of paradingwithout a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having anordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such anordinance becomesunjust when it is used to maintain segregation and todeny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peacefulassembly and protest.I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to pointout. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, aswould the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy.One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovinglyand with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that anindividual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust,and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in orderto arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, isin reality expressing the highest respect for law.Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience.It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach,Meshach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar,on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It waspracticed superbly by the early Christians, who were willingto face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of choppingblocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the RomanEmpire.To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socratespracticed civil disobedience. In our own nation, the BostonTea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did inGermany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedomfighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid andcomfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that,had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided andcomforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communistcountry where certain principles dear to the Christian faith aresuppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’santi-religious laws.I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christianand Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past228 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

few years I have been gravely disappointed with the whitemoderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion thatthe Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedomis not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klan, butthe white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than tojustice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence oftension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; whoconstantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but Icannot agree with your methods of directaction”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetablefor another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept oftime and who constancy advises the Negro to wait for a “moreconvenient season.Shallow understanding from people of good will is morefrustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people ofill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewilderingthan outright rejection. I had hoped that the white moderatewould understand that law and order exist for the purpose ofestablishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose theybecome the dangerously structured dams that block the flow ofsocial progress.I had hoped that the white moderate would understandthat the present tension in the South is a necessary phase ofthe transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which theNegro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive andpositive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity andworth of human personality.Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not thecreators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hiddentension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, whereit can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never becured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with allits ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injusticemust be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, tothe light of human conscience and the air of national opinion,before it can be cured.In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful,must be condemned because they precipitate violence. Butis this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbedman because his possession of money precipitated the evil actof robbery? .We must come to see that, as the federal courts haveconsistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to ceasehis efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because thequest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbedand punish the robber.I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the mythconcerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. .Actually, time itself is neutral: it can be used eitherdestructively or constructively. More and more I feel thatpeople of ill will have used time much more effectively thanhave the people of good will. We will have to repent in thisgeneration not merely for the hateful words and actions of thebad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability:it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to becoworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itselfbecomes an ally of the forces of stagnation. We must use timecreatively;. in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to doright.Now is the time to make real the promise of democracyand transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalmof brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy fromthe quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of humandignity.You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At firstI was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see mynonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinkingabout the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forcesin the Negro community.One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who,as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of selfrespectand a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjustedto segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who,because of a degree of academic and economic security andbecause in some ways they profit by segregation, have becomeinsensitive to the problems of the masses.The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comesperilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in thevarious black nationalist groups that are springing up across thenation, the largest and best-known being Elijah Muhammad’sMuslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration overthe continued existence of racial discrimination, this movementis made up of people who have lost faith in America, who haveabsolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concludedthat the white man is an Incorrigible “devil.”I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that weneed emulate neither the “do-nothings” of the complacent northe hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is themore excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am gratefulto God that, through the influence of the Negro church, theway of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets ofthe South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. AndI am farther convinced that if our white brothers dismiss asrabble rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who employnon-violent direct action, and if they refuse to support ournonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustrationand despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalistideologie, a development that would inevitably lead to afrightening racial nightmare.Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearn-229

ing for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is whathas happened to the American Negro. Something within hasreminded him of his birthright of freedom, and somethingwithout has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciouslyor unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, andwith his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellowbrothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, theUnited States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgencytoward the promised land of racial justice.If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negrocommunity, one should readily understand why publicdemonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent-upresentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them.So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the cityhall; let him go on freedom rides-and try to understand whyhe must do so.If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolentways, they will seek expression through violence; this is nota threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people,“Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say thatthis normal and healthy discontent can be channeled intothe creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now thisapproach is being termed extremist.But though I was initially disappointed at being categorizedas an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter Igradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Wasnot Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless themthat curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray forthem which despitefully use you, and persecute you.Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll downlike waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” . .And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my daysbefore I make a butchery of my conscience.” And AbrahamLincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and halffree.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be selfevident,that all men are created equal.” So the question is notwhether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists wewill be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we beextremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extensionof justice? Perhaps the South, the nation, and the world are indire need of creative extremists.I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need.Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much.I suppose I should have realized that few members of theoppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionateyearning of the pressed race, and still fewer have the visionto see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent,and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some ofour white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning ofthis social revolution and committed themselves to it. They arestill all too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Somesuchas Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, JamesMcBride Dabbs, Ann Braden, and Sarah Patton Boyl-havewritten about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms.Others have marched with us down nameless streets of theSouth. They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails,suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view themas “dirty niggerlovers.” Unlike so many of their moderatebrothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of themoment and sensed the need for powerful “action” antidotes tocombat the disease of segregation.Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have beenso greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership.Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindfulof the fact that each of you has taken some significant standson this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for yourChristian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroesto your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commendthe Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring HillCollege several years ago.But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiteratethat I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say thisas one of those negative critics who can always find somethingwrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel,who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who hasbeen sustained by spiritual blessings and who will remain trueto it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership ofthe bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, Ifelt we would be supported by the white church. I felt thatthe white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would beamong our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outrightopponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement andmisrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been morecautious than courageous and have remained silent behind theanesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham withthe hope that the white religious leadership of this communitywould see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern,would serve as the channel through which our just grievancescould reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of youwould understand. But again I have been disappointed.I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonishtheir worshipers to comply with a desegregation decisionbecause it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministersdeclare: ‘Follow this decree because integration is morally rightand because the Negro is your brother.”230 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, Ihave watched white churchmen stand on the sideline andmouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. Inthe midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial andeconomic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Thoseare social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.”And I have watched many churches commit themselves to acompletely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul; between the sacredand the secular. .I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge ofthis decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to theaid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fearabout the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if ourmotives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goalof freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because thegoal of America is freedom.Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny istied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landedat Plymouth, we were here. For more than two centuries ourforebears labored in this country, without wages; they madecotton king; they built the homes of their masters whilesuffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation and yet outof a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop.If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, theopposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedombecause the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal willof God are embodied in our echoing demands.Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point inyour statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmlycommended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order”and preventing violence.”I doubt that you would have so warmly commended thepolice force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth intounarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would soquickly commend the policemen if you were to observe theirugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail;if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro womenand young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kickold Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them,as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because wewanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in yourpraise of the Birmingham police department.It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline inhandling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conductedthemselves rather “nonviolently’ in public. But for whatpurpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation.the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrongto use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I mustaffirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to usemoral means to preserve Immoral ends. . . . As T. S. Eliot hassaid, “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do theright deed for the wrong reason.I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners anddemonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, theirwillingness to suffer, and their amazing discipline in the midstof great provocation. One day the South will recognize its realheroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble senseof purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs,and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the lifeof the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negrowomen, symbolized in a seventy-two~ year-old woman inMontgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignityand with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, andwho responded with ungrammatical profundity to one whoinquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul isat rest.”They will be the young high school and college students, theyoung ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageouslyand nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters andwillingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the Southwill know that when these disinherited children of God satdown at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up forwhat is best in the American dream and for the most sacredvalues in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing ournation back to those great wells of democracy which weredug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of theConstitution and the Declaration of independence.Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it ismuch too long to take your precious time. I can assure you thatit would have been much shorter if I had been writing from acomfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alonein a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think longthoughts and pray long prayers? . .Yours for the cause of peace and brotherhood,MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolencedemands that the means we use must be as pure as231

Margaret Fuller:The Great Lawsuit (1810‐1850)Sarah Margaret Fuller was born at Cambridgeport (now partof Cambridge), Massachusetts, on May 23, 1810. Her fathersupervised her education, making her a prodigy but depriving herof a childhood. After a brief, traumatic stay at a girls’ school in herearly teens, she returned to pursue her rigorous education at home,steeping herself in the classics and in modern languages and literatures,especially German. Accustomed to intense, lonely study, Fullernevertheless formed lasting intellectual and emotional friendshipswith a few young Harvard scholars, among them her cobiographersJames Freeman Clarke and W. H. Channing. A Cambridge lady,Eliza Farrar, undertook to instill some of the social graces into thefather‐taught Margaret. The death of her father in 1835 burdenedFuller with the education of younger brothers and sisters. Settingaside her own ambitions (including a planned trip to Europe), shetaught for several years, in Boston and Providence. During thistime the German novelist and dramatist Goethe became the chiefinfluence on her religion and philosophy, and she tormented herselfwith the hope that she might have money, time, and ability to writehis biography. In 1839 she began leading “Conversation” classesamong an elite group of Boston women. Later, men participatedalso; and during the next years her topics included Greek mythology,the fine arts, ethics, education, demonology, creeds, and the ideal.A close friend of Emerson’s since she first sought him out in 1836,Fuller edited the Transcendentalists’ magazine The Dial from 1840to 1842, meanwhile continuing to translate works by and aboutGoethe. In 1844 Summer on the Lakes, an account of a trip to theMidwest, led Horace Greeley to hire her as literary critic for his NewYork Tribune, making her one of the first self‐supporting Americanwoman journalists. More than a literary reviewer, Fuller wrote aseries of reports on public questions, among them the conditions ofthe blind, of the insane, and of female prisoners. In 1845 Greeleypublished her Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the title articleof which was an expansion of a controversial Dial essay, The GreatLawsuit. This is one of the great neglected documents of Americansexual liberation—not merely of feminism, for Fuller recognized thatboth men and women were imprisoned by social roles, although menat least had the power to make and enforce the definitions of thoseroles. In 1846 some of her Tribune pieces were collected in Paperson Literature and Art. In New York she fell in love with JamesNathan, a German Jew who, a cosmopolite baffled by her mixtureof sexual honesty and prudery, fled home in June 1845, letting thegrowing spaces between his letters persuade her gradually that hehad rejected her.Fuller sailed for Europe in August 1846, intending to supportherself as foreign correspondent for the Tribune. In England one ofher idols, Thomas Carlyle (then in his fifties), disappointed her byhis reactionary political views and his insensitivity to the worthof others. especially the Italian revolutionary Joseph Mazzini, whohad sought refuge in England. In Paris she met another idol, GeorgeSand, who proved more satisfactory than Carlyle, and anotherpolitical revolutionary, the exiled Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz.Sand’s example of sexually liberated womanhood stirred Fullerprofoundly, as did Mickiewicz’s blunt speculation that she could notdeeply respond to Europe while remaining a virgin—not the sortof comment men like Emerson and Greeley had accustomed her to.Fuller went on to Italy, then not a unified country but a collection ofstates—some controlled by the pope, others independent, and to thenorth, a third group controlled by Austria. Soon after her arrival inRome she became the object of courtship by a Roman of the nobility,Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, almost eleven years younger than she.When she resumed from summering in northern Italy, Rome wasundergoing antipapal ferment, and her dispatches to the Tribunebecame more and more political. Making use of her connections withvarying factions, she began an earnest accumulation of documentsconcerning the forthcoming revolution—newspapers, pamphlets,leaflets.And she began a love affair with Ossoli. In December she waspregnant, with no man or woman she could confide in, either in theUnited States or Europe. At the start of 1848 she wrote guardedlyto a friend at home: “With this year I enter upon a sphere of mydestiny so difficult that at present I see no way out except throughthe gate of death.” Marriage seemed out of the question because of thecertain opposition of Ossoli’s family. Through a dismal rainy season,in which she lived on pennies a day, Fuller covered for the Tribunesuch events as the popular agitation against the Jesuits. She becameintimate with the Princess Belgioioso, a leader of the anti‐Austrianfaction who drew her still more deeply into Italian politics. Whencities of northern Italy revolted against the Austrians in March,Fuller described to her New York readers the joyous response of theRoman citizens. The revolutionaries Mickiewicz and Mazzinientered Italy; both kept in touch with Fuller out of their respect forher personal commitment to their goals and their sense of her valuein shaping American opinion.That spring, 1848, Emerson wrote from England urging herto return home with him before war broke out. Still keeping hersecret, she withdrew instead to the Abruzzi region to wait out herpregnancy. Ossoli had become a member of the civic guard, buthe managed to be with her for the birth of Angelo on September5. Leaving the baby in Rieti with a wet nurse, Fuller returnedto Rome late in November, in time to report the flight of the popeand, early in 1849, the arrival of the Italian nationalist GiuseppeGaribaldi and the proclamation of the Roman Republic. She sharedthe triumph of Mazzini’s arrival in Rome, but the republic wasshort‐lived. Anticipating the intervention of the French on behalfof the pope, Princess Belgioioso urgently wrote Fuller on April30, 1849: “You are named Regolatrice of the Hospital of the FateBene Fratelli”—on an island in the Tiber. Fuller ran the hospitalheroically when the French laid siege, despite her concern for Ossoli,who was fighting with the Republican forces, and her uncertainty232 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

about the baby, whom she had hardly seen since he was two monthsold. After Rome fell to the French on the fourth of July she madeher way to Rieti, only to find that the nurse, assuming the babyhad been abandoned, was allowing him to starve. Retreating toFlorence with Ossoli and the baby, Fuller faced down her shockedacquaintances, including Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,and began work on her history of the Roman Republic. While atFlorence she may have married Ossoli, as his sister later claimed. InMay 1850, she sailed for the United States with Ossoli and the baby,full of forebodings about the ship and the way they would be receivedat home. All three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, onJuly 19. The body of the baby was washed ashore as well as a trunkthat contained some of Fuller’s papers but not the history. Thoreausought in vain for her body.Emerson, Clarke, and Channing edited Fuller’s Memoirs (1852) in away that sanitized her personal life, denigrated her accomplishmentsas a writer, and slighted her lifelong activism. In 1903 her friendJulia Ward Howe published her love letters to James Nathan, therebysealing the image of Fuller as a would‐be intellectual, willful andfoolish in her personal entanglements. Hawthorne’s old verdictseemed confirmed: “There never was such a tragedy as her wholestory; the sadder and sterner, because so much of the ridiculous wasmixed up with it, and because she could bear anything better thanto be ridiculous.”Sexist ridicule dies hard, and in Fuller’s case its death was retardedby the long inaccessibility of most of her writings. The Fullerbibliography included in this volume shows that her writingsnow, in the 1990s, are fast coming back into print—an excellentedition of her letters, a collection of her dispatches to the Tribunefrom Europe, an annotated edition of her Woman in the NineteenthCentury, and a generous anthology of her writings. The substantial“popular” biography of 1990 was followed in 1992 by the meticulouslyresearched first volume of a projected two‐volume scholarly biography.The evidence is at hand that may at last establish Fuller’s candidacyfor serious consideration as what Hawthorne said mockingly, “thegreatest, wisest, best woman of the age.”The Great LawsuitMAN versus MEN. WOMAN versus WOMEN[Four Kinds of Equality]Where the thought of equality has become pervasive, it showsitself in four kinds.The household partnership. In our country the woman looksfor a “smart but kind” husband, the man for a “capable, sweettempered” wife,The man furnishes the house, the woman regulates it. Theirrelation is one of mutual esteem, mutual dependence. Their talkis of business, their affection shows itself by practical kindness.They know that life goes more smoothly and cheerfully to eachfor the other’s aid; they are grateful and content. The wifepraises her husband as a “good provider,” the husband in returncompliments her as a “capital housekeeper.” This relation isgood as far as it goes.Next comes a closer tie which takes the two forms, either ofintellectual companionship, or mutual idolatry. The last, wesuppose, is to no one a pleasing subject of contemplation. Theparties weaken and narrow one another; they lock the gateagainst all the glories of the universe that they may live in a celltogether. To themselves they seem the only wise, to all otherssteeped in infatuation, the gods smile as they look forward tothe crisis of cure, to men the woman seems an unlovely siren,to women the man an effeminate boy.The other form, of intellectual companionship, has becomemore and more frequent. Men engaged in public life, literarymen, and artists have often found in their wives companionsand confidants in thought no less than in feeling. And, as inthe course of things the intellectual development of womanhas spread wider and risen higher, they have, not unfrequently,shared the same employment. As in the case of Roland andhis wife, who were friends in the household and the nation’scouncils, read together, regulated home affairs, or preparedpublic documents together indifferently.It is very pleasant, in letters begun by Roland and finished byhis wife, to see the harmony of mind and the difference ofnature, one thought, but various ways of treating it.This is one of the best instances of a marriage of friendship. Itwas only friendship, whose basis was esteem; probably neitherparty knew love, except by name.Roland was a good man, worthy to esteem and be esteemed,his wife as deserving of admiration as able to do without it.Madame Roland is the fairest specimen we have yet of her class,as clear to discern her aim, as valiant to pursue it, as Spenser’sBritomart, austerely set apart from all that did not belong toher, whether as woman or as mind. She is an antetype of aclass to which the coming time will afford a field, the Spartanmatron, brought by the culture of a book‐furnishing age tointellectual consciousness and expansion.Self‐sufficing strength and clear‐sightedness were in hercombined with a power of deep and calm affection. The pageof her life is one of unsullied dignity.Her appeal to posterity is one against the injustice of thosewho committed such crimes in the name of liberty. She makesit in behalf of herself and her husband. I would put beside it onthe shelf a little volume, containing a similar appeal from theverdict of contemporaries to that of mankind, that of Godwinin behalf of his wife, the celebrated, the by most men detestedMary Wolstonecraft. In his view it was an appeal from theinjustice of those who did such wrong in the name of virtue.Were this little book interesting for no other cause, it wouldbe so for the generous affection evinced under the peculiarcircumstances. This man had courage to love and honor this233

woman in the face of the world’s verdict, and of all that wasrepulsive in her own past history. He believed he saw of whatsoul she was, and that the thoughts she had struggled to act outwere noble. He loved her and he defended her for the meaningand intensity of her inner life. It was a good fact.Mary Wolstonecraft, like Madame Dudevant (commonlyknown as George Sand) in our day, was a woman whoseexistence better proved the need of some new interpretation ofwoman’s rights, than anything she wrote. Such women as these,rich in genius, of most tender sympathies, and capable of highvirtue and a chastened harmony, ought not to find themselvesby birth in a place so narrow, that in breaking bonds theybecome outlaws. Were there as much room in the world forsuch, as in Spenser’s poem for Britomart, they would not runtheir heads so wildly against its laws. They find their way atlast to purer air, but the world will not take off the brand it hasset upon them. The champion of the rights of woman found inGodwin one who plead her own cause like a brother. GeorgeSand smokes, wears male attire, wishes to be addressed as Monfrere; perhaps, if she found those who were as brothers indeed,she would not care whether she were brother or sister.We rejoice to see that she, who expresses such a painfulcontempt for men in most of her works, as shows she musthave known great wrong from them, in La Roche Maupratdepicting one raised, by the workings of love, from the depthsof savage sensualism to a moral and intellectual life. It was lovefor a pure object, for a steadfast woman, one of those who, theItalian said. could make the stair to heaven.Women like Sand will speak now, and cannot be silenced; theircharacters and their eloquence alike foretell an era when suchas they shall easier learn to lead true lives. But though suchforebode, not such shall be the parents of it. Those who wouldreform the world must show that they do not speak in the heatof wild impulse; their lives must be unstained by passionateerror; they must be severe lawgivers to themselves. As to theirtransgressions and opinions, it may be observed, that theresolve of Eloisa to be only the mistress of Abelard, was that ofone who saw the contract of marriage a seal of degradation.6Wherever abuses of this sort are seen, the timid will suffer, thebold protest. But society is in the right to outlaw them till shehas revised her law, and she must be taught to do so, by onewho speaks with authority, not in anger and haste.If Godwin’s choice of the calumniated authoress of the “Rightsof Woman.” for his honored wife, be a sign of a new era, noless so is an article of great learning and eloquence, publishedseveral years since in an English review, where the writer, indoing full justice to Eloisa, shows his bitter regret that she livesnot now to love him, who might have known better how toprize her love than did the egotistical Abelard.These marriages, these characters, with all their imperfections,express an onward tendency. They speak of aspiration of soul,of energy of mind, seeking clearness and freedom. Of a likepromise are the tracts now publishing by Goodwyn Barmby(the European Pariah as he calls himself) and his ~wifeCatharine. Whatever we may think of their measures, we seethem in wedlock, the two minds are wed by the only contractthat can permanently avail, of a common faith, and a commonpurpose.We might mention instances, nearer home, of minds, partnersin work and in life, sharing together, on equal terms, publicand private interests, and which have not on any side thataspect of offence which characterizes theattitude of the last named; persons who steer straight onward,and in our freer life have not been obliged to run their headsagainst any wall. But the principles which guide themmight, under petrified or oppressive institutions, have madethem warlike, paradoxical, or, in some sense, Pariahs. Thephenomenon is different, the last the same, in all these cases.Men and women have been obliged to build their house fromthe very foundation. If they found stone ready in the quarry,they took it peaceably; otherwise they alarmed the country bypulling down old towers to get materials.These are all instances of marriage as intellectual companionship.The parties meet mind to mind, and a mutual trust is excitedwhich can buckler them against a million. They work togetherfor a common purpose, and. in all these instances, with thesame implement, the pen.A pleasing expression in this kind is afforded by the unionin the names of the Howitts. William and Mary Howitt weheard named together for years, supposing them to be brotherand sister; the equality of labors and reputation, even so, wasauspicious, more so, now we find them man and wife. In hislate work on Germany, Howitt mentions his wife with pride, asone among the constellation of distinguished English women,and in a graceful, simple manner.In naming these instances we do not mean to imply thatcommunity of employment is an essential to union of this sort,more than to the union of friendship. Harmony exists no lessin difference than in likeness, if only the same key‐note governboth parts. Woman the poem, man the poet; woman the heart,man the head; such divisions are only important when they arenever to be transcended. If nature is never bound down, northe voice of inspiration stifled, that is enough. We are pleasedthat women should write and speak, if they feel the need of it,from having something to tell; but silence for a hundred yearswould be as well, if that silence be from divine command, andnot from man’s tradition.While Goetz von Berlichingen rides to battle, his wife is busyin the kitchen; but difference of occupation does not preventthat community of life, that perfect esteem, with which hesays,“Whom God loves, to him gives he such a wife!”Manzoni thus dedicates his Adelchi.“To his beloved and venerated wife, Enrichetta Luigia Blondel,234 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

who, with conjugal affections and maternal wisdom. has preserveda virgin mind, the author dedicates this Adelchi, grieving that hecould not. by a more splendid and more durable monument, honorthe dear name and the memory of so many virtues.”The relation could not be fairer, nor more equal, if she too hadwritten poems. Yet the position of the parties might have beenthe reverse as well; the woman might have sung the deeds, givenvoice to the life of the man, and beauty would have been theresult, as we see in pictures of Arcadia the nymph singing tothe shepherds, or the shepherd with his pipe allures the nymphs,either makes a good picture. The sounding lyre requires notmuscular strength, but energy of soul to animate the handwhich can control it. Nature seems to delight in varying herarrangements, as if to show that she will be fettered by no rule,and we must admit the same varieties that she admits.I have not spoken of the higher grade of marriage union, thereligious, which may be expressed as pilgrimage towards acommon shrine. This includes the others; home sympathies,and household wisdom, for these pilgrims must know how toassist one another to carry their burdens along the dusty way;intellectual communion, for how sad it would be on such a journeyto have a companion to whom you could not communicatethoughts and aspirations, as they sprang to life, who wouldhave no feeling for the more and more glorious prospects thatopen as we advance, who would never see the flowers that maybe gathered by the most industrious traveler. It must includeall these. Such a fellow pilgrim Count Zinzendorf3 seems tohave found in his countess of whom he thus writes:“Twenty‐five years’ experience has shown me that just the help‐matewhom I have is the only one that could suit my vocation, Whoelse could have so carried through my family affairs? Who lived sospotlessly before the world? Who so wisely aided me in my rejectionof a dry morality? Who so clearly set aside the Pharisaism. which,as years passed, threatened to creep in among us? Who so deeplydiscerned as to the spirits of delusion which sought to bewilder us?Who would have governed my whole economy so wisely, richly,and hospitably when circumstances commanded? Who have takenindifferently the part of servant or mistress, without on the one sideaffecting an especial spirituality, on the other being sullied by anyworldly pride? Who, in a community where all ranks are eager tobe on a level, would, from wise and real causes, have known howto maintain inward and outward distinctions? Who, without amurmur, have seen her husband encounter such dangers by landand sea? Who undertaken with him and sustained such astonishingpilgrimages? Who amid such difficulties always held up her head,and supported me? Who found so many hundred thousands andacquitted them on her own credit? And, finally, who, of all humanbeings, would so well understand and interpret to others my innerand outer being as this one, of such nobleness in her way of thinking,such great intellectual capacity, and free from the theologicalperplexities that enveloped me?”An observer adds this testimony.“We may in many marriages regard it as the best arrangement, ifthe man has so much advantage over his wife that she can, withoutmuch thought of her own, be, by him, led and directed, as by a father.But it was not so with the Count and his consort. She was not madeto be a copy; she was an original; and, while she loved and honoredhim, she thought for herself on all subjects with so much intelligence,that he could and did look on her as a sister and friend also.”Such a woman is the sister and friend of all beings, as theworthy man is their brother and helper.* * *[The Great Radical Dualism]For woman, if by a sympathy as to outward condition, she isled to aid the enfranchisement of the slave, must no less so,by inward tendency, to favor measures which promise to bringthe world more thoroughly and deeply into harmony with hernature. When the lamb takes place of the lion as the emblemof nations, both women and men will be as children of onespirit, perpetual learners of the word and doers thereof, nothearers only.A writer in a late number of the New York Pathfinder, in twoarticles headed “Femality,” has uttered a still more pregnantword than any we have named. He views woman truly fromthe soul, and not from society, and the depth and leading of histhoughts is proportionately remarkable. He views the femininenature as a harmonizer of the vehement elements, and this hasoften been hinted elsewhere; but what he expresses most forciblyis the lyrical, the inspiring and inspired apprehensiveness ofher being.Had I room to dwell upon this topic, I could not say anythingso precise, so near the heart of the matter, as may be found inthat article; but, as it is, I can only indicate, not declare, myview.There are two aspects of woman’s nature, expressed by theancients as Muse and Minerva. It is the former to which thewriter in the Pathfinder looks. It is the latter which Wordsworthhas in mind, when he says,“With a placid brow,Which woman ne’er should forfeit, keep thy vow.”The especial genius of woman I believe to be electrical inmovement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency. Sheis great not so easily in classification, or re‐creation, as in aninstinctive seizure of causes, and a simple breathing out ofwhat she receives that has the singleness of life, rather than theselecting or energizing of art.More native to her is it to be the living model of the artist,than to set apart from herself any one form in objective reality;235

more native to inspire and receive the poem than to create it.In so far as soul is in her completely developed, all soul is thesame; but as far as it is modified in her as woman, it flows, itbreathes, it sings, rather than deposits soil, or finishes work,and that which is especially feminine flushes in blossom theface of earth, and pervades like air and water all this seemingsolid globe, daily renewing and purifying its life. Such may bethe especially feminine element, spoken of as Femality. Butit is no more the order of nature that it should be incarnatedpure in any form, than that the masculine energy should existunmingled with it in any form.Male and female represent the two sides of the great radicaldualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into oneanother. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There isno wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.History jeers at the attempts of physiologists to bind greatoriginal laws by the forms which flow from them. They make arule; they say from observation what can and cannot be. In vain!Nature provides exceptions to every rule. She sends womento battle, and sets Hercules spinning; she enables women tobear immense burdens, cold, and frost; she enables the man,who feels maternal love, to nourish his infant like a mother.Of late she plays still gayer pranks. Not only she deprivesorganizations, but organs, of a necessary end. She enablespeople to read with the top of the head, and see with the pit ofthe stomach. Presently she will make a female Newton, and amale Syren.Man partakes of the feminine in the Apollo, woman of theMasculine as Minerva.Let us be wise and not impede the soul. Let her work as shewill. Let us have one creative energy, one incessant revelation.Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past toman or woman, black or white. Jove sprang from Rhea, Pallasfrom Jove. So let it be.If it has been the tendency of the past remarks to call womanrather to the Minerva side,—if I, unlike the more generouswriter, have spoken from society no less than the soul,—letit be pardoned. It is love that has caused this, love for manyincarcerated souls, that might be freed could the idea ofreligious self‐dependence be established in them, could theweakening habit of dependence on others be broken up.Every relation, every gradation of nature, is incalculablyprecious, but only to the soul which is poised upon itself, andto whom no loss, no change, can bring dull discord, for it is inharmony with the central soul.If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomesa stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls aftera while into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he canonly be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovatingfountains time to rise up. With a society it is the same. Manyminds, deprived of the traditionary or instinctive means ofpassing a cheerful existence, must find help in self‐impulse orperish. It is therefore that while any elevation, in the view ofunion, is to be hailed with joy, we shall not decline celibacyas the great fact of the time. It is one from which no vow, noarrangement, can at present save a thinking mind. For nowthe rowers are pausing on their oars, they wait a change beforethey can pull together. All tends to illustrate the thought of awise contemporary. Union is only possible to those who areunits. To be fit for relations in time, souls, whether of man orwoman, must be able to do without them in the spirit.It is therefore that I would have woman lay aside all thought,such as she habitually cherishes, of being taught and led bymen. I would have her, like the Indian girl, dedicate herself tothe Sun, the Sun of Truth, and go no where if his beams did notmake clear the path. I would have her free from compromise,from complaisance, from helplessness, because I would haveher good enough and strong enough to love one and all beings,from the fullness, not the poverty of being.Men, as at present instructed, will not help this work, becausethey also are under the slavery of habit. I have seen with delighttheir poetic impulses. A sister is the fairest ideal, and how noblyWordsworth, and even Byron, have written of a sister.There is no sweeter sight than to see a father with his littledaughter. Very vulgar men become refined to the eye whenleading a little girl by the hand. At that moment the rightrelation between the sexes seems established, and you feel asif the man would aid in the noblest purpose, if you ask him inbehalf of his little daughter. Once two fine figures stood beforeme, thus. The father of very intellectual aspect, his falcon eyesoftened by affection as he looked down on his fair child,she the image of himself, only more graceful and brilliant inexpression. I was reminded of Southey’s Kehama, when lo, thedream was rudely broken. They were talking of education, andhe said.“I shall not have Maria brought too forward. If she knows too much,she will never find a husband; superior women hardly ever can.”“Surely,” said his wife, with a blush, “you wish Maria to be as goodand wise as she can, whether it will help her to marriage or not.”“No,” he persisted, “I want her to have a sphere and a home, and someone to protect her when I am gone.”It was a trifling incident, but made a deep impression. I feltthat the holiest relations fail to instruct the unprepared andperverted mind. If this man, indeed, would have looked at iton the other side, he was the last that would have been willingto have been taken himself for the home and protection hecould give, but would have been much more likely to repeat thetale of Alcibiades with his phials.But men do not look at both sides, and women must leaveoff asking them and being influenced by them, but retirewithin themselves, and explore the groundwork of being tillthey find their peculiar secret. Then when they come forthagain, renovated and baptized, they will know how to turnall dross to gold, and will be rich and free though they live in236 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

a hut, tranquil, if in a crowd. Then their sweet singing shallnot be from passionate impulse, but the lyrical overflow of adivine rapture, and a new music shall be elucidated from thismany‐chorded world.Grant her then for a while the armor and the javelin.5 Let herput from her the press of other minds and meditate in virginloneliness. The same idea shall reappear in due time as Muse,or Ceres,6 the all‐kindly, patient Earth‐Spirit.I tire every one with my Goethean illustrations. But it cannotbe helped.Goethe, the great mind which gave itself absolutely to theleadings of truth, and let rise through him the waves whichare still advancing through the century, was its intellectualprophet. Those who know him, see, daily,his thought fulfilled more and more, and they must speak of it,till his name weary and even nauseate, as all great names havein their time. And I cannot spare the reader, if such there be,his wonderful sight as to the prospects and wants of women.As his Wilhelm grows in life and advances in wisdom, hebecomes acquainted with women of more and more character,rising from Mariana to Macaria.Macaria, bound with the heavenly bodies in fixed revolutions,the centre of all relations, herself unrelated, expresses theMinerva side.Mignon, the electrical, inspired lyrical nature.All these women, though we see them in relations, we canthink of as unrelated. They all are very individual, yet seemnowhere restrained. They satisfy for the present, yet arouse aninfinite expectation.The economist Theresa, the benevolent Natalia, the fair Saint,have chosen a path, but their thoughts are not narrowed to it.The functions of life to them are not ends, but suggestions.woman must be represented by a virgin.”But that is the very fault of marriage, and of the present relationbetween the sexes, that the woman does belong to the man,instead of forming a whole with him. Were it otherwise therewould be no such limitation to the thought.Woman, self‐centred, would never be absorbed by any relation;it would be only an experience to her as to man. It is a vulgarerror that love, a love to woman is her whole existence; she alsois born for Truth and Love in their universal energy. Wouldshe but assume her inheritance, Mary would not be the onlyVirgin Mother. Not Manzoni alone would celebrate in hiswife the virgin mind with the maternal wisdom and conjugalaffections. The soul is ever young, ever virgin.And will not she soon appear? The woman who shall vindicatetheir birthright for all women; who shall teach them what toclaim, and how to use what they obtain? Shall not her name befor her era Victoria, for her country and her life Virginia? Yetpredictions are rash; she herself must teach us to give her thefitting name.Thus to them all things are important, because none is necessary.Their different characters have fair play, and each is beautiful inits minute indications, for nothing is enforced or conventional,but everything, however slight, grows from the essential lifeof the being.Mignon and Theresa wear male attire when they like, and itis graceful for them to do so, while Macaria is confined to herarm chair behind the green curtain, ant the Fair Saint couldnot bear a speck of dust on her robe.All things are in their places in this little world because all isnatural and free, just as “there is room for everything out ofdoors.” Yet all is rounded in by natural harmony which willalways arise where Truth and Love are sought in the light offreedom.Goethe’s book bodes an era of freedom like its own, of“extraordinary generous seeking,” and new revelations. Newindividualities shall be developed in the actual world, whichshall advance upon it as gently as the figures come out uponhis canvass.A profound thinker has said “no married woman can representthe female world, for she belongs to her husband. The idea of237

Andrew Jackson:Veto of Maysville Road Bill (1830)Although Jackson vetoed a bill in 1830 providing for a federalgovernment subscription of stock, in the amount of $150,000,in a company that proposed to build a sixty-mile road nearMaysville, Kentucky. Jackson’s veto message offered somethoughtful commentary on the question of the relationshipbetween the federal government and the states and on the roleof government in society more generally. As you read, considerhow Jackson defends his veto of the Maysville Road Bill. And,think about how Jackson’s veto reflected the ideology of theDemocratic Party at the time.To the House of Representatives:Gentlemen, I have maturely considered the bill proposing toauthorize a “subscription of stock in the Maysville. ..RoadCompany,” and now return the same to the House ofRepresentatives, in which it originated, with my objections toits passage...Such grants [of money by the federal government) have alwaysbeen [passed] under the control of the general principle thatthe works which might be thus aided should be “of a general,not local, national, not State,” character. A disregard of thisdistinction would of necessity lead to the subversion of thefederal system.... I am not able to view [the Maysville RoadBill) in any other light than as a measure of purely localcharacter.... It has no connection with any established systemof improvements; [and) is exclusively within the limits of aState [Kentucky]....As great as this object [goal of internal improvements]undoubtedly is, it is not the only one which demands thefostering care of the government. The preservation andsuccess of the republican principle rest with us. To elevate itscharacter and its influence rank among our most importantduties, and the best means to accomplish this desirable endare those which will rivet the attachment of our citizens tothe Government of their choice by the comparative lightnessof their public burthens [burdens] and by the attractionwhich the superior success of its operations will present to theadmiration and respect of the world. Through the favor of anoverruling and indulgent Providence our country is blessedwith a general prosperity and our citizens exempted from thepressure of taxation, which other less favored portions of thehuman family are obliged to bear; yet it is true that many ofthe taxes collected from our citizens through the medium ofimposts have for a considerable period been onerous. In manyparticulars these taxes have borne severely upon the laboringand less prosperous classes of the community, being imposedon the necessaries of life, and this, too, in cases where theburden was not relieved by the consciousness that it wouldultimately contribute to make us independent of foreign nationarticles of prime necessity by the encouragement of growthand manufacture at home. They have been cheerfully bornebecause they were thought to be necessary to the support ofgovernment and the payments of debts unavoidably incurredin the acquisition and maintenance of our national rights andliberties. But have we a right to calculate on the same cheerfulacquiescence when it is known that the necessity for theircontinuance would cease were it not for irregular, improvident,and unequal appropriations of public funds?...How gratifying the effect of presenting to the world the sublimespectacle of a Republic of more than 12,000,000 happy people,in the fifty-fourth year of her existence, after having passedthrough two protracted wars — one for the acquisition and theother for the maintenance of liberty — free from debt and allher immense resources unfettered! What a salutary influencewould not such an exhibition exercise upon the cause of liberalprinciples and free government throughout the world!Would we not find ourselves in its effect an additionalguarantee that our political institutions will be transmitted tothe most remote posterity without decay? A course of policydestined to witness events like these cannot be benefited by alegislation which tolerates a scramble for appropriations thathave no relation to any general system of improvement, andwhose good effects must of necessity be very limited...…If different impressions are entertained in any quarter; if itis expected that the people of this country, reckless of theirconstitutional obligations, will prefer their local interest to theprinciples of the Union. ..indeed has the world but little tohope from the example of free government.When an honest observance of constitutional compactscannot be obtained from communities like ours, it need notbe anticipated elsewhere... and the degrading truth that manis unfit for self -government [will be] admitted. And this willbe the case if expediency be made a rule of construction ininterpreting the Constitution. Power in no government coulddesire a better shield for the insidious advances which it is everready to make upon the checks that are designed to restrainits action...238 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification(November 24,1832)South Carolina and other southern states were upset when Congresspassed the Tariff of 1828, which Southerners dubbed the “Tariff ofAbominations.” Southerners saw the tariff as protecting Northernindustry at the expense of the South, and as unconstitutionallyexpanding the powers of the federal government.her ports, destroy or harass her commerce, or to enforce theacts hereby declared null and void, otherwise than through thecivil tribunals of the country, as inconsistent with the longercontinuance of South Carolina in the Union: and that thepeople of this state will thenceforth hold themselves absolvedfrom all further obligation to maintain or preserve theirpolitical connection with the people of the other States, andwill forthwith proceed to organize a separate Government, anddo all other acts and things which sovereign and independentStates may of right do....Many Southerners was not satisfied when Congress lowered tariffsslightly in 1832. In response, South Carolina’s state legislaturepassed laws nullifying the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 and forbiddingthe collection of the tariffs in South Carolina. South Carolina alsothreatened to secede - to withdraw from the United States - if itsstance on the tariff was not respected. As you read, consider SouthCarolina’s position on the tariff and its response. How might SouthCarolina have defended its position on the tariff and on a state’spower to nullify the laws of the federal government?Whereas the Congress of the United States, by various acts,purporting to be acts laying duties and imposts on foreignimports, but in reality intended for the protection of domesticmanufactures, and the giving of bounties to classes andindividuals engaged in particular employments, at the expenseand to the injury and oppression of other classes and individuals...hath exceeded its just powers under the Constitution....We, therefore the people of the state of South Carolina inConvention assembled, do declare and ordain .... That thetariff acts of 1828 and 18321 purporting to be laws for theimposing of duties and imposts on the importation of foreigncommodities.... are unauthorized by the Constitution of theUnited States, and violate the true meaning and intent thereof,and are null, void, and no law, nor binding upon this State, itsofficers or citizens....And it is further Ordained, That it shall not be lawful for anyof the constituted authorities, whether of this State or of theUnited States, to enforce payment of the duties imposed bysaid acts.... [and] it shall be the duty of the [South Carolina]Legislature to adopt such measures and pass such acts as maybe necessary to give full effect to this Ordinance....And we, the people of South Carolina, to the end that it maybe fully understood by the Government of the United States,and the people of the co-States, that we are determinedto maintain this, our Ordinance and Declaration, at everyhazard, Do further Declare that we will not submit to theapplication of force, on the part of the Federal Government,to reduce this State to obedience; but that we will consider thepassage by Congress, of any act... to coerce the State, shut up239

