In fact, it is upon this felt reserve of uncommunicated goodness that we anchor our loving trust, feeling that the flukes cannot be uplifted nor our confidence drag. Among the few historical characters that red-mark the past 5873 years of the accepted chronology of our race, Franklin stands among the first half-dozen who reconcile us to public greatness, whose individuality is not obscured, whose virtues are not hazed, whose purity is not flecked anywhere by any soil from the public highways.

A very fine lady was our aunt, Mrs. James Madison. That is very manifest by even a casual glance at her carefully arranged head-gear, her elaborately disposed hair, her effectively adjusted shawl, her well-studied laces and thoughtfully selected jewelry, collars, cuffs, and gloves. A little too fine, perhaps, to be cordially loved. A young modest person would, in spite of her assuring ease of manner, feel respectfully uneasy in her presence; but so respectable, so highly respectable she was, and still shows in her portrait, that we are all very proud of her. If she was exacting, she gave in return and to all equal measures of refined courtesy and attention. She was very elegant in her manners, but she was patronizing. Very impressive with her grand airs, but still patronizing. She lit up the White House with the radiance of cultivated beauty, the refinements of courtly ease and high-bred manner, but still was she patronizing.

She had gone through a third of a century of years when the eighteenth century died. She afterwards so cajoled and pleasantly imposed upon Time, that he forgot to score several notches against her, and she reached her eighty-second year, about six months before the next half-century was complete, before it occurred to him that the handsome old lady, with the smooth rosy face, had actually gained twelve lustres on the allotted human term. While her husband was not President until 1809, and continued so only eight years, our Aunt Madison acted like a President’s wife before she went into the Federal mansion, and carried her high head-dress and head under it, like a Presidentess, thirty-two years after he left the Executive residence.

On the next page of our album is an awkward, tall, ungainly, raw-boned figure, slightly stooping in the shoulders. How it was got together it is difficult to conjecture, how kept together still more puzzling. With a sallow complexion, iron-bound brow, stern lines running down and apparently holding immovably a large, rigid mouth, with a face like a large, well-filled, cheerful barn, with the door open, our good-hearted, noble-souled cousin, Patrick Henry, looks out at us as if he had been stared at before. Fortunately, our Aunt Madison is on the other side of the leaf, and cannot be disturbed by his slovenly dress. The features show an uneducated man, yet one of strong individuality, a capacity for great endurance, a fearlessness of personal consequences, and a will which would, even if the traces were cut, draw the load by the bit. Of course he loved a fishing-rod and gun, and told stories all day long. Much pith there was in his daily gathered anecdotes, which he extracted from all passing things, and put into the indolent, good-for-nothing crowd that hung around the tavern, or which crystallized around the stove in his too readily neglected law office. Up to his twenty-fourth year he had been a farmer and country store-keeper; but as his only interest in the farm was the fish which ran through its liquid ways, and as his account of stock stopped at the fish-hooks, powder, and ball, which he speedily borrowed of himself without charge, he naturally failed to acquire anything but sport out of either. He and Henry Clay were born near each other. Neither of them makes a good portrait; both were careless of their personal appearance, and each was as generous as an apple-tree in full bearing, or a shower in June, which slakes the thirst of lazy meadows lying on their backs with their mouths wide open.

But what a treat it must have been to hear Patrick Henry speak. The small dishonesties of rhetoric he scorned. To its greatest opportunities, however, he strode with a master’s step and might. His long, sallow features then glowed, the stern lines melted into an illuminating intellectual beauty, his crooked figure, a moment before like a telescope placed on end and sliding by sections into itself, then stretched out and up into manliest exaltation, and erect, grandiose dignity. His keen words, like the battle-axe of the Douglas, cleaved the subject from head to chine. His large natural thoughts rushed up the summits of argument, as the free winds sweep the hills, without labor or effort, and shook all brains, wise or unwise, dull or quick, cultured or untutored, bending their tops before his resistless march, and shaking all their obstinate roots by his relentless grasp. No grander storm of logic, invective, irony, wit, humor, sharp demonstration, soul-rousing appeal, or tender pathos ever passed over an audience and stirred them from the deep depths of their nature than that which he awoke. No class interests, like those of the Virginia parsons for their tobacco tithes, no selfish isolations, like the petty claims of neighborhood squires, no encroachments on popular rights, like the Stamp Act or tea duties, could withstand the noble sweep of his eloquence. The tribune of the people, he was regarded, ere he had reached his thirty-fifth year, as without exception the greatest orator in America, if not in the world.

