Journey Through the American States

by Catherine Drinker Bowen

ALL through the seventeen eighties and nineties they came, the French visitors to America — and after the Peace of ‘83 came the English for touring, trade, or settlement — men like Dr. Priestley and Thomas Cooper, sympathetic to revolutionary ideals. It began even earlier, with the French Alliance of 1778, when six thousand French soldiers debarked on American shores. The inhabitants had dreaded their arrival, and why not? For generations, America had fought the French and their Indian allies. Moreover, since the first Jesuit missionary-explorer, the French had had a way with Indians, got on with them — palpably a treacherous trait in any white man. Yet here were six thousand French soldiers, magnificently dressed and equipped, surprisingly correct in behavior, keeping to their camps at night and disciplined against pillaging. Their officers, nobly born, wealthy, young, with none of the hauteur of their British counterparts, charmed wherever they went.

Chief among them was of course “the Marquis,” Washington’s favorite, young Lafayette. There were also Count de Rochambeau and Count de Noailles, de Maussion, the Chevalier de Chastellux, and, much later, the civilian Moreau de St. Méry. The French consul general, the Marquis de BarbéMarbois, lived six years in Philadelphia and won many hearts. And that shrewd chargé d’affaires, Monsieur Otto, reported to Versailles all that he could discover about the Federal Convention and its delegates.

These French gentlemen traveled, kept diaries, wrote letters home, wonderfully descriptive and fresh, filled with the sharp yet lighthearted perceptions of men of the world who can afford to be amused by customs and foibles they need not share for long. Well disposed, the travelers saw what they chose to see and were ready to overlook the more uncomfortable aspects of this brave new society. The books later published by these visitors bore alluring titles, very French in style: Rélation Fidèle, Promenades, Voyage Pittoresque. And most famous of all, the classic Letters from an American Farmer, by Crèvecoeur, who loved America, named his daughter America-Frances, and did his best to persuade the world to share his sentiments. It was Crèvecoeur who, when he read the newly projected United States Constitution in November of 1787, told Thomas Jefferson he would be willing to fight for it, or return to Europe should it fail of ratification. No native American could have described his country so well. In these accounts, these diaries and letters, we see the states for which the Federal Convention created a Constitution — and we see them not only as they were but as the travelers had been led, at home, to expect. Pennsylvania, for instance, was inhabited not only by the honest Kouakear in his broad hat, but by that child of nature, the savage– openhearted, beautiful in body, innocent of the corruption endemic to cities and to royal courts:

From Constantinople to London the notions of America as they appeared in print were marvelously ingenious. The Wakwak tree bore its fruit in the shape of young women, ripe and delicious. The reason it was so cold in America was that the great forests covered the interior from the first ridge of mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Densegrowing trees kept the sun from the earth, which naturally stayed frigid. Only on the seacoasts was the climate mild, and becoming milder as the land was cleared. In America grew wondrous plants which yielded two kinds of fruits in one harvest. As for the potato — “There,” exclaimed the traveler Brissot de Warville, “is the food for the man who wants to be, and is capable of being, free!” This vegetable, says Brissot, springs up everywhere without being cultivated. Another curiosity among the Americans, who have neither priests nor masters, said Brissot, is the existence of “a great number of individuals known as ‘men of principle’ ” — a type produced by the Americans’ frequent exercise of reason, and “a type so little known among us,” continues the Frenchman, “that it has not even been named. It is among these men of principle that you will find the true heroes of humanity.” Brissot named as examples William Penn, Franklin, and Washington.

Other European writers, purporting to scorn fantasy and look realistically upon the Western world, noted that the American continent, being only recently formed, had scarcely finished drying out; in places the land was still a deep swamp. Therefore the meager vegetation, the scentless plants, feeble animals, and short-bodied men, hairless and discouragingly impotent in the marriage bed. Such were the conclusions of the redoubtable Abbé de Pauw. Even Buffon, the naturalist, declared the American animals to be inferior, owing to the meager native grasses, which were not nearly as large and succulent as those of Europe. It was said that dogs ceased to bark after breathing American air. Jefferson, getting wind of this in Paris, was irritated enough to send home for the skeleton of a moose.