John C. Calhoun:The Fort Hill Address (1831)Andrew Jackson: Proclamation to thePeople of South Carolina (1832)In 1832-33, the state of South Carolina, in response to a high tariffpassed by the federal government, argued that states were ultimatelysovereign powers and that state legislatures, therefore, had the powerto nullify laws passed by the federal government - that is, states hadthe power to rule federal laws null and void. South Carolina alsothreatened to secede from the Union if the federal government didnot respect its rights.In this speech, John C. Calhoun explains the principles that underlieSouth Carolina’s Ordinance of Nullification. Calhoun offers theclassic states’ rights argument. How does Calhoun defend hisDoctrine of Nullification - his belief that states may rule federallaws null and void? And, how does he depict the relationshipbetween the federal government and state governments created bythe Constitution?The great and leading principle is, that the General Governmentemanated from the people of the several states, formingdistinct political communities, and acting in their separateand sovereign capacity, and not from all the people formingone aggregate political community; that the Constitution ofthe United States is, in fact, a compact, to which each stateis a Party... and that the several states, or parties, have theright to judge the right of its infractions... Be it called whatit may - State-right, veto, nullification, or by any other name,I conceive it to be the fundamental principle of our system,resting on facts as certain as the revolution itself.. and I firmlybelieve that on its recognition depend the stability and safetyof our political institutions....Whenever separate and dissimilar interests have been separatelyrepresented in government: whenever sovereign power has beendivided in its exercise, the experience and wisdom of ages havedevised but one mode by which such political organization canbe preserved - to give each so-state the right to judge of itspowers, with a negative or veto on the acts of others, in order toprotect against the encroachments the interests it particularlyrepresents.... So essential is this principle that, to withholdthis right, where the sovereign power is divided, is to annulthe division itself, and to consolidate, in the one left in theexclusive possession of that right, all powers of government....President Jackson rejected John Calhoun and the state legislature ofSouth Carolina’s insistence that states were sovereign and thereforehad the right to nullify laws passed by the federal government.Jackson also rejected South Carolina’s threat to secede if the federalgovernment tried to enforce its tariff in South Carolina. In responseto the crisis, Congress passed the Force Bill granting PresidentJackson the power to enforce the tariff with federal troops, shouldthey be needed. The Nullification Crisis ended without directconfrontation when Congress passed the Compromise Tariff of 1833which slowly lowered duties.As you read, examine Jackson’s argument rejecting a state’s right tonullify federal laws and rejecting a state’s right to secede from theUnion. How does Jackson defend his position?The Ordinance (of Nullification) is founded... on the strangeposition that any one state may not only declare an act ofCongress void, but prohibit its execution; that they may do thisconsistently with the Constitution; that the true constructionof [the Constitution] permits a state to retain its place in theUnion and yet be bound by no other of its laws than thoseit may choose to consider as constitutional.... Look for amoment to the consequence. If South Carolina considers therevenue laws unconstitutional and has a right to prevent theirexecution in the port of Charleston, there would be a clearconstitutional objection to their collection in every other port;and no revenue shall be collected anywhere.... If this doctrinehad been established at an earlier day, the Union would havebeen dissolved in its infancy....I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States,assumed by one state, incompatible with the existence of theUnion, contradicted explicitly by the letter of the Constitution,unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle onwhich it was founded, and destructive of the great object forwhich it was formed.In vain these sages [the framers of the Constitution] declaredthat Congress should have the power to lay and collect taxes,duties, etc.; in vain they have provided that they shall havethe power to pass laws which shall be necessary and properto carry those powers into execution, that those laws and theConstitution should be the ‘supreme law of the land, and thatjudges in every state shall be bound thereby...’ Vain provisions!ineffectual restrictions! vile profanation of oaths! miserablemockery of legislation! if a bare majority of voters in any onestate may, on real or supposed knowledge of the intent withwhich a law has been passed, declare themselves free from its240 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

operation....The right to secede is deduced from the nature of theConstitution, which they say, is a compact between sovereignstates who have preserved their whole sovereignty and aresubject to no superior: that because they make the compactthey can break it when their opinion has been departed fromby other states....The Constitution forms a government, not a league.... Eachstate having expressly parted with so many powers as toconstitute jointly with other nations, a single nation, cannotfrom that period, posses any right to secede, because suchsuccession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of anation.... To say that any state may at pleasure secede from theunion is to say that the United States is not a nation.... Becausethe union was formed by a compact, it is said that the parties tothat compact may, when they feel themselves aggrieved, departfrom it; but it is precisely because it is a compact that they maynot. A compact is a binding obligation....Andrew Jackson:Veto of the Bank Bill (1832)In 1832 Congress passed a law renewing the charter of the Bankof the United States. (The bank had been chartered for twentyyears and this was due to expire in 1836; if the bank were notrechartered it would cease to exist). President Jackson opposedthe bank for personal, practical and principled reasons, and hevetoed Congress’ bill rechartering the bank in 1832. PresidentJackson subsequently took steps to destroy the bank. In 1833he removed all federal funds from the bank and instead put themoney in state banks. Because it was not rechartered, in 1836the bank closed.As you read his “Veto of the Bank Bill” consider why Jacksonopposed the bank. And, think about how Jackson’s stance onthe bank is consistent with the ideology of the Democraticparty of the 1830s.The bill 1’to modify and continue” the act [to recharter theSecond Bank of the U.S.]... ought not to become a law.... Thepowers and privileges possessed by the existing bank areunauthorized by the Constitution, subversive to the rights ofthe States, and dangerous to the liberties of the people.... Thepresent corporate body... enjoys an exclusive privilege of bankingunder the authority of the General Government, a monopolyof its favor and support.... The powers, privileges, and favorsbestowed upon it in the original charter, by increasing thevalue of the stock far above its par value, operated as a gratuityof many millions to its stockholders.... Every monopoly andall exclusive privileges are granted at the expense of the public,which ought to receive a fair equivalent. The many millionswhich this act proposes to bestow on the stockholders of theexisting bank must come directly or indirectly Out of theearnings of the American people.... It is not conceivable howthe present stockholders can have any claim to the specialfavor of Government. Should [the bank’s] influence becomeconcentrated, as it may under the operation of such an act asthis, in the hands of a self-elected directory...will there not because to tremble for the purity of our elections.It is maintained by the advocates of the bank that itsconstitutionality in all its features ought to be consideredas settled by precedent and by the decision of the SupremeCourt. To this conclusion I can not assent.... The Congress,the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided byits own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer whotakes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he willsupport it as he understands it, and not as it is understood byothers.... The opinion of the judges has no more authority overCongress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges,and on that point the president is independent of both....241

There is nothing in [the bank’s] legitimate functions whichmakes it necessary or proper....It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bendthe acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctionsin society will always exist under every just government.Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot beproduced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of thegifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy,and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law;but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and justadvantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, andexclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent morepowerful, the humble members of our society - the farmers,mechanics and laborers — who have neither the time nor themeans of securing like favors to themselves, have a right tocomplain of the injustice of their Government. There are nonecessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.If [the government] would confine itself to equal protection...it would be an unqualifiedblessing. In the Bank Bill]... there seems to be a wide andunnecessary departure from these just principles....Nor is our Government to be maintained or our Unionpreserved by invasions of the rights and power of the severalStates. In thus attempting to make our General Governmentstrong we make it weak. Its true strength consists in leavingindividuals and States as much as possible to themselves — inmaking itself felt, not in its power, but in its beneficence; not inits control, but in its protection; not in binding the States moreclosely to the center, but leaving each to move unobstructed inits proper orbit.Experience should teach us wisdom. Most of the difficultiesour Government now encounters... have sprung from anabandonment of the legitimate objects of Government.... Manyof our rich men have not been content with equal protectionand equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richerby act of Congress. By attempting to gratify their desires wehave... arrayed section against section, interest against interest,and man against man.... We must] at least take a stand againstall new grants of monopolies and exclusive privileges, againstany prostitution of our Government to the advancement of thefew at the expense of the many....Two Documents on Indian Removal(1830s)The U.S. failed to adopt a consistent policy towards NativeAmerican tribes during the early 19th century, but, generally,Americans agreed that Indians in Eastern states needed to bemoved west of the Mississippi so that Eastern lands could bedeveloped by whites. The only real issue was how rapidly thisshould be done and by what means. By the 1830s, the stateof Georgia was upset that the federal government had notremoved the Cherokee Indians who lived within Georgia, andthe state took steps to remove the Cherokee on their own.Worcester V. Georgia (1832)In 1832, the U.S. Supreme Court led by Chief Justice JohnMarshall ruled that state laws could not be applied to Indians.This ruling, in essence, denied that the state of Georgia had thepower to remove the Cherokee from their land in Georgia. Asyou read, think about why the court ruled as it did.The defendant is a State [Georgia], a member of the Union,which has exercised the powers of government over a peoplewho deny its jurisdiction, and are under the protection ofthe United States We must inquire whether the act of theLegislature of Georgia...be consistent with, or repugnant tothe Constitution, laws and treaties of the United States. It hasbeen said at bar that the acts of the Legislature of Georgiaseize on the whole Cherokee country, parcel it out amongthe neighboring counties of the State, extend her [law] to thewhole country, abolish its institutions and laws, and annihilateits political existence....The very passage of this act by Georgia]is an assertion of jurisdiction over the Cherokee Nation....From the commencement of our government Congress haspassed acts to regulate trade and intercourse with the Indians;which treat them as nations, [and] respect their rights....The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community, occupyingits own territory... in which the laws of Georgia have no force....The Acts of Georgia are repugnant to the Constitution, laws,and treaties of the United States. They interfere forcibly withthe relations established between the United States and theCherokee Nation, the regulation of which according tothe settled principles of our Constitution, are committedexclusively to the government of the Union.Andrew Jackson. “The Removal of Southern Indians...” (1832)President Jackson opposed the Supreme Court’s ruling in242 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Worcester v. Georgia and refused to enforce it, saying, “Mr.Marshall has made his decision now let him enforce it.,, In theend, the Cherokee were removed by gun point to the IndianTerritory of Oklahoma. Thousands of Cherokee died in transit;the event is now known as the Trial of Tears.As you read Jackson’s statement on Indian Removal, thinkabout why Jackson favored permitting Georgia to remove theCherokee. In what sense was Jackson’s stance consistent withthe ideology of his Democratic Party?As a means of effecting this end I suggest... setting apart anample district west of the Mississippi, and without the limitsof any State or Territory now formed, to be guaranteed tothe Indian tribes as long as they shall occupy it.... There thebenevolent may endeavor to teach them the arts of civilization,and by promoting union and harmony among them... attest tothe humanity and justice of this government.”The condition and ulterior design of the Indian tribes withinsome of our States have become objects of much interest andimportance.... Professing a desire to civilize and settle themwe have, at the same time lost no opportunity to purchasetheir lands and thrust them farther into the wilderness. Bythis means they have not only been kept in a wandering state,but led to look upon us as unjust and indifferent to their fate.[Thus), government has constantly defeated its own policy...[and the Indians) have retained their savage habits.... [Some]states claiming to be the only sovereigns within their territories,extended their laws over the Indians, which induced the latterto call upon the United States for their protection....Georgia became a member of the confederacy which eventuatedin our Federal Union as a sovereign State, always asserting herclaim to certain limits,... was admitted to the Union on thesame footing as the original States. There is no constitutional,conventional or legal provision which allows them less powerover the Indians within their borders than is possessed byMaine or New York. Would the people of Maine permit thePenobscot tribe to erect an independent government withintheir State? Could the Indians establish a separate republic [inOhio]? And if they were so disposed would it be the duty ofthe [federal] government to protect them in their attempt? Ifthe principle involved in the obvious answer to this question beabandoned, it would follow that the objects of this governmentare reversed, and it has become part of its duty to aid indestroying the States which it was established to protect....Our conduct towards these people is deeply interesting toour national character. Their present condition... makes amost powerful appeal to our sympathies... Surrounded bythe whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroyingthe resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay..This fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limitsof the States.... Humanity and national honor demand thatevery effort should be made to avert so great a calamity. Astate cannot be dismembered by Congress or restricted in theexercise of her constitutional power.... The people of thoseStates and of every State, actuated by feelings of justice anda regard for our national honor, submit to you the interestingquestion whether something cannot be done, consistent withthe rights of the States, to preserve this much-injured race.243

Cherokee Nation vs. State of Georgia(1831)Mr. Chief Justice Marshall delivered the opinion of theCourt:This bill is brought by the Cherokee Nation, praying aninjunction to restrain the state of Georgia from the executionof certain laws of that state, which as is alleged, go directly toannihilate the Cherokees as a political society, and to seize,for the use of Georgia, the lands of the nation which havebeen assured to them by the United States in solemn treatiesrepeatedly made and still in force.If courts were permitted to indulge their sympathies, a casebetter calculated to excite them can scarcely be imagined. Apeople once numerous, powerful, and truly independent, foundby our ancestors in the quiet and uncontrolled possession of anample domain, gradually sinking beneath our superior policy,our arts, and our arms, have yielded their lands by successivetreaties, each of which contains a solemn guarantee of theresidue, until they retain no more of their formerly extensiveterritory than is deemed necessary to their comfortablesubsistence. To preserve this remnant the present applicationis made.Before we can look into the merits of the case, a preliminaryinquiry presents itself. Has this Court jurisdiction of thecause?The 3rd Article of the Constitution describes the extent ofthe judicial power. The 2nd Section. closes an enumerationof the cases to which it is extended, with controversies betweena state or the citizens thereof and foreign states, citizens, or subjects.A subsequent clause of the same section gives the SupremeCourt original Jurisdiction in all cases in which a state shallbe a party. The party defendant may then unquestionably besued in this Court. May the plaintiff sue in it? Is the CherokeeNation a foreign state in the sense in which that term is usedin the Constitution?The counsel for the plaintiffs have maintained the affirmativeof this proposition with great earnestness and ability. So muchof the argument as was intended to prove the character of theCherokees as a state, as a distinct political society separated fromothers, capable of managing its own affairs and governing itself,has, in the opinion of a majority of the judges, been completelysuccessful. They have been formerly treated as a state fromthe settlement of our country. The numerous treaties madewith them by the United States recognize them as a peoplecapable of maintaining the relations of peace and war, of beingresponsible in their political character for any violation of theirengagements, or for any aggression committed on the citizensof the United States by any individual of their community.Laws have been enacted in the spirit of these treaties. The actsof our government plainly recognize the Cherokee Nation as astate, and the courts are bound by those acts.A question of much more difficulty remains. Do the Cherokeesconstitute a foreign state in the sense of the Constitution?The counsel have shown conclusively that they are not a state ofthe Union, and have insisted that individually they are aliens,not owing allegiance to the United States. An aggregate ofaliens composing a state must, they say, be a foreign state.Each individual being foreign, the whole must be foreign.This argument is imposing, but we must examine it moreclosely before we yield to it. The condition of the Indians inrelation to the United States is perhaps unlike that of any othertwo people in existence. In the general, nations not owing acommon allegiance are foreign to each other. The term foreignnation is, with strict propriety, applicable by either to the other.But the relation of the Indians to the United States is markedby peculiar and cardinal distinctions which exist nowhereelse.The Indian Territory is admitted to compose part of the UnitedStates. In all our maps, geographical treatises, histories, andlaws, it is so considered. In all our intercourse with foreignnations, in our commercial regulations, in any attempt atintercourse between Indians and foreign nations, they areconsidered as within the jurisdictional limits of the UnitedStates, subject to many of those restraints which are imposedupon our own citizens. They acknowledge themselves in theirtreaties to be under the protection of the United States; theyadmit that the United States shall have the sole and exclusiveright of regulating the trade with them and managing all theiraffairs as they think proper; and the Cherokees in particularwere allowed by the Treaty of Hopewell, which preceded theConstitution, to send a deputy of their choice, whenever they thinkfit, to Congress. Treaties were made with some tribes by thestate o New York under a then unsettled construction of theConfederation, by which they ceded all their lands to that state,taking back a limited grant to themselves in which they admittheir dependence.Though the Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionableand, heretofore, unquestioned right to the lands they occupyuntil that right shall be extinguished by a voluntary cessionto our government, ye it may well be doubted whether thosetribes which reside within the acknowledged boundaries of theUnited States can, with strict accuracy, be denominated foreignnations. They may more correctly, perhaps, be denominateddomestic dependent nations. They occupy a territory to whichwe assert a title independent of their will, which must take244 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

effect in point of possession when their right of possessionceases. Meanwhile, they are in a state of pupilage. Theirrelation to the United States resembles that of a ward to hisguardian.They look to our government for protection; rely upon itskindness and its power; appeal to it for relief to their wants;and address the President as their great father. They and theircountry are considered by foreign nations, as well as by ourselves,as being so completely under the sovereignty and dominion ofthe United States that any attempt to acquire their lands or toform a political connection with them would be considered byall as an invasion of our territory and an act of hostility.These considerations go far to support the opinion that theframers of our Constitution had not the Indian tribes in viewwhen they opened the courts of the Union to controversiesbetween a state or the citizens thereof and foreign states.In considering this subject, the habits and usages of the Indiansin their intercourse with their white neighbors ought not to beentirely disregarded. At the time the Constitution was framed,the idea of appealing to an American court of justice for anassertion of right or a redress of wrong had perhaps neverentered the mind of an Indian or of his tribe. Their appealwas to the tomahawk, or to the government. This was wellunderstood by the statesmen who framed the Constitutionof the United States, and might furnish some reason foromitting to enumerate them among the parties who might suein the courts of the Union. Be this as it may, the peculiarrelations between the United States and the Indians occupyingour territory are such that we should feel much difficulty inconsidering them as designated by the term foreign state werethere no other part of the Constitution which might shedlight on the meaning of these words. But we think that inconstruing them, considerable aid is fumished by that clause inthe 8th Section of the 3rd Article, which empowers Congressto regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the severalstates, and with the Indian tribes.In this clause they are as clearly contradistinguished by a nameappropriate to themselves from foreign nations as from theseveral states composing the Union. They are designated by adistinct appellation; and as this appellation can be applied toneither of the others, neither can the appellation distinguishingeither of the others be in fair construction applied to them. Theobjects to which the power of regulating commerce might bedirected are divided into three distinct classes: foreign nations,the several states, and Indian tribes. When forming thisarticle, the Convention considered them as entirely distinct.We cannot assume that the distinction was lost in framing asubsequent article, unless there be something in its languageto authorize the assumption.Foreign nations is a general term, the application of which toIndian tribes, when used in the American Constitution, is atbest extremely questionable. In one article in which a poweris given to be exercised in regard to foreign nations generally,and to the Indian tribes particularly, they are mentioned asseparate in terms clearly contradistinguishing them from eachother. We perceive plainly that theConstitution in this article does not comprehend Indian tribesin the general term foreign nations; not, we presume, becausea tribe may not be a nation but because it is not foreign tothe United States. When afterward, the term foreign state isintroduced, we cannot impute to the Convention the intentionto desert its former meaning and to comprehend Indian tribeswithin it, unless the context force that construction on us. Wefind nothing in the context and nothing in the subject of thearticle which leads to it.The Court has bestowed its best attention on this question and,after mature deliberation, the majority is of opinion that an Indiantribe or nation within the United States is not a foreign state in thesense of the Constitution, and cannot maintain an action in thecourts of the United States.A serious additional objection exists to the jurisdiction of the Court.Is the matter of the bill the proper subject for judicial inquiry anddecision? It seeks to restrain a state from the forcible exerciseof legislative power over a neighboring people, asserting theirindependence; their right to which the state denies. On several ofthe matters alleged in the bill, for example on the laws making itcriminal to exercise the usual powers of self-government in theirown country by the Cherokee Nation, this Court cannot interpose,at least in the form in which those matters are presented.That part of the bill which respects the land occupied by the Indians,and prays the aid of the Court to protect their possession, maybe more doubtful. The mere question of right might perhaps bedecided by this Court in a proper case with proper parties. But theCourt is asked to do more than decide on the title The bill requiresus to control the legislature of Georgia, and to restrain the exertionof its physical force. The propriety of such an interposition by theCourt may be well questioned. It savors too much of the exerciseof political power to be within the proper province of the JudicialDepartment But the opinion on the point respecting parties makesit unnecessary to decide this question.If it be true that the Cherokee Nation have rights, this is not thetribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be truethat wrongs have been inflicted and that still greater are to beapprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past orprevent the future.The motion for an injunction is denied.245

Emily Dickinson: Poems (1830‐1886)Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830,in Amherst, Massachusetts, the second child of Edward(1803‐1874) and Emily Norcross Dickinson (18041882).Dickinson lived out her life in only two houses, the spaciousbut then‐divided Dickinson family Homestead where she wasborn, then another large house nearby from 1840 until 1855,when her father bought back the entire Homestead. Thereaftershe lived in the house where she was born, dying there (ofwhat was diagnosed as Bright’s disease, followed by a stroke)on May 15, 1886. Her closest friends and lifelong allies wereher brother, William Austin (1829‐ 1895), a year and a halfolder than she, and her sister, Lavinia (Vinnie), who was bornin February 1833 and died in 1899. In 1856 when her brother,called Austin, married her school friend Susan Gilbert (1830‐ 1913) the couple moved into the Evergreens, next door to theHomestead, newly built for the couple by Edward Dickinson.Neither Emily nor Lavinia married. Emily Dickinson seldomleft Amherst. Her one lengthy absence was a year at Mt.Holyoke Female Seminary (1847‐48), in South Hadley, tenlong miles away, where she was intensely homesick for her “ownDEAR HOME”; and once back in Amherst she beckoned herbrother from his school teaching in Boston: “Walk away tofreedom and the sunshine here at home.” Undaunted by herpowerful father’s domestic tyrannies, cherishing her mother(who remains hard for biographers to characterize, a passivewoman in a household of forceful personalities), Dickinsondeclared home to be holy, “the definition of God,” a place of“Infinite power.”Economically, politically, and intellectually, the Dickinsonswere among Amherst’s most prominent families. EdwardDickinson helped found Amherst College as a Calvinisticalternative to the more liberal Harvard and Yale, and he was itstreasurer for thirty‐six years. He served as a state representativeand a state senator. During his term in the national House ofRepresentatives (1853‐1854), Emily Dickinson visited him inWashington and stayed briefly in Philadelphia on her way home.A successful lawyer, Austin became a justice of the peace in1857 and followed his father, in 1873. as treasurer of AmherstCollege. Emily Dickinson attended Amherst Academy from1840 through 1846, years her biographer Richard B. Sewallcalls “a blossoming period in her life, full and joyous”; then shespent her year at Mt. Holyoke. At eighteen she was formallyeducated far beyond the level then achieved by most Americans,male or female.Religion was an essential part of Dickinson’s education, andAmherst was nearer to Jonathan Edwards’s Stockbridge of acentury before than it was to the Boston of the 1840s, where,for many of the educated classes, Unitarianism had disposedof the idea of hell and the fear of the fiery pit. For Dickinson,being terrorized by old-fashioned sermons about damnationwas compounded by the frequency of death in that age ofhigh infant and childhood mortality and high mortality inchildbirth. As her girlhood friends married and moved away,she gradually became estranged from the religious beliefsof the community. For several years she dutifully attendedchurch, and her terror diminished, especially after 1852. whenshe became friends with Josiah Gilbert Holland, associateeditor of the Springfield Republican, and his wife; their liberaltheology encouraged her to struggle against the influence ofsermons threatening damnation for souls like her own.Dickinson’s slow, triumph over religious fears was intricatelyinvolved in her seeing herself as a poet and was much aidedby the lifelong course of reading on which she embarked onceback at home after Mt. Holyoke. Of contemporary Americanwriting Dickinson knew the poetry of Longfellow, Holmes,and Lowell. She identified wryly with Hawthorne’s isolated,gnarled, idiosyncratic characters, such as Hepzibah in TheHouse of the Seven Gables. Ralph Waldo Emerson was anenduring favorite and a palpable presence, although she didnot go next door to meet him when he stayed at the Evergreenson a lecture tour in 1857. By the early 1860s she loved Thoreau,recognizing a kindred spirit in the independent, nature‐lovingman who delighted in being the village crank of Concord.She also read a host of lesser American fiction writers andpoets as lowly as the authors of what Sewall calls “the endlesssong of fugitive verses in the periodicals (the Republican, theHampshire and Franklin Express, the Atlantic, Harpers, andScriveners).”Dickinson’s deepest literary debts were to the Bible and toBritish writers, dead and living. In her maturity, throughnational magazines she subscribed to and books she orderedfrom Boston, she had access to the best British literature ofher time within weeks or months, usually, of its publication.Her knowledge of Shakespeare was minute and extremelypersonal, and she knew line-by-line works of other olderBritish poets, notably Milton. A favorite recent poet was Keats,and her reading of her English contemporaries started early.She read the novels of Charles Dickens as they appeared. Sheknew the poems of Robert Browning and the poet laureateTennyson, but the English contemporaries who mattered mostto her career were Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Brontesisters. Browning was immensely important as an exampleof a successful contemporary female poet. Indeed (to judgefrom No. 593), she seems to have awakened Dickinson to hervocation when she was still “a sombre Girl,” and Dickinsonrevered her. For Dickinson all three of the Bronte sisters (the“Yorkshire girls”) became not merely admired authors but dailypresences in her life. Dickinson subsequently had yet anotherEnglish model, George Eliot, whom she called “Mrs. Lewes,”unperturbed by newspaper accounts of the scandalous house-246 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

hold the writer maintained with the married George Lewes.She read Eliot’s novels, and poems she read as they appeared;and after Eliot’s death she eagerly awaited the announcedbiography. In her growing seclusion Dickinson became asfamiliar with Eliot’s fictional characters as she was withmany of the inhabitants of Amherst; only Dickens filled hermind with as many fictional acquaintances as Eliot did. Thescandalous George Sand was a powerful French parallel, notmerely as a woman but, after her death, as another “queen”—like herself, a queen of a literary realm. “Gigantic” EmilyBronte was a dead English queen, Mrs. Browning and GeorgeEliot reigned as dual English queens of poetry and (primarily)prose, and Emily Dickinson reigned unchallenged (in her ownknowledge) as the queen of American poetry; humorously shedeclared that every day she tried out ways of behaving “ ‘If Ishould be a Queen tomorrow’” (No. 373).No one has persuasively traced the precise stages of Dickinson’sgrowth from a conventional schoolgirl versifier to one of thegreatest American poets. It seems, however, that her originalityemerged in music before it emerged in verse. Through voiceand piano lessons, she became a musician good enough toimprovise for her family, but often alone, playing softly afterthe rest of the family had retired. Going beyond improvisingoriginal melodies on the piano, she began to improvise poetrythat was not merely of her own authorship but was genuinelyoriginal, in Emerson’s sense of adorning the world with anew thing. From her twenties until her death Dickinson wasfree to devote much of her life to poetry; and by the late 1850s. When she had become a true poet, Richard B. Sewallexplains, Dickinson ‘lived increasingly a competitive literarymarketplace. She found in the essay the assurance that everyeditor is always hungering and thirsting after novelties.” eagerfor the privilege of bringing forward a new genius.” In anotherpassage Higginson encouraging exalted the magnificentmystery of words” over a style merely conventionally smoothand accurate. Ignoring other passages (such as a stern ``warningagainst premature individualism and mannerism”), she copiedout a few. of her poems—plainly to see if he would publishthem.In her letter to Higginson on April 15, 1862, her first sentencewas a plea for recognition “Are you too deeply occupied to sayif my Verse is alive’’’ If it was alive, plain!!. It deserved to bein print. Higginson was incapable of responding as she hoped.and in the face of his disapproved her formal imperfectionsshe defensively disguised her desire to become a publishedpoet. Higginson looms large in any Dickinson biography notbecause he recognized her as a great poet in time to nourishand prolong her intense creative years but because MabelLoomis Todd much later enlisted him as a front man, whoseliterary stature whose guarantee that attention would be paidto the 1890 volume of Dickinson’s poetry she had edited withminimal help from him. After Higginson’s disappointingresponse to her poems, Dickinson built up an armor againstrejection, proclaiming contemptuously that publication was“the Auction/Of the Mind of Man” and that she would go toher maker undefiled by commerce. But knowing she was greatand having longed for public recognition, she continued for therest of her life to function (in her own eves) on equal footingwith her great Victorian contemporaries.The second half of Dickinson’s life was marked by a successionof deaths. She had experienced deaths all her life, but nothingto compare with the death of her eight-year‐old nephew Gilbertin 1883, next door at the Evergreens. Dickinson’s seclusionlate in life may have owed as much to her desire to distanceherself from strains in the marriage next door as anythingelse. In 1881 David Todd arrived in Amherst as director of theAmherst College Observatory. His young wife, Mabel, wastaken up by Sue Gilbert for a time, and the subsequent sexualliaison between Austin and Mabel lasted until Austin’s death.Several months before her death in 1882. Mrs. Dickinsonread some of her daughter’s poetry to Mrs. Todd, who foundthem ‘full of power.” Soon Todd and Emily Dickinson hadestablished “a very pleasant friendship” without meeting (Mabel Todd saw Dickinson once, in her coffin), and Toddhad decided that even though her neighbor reminded herof Dickens’s Miss Haversham in Great Expectations, thisAmherst eccentric was in many respects a genius.” Withoutthe poet’s overtures (a glass of sherry, flowers, poems) to thenewcomer, Emily Dickinson would not be in this or any otheranthology. She might have been wholly forgotten had not youngMabel Todd (at Lavinia’s instigation) painstakingly transcribedmany of Dickinson’s poems. The subsequent preservation andpublication of Dickinson’s poems and letters verse initiated andcarried forth by Todd, almost single‐handedly. She persuadedthe ever‐cautious T. W. Higginson to help her see a collectionof Poems into print in 1890 and a second series” of Poems in1891: she published a third series in 1896, without Higginson’sinvolvement. Richard B. Sewall estimates that only about atenth of the letters Dickinson wrote have survived and onlya thousandth of those written to her. Mabel Todd could donothing about the destruction of letters to Dickinson, butthrough her editing and her popular lectures she performedsmall miracles in alerting people. in time, to the presentationof Dickinson’s letters. the first edition of which she publishedin 1894. In the 1890s some critics reacted with superioritytoward w hat they saw as verse that violated the lay. s of meter,but the public loved the poems at once. After Todd’s laborsDickinson’s survival as a popular minor poet was never longin doubt; and through her efforts the documentary materialswere preserved on which literary scholars and critics could latercrown Dickinson as one of the great American poets, another‘gigantic Emily.”247

287A Clock stopped—Not the Mantel’s—Geneva’s farthest skillCan’t put the puppet bowing—That just now dangled still—An awe came on the Trinket!The Figures hunched, with pain—Then quivered out of Decimals—Into Degreeless Noon—It will not stir for Doctors—This Pendulum of snow—The Shopman importunes it—While cool—concernless No—Nods from the Gilded pointers—Nods from the Seconds slim—Decades of Arrogance betweenThe Dial life—And Him—303The Soul selects her own Society—Then—shuts the Door—To her divine Majority—Present no more—Unmoved—she notes the Chariots—pausing—At her low Gate—Unmoved—an Emperor be kneelingUpon her Mat—I’ve known her—from an ample nation—Choose One—Then—close the Valves of her attention—Like Stone—441This is my letter to the WorldThat never wrote to Me—The simple News that Nature told—With tender MajestyHer Message is committedTo Hands I cannot see—For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen—Judge tenderly—of Me46I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—The Stillness in the RoomWas like the Stillness in the Air—Between the Heaves of Storm—The Eyes around—had wrung them dry—And Breaths were gathering firmFor that last Onset—when the KingBe witnessed—in the Room—I willed my Keepsakes—Signed awayWhat portion of me beAssignable—and then it wasThere interposed a Fly—712Because I could not stop for Death—He kindly stopped for me—The Carriage held but just Ourselves—And Immortality.We slowly drove—He knew no hasteAnd I had put awayMy labor and my leisure too,For His Civility—We passed the School, where Children stroveAt Recess—in the Ring—We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—We passed the Setting Sun—Or rather—He passed Us—The Dews drew quivering and chill—For only Gossamer, my Gown—My Tippet—only TulleWe paused before a House that seemedA Swelling of the Ground—The Roof was scarcely visible—The Cornice—in the Ground—Since then—’tis Centuries—and yetFeels shorter than the DayI first surmised the Horses HeadsWere toward Eternity—248 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

986A narrow Fellow in the GrassOccasionally rides—You may have met Him—did you notHis notice sudden is—The Grass divides as with a Comb—A spotted shaft is seen—And then it closes at your feetAnd opens further on—He likes a Boggy AcreA Floor too cool for Corn—Yet when a Boy, and BarefootI more than once at NoonHave passed, I thought, a Whip lashUnbraiding in the SunWhen stooping to secure itIt wrinkled, and was gone—Several of Nature’s PeopleI know and they know me—I feel for them a transportOf cordiality—But never met this FellowAttended, or aloneWithout a tighter breathingAnd Zero at the Bone—29Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—Success in Circuit liesToo bright for our infirm DelightThe Truth s superb surpriseAs Lightning to the Children easedWith explanation kindThe Truth must dazzle graduallyOr every man be blind—Kate Chopin, At the ‘Cadian BallBobinot, that big, brown, good-natured Bobinôt, had nointention of going to the ball, even though he knew Calixtawould be there. For what came of those balls but heartache, anda sickening disinclination for work the whole week through, tillSaturday night came again and his tortures began afresh? Whycould he not love Ozéina, who would marry him to-morrow;or Fronie, or any one of a dozen others, rather than that littleSpanish vixen? Calixta’s slender foot had never touched Cubansoil; but her mother’s had, and the Spanish was in her blood allthe same. For that reason the prairie people forgave her muchthat they would not have overlooked in their own daughtersor sisters.Her eyes, — Bobinôt thought of her eyes, and weakened, — thebluest, the drowsiest, most tantalizing that ever looked into aman’s, he thought of her flaxen hair that kinked worse than amulatto’s close to her head; that broad, smiling mouth and tiptiltednose, that full figure; that voice like a rich contralto song,with cadences in it that must have been taught by Satan, forthere was no one else to teach her tricks on that ‘Cadian prairie.Bobinôt thought of them all as he plowed his rows of cane.There had even been a breath of scandal whispered about her ayear ago, when she went to Assumption,— but why talk of it?No one did now. “C’est Espagnol, ça,” most of them said withlenient shoulder-shrugs. “Bon chien tient de race,” the old menmumbled over their pipes, stirred by recollections. Nothing wasmade of it, except that Fronie threw it up to Calixta when thetwo quarreled and fought on the church steps after mass oneSunday, about a lover. Calixta swore roundly in fine ‘CadianFrench and with true Spanish spirit, and slapped Fronie’s face.Fronie had slapped her back; “Tiens, bocotte, va!” “Espèce delionèse; prends ça, et ça!” till the curé himself was obliged tohasten and make peace between them. Bobinôt thought of itall, and would not go to the ball.But in the afternoon, over at Friedheimer’s store, where hewas buying a trace-chain, he heard some one say that AlcéeLaballière would be there. Then wild horses could not havekept him away. He knew how it would be—or rather he did notknow how it would be—if the handsome young planter cameover to the ball as he sometimes did. If Alcée happened to bein a serious mood, he might only go to the card-room and playa round or two; or he might stand out on the galleries talkingcrops and politics with the old people. But there was no telling.A drink or two could put the devil in his head,—that was whatBobinôt said to himself, as he wiped the sweat from his browwith his red bandanna; a gleam from Calixta’s eyes, a flash ofher ankle, a twirl of her skirts could do the same. Yes, Bobinôtwould go to the ball.That was the year Alcée Laballière put nine hundred acres inrice. It was putting a good deal of money into the ground, butthe returns promised to be glorious. Old Madame Laballière,249

sailing about the spacious galleries in her white volante, figuredit all out in her head. Clarisse, her goddaughter helped her alittle, and together they built more air-castles than enough.Alcée worked like a mule that time; and if he did not killhimself, it was because his constitution was an iron one. Itwas an every-day affair for him to come in from the field wellnighexhausted, and wet to the waist. He did not mind if therewere visitors; he left them to his mother and Clarisse. Therewere often guests: young men and women who came up fromthe city, which was but a few hours away, to visit his beautifulkinswoman. She was worth going a good deal farther than thatto see. Dainty as a lily; hardy as a sunflower; slim, tall, graceful,like one of the reeds that grew in the marsh. Cold and kind andcruel by turn, and everything that was aggravating to Alcée.He would have liked to sweep the place of those visitors, often.Of the men, above all, with their ways and their manners; theirswaying of fans like women, and dandling about hammocks.He could have pitched them over the levee into the river, if ithadn’t meant murder. That was Alcée. But he must have beencrazy the day he came in from the rice-field, and, toil-stainedas he was, clasped Clarisse by the arms and panted a volleyof hot, blistering love-words into her face. No man had everspoken love to her like that.“Monsieur!” she exclaimed, looking him full in the eyes, withouta quiver. Alcée’s hands dropped and his glance wavered beforethe chill of her calm, clear eyes.“Par exemple!” she muttered disdainfully, as she turned fromhim, deftly adjusting the careful toilet that he had so brutallydisarranged.That happened a day or two before the cyclone came that cutinto the rice like fine steel. It was an awful thing, coming soswiftly, without a moment’s warning in which to light a holycandle or set a piece of blessed palm burning. Old madamewept openly and said her beads, just as her son Didier, the NewOrleans one, would have done. If such a thing had happened toAlphonse, the Laballière planting cotton up in Natchitoches,he would have raved and stormed like a second cyclone, andmade his surroundings unbearable for a day or two. But Alcéetook the misfortune differently. He looked ill and gray after it,and said nothing. His speechlessness was frightful. Clarisse’sheart melted with tenderness; but when she offered her soft,purring words of condolence, he accepted them with muteindifference. Then she and her nénaine wept afresh in eachother’s arms.A night or two later, when Clarisse went to her window tokneel there in the moonlight and say her prayers beforeretiring, she saw that Bruce, Alcée’s negro servant, had led hismaster’s saddle-horse noiselessly along the edge of the swardthat bordered the gravel-path, and stood holding him near by.Presently, she heard Alcée quit his room, which was beneathher own, and traverse the lower portico. As he emerged fromthe shadow and crossed the strip of moonlight, she perceivedthat he carried a pair of well-filled saddle-bags which he atonce flung across the animal’s back. He then lost no time inmounting, and after a brief exchange of words with Bruce,went cantering away, taking no precaution to avoid the noisygravel as the negro had done.Clarisse had never suspected that it might be Alcée’s customto sally forth from the plantation secretly, and at such an hour;for it was nearly midnight. And had it not been for the telltalesaddle-bags, she would only have crept to bed, to wonder, tofret and dream unpleasant dreams. But her impatience andanxiety would not be held in check. Hastily unbolting theshutters of her door that opened upon the gallery, she steppedoutside and called softly to the old negro.“Gre’t Peter! Miss Clarisse. I was n’ sho it was a ghos’ o’ w’at,stan’in’ up dah, plumb in de night, dataway.”He mounted halfway up the long, broad flight of stairs. Shewas standing at the top.“Bruce, w’ere has Monsieur Alcée gone?” she asked.“W’y, he gone ‘bout he business, I reckin,” replied Bruce,striving to be noncommittal at the outset.“W’ere has Monsieur Alcée gone?” she reiterated, stamping herbare foot. “I won’t stan’ any nonsense or any lies; mine, Bruce.”“I don’ ric’lic ez I eva tole you lie yit, Miss Clarisse. Mista Alcée,he all broke up, sho.”“W’ere - has - he gone? Ah, Sainte Vierge! faut de la patience!butor, va!”“W’en I was in he room, a-breshin’ off he clo’es to-day,” thedarkey began, settling himself against the stair-rail, “he lookdat speechless an’ down, I say, ‘You ‘pear tu me like somepussun w’at gwine have a spell o’ sickness, Mista Alcée.’ Hesay, ‘You reckin?’ ‘I dat he git up, go look hisse’f stiddy in deglass. Den he go to de chimbly an’ jerk up de quinine bottle anpo’ a gre’t hoss-dose on to he han’. An’ he swalla dat mess in awink, an’ wash hit down wid a big dram o’ w’iskey w’at he keepin he room, aginst he come all soppin’ wet outen de fiel’.“He ‘lows, ‘No, I ain’ gwine be sick, Bruce.’ Den he square off.He say, ‘I kin mak out to stan’ up an’ gi’ an’ take wid any manI knows, lessen hit ‘s John L. Sulvun. But w’en God A’mightyan’ a ‘omen jines fo’ces agin me, dat ‘s one too many fur me.’ Itell ‘im, ‘Jis so,’ while’ I ‘se makin’ out to bresh a spot off w’atain’ dah, on he coat colla. I tell ‘im, ‘You wants li’le res’, suh.’He say, ‘No, I wants li’le fling; dat w’at I wants; an I gwine gitit. Pitch me a fis’ful o’ clo’es in dem ‘ar saddle-bags.’ Dat w’athe say. Don’t you bodda, missy. He jis’ gone a-caperin’ yondato de Cajun ball. Uh - uh - de skeeters is fair’ a-swarmin’ likebees roun’ yo’ foots!”The mosquitoes were indeed attacking Clarisse’s white feetsavagely. She had unconsciously been alternately rubbing onefoot over the other during the darkey’s recital.“The ‘Cadian ball,” she repeated contemptously. “Humph! Parexemple! Nice conduc’ for a Laballière. An’ he needs a saddlebag,fill’ with clothes, to go to the ‘Cadian ball!”“Oh, Miss Clarisse; you go on to bed, chile; git yo’ soun’ sleep.He ‘low he come back in couple weeks o’ so. I kiarn be repeatin’lot o’ truck w’at young mans say, out heah face o’ a young gal.”Clarisse said no more, but turned and abruptly reentered the250 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