On the opposite page is the photograph of a dear visitor to our family, General Lafayette. We never cared to inquire whether he was a relation or not. He was just as good to us as an own brother. He first came to see us when we were poor and needed friends. He had great difficulty in reaching us, as his own government gave orders to stop him. His young bride, equally noble in her nature, encouraged his coming. He was obliged to escape from France into Spain, and in a Spanish port to take passage in a Spanish ship, the only cargo of any value, except that made up of Columbus and his one hundred and twenty men from Palos in 1492, that ever came to us from the land of the Cid. The spirited young marquis remained with us from 1777 to 1781, fighting among our bravest, suffering privations with the most patriotic, confided in and beloved by Washington and the best of the Revolution. He made us two visits after the war, once in 1784, and the second time just forty years later, upon a special invitation of the nation. Proud and glad were we all to see him. The most wonderful part of the story is, that, after enduring vigorous hand-shaking through each of our then twenty-four States, and kissing all the children from two years old and upwards, he survived the job ten years.

We must now turn over the leaves rapidly, catching quick, pleasant glances at the fine, pale scholarly features of the pure-minded John Jay, and, on the opposite side, of the handsome face and form of his accomplished wife Sallie Livingston, who mated him when he was only nineteen, and consoled his heart and invigorated his head for twenty-eight eventful years, during which his inflexible patriotism, solid judgment, and weighty learning placed him by the side of Washington and John Adams in the estimation of the American household.

Then come the bluff face of hearty old Israel Putnam, whose expression bears the clearly read inscription carved on his tombstone, “He dared to lead where any dared to follow”; the massed, trustworthy head of Nathaniel Greene, with its square, Quaker characteristics; Francis Marion’s calm, lucid, telescopic eyes, and his farmer-like breadth of front, animated by the dash which egged him, when in the saddle, to plucky marches; and a long procession of valiant men and noble women,—family portraits in our national home gallery,—which gem and illuminate our collection and summon fresh pride to our patriotism, and new pleasures, on each review, to our hearts.

It is quite needless to suggest that here, too, are the well-preserved effigies of those Wise Men whom we saw together on the summit of July 4, 1776, and whose remembered figures flitted often through the varied scenes of the Revolution and alighted in the green boughs, of our memories.

Some of these faces are singularly handsome, illuminated with the beauty of great purposes. Some, however, are rugged as hillocks, rich in mould but unsubdued by the plough of culture or the spade of refining taste. Some few hide mean purposes behind great, rotund cheekiness; others tell a mixed story of joy and suffering; a few ache with ambitions unsatisfied; still fewer awe us by a Titanic distress; but most are firm with earnest, resolute convictions spiked with will and riveted to the wide aims of continental purposes.

Here and there come in faces of great softness, sweetness, and delicacy, in which feminine grace and dignity are blent so holily; the mothers, wives, or sisters of the men of the Revolution and who kept alive in their own loving hearts faith in God, their kinsmen, and themselves; faces which plainly say,

The Pre-Adamite Epoch: its Upheavals and Disruptions in America, and the red-hot diplomatic Stones, Fauchet and Adet, ejected from France upon us.—The new French Acrostics; and the Attempts by our Commissioners and Congress to solve them.—Gold-mounted Spectacles offered us by France; and our Inability to see our Interests or Duty through them.—Why and when the Keel of the American Navy was laid.—Of the Alien and Sedition Laws; why passed and how passed by.—General Washington and the Gallic Cock; a Crow never crowed out.—Napoleon’s Tour in Egypt and Palestine described; and its Results on the Treaty of Peace deduced.—Of the Office and Offices of Consul.—A Review and new View of our Difficulties with France from 1790 to 1800.—What a Pitt England fell into.—The City of Washington as a Geographical Study.—About Mississippi, Alabama, and the French Growth of Mobile.—The Territorial Condition illustrated.—The Introduction of Vaccine and other Virus.—Why some Things first break out in Boston.—State of Parties in 1801.—Why the first Adams was banished from the Presidential Eden; and the Flaming Swords which prevented his Return.

The elder pre-Adamite epoch in our history was past. New, more fiery, and eruptive elements, anti-Federal or Republican, upheaving and disrupting the old strata below, broke the settled upper crust of our political world.