Accounts of travels in America were so well received in France and so popular that men eventually began inventing them. One quite respectable scholar who had never set foot on a transatlantic ship wrote, under a pseudonym, an entire book about his adventures and fooled everybody. Not until the eighth edition did the author sign his real name, though his work was entertaining as well as perceptive.

It was natural for Europeans to speculate about this vast unpenetrated continent; the very exaggerations held an element of truth. Few men saw the physical potential, the almost limitless resources for wealth and material expansion. Yet America’s spiritual potential was recognized; at the same time feared by despots and celebrated by the enlightened. Here was indeed an asylum, a refuge for the downtrodden. If the noble savage was a fiction, the sturdy Quaker citizen was not, nor the husbandman tilling his own soil, free of church tithes and overlord, nor the artisan or mechanic who dared to raise his voice at town meeting with his betters. In America the âme républicaine found vital airs for nourishment. German liberals echoed this enthusiasm. “In America,” said a newssheet, the Deutsche Chronik, “thirteen golden gates are open to the victims of intolerance and despotism.”

The friends of America were by no means numerous in Europe, but they were vocal and enjoyed their defiance. La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt wrote warmly to Dr. Franklin about the constitutional principles of the Americans. That Europe did not “understand” us was clear to every American who went abroad. Yet it was clear also that certain circles looked to us with hope and good faith, equating their own revolutionary plans with the success of our experiment.

But philosophy is one thing, and day-to-day hard facts are another. Debarking from their ships, European travelers found in America less, or horrifyingly more, than they had been led to expect. There was a harshness to this land, this terrain, which poets and philosophes had neglected to mention. Instead of the glen, the rill, the zephyr, they met with an uneven climate, incredibly bad roads or no roads beyond a forest trail, swollen rivers unbridged, and everywhere the unsightly two-foothigh tree stumps which the Americans looked on with indifference or even with pride, symbolic of the forest conquered. Here were storms of lightning and thunder unequaled at home; here were snows which fell for days running. In summer, most violent transitions from heat to cold were occasioned, wrote an English traveler, “by means of the N.W. wind, which in this country is the most keen and severe of any that is to be met with on the face of the globe. The wind is perfectly dry, and so uncommonly penetrating that I am convinced it would destroy all the plagues of Egypt.” Here were fireflies, hummingbirds, bullfrogs that roared in the swamps like calves taken from their mothers. The flowering trees were entrancing. BarbéMarbois rode out from Philadelphia to “a neighboring forest,” where he saw magnolias, “whose flowers perfume the air . . . tulip trees, of which they say the shade rejuvenates old married couples; catalpas, sassafras . . . laurels of every kind with which we shall crown the heroes of America, but which are still waiting for her to produce a poet.”

Nevertheless, it was plain that in this country the forest was man’s enemy. “Compared with France,” wrote one traveler, “the entire country is one vast wood.” Isaac Weld, a visiting Englishman, wrote of the American’s “unconquerable aversion to trees.” Another said his landlord “this day cut down thirty-two young cedars to make a hog-pen.” The ground, says Weld, could not be tilled nor the inhabitants support themselves until the trees were destroyed. “ The man that can cut down the largest number, and have the held about his house most clear of them, is looked upon as the most industrious citizen, and the one that is making the greatest improvement in the country. ... I have heard of Americans landing in barren parts of the northwest coast of Ireland, and evincing the greatest surprise and pleasure at the beauty and improved state of the country, ‘so clear of trees!’ ” Considering the burning heats of summer, could not some few trees near the houses be spared? Weld asked. Oh, no, their owners replied, that would be dangerous.

Slumps were left to rot, a matter of years. In the front yards were no flowers; farmers grew their wheat and corn right up to the front door. Everywhere the zigzag wooden barriers known as snake fences were a depressing sight, with none of the charm of the English hedges or French poplars. The farmhouses stood stark among the stumps and cornstalks. Around the larger trees, Weld noted poisonous vines which looked like grapevines but which, if handled, raised large blisters.