house.“You done talk too much wid yo’ mouf already, you ole foolnigga, you,” muttered Bruce to himself as he walked away.Alcée reached the ball very late, of course—too late for thechicken gumbo which had been served at midnight.The big, low-ceiled room—they called it a hall—was packedwith men and women dancing to the music of three fiddles.There were broad galleries all around it. There was a room atone side where sober-faced men were playing cards. Another,in which babies were sleeping, was called le parc aux petits.Any one who is white may go to a ‘Cadian ball, but he must payfor his lemonade, his coffee and chicken gumbo. And he mustbehave himself like a ‘Cadian. Grosboeuf was giving this ball.He had been giving them since he was a young man, and hewas a middle-aged one, now. In that time he could recall butone disturbance, and that was caused by American railroaders,who were not in touch with their surroundings and had nobusiness there. “Ces maudits gens du raiderode,” Grosboeufcalled them.Alcée Laballière’s presence at the ball caused a flutter evenamong the men, who could not but admire his “nerve” aftersuch misfortune befalling him. To be sure, they knew theLaballières were rich—that there were resources East, andmore again in the city. But they felt it took a brave hommeto stand a blow like that philosophically. One old gentleman,who was in the habit of reading a Paris newspaper and knewthings, chuckled gleefully to everybody that Alcée’s conductwas altogether chic, mais chic. That he had more panache thanBoulanger. Well, perhaps he had.But what he did not show outwardly was that he was in a moodfor ugly things to-night. Poor Bobinôt alone felt it vaguely. Hediscerned a gleam of it in Alcée’s handsome eyes, as the youngplanter stood in the doorway, looking with rather feverishglance upon the assembly, while he laughed and talked with a‘Cadian farmer who was beside him.Bobinôt himself was dull-looking and clumsy. Most of the menwere. But the young women were very beautiful. The eyes thatglanced into Alcée’s as they passed him were big, dark, softas those of the young heifers standing out in the cool prairiegrass.But the belle was Calixta. Her white dress was not nearly sohandsome or well made as Fronie’s (she and Fronie had quiteforgotten the battle on the church steps, and were friendsagain), nor were her slippers so stylish as those of Ozéina; andshe fanned herself with a handkerchief, since she had brokenher red fan at the last ball, and her aunts and uncles were notwilling to give her another. But all the men agreed she was ather best to-night. Such animation! and abandon! such flashesof wit!“Hé, Bobinôt! Mais w’at’s the matta? W’at you standin’ plantélà like ole Ma’ame Tina’s cow in the bog, you?”That was good. That was an excellent thrust at Bobinôt, whohad forgotten the figure of the dance with his mind bent onother things, and it started a clamor of laughter at his expense.He joined good-naturedly. It was better to receive even suchnotice as that from Calixta than none at all. But MadameSuzonne, sitting in a corner, whispered to her neighbor thatif Ozéina were to conduct herself in a like manner, she shouldimmediately be taken out to the mule-cart and driven home.The women did not always approve of Calixta.Now and then were short lulls in the dance, when couplesflocked out upon the galleries for a brief respite and fresh air.The moon had gone down pale in the west, and in the east wasyet no promise of day. After such an interval, when the dancersagain assembled to resume the interrupted quadrille, Calixtawas not among them.She was sitting upon a bench out in the shadow, with Alcéebeside her. They were acting like fools. He had attempted totake a little gold ring from her finger; just for the fun of it, forthere was nothing he could have done with the ring but replaceit again. But she clinched her hand tight. He pretended that itwas a very difficult matter to open it. Then he kept the handin his. They seemed to forget about it. He played with her earring,a thin crescent of gold hanging from her small brownear. He caught a wisp of the kinky hair that had escaped itsfastening, and rubbed the ends of it against his shaven cheek.“You know, last year in Assumption, Calixta?” They belongedto the younger generation, so preferred to speak English.“Don’t come say Assumption to me, M’sieur Alcée. I done yeardAssumption till I ‘m plumb sick.”“Yes, I know. The idiots! Because you were in Assumption, and Ihappened to go to Assumption, they must have it that we wenttogether. But it was nice— hein, Calixta?—in Assumption?”They saw Bobinôt emerge from the hall and stand a momentoutside the lighted doorway, peering uneasily and searchinglyinto the darkness. He did not see them, and went slowly back.“There is Bobinôt looking for you. You are going to set poorBobinôt crazy. You ‘ll marry him some day; hein, Calixta?”“I don’t say no, me,” she replied, striving to withdraw her hand,which he held more firmly for the attempt.“But come, Calixta; you know you said you would go back toAssumption, just to spite them.”“No, I neva said that, me. You mus’ dreamt that.”“Oh, I thought you did. You know I ‘m going down to the city.”“W’en?”“To-night.”“Betta make has’e, then; it ‘s mos’ day.”“Well, to-morrow ‘ll do.”“W’at you goin’ do, yonda?”“I don’t know. Drown myself in the lake, maybe; unless you godown there to visit your uncle.”Calixta’s senses were reeling; and they well-nigh left her whenshe felt Alcée’s lips brush her ear like the touch of a rose.“Mista Alcée! Is dat Mista Alcée?” the thick voice of a negrowas asking; he stood on the ground, holding to the banisterrailsnear which the couple sat.“W’at do you want now?” cried Alcée impatiently. “Can’t I have251

a moment of peace?”“I ben huntin’ you high an’ low, suh,” answered the man. “Dey- dey some one in de road, onda de mulbare-tree, want see youa minute.”“I would n’t go out to the road to see the Angel Gabriel. And ifyou come back here with any more talk, I ‘ll have to break yourneck.” The negro turned mumbling away.Alcée and Calixta laughed softly about it. Her boisterousnesswas all gone. They talked low, and laughed softly, as lovers do.“Alcée! Alcée Laballière!”It was not the negro’s voice this time; but one that went throughAlcée’s body like an electric shock, bringing him to his feet.Clarisse was standing there in her riding-habit, where thenegro had stood. For an instant confusion reigned in Alcée’sthoughts, as with one who awakes suddenly from a dream. Buthe felt that something of serious import had brought his cousinto the ball in the dead of night.“W’at does this mean, Clarisse?” he asked.“It means something has happen’ at home. You mus’ come.”“Happened to maman?” he questioned, in alarm.“No; nénaine is well, and asleep. It is something else. Not tofrighten you. But you mus’ come. Come with me, Alcée.”There was no need for the imploring note. He would havefollowed the voice anywhere.She had now recognized the girl sitting back on the bench.“Ah, c’est vous, Calixta? Comment ça va, mon enfant?”“Tcha va b’en; et vous, mam’zélle?”Alcée swung himself over the low rail and started to followClarisse, without a word, without a glance back at the girl. Hehad forgotten he was leaving her there. But Clarisse whisperedsomething to him, and he turned back to say “Good-night,Calixta,” and offer his hand to press through the railing. Shepretended not to see it.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .“How come that? You settin’ yere by yo’se’f, Calixta?” It wasBobinôt who had found her there alone. The dancers hadnot yet come out. She looked ghastly in the faint, gray lightstruggling out of the east.“Yes, that ‘s me. Go yonda in the parc aux petits an’ ask AuntOlisse fu’ my hat. She knows w’ere ‘t is. I want to go home,me.”“How you came?”“I come afoot, with the Cateaus. But I ‘m goin’ now. I ent goin’wait fu’ ‘em. I ‘m plumb wo’ out, me.”“Kin I go with you, Calixta?”“I don’ care.”They went together across the open prairie and along the edgeof the fields, stumbling in the uncertain light. He told her tolift her dress that was getting wet and bedraggled; for she waspulling at the weeds and grasses with her hands.“I don’ care; it ‘s got to go in the tub, anyway. You been sayin’ allalong you want to marry me, Bobinôt. Well, if you want, yet,I don’ care, me.”The glow of a sudden and overwhelming happiness shone outin the brown, rugged face of the young Acadian. He could notspeak, for very joy. It choked him.“Oh well, if you don’ want,” snapped Calixta, flippantly,pretending to be piqued at his silence.“Bon Dieu! You know that makes me crazy, w’at you sayin’. Youmean that, Calixta? You ent goin’ turn roun’ agin?”“I neva tole you that much yet, Bobinôt. I mean that. Tiens,”and she held out her hand in the business-like manner of aman who clinches a bargain with a hand-clasp. Bobinôt grewbold with happiness and asked Calixta to kiss him. She turnedher face, that was almost ugly after the night’s dissipation, andlooked steadily into his.“I don’ want to kiss you, Bobinôt,” she said, turning away again,“not to-day. Some other time. Bonté divine! ent you satisfy,yet!”“Oh, I ‘m satisfy, Calixta,” he said.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Riding through a patch of wood, Clarisse’s saddle becameungirted, and she and Alcée dismounted to readjust it.For the twentieth time he asked her what had happened athome.“But, Clarisse, w’at is it? Is it a misfortune?”“Ah Dieu sait!” It ‘s only something that happen’ to me.”“To you!”“I saw you go away las night, Alcée, with those saddle-bags,”she said, haltingly, striving to arrange something about thesaddle, “an’ I made Bruce tell me. He said you had gone tothe ball, an’ wouldn’ be home for weeks an’ weeks. I thought,Alcée—maybe you were going to—to Assumption. I got wild.An’ then I knew if you didn’t come back, now, to-night, I couldn’t stan’ it,—again.”She had her face hidden in her arm that she was resting againstthe saddle when she said that.He began to wonder if this meant love. But she had to tell himso, before he believed it. And when she told him, he thoughtthe face of the Universe was changed—just like Bobinôt. Wasit last week the cyclone had well-nigh ruined him? The cycloneseemed a huge joke, now. It was he, then, who, an hour agowas kissing little Calixta’s ear and whispering nonsense intoit. Calixta was like a myth, now. The one, only, great reality inthe world was Clarisse standing before him, telling him thatshe loved him.In the distance they heard the rapid discharge of pistol-shots;but it did not disturb them. They knew it was only the negromusicians who had gone into the yard to fire their pistols intothe air, as the custom is, and to announce “le bal est fini.”252 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Kate Chopin: The StormIThe leaves were so still that even Bibi thought it was going torain. Bobinôt, who was accustomed to converse on terms ofperfect equality with his little son, called the child’s attention tocertain sombre clouds that were rolling with sinister intentionfrom the west, accompanied by a sullen, threatening roar. Theywere at Friedheimer’s store and decided to remain there till thestorm had passed. They sat within the door on two empty kegs.Bibi was four years old and looked very wise.“Mama’ll be ‘fraid, yes, he suggested with blinking eyes.“She’ll shut the house. Maybe she got Sylvie helpin’ her thisevenin’,” Bobinôt responded reassuringly.“No; she ent got Sylvie. Sylvie was helpin’ her yistiday,’ pipedBibi.Bobinôt arose and going across to the counter purchased a canof shrimps, of which Calixta was very fond. Then he returnedto his perch on the keg and sat stolidly holding the can ofshrimps while the storm burst. It shook the wooden store andseemed to be ripping great furrows in the distant field. Bibilaid his little hand on his father’s knee and was not afraid.IICalixta, at home, felt no uneasiness for their safety. She satat a side window sewing furiously on a sewing machine. Shewas greatly occupied and did not notice the approaching storm.But she felt very warm and often stopped to mop her face onwhich the perspiration gathered in beads. She unfastened herwhite sacque at the throat. It began to grow dark, and suddenlyrealizing the situation she got up hurriedly and went aboutclosing windows and doors.Out on the small front gallery she had hung Bobinôt’s Sundayclothes to dry and she hastened out to gather them before therain fell. As she stepped outside, Alcée Laballière rode in at thegate. She had not seen him very often since her marriage, andnever alone. She stood there with Bobinôt’s coat in her hands,and the big raindrops began to fall. Alcée rode his horse underthe shelter of a side projection where the chickens had huddledand there were plows and a harrow piled up in the corner.“May I come and wait on your gallery till the storm is over,Calixta?” he asked.Come ‘long in, M’sieur Alcée.”His voice and her own startled her as if from a trance, and sheseized Bobinôt’s vest. Alcée, mounting to the porch, grabbedthe trousers and snatched Bibi’s braided jacket that was aboutto be carried away by a sudden gust of wind. He expressedan intention to remain outside, but it was soon apparent thathe might as well have been out in the open: the water beat inupon the boards in driving sheets, and he went inside, closingthe door after him. It was even necessary to put somethingbeneath the door to keep the water out.“My! what a rain! It’s good two years sence it rain’ like that,”exclaimed Calixta as she rolled up a piece of bagging andAlcée helped her to thrust it beneath the crack.She was a little fuller of figure than five years before whenshe married; but she had lost nothing of her vivacity. Her blueeyes still retained their melting quality; and her yellow hair,dishevelled by the wind and rain, kinked more stubbornlythan ever about her ears and temples.The rain beat upon the low, shingled roof with a force andclatter that threatened to break an entrance and deluge themthere. They were in the dining room—the sitting room—thegeneral utility room. Adjoining was her bedroom, with Bibi’scouch along side her own. The door stood open, and the roomwith its white, monumental bed, its closed shutters, lookeddim and mysterious.Alcée flung himself into a rocker and Calixta nervously beganto gather up from the floor the lengths of a cotton sheet whichshe had been sewing.lf this keeps up, Dieu sait if the levees goin’ to stan it!” sheexclaimed.“What have you got to do with the levees?”“I got enough to do! An’ there’s Bobinôt with Bibi out in thatstorm—if he only didn’ left Friedheimer’s!”“Let us hope, Calixta, that Bobinôt’s got sense enough to comein out of a cyclone.”She went and stood at the window with a greatly disturbedlook on her face. She wiped the frame that was clouded withmoisture. It was stiflingly hot. Alcée got up and joined her at thewindow, looking over her shoulder. The rain was coming downin sheets obscuring the view of far-off cabins and envelopingthe distant wood in a gray mist. The playing of the lightningwas incessant. A bolt struck a tall chinaberry tree at the edge ofthe field. It filled all visible space with a blinding glare and thecrash seemed to invade the very boards they stood upon.253

Calixta put her hands to her eyes, and with a cry, staggeredbackward. Alcée’s arm encircled her, and for an instant hedrew her close and spasmodically to him.“Bonté!” she cried, releasing herself from his encircling armand retreating from the window, the house’ll go next! If I onlyknew w’ere Bibi was!” She would not compose herself; shewould not be seated. Alcée clasped her shoulders and lookedinto her face. The contact of her warm, palpitating body whenhe had unthinkingly drawn her into his arms, had aroused allthe old-time infatuation and desire for her flesh.“Calixta,” he said, “don’t be frightened. Nothing can happen.The house is too low to be struck, with so many tall treesstanding about. There! aren’t you going to be quiet? say, aren’tyou?” He pushed her hair back from her face that was warmand steaming. Her lips were as red and moist as pomegranateseed. Her white neck and a glimpse of her full, firm bosomdisturbed him powerfully. As she glanced up at him the fearin her liquid blue eyes had given place to a drowsy gleam thatunconsciously betrayed a sensuous desire. He looked downinto her eyes and there was nothing for him to do but to gatherher lips in a kiss. It reminded him of Assumption.“Do you remember—in Assumption, Calixta?” he asked ina low voice broken by passion. Oh! she remembered; for inAssumption he had kissed her and kissed and kissed her; untilhis senses would well nigh fail, and to save her he would resortto a desperate flight. If she was not an immaculate dove in thosedays, she was still inviolate; a passionate creature whose verydefenselessness had made her defense, against which his honorforbade him to prevail. Now—well, now—her lips seemed ina manner free to be tasted, as well as her round, white throatand her whiter breasts.They did not heed the crashing torrents, and the roar of theelements made her laugh as she lay in his arms. She was arevelation in that dim, mysterious chamber; as white as thecouch she lay upon. Her firm, elastic flesh that was knowingfor the first time its birthright, was like a creamy lily that thesun invites to contribute its breath and perfume to the undyinglife of the world.The generous abundance of her passion, without guile ortrickery, was like a white flame which penetrated and foundresponse in depths of his own sensuous nature that had neveryet been reached.When he touched her breasts they gave themselves up inquivering ecstasy, inviting his lips. Her mouth was a fountainof delight. And when he possessed her, they seemed to swoontogether at the very borderland of life’s mystery.He stayed cushioned upon her, breathless, dazed, enervated,with his heart beating like a hammer upon her. With one handshe clasped his head, her lips lightly touching his forehead.The other hand stroked with a soothing rhythm his muscularshoulders.The growl of the thunder was distant and passing away. Therain beat softly upon the shingles, inviting them to drowsinessand sleep. But they dared not yield.IIIThe rain was over; and the sun was turning the glistening greenworld into a palace of gems. Calixta, on the gallery, watchedAlcée ride away. He turned and smiled at her with a beamingface; and she lifted her pretty chin in the air and laughedaloud.Bobinôt and Bibi, trudging home, stopped without at thecistern to make themselves presentable.“My! Bibi, w’at will yo’ mama say! You ought to be ashame’. Yououghta’ put on those good pants. Look at ‘em! An’ that mudon yo’ collar! How you got that mud on yo’ collar, Bibi? I neversaw such a boy!” Bibi was the picture of pathetic resignation.Bobinôt was the embodiment of serious solicitude as he stroveto remove from his own person and his son’s the signs of theirtramp over heavy roads and through wet fields. He scrapedthe mud off Bibi’s bare legs and feet with a stick and carefullyremoved all traces from his heavy brogans. Then, prepared forthe worst—the meeting with an over-scrupulous housewife,they entered cautiously at the back door.Calixta was preparing supper. She had set the table and wasdripping coffee at the hearth. She sprang up as they came in.“Oh, Bobinôt! You back! My! but I was uneasy. W’ere you beenduring the rain? An’ Bibi? he ain’t wet? he ain’t hurt?” Shehad clasped Bibi and was kissing him effusively. Bobinôt’sexplanations and apologies which he had been composing allalong the way, died on his lips as Calixta felt him to see if hewere dry, and seemed to express nothing but satisfaction attheir safe return.“I brought you some shrimps, Calixta,” offered Bobinôt, haulingthe can from his ample side pocket and laying it on the table.“Shrimps! Oh, Bobinôt! you too good fo’ anything!” and shegave him a smacking kiss on the cheek that resounded, “J’vousréponds, we’ll have a feas’ to-night! umph-umph!”Bobinôt and Bibi began to relax and enjoy themselves, andwhen the three seated themselves at table they laughed muchand so loud that anyone might have heard them as far away asLaballière’s.254 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

IVAlcée Laballière wrote to his wife, Clarisse, that night. Itwas a loving letter, full of tender solicitude. He told her notto hurry back, but if she and the babies liked it at Biloxi, tostay a month longer. He was getting on nicely; and thoughhe missed them, he was willing to bear the separation a whilelonger—realizing that their health and pleasure were the firstthings to be considered.VAs for Clarisse, she was charmed upon receiving her husband’sletter. She and the babies were doing well. The society wasagreeable; many of her old friends and acquaintances were atthe bay. And the first free breath since her marriage seemed torestore the pleasant liberty of her maiden days. Devoted as shewas to her husband, their intimate conjugal life was somethingwhich she was more than willing to forego for a while.So the storm passed and every one was happy.Kate Chopin, Desiree’s BabyAs the day was pleasant, Madame Valmonde drove over toL’Abri to see Desiree and the baby.It made her laugh to think of Desiree with a baby. Why, itseemed but yesterday that Desiree was little more than a babyherself; when Monsieur in riding through the gateway ofValmonde had found her lying asleep in the shadow of the bigstone pillar.The little one awoke in his arms and began to cry for “Dada.”That was as much as she could do or say. Some people thoughtshe might have strayed there of her own accord, for she was ofthe toddling age. The prevailing belief was that she had beenpurposely left by a party of Texans, whose canvas-coveredwagon, late in the day, had crossed the ferry that Coton Maiskept, just below the plantation. In time Madame Valmondeabandoned every speculation but the one that Desiree hadbeen sent to her by a beneficent Providence to be the child ofher affection, seeing that she was without child of the flesh.For the girl grew to be beautiful and gentle, affectionate andsincere,--the idol of Valmonde.It was no wonder, when she stood one day against the stonepillar in whose shadow she had lain asleep, eighteen yearsbefore, that Armand Aubigny riding by and seeing her there,had fallen in love with her. That was the way all the Aubignysfell in love, as if struck by a pistol shot. The wonder was thathe had not loved her before; for he had known her since hisfather brought him home from Paris, a boy of eight, after hismother died there. The passion that awoke in him that day,when he saw her at the gate, swept along like an avalanche, orlike a prairie fire, or like anything that drives headlong overall obstacles.Monsieur Valmonde grew practical and wanted things wellconsidered: that is, the girl’s obscure origin. Armand lookedinto her eyes and did not care. He was reminded that she wasnameless. What did it matter about a name when he could giveher one of the oldest and proudest in Louisiana? He orderedthe corbeille from Paris, and contained himself with whatpatience he could until it arrived; then they were married.Madame Valmonde had not seen Desiree and the baby forfour weeks. When she reached L’Abri she shuddered at thefirst sight of it, as she always did. It was a sad looking place,which for many years had not known the gentle presence ofa mistress, old Monsieur Aubigny having married and buriedhis wife in France, and she having loved her own land too wellever to leave it. The roof came down steep and black like acowl, reaching out beyond the wide galleries that encircledthe yellow stuccoed house. Big, solemn oaks grew close to it,and their thick-leaved, far-reaching branches shadowed it likea pall. Young Aubigny’s rule was a strict one, too, and underit his negroes had forgotten how to be gay, as they had beenduring the old master’s easy-going and indulgent lifetime.The young mother was recovering slowly, and lay full length, in255

her soft white muslins and laces, upon a couch. The baby wasbeside her, upon her arm, where he had fallen asleep, at herbreast. The yellow nurse woman sat beside a window fanningherself.Madame Valmonde bent her portly figure over Desiree andkissed her, holding her an instant tenderly in her arms. Thenshe turned to the child.“This is not the baby!” she exclaimed, in startled tones. Frenchwas the language spoken at Valmonde in those days.“I knew you would be astonished,” laughed Desiree, “at the wayhe has grown. The little cochon de lait! Look at his legs, mamma,and his hands and fingernails,--real finger-nails. Zandrine hadto cut them this morning. Isn’t it true, Zandrine?”The woman bowed her turbaned head majestically, “Mais si,Madame.”“And the way he cries,” went on Desiree, “is deafening. Armandheard him the other day as far away as La Blanche’s cabin.”Madame Valmonde had never removed her eyes from thechild. She lifted it and walked with it over to the window thatwas lightest. She scanned the baby narrowly, then looked assearchingly at Zandrine, whose face was turned to gaze acrossthe fields.“Yes, the child has grown, has changed,” said MadameValmonde, slowly, as she replaced it beside its mother. “Whatdoes Armand say?”Desiree’s face became suffused with a glow that was happinessitself.“Oh, Armand is the proudest father in the parish, I believe,chiefly because it is a boy, to bear his name; though he says not,--that he would have loved a girl as well. But I know it isn’t true.I know he says that to please me. And mamma,” she added,drawing Madame Valmonde’s head down to her, and speakingin a whisper, “he hasn’t punished one of them--not one ofthem--since baby is born. Even Negrillon, who pretendedto have burnt his leg that he might rest from work--he onlylaughed, and said Negrillon was a great scamp. oh, mamma,I’m so happy; it frightens me.”What Desiree said was true. Marriage, and later the birth of hisson had softened Armand Aubigny’s imperious and exactingnature greatly. This was what made the gentle Desiree so happy,for she loved him desperately. When he frowned she trembled,but loved him. When he smiled, she asked no greater blessingof God. But Armand’s dark, handsome face had not often beendisfigured by frowns since the day he fell in love with her.When the baby was about three months old, Desiree awokeone day to the conviction that there was something in the airmenacing her peace. It was at first too subtle to grasp. It hadonly been a disquieting suggestion; an air of mystery amongthe blacks; unexpected visits from far-off neighbors who couldhardly account for their coming. Then a strange, an awfulchange in her husband’s manner, which she dared not ask himto explain. When he spoke to her, it was with averted eyes, fromwhich the old love-light seemed to have gone out. He absentedhimself from home; and when there, avoided her presence andthat of her child, without excuse. And the very spirit of Satanseemed suddenly to take hold of him in his dealings with theslaves. Desiree was miserable enough to die.She sat in her room, one hot afternoon, in her peignoir,listlessly drawing through her fingers the strands of her long,silky brown hair that hung about her shoulders. The baby, halfnaked, lay asleep upon her own great mahogany bed, thatwas like a sumptuous throne, with its satin-lined half-canopy.One of La Blanche’s little quadroon boys--half naked too--stood fanning the child slowly with a fan of peacock feathers.Desiree’s eyes had been fixed absently and sadly upon the baby,while she was striving to penetrate the threatening mist thatshe felt closing about her. She looked from her child to the boywho stood beside him, and back again; over and over. “Ah!” Itwas a cry that she could not help; which she was not consciousof having uttered. The blood turned like ice in her veins, and aclammy moisture gathered upon her face.She tried to speak to the little quadroon boy; but no soundwould come, at first. When he heard his name uttered, helooked up, and his mistress was pointing to the door. He laidaside the great, soft fan, and obediently stole away, over thepolished floor, on his bare tiptoes.She stayed motionless, with gaze riveted upon her child, andher face the picture of fright.Presently her husband entered the room, and without noticingher, went to a table and began to search among some paperswhich covered it.“Armand,” she called to him, in a voice which must have stabbedhim, if he was human. But he did not notice. “Armand,” shesaid again. Then she rose and tottered towards him. “Armand,”she panted once more, clutching his arm, “look at our child.What does it mean? tell me.”He coldly but gently loosened her fingers from about his armand thrust the hand away from him. “Tell me what it means!”she cried despairingly.“It means,” he answered lightly, “that the child is not white; itmeans that you are not white.”A quick conception of all that this accusation meant for hernerved her with unwonted courage to deny it. “It is a lie; itis not true, I am white! Look at my hair, it is brown; and myeyes are gray, Armand, you know they are gray. And my skinis fair,” seizing his wrist. “Look at my hand; whiter than yours,Armand,” she laughed hysterically.“As white as La Blanche’s,” he returned cruelly; and went awayleaving her alone with their child.When she could hold a pen in her hand, she sent a despairingletter to Madame Valmonde.“My mother, they tell me I am not white. Armand has told meI am not white. For God’s sake tell them it is not true. Youmust know it is not true. I shall die. I must die. I cannot be sounhappy, and live.”The answer that came was brief:“My own Desiree: Come home to Valmonde; back to yourmother who loves you. Come with your child.”256 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

When the letter reached Desiree she went with it to her husband’sstudy, and laid it open upon the desk before which he sat. Shewas like a stone image: silent, white, motionless after she placedit there.In silence he ran his cold eyes over the written words.He said nothing. “Shall I go, Armand?” she asked in tones sharpwith agonized suspense.“Yes, go.”“Do you want me to go?”“Yes, I want you to go.”He thought Almighty God had dealt cruelly and unjustly withhim; and felt, somehow, that he was paying Him back in kindwhen he stabbed thus into his wife’s soul. Moreover he no longerloved her, because of the unconscious injury she had brought uponhis home and his name.She turned away like one stunned by a blow, and walked slowlytowards the door, hoping he would call her back.“Good-by, Armand,” she moaned.He did not answer her. That was his last blow at fate.Desiree went in search of her child. Zandrine was pacing thesombre gallery with it. She took the little one from the nurse’s armswith no word of explanation, and descending the steps, walkedaway, under the live-oak branches.It was an October afternoon; the sun was just sinking. Out in thestill fields the negroes were picking cotton.Desiree had not changed the thin white garment nor the slipperswhich she wore. Her hair was uncovered and the sun’s rays broughta golden gleam from its brown meshes. She did not take the broad,beaten road which led to the far-off plantation of Valmonde. Shewalked across a deserted field, where the stubble bruised her tenderfeet, so delicately shod, and tore her thin gown to shreds.She disappeared among the reeds and willows that grew thickalong the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou; and she did not comeback again.Some weeks later there was a curious scene enacted at L’Abri. Inthe centre of the smoothly swept back yard was a great bonfire.Armand Aubigny sat in the wide hallway that commanded a viewof the spectacle; and it was he who dealt out to a half dozen negroesthe material which kept this fire ablaze.A graceful cradle of willow, with all its dainty furbishings, waslaid upon the pyre, which had already been fed with the richnessof a priceless layette. Then there were silk gowns, and velvet andsatin ones added to these; laces, too, and embroideries; bonnetsand gloves; for the corbeille had been of rare quality.The last thing to go was a tiny bundle of letters; innocent littlescribblings that Desiree had sent to him during the days of theirespousal. There was the remnant of one back in the drawer fromwhich he took them. But it was not Desiree’s; it was part of an oldletter from his mother to his father. He read it. She was thankingGod for the blessing of her husband’s love:--“But above all,” she wrote, “night and day, I thank the good Godfor having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will neverknow that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that iscursed with the brand of slavery.”Edith Wharton: The Other TwoWAYTHORN, on the drawing-room hearth, waited for hiswife to come down to dinner.It was their first night under his own roof, and he was surprisedat his thrill of boyish agitation. He was not so old, to be sure --his glass gave him little more than the five-and-thirty years towhich his wife confessed -- but he had fancied himself alreadyin the temperate zone; yet here he was listening for her stepwith a tender sense of all it symbolized, with some old trail ofverse about the garlanded nuptial door-posts floating throughhis enjoyment of the pleasant room and the good dinner justbeyond it.They had been hastily recalled from their honeymoon bythe illness of Lily Haskett, the child of Mrs. Waythorn’sfirst marriage. The little girl, at Waythorn’s desire, had beentransferred to his house on the day of her mother’s wedding,and the doctor, on their arrival, broke the news that she wasill with typhoid, but declared that all the symptoms werefavorable. Lily could show twelve years of unblemished health,and the case promised to be a light one. The nurse spoke asreassuringly, and after a moment of alarm Mrs. Waythorn hadadjusted herself to the situation. She was very fond of Lily --her affection for the child had perhaps been her decisive charmin Waythorn’s eyes -- but she had the perfectly balanced nerveswhich her little girl had inherited, and no woman ever wastedless tissue in unproductive worry. Waythorn was therefore quiteprepared to see her come in presently, a little late because of alast look at Lily, but as serene and well-appointed as if her goodnightkiss had been laid on the brow of health. Her composurewas restful to him; it acted as ballast to his somewhat unstablesensibilities. As he pictured her bending over the child’s bedhe thought how soothing her presence must be in illness: hervery step would prognosticate recovery.His own life had been a gray one, from temperament ratherthan circumstance, and he had been drawn to her by theunperturbed gayety which kept her fresh and elastic at anage when most women’s activities are growing either slack orfebrile. He knew what was said about her; for, popular as shewas, there had always been a faint undercurrent of detraction.When she had appeared in New York, nine or ten years earlier,as the pretty Mrs. Haskett whom Gus Varick had unearthedsomewhere -- was it in Pittsburgh or Utica? -- society, whilepromptly accepting her, had reserved the right to cast a doubton its own discrimination. Inquiry, however, established herundoubted connection with a socially reigning family, andexplained her recent divorce as the natural result of a runawaymatch at seventeen; and as nothing was known of Mr. Haskettit was easy to believe the worst of him.257

Alice Haskett’s remarriage with Gus Varick was a passport tothe set whose recognition she coveted, and for a few years theVaricks were the most popular couple in town. Unfortunatelythe alliance was brief and stormy, and this time the husbandhad his champions. Still, even Varick’s staunchest supportersadmitted that he was not meant for matrimony, and Mrs.Varick’s grievances were of a nature to bear the inspection ofthe New York courts. A New York divorce is in itself a diplomaof virtue, and in the semi- widowhood of this second separationMrs. Varick took on an air of sanctity, and was allowed toconfide her wrongs to some of the most scrupulous ears intown. But when it was known that she was to marry Waythornthere was a momentary reaction. Her best friends would havepreferred to see her remain in the role of the injured wife,which was as becoming to her as crape to a rosy complexion.True, a decent time had elapsed, and it was not even suggestedthat Waythorn had supplanted his predecessor. Still, peopleshook their heads over him, and one grudging friend, to whomhe affirmed that he took the step with his eyes open, repliedoracularly: “Yes -- and with your ears shut.”Waythorn could afford to smile at these innuendoes. Inthe Wall Street phrase, he had “discounted” them. He knewthat society has not yet adapted itself to the consequences ofdivorce, and that till the adaptation takes place every womanwho uses the freedom the law accords her must be her ownsocial justification. Waythorn had an amused confidence in hiswife’s ability to justify herself. His expectations were fulfilled,and before the wedding took place Alice Varick’s group hadrallied openly to her support. She took it all imperturbably:she had a way of surmounting obstacles without seeming to beaware of them, and Waythorn looked back with wonder at thetrivialities over which he had worn his nerves thin. He had thesense of having found refuge in a richer, warmer nature thanhis own, and his satisfaction, at the moment, was humorouslysummed up in the thought that his wife, when she had doneall she could for Lily, would not be ashamed to come down andenjoy a good dinner.The anticipation of such enjoyment was not, however, thesentiment expressed by Mrs. Waythorn’s charming face whenshe presently joined him. Though she had put on her mostengaging tea gown she had neglected to assume the smile thatwent with it, and Waythorn thought he had never seen herlook so nearly worried.“What is it?” he asked. “Is anything wrong with Lily?”“No; I’ve just been in and she’s still sleeping.” Mrs. Waythornhesitated. “But something tiresome has happened.”He had taken her two hands, and now perceived that he wascrushing a paper between them.“This letter?”“Yes -- Mr. Haskett has written -- I mean his lawyer haswritten.”Waythorn felt himself flush uncomfortably. He dropped hiswife’s hands.“What about?”“About seeing Lily. You know the courts -- ““Yes, yes,” he interrupted nervously.Nothing was known about Haskett in New York. He wasvaguely supposed to have remained in the outer darkness fromwhich his wife had been rescued, and Waythorn was one of thefew who were aware that he had given up his business in Uticaand followed her to New York in order to be near his little girl.In the days of his wooing, Waythorn had often met Lily on thedoorstep, rosy and smiling, on her way “to see papa.”“I am so sorry,” Mrs. Waythorn murmured.He roused himself. “What does he want?”“He wants to see her. You know she goes to him once aweek.”“Well -- he doesn’t expect her to go to him now, does he?”“No -- he has heard of her illness; but he expects to comehere.”“Here?”Mrs. Waythorn reddened under his gaze. They looked awayfrom each other.“I’m afraid he has the right. . . . You’ll see. . . .” She made aproffer of the letter.Waythorn moved away with a gesture of refusal. He stoodstaring about the softly lighted room, which a moment beforehad seemed so full of bridal intimacy.“I’m so sorry,” she repeated. “If Lily could have been moved-- ““That’s out of the question,” he returned impatiently.“I suppose so.”258 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Her lip was beginning to tremble, and he felt himself abrute.“He must come, of course,” he said. “When is -- his day?”“I’m afraid -- to-morrow.”“Very well. Send a note in the morning.”The butler entered to announce dinner.Waythorn turned to his wife. “Come -- you must be tired.It’s beastly, but try to forget about it,” he said, drawing herhand through his arm.“You’re so good, dear. I’ll try,” she whispered back.Her face cleared at once, and as she looked at him across theflowers, between the rosy candle-shades, he saw her lips waverback into a smile.“How pretty everything is!” she sighed luxuriously.He turned to the butler. “The champagne at once, please.Mrs. Waythorn is tired.”In a moment or two their eyes met above the sparklingglasses. Her own were quite clear and untroubled: he saw thatshe had obeyed his injunction and forgotten.IIWaythorn moved away with a gesture of refusal.A small effaced-looking man.WAYTHORN, the next morning, went down town earlierthan usual. Haskett was not likely to come till the afternoon,but the instinct of flight drove him forth. He meant to stayaway all day -- he had thoughts of dining at his club. As hisdoor closed behind him he reflected that before he opened itagain it would have admitted another man who had as muchright to enter it as himself, and the thought filled him with aphysical repugnance.He caught the “elevated” at the employees’ hour, and foundhimself crushed between two layers of pendulous humanity. AtEighth Street the man facing him wriggled out and another tookhis place. Waythorn glanced up and saw that it was Gus Varick.The men were so close together that it was impossible to ignorethe smile of recognition on Varick’s handsome overblown face.And after all -- why not? They had always been on good terms,and Varick had been divorced before Waythorn’s attentions tohis wife began. The two exchanged a word on the perennialgrievance of the congested trains, and when a seat at their sidewas miraculously left empty the instinct of self-preservationmade Waythorn slip into it after Varick.The latter drew the stout man’s breath of relief.“Lord -- I was beginning to feel like a pressed flower.” Heleaned back, looking unconcernedly at Waythorn. “Sorry tohear that Sellers is knocked out again.”“Sellers?” echoed Waythorn, starting at his partner’s name.Varick looked surprised. “You didn’t know he was laid upwith the gout?”“No. I’ve been away -- I only got back last night.” Waythornfelt himself reddening in anticipation of the other’s smile.“Ah -- yes; to be sure. And Sellers’s attack came on twodays ago. I’m afraid he’s pretty bad. Very awkward for me,as it happens, because he was just putting through a ratherimportant thing for me.”“Ah?” Waythorn wondered vaguely since when Varick hadbeen dealing in “important things.” Hitherto he had dabbledonly in the shallow pools of speculation, with which Waythorn’soffice did not usually concern itself.It occurred to him that Varick might be talking at random,to relieve the strain of their propinquity. That strain wasbecoming momentarily more apparent to Waythorn, and when,at Cortlandt Street, he caught sight of an acquaintance, andhad a sudden vision of the picture he and Varick must presentto an initiated eye, he jumped up with a muttered excuse.“I hope you’ll find Sellers better,” said Varick civilly, and hestammered back: “If I can be of any use to you -- “ and let thedeparting crowd sweep him to the platform.At his office he heard that Sellers was in fact ill with thegout, and would probably not be able to leave the house forsome weeks.“I’m sorry it should have happened so, Mr. Waythorn,” thesenior clerk said with affable significance. “Mr. Sellers wasvery much upset at the idea of giving you such a lot of extrawork just now.”“Oh, that’s no matter,” said Waythorn hastily. He secretlywelcomed the pressure of additional business, and was glad tothink that, when the day’s work was over, he would have to callat his partner’s on the way home.259