In France, the Directory of Five, succeeding to the Convention, and its powerful national forces,—now welded to Napoleon by the fusing heats of Monte Notte, Arcoli, and Rivoli,—ejected out upon us those red-hot diplomatic stones, Fauchet and Adet. The French conundrums thickened. Genet’s successors out-geneted Genet. They not only equipped cruisers from American ports, but—displeased with a treaty which our government had seen fit to make with England, stipulating for the neutrality of America in the pending war between France on the one side, and England, Holland, Spain, and Rome on the other—authorized the capture and confiscation of American ships. In fact, the French envoys seemed determined to show the absurdity of the old-fashioned rule, that it took two to make a bargain.

Mr. Pinckney, the American minister to France, was obliged to leave that American paradise, Paris, without a fig-leaf of excuse to cover the naked results of his mission.

That comic body, Congress, was convened to look into the French conundrums. Of course they talked so much that they forgot what they came together for; and no one was any wiser when the speaker’s gavelgavel fell and sent them home. The puzzled President despatched three commissioners to get a new statement of the riddle. The Directory told these gentlemen—as legislative bodies now reply to applicants for relief—that they could only see them through gold-mounted spectacles. Such a spectacle the American people were not prepared to become. Knowing the sympathy of the anti-Federal party in America with their principles, the French Directory slammed the door abruptly in the face of the two commissioners with Federal leanings, and held the envoy with Republican tendencies, like another Joseph, by his skirts.

In spite of party feeling, however, American indignation now rose to the gorge. A small standing army was raised. The keel of our navy was laid, and a Navy Department created, over which was placed Benjamin Stodart. The alien law, authorizing the President to elbow out of the country disagreeable foreigners, and the sedition act, to fine and imprison any one writing too freely against the government,—measures which marked the distance of Americans of that day from the political millennium,—were first passed by Congress, and afterwards passed, without any fear, by everybody else. The wise old General at Mount Vernon was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the army; and there was a fair chance that the American Captain might yet be obliged to cut the comb of that strutting French cock, which had lately scratched and crowed on so many Italian dung-hills that he fancied himself a full-fledged eagle.

Peace commissioners, however, settled the difficulties, as old ladies do tea, by a long chat around a covered table. Bonaparte, who had made a flying military trip to Egypt, had got the Pyramids to look down on him from their stony, century-crusted tops, while he slaughtered the Mamelukes at their feet, had pushed across the desert with the mirage of empire ever rising upon his unslaked sight, had made a disagreeable tour of the Holy Land, and had attempted twenty-three times in vain to take St. Jean D’Acre, came back to Paris to be made First Consul in December, 1799,—a Roman office, which he filled like a Roman, by subjugating all Europe by arms and insolence. The gristle of the Corsican had at last stiffened into the bone of a ruler of a large, consolidated empire; and the concentration of power in his hands enabled him to concede to the justice of America what the shifting authority of constituted assemblies, conventions, legislative assemblies, and directories were too weak to dare. Bonaparte met the American commissioners around the round table, himself as round in power as it in shape, and in September, 1800, gave his autograph to a treaty of peace which shielded American independence of action from the insults of the envoys of a nation hitherto friendly,—a nation which had in a timely and efficient way, mainly to help itself against an old rival, helped us, but which, for the preceding ten years, had claimed, and offensively insisted in return, not from our gratitude, but as a right, that we should give our assistance to their ever-shifting schemes, with many of which we had no sympathy, and at a time when to furnish aid was almost to ruin our young strength.

While the Frenchman was thus bestriding Europe, putting England to her straits, and in fact even to such despair as to find relief in the Pitt, our American Colossus fell before the only foe which was ever permitted to be his conqueror.

Washington died December 14, 1799.

The year following the seat of government was removed to the District of Columbia, where, by frequent patching since, it has been made to stand much wear and tear. The city named after Washington is still the greatest atlas in the United States, its large geography requiring the most patient study to find out what one is looking for. Many die without accomplishing it, some by it. The wheel-shaped city has rotated off from its periphery so many different officials, that, although like a velocipede it is very hard riding, it cannot well be stopped without considerable injury to its Federal rider.