Europeans were shocked by the American destruction of trees and the resulting ugliness. Even so, travelers riding through Virginia, Ohio, western Pennsylvania told of their hearts lifting at the sound of an ax against wood: it meant a habitation, human companionship. The American forest! Only a man who had made his own clearing, who in the face of hunger, wild animals, storms, and savages had put his ax to the trees, plowed the land, and sown his first crop of corn — only he could know that in America the forest signified wilderness and a clearing meant civilization. To an American “the forest” was the backlands, the backwoods, pioneer country. John Marshall’s grandfather was known as Thomas Marshall of the forest; he came from Fauquier County, on Virginia’s western frontier, where store goods were hard to obtain and the Marshall women used thorns for pins. To Europeans, however, “the forest” was synonymous with all America. As late as 1827, a Frenchman who had lived in the United States wrote of “those forests where I spent eleven years so free and independent . . . where one meets neither peasant nor pauper, where one enters without passport and leaves without permission.” The redoubtable Abbé Robin, noting in Connecticut the elaborate headdresses of the ladies, declared himself surprised to find French fashions “in the midst of American forests.” Thomas Jefferson in Paris varied the expression, inquiring of a correspondent if he would like to hear what “a savage of the mountains of America” thought of Europe.

THE New World invited. “The river Ohio,” wrote a British visitor, “is, beyond all competition, the most beautiful in the universe.” The French called it La Belle Rivière. There was a grandeur to the American scenery, a wild, awesome invitation. Yet the land proved inhospitable to any who would not claim it by hard work. “I do not think America the place for a man of pleasure,” wrote Thomas Cooper. Cooper was a highly educated scientist and theologian, who in the early 1790s emigrated to Pennsylvania with Dr. Priestley and settled in Northumberland County. Even in Philadelphia, Cooper knew, he said, of only one “professed gentleman — i.e. idle, unoccupied person of fortune. Their time is not yet come.” Cooper advised the prospective emigrant to avoid the sevenmonth winters of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, also the parching summers of New Jersey and the Carolinas. In New Jersey, Cooper reported, one found insects, reptiles, oppressive heat, fevers, and ague. “The influence of a hot sun upon the moist and low land of the American coast almost infallibly subjects an European ... to attacks of intermittents.” Like the celebrated Dr. Priestley, Cooper preferred northwest Pennsylvania, the high clear Susquehanna country. In Kentucky one risked continual danger from Indians.

And how hard it was to clear the land! “Grubbing,” the Americans called it. For grubbing, laborers received three shillings a day, victuals, and a dram of whiskey morning and evening. To quench great thirst by water alone, without spirits, was said to be extremely hazardous. In summer men had been seen to fall dead on the streets of Philadelphia after drinking cold water from the pumps. Bleeding was suggested, Moreau said, for those who drank too fast; some pumps bore a sign reading, “Death to him who drinks too quickly.” And what quantities of spirituous liquors the Americans consumed! When drunk they had a propensity to fight; in the Southern and Western country, firstflights were looked on as a frolic. No rules were observed of honor or sport, and men gathered to watch two champions gouge out eyes, break jaws, and bite off fingertips with every appearance of ferocious pleasure.

FRENCH visitors were likely to view this landscape and its people more genially. In 1784, three French noblemen, including the Marquis of Lafayette, set out from Albany on an expedition. James Madison happened to be one of the party. They planned to see the Oneida Indians and also a colony of Shakers, in whom Lafayette, an ardent admirer of Dr. Mesmer in Paris, was especially interested because their practices resembled mesmerism. It was cold; Lafayette wore a rain cloak of gummed taffeta which had been sent him from France wrapped in newspapers. The papers had stuck to the gum, “so that,” wrote Barbé-Marbois, “the curious could read, on his chest or back, the Journal de Paris, the Courier de l’Europe, or news from other places.”

As for the Chevalier de Chastellux, he rode through the forests and the cities with a blue jay’s feather in his cap, enjoying everything. It was natural to feel well disposed toward a people with whom one had fought side by side. In Connecticut the Chevalier went squirrel-hunting, a diversion which he wrote was much in fashion in that part of the country. The animals, he said, were larger than those of Europe, with thicker fur, and very adroit in leaping from tree to tree. Should a squirrel be wounded without falling, it was only a slight inconvenience; somebody was usually within call to cut down the tree. “As squirrels are not rare,” finished Chastellux, “one may conclude, and quite rightly, that trees are very common.”