He was late for luncheon, and turned in at the nearestrestaurant instead of going to his club. The place was full, andthe waiter hurried him to the back of the room to capture theonly vacant table. In the cloud of cigar-smoke Waythorn didnot at once distinguish his neighbors; but presently, lookingabout him, he saw Varick seated a few feet off. This time,luckily, they were too far apart for conversation, and Varick,who faced another way, had probably not even seen him; butthere was an irony in their renewed nearness.Varick was said to be fond of good living, and as Waythornsat despatching his hurried luncheon he looked across halfenviously at the other’s leisurely degustation of his meal.When Waythorn first saw him he had been helping himselfwith critical deliberation to a bit of Camembert at the idealpoint of liquefaction, and now, the cheese removed, he was justpouring his cafe double from its little two-storied earthen pot.He poured slowly, his ruddy profile bent above the task, andone beringed white hand steadying the lid of the coffee-pot;then he stretched his other hand to the decanter of cognac athis elbow, filled a liqueur-glass, took a tentative sip, and pouredthe brandy into his coffee-cup.Waythorn watched him in a kind of fascination. Whatwas he thinking of -- only of the flavor of the coffee and theliqueur? Had the morning’s meeting left no more trace in histhoughts than on his face? Had his wife so completely passedout of his life that even this odd encounter with her presenthusband, within a week after her remarriage, was no morethan an incident in his day? And as Waythorn mused, anotheridea struck him: had Haskett ever met Varick as Varick and hehad just met? The recollection of Haskett perturbed him, andhe rose and left the restaurant, taking a circuitous way out toescape the placid irony of Varick’s nod.It was after seven when Waythorn reached home. He thoughtthe footman who opened the door looked at him oddly.“How is Miss Lily?” he asked in haste.“Doing very well, sir. A gentleman -- ““Tell Barlow to put off dinner for half an hour,” Waythorncut him off, hurrying upstairs.He went straight to his room and dressed without seeinghis wife. When he reached the drawing-room she was there,fresh and radiant. Lily’s day had been good; the doctor was notcoming back that evening.At dinner Waythorn told her of Sellers’s illness and ofthe resulting complications. She listened sympathetically,adjuring him not to let himself be overworked, and askingvague feminine questions about the routine of the office. Thenshe gave him the chronicle of Lily’s day; quoted the nurseand doctor, and told him who had called to inquire. He hadnever seen her more serene and unruffled. It struck him, witha curious pang, that she was very happy in being with him,so happy that she found a childish pleasure in rehearsing thetrivial incidents of her day.After dinner they went to the library, and the servant put thecoffee and liqueurs on a low table before her and left the room.She looked singularly soft and girlish in her rosy pale dress,against the dark leather of one of his bachelor armchairs. A dayearlier the contrast would have charmed him.He turned away now, choosing a cigar with affecteddeliberation.“Did Haskett come?” he asked, with his back to her.“Oh, yes -- he came.”“You didn’t see him, of course?”She hesitated a moment. “I let the nurse see him.”That was all. There was nothing more to ask. He swung roundtoward her, applying a match to his cigar. Well, the thing wasover for a week, at any rate. He would try not to think of it.She looked up at him, a trifle rosier than usual, with a smilein her eyes.“Ready for your coffee, dear?”He leaned against the mantelpiece, watching her as shelifted the coffee-pot. The lamplight struck a gleam from herbracelets and tipped her soft hair with brightness. How lightand slender she was, and how each gesture flowed into thenext! She seemed a creature all compact of harmonies. As thethought of Haskett receded, Waythorn felt himself yieldingagain to the joy of possessorship. They were his, those whitehands with their flitting motions, his the light haze of hair, thelips and eyes. . . .She set down the coffee-pot, and reaching for the decanterof cognac, measured off a liqueur-glass and poured it into hiscup.Waythorn uttered a sudden exclamation.“What is the matter?” she said, startled.“Nothing; only -- I don’t take cognac in my coffee.”“Oh, how stupid of me,” she cried.260 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

IIITheir eyes met, and she blushed a sudden agonized red.Ten Days later, Mr. Sellers, still house-bound, askedWaythorn to call on his way downtown.The senior partner, with his swaddled foot propped up by thefire, greeted his associate with an air of embarrassment.“I’m sorry, my dear fellow; I’ve got to ask you to do anawkward thing for me.”Waythorn waited, and the other went on, after a pauseapparently given to the arrangement of his phrases: “Thefact is, when I was knocked out I had just gone into a rathercomplicated piece of business for -- Gus Varick.”“Well?” said Waythorn, with an attempt to put him at hisease.“Well -- it’s this way: Varick came to me the day before myattack. He had evidently had an inside tip from somebody, andhad made about a hundred thousand. He came to me for advice,and I suggested his going in with Vanderlyn.”“Oh, the deuce!” Waythorn exclaimed. He saw in a flashwhat had happened. The investment was an alluring one, butrequired negotiation. He listened intently while Sellers put thecase before him, and, the statement ended, he said: “You thinkI ought to see Varick?”“I’m afraid I can’t as yet. The doctor is obdurate. And thisthing can’t wait. I hate to ask you, but no one else in the officeknows the ins and outs of it.”Waythorn stood silent. He did not care a farthing for thesuccess of Varick’s venture, but the honor of the office was to beconsidered, and he could hardly refuse to oblige his partner.“Very well,” he said, “I’ll do it.”That afternoon, apprised by telephone, Varick called at theoffice. Waythorn, waiting in his private room, wondered whatthe others thought of it. The newspapers, at the time of Mrs.Waythorn’s marriage, had acquainted their readers with everydetail of her previous matrimonial ventures, and Waythorncould fancy the clerks smiling behind Varick’s back as he wasushered in.Varick bore himself admirably. He was easy without beingundignified, and Waythorn was conscious of cutting a muchless impressive figure. Varick had no head for business, andthe talk prolonged itself for nearly an hour while Waythornset forth with scrupulous precision the details of the proposedtransaction.“I’m awfully obliged to you,” Varick said as he rose. “The factis I’m not used to having much money to look after, and I don’twant to make an ass of myself -- “ He smiled, and Waythorncould not help noticing that there was something pleasantabout his smile. “It feels uncommonly queer to have enoughcash to pay one’s bills. I’d have sold my soul for it a few yearsago!”Waythorn winced at the allusion. He had heard it rumoredthat a lack of funds had been one of the determining causes ofthe Varick separation, but it did not occur to him that Varick’swords were intentional. It seemed more likely that the desireto keep clear of embarrassing topics had fatally drawn him intoone. Waythorn did not wish to be outdone in civility.“We’ll do the best we can for you,” he said. “I think this is agood thing you’re in.”“Oh, I’m sure it’s immense. It’s awfully good of you -- “Varick broke off, embarrassed. “I suppose the thing’s settlednow -- but if -- ““If anything happens before Sellers is about, I’ll see youagain,” said Waythorn quietly. He was glad, in the end, toappear the more self-possessed of the two.The course of Lily’s illness ran smooth, and as the dayspassed Waythorn grew used to the idea of Haskett’s weeklyvisit. The first time the day came round, he stayed out late, andquestioned his wife as to the visit on his return. She replied atonce that Haskett had merely seen the nurse downstairs, as thedoctor did not wish any one in the child’s sick-room till afterthe crisis.The following week Waythorn was again conscious of therecurrence of the day, but had forgotten it by the time he camehome to dinner. The crisis of the disease came a few days later,with a rapid decline of fever, and the little girl was pronouncedout of danger. In the rejoicing which ensued the thought ofHaskett passed out of Waythorn’s mind and one afternoon,letting himself into the house with a latchkey, he went straightto his library without noticing a shabby hat and umbrella inthe hall.In the library he found a small effaced-looking man with athinnish gray beard sitting on the edge of a chair. The strangermight have been a piano-tuner, or one of those mysteriouslyefficient persons who are summoned in emergencies toadjust some detail of the domestic machinery. He blinked atWaythorn through a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles and said261

mildly: “Mr. Waythorn, I presume? I am Lily’s father.”Waythorn flushed. “Oh -- “ he stammered uncomfortably.He broke off, disliking to appear rude. Inwardly he was tryingto adjust the actual Haskett to the image of him projected byhis wife’s reminiscences. Waythorn had been allowed to inferthat Alice’s first husband was a brute.“I am sorry to intrude,” said Haskett, with his over-thecounterpoliteness.“Don’t mention it,” returned Waythorn, collecting himself.“I suppose the nurse has been told?”“I presume so. I can wait,” said Haskett. He had a resignedway of speaking, as though life had worn down his naturalpowers of resistance.Waythorn stood on the threshold, nervously pulling off hisgloves.“I’m sorry you’ve been detained. I will send for the nurse,” hesaid; and as he opened the door he added with an effort: “I’mglad we can give you a good report of Lily.” He winced as thewe slipped out, but Haskett seemed not to notice it.“Thank you, Mr. Waythorn. It’s been an anxious time forme.”“Ah, well, that’s past. Soon she’ll be able to go to you.”Waythorn nodded and passed out.In his own room, he flung himself down with a groan. Hehated the womanish sensibility which made him suffer soacutely from the grotesque chances of life. He had knownwhen he married that his wife’s former husbands were bothliving, and that amid the multiplied contacts of modernexistence there were a thousand chances to one that he wouldrun against one or the other, yet he found himself as muchdisturbed by his brief encounter with Haskett as though thelaw had not obligingly removed all difficulties in the way oftheir meeting.Waythorn sprang up and began to pace the room nervously.He had not suffered half so much from his two meetings withVarick. It was Haskett’s presence in his own house that madethe situation so intolerable. He stood still, hearing steps in thepassage.“This way, please,” he heard the nurse say. Haskett was beingtaken upstairs, then: not a corner of the house but was open tohim. Waythorn dropped into another chair, staring vaguelyahead of him. On his dressing-table stood a photograph ofAlice, taken when he had first known her. She was Alice Varickthen -- how fine and exquisite he had thought her! Thosewere Varick’s pearls about her neck. At Waythorn’s instancethey had been returned before her marriage. Had Haskettever given her any trinkets -- and what had become of them,Waythorn wondered? He realized suddenly that he knew verylittle of Haskett’s past or present situation; but from the man’sappearance and manner of speech he could reconstruct withcurious precision the surroundings of Alice’s first marriage.And it startled him to think that she had, in the backgroundof her life, a phase of existence so different from anything withwhich he had connected her. Varick, whatever his faults, was agentleman, in the conventional, traditional sense of the term:the sense which at that moment seemed, oddly enough, tohave most meaning to Waythorn. He and Varick had the samesocial habits, spoke the same language, understood the sameallusions. But this other man . . . it was grotesquely uppermostin Waythorn’s mind that Haskett had worn a made-up tieattached with an elastic. Why should that ridiculous detailsymbolize the whole man? Waythorn was exasperated by hisown paltriness, but the fact of the tie expanded, forced itselfon him, became as it were the key to Alice’s past. He could seeher, as Mrs. Haskett, sitting in a “front parlor” furnished inplush, with a pianola, and a copy of “Ben Hur” on the centretable.He could see her going to the theatre with Haskett -- orperhaps even to a “Church Sociable” -- she in a “picture hat”and Haskett in a black frock-coat, a little creased, with themade-up tie on an elastic. On the way home they would stopand look at the illuminated shop-windows, lingering over thephotographs of New York actresses. On Sunday afternoonsHaskett would take her for a walk, pushing Lily ahead of themin a white enameled perambulator, and Waythorn had a visionof the people they would stop and talk to. He could fancy howpretty Alice must have looked, in a dress adroitly constructedfrom the hints of a New York fashion-paper; how she musthave looked down on the other women, chafing at her life, andsecretly feeling that she belonged in a bigger place.For the moment his foremost thought was one of wonder atthe way in which she had shed the phase of existence whichher marriage with Haskett implied. It was as if her wholeaspect, every gesture, every inflection, every allusion, were astudied negation of that period of her life. If she had deniedbeing married to Haskett she could hardly have stood moreconvicted of duplicity than in this obliteration of the self whichhad been his wife.Waythorn started up, checking himself in the analysis ofher motives. What right had he to create a fantastic effigy ofher and then pass judgment on it? She had spoken vaguelyof her first marriage as unhappy, had hinted, with becomingreticence, that Haskett had wrought havoc among her youngillusions. . . . It was a pity for Waythorn’s peace of mind thatHaskett’s very inoffensiveness shed a new light on the natureof those illusions. A man would rather think that his wife hasbeen brutalized by her first husband than that the process has262 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

een reversed.“Why, how do you do?” she said with a distinct note ofpleasureIV“MR. WAYTHORN, I don’t like that French governess ofLily’s.”Haskett, subdued and apologetic, stood before Waythorn inthe library, revolving his shabby hat in his hand.Waythorn, surprised in his armchair over the evening paper,stared back perplexedly at his visitor.“You’ll excuse my asking to see you,” Haskett continued. “Butthis is my last visit, and I thought if I could have a word withyou it would be a better way than writing to Mrs. Waythorn’slawyer.”Waythorn rose uneasily. He did not like the French governesseither; but that was irrelevant.“I am not so sure of that,” he returned stiffly; “but since youwish it I will give your message to -- my wife.” He alwayshesitated over the possessive pronoun in addressing Haskett.The latter sighed. “I don’t know as that will help much. Shedidn’t like it when I spoke to her.”Waythorn turned red. “When did you see her?” he asked.“Not since the first day I came to see Lily -- right after shewas taken sick. I remarked to her then that I didn’t like thegoverness.”Waythorn made no answer. He remembered distinctly that,after that first visit, he had asked his wife if she had seenHaskett. She had lied to him then, but she had respectedhis wishes since; and the incident cast a curious light on hercharacter. He was sure she would not have seen Haskett thatfirst day if she had divined that Waythorn would object, andthe fact that she did not divine it was almost as disagreeable tothe latter as the discovery that she had lied to him.“I don’t like the woman,” Haskett was repeating with mildpersistency. “She ain’t straight, Mr. Waythorn -- she’ll teachthe child to be underhand. I’ve noticed a change in Lily -- she’stoo anxious to please -- and she don’t always tell the truth. Sheused to be the straightest child, Mr. Waythorn -- “ He brokeoff, his voice a little thick. “Not but what I want her to have astylish education,” he ended.Waythorn was touched. “I’m sorry, Mr. Haskett; but frankly,I don’t quite see what I can do.”Haskett hesitated. Then he laid his hat on the table, andadvanced to the hearth-rug, on which Waythorn was standing.There was nothing aggressive in his manner; but he had thesolemnity of a timid man resolved on a decisive measure.“There’s just one thing you can do, Mr. Waythorn,” he said.“You can remind Mrs. Waythorn that, by the decree of thecourts, I am entitled to have a voice in Lily’s bringing up.” Hepaused, and went on more deprecatingly: “I’m not the kind totalk about enforcing my rights, Mr. Waythorn. I don’t know asI think a man is entitled to rights he hasn’t known how to holdon to; but this business of the child is different. I’ve never letgo there -- and I never mean to.”The scene left Waythorn deeply shaken. Shamefacedly, inindirect ways, he had been finding out about Haskett; andall that he had learned was favorable. The little man, in orderto be near his daughter, had sold out his share in a profitablebusiness in Utica, and accepted a modest clerkship in a NewYork manufacturing house. He boarded in a shabby streetand had few acquaintances. His passion for Lily filled hislife. Waythorn felt that this exploration of Haskett was likegroping about with a dark-lantern in his wife’s past; but he sawnow that there were recesses his lantern had not explored. Hehad never inquired into the exact circumstances of his wife’sfirst matrimonial rupture. On the surface all had been fair. Itwas she who had obtained the divorce, and the court had givenher the child. But Waythorn knew how many ambiguities sucha verdict might cover. The mere fact that Haskett retained aright over his daughter implied an unsuspected compromise.Waythorn was an idealist. He always refused to recognizeunpleasant contingencies till he found himself confrontedwith them, and then he saw them followed by a special trainof consequences. His next days were thus haunted, and hedetermined to try to lay the ghosts by conjuring them up in hiswife’s presence.When he repeated Haskett’s request a flame of anger passedover her face; but she subdued it instantly and spoke with aslight quiver of outraged motherhood.“It is very ungentlemanly of him,” she said.The word grated on Waythorn. “That is neither here northere. It’s a bare question of rights.”She murmured: “It’s not as if he could ever be a help to Lily-- “Waythorn flushed. This was even less to his taste. “Thequestion is,” he repeated, “what authority has he over her?”263

She looked downward, twisting herself a little in her seat. “Iam willing to see him -- I thought you objected,” she faltered.In a flash he understood that she knew the extent of Haskett’sclaims. Perhaps it was not the first time she had resisted them.“My objecting has nothing to do with it,” he said coldly; “ifHaskett has a right to be consulted you must consult him.”She burst into tears, and he saw that she expected him toregard her as a victim.Haskett did not abuse his rights. Waythorn had felt miserablysure that he would not. But the governess was dismissed, andfrom time to time the little man demanded an interview withAlice. After the first outburst she accepted the situation withher usual adaptability. Haskett had once reminded Waythornof the piano-tuner, and Mrs. Waythorn, after a month or two,appeared to class him with that domestic familiar. Waythorncould not but respect the father’s tenacity. At first he hadtried to cultivate the suspicion that Haskett might be “up to”something, that he had an object in securing a foothold in thehouse. But in his heart Waythorn was sure of Haskett’s singlemindedness;he even guessed in the latter a mild contempt forsuch advantages as his relation with the Waythorns might offer.Haskett’s sincerity of purpose made him invulnerable, and hissuccessor had to accept him as a lien on the property.Mr. Sellers was sent to Europe to recover from his gout, andVarick’s affairs hung on Waythorn’s hands. The negotiationswere prolonged and complicated; they necessitated frequentconferences between the two men, and the interests of the firmforbade Waythorn’s suggesting that his client should transferhis business to another office.Varick appeared well in the transaction. In moments ofrelaxation his coarse streak appeared, and Waythorn dreadedhis geniality; but in the office he was concise and clear-headed,with a flattering deference to Waythorn’s judgment. Theirbusiness relations being so affably established, it would havebeen absurd for the two men to ignore each other in society.The first time they met in a drawing-room, Varick tookup their intercourse in the same easy key, and his hostess’sgrateful glance obliged Waythorn to respond to it. After thatthey ran across each other frequently, and one evening at a ballWaythorn, wandering through the remoter rooms, came uponVarick seated beside his wife. She colored a little, and faltered inwhat she was saying; but Varick nodded to Waythorn withoutrising, and the latter strolled on.In the carriage, on the way home, he broke out nervously: “Ididn’t know you spoke to Varick.”Her voice trembled a little. “It’s the first time -- he happenedto be standing near me; I didn’t know what to do. It’s soawkward, meeting everywhere -- and he said you had beenvery kind about some business.”“That’s different,” said Waythorn.She paused a moment. “I’ll do just as you wish,” she returnedpliantly. “I thought it would be less awkward to speak to himwhen we meet.”Her pliancy was beginning to sicken him. Had she really nowill of her own -- no theory about her relation to these men?She had accepted Haskett -- did she mean to accept Varick?It was “less awkward,” as she had said, and her instinct was toevade difficulties or to circumvent them. With sudden vividnessWaythorn saw how the instinct had developed. She was “aseasy as an old shoe” -- a shoe that too many feet had worn.Her elasticity was the result of tension in too many differentdirections. Alice Haskett -- Alice Varick -- Alice Waythorn-- she had been each in turn, and had left hanging to each namea little of her privacy, a little of her personality, a little of theinmost self where the unknown god abides.“Yes -- it’s better to speak to Varick,” said Waythorn wearily.VTHE WINTER wore on, and society took advantage of theWaythorns’ acceptance of Varick. Harassed hostesses weregrateful to them for bridging over a social difficulty, andMrs. Waythorn was held up as a miracle of good taste. Someexperimental spirits could not resist the diversion of throwingVarick and his former wife together, and there were thosewho thought he found a zest in the propinquity. But Mrs.Waythorn’s conduct remained irreproachable. She neitheravoided Varick nor sought him out. Even Waythorn could notbut admit that she had discovered the solution of the newestsocial problem.He had married her without giving much thought to thatproblem. He had fancied that a woman can shed her past likea man. But now he saw that Alice was bound to hers bothby the circumstances which forced her into continued relationwith it, and by the traces it had left on her nature. With grimirony Waythorn compared himself to a member of a syndicate.He held so many shares in his wife’s personality and hispredecessors were his partners in the business. If there hadbeen any element of passion in the transaction he would havefelt less deteriorated by it. The fact that Alice took her changeof husbands like a change of weather reduced the situationto mediocrity. He could have forgiven her for blunders, forexcesses; for resisting Hackett, for yielding to Varick; foranything but her acquiescence and her tact. She reminded him264 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

of a juggler tossing knives; but the knives were blunt and sheknew they would never cut her.And then, gradually, habit formed a protecting surfacefor his sensibilities. If he paid for each day’s comfort withthe small change of his illusions, he grew daily to value thecomfort more and set less store upon the coin. He had driftedinto a dulling propinquity with Haskett and Varick and hetook refuge in the cheap revenge of satirizing the situation.He even began to reckon up the advantages which accruedfrom it, to ask himself if it were not better to own a third of awife who knew how to make a man happy than a whole onewho had lacked opportunity to acquire the art. For it was anart, and made up, like all others, of concessions, eliminationsand embellishments; of lights judiciously thrown and shadowsskillfully softened. His wife knew exactly how to manage thelights, and he knew exactly to what training she owed herskill. He even tried to trace the source of his obligations, todiscriminate between the influences which had combined toproduce his domestic happiness: he perceived that Haskett’scommonness had made Alice worship good breeding, whileVarick’s liberal construction of the marriage bond had taughther to value the conjugal virtues; so that he was directlyindebted to his predecessors for the devotion which made hislife easy if not inspiring.From this phase he passed into that of complete acceptance.He ceased to satirize himself because time dulled the irony ofthe situation and the joke lost its humor with its sting. Eventhe sight of Haskett’s hat on the hall table had ceased to touchthe springs of epigram. The hat was often seen there now, for ithad been decided that it was better for Lily’s father to visit herthan for the little girl to go to his boarding-house. Waythorn,having acquiesced in this arrangement, had been surprised tofind how little difference it made. Haskett was never obtrusive,and the few visitors who met him on the stairs were unawareof his identity. Waythorn did not know how often he saw Alice,but with himself Haskett was seldom in contact.One afternoon, however, he learned on entering that Lily’sfather was waiting to see him. In the library he found Haskettoccupying a chair in his usual provisional way. Waythornalways felt grateful to him for not leaning back.“I hope you’ll excuse me, Mr. Waythorn,” he said rising. “Iwanted to see Mrs. Waythorn about Lily, and your man askedme to wait here till she came in.”“Of course,” said Waythorn, remembering that a suddenleak had that morning given over the drawing-room to theplumbers.He opened his cigar-case and held it out to his visitor, andHaskett’s acceptance seemed to mark a fresh stage in theirintercourse. The spring evening was chilly, and Waythorninvited his guest to draw up his chair to the fire. He meant tofind an excuse to leave Haskett in a moment; but he was tiredand cold, and after all the little man no longer jarred on him.The two were inclosed in the intimacy of their blended cigarsmokewhen the door opened and Varick walked into the room.Waythorn rose abruptly. It was the first time that Varick hadcome to the house, and the surprise of seeing him, combinedwith the singular inopportuneness of his arrival, gave a newedge to Waythorn’s blunted sensibilities. He stared at hisvisitor without speaking.Varick seemed too preoccupied to notice his host’sembarrassment.“My dear fellow,” he exclaimed in his most expansive tone, “Imust apologize for tumbling in on you in this way, but I wastoo late to catch you down town, and so I thought -- “ Hestopped short, catching sight of Haskett, and his sanguinecolor deepened to a flush which spread vividly under his scantblond hair. But in a moment he recovered himself and noddedslightly. Haskett returned the bow in silence, and Waythornwas still groping for speech when the footman came in carryinga tea-table.The intrusion offered a welcome vent to Waythorn’s nerves.“What the deuce are you bringing this here for?” he saidsharply.“I beg your pardon, sir, but the plumbers are still in thedrawing-room, and Mrs. Waythorn said she would have tea inthe library.” The footman’s perfectly respectful tone implied areflection on Waythorn’s reasonableness.“Oh, very well,” said the latter resignedly, and the footmanproceeded to open the folding tea-table and set out itscomplicated appointments. While this interminable processcontinued the three men stood motionless, watching it witha fascinated stare, till Waythorn, to break the silence, said toVarick: “Won’t you have a cigar?”He held out the case he had just tendered to Haskett, andVarick helped himself with a smile. Waythorn looked aboutfor a match, and finding none, proffered a light from his owncigar. Haskett, in the background, held his ground mildly,examining his cigar-tip now and then, and stepping forward atthe right moment to knock its ashes into the fire.The footman at last withdrew, and Varick immediately began:“If I could just say half a word to you about this business -- ““Certainly,” stammered Waythorn; “in the dining-room -- “265

But as he placed his hand on the door it opened from without,and his wife appeared on the threshold.She came in fresh and smiling, in her street dress and hat,shedding a fragrance from the boa which she loosened inadvancing.“Shall we have tea in here, dear?” she began; and then shecaught sight of Varick. Her smile deepened, veiling a slighttremor of surprise. “Why, how do you do?” she said with adistinct note of pleasure.As she shook hands with Varick she saw Haskett standingbehind him. Her smile faded for a moment, but she recalled itquickly, with a scarcely perceptible side-glance at Waythorn.“How do you do, Mr. Haskett?” she said, and shook handswith him a shade less cordially.The three men stood awkwardly before her, till Varick, alwaysthe most self-possessed, dashed into an explanatory phrase.“We -- I had to see Waythorn a moment on business,” hestammered, brick-red from chin to nape.Haskett stepped forward with his air of mild obstinacy. “I amsorry to intrude; but you appointed five o’clock -- “ he directedhis resigned glance to the time-piece on the mantel.She swept aside their embarrassment with a charminggesture of hospitality.“I’m so sorry -- I’m always late; but the afternoon was solovely.” She stood drawing her gloves off, propitiatory andgraceful, diffusing about her a sense of ease and familiarity inwhich the situation lost its grotesqueness. “But before talkingbusiness,” she added brightly, “I’m sure every one wants a cupof tea.”She dropped into her low chair by the tea-table, and the twovisitors, as if drawn by her smile, advanced to receive the cupsshe held out.She glanced about for Waythorn, and he took the third cupwith a laugh.Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentimentsand ResolutionsOn the eve of the Declaration of Independence, the Americanchallenge to the legitimacy of Britain’s traditional authorityover the colonies had led Abigail Adams to question thelegitimacy of a far more ancient and deeply rooted tradition -that of the subjugation of women to male authority. played asignificant role In the great burst of American reform activityof the 1830s and 1840s, working for such causes as temperance,abolition, and educational progress. A small number, led byElizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, took up the causeof what today would be called’ ‘s liberation.” The 1848 SenecaFalls convention on “the social, civil, and religious rights ofYvonne” was attended by about 300 people, 40 of them men.It attracted very little attention at the time, but expressed thefundamental concerns that would be the focus of women’sorganized political activities for many decades to come.The first four complaints registered In the declaration arevariants of the same grievance-that women were not allowedthe right to vote. Winning the suffrage was the central aim ofthe women’s movement from Seneca Falls until the NineteenthAmendment became law in 1920. The predominantly nonimmigrantwhite middle class character of the suffrage causethen and later Is Indicated by the blunt references to the votingof “the most ignorant and degraded mien-both natives andforeign.” Votes for women were frequently urged to offset theallegedly evil influence of Immigrants, workers, and (afterslavery was ended) black men. Several other of the complaintslisted in the Declaration, concerning property rights, divorcelaw, and education, were largely remedied well before 1920.The demands concerning access to certain occupations, an endto the double standard of morality, and Independence and selfrespectfor women are obviously of some continuing relevance.When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary forone portion of the family of man to assume among the peopleof the earth a position different from that which they havehitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature andof nature’s God entitle them, 2 decent respect to the opinionsof mankind requires that they should declare the causes thatimpel them to such a course....The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries andusurpations on the part of man toward woman, having indirect object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right tothe elective franchise.He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation ofwhich she had no voice.He has withheld from her rights which are given to the mostignorant and degraded ... natives and foreigners.266 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the electivefranchise, thereby leaving her without representation in thehalls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civillydead.He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wagesshe earns.He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she cancommit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done inthe presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she iscompelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming,to all intents and purposes, her master-the law giving him powerto deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall bethe proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom theguardianship of the children shall be given, as to be whollyregardless of the happiness of women-the law, in all cases,going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, andgiving all power into his hands.After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single,and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support agovernment which recognizes her only when her property canbe made profitable to it.He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employment, andfrom those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scantyremuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealthand distinction which he considers most honorable to himself.As a teacher of theology, medicine or law, she is not known.He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorougheducation, all colleges being closed against her.He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinateposition, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion fromthe ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any publicparticipation in die affairs of the church.He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the worlda different code of morals for men and women, by which moraldelinquencies which exclude women from society, are not onlytolerated, but deemed of little account in man....He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy herconfidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and tomake her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half thepeople of this country, their social and religious degradation-inview of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because womendo feet themselves aggrieved, oppressed and fraudulentlydeprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they haveimmediate admission to all the rights and privileges whichbelong to them as citizens of the United States.In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no smallamount of misconception, misrepresentation and ridicule; butwe shall use every instrumentality within our power to effectour object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petitionthe state and national legislatures, and endeavor to enlist thepulpit and the press in our behalf.Elizabeth Cady Stanton: AddressDelivered at the Seneca Falls ConventionJuly 19, 1848We have met here today to discuss our rights and wrongs, civiland political, and not, as some have supposed, to go into thedetail of social life alone. We do not propose to petition thelegislature to make our husbands just, generous, and courteous,to seat every man at the head of a cradle, and to clothe everywoman in male attire.None of these points, however important they may beconsidered by leading men, will be touched in this convention.As to their costume, the gentlemen need feel no fear of ourimitating that, for we think it in violation of every principle oftaste, beauty, and dignity; notwithstanding all the contemptcast upon our loose, flowing garments, we still admire thegraceful folds, and consider our costume far more artistic thantheirs. Many of the nobler sex seem to agree with us in thisopinion, for the bishops, priests, judges, barristers, and lordmayors of the first nation on the globe, and the Pope of Rome,with his cardinals, too, all wear the loose flowing robes, thustacitly acknowledging that the male attire is neither dignifiednor imposing.No, we shall not molest you in your philosophical experimentswith stocks, pants, high-heeled boots, and Russian belts. Yoursbe the glory to discover, by personal experience, how long thekneepan can resist the terrible strapping down which youimpose, in how short time the well-developed muscles of thethroat can be reduced to mere threads by the constant pressureof the stock, how high the heel of a boot must be to make ashort man tall, and how tight the Russian belt may be drawnand yet have wind enough left to sustain life.But we are assembled to protest against a form of governmentexisting without the consent of the governed - to declareour right to be free as man is free, to be represented in thegovernment which we are taxed to support, to have such isgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprisonhis wife, to take the wages which she earns, the propertywhich she inherits, and, in case of separation, the childrenof her love; laws which make her the mere dependent on hisbounty. It is to protest against such unjust laws as these thatwe are assembled today, and to have them, if possible, forevererased from our statute books, deeming them a shame anda disgrace to a Christian republic in the nineteenth century.We have met to uplift woman’s fallen divinity upon an evenpedestal with man’s. And, strange as it may seem to many, wenow demand our right to vote according to the declaration ofthe government under which we live.267

This right no one pretends to deny. We need not prove ourselvesequal to Daniel Webster to enjoy this privilege, for the ignorantIrishman in the ditch has all the civil rights he has. We neednot prove our muscular power equal to this same Irishmanto enjoy this privilege, for the most tiny, weak, ill-shapedstripling of twenty-one has all the civil rights of the Irishman.We have no objection to discuss the question of equality, forwe feel that the weight of argument lies wholly with us, but wewish the question of equality kept distinct from the question ofrights, for the proof of the one does not determine the truth ofthe other. All white men in this country have the same rights,however they may differ in mind, body, or estate.The right is ours. The question now is: how shall we getpossession of what rightfully belongs to us? We should notfeel so sorely grieved if no man who had not attained thefull stature of a Webster, Clay, Van Buren, or Gerrit Smithcould claim the right of the elective franchise. But to havedrunkards, idiots, horse-racing, rum-selling rowdies, ignorantforeigners, and silly boys fully recognized, while we ourselvesare thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens, itis too grossly insulting to the dignity of woman to be longerquietly submitted to.The right is ours. Have it, we must. Use it, we will. The pens, thetongues, the fortunes, the indomitable wills of many womenare already pledged to secure this right. The great truth thatno just government can be formed without the consent of thegoverned we shall echo and re-echo in the ears of the unjustjudge, until by continual coming we shall weary himThere seems now to be a kind of moral stagnation in our midst.Philanthropists have done their utmost to rouse the nation toa sense of its sins. War, slavery, drunkenness, licentiousness,gluttony, have been dragged naked before the people, and alltheir abominations and deformities fully brought to light, yetwith idiotic laugh we hug those monsters to our breasts andrush on to destruction. Our churches are multiplying on allsides, our missionary societies, Sunday schools, and prayermeetings and innumerable charitable and reform organizationsare all inoperation, but still the tide of vice is swelling, andthreatens the destruction of everything, and the battlementsof righteousness are weak against the raging elements of sinand death.Verily, the world waits the coming of some new element, somepurifying power, some spirit of mercy and love. The voice ofwoman has been silenced in the state, the church, and the home,but man cannot fulfill his destiny alone, he cannot redeem hisrace unaided. There are deep and tender chords of sympathyand love in the hearts of the downfallen and oppressed thatwoman can touch more skillfully than man.because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of lifeare poisoned at their source. It is vain to look for silver and goldfrom mines of copper and lead.It is the wise mother that has the wise son. So long as yourwomen are slaves you may throw your colleges and churchesto the winds. You can’t have scholars and saints so long as yourmothers are ground to powder between the upper and nethermillstone of tyranny and lust. How seldom, now, is a father’spride gratified, his fond hopes realized, in the budding geniusof his son!The wife is degraded, made the mere creature of caprice, andthe foolish son is heaviness to his heart. Truly are the sins ofthe fathers visited upon the children to the third and fourthgeneration. God, in His wisdom, has so linked the wholehuman family together that any violence done at one end ofthe chain is felt throughout its length, and here, too, is the lawof restoration, as in woman all have fallen, so in her elevationshall the race be recreated.“Voices” were the visitors and advisers of Joan of Arc. Do not“voices” come to us daily from the haunts of poverty, sorrow,degradation, and despair, already too long unheeded. Now isthe time for the women of this country, if they would saveour free institutions, to defend the right, to buckle on thearmor that can best resist the keenest weapons of the enemy-- contempt and ridicule. The same religious enthusiasm thatnerved Joan of Arc to her work nerves us to ours. In everygeneration God calls some men and women for the utteranceof truth, a heroic action, and our work today is the fulfilling ofwhat has long since been foretold by the Prophet -- Joel 2:28:“And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out myspirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shallprophesy.”We do not expect our path will be strewn with the flowers ofpopular applause, but over the thorns of bigotry and prejudicewill be our way, and on our banners will beat the darkstorm clouds of opposition from those who have entrenchedthemselves behind the stormy bulwarks of custom and authority,and who have fortified their position by every means, holy andunholy. But we will steadfastly abide the result. Unmoved wewill bear it aloft. Undauntedly we will unfurl it to the gale,for we know that the storm cannot rend from it a shred, thatthe electric flash will but more clearly show to us the gloriouswords inscribed upon it,“Equality of Rights”The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation,268 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Sojorner Truth: Ain’t I A Woman?Sojourner Truth (1797? - 1883) was a former slave who becameactive in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements. In1843, responding to what she felt was divine inspiration, shechanged her name to Sojourner Truth and began to preach. Inaddition to being an evangelist, she was involved in abolitionismand (after 1850) the women’s rights movement. Gaunt andmuscular, she was an intense, powerful, and uncompromisingspeaker. This is evident in the following reading, a shortaddress she delivered at a women’s rights convention in Akron,Ohio, in 1851. Up to the moment she spoke at the convention,the advocates of greater freedom for women had been losingground. There were a number of ministers present who opposedwomen’s rights on various grounds. One claimed that men hadgreater intellect than women. Another asserted that Christ’smanhood made men superior. A third pointed out that thesin of Eve had brought evil into the world. The male membersof the audience in the gallery had been enjoying the spectacle.Then Sojourner Truth walked in and addressed the conventionwith an effect that Frances Gage, who was present, describedas “magical, ... turning the whole tide in our favor.” Whatimage of female identity was Truth opposing in her remarks?If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turnthe world upside down all alone, these women together oughtto be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! Andnow they is asking to do it, the men better let them.Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t gotnothing more to say.WELL, CHILDREN, WHERE THERE IS SO MUCHRACKET there must be something out of kilter. I think that‘twixt the Negroes of the South and the women of the North,all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix prettysoon. But what’s all this here talking about? That man overthere says that women need to be helped into carriages, andlifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere.Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mudpuddles, orgives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at ‘me!Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gatheredinto barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? Icould work as much and eat as much as a man—when I couldget it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I haveborne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off toslavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none butJesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?Then they talk about this thing in the head: what’s this theycall it? “Intellect,” someone whispers. That’s it, honey. What’sthat got to do with women’s rights or Negro’s rights? If my cupwon’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you bemean not to let me have my little half-measure full?Then that little man in black there [one of the many clergymenpresent at the convention], he says women can’t have as muchrights as men, cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did yourChrist come from? Where did your Christ come from? FromGod and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him.269