The wide region called Mississippi, embracing the present State of that name and also Alabama,—the latter no longer apprehending any new petticoat insurrection in Mobile from the descendants of the insurgents of 1706, which with French slowness in swelling the census had only in ninety-five years become two hundred and fifty, and these balanced by an equal number of blacks,—this Mississippi region, now separated from Georgia, was put into that pantaleted territorial condition in which a community finds itself, like a young girl-lady at sixteen, who goes to school, lives at home, is governed partly by herself and partly by her parents, acquires pocket-money from the old people, and notions from circumstances, and drifts vigorously on through an unsettled perplexity into an early and settled independence. Such in this year of grace 1869 are Arizona, Dakota, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Washington, whose quickly doubling populations are rapidly pursuing their education through a university where sharp, practical studies are urged with bullet speed; mining silver, gold, and lead by day, and spending most of it in gambling saloons by night; rolling their residences on wheels from one ranch to another; practising high gymnastics with the Indians, by a method better than Dio Lewis’s; taking frequent lessons in bar-rooms, and pretty sure to make and be a mark for some one in every quarter.

It may not be beneath the dignity of history to state that, while the new century was inoculated with virus taken from various sources, pure and impure, political, monetary, and social, its first year witnessed the earliest introduction of vaccination for small-pox in this country, to which it worked its way four years after its first discovery by Edward Jenner in England.

Of course it first took near Boston, where it has since continued to break out in various eruptions, whose vesicles, always surrounded by a rose-hued areola in the eyes of home nurses, it never allowed any one but itself to puncture.

Meanwhile, however, the political crust, broken and cracked in 1797, again heaved anew; muttered thunder rolled off from the press; party lava reddened the sides of the political Vesuvius, over whose cindered lips soon poured the hot melted streams of rage, which left, as they cooled, nothing of the late Federal party but scoria and ashes.

The first Adams was banished from his much-loved Presidential Eden, and a flaming sword with many blades—alien law, sedition act, personal desire for office, supposed sympathy with England, and suspected antipathy to France—was set at the door, turning every way, and prohibiting his return any way.

The Cereals and Serials of the last Century.—Hares caught before cooked.—Useless Indians put under Ground.—Human Bones the Phosphates of History.—The Statecraft of Washington, Jefferson, and Others.—The Automatic Workings of Governments exposed.—What small Brains rule.—Description of our Government Machine.—Its Merits and Demerits.—The Disadvantages of frequent Changes of official Workmen.—How the Machine-Oil is stolen.—The Inventions of the Eighteenth Cycle of Time.—An American Noah inebriated by the Cotton-Gin.—How Ham laughed and how Japhet put a Blanket over the Patriarch.—The Growth of Commerce.—The Notions which Importations put in and on the Heads of the Young People.—Paris supplies the Mistakes of Nature.—Of Dress.—Hoops, Head-Gear, Coats, Vests, Tights, etc., descanted upon.—Improvements in Roads and Means of Transit.—The Journey from New York to Boston in 1732.—The Road-Maker and Vehicle-Propeller as Leaders of Civilization.—The great Invention now needed.—The Populations of New York and Boston in 1700.—Description of the Former in that Year by an English Traveller.—Slave-Market in New York in 1711.—Manufactures and their Growth.—The Habits of the Period described.—Improvements in Morals, and wherein.—A general Review of American Literature and Book-Making through the Century.—The first American printed Volume; and how fast and long it ran.—Earliest Original Book of Poems; by a Woman, with a touching Specimen therefrom.—An Account of the leading Writers on Theology, Political Science, Government, Natural Science, Natural History, of Novels, etc.—The American Joss; its Worshippers, and their Treatment.

Before turning our backs upon the eighteenth and leaping upon the engine-driven nineteenth century, to be borne swiftly through its rapidly changing scenes, it is well to take a hurried glance backward over the path we have traversed and to pick up a few waifs strewn along the wayside.

The largest American products of the last century were material. Cereals were common and abundant; serials uncommonly few. The Western lobe or half of the world’s brain did not work so actively as the Eastern. Our forefathers were occupied with the earnest business of first catching their hare before preparing to cook him. They improved the breeds of useless Indians by putting them thoroughly under ground. They disposed also of not a few Englishmen and Hessians during the last quarter of the century by converting them at Saratoga, Princeton, Eutaw Springs, Yorktown, and elsewhere into good compost, making our soil historically fruitful.

Human bones are the phosphates of history. They quicken a rich heroic growth over sterile soils. Our ancestors enriched many American fields in this way. It is not Quaker husbandry, and Quaker phosphates are few; but for all that, the seeds which they raise and sell never do as well as when sown in these phosphated furrows.