Squirrel ragout was tasty and gamy, though some preferred their squirrels fried for supper, with coffee. Travelers frequently carried their food with them, meat or cornmeal. Innkeepers let them cook it over the fire. Visitors were impressed with the American wild turkey, its size and appearance. “Why do not the Americans domesticate this noble bird?” asked William Priest. Frenchmen complained unsparingly of the American bread, but remarked that in a surprisingly short time a landlord could produce little hot galettes, baked and kneaded. Chastellux found them to his taste.

Persons of all ranks, it was noted, drank coffee and tea. The Americans breakfasted on what they called “relishes”—salt fish, beefsteaks, broiled fowls, ham, and bacon. Oysters were much eaten, and the shad an excellent fish, but there existed “a fanatical law, passed by the Quakers,” which prohibited catching shad on Sunday, a great waste, considering the fish remained in the river but a short time. The Bostonians ate fish every Saturday “to benefit their fisheries,” and in private houses grace was said before meat. Barbé-Marbois noted that all the courses, even dessert, were put on the table at one time. Tablecloths fell over the knees and took the place of napkins, after the English style. In Boston, a town of eighteen thousand, everything reminded travelers of London: the brick and wooden houses, the customs, even the speech and accent. But it seemed odd that on a warm August day people paid calls dressed in velvet, satin, and damask. In the country, stone fences divided men’s property. New England churches were clean and well lighted; to the Frenchmen they did not look like churches. One found oneself in a room with benches, lacking paintings or ornaments — “no addresses to the heart and the imagination.” Yet one met no beggars therein, “nor even,” wrote Barbé-Marbois, “an untidily dressed man, no one from the hospital for the blind to hit you with his stick, nor verger to interrupt you with the noise of his halberd.”

Connecticut, travelers noted, was as closely populated as England; one passed continually through towns and villages. Hartford had no galleries, public gardens or palaces, but BarbéMarbois was shown the Charter Oak. “In this country,” he wrote, “everything which has any connection with liberty is sacred.” And what odd customs were attributed to liberty and equality! — even the barbarous custom of admitting another man to one’s bed when one was asleep at an inn. Another sign of this so-called liberty, wrote Moreau, was the refusal of a carriage to alter its course when passing, unless threatened with collision by a heavier vehicle. It was charming to see schoolchildren, girls and boys, draw up in line along the road and salute the passing stranger by curtsies or doffing the hat, though some Americans protested the custom as servile, a relic of the old country.

New York (population thirty-three thousand) in 1787 still showed the ravages of war. The city had been occupied by the enemy for seven years, till the English left and the Tories with them. Now the wharves were tumbledown, bereft of ships; the great fire had swept away almost every building on Broadway, including Trinity Church. What remained was a collection of wooden hovels and gabled Dutch houses of yellow brick. In the East and North rivers one saw porpoises. Baltimore, with its thirteen thousand inhabitants, was badly paved, “with scarcely a dozen lamps in the whole town.”

Nearly every French traveler commented on the high scale of living in America. Brissot de Warville remarked that it was not rare to see a carter driving his cart and eating a turkey wing and some white bread. Wages for laborers and servants were high, much higher than in Europe, and when a vessel loaded with Scotchmen landed in New York, “the next day there was not one who was not hired out and busy.” Travelers agreed that the farther south one went, the more this condition deteriorated. It was in Virginia that Chastellux saw poor people, “for the first time,” he said, “since I crossed the sea.” Not only the Negro slaves but the wan and ragged whites in their miserable huts aroused his pity. In Virginia the horses were beautiful, finely bred to race. Gentlemen’s houses were spacious, well furnished with linen and silver plate, but few had books or libraries, and the plantation manors were crowded as to bedrooms: “they think nothing of putting three or four persons in the same room.” The seed ticks made life miserable in summer, and the bedbugs, which Virginia called chinches. With Southerners the drinking of spirituous liquors was a delightful — and frequent—ceremony which involved extraordinary mixtures: mint sling, pumpkin flip, bumbo, apple toddy.