John L. O’Sullivan: Manifest Destinyfrom Democratic Review (1839 and 1845)John L. O’Sullivan is credited with popularizing the concept(and coining the term) Manifest Destiny. O’Sullivan was editorof Democratic Review, a nationalist magazine which advocatedAmerican expansionism during the 174Os. The following selectionis taken from his article “The Great Nation of Futurity” (1839). Asyou read, think about how O’Sullivan depicts the United States, itsrelationship to God and its role in the world.America is destined for better deeds.... We have no interest inthe scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of avoidance of nearlyall their examples. The expansive future is our arena, and forour history. We are entering on its untrodden space, with thetruths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our heartsand with a clear conscience unsullied by the past. We are thenation of human progress, and who will... set limits on ouronward march. Providence is with us....The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era ofAmerican greatness. In its magnificent domain of space andtime, the nation... is destined to manifest to mankind theexcellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblesttemple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High — theSacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere — its roofthe firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregationan Union... comprising hundreds of happy millions... governedby God’s natural law of equality, the law of brotherhood....millions....It is wholly untrue, and unjust to ourselves, the pretense thatthe Annexation [of Texas] has been a measure of spoliation,unrightful and unrighteous — of military conquest... — ofaggrandizement at the expense of justice.... This view of thequestion is wholly unfounded....California will, probably, next fall away from [the Federationof Mexico].... Imbecile and distracted, Mexico never canexert any real governmental authority over such a country....The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on [California’s] borders.Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armedwith the plow and the rifle, and marking its trail with schoolsand colleges, courts and representative halls, mills andmeetinghouses.... [All this will happen) in the natural flowof events, the spontaneous workings of principles.... And [theCalifornians] will have a right to independence — to selfgovernment- to the possession of the homes conquered fromthe wilderness by their own labors and dangers, sufferings andsacrifices — a better and a truer right than the artificial titleof sovereignty in Mexico a thousand miles away....The day isnot distant when the Empires of the Atlantic and the Pacificwould again flow together into one....Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, ofuniversal enfranchisement.... [All of] this is our high destiny...we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, toestablish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man....For this blessed mission... has America been chosen.In 1845, O’Sullivan returned to his theme of Manifest Destinyin an article in Democratic Review advocating continued U.S.expansion. As you read, think about how O’Sullivan depictsthe United States and its role in the hemisphere. what impactmight O’Sullivan’s words have had on the American decisionto annex Texas and later to go to war with Mexico?[I am] in favor of now elevating this question of the receptionof Texas into the Union... up to its proper level of a high andbroad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, inthe manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrudethemselves into it... in a spirit of hostile interference against us,for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hamperingour power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillmentof our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted byProvidence for the free development of our yearly multiplying270 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Viewpoints of the Mexican WarThe following are textbook excerpts examining the causes ofthe war between Mexico and the United States often referredto as the Mexican War by American historians. Considerhow the American textbook excerpts differ in content, toneand emphasis from the Mexican textbook excerpts. Thenexamine the primary source quotations that follow. Whatdo the textbook excerpts and the primary source quotationsindicate about the causes of the Mexican War? What do thetextbook excerpts indicate about history and the difficultiesone encounters in trying to understand the past?American Textbooks:“Many Americans in Mexico had lost their property or hadbeen injured because the Mexican government could not keeporder. Mexico had paid some of the claims of these Americansbut stopped such payments when Texas was admitted to theUnion. That event brought the two nations to the verge of war.The people of Texas declared that their territory extended asfar south and west as the Rio Grande. The region which theyhad actually settled, however, was not so large. As soon asTexas entered the Union, the United States sent an army underGeneral Zachary Taylor to take up a position on the northbank of the Rio Grande with orders to hold the country forthe United States.Meanwhile, President Polk developed a plan he thought wouldsolve the whole matter to the satisfaction of both Mexico andthe United States. Polk knew that the vast region which nowincludes California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah,and part of Colorado contained very few Mexicans, althoughit was part of Mexican soil.... There seemed little chance thatMexico would be able to fill it with settlers. Polk offered tobuy that broad and almost empty country for a good priceand also to relieve Mexico from paying any more of oldclaims of Americans against the [Mexican] government. Thegovernment of Mexico, though poor, was too proud to sell.The Mexicans refused even to listen to Polk’s plan. Meanwhile,some Mexican soldiers crossed to the North side of the RioGrande, and a fight occurred between some of them and someof Taylor’s troops. This fight brought on the Mexican War.”— Casner and Gabriel, Exploring American History“The trouble lay in the question, where is the boundary betweenMexico and Texas? Mexico said that it was on the Nueces River;Texas said that it was the Rio Grande.... The space between theriver was almost uninhabited.... Although Mexico had somejustification for her claim, so also had Texas. President Polksent Zachary Taylor with American troops clear down to theRio Grande; that is to the farthest edge of the disputed area.A fight resulted between American and Mexican troops. ThenPresident Polk sent a message to Congress saying that Mexicansoldiers had invaded American territory and killed Americantroops on American soil. He asked Congress to declare war onMexico.”— Tryon, Lingley, Morehouse, The American People andNationMexican Textbooks:“The prosperous development of the American Union furtherencouraged the... acquisition of larger territory. The North-Americans succeeded in getting Florida, Louisiana and Oregonwith but little effort. However, the rich, fertile and extensiveprovince of Texas excited their greediness. The governmentmade itself the agency of these desires and first proposed toSpain and then to Mexico to purchase that territory.These offers having been rejected, the American governmentresorted to a more perfidious policy. It defended the insurrectionof the settlers [of Texas] against the Mexican government....Texas, having made itself free... the United States annexed it insuch an outrageous manner that our minister in Washington,Don Manuel E. Gorostiza, asked for his passport and left theUnited States.The Congress of the United States approved this scandalousrobbery of land, and the government, not yet satisfied, gave theterritory further extension by asserting that the Rio Bravo wasits boundary. By means of this brutal stratagem, supported bymight, they wished to make people believe that Mexico was theassaulter while she was being mutilated contrary to al rights.For this reason war was declared.... A treaty was enteredinto on February 2, 1848, by virtue of which Mexico cededto the United States, Texas, Upper California, New Mexico,and the northern parts of the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila,and Tamaulipas. Mexico received in return fifteen milliondollars....Mexico lost in this war a third of her territory.... This richacquisition of the United States is not going to erase the blot ofiniquity which has been written into the pages of her historyby this invasion.”— Prieto, Lessons in National History (translated fromSpanish)“The result of that war was lamentable not only for our countrybut also lamentable for the reputation of the Americans. Thedespoliation which we suffered was qualified as a real robberyeven by citizens of that country.... [Wars] cost, also, much271

loodshed which, when poured out in order to serve injusticeand oppression, does not pay at all, for it does not even receivethe applause of history.”— Sherwell, Second Course in National History (translatedfrom Spanish)Primary Source Quotations on the Mexican War:“Shall this garden of beauty be suffered to lie dormant in itswild and useless luxuriance? Myriad enterprising Americanswould flock to its rich and inviting prairies; the hum of Anglo-American industry would be heard in valleys; cities would riseup on its plains and sea coast, and the resources and wealth ofthe nation shall be increased to an incalculable degree.”— The Illinois State Register“The Mexican War is part of the mission of the destiny allottedto the Anglo-Saxon race on this continent. It is our destiny,our mission to Americanize this continent.... The sword is thegreat civilizer”— Ashbel Smith, (former) Sec. of State of the Texas Republic“I believe we should be recreant to our noble mission, if werefused acquiesced in the high purposes of a wise Providence.War has its evils. In all ages it has been the minister ofwholesale death and appalling desolation; but howeverinscrutable to us, it has been made, by the Allwise Dispenserof events, the instrumentality of accomplishing the great endof human elevation and human happiness.... We must marchfrom Texas straight to the Pacific Ocean, and be bounded onlyby its roaring wave... It is the destiny of the white race, theAnglo}Saxon race...— Congressional GlobeWe are fighting this war for Texas and the South.... For, this,sir, Northern treasure is being exhausted, and Northern bloodpoured on the plains of Mexico.... Slavery follows in the rear ofour armies. Shall the war power of our government be exertedto produce such a result? Shall this government... lend its powerand influence to plant slavery in these territories?”— U.S. Representative David WilmotBarbara Welter: The Cult of TrueWomanhood (1820-1860)In the following article, historian Barbara Welter looks at theantebellum decades of the nineteenth century and describes animportant stage in the expression of sexual stereotypes. The idea of“The Cult of True Womanhood,” or “the cult of domesticity,” sought toassert that womanly virtue resided in piety, purity, submissivenessand domesticity. As you read, consider why these characteristics wereseen as so crucial to promoting a woman’s “proper role,” and howsuch assertions about the roles of women might have served as aresponse to the growth of industrial capitalism.The nineteen century American man was a busy builder ofbridges and railroads, at work long hours in a materialisticsociety. The religious values of his forbears were neglected inpractice if not in intent, and he occasionally felt some guilt thathe had turned this new land, this temple of the chosen people,into one cast counting house. But he could salve his conscienceby reflecting that he had left behind a hostage, not only tofortune, but to all the values which he held so dear and treatedso lightly. Woman, in the cult of True Womanhood presentedby the women’s magazines, gift annuals, and religious literatureof the nineteenth century, was the hostage in the home. In asociety where values changed frequently, where fortunes roseand fell with frightening rapidity, where social and economicmobility provided instability as well as hope, one thing at leastremained the same a true woman was a true woman, wherevershe was found. If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper withthe complex of virtues that made up True Womanhood, hewas damned immediately as the enemy of God, of civilization,and of the Republic. It was the fearful obligation, a solemnresponsibility, which the nineteenth-century American womanhad — to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail whitehand.The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judgedherself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors, and hersociety could be divided into four cardinal virtues — piety,purity, submissiveness, and domesticity... Without them.... allwas ashes. With them she was promised happiness and power.Religion or piety was the core of woman’s virtue, the sourceof her strength. Young men looking for a mate were cautionedto search first for piety, for if that were there, all else wouldfollow. Religion belonged to woman by divine right, a gift ofGod and nature. This “peculiar susceptibility” to religion wasgiven her for a reason: “the vestal flame of piety, lightened upby Heaven in the breast of woman” would throw its beamsinto the naughty world of men. So far would the candlepowerreach that the “Universe might be enlightened, improved, andharmonized by Woman bringing the world back “from its272 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

evolt and sin...”Caleb Atwater, Esq., writing in The Ladies Repository, sawthe hand of the Lord in female piety:“Religion is exactly what a woman needs, for it gives herthat dignity that best suits her dependence.” And Mrs. JohnSanford... agreed thoroughly: “Religion is just what a womanneeds. Without it she is ever restless and unhappy...” [Thesewriters] spoke of religion as a kind of tranquilizer for the manyundefined longings which swept even the most pious younggirl, and about which it was better to pray than to think.One reason religion was valued was that it did not take a womanaway from her “proper sphere,” her home. Unlike participationin other societies or movements, church work would not makeher less domestic or submissive... In religious vineyards, said theYoung Ladies’ Literary and Missionary Report, “you may laborwithout the apprehension of detracting from the charms offeminine delicacy.” Mrs. S. L. Dagg, writing from her chapterof the Society in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was equally reassuring:“As no sensible woman will suffer her intellectual pursuits toclash with her domestic duties,” she should concentrate onreligious work “which promotes these very duties...”If religion was so vital to a woman, irreligion was almost tooawful to contemplate. Women were warned not to let theirliterary or intellectual pursuits take them away from God.Sarah Joseph Hale spoke darkly of those who... threw away the“One True Book” for others, open to error... Mrs. Hale used[these unfortunate women] as fateful proof that “the greaterthe intellectual force, the greater and more fatal the errors intowhich women fall who wander from the Rock of Salvation...”Purity was as essential as piety to a young woman, its absenceas unnatural and unfeminine. Without it she was, in fact, nowoman at all, but a member of some lower order. A “fallenwoman” was a “fallen angel,” unworthy of the celestial companyof her sex. To contemplate such loss of purity brought tears;to be guilty of such a crime, in the women’s magazines, atleast, brought madness or death. Even the language of flowershad bitter words for it: a dried white rose symbolized “Deathpreferable to the loss of innocence...”Therefore all True Women were urged, in the strongestpossible terms, to maintain their virtue, although men, beingby nature more sensual than they, would try to assault it.Thomas Branagan admitted in The Excellency of the FemaleCharacter Vindicated that his sex would sin and sin again, butwoman, stronger and purer, must not give in and let man “takeliberties incompatible with her delicacy.” “If you do,” Branaganaddressed his gentle reader, “You will be left in silent sadnessto bewail your credulity, imbecility, duplicity, and prematureprostitution.”If such good advice was ignored the consequences were terribleand inexorable... A popular and often reprinted story by FannyForester told the sad tale of “Lucy Dutton.” Lucy “with the sealof innocence upon her heart, and a rose-leaf upon her cheek,”came out of her vine-covered cottage and ran into a city slicker.“And Lucy was beautiful and trusting, and thoughtless...Needs the story be told? Nay... Lucy was a child - considerhow young, how very untaught - oh! Her innocence was nomatch for the sophistry of a gay, city youth! Spring came andshame was stamped upon the cottage at the foot of the hill.”The baby died; Lucy went mad at the funeral and finally diedherself... The frequency with which derangement follows lossof virtue suggests the exquisite sensibility of woman, and thepossibility that, in the women’s magazines at least, her intellectwas geared towards her hymen, not her brain.... If, however, awoman managed to withstand man’s assaults on her virtue, shedemonstrated her superiority and power over him... Men couldhe counted on to be grateful when women thus saved themfrom themselves...In the nineteenth century, any form of social change wastantamount to an attack on woman’s virtue... For example, dressreform seemed innocuous enough and the bloomers worn bythe lady of that name and her followers were certainly modestattire. Such was the reasoning of only the ignorant. In an issueof The Ladies’ Wreath a young lady is represented in dialoguewith her “Professor.” The girl expresses admiration for thebloomer costume — it gives freedom of motion, is healthful,and attractive. The Professor sets her straight. Trousers, heexplains, are “only one of the many manifestations of that wildspirit 9f socialism and agrarian radicalism which is at presentso rife in our land...”Purity, considered as a moral imperative, set up a dilemmawhich was hard to resolve. Woman must preserve her virtueuntil marriage and marriage was necessary for her happiness.Yet marriage was, literally, an end to innocence. She was toldnot to question this dilemma, but simply to accept it.Submission was perhaps the most feminine virtue expectedof women, Men were supposed to be religious, although theyrarely had time for it, and supposed to be pure, although it cameawfully hard to them, but men were the movers, the doers, theactors. Women were the passive, submissive responders. Theorder of dialogue was of course, fixed in Heaven. Man was“woman’s superior by God’s appointment...”Therefore, as Charles Elliot argued in The Ladies’ Repository,she should submit to him “for the sake of good order at least.”In The Ladies Companion a young wife was quoted approvinglyas saying that she did not think woman should “feel and act forherself” because “When, next to God, her husband is not thetribunal to which her heart and intellect appeals — the goldenbowl of affection is broken.” Women were warned that if they273

tampered with this quality, they tampered with the order ofthe Universe.Woman understood her position if she was the right kind ofwoman, a true woman. ..Put strongly by Mrs. Sandford: “Areally sensible woman feels her dependence. She does what shecan, but she is conscious of her inferiority, and therefore gratefulfor support ....“ “True feminine genius,” said Grace Greenwood,“is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetualchildhood . Thus, “if [your husband] is abusive, never retort.”A Young Woman’s Guide to the Harmonious Development ofa Christian Character suggested that females should “becomeas little children” and avoid “a controversial spirit...” Withoutcomment or criticism the writer affirms that “to suffer and besilent under suffering seems to be the great command a womanhas to obey...”Domesticity was among the virtues most prized by women’smagazines... Sacred Scripture reinforced social pressure. “St.Paul knew what was best for women when he advised themto be domestic,” said Mrs. Sandford. “There is composure athome; there is something “sedative in the duties’ which homeinvolves. It affords security not only from the world, but fromdelusions and errors of every kind.”From her home woman performed her great task of bringingmen back to God. The Young Ladies’ Class Book was sure thatthe “domestic fireside is the great guardian of society againstthe excesses of human passions...Even if we cannot reformthe world in a moment, we can begin the work by reformingourselves and our households — it is woman’s mission. Let hernot look away from her own little family circle for the means ofproducing moral and social reforms, but begin at home...”One of the most important functions of woman as comforterwas her role as nurse.. There were enough illnesses of youthand age, major and minor, to give the nineteenth centuryAmerican woman nursing experience. The sickroom calledfor the exercise of her higher qualities of patience, mercy, andgentleness as well as her housewifely arts. She could thus fulfillher dual feminine function — beauty and usefulness...In the home women were not only the highest adornment ofcivilization, but they were supposed to keep busy at morallyuplifting tasks. Fortunately most of housework, if looked atin true womanly fashion, could be regarded as uplifting. Mrs.Sigourney extolled its virtues: “The science of housekeepingaffords exercise for the judgment and energy, ready recollection,an patient self-possession, that are the characteristics of asuperior mind.” According to Mrs. Farrar, making beds wasgood exercise, the repetitiveness of routine tasks inculcatedpatience and perseverance...The female was dangerously addicted to novels, accordingto the literature of the period. She should avoid them, sincethey interfered with “serious piety.” If she simply couldn’t helpherself and read them anyway, she should choose edifyingones from the lists of morally acceptable authors... Nineteenthcentury knew that girls could be ruined by the book... Bookswhich attacked or which seemed to attack woman’s acceptedplace were regarded as dangerous. [Women were so susceptibleto persuasion, with their “gentle yielding natures” that theymight listen to the “bold ravings of the hard-featured of theirown sex.” The frightening result: “such reading will unsettlethem for their true station and pursuits, and they will throwthe world back again into confusion...”Female seminaries were quick to defend themselves againstany suspicion of interfering with the role which nature’s Godhad assigned to women. They hoped to enlarge and deepenthat role, but not to change its setting. At the Young Ladies’Seminary and Collegiate Institute in Monroe City, Michigan,the catalogue admitted few of its graduates would be likely to“fill the learned professions.” Still, they were called to “otherscenes of usefulness and honor.” The average woman is to bethe “presiding genius of love” in the home... At Miss Pierce’sfamous school in Litchfield, the students were taught thatthey had “attained the perfection of their characters whenthey could combine their elegant accomplishments with a turnfor solid domestic virtues.” Mt. Holyoke paid pious attentiontribute to domestic skills: “Let a young lady despise this branchof the duties of woman, and she despises the appointments ofher existence...”If any woman asked for a greater scope for her gifts, themagazines were sharply critical. Such women were tamperingwith society, undermining civilization. [Such women] werecondemned in the strongest possible language... “They are onlysemi-women, mental hermaphrodites.” The Rev. Harringtonknew the women of America could not possibly approve ofsuch perversions and went to some wives and mothers to ask ifthey did want a “wider sphere of interest” as these nonwomenclaimed. The answer was reassuring. “NO! Let the men takecare of politics, we will take care of our children!” Again femalediscontent resulted only from a lack of understanding: womenwere not subservient; they were rather “chosen vessels...”“Women’s Rights” meant one thing to reformers, but quiteanother to the True Woman. She knew her rights.The right to love whom others scornThe right to comfort and to mourn.The right to shed new joy on earth.The right to feel the soul’s high worth.Such women’s rights, and God will blessAnd crown their champions with success...But even while the women’s magazines and related literature274 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

encouraged this ideal of the perfect woman, forces wereat work in the nineteenth century which impelled womanherself to change, to play a more creative role in society. Themovements for social reform, westward migration, missionaryactivity, utopian communities, industrialism, the Civil War— all called forth responses from woman which differed fromthose she was trained to believe were hers by nature and divinedecree. The very perfection of True Womanhood, moreover,carried with it the seeds of its own destruction. For, if womenwere so very little less than the angels, she should surely takea more active part in running the world, especially since menwere making such a hash of things...Arlene Hirschfelder: Supreme CourtDecisions Affecting Native AmericansSince 1810, when the first Indian case was decided by the U.S.Supreme Court, several hundred cases dealing with Indian rightshave been decided by the Court. Opinions rendered in these casesreflect shifts in judicial interpretations. In Cherokee Nation v.Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the court handeddown decisions in which tribes were viewed as largely autonomousgovernments retaining inherent powers not expressly ceded awayby the tribes or extinguished by Congress and essentially independentof state control. In United States v. Kagana (1886), the courtrecognized a seemingly unlimited federal power to alter tribalproperty without tribal approval and infringe on internal tribalresolution of disputes. Over a half century later in 1959, the courtushered in a new era of Indian law. In Williams A Lee, the courtrecognized Indian tribes as permanent governments within thefederal constitutional system.The Supreme Court has developed a set of judicial rules that treaties,agreements, and statutes be construed as the Indians would haveunderstood them, that ambiguities be read in their favor, and thatIndian laws be read liberally in favor of the Indians. Despite thesedoctrines of construction favoring Indian rights, the court has setlimits and stated “a canon of construction is not a license to disregardclear expressions of . . . congressional intent.”In his renowned treatise, Handbook of Federal Indian Law publishedin 1942 by the Department of the Interior, Felix S. Cohen stated:Congress, in the first instance, all the powers of any sovereign scare.(2) Conquest renders the tribe subject to the legislative power of theUnited States and, in substance, terminates the external powers ofsovereignty of the tribe, e.g., its power to enter into treaties withforeign nations, but does not by itself affect the internal sovereigntyof the tribe, i.e., its powers of local self‐government. (3) These powersare subject to qualification by treaties and by express legislation ofCongress, but, save as thus expressly qualified, full powers of internalsovereignty are vested in the Indian tribes and in their duly electedorgans of government.The following brief discussions of ten key Supreme Court casesintroduce broad philosophical directions of the Court as well assome specific principles in the areas of tribal powers, the federaltribal relationship, tribal—state relationships, resource rights, andreligious rights.CHEROKEE NATION v. GEORGIA (1831)In 1828 and 1829, Wilson Lumpkin, the governor of Georgiasigned acts to parcel out Cherokee territory to four countiesin Georgia, “to extend the laws of this State over the same”and “to annul all laws and ordinances made by the Cherokee275

Nations of Indians.” Other Georgia laws authorized thesurvey and distribution by lottery of Cherokee lands to peoplein Georgia and prevented white persons from residing withinCherokee territory without a license from the governor. TheGeorgia governor was also authorized to take over gold, silver,and other mines in Cherokee country, to state citizen armedforces at the gold mines, and to punish anyone “found trespassingupon the mines.”The Cherokee National declared these laws “null and void”owing to its status as “a foreign stare, not owing allegianceto the United States, nor to any State of this Union, norto any prince, potentate or States, other than their own.”The Cherokees, who believed themselves to be sovereign,independent, and self‐governing, stated that Georgia, in itsefforts to force the Cherokees from their homeland, violatedat least a dozen treaties the Cherokees made with the U.S.government. “All of which treaties and conventions were dulyratified and confirmed by the Senate of the United States, and. . . a part of the supreme law of the land” and violated variousacts of Congress that consecrated the Indian boundaries andrecognized the exclusive Cherokee “right to give and to executethe law within that boundary.”The Cherokees, determined to resist Georgia efforts to forcethem from their homeland, filed suit in the Supreme Courtfor an injunction to prevent the enforcement of Georgia statestatutes. The Cherokees believed the Supreme Court hadoriginal jurisdiction for their case because the third articleof the Constitution gave the Supreme Court jurisdiction incontroversies “between the State or the citizens thereof, andforeign stares, citizens, or subjects.”In a brief opinion by Chief Justice John Marshall, the majorityof the Court held that the Cherokee Nation lacked originaljurisdiction because an Indian tribe or nation within theUnited States was not a “foreign state” in the sense of theConstitution because their lands “compose a part of the UnitedStates.” It was, rather, a “domestic, dependent nation” that“cannot maintain an action in the courts of the United States.”The Chief Justice described the federal‐Indian relationship as“perhaps unlike that of any other two people in existence” and“marked by peculiar and cardinal distinctions which exist nowhereelse.” Marshall agreed with the Cherokees that they werea state, “a distinct political society . . . capable of managing itsown affairs and governing itself but that owing to the treatiesthey made, the Cherokees were considered by foreign nationsand by the U.S. government “as being . . . completely under thesovereignty and dominion of the United States.” Regardingthe actions of the Georgia legislature, however, the Courtstated “the point respecting parties makes it unnecessary todecide the question.”WORCESTER v. GEORGIA (1832)In 1829 and 1830, the Georgia legislature passed acts tryingto seize Cherokee country, parcel it out among neighboringcounties of the seat, extend its code over the Cherokees, abolishits institutions and laws, and annihilate its political existence.One act stated that “all white persons residing within thelimits of the Cherokee Nation . . . without a license or permitfrom his excellency the governor . . . shall be guilty of a highmisdemeanor.”In July 1831, Samuel Worcester, a missionary to the CherokeeNation, was indicted in a county court for residing in theCherokee Nation without a license or permit from thegovernor and for not taking the oath of support and defendthe constitution and laws of Georgia. Despite Worcester’scontention that he, a Vermont citizen and a missionaryauthorized by the President of the United States and theCherokees to preach the gospel, was in the sovereign CherokeeNation completely separated from the other states by U.S.treaties and laws and therefore outside the jurisdiction of thecounty court, the state prosecuted him. Convicted, Worcesterwas sentenced to “hard labor in the penitentiary for four years”for violating some of the same statutes challenged in CherokeeNation the year before.Worcester took his case to the Supreme Court which firstdecided that it had jurisdiction, under the 1789 Judicial Actto decide the controversy because the missionary’s indictmentand plea in this case drew into question the validity of U.S.treaties and Georgia statutes which tried to regulate andcontrol the “intercourse with the Cherokee Nation whichbelongs exclusively to Congress.”Speaking for the court in one of its more lasting statements(since 1970, Worcester has been cited by state and federalcourts more than virtually any other case handed down by theCourt between 1789 and1865), Justice John Marshall held that Georgia’s statutes wereunlawful because they were “repugnant to the Constitution,treaties, and laws of the United States.” In reaching thisdecision, the Court announced virtually every basic doctrinein Indian law.( Federal plenary power: “The whole intercourse between theUnited States and this nation is, by our Constitution and laws,vested in the government of the United States;”( Trust relationship. “From the commencement of ourgovernment Congress has passed acts to regulate trade andintercourse with the Indians; which created them as nations,respect their rights, and manifest a firm purpose to afford thatprotection which treaties stipulate.”( Reserved rights: “The Indian nations possessed a full rightto The lands they occupied, until that right should be extinguishedby the United States, with their consent;” and thegeneral exclusion of state law from Indian country.”( The Cherokee nation: “… is a distinct community, occupying276 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, inwhich the laws of Georgia can have no force.”TWENTY SUPREME COURTCASESThe following important cases have shaped federal Indian lawby establishing tribes as sovereign governments or limitingtribal powers as indicated.1823 Johnson v. McCintosh.Indian title, aboriginal possessory right.1870 Cherokee Tobacco Case.Law of Congress supersedes provisions of treaty.1881 United States v. McBratney.State law in indian country.1896 Talton v. Mayes.Tribal self‐government.of New York State.Tribal right to sue to enforce aboriginal land rights.1985 Kerr‐McGee Corp. v. Navajo Tribe of Indians.Tribal sovereignty; non‐IRA tribal taxation power.1985 United States v. Dann.Aboriginal title extinguished.1986 United States v. Dion.Treaty rights to hunt eagles abrogated.1987 California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians.Gaming; state regulation not permitted.1988 Lyog, Secretary of Agriculture, et al. v. NorthwestIndian Cemetery Protective Association, et al.First Amendment, free exercise claim denied; sacred site onpublic land.1989 Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians v. Holyfield.Tribal jurisdiction in adoptions; Indian Child Welfare Act.1903 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock.Federal power over Indian affairs; treaty abrogation.1905 United States v. Winans.Treaty rights; reserved access to fishing sites.1955 Tee‐Hit‐Ton Indians v. United States.Federal power over Indian affairs; land seized withoutcompensation.1968 Menominee Tribe of Indians v. United States.Treaty hunting and fishing rights preserved.1974 Morton v. Mancari.Indian hiring preference.1979 Washington v. Washington StateCommercial Passenger Fishing Vessel Association. Preservationof treaty fishing rights.1980 Washington v. Confederated Tribes of the ColvilleIndian Reservation.State jurisdiction; state sales tax.1982 Liferrion v. Iicarilla Apache Tribe.Tribal sovereignty; tribal severance taxes.1983 New Mexico v. Mescalero Apache Tribe.Tribal regulatory jurisdiction; hunting and fishing.1985 County of Oneida, New York v. Oneida Indian Nation277

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3vi.slavery, sectionalismand secession:1830-1860VI............................................................Slavery, Sectionalism and Secession: 1830-1860279

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Charles W. Chestnut:The Passing of GrandisonWhen it is said that it was done to please a woman, thereought perhaps to be enough said to explain anything; for whata man will not do to please a woman is yet to be discovered.Nevertheless, it might be well to state a few preliminary factsto make it clear why young Dick Owens tried to run one of hisfather’s negro men off to Canada.In the early fifties, when the growth of anti‐slavery sentimentand the constant drain of fugitive slaves into the North had soalarmed the slaveholders of the border States as to lead to thepassage of the Fugitive Slave Law, a young white man fromOhio, moved by compassion for the sufferings of a certainbondman who happened to have a “hard master,” essayedto help the slave to freedom. The attempt was discoveredand frustrated; the abductor was tried and convicted forslave‐stealing, and sentenced to a term of imprisonment in thepenitentiary. His death, after the expiration of only a smallpart of the sentence, from cholera contracted while nursingstricken prisoners, lent to the case a melancholy interest thatmade it famous in anti‐slavery annals.Dick Owens had attended the trial. He was a youth of abouttwenty‐two, intelligent, handsome, and amiable, but extremelyindolent, in a graceful and gentlemanly way; or, as old JudgeFenderson put it more than once, he was lazy as the Devil—amere figure of speech, of course, and not one that did justiceto the Enemy of Mankind. When asked why he never didanything serious, Dick would good‐naturedly reply, with awell‐modulated drawl, that he didn’t have to. His father wasrich; there was but one other child, an unmarried daughter,who because of poor health would probably never marry, andDick was therefore heir presumptive to a large estate. CharityLomax had shamed him into studying law, but notwithstandingan hour or so a day spent at Old Judge Fenderson’s office, hedid no’ make remarkable headway in his legal studies.“What Dick needs,” said the judge, who was fond of tropes, asbecame a scholar, and of horses, as was befitting a Kentuckian,“is the whip of necessity, or the spur of ambition. If he hadeither, he would soon need the snaffle to hold him back”But all Dick required, in fact, to prompt him to the mostremarkable thing he accomplished before he was twenty‐five,was a mere suggestion from Charity Lomax. The story wasnever really known to but two persons until after the warwhen it came out because it was a good story and there was noparticular reason for its concealment.Young Owens had attended the trial of this slave‐stealer, ormartyr,—either or both,—and, when it was over, had gone tocall on Charity Lomax, and, while they sat on the verandaafter sundown, had told her all about the trial. He was a goodtalker, as his career in later years disclosed, and described theproceedings very graphically.“I confess,” he admitted, “that while my principles were againstthe prisoner my sympathies were on his side. It appearedthat he was of good family, and that he had an old father andmother, respectable people, dependent upon him for supportand comfort in their declining years. He had been led into thematter by pity for a negro whose master ought to have been runout of the country long ago for abusing his slaves. If it had beenmerely a question of old Sam Briggs’s negro, nobody wouldhave cared anything about it. But father and the rest of themstood on the principle of the thing, and told the judge so, andthe fellow was sentenced to three years in the penitentiary.”Miss Lomax had listened with lively interest.“I’ve always hated old Sam Briggs,” she said emphatically, “eversince the time he broke a negro’s leg with a piece of cordwood.When I hear of a cruel deed it makes the Quaker blood thatcame from my grandmother assert itself. Personally I wish thatall Sam Briggs’s negroes would run away. As for the youngman, I regard him as a hero. He dared something for humanity.I could love a man who would take such chances for the sakeof others.”“Could you love me, Charity, if I did something heroic?”“You never will, Dick. You’re too lazy for any use. You’ll neverdo anything harder than playing cards or fox‐hunting.”“Oh, come now, sweetheart! I’ve been courting you for a yearand it’s the hardest work imaginable. Are you never going tolove me?” he pleaded.His hand sought hers, but she drew it back beyond his reach.“1’11 never love you, Dick Owens, until you have donesomething. When the time comes, I’ll think about it.”“But it takes so long to do anything worth mentioning, andI don’t wan’ to wait. One must read two years to become alawyer, and work five more to make reputation. We shall bothbe gray by then.”“Oh, I don’t know,” she rejoined. “It doesn’t require a lifetimefor a man prove that he is a man. This one did something, orat least tried to.”“Well, I’m willing to attempt as much as any other man. Whatdo you want me to do, sweetheart? Give me a test.”281

“Oh, dear me!” said Charity, “I don’t care what you do. Really,come to think of it, why should I care whether you do anythingat all.”“I’m sure I don’t know why you should, Charity,” rejoined Dickhumbly, “for I m aware that I’m not worthy of it.”“Except that I do hate,” she added, relenting slightly, “to see areally clever man so utterly lazy and good for nothing.”“Thank you, my dear; a word of praise from you has sharpenedmy wits already. I have an idea! Will you love me if I run anegro off to Canada?”“What nonsense!” said Charity scornfully. “You must be losingyour wits. Steal another man’s slave, indeed, while your fatherowns a hundred!”“Oh, there’ll be no trouble about that,” responded Dick lightly;“I’ll run off one of the old man’s; we’ve got too many anyway.It may not be quite as difficult as the other man found it, butit will be just as unlawful, and will demonstrate what I amcapable of.”“Seeing is believing,” replied Charity. “Of course, what youare talking about now is merely absurd. I’m going away forthree weeks, to visit my aunt in Tennessee. If you’re able to tellme, when I return, that you’ve done something to prove yourquality, I’ll—well, you may come and tell me about it.”IIYoung Owens got up about nine o’clock next morning, andwhile making his toilet put some questions to his personalattendant, a rather bright looking young mulatto of about hisown age.“Tom,” said Dick.“Yes, Mars Dick,” responded the servant.“I’m going on a trip North. Would you like to go with me?”Now, if there was anything chat Tom would have liked to make,it was a trip North. 1t was something he had long contemplatedin the abstract, but had never been able to muster up sufficientcourage to attempt in the concrete. He was prudent enough,however, to dissemble his feelings.“I wouldn’t min’ it, Mars Dick, ez long ez you’d take keer er mean’ fetch me home all right.”Tom’s eyes belied his words, however, and his young masterfelt well assured that Tom needed only a good opportunityto make him run away. Having a comfortable home, and adismal prospect in case of failure, Tom was not likely to takeany desperate chances; but young Owens was satisfied that in afree State but little persuasion would be required to lead Tomastray. With a very logical and characteristic desire to pursuehis end with least necessary expenditure of effort, he decidedto take Tom with him, if his father did not object.Colonel Owens had left the house when Dick went to breakfast,so Dick did not see his father till luncheon.“Father,” he remarked casually to the colonel, over the friedchicken, “I’m feeling a trifle run down. I imagine my healthwould be improved somewhat by a little travel and change ofscene.”“Why don’t you take a trip North?” suggested his father. Thecolonel added to paternal affection a considerable respectfor his son as the heir of a large estate. He himself had beenraised in comparative poverty, and had laid the foundationsof his fortune by hard work; and while he despised the ladderby which he had climbed, he could not entirely forget it, andunconsciously manifested, in his intercourse with his son, someof the poor man’s deference toward the wealthy and well‐born.“I think I’ll adopt your suggestion, sir,” replied the son, “andrun up to New York; and after I’ve been there awhile I maygo on to Boston for a week or so. I’ve never been there, youknow.”“There are some matters you can talk over with my manufacturerin New York” rejoined the colonel, “and while you are up thereamong the Yankees, I hope you’ll keep your eyes and ears opento find out what the rascally abolitionists are saying and doing.They’re becoming altogether too active for our comfort, andentirely too many ungrateful riggers are running away. I hopethe conviction of that fellow yesterday may discourage the restof the breed. I’d just like to catch any one trying to run off oneof my darkeys. He’d get short shrift; I don’t think any Courtwould have a chance to try him.”“They are a pestiferous lot,” assented Dick, “and dangerous toour institutions. But say, father, if I go North I shall want totake Tom with me.”Now, the colonel, while a very indulgent father, had pronouncedviews on the subject of negroes, having studied them, as heoften said, for a great many years, and, as he asserted oftenerstill, understanding them perfectly. It is scarcely worthwhileto say, either, that he valued more highly than if he inheritedthem the slaves he had toiled and schemed for.“I don’t think it safe to take Tom up North,” he declared, with282 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

promptness and decision. “He’s a good enough boy, but toosmart to trust among those lowdown abolitionist. I stronglysuspect him of having learned to read, though I can’t imaginehow. I saw him with a newspaper the other day, and while hepretended to be looking at a woodcut, I’m almost sure he wasreading the paper. I think it by no means safe to take him.”Dick did not insist, because he knew it was useless. The colonelwould have obliged his son in any other matter, but his negroeswere the outward and visible sign of his wealth, and station,and therefore sacred to him.“Whom do you think it safe to take?” asked Dick. “I supposeI’ll have to have a body‐servant.”“What’s the matter with Grandison?” suggested the colonel.“He’s handy enough, and I reckon we can trust him. He’s toofond of good eating, to risk losing his regular meals; besides,he’s sweet on your mother’s maid, Betty, and I’ve promised tolet ‘em get married before long. I’ll have Grandison up, andwe’ll rally to him. Here, you boy, Jack,” called the colonel toa yellow youth in the next room who was catching flies andpulling their wings off to pass the time, “go down to the barnand tell Grandison to come here.”“Grandison,” said the colonel, when the negro stood before him,hat in hand“Yes, marster.”“Haven’t I always treated you right?”“Yes, marster.”“Haven’t you always got all you wanted to eat?”“Yes, marster.”“Y‐a‐s, marster.”I should just like to know, Grandison, whether you don’t thinkyourself a great deal better off than those poor free negroesdown by the plank road, with no kind master to look afterthem and no mistress to give them medicine when they’re sickand—and…“Well, I sh’d jes’ reckon I is better off, suh, den dem low‐downfree riggers, suh! Ef anybody ax ‘em who dey b’long ter, deyhas ter say nobody, er e’se lie erbout it. Anybody ax me who Ib’longs ten I ain’t got no ‘casion ter be shame’ ter tell ‘em, no,suh, ‘deed I ain’, suh!”The colonel was beaming. This was true gratitude, and hisfeudal heart thrilled at such appreciative homage. Whatcold‐blooded, heartless monsters they were who would breakup this blissful relationship of kindly protection on the onehand, of wise subordination and loyal dependence on the other!The colonel always became indignant at the mere thought ofsuch wickedness.“Grandison,” the colonel continued, “your young master Dickis going North for a few weeks, and I am thinking of lettinghim take you along. I shall send you on this trip, Grandison,in order that you may take care of your young master. He willneed some one to wait on him, and no one can ever do it so wellas one of the boys brought up with him on the old plantation.I am going to trust him in your hands, and I’m sure you’lldo your duty faithfully, and bring him back home safe andsound—to old Kentucky.”Grandison grinned. “Oh yes, marster, I’ll take keer er youngMars Dick.”I want to warn you, though, Grandison,” continued thecolonel impressively, “against these cussed abolitionists, whotry to entice servants from their comfortable homes and theirindulgent masters, from the blue skies, the green fields, and thewarm sunlight of their southern home, and send them away offyonder to Canada, a dreary country, where the woods are fullof wildcats and wolves and bears, where the snow lies up to theeaves of the houses for six months of the year, and the cold is sosevere that it freezes your breath and curdles your blood) andwhere, when runaway riggers get sick and can’t work, they areturned out to starve and die, unloved and uncared for. I reckon,Grandison, that you have too much sense to permit yourself tobe led astray by any such foolish and wicked people.”“’Deed, suh, I would n’low none er dem cussed, low‐downabolitioners ter come nigh me, suh. I’d—I’d—would I be‘lowed ter hit ‘em, suh?”“Certainly, Grandison,” replied the colonial, chuckling, “hit‘em as hard as you can. I reckon they’d rather like it. Begad,I believe they would! It would serve ‘em right to be hit by anigger!”“Er ef I didn’t hit ‘em, suh,” continued Grandison reflectively,“I’d tell Mars Dick, en he’d fix ‘em. He’d smash de face off’n‘em, suh, I jes’ knows he would.”“0h yes, Grandison, your young master will protect you. Youneed fear no harm while he is near.”“Deywont try ter steal me, will dry, marster?” asked the negro,with sudden alarm.“I don’t know, Grandison,” replied the colonel, lighting a freshcigar. “They’re desperate set of lunatics, and there’s no telling283

what they may resort to. But if you stick close to your youngmaster, and remember always that he is your best friend, andunderstands your real needs, and has your true interests atheart, and if you will be careful to avoid strangers who try totalk to you, you’ll stand a fair chance of getting back to yourhome and your friends. And if you please your master Dick,he’ll buy you a present, and a string of beads for Betty to wearwhen you and she get married in the fall.”“Thanky, marster, thanky, suh,” replied Grandison, oozinggratitude in every pore; “you is a good marster, to be sho’, suh;yes, ‘deed you is. You kin jes’ bet me and Mars Dick “wine git‘long jes’ lack I wuz own boy ter Mars Dick. En it won’t be myfault ef he don’ want me fer his boy all de time, w’en we comeback home ag’in.”“All right, Grandison, you may go now. You needn’t work anymore to‐day and here’s a piece of tobacco for you off my ownplug.”“Thanky, marster, thanky, marster! You is de tees’ marsterany nigger ever had in dis worl’.” And Grandison bowed andscraped and disappeared round the corner, his jaws closingaround a large section of the colonel’s best tobacco.“You may take Grandison,” said the colonel to his son. “I allowhe’s abolitionist‐proof.”Richard Owens, Esq., and servant, from Kentucky, registeredat the fashionable New York hostelry for Southerners in thosedays, a hotel where an atmosphere congenial to Southerninstitutions was sedulously maintained. But there were negrowaiters in the dining room, and mulatto bell‐boys, and Dickhad no doubt that Grandison, with the native gregariousnessand garrulousness of his race, would foregather and palaverwith them sooner or later, and Dick hoped that they wouldspeedily inoculate him with the virus of freedom. For it wasnot Dick’s intention to say anything to his servant abouthis plan to free him, for obvious reasons. To mention oneof them, if Grandison should go away, and by legal processbe recaptured, his young master’s part in the matter woulddoubtless become known, which would be embarrassing toDick, to say the least. If, on the other hand, he should merelygive Grandison sufficient latitude, he had no doubt he wouldeventually lose him. For while not exactly skeptical aboutGrandison’s perfervid loyalty, Dick had been a somewhat keenobserver of human nature, in his own indolent way, and basedhis expectations upon the force of the example and argumentthat his servant could scarcely fail to encounter. Grandisonshould have a fair chance to become free by his own initiative;if it should become necessary to adopt other measures to getrid of him, it would be time enough to act when the necessityarose; and Dick Owens was not the youth to take needlesstrouble.The young master renewed some acquaintances and made others,and spent a week or two very pleasantly in the best societyof the metropolis, easily accessible to a wealthy, well‐bredyoung Southerner, with proper introductions. Young womensmiled on him, and young men of convivial habits pressed theirhospitalities but the memory of Charity’s sweet, strong face andclear blue eyes made his proof against the blandishments of theone sex and the persuasions of the other. Meanwhile he keptGrandison supplied with pocket‐money, and left him mainlyto his own devices. Every night when Dick came in he hopedhe might have to look upon himself, and every morning helooked forward with pleasure to the chore of making his toiletunaided. His hopes, however, were doomed to disappointment,for every night when he came in Grandison was on hand with abook and a nightcap mixed for his young master as the colonelhad taught him to make. And every morning Grandisonappeared with his master’s boots blacked and his clothesbrushed, and laid his linen out for the day.“Grandison,” said Dick one morning, after finishing his toilet,“this is the chance of your life to go around among your ownpeople and see how they live. Have you met any of them?”“Yes, suh, I’s seen some of ‘em. But I don’ keer nuffin fer ‘em,suh. Dey’re diffe’nt fm de riggers down ou’ way. Dey ‘lowsdey’re free, but dey ain’ got sense ‘nuff ter know dey ain’ half aswell offas dey would be down Souf, whar dey’d be ‘preciated.”When two weeks had passed without any apparent effectof evil example upon Grandison, Dick resolved to go on toBoston, where he thought the atmosphere might prove morefavorable to his ends. After he had been at the Revere Housefor a day to two without losing Grandison, he decided uponslightly different tactics.Having ascertained from a city directory the addresses ofseveral well‐known abolitionists, he wrote them each a lettersomething like this:Dear Friend and Brother:A wicked slaveholder from Kentucky, stopping at the Revere House,has dared to insult the liberty‐loving people of Boston by bringinghis slave into their midst. Shall this be tolerated? Or shall steps betaken in the name of liberty to rescue a fellow‐man from bondage?For obvious reasons I can only sign myselfA Friend of Humanity.That his letter might have an opportunity to prove effective,Dick made it a point to send Grandison away from the hotel onvarious errands. On one of these occasions Dick watched himfor quite a distance down the street. Grandison had scarcely284 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

left the hotel when a long‐haired, sharp‐featured man cameout behind him, followed him, soon overtook him, and keptalong beside him until they turned the next corner. Dick’shopes were roused by this spectacle, but sank correspondinglywhen Grandison returned to the hotel. As Grandison saidnothing about the encounter, Dick hoped there might be someself‐consciousness behind his unexpected reticence, the resultsof which might develop later on.But Grandison was on hand again when his master cameback to the hotel at night, and was in attendance again inthe morning, with hot water, to assist at his master’s toilet.Dick sent him on further errands from day to day, and uponone occasion came squarely up to him—inadvertently ofcourse—while Grandison was engaged in conversation with ayoung white man in clerical garb. When Grandison saw Dickapproaching, he edged away from the preacher and hastenedtoward his master, with a very evident expression of relief onhis countenance.“Mars Dick,” he said, “dese yer abolitioners is jes’ pesterin’de life out er me tryin’ ter git me ter run away. I don’ pay no‘tension ter ‘em, but dey riles me so sometimes dat I’m fearedI’ll hit some of ‘cm some er dese days, an’ dat mought git meinter trouble. I ain’ said puffin’ ter you ‘bout it, Mars Dick, ferI didn’ wanter ‘sturb yo’ min’; but I don’ like it, suh; no, suh, Idon’! Is we “wine back home ‘fo’ long, Mars Dick?”“We’ll be going back soon enough,” replied Dick somewhatshortly, while he inwardly cursed the stupidity of a slavewho could be free and would not, and registered a secretvow that if he were unable to get rid of Grandison withoutassassinating him, ant were therefore compelled to take himback to Kentucky, he would see that Grandison got a taste ofan article of slavery that would make him regret his wastedopportunities. Meanwhile he determined to tempt his servantyet more strongly.“Grandison,” he said next morning, “I’m going away for a dayor two, but I shall leave you here. I shall lock up a hundreddollars in this drawer and give you the key. If you need any ofit, use it and enjoy yourself,—spend it all if you like,— for thisis probably the last chance you’ll have for some time to be in afree Stare, and you’d better enjoy your library while you may.”When he came back a couple of days later and found the faithfulGrandison at his post, and the hundred dollars intact, Dick feltseriously annoyed. His vexation was increased by the fact thathe could not express his feelings adequately. He did not evenscold Grandison; how could he, indeed, find fault with onewho so sensibly recognized his true place in the economy ofcivilization, and kept it with such touching fidelity?“I can’t say a thing to him,” groaned Dick. “He deserves aleather medal, made out of his own hide tanned. I reckon I’llwrite to father and let him know what a model servant he hasgiven me.”He wrote his father a letter which made the colonel swell withpride and pleasure. “I really think,” the colonel observed to oneof his friends, “that Dick ought to have the nigger interviewedby the Boston papers, so that they may see how contented andhappy our darkeys really are.”Dick also wrote a long letter to Charity Lomax, in which hesaid, among other things, that if she knew how hard he wasworking, and under what difficulties, to accomplish somethingserious for her sake, she would no longer keep him in suspense,but overwhelm him with love and admiration.Having thus exhausted without result the more obviousmethods of getting rid of Grandison, and diploma havingalso proved a failure, Dick was forced to consider more radicalmeasures. Of course he might run away himself, and abandonGrandison, but this would be merely to leave him in the UnitedStates, where he was still a slave, and where, with his notionsof loyalty, he would speedily be reclaimed. It was necessary, inorder to accomplish the purpose of his trip to the North, toleave Grandison permanency in Canada, where he would belegally free.“I might extend my trip to Canada,” he reflected, “but thatwould be too palpable. I have it! I’ll visit Niagara Fails on theway home, and lose him on the Canada side. When he oncerealizes chat he is actually free, I’ll warrant that he’ll stay.”So the next day saw them westward bound, and in due courseof time, by the somewhat slow measures of the period, theyfound themselves at Niagara. Dick walked and drove aboutthe Falls for several days, taking Grandison along with him onmost occasions. One morning they stood on the Canadian side,watching the wild whirl of the waters below them.“Grandison,” said Dick, raising his voice above the roar of thecataract, “do you know where you are now?”“I’s wid you, Mars Dick; cat’s all I keers.”“You are now in Canada, Grandison, where your people go whenthey run away from their masters. If you wished, Grandison,you might walk away from me this very minute, and I couldnot lay my hands upon you to take you back.”Grandison looked around uneasily.“Let’s go back ober de ribber, Mars Dick. I’s feared I’ll lose youovuh heah, an’ den I won’ hate no marster, an’ won’t nebber beable to git back home no mo’.”285