A large crop of political principles was gathered in by such laborers as Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Jay, Patrick Henry, and others, unpractised in other fields, but yet found to be efficient and skilful. They learned the old art and mystery of government so readily, and showed its workings with such unreserve, that statecraft,—which theretofore had been, in spite of its pretentious parade, mainly a system of mutual imposition and overreaching,—saw itself suddenly exposed to popular inspection, and made a subject of vulgar, every-day comment. Like the automatic chess-player, which seemed such a mystery in its curious, systematic, intelligent work, these old automatic, governmental machines were found to be contrivances, very common when taken apart; in fact, like the wonderful chess-player, kept slyly in motion, by a very ordinary chap, boxed up inside and moving from his hidden quarters, springs invented by a person whose name was concealed, and which kept the pieces going just as well as if the operator had a brain to work with. The machine which our forefathers finished in 1789,—scorning to take out a patent for it, or in any way to make it exclusively their own,—apparently complex but really simple, and open to inspection in all its parts, consisted of a stiff popular main-spring, distributing its propelling forces through primary wheels and political chain-work, which runs from the main wheel to smaller state wheels, and so back and through governors and assemblies of ingenious cogged and racket motions, securing thus a free yet regulated movement to all the parts. It is a good machine, although operated at a great disadvantage by reason of the frequent changes in the hands employed, who have scarcely time to learn their business before they are required to give another set a chance. It is inexpensive, notwithstanding that some of the workmen are learning the kingly trick of considering as their own a good share of the oil which, in fact, belongs exclusively to its owners, and is intended only to keep the machine running. Of course foreigners found not a little fault with this American product, alleging defects which seem very great when viewed under European lights. At first they expressed as many objections to it as the cotton-planters to Whitney’s gin; but it is now very manifest that, while taking exceptions to the political machine, these foreign gentlemen have copied the planters’ example of getting up, as soon as they conveniently could, very palpable imitations of the deprecated plan.

Among the mechanical inventions, the gin for cleaning cotton-seeds out of the white tangle, combing the shock head of the old king, and thus making him at once a power and a presentable personage among other self-constituted sovereigns,—an invention wrought out in 1793 by a cute Yankee,—was one which, in its results directly on the material, and indirectly on the moral, condition of the United States stands eminently foremost. By the old hand-picking process, the slave had his hands full to separate the seeds from a single pound of cotton a day. The new mechanical picker cleaned six thousand six hundred pounds within the same time. The gin so intoxicated the planter, that he committed all sorts of political extravagances and uttered many maudlin ejaculations, until finally, in 1861, he threw himself down upon a bed of 3,400,000 bales in the condition of Noah when, after the flood, he became very hilarious in the presence of his children. Ham laughed exceedingly at the spectacle of the American Noah; but Japhet, after allowing the drunkenness four years to cool, at last put over the offensive nakedness a large patch-work blanket, reconstructed at a quilting-match in Washington. It is expected that hereafter his majesty will wear colors of a faster moral hue than before he so abused the gin.

Commerce, no longer tied up to the shore by the English navigation acts, began, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, to creep out from the commodious bays and harbors of our long, wavy coast; and soon, not content with these timorous tentatives, put on waistbands, top-gallant manners, and flaunting gear, and went boldly courting among the wine-cheeked nations, the silk-growing empires, and spicy-tongued kingdoms of the earth. Importations, of course, not only put many new things on, but in, the heads of the emancipated Americans, who showed their independence, then as now, by buying abroad liberally the things which they did not make or need here. In spite of sumptuary laws, which in some of the new States imposed fines for owning more than one silk gown in a family, and which banished jewelry from homes still innocent of aught but trinkets that cost less money than taste, the beaux and belles of the period whereof we speak began to put on hairs where nature had forgotten to furnish them, and supplied from Paris, in amounts limited it is true, appliances to remedy defects which fashion insisted had been left by the Creator, in making up woman from a sleepy man. Hoops every few years girdled the larger or smaller conceits of Madam Mode’s improved figures. Of course Paris was always finding mistakes in the original Eden pattern; and her customers were ever ready to try her suggestions as to the newest mode of correcting them. Top-gears naturally varied like the crescendo et diminuendo notes in music, or the equally flexible bars of the gold market, whose undulating lines draw such different tunes from its performers, and sometimes run so high as to take away all their breath. Tights, now unwhisperable except in veracious histories, held their own with elderly gentlemen to the very close of the century, and were clasped with silver enough to bring a smile, in our day, all over the wrinkling face of the Secretary of the Treasury. The wide-tailed coats and broad-lapelled vests of the respectable citizens of the Washington and Adams periods would, if worn now upon the platform of an equal rights convention, make the fame of their wearers, and insure full-length portraitures of their inner selves by conversation-drawing correspondents.

Another production of the eighteenth century was better material ways for translation over the surface of our rapidly augmenting areas. In 1732 enterprising stages took fourteen days from New York to Boston; but ere the cycle had rounded up to 1800, the time, by reason of better roads, was reduced one half. The hard earnings, trickling from the little heaps that labor had gathered up, began to flow out into turnpikes; and milestones chronicled spaces and pointed the fingers of Time to measures for ascertaining and so accelerating speed. The road-maker and the vehicle-propeller are the two Dioscuri of modern civilization. Whoever subtracts portions of the earth’s surface, be it solid or aqueous, from between separated States, communities, or individuals, multiplies the well-being and happiness of the human race. Could the tea raiser in China be placed alongside of the tea consumer in America, or the cotton manufacturer of Lowell within a half-hour’s delivery of his fabrics from their purchaser, the expenses of handling at either end, the long, costly, tedious voyages that now waste so much labor, time, and money, and the accumulatedaccumulated taxes upon the articles sold added by intermediate commissions, would be saved. The costs of translation are a necessary but onerous assessment upon productive industry. The greatest invention now needed is one which would so condense the earth’s bulk by improved and rapid communication, as to squeeze out the distances that separate nations and chill their natural outflow from themselves into others.

In 1700 the population of Boston was 7,000; that of New York 5,250, of which latter one in seven was colored; a proportion which was augmented in 1711 in favor of the blacks, by the establishment of a regular and public slave-market. An English traveller describes Boston in 1700 as a place whose “buildings are, like its women, neat and pretty; the streets of pebble, like the hearts of the men.” From such flinty masculines no wonder that the population only reached to 24,937 in the next one hundred years.

Among the leading productions of this century the establishment and growth of manufactures must be reckoned. Even before the Revolution, iron-mills at Salisbury, Connecticut, at Cold Spring, on the Hudson, at Valley Forge and Durham, Pennsylvania, had lifted their ponderous hammers to weld the fused ores, dragged out of our slightly tumbled beds by cars, and had commenced to fabricate instruments of husbandry, kitchen utensils, and other tripods on which sat, then as now, the Pythonesses of life, who not only interpret, but are themselves the oracles of fate. Our running streams soon coaxed cotton to take a turn around the spindles which Arkwright, in 1768, had so taught to whirl with their mechanical iron fingers, that one man could work a stubborn iron mule up to a capacity equal to one hundred and thirty of the human species. The cotton-gin, ere the century closed accounts with its busy customers, had handed over such clean cotton to the coquettish jennies, that very pretty yarns began to be spun along many gliding streams.

The habits prevailing through the eighteenth century were still transitional. It was the chrysalis film, covering the flitting worm which had succeeded the inert and slow-moving grub of the seventeenth, and which was soon to burst into the gayer, full-winged butterfly of the nineteenth cycle of time. What habits they had were of solid silver. The platings, spread over and hiding darker substances with polished surfaces, were not yet invented.

Morals, too, triturated by the ever-restless surges of time, like the pebbles on a shore which the industrious ocean ever scrubs and washes, became rounder and smoother, and lost something of those angular asperities which added nothing to their usefulness or strength.

If we take an account of the purely intellectual and literary stock on hand in America at the close of the century, we shall find that, while the one hundred years had been run on a slender and mainly upon borrowed capital, there were results in fabricated stuffs by no means discreditable, and in raw material a mass very pleasant to contemplate. To a large extent our literary manufactures were still imitations of English styles, with an increasing tendency to introduce American figures in the patterns. The first literary effort was in hymn and psalm books. The very first volume printed in this country was “The Bay Psalm-Book,” published, of course, near Boston (at Cambridge) in 1640; rather slow in metres, but which, before 1750, had run through seventy editions,—run in fact so well and fast that, like certain plays now, it forgot how or where to stop. Singing-books, as an intellectual circulation, thus went to the American head, and, without blowing the matter too much, we may reasonably assume that this tendency set up the American nose as an instrument of psalmody.