Discouraged, but not yet hopeless, Dick said, a few minuteslater,—“Grandison, I’m going up the road a bit, to the inn over yonder.You stay here until I return. I’ll not be gone a great while.”Grandison’s eyes opened wide and he looked somewhatfearful.“Is dry any er dem dadblasted abolitioners roun’ heah, MarsDick?”“l don’t imagine that there are,” replied his master, hoping theremight be. But I’m not afraid of you running away, Grandison.”I only wish I were, he added to himself.Dick walked leisurely down the road to where the whitewashedinn, built of stone, with true British solidity, loomed upthrough the trees by the roadside. Arrived there he ordereda glass of ale and a sandwich, and took a seat at a table by awindow, from which he could see Grandison in the distance.For a while he hoped that the seed he had sown might havefallen on fertile ground, and that Grandison, relieved from therestraining power of a master’s eye, and finding himself in afree country, might get up and walk away; but the hope wasvain, for Grandison remained faithfully at his post, awaitinghis master’s return. He had seated himself on a broad flat stone,and, turning his eyes away from the grand and awe‐inspiringspectacle that lay close at hand, was looking anxiously towardthe inn where his master sat cursing his ill‐timed fidelity.By and by a girl came into the room to serve his order, andDick very naturally glanced at her; and as she was young andpretty and remained in attendance, it was some minutes beforehe looked for Grandison. When he did so his faithful servanthad disappeared.To pay his reckoning and go away without the change was amatter quickly accomplished. Retracing his footsteps towardsthe Falls, he saw, to his great disgust, as he approached thespot where he had left Grandison, the familiar form of hisservant stretched out on the ground, his face to the sun, hismouth open, sleeping the time away, oblivious alike to thegrandeur of the scenery, the thunderous roar of the cataract, orthe insidious voice of sentiment.“Grandison,” soliloquized his master, as he stood gazing downat his ebony encumbrance, I do not deserve to be an Americancitizen; I ought not to have the advantages I possess over you;and I certainly am not worthy of Charity Lomax, if I am notsmart enough to get rid of you. I have an idea! You shall befree, and I will be the instrument of your deliverance. Sleepon, faithful and affectionate servant, and dream of the bluegrass and the bright skies of Old Kentucky, for it is only in yourdreams that you will ever see them again!”Dick retraced his footsteps towards the inn. The young womanchanced to look our of the window and saw the handsome younggentleman she had waited on a few minutes before, standing inthe road a short distance away, apparently engaged in earnestconversation with a colored man employed as hostler for theinn. She thought she saw something pass from the white manto the other, but at that moment her duties called her awayfrom the window, and when she looked out again the younggentleman had disappeared, and the hostler, with two otheryoung men of the neighborhood, one white and one colored,were walking rapidly towards the Falls.IVDick made the journey homeward alone, and as rapidly as theconveyances of the day would permit. As he drew near homehis conduct in going back without Grandison took on a moreserious aspect than it had borne at any previous time, andalthough he had prepared the colonel by a letter sent severaldays ahead, there was still the prospect of a bad quarter of anhour with him. Not, indeed, that his father would upbraidhim, but he was likely to make searching inquires. Andnotwithstanding the vein of quiet recklessness that had carriedDick through his preposterous scheme, he was a very poor liar,having rarely had occasion or inclination to tell anything butthe truth. Any reluctance to meet his father was more thanoffset however, by a stronger force drawing him homeward, forCharity Lomax must long since have returned from her visit toher aunt in Tennessee.Dick got off easier than he had expected. He told a straightstory, and a truthful one, so far as it went.The colonel raged at first, but rage soon subsided into anger,and anger moderated into annoyance, and annoyance into asort of garrulous sense of injury. The colonel thought he hadbeen hardly used; he had trusted this negro, and he had brokenfaith. Yet, after all, he did not blame Grandison so much as hedid the abolitionists, who were undoubtedly at the bottom ofit.As for Charity Lomax, Dick told her, privately of course, thathe had run his father’s man, Grandison, off to Canada, andleft him there.“Oh, Dick,” she had said with shuddering alarm, “what haveyou done? If they knew it they’d send you to the penitentiary,like they did that Yankee.”“But they don’t know it,” he had replied seriously; adding, withan injured tone, “you don’t seem to appreciate my heroism likeyou did chat of the Yankee; perhaps it’s because I wasn’t caught286 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

and sent to the penitentiary. I thought you wanted me to doit.”“Why, Dick Owens!” she exclaimed. “You know I neverdreamed of any such outrageous proceeding.“But I presume I’ll have to marry you,” she concluded, aftersome insistence on Dick’s part, if only to take care of you. Youare too reckless for anything; and a man who goes chasing allover the North, being entertained by New York and Bostonsociety and having negroes to throw away, needs some one tolook after him.”One last glimpse he caught of his vanishing property, as hestood, accompanied by a United States marshal, on a wharf ata port on the south shore of Lake Erie. On the stern of a smallsteamboat which was receding rapidly from the wharf, withnose pointing toward Canada, there stood a group of familiardark faces, and the look they cast backward was not one oflonging for the fleshpots of Egypt. The colonel saw Grandisonpoint him out to one of the crew of the vessel, who waved hishand derisively toward the colonel. The latter shook his fistimpotently—and the incident was closed.“It’s a most remarkable dining,” replied Dick fervency, “that yourview corresponds exactly with my profoundest convictions. Itproves beyond question that we were made for one another.”They were married three weeks later. As each of them had justreturned from journey, they spent their honeymoon at home.A week after the wedding they were seated, one afternoon,on the piazza of the colonel’s house, where Dick had takenhis bride, when a negro from the yard ran down the lane andthrew open the big gate for the colonel’s buggy to enter. Thecolonel was not alone. Beside him, ragged and travel‐stained,bowed with wan. ness, and upon his face a haggard look chattold of hardship and privation, sat lost Grandison.The colonel alighted at the steps.About three weeks after Grandison’s return the colonel’sfaith in sable humanity was rudely shaken, and its foundationalmost broken up. He came near losing his belief in the fidelityof the negro to his master,—the servile virtue most highlyprized and most sedulously cultivated by the colonel and hiskind. One Monday morning Grandison was missing. And notonly Grandison, but his wife, Betty the maid; his mother, auntEunice; his father, uncle Ike; his brothers, Tom and John, andhis little sister Elsie, were likewise absent from the plantation;and a hurried search and inquiry in the neighborhood resultedin no information as to their whereabouts. So much valuableproperty could not be lost without an effort to recover it, andthe wholesale nature of the transaction carried consternation tothe hearts of those whose ledgers were chiefly bound in black.Extremely energetic measures were taken by the colonel andhis friends. The fugitives were traced and followed from pointto point, on their northward run through Ohio. Several timesthe hunters were close upon their heels, but the magnitude ofthe escaping party begot unusual vigilance on the part of thosewho sympathized with the fugitives, and strangely enough, theunderground railroad seemed to have had its tracks cleared andsignals set for this particular train. Once, twice, the colonelthought he had them, but they slipped through his fingers.287

Charles Ball: Slave Testimony (1858)For forty years, Charles Ball toiled as a slave in Maryland, SouthCarolina, and Georgia, and, according to his autobiography,managed to escape twice. In the following selection, he describes theregimen on a tobacco plantation.In Maryland and Virginia, although the slaves are treated withso much rigour, and oftimes with so much cruelty, I have seeninstances of the greatest tenderness of feeling on the part oftheir owners. 1, myself, had three masters in Maryland, andI cannot say now, even after having resided so many yearsin a state where slavery is not tolerated, that either of them(except the last, who sold me to the Georgians, and was anunfeeling man,) used me worse than they had a moral rightto do, regarding me merely as an article of property, and notentitled to any rights as a man, political or civil. My mistresses,in Maryland, were all good women; and the mistress of mywife, in whose kitchen I spent my Sundays and many of mynights, for several years, was a lady of most benevolent andkindly feelings. She was a true friend to me, and I shall alwaysvenerate her memory....If the proprietors of the soil in Maryland and Virginia, wereskillful cultivators-had their lands in good condition-and keptno more slaves on each estate, than would be sufficient to workthe soil in a proper manner. and kept up the repairs of the placethecondition of the coloured people would not be, by anymeans, a comparatively unhappy one. I am convinced, that innine cases in ten, the hardships and suffering of the colouredpopulation of lower Virginia, are attributable to the povertyand distress of its owners. In many instances, an estate scarcelyyields enough to feed and clothe the slaves in a comfortablemanner, without allowing any thing for the support of themaster and family; but it is obvious, that the family mustfirst be supported, and the slaves must be content with thesurplus-and this, on A poor, old, worn out tobacco plantation,is often very small, and wholly inadequate to the comfortablesustenance of the hands, and they are called. There, in manyplaces, nothing is allowed to the poor Negro, but his peck ofcorn per week, without the sauce of a salt herring, or even alittle salt itself...The general features of slavery are the same every where; butthe unrest rigour of the system, is only to be met with, on thecotton plantations of Carolina and Georgia, or in the rice fieldswhich skirt the deep swamps and morasses of the southernrivers. In the tobacco fields of Maryland and Virginia, greatcruelties are practiced-not so frequently by the owners, asby the overseers of the slaves; but yet, the tasks are not soexcessive as in the cotton region, nor is the press of labour soincessant throughout the year. It is true, that from the periodwhen the tobacco plants are set in the field, there is no restingtime until it is housed; but it is planted out about the 9th ofMay, and must be cut and taken out of the field before the frostcomes. After it is hung and dried, the labor of stripping andpreparing it for the hogshead in leaf, or of manufacturing itinto twist, is comparatively a work of leisure and ease. Besides,on almost every plantation the hands are able to completethe work of preparing the tobacco by January, and sometimesearlier; so that the winter months, form some sort of respitefrom the cold of the year. The people are obliged, it is true, tooccupy themselves in cutting wood for the house, building andrepairing fences, and in clearing new land, to raise the tobaccoplants for the next year; but as there is usually time enough,and to spare, for the completion of all this work, before theseason arrives for setting the plants in the field; the men areseldom flogged much, unless they are very lazy or negligent,and the women are allowed to remain in the house, in the verycold, snowy, or rainy weather....In Maryland I never knew a mistress or a young mistress, whowould not listen to the complaints of the slaves. It is true, wewere always obliged to approach the door of the mansion, withour hats in our hands, and the most subdued and beseechinglanguage in our mouths-but, in return, we generally receivedwords of kindness, and very often a redress of our grievances;though I have known very great ladies, who would never grantany request from the plantation hands, but always refilledthem and their petitions to their master, under a pretence, thatthey could not meddle with things that did not belong to thehouse. The mistresses of the great families, generally gavemild language to the slaves; though they sometimes sent forthe overseer and have them severely flogged; but I have neverheard any mistress, in either Maryland or Virginia, indulgein the low, vulgar and profane vituperations, of which I wasmyself the object, in Georgia. for many years, whenever Icame into the presence of my mistress. Flogging-though oftensevere and excruciating in Maryland, is not practiced withthe order, regularity and system to which it is often reducedin the South. On the Potomac, if a slave gives offence, heis generally chastised on the spot, in the field where he isat work, as the overseer always carried a whip-sometimes atwisted cow-hide sometimes a kind of horse-whip, and veryoften a simple hickory switch or gad, cut in the adjoiningwoods. For stealing meat, or other provisions, or for any of thehigher offences, the slaves are stripped, tied up by the handssometimes by the thumbs-and whipped at the quarter-butmany times, on a large tobacco plantation, there is no morethan one of these regular whippings in a week while on others,where the master happens to be a bad man, or a drunkard-theback of the unhappy Maryland slaves, is seamed with scarsfrom his neck to his hips.288 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Necessary Evil to Positive GoodSource: Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains-, or, the Life of anAmerican Slave (New York, 1858).Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia (1780)There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the mannersof our people produced by the existence of slavery among us.The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetualexercise of the most boisterous passion, the most unremittingdespotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on theother. Our child see this, and learn to imitate it; for man isan imitative animal The spirit of the master is abating, that ofthe slave rising’ from the dust, his condition mollifying, theway I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a totalemancipation, and that this is disposed in the order eventsto be with the consent of the masters, rather than by theirextirpation.Southern Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. VII.‐‐no. 13.(Jan., 1853) Excerpts from Louisa McCord’s response toHarriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabinmaster ‐‐ for the good of the world.Southern hearts and Southern souls can beat high, and lookheavenward, with noble and pure aspirations, blessing Godfor his mercies; blessing “the system” through which hiswisdom obviates, what to man’s little intellect might seeminsurmountable, evils, and blessing that beautiful order ofcreation, which ignorant bigotry, vainly, as yet has striven tocast back into chaos.Make your laws to interfere with the God‐established systemof slavery, which our Southern States are beautifully developingto perfection, daily improving the condition of the slave, dailymaking more and more the master to his high and responsibleposition; make your laws, we say, to pervert this God‐directedcourse, and the world has yet to see the horrors which mightensue.We do not say it is a necessary evil. We do not allow that itis a temporary make‐shift to choke the course of Providencefor man’s convenience. It is not “a sorrow and a wrong to belived down.” We proclaim it, on the contrary, a Godlikedispensation, a providential caring for the weak and a refugefor the portionless.Indeed, the existence of a system of slavery rather tends toincrease than diminish this feeling, as, leaving a larger portionof society in a state of tutelage, naturally and necessarily greaterattention is turned to the subject.If there is any community whose system of government worksbetter for all classes than our own we arewilling to abandon the defense of ours... no where [except theSouth] are the higher classes more elevated—no where are thelower classes more comfortable—no where do both and allwork together in their several positions with less bitterness ormore of the genial spirit of Christian love and charity ‐‐ thatno where is there less misery and less vice exhibited than underthe working of our system; if cases of wrong and oppression(which exist in every system, and must exist so long as manis not perfect) are, as in good governments they must beexceptional cases and not cases in rule....there really are a good many among our Southern inhabitants,men and women, who do what they think right, and are notliving with a constant lie on their lips and in their hearts; whoown slaves because they believe “the system” to be the bestpossible for black and white, for slave and master, and who can,on their knees, Gratefully worship the all gracious providenceof an Almighty God, who has seen fit, so beautifully, to suitevery being to the place to which its nature calls it... who ownslaves because they think it, not expedient only, but right, holyand just to do so, for the good of the slave – for the good of the289

Abolitionist ArgumentsDocument ASource: Theodore Dwight Weld“Slaves in the United States are treated with barbarousinhumanity.... They are overworked, underfed, wretchedly cladand lodged.... they are frequently flogged with terrible severity,have red pepper rubbed into their lacerated flesh.... They areoften stripped naked, their back and limbs cut with knives....They are often suspended by the arms and whipped and beatentill they faint, and when revived... beaten again till they faith,and sometimes till they die....”Document BSource: Frederick Douglass, “Independence Day Speech atRochester,” July 4, 18S2“What to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answera day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year,the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is constantly victim.To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, anunholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; yoursounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciationof tyrants, brass‐fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty andequality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns... are tohim, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy‐ a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nationof savages....”Document CSource: Manifesto of the American Anti-Slavery SocietySource: Reverend Richard Fuller“The natural descendants of Abraham were holders of slaves,and God took them into specialrelationship to himself[The Old Testament said], ‘both thybondmen and thy bondmaids, whichthou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round aboutyou; of them shall ye buy bondmen andbondmaids.’[Leviticus, XXV]’’Document FSource: U.S. Representative H. Hammond“It is a proverb that no human being is contented with hislot, and it may be said that some... may extract occasionallycomplaints from southern slaves.... But such instances are rare.As a class, I say it boldly, there is not a happier, more contentedrace on the face of the earth.... I should say that they have everyreason to be happy. Lightly tasked, well clothed, well fed ‐ farbetter than the free laborers of any country in the world... allof the sufferings alleviated by the kindest and most interestedcare.”Document HSource: Solon Robinson, trader“A greater punishment could not be devised or inflicted upon theSouthern slave at this day than to give him that liberty whichGod in his wisdom and mercy deprived of him.... Free themfrom control, and how soon does poverty and wretchednessovertake them!”“The sin is as great to enslave an American as an African....Every American citizen who retains a human being ininvoluntary bondage as his property is, according to Scripture(Exodus 21:16) a man stealer... Those laws which are now inforce admitting the right of slavery are therefore, before God,utterly null and void....”Pro-slavery ArgumentsDocument DSource: William Harper, judge, South Carolina“Slavery was forced upon us by the extremist exigency ofcircumstances in a struggle for very existence. Without it, it isdoubtful whether a white man would be now existing on thiscontinent ‐ certain that, if there were, they would be in a stateof the utmost destitution, weakness and misery.”Document E290 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Dred Scott vs Sanford (1857)The following case began when Dred Scott, a black slave, wastaken by his owner from Missouri, a slave state, to Illinois, afree state, and later to Wisconsin Territory where slavery hadbeen forbidden by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. WhenScott was brought back to Missouri, he sued to obtain hisfreedom, claiming that he had become free when taken intoWisconsin, a territory in which slavery was forbidden. The caseeventually made its way to the Supreme Court. The Court wasconfronted with two major questions: First, was Scott a citizenof Missouri (if he was not, he could not bring suit in federalcourt, and the court did not have jurisdiction to resolve thecase); Second, had Scott been set free by virtue of his sojourninto the free territory of Wisconsin (or, in other words, was theMissouri Compromise constitutional).The court ruled that Scott was not a citizen of Missouri or ofthe United States and therefore could not sue in federal court.Having refused jurisdiction, the Court went on to rule onthe other issue. The Court decided that Scott’s residence inthe Wisconsin Territory did not entitle him to freedom fromslavery because Congress did not have the power to prohibitslavery in the territories. Therefore, the Missouri Compromise(which prohibited slavery in territories north of the 36 0 30’line) violated the Constitution and was null and void.As you read, examine the reasoning the court uses to come toits two main conclusions that Dred Scott was not a citizen andthat the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.Two days before the ruling, in his inaugural address, newlyelected president Buchanan argued that the issue of slaveryin the territories was best settled by the federal courts. OnMarch 6, 1857 Chief Justice Taney read the Court’s opinion.He hoped the ruling would settle the issue of slavery in theterritories once and for all. It did not.The simple question is this: Can a Negro, whose ancestorswere imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become amember of the political community founded and brought intoexistence by the Constitution of the United States, and as suchbecome entitled to all of the rights, and privileges... granted[by the Constitution] to the citizen?We think that they are not included, and were never meantto be included, in the word, “citizens,” in the Constitution.On the contrary, they were at that time [of the writing of theConstitution] considered as a subordinate and inferior class ofbeings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, andwhether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to [white]authority. Rather, they should be and are considered an inferiorclass of beings, who have been subjugated by the dominantrace, and whether emancipated or not, have no rights providedthem but such are those held the power and the governmentmight choose to grant them....In the opinion of the court, the legislation and historiesof the times, and the language used in the Declaration ofIndependence, show, that neither the class of person who hadbeen imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether theyhad become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part ofthe people, nor intended to be included in the general words [ofthat document]....They had for more than a century before beenconsidered as beings of an inferior order... and so far inferiorthat they had no rights which the white man was bound torespect... This opinion was at that time fixed and universal.... Itwas regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics....Dred Scott was not a citizen of Missouri within the meaningof the Constitution of the United States, and not entitled assuch to sue in its courts; and consequently... [the federal courtsystem] had no jurisdiction of the case....We proceed therefore, to inquire whether the facts relied on bythe plaintiff entitle him to his freedom....The Act of Congress, upon which the plaintiff relies [theMissouri Compromise] declares that slavery and involuntaryservitude, except as a punishment for a crime, shall be foreverprohibited in all part of the [Louisiana] territory... which liesnorth of the thirty-six degrees thirty minute north latitude[other than Missouri].... And the difficulty which meets us atthe threshold of this part of the inquiry is, whether Congresswas authorized to pass this law under any of the powers grantedto it by the Constitution; for, if the authority is not given to itby that instrument, then it is the duty of this court to declare itvoid and inoperative, and incapable of conferring freedom anyone who is held a slave under the laws of any one of the States.The counsel for the plaintiff has laid much stress upon thearticle in the Constitution which confers on Congress thepower to “dispose of and make all needful rules and regulationsrespecting the territory... belonging to the United States.” But,in the judgment of the court, that provision has no bearing onthe present controversy and was intended to be confined, to theterritory which at the time [of the writing of the Constitution]belonged to, or was claimed by, the United States... and canhave no influence upon a territory afterwards acquired from aforeign government.The powers of the Government and the rights and privilegesof the citizen are regulated and plainly defined by theConstitution itself. And when [the] Territory becomes a partof the United States, the Federal Government enters... upon itwith its powers over the citizens strictly defined, and limitedby the Constitution, from which it derives its own existence,291

and by virtue of which alone it continues to exist and act asa Government and sovereignty. It has no power of any kindbeyond it; and it cannot, when it enters into a Territory ofthe United States... [assume) despotic powers which theConstitution has denied to it.... The Territory being a part ofthe United States, the Government and the citizen both enterit under the authority of the Constitution, with their respectiverights defined and marked out; and the Federal Governmentcan exercise no power over his person or property, beyond whatthat instrument confers, nor lawfully deny any right which ithas reserved....The rights of private property have been guarded with equal care.Thus the rights of property are united with the rights of person,and placed on the same ground by the fifth amendment to theConstitution.... An Act of Congress which deprives a personof the United States of his liberty or property merely becausehe came himself or brought his property into a particularTerritory of the United States, and who had committed nooffense against the laws, could hardly be dignified with thename of due process of law....Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the courtthat the Act of Congress [the Missouri Compromise] whichprohibited a citizen from holding and owning property ofthis kind in the territory of the United States north of theline therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution,and is therefore void; and that neither Dred Scott himself, norany of his family were made free by being carried into thisterritory....Upon the whole, therefore, it is judgment of this court, that itappears by the record before us that the plaintiff in error is nota citizen of Missouri, in the sense in which that word is used inthe Constitution; and that the [lower federal court]... for thatreason, had no jurisdiction in the case....[The Constitution] places the citizens of a territory, so faras these rights are concerned, on the same footing with thecitizens of the States, and guards them as firmly and plainlyagainst any inroads which the general government mightattempt. And if Congress itself cannot do this — if it is beyondthe powers conferred on the Federal Government .... it couldnot authorize a territorial government to exercise them. [TheFederal Government] could confer no power on any localgovernment... to violate the provisions of the Constitution.It seems, however, to be supposed, that there is a differencebetween property in a slave and other property, and thatdifferent rules may be applied to it.... [But] if the Constitutionrecognizes the right of property of the master in a slave, andmakes no distinction between that description of property andother property owned by a citizen, no tribunal, acting underthe authority of the United States, whether it be legislative ,executive, or judicial, has a right to draw such a distinction, ordeny to it the benefit of the provisions and guarantees whichhave been provided for the protection of private propertyagainst the encroachments of the Government....[Now] the right of property in a slave is distinctly andexpressly affirmed in the Constitution. The right to traffic init, like an ordinary article of merchandise.. was guaranteed tothe citizens of the United States.... No word can be found inthe Constitution which gives Congress a greater power overslave property, or which entitles property of that kind to lessprotection than property of any other description. The onlypower conferred is the power... of protecting the owner in hisrights.292 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1858)In 1858 Lincoln ran against Senator Stephen A. Douglas for aSenate seat from Illinois. Lincoln challenged Douglas to a seriesof debates across the state. Douglas was a national leader of theDemocratic party, Lincoln was a little known member of the upstartRepublicans. Douglas, an avid expansionist and champion of popularsovereignty had helped secure passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of1854 which in part repealed the Missouri Compromise. Lincoln lostthe election. (Senators at the time were chosen by state legislatures.)Despite his loss, the debates made Lincoln a national figure and animmediate contender for the Republican presidential nomination in1860. The following is from a debate in Alton, Illinois on October15, 1858.As you read, think about how Lincoln depicts his fledgling Republicanparty and its stance on slavery. What exactly was the party’s stanceon slavery according to Lincoln? What factors might have ledLincoln and the Republican party to embrace such a policy?Stephen Douglas’ OpeningIt is now nearly four months since the canvass between Mr.Lincoln and myself commenced.... [Mr. Lincoln’s principalplatform is]: First, that this government could not endurepermanently divided into free and slave States, as our fathersmade it; that they must all become free or all become slave...otherwise this Union could not continue to exist.. ..His secondproposition was a crusade against the Supreme Court of theUnited States because of the Dred Scott decision, urging asan especial reason for his opposition to that decision that itdeprived the Negro of rights and benefits of that clause in theConstitution of the United States which guarantees to thecitizens of each state all the privileges and immunities of thecitizens of the several states.On the tenth of July I returned home, and delivered a speechto the people of Chicago, in which I announced it to be mypurpose to appeal to the people of Illinois to sustain the courseI pursued in Congress... On the next day, the eleventh of July,Mr. Lincoln replied to me at Chicago, explaining at somelength and reaffirming the positions which he had taken... heeven went further than he had before, and uttered sentimentsin regard to the Negro being on an equality with the whiteman. He adopted in support of this position the argument...[of] abolition lecturers... to wit, that the Declaration ofIndependence having declared all men free and equal, bydivine law, also that Negro equality was an inalienable right,of which they could not be deprived. He insisted, in thatspeech, that the Declaration included the Negro in the clauseasserting that all men were created equal, and went so far asto say that if one were allowed to take the position that it didnot include the Negro, others might take the position that itdid not include other men. He said that all these distinctionsbetween this man and that man, this race and the other race,must be discarded, and we must all stand by the Declaration ofIndependence, declaring all men were created equal.I took up Mr. Lincoln’s three propositions in my severalspeeches, analyzed them and pointed out what I believe to bethe radical errors contained in them. First, in regard to hisdoctrine that the government was in violation of the law ofGod, which says that a house divided against itself cannotstand, I repudiate it as slander upon the immortal framers ofour Constitution. I then said, I have often repeated, and nowagain assert, that in my opinion our government can endureforever, divided into free and slave States as our fathers madeit — each State having the right to prohibit, abolish or sustainslavery, just as it pleases. This government was made uponthe great basis of the sovereignty of the States, the right toeach state to regulate its own domestic institutions to suititself; and that right was conferred with the understandingand expectation that, inasmuch as each locality had separateinterests, each locality must have different and distinct local anddomestic institutions, corresponding to its wants and interests.Our fathers knew when they made the government that thelaws and institutions which were well adapted to the GreenMountains of Vermont were unsuited to the rice plantations ofSouth Carolina. They knew then, as well as we know now, thatthe laws and institutions which would be well adapted to thebeautiful prairies of Illinois would not be suited to the miningregions of California. They knew in a republic as broad as this,having such a variety of soil, climate and interest, there mustnecessarily be a corresponding variety of local laws, — thepolicy and institutions of each State adapted to its conditionand wants. For this reason this Union was established onthe right of each State to do as it pleased on the question ofslavery, and every other question; and the various states werenot allowed to complain of, much less interfere with, the policyof their neighbors.Abraham Lincoln’s ReplyIt is not true that our fathers, as Judge Douglas assumes,made this government part slave and part free. Understandthe sense in which he puts it. He assumes that slavery is arightful thing within itself, - was introduced by the framersof the Constitution. The exact truth is, that they found theinstitution existing among us, and they left it as they foundit. But in making the government they left this institutionwith many clear marks of disapprobation upon it. They foundslavery among them, and they left it among them because ofthe difficulty - the absolute impossibility - of its immediateremoval.... [I ask Douglas] when the policy that the fathersof the government had adopted... was the best policy in theworld, the only wise policy, the only policy we can ever safelycontinue upon, that will give us peace, unless this dangerous293

element becomes a national institution - I turn upon him andask him why he could not leave it alone. I turn and ask him whyhe was driven to the necessity of introducing a new policy.... Iask him why he could not let it remain where our fathers placedit.... I ask you, when he infers that I am in favor of setting thefree and slaves states at war, when the institution was placedin the attitude by those who made the Constitution, did theymake any war?... Wherein is the ground of belief that we shallhave war out of it if we return to that policy? I have proposednothing more than a return to the policy of the fathers.Now, irrespective of the moral aspect of this question as towhether there is a right or wrong in enslaving a Negro, I amstill in favor of the new Territories being in such a conditionthat white men may find a home, — may find some spot wherethey can better their condition; where they can settle upon newsoil and better their condition in life. I am in favor of this, notmerely... for our own people who are born amongst us, but asan outlet for free white people everywhere - the world over....I have stated upon former occasions, and I may as well stateagain, what I understand to be the real issue in the controversybetween Justice Douglas and myself.... There has been no issuebetween us... when he assumes that I am in favor of introducinga perfect social and political equality between the white andblack races. These are false issues, upon which Judge Douglashas tried to force the controversy. There is no foundation intruth for the charge that I maintain either of these propositions.The real issue in this controversy - the one pressing upon everymind - is the sentiment on the part of one class that looksupon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of anotherclass that does not look upon it as a wrong. The sentimentthat contemplates the institution of slavery in this countryas a wrong is the sentiment of the Republican party. It is thesentiment around which all their actions, all their arguments,circle, from which all their propositions radiate. They lookupon it as being a moral social and political wrong; and whilethey contemplate it as such, they nevertheless have due regardfor its actual existence among us.... [The Republicans) insistthat it should, as far as may be, be treated as a wrong; and oneof the methods of treating it as a wrong is to make provisionthat it shall grow no larger. They also desire a policy that looksto a peaceful end of slavery at sometime.... If there be a manamongst us who does not think that the institution of slaveryis wrong in any one of the aspects of which I have spoken,he is misplaced and ought not be with us. And if there be aman amongst us who is so impatient of it as a wrong as todisregard its actual presence among us and the difficulty ofgetting rid of it suddenly in a satisfactory way, and to disregardthe constitutional obligations thrown about it, that man isdisplaced if he is on our platform. We disclaim sympathy withhim in practical action. He is not properly placed with us.spread, let me say a word. Has anything ever threatened theexistence of this Union save and except this very institution ofslavery? What is it that we hold most dear? Our own libertyand prosperity. What has ever threatened our liberty andprosperity, save and except this institution of slavery? If this istrue, how do you propose to improve the condition of thingsby enlarging slavery?... That is no proper way of treating whatyou regard a wrong. You see this peaceful way of dealing withit as a wrong - restricting the spread of it, and not allowing itto go into new countries where it has not already existed. Thatis the peaceful way... the way in which the fathers themselvesset us the example.On the other hand, I have said that there is a sentiment whichtreats it as not being wrong. The is the Democratic sentimentof this day. I do not mean to say that every man who standswithin that range positively asserts that it is right. That classwill include all who positively assert that it is right, and allwho, like Justice Douglas, treat it as indifferent and do not sayit is right or wrong. These two classes of men fall within thegeneral class of those who do not look upon it as wrong....The Democratic policy in regard to that institution will nottolerate... the slightest hint, the least degree of wrong aboutit.... [Douglas] says he ‘don’t care whether it is voted up or voteddown’ in the Territories.... Any man can say that who does notsee anything wrong in slavery; but no man can logically say itwho does see a wrong in it, because no man can logically sayhe does not care whether a wrong is voted up or down.... [TheDemocratic maxim] carefully excludes the idea that there isanything wrong in [slavery]....That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in thiscountry when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myselfshall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these twoprinciples — right and wrong - throughout the world. Theseare the two principles that have stood face to face from thebeginning of time and will ever continue to struggle. The oneis the common right of humanity, the other the divine rightof kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it developsitself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earnbread, and I eat it.” No matter what shape it comes, whetherfrom the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people ofhis own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from onerace of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is thesame tyrannical principle....On the subject of treating it as a wrong, and limiting its294 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