The first book of original poems was by a woman, Mrs. Anne Bradstreet. The third edition came out in Boston in 1758. Besides this intellectual progeny, she had eight children; and to these latter she thus alludes in the printed issue:—

During the first half of the century, ecclesiastical and religious writings in all departments naturally took the lead, as in these American mind was left free. In this field roamed the two Mathers, father and son,—Increase, the first, but unfortunately not the last, who was created a D. D.; and Cotton, who committed nearly three hundred and eighty-three sins in as many books, with which he loaded down the world, the greatest like its title, Magnalia. He made a partial atonement in a few good treatises. In the same department wrought largely, and with a “Freedom of the Will,” Jonathan Edwards, of whom Dugald Stewart said, “that in logical acuteness and subtilty he did not yield to any disputant bred in the universities of Europe”; Samuel Johnson, the first president of Columbia College, and the father of that highly respectable family, the American Protestant Episcopal Church; Ezra Stiles, who delivered orations in good Latin, and found audiences to listen to them; Timothy Dwight, his successor as president of Yale College, whose “System of Theology” still claims attention, even among the acute researches of the bibliologists of our time, and whose four volumes of “Travels in New England and New York” give rare reading on express trains; Samuel Hopkins, Joseph Bellamy, William White, the first American bishop of the Episcopal Church, and whose sweet spirit perfumed even his controversial writings; Edward Payson, Joseph S. Buckminster, and many others;—of but few of whom it could be said, “that their works do follow them”—to silence; for the churches still hold them in living honor.

Political writings divided with the theological the public mind as soon as government became domesticated. In books like “The Federalist,” “Notes on Virginia,” “Discourses on Davila”; in speeches embedding constitutional argument; in treatises, tracts, and in all forms and ways known to type, many of the wise men of the Revolution, with James Otis, Josiah Quincy, Jeremy Belknap, David Ramsey, and others, spake out in varied logic, historical research, wit, satire, and in captivating dialogue, discussing principles of government, political ethics, and social economy.

In the natural sciences, Benjamin Franklin, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Rush, Samuel L. Mitchell, and Count Rumford; in natural history, Cadwallader Golden, Paul Dudley, John Bartram, and Alexander Wilson; in history, William Stith, Abiel Holmes; among the singing birds, in the same tree with Anne Bradstreet but on higher branches, Philip Freneau, John Trumbull, the author of “McFingal,” Joel Barlow, who got up “Hasty Pudding,” and survived “The Columbiad,” and Joseph Hopkinson, who salutes us evermore in “Hail Columbia”; and finally, in fiction, standing by himself, Charles Brockden Brown, whose nine novels in paper covers delighted our great-grandmothers;—all these were quite equal to the instruction of their various audiences, and might, had they lived long enough, written something—perhaps several novels each—for the “New York Ledger.”

The last production, whereof we shall speak, was that great American Joss, money, which was set up as an idol in many households, but which had not yet been installed in municipal halls, fashionable churches, and State capitals. Beautiful to the sight at first were its golden hands and feet, and almost kissable the wand which it drew before the glistering eyes of its frantic worshippers. Of course no one was believed then, any more than now, who called attention to the cruel steel knives which it hid in its dollar-embossed breast, and against whose sharp points he pressed those who yielded to his fatal embrace.

Few Removals by Mr. Jefferson from the Ungilt, Official Chairs.—Mr. Smith gets into the Navy.—Who started long Messages to Congress; and the Difficulty of finding an End to them.—War with Tripoli; and the Complexion with which the Bey ended it.—Decatur and his Mediterranean Travels.—Ohio in 1802.—The early Danger it ran of being all cut up into City Lots.—How the Exodus of its Population was the Genesis of its Growth.—Of Westering Caravans.—Bonaparte sells Louisiana, and what a Sell it was.—How we were saved an extra Volume of Supreme Court Decisions.—The Murder of Alexander Hamilton.—A Ghost-Story about Aaron Burr.—The public Estimate of his Character unchanged by Biographical varnishing.—A South Carolina Conceit.—The Play of Lear in Tripoli.—Peculiar Mussulman Habits; the Author of Don Quixote.—Michigan escapes the Cuppings of Eastern States.—Her lymphatic Temperament.—Lake Michigan as a Breakwater against Chicago.—Burr tried for Treason, “not proven” guilty, and surrendered—to himself.—Of Bonaparte and other Usurpers.—The Oldest dislike the Youngest.—History of the Attempts of George III. and Bonaparte to blockade without Ships.—Once a Bull always a Bull.—Search of American Ships for Seamen.—The Unwisdom of Half-Apologies.—The American Embargo and its Popularity with Unmarried Girls.