DBQ: Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men— The Rise of the Republican PartyThe Free-Soil movement was launched by Congressman DavidWilmot in 1846, at the close of the Mexican War. He proposeda proviso that would outlaw the expansion of slavery intoany territory that might be acquired from Mexico. Wilmot’sfollowers, who became known as “Free Soilers,” were unifiedby the idea that slavery should be banned from newly acquiredterritories. Largely as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska actof 1854, Northern Whigs joined the Free-Soilers, and thusformed the foundation of the new Republican Party in 1854.The primary sources below are representative of the definingbeliefs of the new Republican party. As you read, think abouthow the Free-Soil movement was different from the abolitionistmovement. If Free-Soilers were not abolitionists, whatwere their arguments against the extension of slavery in theterritories? What do the views expressed below indicate aboutthe Republicans view of racial equality? What critique do theRepublicans offer of the ways in which slavery has impactedthe economy of the South? Of the nation? Why might the newRepublican party have been able to form a coalition amonginterests as diverse as Northern Whigs, poor northern laborers,and abolitionists?Document ASource: Editor of the Chicago Evening Journal“It does not necessarily follow that we should fellowship withthe Negroes because our policy shakes off their shackles.”Document BSource: Congressional Globe, 1858“It is the institution of slavery which is the great parent ofamalgamation. Gentlemen need not fear it from those opposedto the institution.”Document CSource: David Wilmot, 1848“My proviso is the ‘white man’s proviso’... (the Mexican cession)should be preserved for the sons of toil, of my own race and ofmy own color.”Document DSource: Cincinnati Gazette, 1859“It is certainly the wish of every patriot, that all within thelimits of our Union should be homogeneous in race and of ourown blood.. [The colonization plan] would keep our Anglo-Saxon institutions as well as our Anglo-Saxon blood pure anduncontaminated.”Document ESource: F P Blair, 1858“[Colonization] would create rich colonies under our protection,likely, in the end, to appropriate the whole region to our use..Central America could, in fact, become our India. Only blackscan exercise influence in the tropics, because in such a climate,the white race is doomed. It is by the black race alone thatthose regions are to be regenerated, and brought within thiscircle of civilization. ..It is this race of men, christianizedin our churches, civilized by our firesides, and educated ingovernment by hearing our political discussions, who couldestablish the laws, customs, and power of the United States inCentral America.”Document FSource: Ben Wade, New York Evening Post, 1851“In this country, the colored man has no future to which hecan look forward with the hope of pleasure.. Free Negroes aredespised by all, repudiated by all; outcasts upon the face ofthe earth, without any fault of theirs that I know of. I deplorethe prejudice, but I...believe it to be perfectly impossible thatthese two races can inhabit the same place and be prosperousand happy.”Document GSource: New York Tribune, 1858“As far as natural rights are concerned, the question of Negroinferiority is irrelevant...So long as he is a man, the Negro isentitled to his natural rights. It is a question of manhood, notof color.”Document HSource: Michigan Constitutional Convention, 1859“We do not say that a black man is, or shall ever be, the equal ofthe white man; or that he shall vote or hold office, however justsuch a position may be; but we do assert that he who murders ablack man shall be hanged; that he who robs a black man of hisliberty or his property shall be punished like other criminals.”Document ISource: Governor Randall of New York, to his Democraticrival, 1859“Equality is one thing; familiarity is another. It is not whetherwe want to associate with the black man, sit by the fireside withthem in the social circle, or intermarry with them. That is aquestion of taste. There is a natural antipathy between him and295

the white race, that we do not profess to have overcome. This,however, has nothing to do with the question of suffrage.”Document JSource: An Iowa Republican, New York Times, 1857“What is it that makes a great mass of American citizens somuch more enterprising andintelligent than the laboring classes in Europe? It is thestimulant held out to them buy the character of our institutions.The door is thrown open to all, and even the poorest andhumblest in the land, may, by industry and application, attaina position which will entitle him to the respect and confidenceof his fellow men.”Document KSource: Abraham Lincoln, 1856“Northerners... work for themselves, taking the whole productto themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand,nor of hirelings and slaves on the other. The north has no classwhich is always to remain laborers. The man who labored foranother last year, this year labors for himself, and next year hewill hire others to work for him.”Document LSource: Representative Henry Wilson, Massachusetts“Northern society is the model of a progressive, permanent,Christian civilization... Sir, a majority of citizens in my stateoccupy that happy social position which is a medium betweenwealthy aristocracy on one hand, and poverty, which is generallywedded to ignorance, on the other... [In Massachusetts],laborers are more elevated than in any part of the globe, andour soil is divided into small estates, not large plantations.”Document MSource: Republican Senator Carl Schurz“Cast your eyes over that beehive called the free States. Seeby the railroad and telegraph wire every village, almost everybackwoods cottage, drawn within the immediate reachof progressive civilization... look upon our society, whereby popular education and continual change of conditionthe dividing lines between the ranks and classes are almostobliterated; look upon our system of public instruction, whichplaces even the lowliest child of the people upon the high roadof progressive civilization.”Document NSource: The Springfield Republican“Who forms the strength of this party? Precisely those whowould be most likely be expected to--the great middlinginterestclass. The highest class, aristocratically associated andaffiliated, timid, afraid of change... and the lowest class... thoseare the forces arrayed against Republicanism as a whole... Thosewho work with their hands, who live and act independently,who hold the stakes of home and family, of farm and workshop,of education and freedom—these as a mass are enrolled in theRepublican ranks.”Document OSource: William H. Seward, 1857“It was necessary that I should travel in Virginia to have any ideaof a slave State.. An exhausted soil, old and decaying towns,wretchedly-neglected roads, in every respect, an absence ofenterprise and improvement, distinguish the region throughwhich we have come, in contrast to that in which we live. Suchhas been the effect of slavery.”Document PSource: Frederick Law Olmstead, New York“Manual agricultural labor is the chief employment of slaves inthe South... For manual labor, therefore, the free man lookingon, has a contempt... Labor is held honorable on one side ofthe line [the North] because it is the vocation of freemen —degrading in the eyes of some on the other side because it isthe task of slaves.”Document QSource: Cincinnati Gazette, 1856“[Until my visit to the South) I had never met men in whomhope, energy, and courage to all outward appearance seemedso utterly extinguished. They are a very different specimen ofhumanity known as the mean white man, the poor buckaroo,in the Southern states... the poor, shiftless, lazy, uninstructed,cowed non-slaveholder of the South... because three quartersof the South’s white population retire to the outskirts ofcivilization, where they live a semi-savage life, sinking deeperand more hopelessly into barbarism with every succeedinggeneration. They are depressed, poor, impoverished, degradedin caste, because labor is disgraceful.... In the slaveholdingstates, there is no middle class. Great wealth or hopelesspoverty is the settled condition.”Document RSource: Republican George Weston, Maine“It is unquestionable the immigration from the South hasbrought into the free states more ignorance, poverty, andthriftlessness, than an equal amount of European immigration.Where it forms a marked feature of the population, as inSouthern Illinois, a long time must elapse before it is broughtup to the general standard of intelligence and enterprise in thefree States... It is appears, that one plain and obvious effect296 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

of the slave-holding system is to deaden in every class ofsociety that spirit of industry essential to the increase of publicwealth.”Document SSource: Abraham Lincoln, Peoria Speech, 1860“The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be madeof these territories. We want them to be homes of free whitepeople. This they cannot be, to any considerable extent, ifslavery shall be planted within them. Slave states are placesfor poor white people to remove from, not remove to. New freestates are the places for poor people to go to, and better theircondition. For this the nation needs these territories.”Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s CabinChapter V: Showing the Feelings of Living Property on ChangingOwnersMr. and Mrs. Shelby had retired to their apartment forthe night. He was lounging in a large easy chair, looking oversome letters that had come in the afternoon mail, and shewas standing before her mirror, brushing out the complicatedbraids and curls in which Eliza had arranged her hair; for,noticing her pale cheeks and haggard eyes, she had excusedher attendance that night, and ordered her to bed. Theemployment, naturally enough, suggested her conversationwith the girl in the morning; and, turning to her husband, shesaid carelessly,— “By the bye, Arthur, who was that low-bredfellow that you lugged in to our dinner-table today?”“Haley is his name,” said Shelby, turning himself rather uneasilyin his chair, and continuing with his eyes fixed on a letter.“Haley! Who is he, and what may be his business here, pray?”“Well, he’s a man that I transacted some business with, lasttime I was at Natchez,” said Mr. Shelby..“And he presumed on it to make himself quite at home, andcall and dine here.”“Why, I invited him; I had some accounts with him,” saidShelby.“Is he a negro trader?” said Mrs. Shelby, noticing a certainembarrassment in her husband’s manner.“Why, my dear, what put that into your head?” said Shelby,looking up.“Nothing,—only Eliza came in here, after dinner, in a greatworry, crying and taking on, and said you were talking with atrader, and that she heard him make an offer for her boy,—theridiculous little goose!”“She did, hey?” said Mr. Shelby, returning to his paper, whichhe seemed for a few moments quite intent upon, not perceivingthat he was holding it bottom upwards.“It will have to come out,” said he mentally; “as well now asever.”“I told Eliza,” said Mrs. Shelby, as she continued brushing herhair, “that she was a little fool for her pains, and that you neverhad anything to do with that sort of persons. Of course, I knewyou never meant to sell any of our people, least of all, to sucha fellow.”“Well, Emily,” said her husband, “so I have always felt and said;but the fact is that my business lies so that I cannot get onwithout I should have to sell some of my hands.”“To that creature? Impossible! Mr. Shelby, you cannot beserious.”“I’m sorry to say that I am,” said Mr. Shelby. “I’ve agreed tosell Tom.”“What! our Tom?—that good, faithful creature!—been yourfaithful servant from a boy! Oh, Mr. Shelby! and you have297

promised him his freedom, too, you and I have spoken to hima hundred times of it. Well, I can believe anything now,— Ican believe now that you could sell little Harry, poor Eliza’sonly child!” said Mrs. Shelby, in a tone between grief andindignation.“Well, since you must know all, it is so. I have agreed to sellTom and Harry both; and I don’t know why I am to be rated, asif I were a monster, for doing what every one does every day.”“But why, of all others, choose these?” said Mrs. Shelby. “Whysell them, of all on the place, if you must sell at all?”“Because they will bring the highest sum of any,—that’s why.I could choose another, if you say so. The fellow made me ahigh bid on Eliza, if that would suit you any better,” said Mr.Shelby.“The wretch!” said Mrs. Shelby vehemently.“Well, I didn’t listen to it, a moment,—out of regard to yourfeelings, I wouldn’t;—so give me some credit.”“My dear,” said Mrs. Shelby, recollecting herself, “forgive me;I have been hasty. I was surprised, and entirely unprepared forthis;—but surely you will allow me to intercede for these poorcreatures. Tom is a noble-hearted, faithful fellow, if he is black.I do believe, Mr. Shelby, that if he were put to it, he would laydown his life for you.”“I know it,—I dare say;—but what’s the use of all this?—I can’thelp myself.”“Why not make a pecuniary sacrifice? I’m willing to bear mypart of the inconvenience. Oh, Mr. Shelby, I have tried andtried most faithfully, as a Christian woman should to do myduty to these poor, simple, dependent creatures. I have caredfor them, instructed them, watched over them, and known alltheir little cares and joys, for years; and how can I ever holdup my head again among them if, for the sake of a little paltrygain, we sell such a faithful, excellent, confiding creature aspoor Tom, and tear from him in a moment all we have taughthim to love and value? I have taught them the duties of thefamily, of parent and child, and husband and wife; and howcan I bear to have this open acknowledgment that we care forno tie, no duty, no relation, however sacred, compared withmoney? I have talked with Eliza about her boy, her duty tohim as a Christian mother, to watch over him, pray for him,and bring him up in a Christian way; and now what can I say,if you tear him away, and sell him, soul and body, to a profane,unprincipled man, just to save a little money? I have told herthat one soul is worth more than all the money in the world;and how will she believe me when she sees us turn round andsell her child? Sell him, perhaps, to certain ruin of body andsoul!”“I’m sorry you feel so about it, Emily, indeed I am,” saidMr. Shelby; “and I respect your feelings, too, though I don’tpretend to share them to their full extent; but I tell you now,solemnly, it’s of no use, I can’t help myself. I didn’t mean to tellyou this, Emily; but in plain words, there is no choice betweenselling these two and selling everything. Either they must go,or I must. Haley has come into possession of a mortgage which,if I don’t clear off with him directly, will take everything beforeit. I’ve raked, and scraped, and borrowed, and all but begged,and the price of these two was needed to make up the balance,and I had to give them up. Haley fancied the child; he agreedto settle the matter that way and no other. I was in his power,and had to do it. If you feel so to have them sold, would it beany better to have all sold?”Mrs. Shelby stood like one stricken. Finally, turning to hertoilet, she rested her face in her hands, and gave a sort ofgroan.“This is God’s curse on slavery! A bitter, bitter, most accursedthing! A curse to the master and a curse to the slave! I was afool to think I could make anything good out of such a deadlyevil. It is a sin to hold a slave under laws like ours, I alwaysfelt it was, I always thought so when I was a girl, I thoughtso still more after I joined the church; but I thought I couldgild it over, I thought, by kindness, and care, and instruction,I could make the condition of mine better than freedom, foolthat I was!”“Why, wife, you are getting to be an abolitionist, quite.”“Abolitionist! If they knew all I know about slavery they mighttalk! We don’t need them to tell us; you know I never thoughtthat slavery was right, never felt willing to own slaves.”“Well, therein you differ from many wise and pious men,”said Mr. Shelby. “You remember Mr. B.’s sermon, the otherday?”“I don’t want to hear such sermons; I never wish to hear Mr.B. in our church again. Ministers can’t help the evil, perhaps,can’t cure it, any more than we can, but defend it! It alwayswent against my common sense. And I think you didn’t thinkmuch of that sermon, either.”“Well,” said Shelby, “I must say these ministers sometimescarry matters further than we poor sinners would exactly dareto do. We men of the world must wink pretty hard at variousthings, and get used to a deal that isn’t the exact thing. But wedon’t quite fancy, when women and ministers come out broadand square, and go beyond us in matters of either modestyor morals, that’s a fact. But now, my dear, I trust you see thenecessity of the thing, and you see that I have done the verybest that circumstances would allow.”“Oh, yes, yes!” said Mrs. Shelby, hurriedly and abstractedlyfingering her gold watch,—”I haven’t any jewelry of anyamount,” she added thoughtfully; “but would not this watchdo something?—it was an expensive one when it was bought.If I could only at least save Eliza’s child, I would sacrificeanything I have.”“I’m sorry, very sorry, Emily,” said Mr. Shelby. “I’m sorry thistakes hold of you so; but it will do no good. The fact is, Emily,the thing’s done; the bills of sale are already signed, and inHaley’s hands; and you must be thankful it is no worse. Thatman has had it in his power to ruin us all,—and now he is fairlyoff. If you knew the man as I do, you’d think that we had hada narrow escape.“Is he so hard, then?”298 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

“Why, not a cruel man, exactly, but a man of leather,— a manalive to nothing but trade and profit,—cool, and unhesitating,and unrelenting, as death and the grave. He’d sell his ownmother at a good percentage,—not wishing the old womanany harm, either.”“And this wretch owns that good, faithful Tom and Eliza’schild!”“Well, my dear, the fact is that this goes rather hard with me;it’s a thing I hate to think of. Haley wants to drive matters, andtake possession tomorrow. I’m going to get out my horse brightand early, and be off. I can’t see Tom, that’s a fact; and you hadbetter arrange a drive somewhere, and carry Eliza off. Let thething be done when she is out of sight.”“No, no,” said Mrs. Shelby; “I’ll be in no sense accomplice orhelp in this cruel business. I’ll go and see poor old Tom, Godhelp him, in his distress! They shall see, at any rate, that theirmistress can feel for and with them. As to Eliza, I dare notthink about it. The Lord forgive us! What have we done, thatthis cruel necessity should come on us?”There was one listener to this conversation whom Mr. and Mrs.Shelby little suspected.Communicating with their apartment was a large closet,opening by a door into the outer passage. When Mrs. Shelbyhad dismissed Eliza for the night, her feverish and excitedmind had suggested the idea of this closet; and she had hiddenherself there, and, with her ear pressed close against the crackof the door, had lost not a word of the conversation.When the voices died into silence, she rose and crept stealthilyaway. Pale, shivering, with rigid features and compressed lips,she looked an entirely altered being from the soft and timidcreature she had been hitherto. She moved cautiously alongthe entry, paused one moment at her mistress’s door and raisedher hands in mute appeal to Heaven, and then turned andglided into her own room. It was a quiet, neat apartment, onthe same floor with her mistress. There was the pleasant sunnywindow, where she had often sat singing at her sewing; there,a little case of books, and various little fancy articles, rangedby them, the gifts of Christmas holidays; there was her simplewardrobe in the closet and in the drawers:—here was, in short,her home; and, on the whole, a happy one it had been to her.But there, on the bed, lay her slumbering boy, his long curlsfalling negligently around his unconscious face, his rosy mouthhalf open, his little fat hands thrown out over the bedclothes,and a smile spread like a sunbeam over his whole face.“Poor boy! poor fellow!” said Eliza; “they have sold you! butyour mother will save you yet!”No tear dropped over that pillow; in such straits as thesethe heart has no tears to give,—it drops only blood, bleedingitself away in silence. She took a piece of paper and a pencil,and wrote hastily,— “Oh, Missis! dear Missis! don’t think meungrateful,—don’t think hard of me, anyway,—I heard all youand Master said tonight. I am going to try to save my boy,—you will not blame me! God bless and reward you for all yourkindness!”Hastily folding and directing this, she went to a drawer andmade up a little package of clothing for her boy, which she tiedwith a handkerchief firmly round her waist; and, so fond is amother’s remembrance that, even in the terrors of that hour,she did not forget to put in the little package one or two ofhis favorite toys, reserving a gayly painted parrot to amusehim, when she should be called on to awaken him. It was sometrouble to arouse the little sleeper; but, after some effort, hesat up, and was playing with his bird, while his mother wasputting on her bonnet and shawl.“Where are you going, mother?” said he, as she drew near thebed, with his little coat and cap.His mother drew near, and looked so earnestly into his eyes thathe at once divined that something unusual was the matter.“Hush, Harry,” she said; “mustn’t speak loud, or they will hearus. A wicked man was coming to take little Harry away fromhis mother, and carry him ‘way off in the dark; but motherwon’t let him,—she’s going to put on her little boy’s cap andcoat, and run off with him, so the ugly man can’t catch him.”Saying these words, she had tied and buttoned on the child’ssimple outfit, and, taking him in her arms, she whispered tohim to be very still; and, opening a door in her room which ledinto the outer veranda, she glided noiselessly out.It was a sparkling, frosty, starlight night, and the motherwrapped the shawl close round her child, as, perfectly quietwith vague terror, he clung round her neck.Old Bruno, a great Newfoundland, who slept at the end of theporch, rose, with a low growl, as she came near. She gentlyspoke his name, and the animal, an old pet and playmate ofhers, instantly, wagging his tail, prepared to follow her, thoughapparently revolving much, in his simple dog’s head, what suchan indiscreet midnight promenade might mean. Some dimideas of imprudence or impropriety in the measure seemedto embarrass him considerably; for he often stopped, as Elizaglided forward, and looked wistfully, first at her and then atthe house, and then, as if reassured by reflection, he patteredalong after her again. A few minutes brought them to thewindow of Uncle Tom’s cottage, and Eliza, stopping, tappedlightly on the windowpane.The prayer-meeting at Uncle Tom’s had, in the order of hymnsinging,been protracted to a very late hour; and, as Uncle Tomhad indulged himself in a few lengthy solos afterwards, theconsequence was that, although it was now between twelve andone o’clock, he and his worthy helpmate were not yet asleep.“Good Lord! what’s that?” said Aunt Chloe, starting up andhastily drawing thecurtain. My sakes alive, if it ain’t Lizy! Get on your clothes, oldman, quick! There old Bruno, too, a pawin’ round. What onairth—I’m gwine to open the door.”And, suiting the action to the word, the door flew open, andthe light of the tallow candle, which Tom had hastily lighted,fell on the haggard face and dark, wild eyes of the fugitive.“Lord bless you!—I’m skeered to look at ye, Lizy! Are ye tucksick, or what’s come over ye?”299

“I’m running away,—Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe, carrying offmy child,— Master sold him!”“Sold him?” echoed both, lifting up their hands in dismay.“Yes, sold him!” said Eliza firmly. “I crept into the closet byMistress’s door tonight, and I heard Master tell Missis that hehad sold my Harry, and you, Uncle Tom, both to a trader; andthat he was going off this morning on his horse, and that theman was to take possession today.”Tom had stood, during the speech, with his hands raised, andhis eyes dilated, like a man in a dream. Slowly and gradually,as its meaning came over him, he collapsed, rather than seatedhimself, on his old chair, and sunk his head down upon hisknees.“The good Lord have pity on us!” said Aunt Chloe. “Oh, it don’tseem as if it was true! What has he done, that Mas’r shouldsell him?”“He hasn’t done anything,—it isn’t for that. Master don’t wantto sell; and Missis, —she’s always good. I heard her plead andbeg for us; hut he told her ‘t was no use; that he was in thisman’s debt, and that this man had got the power over him. andthat if he didn’t pay him off clear, it would end in his having tosell the place and all the people, and move off. Yes, I heard himsay there was no choice between selling these two and sellingall, the man was driving him so hard. Master said he was sorry;but oh, Missis,—you ought to have heard her talk! If she ain’t aChristian and an angel, there never was one. I’m a wicked girlto leave her so; but, then, I can’t help it. She said, herself, onesoul was worth more than the world; and this boy has a soul,and if I let him be carried off, who knows what’ll become of it?It must be right; but, if it ain’t right, the Lord forgive me, for Ican’t help doing it!”“Well, old man!” said Aunt Chloe, “why don’t you go, too? Willyou wait to be toted down river, where they kill niggers withhard work and starving? I’d a rather die than go there, anyday! There’s time for ye,—be off with Lizy, you’ve got a passto come and go any time. Come, bustle up, and I’ll get yourthings together.”Tom slowly raised his head, and looked sorrowfully but quietlyaround, and said,“No, no,—I ain’t going. Let Eliza go,—it’s her right! Iwouldn’t be the one to say no, it ain’t in nature for her tostay; but you heard what she said! If I must be sold, or all thepeople on the place, and everything go to rack, why, let mebe sold. I s’pose I can b’ar it as well as any on ‘em,” he added,while something like a sob and a sigh shook his broad, roughchest convulsively. “Mas’r always found me on the spot,—healways will. I never have broke trust, nor used my pass nowayscontrary to my word, and I never will. It’s better for me aloneto go, than to break up the place and sell all. Mas’r ain’t toblame, Chloe, and he’ll take care of you and the poor.” Here heturned to the rough trundle bed full of little woolly heads, andbroke fairly down. He leaned over the back of the chair, andcovered his face with his large hands. Sobs, heavy, hoarse, andloud, shook the chair, and great tears fell through his fingerson the floor: just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffinwhere lay your firstborn son; such tears, woman, as you shedwhen you heard the cries of your dying babe. For, sir, he wasa man,—and you are but another man. And, woman, thoughdressed in silk and jewels, you are but a woman, and, in life’sgreat straits and mighty griefs, ye feel but one sorrow!“And now,” said Eliza, as she stood in the door, “I saw myhusband only this afternoon, and I little knew then what wasto come. They have pushed him to the very last standing-place,and he told me, to-day, that he was going to run away. Dotry, if you can, to get word to him. Tell him how I went, andwhy I went; and tell him I’m going to try and find Canada.You must give my love to him, and tell him, if I never see himagain,”—she turned away, and stood with her back to themfor a moment, and then added, in a husky voice,— “tell himto be as good as he can, and try and meet me in the kingdomof heaven.”“Call Bruno in there,” she added. “Shut the door on him, poorbeast! He mustn’t go with me!”A few last words and tears, a few simple adieus and blessings,and, clasping her wondering and affrighted child in her arms,she glided noiselessly away.1851—1852300 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

Lincoln Denies Racial EqualityInterpreting the Causes of the Civil WarLincoln in his high-pitched voice, parried Douglas’s charges, tohe delight of his noisy Ottawa supporters, who outnumbered theDouglasites about two to one. When this particular debate ended, theRepublicans bore their awkward hero in triumph from the platform-- with his drawn-up trousers, said one observer, revealing the edgesof his long underwear. Douglas later claimed that his opponent,beaten and exhausted, was unable to leave under his own power --a charge that angered Lincoln. In the following portion of Lincoln’scontribution to the interchange at Ottawa, what portion of hisstand was most offensive to Northern abolitionists? to the whiteSouth?My Fellow Citizens: When a man hears himself somewhatmisrepresented, it provokes him-at least, I find it so withmyself. But when the misrepresentation becomes very grossand palpable, it is more apt to amuse him. (Laughter.) ...... Anything that argues me into his [Douglas’s] idea of perfectsocial and political equality with the Negro is but a speciousand fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can provea horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse. (Laughter.)I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purposedirectly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slaveryin the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right todo so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose tointroduce political and social equality between the white andthe black races. There is a physical difference between the two,which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their livingtogether upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch asit becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, 1, as wellas judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belonghaving the superior position.I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that,notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world whythe Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumeratedin the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty,and the pursuit of happiness. (Loud cheers.) I hold that he isas much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with judgeDouglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not incolor, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. Butin the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else,which his own hand earns, be & my equal and the equal of judgeDouglas, and the equal of every living man. (Great applause.)Free labor vs. Slave labor“I am glad to see that a system prevails in New England underwhich laborers can strike when they want to, where they arenot obliged to work under all circumstances, and are not tieddown and obliged to labor whether you pay them or not! I likea system which lets a man quit when he wants to.... One ofthe reasons why I am opposed to slavery is just here... I don’tbelieve in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it woulddo more harm than good.... We do wish to allow the humblestman an equal chance to get rich with everyone else. Whenone starts poor, as most do in this race of life, free society issuch that he knows he can better his condition; he knows thatthere is no fixed condition for his whole life.... That is the truesystem.”— Abraham Lincoln, 1860“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menialduties, to perform the drudgery of life.... It constitutes the verymud-sill of society.... Your whole [Northern] hireling class ofmanual laborers and ‘operatives’... are essentially slaves. Thedifference between us (North and South] is, that our slaves arehired for life... yours are hired by the day.”— Senator James Hammond, South Carolina“At the slaveholding South all is peace, quiet, plenty andcontentment. We have no mobs, no trade unions, no strikes forhigher wages, no armed resistance to the law, but little jealousyof the rich by the poor.”— George Fitzhugh, “Slavery Justified”Two Views of Industrialism and Progress“Cast your eyes over that great beehive called the tree States.See by the railroad and telegraph wire every village, almostevery backwoods cottage, drawn within the immediate reachof progressive civilization.... look upon our society, whereby popular education and continual change of condition thedividing lines between ranks and classes are almost obliterated;look upon our system of public instruction, which placeseven the lowliest child of the people upon the high road ofprogressive education.”— Carl Schurz301

“[Slavery has] impeded the progress and prosperity of the South...[has] dwindled [Southern] commerce, and other similar pursuitsinto the most contemptible insignificance; sunk a large majorityof our people in galling poverty and ignorance, rendered a smallminority conceited and tyrannical. ..The South bears nothingto the North in navigation, commerce, or manufactures, andcontrary to the belief of ninety-nine hundredths of her people,she is far behind the free states in the only thing of which shehas ever dared to boast — agriculture.”— Hinton Helper“The non-slaveholders, as a class, are not reduced... as [the poorare] in... the free states, to find employment in crowded citiesand come into competition in close and sickly workshops andfactories with remorseless and untiring machinery.”— JDB DeBowTwo Visions of Liberty“[From] the high and solemn motive of defending and protectingthe rights... which our [founding] fathers bequeathed to us...[let us] renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holycause... of liberty.”— Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy“Freedom is not possible without slavery.”— Richmond Inquirer“[Davis’ argument that the secessionists are heirs to the valuesof the Founding Fathers] is a libel upon the whole characterand conduct of the men of ‘76... [who fought] to establish therights of man and the principles of universal liberty.... [TheSouth is rebelling] not in the interest of general humanity, but adomestic despotism.... Their motto is not liberty, but slavery.”— William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York EveningPostNathaniel Hawthorne:Young Goodman BrownYOUNG GOODMAN BROWN came forth at sunset, intothe street of Salem village, but put his head back, after crossingthe threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife.And Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own prettyhead into the street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbonsof her cap, while she called to Goodman Brown.“Dearest heart,” whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when herlips were close to his ear, “pr’y thee, put off your journey untilsunrise, and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman istroubled with such dreams and such thoughts, that she’s afeardof herself, sometimes. Pray, tarry with me this night, dearhusband, of all nights in the year!”“My love and my Faith,” replied young Goodman Brown, “ofall nights in the year, this one night must I tarry away fromthee. My journey, as thou callest it, forth and back again, mustneeds be done ‘twixt now and sunrise. What, my sweet, prettywife, dost thou doubt me already, and we but three monthsmarried!”“Then God bless you!” said Faith, with the pink ribbons, “andmay you find all well, when you come back.”“Amen!” cried Goodman Brown. “Say thy prayers, dear Faith,and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee.”So they parted; and the young man pursued his way, until,being about to turn the corner by the meeting-house, he lookedback and saw the head of Faith still peeping after him, with amelancholy air, in spite of her pink ribbons.“Poor little Faith!” thought he, for his heart smote him. “Whata wretch am I, to leave her on such an errand! She talks ofdreams, too. Methought, as she spoke, there was trouble inher face, as if a dream had warned her what work is to be doneto-night. But, no, no! ‘twould kill her to think it. Well; she’s ablessed angel on earth; and after this one night, I’ll cling to herskirts and follow her to Heaven.”With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brownfelt himself justified in making more haste on his present evilpurpose. He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all thegloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let thenarrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind.It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarityin such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may beconcealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughsoverhead; so that, with lonely footsteps, he may yet be passing302 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

through an unseen multitude.“There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree,” saidGoodman Brown to himself; and he glanced fearfully behindhim, as he added, “What if the devil himself should be at myvery elbow!”His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, andlooking forward again, beheld the figure of a man, in graveand decent attire, seated at the foot of an old tree. He arose, atGoodman Brown’s approach, and walked onward, side by sidewith him.“You are late, Goodman Brown,” said he. “The clock of the OldSouth was striking, as I came through Boston; and that is fullfifteen minutes agone.”“Faith kept me back awhile,” replied the young man, with atremor in his voice, caused by the sudden appearance of hiscompanion, though not wholly unexpected.It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in that partof it where these two were journeying. As nearly as couldbe discerned, the second traveller was about fifty years old,apparently in the same rank of life as Goodman Brown, andbearing a considerable resemblance to him, though perhapsmore in expression than features. Still, they might have beentaken for father and son. And yet, though the elder person wasas simply clad as the younger, and as simple in manner too, hehad an indescribable air of one who knew the world, and wouldnot have felt abashed at the governor’s dinner-table, or in KingWilliam’s court, were it possible that his affairs should call himthither. But the only thing about him, that could be fixed uponas remarkable, was his staff, which bore the likeness of a greatblack snake, so curiously wrought, that it might almost be seento twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent. This, of course,must have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertainlight.“Come, Goodman Brown!” cried his fellow-traveller, “this is adull pace for the beginning of a journey. Take my staff, if youare so soon weary.”“Friend,” said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop,“having kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purposenow to return whence I came. I have scruples, touching thematter thou wot’st of.”“Sayest thou so?” replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. “Letus walk on, nevertheless, reasoning as we go, and if I convincethee not, thou shalt turn back. We are but a little way in theforest, yet.”“Too far, too far!” exclaimed the goodman, unconsciouslyresuming his walk. “My father never went into the woods onsuch an errand, nor his father before him. We have been arace of honest men and good Christians, since the days of themartyrs. And shall I be the first of the name of Brown, thatever took this path and kept--”“Such company, thou wouldst say,” observed the elder person,interrupting his pause. “Well said, Goodman Brown! I havebeen as well acquainted with your family as with ever a oneamong the Puritans; and that’s no trifle to say. I helpedyour grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quakerwoman so smartly through the streets of Salem. And it wasI that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at myown hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip’sWar. They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasantwalk have we had along this path, and returned merrily aftermidnight. I would fain be friends with you, for their sake.”“If it be as thou sayest,” replied Goodman Brown, “I marvelthey never spoke of these matters. Or, verily, I marvel not,seeing that the least rumor of the sort would have driven themfrom New England. We are a people of prayer, and good worksto boot, and abide no such wickedness.”“Wickedness or not,” said the traveller with the twisted staff,“I have a very general acquaintance here in New England.The deacons of many a church have drunk the communionwine with me; the selectmen, of divers towns, make me theirchairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court arefirm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too--butthese are state-secrets.”“Can this be so!” cried Goodman Brown, with a stare ofamazement at his undisturbed companion. “Howbeit, I havenothing to do with the governor and council; they have theirown ways, and are no rule for a simple husbandman like me.But, were I to go on with thee, how should I meet the eyeof that good old man, our minister, at Salem village? Oh, hisvoice would make me tremble, both Sabbath-day and lectureday!”Thus far, the elder traveller had listened with due gravity, butnow burst into a fit of irrepressible mirth, shaking himself soviolently that his snake-like staff actually seemed to wriggle insympathy.“Ha! ha! ha!” shouted he, again and again; then composinghimself, “Well, go on, Goodman Brown, go on; but, pr’y thee,don’t kill me with laughing!”“Well, then, to end the matter at once,” said Goodman Brown,considerably nettled, “there is my wife, Faith. It would breakher dear little heart; and I’d rather break my own!”“Nay, if that be the case,” answered the other, “e’en go thy ways,303

Goodman Brown. I would not, for twenty old women like theone hobbling before us, that Faith should come to any harm.”As he spoke, he pointed his staff at a female figure on thepath, in whom Goodman Brown recognized a very pious andexemplary dame, who had taught him his catechism in youth,and was still his moral and spiritual adviser, jointly with theminister and Deacon Gookin.“A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so far in thewilderness, at night-fall!” said he. “But, with your leave, friend,I shall take a cut through the woods, until we have left thisChristian woman behind. Being a stranger to you, she mightask whom I was consorting with, and whither I was going.”“Be it so,” said his fellow-traveller. “Betake you to the woods,and let me keep the path.”Accordingly, the young man turned aside, but took care towatch his companion, who advanced softly along the road,until he had come within a staff’s length of the old dame. She,meanwhile, was making the best of her way, with singularspeed for so aged a woman, and mumbling some indistinctwords, a prayer, doubtless, as she went. The traveller put forthhis staff, and touched her withered neck with what seemed theserpent’s tail.“The devil!” screamed the pious old lady.“Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend?” observed thetraveller, confronting her, and leaning on his writhing stick.“Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship, indeed?” cried the gooddame. “Yea, truly is it, and in the very image of my old gossip,Goodman Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that nowis. But--would your worship believe it?--my broomstick hathstrangely disappeared, stolen, as I suspect, by that unhangedwitch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when I was all anointedwith the juice of smallage and cinquefoil and wolf’s-bane--”“Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe,” saidthe shape of old Goodman Brown.“Ah, your worship knows the recipe,” cried the old lady, cacklingaloud. “So, as I was saying, being all ready for the meeting, andno horse to ride on, I made up my mind to foot it; for they tellme, there is a nice young man to be taken into communion tonight.But now your good worship will lend me your arm, andwe shall be there in a twinkling.”“That can hardly be,” answered her friend. “I may not spare youmy arm, Goody Cloyse, but here is my staff, if you will.”So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, itassumed life, being one of the rods which its owner had formerlylent to Egyptian Magi. Of this fact, however, GoodmanBrown could not take cognizance. He had cast up his eyes inastonishment, and looking down again, beheld neither GoodyCloyse nor the serpentine staff, but his fellow-traveller alone,who waited for him as calmly as if nothing had happened.“That old woman taught me my catechism!” said the young man;and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment.They continued to walk onward, while the elder travellerexhorted his companion to make good speed and perseverein the path, discoursing so aptly, that his arguments seemedrather to spring up in the bosom of his auditor, than to besuggested by himself. As they went, he plucked a branch ofmaple, to serve for a walking-stick, and began to strip it ofthe twigs and little boughs, which were wet with evening dew.The moment his fingers touched them, they became strangelywithered and dried up, as with a week’s sunshine. Thus thepair proceeded, at a good free pace, until suddenly, in a gloomyhollow of the road, Goodman Brown sat himself down on thestump of a tree, and refused to go any farther.“Friend,” said he, stubbornly, “my mind is made up. Not anotherstep will I budge on this errand. What if a wretched old womando choose to go to the devil, when I thought she was going toHeaven! Is that any reason why I should quit my dear Faith,and go after her?”“You will think better of this by-and-by,” said his acquaintance,composedly. “Sit here and rest yourself awhile; and when youfeel like moving again, there is my staff to help you along.”Without more words, he threw his companion the maple stick,and was as speedily out of sight, as if he had vanished into thedeepening gloom. The young man sat a few moments by theroad-side, applauding himself greatly, and thinking with howclear a conscience he should meet the minister, in his morningwalk,nor shrink from the eye of good old Deacon Gookin.And what calm sleep would be his, that very night, which wasto have been spent so wickedly, but purely and sweetly now,in the arms of Faith! Amidst these pleasant and praiseworthymeditations, Goodman Brown heard the tramp of horses alongthe road, and deemed it advisable to conceal himself withinthe verge of the forest, conscious of the guilty purpose that hadbrought him thither, though now so happily turned from it.On came the hoof-tramps and the voices of the riders, twograve old voices, conversing soberly as they drew near. Thesemingled sounds appeared to pass along the road, within a fewyards of the young man’s hiding-place; but owing, doubtless,to the depth of the gloom, at that particular spot, neither thetravellers nor their steeds were visible. Though their figuresbrushed the small boughs by the way-side, it could not be seen304 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

that they intercepted, even for a moment, the faint gleam fromthe strip of bright sky, athwart which they must have passed.Goodman Brown alternately crouched and stood on tip-toe,pulling aside the branches, and thrusting forth his head asfar as he durst, without discerning so much as a shadow. Itvexed him the more, because he could have sworn, were sucha thing possible, that he recognized the voices of the ministerand Deacon Gookin, jogging along quietly, as they were wontto do, when bound to some ordination or ecclesiastical council.While yet within hearing, one of the riders stopped to pluck aswitch.“Of the two, reverend Sir,” said the voice like the deacon’s, Ihad rather miss an ordination-dinner than tonight’s meeting.They tell me that some of our community are to be here fromFalmouth and beyond, and others from Connecticut andRhode-Island; besides several of the Indian powows, who,after their fashion, know almost as much deviltry as the bestof us. Moreover, there is a goodly young woman to be takeninto communion.”“Mighty well, Deacon Gookin!” replied the solemn old tonesof the minister. “Spur up, or we shall be late. Nothing can bedone, you know, until I get on the ground.”The hoofs clattered again, and the voices, talking so strangelyin the empty air, passed on through the forest, where nochurch had ever been gathered, nor solitary Christian prayed.Whither, then, could these holy men be journeying, so deepinto the heathen wilderness? Young Goodman Brown caughthold of a tree, for support, being ready to sink down on theground, faint and overburthened with the heavy sickness of hisheart. He looked up to the sky, doubting whether there reallywas a Heaven above him. Yet, there was the blue arch, and thestars brightening in it.“With Heaven above, and Faith below, I will yet stand firmagainst the devil!” cried Goodman Brown.While he still gazed upward, into the deep arch of thefirmament, and had lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, thoughno wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith, and hid thebrightening stars. The blue sky was still visible, except directlyoverhead, where this black mass of cloud was sweeping swiftlynorthward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of thecloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once,the listener fancied that he could distinguish the accent oftown’s-people of his own, men and women, both pious andungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion-table,and had seen others rioting at the tavern. The next moment, soindistinct were the sounds, he doubted whether he had heardaught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering withouta wind. Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones,heard daily in the sunshine, at Salem village, but never, untilnow, from a cloud of night. There was one voice, of a youngwoman, uttering lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow,and entreating for some favor, which, perhaps, it would grieveher to obtain. And all the unseen multitude, both saints andsinners, seemed to encourage her onward.“Faith!” shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony anddesperation; and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying--”Faith! Faith!” as if bewildered wretches were seeking her, allthrough the wilderness.The cry of grief, rage, and terror, was yet piercing the night,when the unhappy husband held his breath for a response.There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder murmurof voices, fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud sweptaway, leaving the clear and silent sky above Goodman Brown.But something fluttered lightly down through the air, andcaught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, andbeheld a pink ribbon.“My Faith is gone!” cried he, after one stupefied moment.“There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil!for to thee is this world given.”And maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long,did Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, at sucha rate, that he seemed to fly along the forest-path, rather thanto walk or run. The road grew wilder and drearier, and morefaintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heartof the dark wilderness, still rushing onward, with the instinctthat guides mortal man to evil. The whole forest was peopledwith frightful sounds; the creaking of the trees, the howling ofwild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while, sometimes the windtolled like a distant church-bell, and sometimes gave a broadroar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing himto scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, andshrank not from its other horrors.“Ha! ha! ha!” roared Goodman Brown, when the wind laughedat him. “Let us hear which will laugh loudest! Think not tofrighten me with your deviltry! Come witch, come wizard,come Indian powow, come devil himself! and here comesGoodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you!”In truth, all through the haunted forest, there could benothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown.On he flew, among the black pines, brandishing his staff withfrenzied gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horridblasphemy, and now shouting forth such laughter, as set all theechoes of the forest laughing like demons around him. Thefiend in his own shape is less hideous, than when he rages inthe breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course, until,quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, aswhen the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been305

set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, atthe hour of midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest thathad driven him onward, and heard the swell of what seemeda hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance, with the weight ofmany voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in thechoir of the village meeting-house. The verse died heavily away,and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but ofall the sounds of the benighted wilderness, pealing in awfulharmony together. Goodman Brown cried out; and his cry waslost to his own ear, by its unison with the cry of the desert.In the interval of silence, he stole forward, until the lightglared full upon his eyes. At one extremity of an open space,hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearingsome rude, natural resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit,and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame, theirstems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The massof foliage, that had overgrown the summit of the rock, was allon fire, blazing high into the night, and fitfully illuminatingthe whole field. Each pendent twig and leafy festoon was in ablaze. As the red light arose and fell, a numerous congregationalternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and againgrew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of thesolitary woods at once.“A grave and dark-clad company!” quoth Goodman Brown.In truth, they were such. Among them, quivering to-and-fro,between gloom and splendor, appeared faces that would beseen, next day, at the council-board of the province, and otherswhich, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward,and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the holiestpulpits in the land. Some affirm, that the lady of the governorwas there. At least, there were high dames well known to her,and wives of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude,and ancient maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair younggirls, who trembled lest their mothers should espy them.Either the sudden gleams of light, flashing over the obscurefield, bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a scoreof the church-members of Salem village, famous for theirespecial sanctity. Good old Deacon Gookin had arrived, andwaited at the skirts of that venerable saint, his reverend pastor.But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, andpious people, these elders of the church, these chaste damesand dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and womenof spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice,and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see, thatthe good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinnersabashed by the saints. Scattered, also, among their palefacedenemies, were the Indian priests, or powows, who had oftenscared their native forest with more hideous incantations thanany known to English witchcraft.“But, where is Faith?” thought Goodman Brown; and, as hopecame into his heart, he trembled.Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain,such as the pious love, but joined to words which expressedall that our nature can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted atfar more. Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends.Verse after verse was sung, and still the chorus of the desertswelled between, like the deepest tone of a mighty organ.And, with the final peal of that dreadful anthem, there came asound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howlingbeasts, and every other voice of the unconverted wilderness,were mingling and according with the voice of guilty man, inhomage to the prince of all. The four blazing pines threw upa loftier flame, and obscurely discovered shapes and visages ofhorror on the smoke-wreaths, above the impious assembly. Atthe same moment, the fire on the rock shot redly forth, andformed a glowing arch above its base, where now appeared afigure. With reverence be it spoken, the figure bore no slightsimilitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine ofthe New-England churches.“Bring forth the converts!” cried a voice, that echoed throughthe field and rolled into the forest.At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadowof the trees, and approached the congregation, with whom hefelt a loathful brotherhood, by the sympathy of all that waswicked in his heart. He could have well nigh sworn, that theshape of his own dead father beckoned him to advance, lookingdownward from a smoke-wreath, while a woman, with dimfeatures of despair, threw out her hand to warn him back. Wasit his mother? But he had no power to retreat one step, norto resist, even in thought, when the minister and good oldDeacon Gookin seized his arms, and led him to the blazingrock. Thither came also the slender form of a veiled female, ledbetween Goody Cloyse, that pious teacher of the catechism,and Martha Carrier, who had received the devil’s promise tobe queen of hell. A rampant hag was she! And there stood theproselytes, beneath the canopy of fire.“Welcome, my children,” said the dark figure, “to the communionof your race! Ye have found, thus young, your nature and yourdestiny. My children, look behind you!”They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame,the fiend-worshippers were seen; the smile of welcome gleameddarkly on every visage.“There,” resumed the sable form, “are all whom ye havereverenced from youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves,and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their livesof righteousness, and prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet,here are they all, in my worshipping assembly! This night itshall be granted you to know their secret deeds; how hoary-306 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

earded elders of the church have whispered wanton wordsto the young maids of their households; how many a woman,eager for widow’s weeds, has given her husband a drink atbed-time, and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; howbeardless youth have made haste to inherit their father’swealth; and how fair damsels--blush not, sweet ones--havedug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest,to an infant’s funeral. By the sympathy of your human heartsfor sin, ye shall scent out all the places--whether in church,bed-chamber, street, field, or forest--where crime has beencommitted, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stainof guilt, one mighty blood-spot. Far more than this! It shall beyours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, thefountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly suppliesmore evil impulses than human power--than my power at itsutmost!--can make manifest in deeds. And now, my children,look upon each other.”They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, thewretched man beheld his Faith, and the wife her husband,trembling before that unhallowed altar.“Lo! there ye stand, my children,” said the figure, in a deep andsolemn tone, almost sad, with its despairing awfulness, as ifhis once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race.“Depending upon one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped thatvirtue were not all a dream! Now are ye undeceived! Evil is thenature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome,again, my children, to the communion of your race!”“Welcome!” repeated the fiend-worshippers, in one cry ofdespair and triumph.And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yethesitating on the verge of wickedness, in this dark world. Abasin was hollowed, naturally, in the rock. Did it contain water,reddened by the lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, aliquid flame? Herein did the Shape of Evil dip his hand, andprepare to lay the mark of baptism upon their foreheads, thatthey might be partakers of the mystery of sin, more consciousof the secret guilt of others, both in deed and thought, thanthey could now be of their own. The husband cast one look athis pale wife, and Faith at him. What polluted wretches wouldthe next glance show them to each other, shuddering alike atwhat they disclosed and what they saw!“Faith! Faith!” cried the husband. “Look up to Heaven, andresist the Wicked One!”cheek with the coldest dew.The next morning, young Goodman Brown came slowlyinto the street of Salem village, staring around him like abewildered man. The good old minister was taking a walkalong the graveyard, to get an appetite for breakfast andmeditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed,on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint, asif to avoid an anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domesticworship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard throughthe open window. “What God doth the wizard pray to?” quothGoodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that excellent old Christian,stood in the early sunshine, at her own lattice, catechizinga little girl, who had brought her a pint of morning’s milk.Goodman Brown snatched away the child, as from the graspof the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house,he spied the head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazinganxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at sight of him, thatshe skipped along the street, and almost kissed her husbandbefore the whole village. But Goodman Brown looked sternlyand sadly into her face, and passed on without a greeting.Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and onlydreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?Be it so, if you will. But, alas! it was a dream of evil omen foryoung Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, adistrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become, from thenight of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath-day, when thecongregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen,because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear, anddrowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke fromthe pulpit, with power and fervid eloquence, and with hishand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion,and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of futurebliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turnpale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon thegray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awaking suddenly atmidnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith, and at morningor eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled,and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, andturned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne tohis grave, a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman,and children and grand-children, a goodly procession, besidesneighbors, not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon histombstone; for his dying hour was gloom.Whether Faith obeyed, he knew not. Hardly had he spoken,when he found himself amid calm night and solitude, listeningto a roar of the wind, which died heavily away through theforest. He staggered against the rock, and felt it chill and damp,while a hanging twig, that had been all on fire, besprinkled his307