The advent of the first Democratic brave to the dispensing patronage and to the right of taking official scalps, was not followed by a general emptying of official chairs and the massacre of official enemies. The thirty-five ballotings in the House of Representatives between Mr. Jefferson and Aaron Burr made men anxious, not hungry and thirsty. The fair-minded Madison was appointed to the State Department; Albert Gallatin, the golden-mouthed, to the Treasury; and Robert, not John Smith, to the Navy. Few changes were made in the ungilt places; although the innocent public of that day were not a little excited, at the bare suspicion that a few dozen Federalists were removed for their political opinions. The guilt of differing politically from the administration was not considered by the President so flagrant as to be adequately punished only by exile from office.

Upon Mr. Jefferson must, however, be laid the crime of beginning the practice of sending to Congress messages in writing,—a beginning which, like the messages themselves, seems to have no end. Since the flood human life is far too short for these Presidential essays, even without the accompanying documents.

A war with that dusky corsair, the Bey of Tripoli, clouded the very commencement of the new administration, breaking finally, after lasting three years, into a heavy shower, February 9, 1804, from the cannonading guns of young Decatur’s ship, the “Intrepid”,—a shower followed by blue-skied peace. Commodore Preble, who with his fleet had been dealing with Morocco, assisted in tanning, by some of Bellona’s bleaching-powders, the sable-peltried Tripolitan. The result was that the Bey turned to another complexion in his treatment of Christian captives.

In 1802 Ohio doffed the pantalets and appeared around the Union board as a full-grown State. Some of her settlements had grown so fast, and so threatened to absorb the land into building-lots, that it was feared for a time that the surface would be insufficient for farming purposes. The exodus of population farther westward, however, relieved the anxieties of its genesis, and marked the first chapter of its growth. The bivouac that had encamped on her grandly rolling rivers began soon to join the westering caravan which pitched their tents across the Mississippi against the sunsettings. A Hoosier who borrows money at two per cent a month to buy land with may be trusted to pay it back in a short time. Two to nothing that he will add from his generosity a bonus with the return of the loan.

Bonaparte, now Consul for life, and in sore need of money, sold to us, for $15,000,000, that tract of country stretching undefinedly towards the Pacific, and called Louisiana. Some of the wits of that day raised the question whether the purchase lawfully included alligators of such length that they stretched over the boundary lines. Neither this great question, nor the secondary one of the right of our government to buy foreign territory, was mooted in the Supreme Court, and thus we were spared an extra volume of majority essays and longer dissenting opinions. The foreign pill was too sugar-coated to cause any wry faces. It was a very big sell—for France.

In July, 1804, Aaron Burr, Vice-President, murdered Alexander Hamilton at Hoboken. Some biographers have attempted, since the death of the future exile and fugitive from justice, to lighten the heavy burden which he carried for thirty-three years afterwards, but in vain. The public rarely reverses its first verdict. They can seldom be made to believe that its first look at the piece was on the wrong side, and no new napping or glossing will convince it that the other is the right side.

The Presidency took such a fancy to Mr. Jefferson that, at his re-election, in 1804, he received 162 out of 176 votes cast; C. C. Pinckney, Esquire, of South Carolina getting the other 14. South Carolina then had the pleasant little conceit of voting for herself,—a harmless pastime that kept up her peculiar idea of resistance to Federal subjugation, and made a variety for the tellers in counting the contents of the electoral urn.

During 1805 Mr. Eaton, the American consul at Tunis, made an agreeable arrangement with Hamet Caramelli, the legitimate but exiled Bashaw of Tripoli, for his restoration to his seat, badly filled by his brother; and to carry out the plan, he started from Alexandria, in Egypt, in company with the sable Hamet, seventy American seamen and four hundred and thirty Arabs. After traversing a thousand miles of desert sands, he fought two severe battles, took Derne, the capital city of the chief province of Tripoli, and would have deposed the cruel reigning Bashaw, and opened the prison doors shut on hundreds of innocent Christian captives,—Eaton’s principal object in the romantic expedition,—but for a hasty, jealous, and disreputable treaty got up between Tobias Lear, Consul-General of the United States, and the Bey, whereby we agreed to pay the crowned bandit $60,000 in silver, instead of in leaden pieces, for the ransom of our sailors enmeshed, like flies, in the old spider’s web.

The nation never liked that play of Lear. They always thought of this its principal act, with the Earl of Kent:—