Nathaniel Hawthorne:My Kinsman, Major MolineuxAFTER THE KINGS of Great Britain had assumed theright of appointing the colonial governors, the measures of thelatter seldom met with the ready and general approbation whichhad been paid to those of their predecessors, under the originalcharters. The people looked with most jealous scrutiny to theexercise of power, which did not emanate from themselves, andthey usually rewarded the rulers with slender gratitude for thecompliance’s, by which, in softening their instructions frombeyond the sea, they had incurred the reprehension of thosewho gave them. The annals of Massachusetts Bay will informus, that of six governors, in the space of about forty years fromthe surrender of the old charter, under James II, two wereimprisoned by a popular insurrection; a third, as Hutchinsoninclines to believe, was driven from the province by the whizzingof a musketball; a fourth, in the opinion of the same historian,was hastened to his grave by continual bickerings with theHouse of Representatives; and the remaining two, as well astheir successors, till the Revolution, were favored with few andbrief intervals of peaceful sway. The inferior members of thecourt party, in times of high political excitement, led scarcely amore desirable life. These remarks may serve as a preface to thefollowing adventures, which chanced upon a summer night,not far from a hundred years ago. The reader, in order to avoida long and dry detail of colonial affairs, is requested to dispensewith an account of the train of circumstances, that had causedmuch temporary inflammation of the popular mind.It was near nine o’clock of a moonlight evening, when a boatcrossed the ferry with a single passenger, who had obtained hisconveyance, at that unusual hour, by the promise of an extrafare. While he stood on the landing-place, searching in eitherpocket for the means of fulfilling his agreement, the ferrymanlifted a lantern, by the aid of which, and the newly risen moon,he took a very accurate survey of the stranger’s figure. He wasa youth of barely eighteen years, evidently country-bred, andnow, as it should seem, upon his first visit to town. He wasclad in a coarse gray coat, well worn, but in excellent repair;his under garments were durably constructed of leather, andsat tight to a pair of serviceable and well-shaped limbs; hisstockings of blue yarn, were the incontrovertible handiworkof a mother or a sister; and on his head was a three-corneredhat, which in its better days had perhaps sheltered the graverbrow of the lad’s father. Under his left arm was a heavy cudgel,formed of an oak sapling, and retaining a part of the hardenedroot; and his equipment was completed by a wallet, not soabundantly stocked as to incommode the vigorous shoulderson which it hung. Brown, curly hair, well-shaped features, andbright, cheerful eyes, were nature’s gifts, and worth all that artcould have done for his adornment.The youth, one of whose names was Robin, finally drew from hispocket the half of a little province-bill of five shillings, which,in the depreciation of that sort of currency, did but satisfy theferryman’s demand, with the surplus of a sexangular piece ofparchment, valued at three pence. He then walked forwardinto the town, with as light a step, as if his day’s journey hadnot already exceeded thirty miles, and with as eager an eye asif he were entering London city, instead of the little metropolisof a New England colony. Before Robin had proceeded far,however, it occurred to him, that he knew not whither to directhis steps; so he paused, and looked up and down the narrowstreet, scrutinizing the small and mean wooden buildings, thatwere scattered on either side.“This low hovel cannot be my kinsman’s dwelling,” thoughthe, “nor yonder old house, where the moonlight enters at thebroken casement; and truly I see none hereabouts that mightbe worthy of him. It would have been wise to inquire my wayof the ferryman, and doubtless he would have gone with me,and earned a shilling from the major for his pains. But the nextman I meet will do as well.”He resumed his walk, and was glad to perceive that the streetnow became wider, and the houses more respectable in theirappearance. He soon discerned a figure moving on moderatelyin advance, and hastened his steps to overtake it. As Robindrew nigh, he saw that the passenger was a man in years, witha full periwig of gray hair, a wide-skirted coat of dark cloth,and silk stockings rolled above his knees. He carried a longand polished cane, which he struck down perpendicularlybefore him, at every step; and at regular intervals he utteredtwo successive hems, of a peculiarly solemn and sepulchralintonation. Having made these observations, Robin laid holdof the skirt of the old man’s coat, just when the light from theopen door and windows of a barber’s shop fell upon both theirfigures. “Good evening to you, honored sir,” said he, makinga low bow, and still retaining his hold of the skirt. “I pray youtell me whereabouts is the dwelling of my kinsman, MajorMolineux?”The youth’s question was uttered very loudly; and one ofthe barbers, whose razor was descending on a well-soapedchin, and another who was dressing a Ramillies wig, lefttheir occupations, and came to the door. The citizen, in themeantime, turned a long-favored countenance upon Robin,and answered him in a tone of excessive anger and annoyance.His two sepulchral hems, however, broke into the very centreof his rebuke, with most singular effect, like a thought of thecold grave obtruding among wrathful passions.“Let go my garment, fellow! I tell you, I know not the man you308 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

speak of. What! I have authority, I have--hem, hem--authority;and if this be the respect you show for your betters, yourfeet shall be brought acquainted with the stocks by daylight,tomorrow morning!”Robin released the old man’s skirt, and hastened away, pursuedby an ill-mannered roar of laughter from the barber’s shop. Hewas at first considerably surprised by the result of his question,but, being a shrewd youth, soon thought himself able toaccount for the mystery.“This is some country representative,” was his conclusion, “whohas never seen the inside of my kinsman’s door, and lacks thebreeding to answer a stranger civilly. The man is old, or verily--I might be tempted to turn back and smite him on the nose.Ah, Robin, Robin! even the barber’s boys laugh at you choosingsuch a guide! You will be wiser in time, friend Robin.”He now became entangled in a succession of crooked andnarrow streets, which crossed each other, and meanderedat no great distance from the water-side. The smell of tarwas obvious to his nostrils, the masts of vessels pierced themoonlight above the tops of the buildings, and the numeroussigns, which Robin paused to read, informed him that he wasnear the centre of business. But the streets were empty, theshops were closed, and lights were visible only in the secondstories of a few dwelling-houses. At length, on the corner ofa narrow lane, through which he was passing, he beheld thebroad countenance of a British hero swinging before the doorof an inn, whence proceeded the voices of many guests. Thecasement of one of the lower windows was thrown back, anda very thin curtain permitted Robin to distinguish a party atsupper, round a well-furnished table. The fragrance of the goodcheer steamed forth into the outer air, and the youth could notfail to recollect, that the last remnant of his travelling stock ofprovision had yielded to his morning appetite, and that noonhad found, and left him, dinnerless.“Oh, that a parchment three-penny might give me a right to sitdown at yonder table!” said Robin, with a sigh. “But the majorwill make me welcome to the best of his victuals; so I will evenstep boldly in, and inquire my way to his dwelling.”He entered the tavern, and was guided by the murmur ofvoices, and the fumes of tobacco, to the public room. It was along and low apartment, with oaken walls, grown dark in thecontinual smoke, and a floor, which was thickly sanded, but ofno immaculate purity. A number of persons, the larger part ofwhom appeared to be mariners, or in some way connected withthe sea, occupied the wooden benches, or leather-bottomedchairs, conversing on various matters, and occasionally lendingtheir attention to some topic of general interest. Three or fourlittle groups were draining as many bowls of punch, which theWest India trade had long since made a familiar drink in thecolony. Others, who had the appearance of men who lived byregular and laborious handicraft, preferred the insulated blissof an unshared potation, and became more taciturn under itsinfluence. Nearly all, in short, evinced a predilection for theGood Creature in some of its various shapes, for this is a vice towhich, as Fast-day sermons of a hundred years ago will testify,we have a long hereditary claim. The only guests to whomRobin’s sympathies inclined him, were two or three sheepishcountrymen, who were using the inn somewhat after thefashion of a Turkish caravansary; they had gotten themselvesinto the darkest corner of the room, and, heedless of theNicotian atmosphere, were supping on the bread of their ownovens, and the bacon cured in their own chimney-smoke. Butthough Robin felt a sort of brotherhood with these strangers,his eyes were attracted from them to a person who stood nearthe door, holding whispered conversation with a group of illdressedassociates. His features were separately striking almostto grotesqueness, and the whole face left a deep impression onthe memory. The forehead bulged out into a double prominence,with a vale between; the nose came boldly forth in an irregularcurve, and its bridge was of more than a finger’s breadth; theeyebrows were deep and shaggy, and the eyes glowed beneaththem like fire in a cave.While Robin deliberated of whom to inquire respecting hiskinsman’s dwelling, he was accosted by the innkeeper, alittle man in a stained white apron, who had come to pay hisprofessional welcome to the stranger. Being in the secondgeneration from a French Protestant, he seemed to haveinherited the courtesy of his parent nation; but no variety ofcircumstances was ever known to change his voice from theone shrill note in which he now addressed Robin.“From the country, I presume, Sir?” said he, with a profoundbow. “Beg to congratulate you on your arrival, and trust youintend a long stay with us. Fine town here, Sir, beautifulbuildings, and much that may interest a stranger. May I hopefor the honor of your commands in respect to supper?”“The man sees a family likeness! the rogue has guessed that Iam related to the Major!” thought Robin, who had hithertoexperienced little superfluous civility.All eyes were now turned on the country lad, standing atthe door, in his worn three-cornered hat, gray coat, leatherbreeches, and blue yarn stockings, leaning on an oaken cudgel,and bearing a wallet on his back.Robin replied to the courteous innkeeper, with such anassumption of confidence as befitted the major’s relative.309

“My honest friend,” he said, “I shall make it a point to patronizeyour house on some occasion when--” here he could not helplowering his voice--”I may have more than a parchment threepencein my pocket. My present business,” continued he,speaking with lofty confidence, “is merely to inquire my wayto the dwelling of my kinsman, Major Molineux.”There was a sudden and general movement in the room, whichRobin interpreted as expressing the eagerness of each individualto become his guide. But the innkeeper turned his eyes to awritten paper on the wall, which he read, or seemed to read,with occasional recurrences to the young man’s figure.“What have we here?” said he, breaking his speech into littledry fragments. “’Left the house of the subscriber, boundenservant, Hezekiah Mudge--had on, when he went away, graycoat, leather breeches, master’s third best hat. One poundcurrency reward to whosoever shall lodge him in any jail of theprovince.’ Better trudge, boy, better trudge!”Robin had begun to draw his hand towards the lighter end ofthe oak cudgel, but a strange hostility in every countenance,induced him to relinquish his purpose of breaking thecourteous innkeeper’s head. As he turned to leave the room,he encountered a sneering glance from the bold-featuredpersonage whom he had before noticed; and no sooner was hebeyond the door, than he heard a general laugh, in which theinnkeeper’s voice might be distinguished, like the dropping ofsmall stones into a kettle.“Now, is it not strange,” thought Robin, with his usualshrewdness, “is it not strange, that the confession of an emptypocket should outweigh the name of my kinsman, MajorMolineux? Oh, if I had one of those grinning rascals in thewoods, where I and my oak sapling grew up together, I wouldteach him that my arm is heavy, though my purse be light!”On turning the corner of the narrow lane, Robin found himselfin a spacious street, with an unbroken line of lofty houses oneach side, and a steepled building at the upper end, whencethe ringing of a bell announced the hour of nine. The light ofthe moon, and the lamps from the numerous shop windows,discovered people promenading on the pavement, and amongstthem Robin hoped to recognize his hitherto inscrutable relative.The result of his former inquiries made him unwilling to hazardanother, in a scene of such publicity, and he determined to walkslowly and silently up the street, thrusting his face close to thatof every elderly gentleman, in search of the Major’s lineaments.In his progress, Robin encountered many gay and gallantfigures. Embroidered garments, of showy colors, enormousperiwigs, gold-laced hats, and silver-hilted swords, glided pasthim, and dazzled his optics. Travelled youths, imitators of theEuropean fine gentlemen of the period, trod jauntily along,half-dancing to the fashionable tunes which they hummed,and making poor Robin ashamed of his quiet and naturalgait. At length, after many pauses to examine the gorgeousdisplay of goods in the shop windows, and after suffering somerebukes for the impertinence of his scrutiny into people’s faces,the major’s kinsman found himself near the steepled building,still unsuccessful in his search. As yet, however, he had seenonly one side of the thronged street, so Robin crossed, andcontinued the same sort of inquisition down the oppositepavement, with stronger hopes than the philosopher seekingan honest man, but with no better fortune. He had arrivedabout midway towards the lower end, from which his coursebegan, when he overheard the approach of someone, whostruck down a cane on the flag-stones at every step, uttering, atregular intervals, two sepulchral hems.“Mercy on us!” quoth Robin, recognizing the sound.Turning a corner, which chanced to be close at his right hand,he hastened to pursue his researches, in some other part of thetown. His patience was now wearing low, and he seemed tofeel more fatigue from his rambles since he crossed the ferry,than from his journey of several days on the other side. Hungeralso pleaded loudly within him, and Robin began to balancethe propriety of demanding, violently, and with lifted cudgel,the necessary guidance from the first solitary passenger, whomhe should meet. While a resolution to this effect was gainingstrength, he entered a street of mean appearance, on either sideof which a row of ill-built houses was straggling towards theharbor. The moonlight fell upon no passenger along the wholeextent, but in the third domicile which Robin passed there wasa half-opened door, and his keen glance detected a woman’sgarment within.“My luck may be better here,” said he to himself.Accordingly, he approached the door, and beheld it shut closeras he did so; yet an open space remained, sufficing for the fairoccupant to observe the stranger, without a correspondingdisplay on her part. All that Robin could discern was a strip ofscarlet petticoat, and the occasional sparkle of an eye, as if themoonbeams were trembling on some bright thing.“Pretty mistress,” for I may call her so with a good conscience,thought the shrewd youth, since I know nothing to the contrary--”my sweet pretty mistress, will you be kind enough to tell mewhereabouts I must seek the dwelling of my kinsman, MajorMolineux?”Robin’s voice was plaintive and winning, and the female, seeing310 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

nothing to be shunned in the handsome country youth, thrustopen the door, and came forth into the moonlight. She wasa dainty little figure, with a white neck, round arms, and aslender waist, at the extremity of which her scarlet petticoatjutted out over a hoop, as if she were standing in a balloon.Moreover, her face was oval and pretty, her hair dark beneaththe little cap, and her bright eyes possessed a sly freedom,which triumphed over those of Robin.“Major Molineux dwells here,” said this fair woman.Now her voice was the sweetest Robin had heard that night,the airy counterpart of a stream of melted silver; yet he couldnot help doubting whether that sweet voice spoke Gospel truth.He looked up and down the mean street, and then surveyedthe house before which they stood. It was a small, dark edificeof two stories, the second of which projected over the lowerfloor; and the front apartment had the aspect of a shop forpetty commodities.“Now truly I am in luck,” replied Robin, cunningly, “andso indeed is my kinsman, the major, in having so pretty ahousekeeper. But I prithee trouble him to step to the door; Iwill deliver him a message from his friends in the country, andthen go back to my lodgings at the inn.”“Nay, the Major has been a-bed this hour or more,” said thelady of the scarlet petticoat; “and it would be to little purposeto disturb him tonight, seeing his evening draught was of thestrongest. But he is a kind-hearted man, and it would be asmuch as my life’s worth, to let a kinsman of his turn awayfrom the door. You are the good old gentleman’s very picture,and I could swear that was his rainy-weather hat. Also he hasgarments very much resembling those leather small-clothes.But come in, I pray, for I bid you hearty welcome in his name.”So saying, the fair and hospitable dame took our hero bythe hand; and though the touch was light, and the force wasgentleness, and though Robin read in her eyes what he did nothear in her words, yet the slender-waisted woman, in the scarletpetticoat, proved stronger than the athletic country youth. Shehad drawn his half-willing footsteps nearly to the threshold,when the opening of a door in the neighborhood, startledthe Major’s housekeeper, and, leaving the Major’s kinsman,she vanished speedily into her own domicile. A heavy yawnpreceded the appearance of a man, who, like the Moonshineof Pyramus and Thisbe, carried a lantern, needlessly aiding hissister luminary in the heavens. As he walked sleepily up thestreet, he turned his broad, dull face on Robin, and displayed along staff, spiked at the end.“Home, vagabond, home!” said the watchman, in accents thatseemed to fall asleep as soon as they were uttered. “Home, orwe’ll set you in the stocks by peep of day!”“This is the second hint of the kind,” thought Robin. “I wishthey would end my difficulties, by setting me there tonight.”Nevertheless, the youth felt an instinctive antipathy towardsthe guardian of midnight order, which at first prevented himfrom asking his usual question. But just when the man wasabout to vanish behind the corner, Robin resolved not to losethe opportunity, and shouted lustily after him--“I say, friend! will you guide me to the house of my kinsman,Major Molineux?”The watchman made no reply, but turned the corner and wasgone; yet Robin seemed to hear the sound of drowsy laughterstealing along the solitary street. At that moment, also, apleasant titter saluted him from the open window above hishead; he looked up, and caught the sparkle of a saucy eye; around arm beckoned to him, and next he heard light footstepsdescending the staircase within. But Robin, being of thehousehold of a New England clergyman, was a good youth, aswell as a shrewd one; so he resisted temptation, and fled away.He now roamed desperately, and at random, through the town,almost ready to believe that a spell was on him, like that bywhich a wizard of his country had once kept three pursuerswandering, a whole winter night, within twenty paces of thecottage which they sought. The streets lay before him, strangeand desolate, and the lights were extinguished in almost everyhouse. Twice, however, little parties of men, among whomRobin distinguished individuals in outlandish attire, camehurrying along; but though on both occasions they pausedto address him, such intercourse did not at all enlighten hisperplexity. They did but utter a few words in some languageof which Robin knew nothing, and perceiving his inabilityto answer, bestowed a curse upon him in plain English, andhastened away. Finally, the lad determined to knock at the doorof every mansion that might appear worthy to be occupied byhis kinsman, trusting that perseverance would overcome thefatality that had hitherto thwarted him. Firm in this resolve,he was passing beneath the walls of a church, which formedthe corner of two streets, when, as he turned into the shade ofits steeple, he encountered a bulky stranger, muffled in a cloak.The man was proceeding with the speed of earnest business,but Robin planted himself full before him, holding the oakcudgel with both hands across his body, as a bar to furtherpassage.“Halt, honest man, and answer me a question,” said he, very311

esolutely. “Tell me, this instant, whereabouts is the dwellingof my kinsman, Major Molineux?”“Keep your tongue between your teeth, fool, and let me pass!”said a deep, gruff voice, which Robin partly remembered. “Letme pass, I say, or I’ll strike you to the earth!”“No, no, neighbor!” cried Robin, flourishing his cudgel, andthen thrusting its larger end close to the man’s muffled face.“No, no, I’m not the fool you take me for, nor do you pass, tillI have an answer to my question. Whereabouts is the dwellingof my kinsman, Major Molineux?”The stranger, instead of attempting to force his passage, steppedback into the moonlight, unmuffled his face, and stared fullinto that of Robin.“Watch here an hour, and Major Molineux will pass by,” saidhe.Robin gazed with dismay, and astonishment, on theunprecedented physiognomy of the speaker. The forehead withits double prominence, the broad-hooked nose, the shaggyeyebrows, and fiery eyes, were those which he had noticed atthe inn, but the man’s complexion had undergone a singular,or, more properly, a two-fold change. One side of the faceblazed an intense red, while the other was black as midnight,the division line being in the broad bridge of the nose; and amouth which seemed to extend from ear to ear was black or red,in contrast to the color of the cheek. The effect was as if twoindividual devils, a fiend of fire and a fiend of darkness, hadunited themselves to form this infernal visage. The strangergrinned in Robin’s face, muffled his parti-colored features, andwas out of sight in a moment.“Strange things we travellers see!” ejaculated Robin.He seated himself, however, upon the steps of the church-door,resolving to wait the appointed time for his kinsman. A fewmoments were consumed in philosophical speculations uponthe species of the genus homo, who had just left him; but havingsettled this point shrewdly, rationally, and satisfactorily, hewas compelled to look elsewhere for his amusement. And firsthe threw his eyes along the street; it was of more respectableappearance than most of those into which he had wandered,and the moon, “creating, like the imaginative power, abeautiful strangeness in familiar objects,” gave something ofromance to a scene, that might not have possessed it in thelight of day. The irregular and often quaint architecture of thehouses, some of whose roofs were broken into numerous littlepeaks, while others ascended, steep and narrow, into a singlepoint, and others again were square; the pure milk-white ofsome of their complexions, the aged darkness of others, andthe thousand sparklings, reflected from bright substances inthe walls of many; these matters engaged Robin’s attentionfor a while, and then began to grow wearisome. Next heendeavored to define the forms of distant objects, starting away,with almost ghostly indistinctness, just as his eye appeared tograsp them; and finally he took a minute survey of an edificewhich stood on the opposite side of the street, directly in frontof the church-door, where he was stationed. It was a large,square mansion, distinguished from its neighbors by a balcony,which rested on tall pillars, and by an elaborate Gothic window,communicating therewith.“Perhaps this is the very house I have been seeking,” thoughtRobin.Then he strove to speed away the time, by listening to a murmurwhich swept continually along the street, yet was scarcelyaudible, except to an unaccustomed ear like his; it was a low,dull, dreamy sound, compounded of many noises, each ofwhich was at too great a distance to be separately heard. Robinmarvelled at this snore of a sleeping town, and marvelled morewhenever its continuity was broken by now and then a distantshout, apparently loud where it originated. But altogetherit was a sleep-inspiring sound, and, to shake off its drowsyinfluence, Robin arose, and climbed a window-frame, that hemight view the interior of the church. There the moonbeamscame trembling in, and fell down upon the deserted pews,and extended along the quiet aisles. A fainter, yet more awfulradiance, was hovering around the pulpit, and one solitary rayhad dared to rest upon the opened page of the great Bible. Hadnature, in that deep hour, become a worshipper in the house,which man had builded? Or was that heavenly light the visiblesanctity of the place, visible because no earthly and impure feetwere within the walls? The scene made Robin’s heart shiverwith a sensation of loneliness, stronger than he had ever feltin the remotest depths of his native woods; so he turned away,and sat down again before the door. There were graves aroundthe church, and now an uneasy thought obtruded into Robin’sbreast. What if the object of his search, which had been sooften and so strangely thwarted, were all the time moulderingin his shroud? What if his kinsman should glide throughyonder gate, and nod and smile to him in dimly passing by?“Oh, that any breathing thing were here with me!” said Robin.Recalling his thoughts from this uncomfortable track, he sentthem over forest, hill, and stream, and attempted to imaginehow that evening of ambiguity and weariness, had been spentby his father’s household. He pictured them assembled at thedoor, beneath the tree, the great old tree, which had beenspared for its huge twisted trunk, and venerable shade, whena thousand leafy brethren fell. There, at the going down of the312 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

summer sun, it was his father’s custom to perform domesticworship, that the neighbors might come and join with himlike brothers of the family, and that the wayfaring man mightpause to drink at that fountain, and keep his heart pure byfreshening the memory of home. Robin distinguished theseat of every individual of the little audience; he saw the goodman in the midst, holding the Scriptures in the golden lightthat shone from the western clouds; he beheld him close thebook, and all rise up to pray. He heard the old thanksgivingsfor daily mercies, the old supplications for their continuance,to which he had so often listened in weariness, but whichwere now among his dear remembrances. He perceived theslight inequality of his father’s voice when he came to speakof the Absent One; he noted how his mother turned her faceto the broad and knotted trunk; how his elder brother scorned,because the beard was rough upon his upper lip, to permithis features to be moved; how the younger sister drew downa low hanging branch before her eyes; and how the little oneof all, whose sports had hitherto broken the decorum of thescene, understood the prayer for her playmate, and burst intoclamorous grief. Then he saw them go in at the door; and whenRobin would have entered also, the latch tinkled into its place,and he was excluded from his home.“Am I here, or there?” cried Robin, starting; for all at once,when his thoughts had become visible and audible in a dream,the long, wide, solitary street shone out before him.He aroused himself, and endeavored to fix his attention steadilyupon the large edifice which he had surveyed before. But stillhis mind kept vibrating between fancy and reality; by turns,the pillars of the balcony lengthened into the tall, bare stems ofpines, dwindled down to human figures, settled again into theirtrue shape and size, and then commenced a new succession ofchanges. For a single moment, when he deemed himself awake,he could have sworn that a visage, one which he seemed toremember, yet could not absolutely name as his kinsman’s, waslooking towards him from the Gothic window. A deeper sleepwrestled with and nearly overcame him, but fled at the soundof footsteps along the opposite pavement. Robin rubbed hiseyes, discerned a man passing at the foot of the balcony, andaddressed him in a loud, peevish, and lamentable cry.“Hallo, friend! must I wait here all night for my kinsman, MajorMolineux?”The sleeping echoes awoke, and answered the voice; and thepassenger, barely able to discern a figure sitting in the obliqueshade of the steeple, traversed the street to obtain a nearer view.He was himself a gentleman in his prime, of open, intelligent,cheerful, and altogether prepossessing countenance. Perceivinga country youth, apparently homeless and without friends, heaccosted him in a tone of real kindness, which had becomestrange to Robin’s ears.“Well, my good lad, why are you sitting here?” inquired he.“Can I be of service to you in any way?”“I am afraid not, Sir,” replied Robin, despondently; “yet I shalltake it kindly, if you’ll answer me a single question. I’ve beensearching, half the night, for one Major Molineux; now, Sir, isthere really such a person in these parts, or am I dreaming?”“Major Molineux! The name is not altogether strange to me,”said the gentleman, smiling. “Have you any objection to tellingme the nature of your business with him?”Then Robin briefly related that his father was a clergyman,settled on a small salary, at a long distance back in the country,and that he and Major Molineux were brothers’ children. TheMajor, having inherited riches, and acquired civil and militaryrank, had visited his cousin, in great pomp, a year or twobefore; had manifested much interest in Robin and an elderbrother, and, being childless himself, had thrown out hintsrespecting the future establishment of one of them in life. Theelder brother was destined to succeed to the farm, which hisfather cultivated, in the interval of sacred duties; it was thereforedetermined that Robin should profit by his kinsman’s generousintentions, especially as he seemed to be rather the favorite,and was thought to possess other necessary endowments.“For I have the name of being a shrewd youth,” observed Robin,in this part of his story.“I doubt not you deserve it,” replied his new friend, goodnaturedly;“but pray proceed.”“Well, sir, being nearly eighteen years old, and well-grown, asyou see,” continued Robin, drawing himself up to his full height,“I thought it high time to begin the world. So my mother andsister put me in handsome trim, and my father gave me halfthe remnant of his last year’s salary, and five days ago I startedfor this place, to pay the Major a visit. But, would you believeit, Sir? I crossed the ferry a little after dusk, and have yet foundnobody that would show me the way to his dwelling; only anhour or two since, I was told to wait here, and Major Molineuxwould pass by.”“Can you describe the man who told you this?” inquired thegentleman.“Oh, he was a very ill-favored fellow, Sir,” replied Robin, “withtwo great bumps on his forehead, a hook nose, fiery eyes, and,what struck me as the strangest, his face was of two differentcolors. Do you happen to know such a man, Sir?”“Not intimately,” answered the stranger, “but I chanced tomeet him a little time previous to your stopping me. I believe313

you may trust his word, and that the Major will very shortlypass through this street. In the meantime, as I have a singularcuriosity to witness your meeting, I will sit down here uponthe steps, and bear you company.”He seated himself accordingly, and soon engaged his companionin animated discourse. It was but of brief continuance, however,for a noise of shouting, which had long been remotely audible,drew so much nearer, that Robin inquired its cause.“What may be the meaning of this uproar?” asked he. “Truly,if your town be always as noisy, I shall find little sleep, while Iam an inhabitant.”“Why, indeed, friend Robin, there do appear to be three or fourriotous fellows abroad to-night,” replied the gentleman. “Youmust not expect all the stillness of your native woods, here inour streets. But the watch will shortly be at the heels of theselads, and--”“Ay, and set them in the stocks by peep of day,” interruptedRobin, recollecting his own encounter with the drowsylantern-bearer. “But, dear Sir, if I may trust my ears, an armyof watchmen would never make head against such a multitudeof rioters. There were at least a thousand voices went to makeup that one shout.”“May not a man have several voices, Robin, as well as twocomplexions?” said his friend.“Perhaps a man may; but Heaven forbid that a woman should!”responded the shrewd youth, thinking of the seductive tones ofthe Major’s housekeeper.The sounds of a trumpet in some neighboring street nowbecame so evident and continual, that Robin’s curiosity wasstrongly excited. In addition to the shouts, he heard frequentbursts from many instruments of discord, and a wild andconfused laughter filled up the intervals. Robin rose from thesteps, and looked wistfully towards a point, whither severalpeople seemed to be hastening.“Surely some prodigious merrymaking is going on,” exclaimedhe. “I have laughed very little since I left home, Sir, and shouldbe sorry to lose an opportunity. Shall we just step round thecorner by that darkish house, and take our share of the fun?”“Sit down again, sit down, good Robin,” replied the gentleman,laying his hand on the skirt of the gray coat. “You forget that wemust wait here for your kinsman; and there is reason to believethat he will pass by, in the course of a very few moments.”The near approach of the uproar had now disturbed theneighborhood; windows flew open on all sides; and many heads,in the attire of the pillow, and confused by sleep suddenlybroken, were protruded to the gaze of whoever had leisureto observe them. Eager voices hailed each other from houseto house, all demanding the explanation, which not a soulcould give. Half-dressed men hurried towards the unknowncommotion, stumbling as they went over the stone steps, thatthrust themselves into the narrow foot-walk. The shouts, thelaughter, and the tuneless bray, the antipodes of music, cameonward with increasing din, till scattered individuals, and thendenser bodies, began to appear round a corner, at the distanceof a hundred yards.“Will you recognize your kinsman, Robin, if he passes in thiscrowd?” inquired the gentleman.“Indeed, I can’t warrant it, Sir; but I’ll take my stand here, andkeep a bright look out,” answered Robin, descending to theouter edge of the pavement.A mighty stream of people now emptied into the street, andcame rolling slowly towards the church. A single horsemanwheeled the corner in the midst of them, and close behindhim came a band of fearful wind-instruments, sending fortha fresher discord, now that no intervening buildings kept itfrom the ear. Then a redder light disturbed the moonbeams,and a dense multitude of torches shone along the street,concealing, by their glare, whatever object they illuminated.The single horseman, clad in a military dress, and bearing adrawn sword, rode onward as the leader, and, by his fierce andvariegated countenance, appeared like war personified: the redof one cheek was an emblem of fire and sword; the blacknessof the other betokened the mourning that attends them. In histrain were wild figures in the Indian dress, and many fantasticshapes without a model, giving the whole march a visionary air,as if a dream had broken forth from some feverish brain, andwere sweeping visibly through the midnight streets. A massof people, inactive, except as applauding spectators, hemmedthe procession in, and several women ran along the side-walk,piercing the confusion of heavier sounds, with their shrillvoices of mirth or terror.“The double-faced fellow has his eye upon me,” muttered Robin,with an indefinite but an uncomfortable idea that he washimself to bear a part in the pageantry.The leader turned himself in the saddle, and fixed his glancefull upon the country youth, as the steed went slowly by. WhenRobin had freed his eyes from those fiery ones, the musicianswere passing before him, and the torches were close at hand;but the unsteady brightness of the latter formed a veil whichhe could not penetrate. The rattling of wheels over the stonessometimes found its way to his ear, and confused traces of314 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007

a human form appeared at intervals, and then melted intothe vivid light. A moment more, and the leader thundered acommand to halt: the trumpets vomited a horrid breath, andheld their peace; the shouts and laughter of the people diedaway, and there remained only a universal hum, allied tosilence. Right before Robin’s eyes was an uncovered cart. Therethe torches blazed the brightest, there the moon shone out likeday, and there, in tar-and-feathery dignity, sat his kinsmanMajor Molineux!He was an elderly man, of large and majestic person, and strong,square features, betokening a steady soul; but steady as it was,his enemies had found means to shake it. His face was pale asdeath, and far more ghastly; the broad forehead was contractedin his agony, so that his eyebrows formed one grizzled line;his eyes were red and wild, and the foam hung white upon hisquivering lip. His whole frame was agitated by a quick andcontinual tremor, which his pride strove to quell, even in thosecircumstances of overwhelming humiliation. But perhaps thebitterest pang of all was when his eyes met those of Robin;for he evidently knew him on the instant, as the youth stoodwitnessing the foul disgrace of a head grown gray in honor.They stared at each other in silence, and Robin’s knees shook,and his hair bristled, with a mixture of pity and terror. Soon,however, a bewildering excitement began to seize upon hismind; the preceding adventures of the night, the unexpectedappearance of the crowd, the torches, the confused din andthe hush that followed, the spectre of his kinsman reviled bythat great multitude, all this, and, more than all, a perceptionof tremendous ridicule in the whole scene, affected him witha sort of mental inebriety. At that moment a voice of sluggishmerriment saluted Robin’s ears; he turned instinctively, andjust behind the corner of the church stood the lantern-bearer,rubbing his eyes, and drowsily enjoying the lad’s amazement.Then he heard a peal of laughter like the ringing of silvery bells;a woman twitched his arm, a saucy eye met his, and he sawthe lady of the scarlet petticoat. A sharp, dry cachinnationappealed to his memory, and, standing on tiptoe in the crowd,with his white apron over his head, he beheld the courteouslittle innkeeper. And lastly, there sailed over the heads of themultitude a great, broad laugh, broken in the midst by twosepulchral hems; thus--“Haw, haw, haw--hem, hem--haw, haw, haw, haw!”Robin seemed to hear the voices of the barbers, of the guestsof the inn, and of all who had made sport of him that night.The contagion was spreading among the multitude, when, allat once, it seized upon Robin, and he sent forth a shout oflaughter that echoed through the street; every man shook hissides, every man emptied his lungs, but Robin’s shout wasthe loudest there. The cloud-spirits peeped from their silveryislands, as the congregated mirth went roaring up the sky! TheMan in the Moon heard the far bellow; “Oho,” quoth he, “theold earth is frolicsome tonight!”When there was a momentary calm in that tempestuous seaof sound, the leader gave the sign, the procession resumedits march. On they went, like fiends that throng in mockeryaround some dead potentate, mighty no more, but majestic stillin his agony. On they went, in counterfeited pomp, in senselessuproar, in frenzied merriment, trampling all on an old man’sheart. On swept the tumult, and left a silent street behind.“Well, Robin, are you dreaming?” inquired the gentleman,laying his hand on the youth’s shoulder.Robin started, and withdrew his arm from the stone post towhich he had instinctively clung, while the living stream rolledby him. His cheek was somewhat pale, and his eye not quite aslively as in the earlier part of the evening.“Will you be kind enough to show me the way to the ferry?”said he, after a moment’s pause.“You have, then, adopted a new subject of inquiry?” observedhis companion, with a smile.“Why, yes, Sir,” replied Robin, rather dryly. “Thanks to you,and to my other friends, I have at last met my kinsman, and hewill scarce desire to see my face again. I begin to grow weary ofa town life, Sir. Will you show me the way to the ferry?”“No, my good friend Robin, not to-night, at least,” said thegentleman. “Some few days hence, if you continue to wish it,I will speed you on your journey. Or, if you prefer to remainwith us, perhaps, as you are a shrewd youth, you may rise in theworld, without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineux.”The sound proceeded from the balcony of the opposite edifice,and thither Robin turned his eyes. In front of the Gothicwindow stood the old citizen, wrapped in a wide gown, hisgray periwig exchanged for a night-cap, which was thrust backfrom his forehead, and his silk stockings hanging down abouthis legs. He supported himself on his polished cane in a fit ofconvulsive merriment, which manifested itself on his solemnold features like a funny inscription on a tomb-stone. Then315

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