In Virginia, Chastellux met with his first pioneer, a young man who had come from Philadelphia with his pretty wife and babe, and was setting out for “Kentucket.” Chastellux was astonished at the easy manner in which this pioneer proceeded on his expedition, with but one horse, no cattle, and no tools. “I have money in my pocket,” the young man said stoutly, “and shall want for nothing.” In Pennsylvania good lands were “too expensive to get.” This nonchalance at moving about seemed indeed one of the most striking traits of Americans. “Four times running,” wrote Moreau, “they will break land for a new home, abandoning without a thought the house in which they were born, the church where they learned about God, the tombs of their fathers, the friends of their childhood, the companions of their youth, and all the pleasures of their first society.” The American clung to nothing. At a price, said Moreau, he would part with “his house, his carriage, his horse, his god.”

It was the very antithesis of Europe, this repudiation of the past, and for the foreigner it repelled or inspired according to his personal philosophy.

THE slaughtered trees, the American “forests,” the free land waiting to be claimed, the Beautiful River and wild romantic scenery; the rattlesnakes in the brush, the zigzag fences, hummingbirds, squirrel ragout; the bridgeless streams to be crossed, the clear cold northwest wind — in the accounts of Europeans all this took second place to the Americans themselves, to the men, women, and children who inhabited this New World and who themselves seemed a species of new people. “By the term American,” wrote William Priest, “you must understand a white man, descended from a native of the Old Continent; and by the term Indian, or Savage, one of the aborigines of the New World.” “Americans,” noted Moreau, “are said to be a sort of blend of Europeans and Indians. It is evident that they have progressed far beyond the Indians and are rapidly becoming more and more like Europeans.”

Perhaps the gentleman showed restraint, everything considered. The longer lie stayed in America, the less European its inhabitants appeared. Moreau and his friends were continually surprised by the condition of equality between citizens of different rank; nothing they had read at home prepared them for it. In France, a man of the world would blush, said Brissot de Warville, to ride in so unworthy a vehicle as a public diligence. Yet in America one saw a member of Congress seated in the stagecoach beside a laborer “who had voted for him,” the two talking busily. “You do not see people putting on airs, which you find so often in France,” added Brissot. He had traveled through New Jersey in a coach of this kind with the son of Governor Livingston — nor would he have known it, had not the innkeepers at the stops saluted young Mr. Livingston “with an air of respectful familiarity.” It was said the governor himself frequently used the public stage.

All this was extraordinary. Surely it stood as proof that the American experiment was succeeding? Here the equality of man was not a matter for philosophers, poets, and the conversation of enlightened drawing rooms. Here it was put into practice, accepted as an everyday fact. One must, however, accommodate oneself—and accommodation was not always easy. Barbé-Marbois wrote home that his party had found it necessary to address innkeepers discreetly. An imperative tone was unsuccessful; more than one host had said he could be asked but not commanded. “People treat us very familiarly,” said the Frenchman, “and they do it so innocently that we should be very hard to get on with if we took it in bad part.” Wagoners, after putting their carts under cover and oating their horses, came and joined the company for dinner, without apology. At private houses were neither porters nor doorkeepers; in Boston the governor of the state himself answered their knock when they came to call one evening. After the call was over His Excellency showed them to the door, candle in hand. Often one met respected magistrates - Barbé-Marbois called them “senators” — returning from the market with greenstuff or fish, not even trying to hide the parcels under their cloaks.

As for the stagecoach drivers, they were a phenomenon; they showed no surprise when addressed as Colonel, took part in the conversation, said Brissot, and passed on all kinds of questions as “a sort of magistrate.” It was rare for anyone to remonstrate with the driver, even in the humblest way, on his manner of handling the reins. And if debates arose upon the length of the road, upon whether or not the journey was comfortable, upon horseflesh and the lineage thereof, or upon the private fortunes of gentlemen whose houses were seen along the road, the driver was consulted and listened to with deference. And how pleasant it was to travel with so little official interference! In New England, wrote Barbé-Marbois, “we went through pretty little villages, without ever having an official come up, hat in hand, and with a mawkish expression beg us in the name of the Thirteen States to get out of our carriages and let him inspect them.” Here were no seignorial rights on entering or leaving districts, and no farm guards.

French noblemen who had served as officers under Washington were amazed to find retired captains and majors keeping inns, even an apothecary who had been a general. In Europe, war was a profession; a gentleman bought his commission as he would buy a place in the government. War, moreover, was a policy of princes, an instrument of power continually in use, to be reckoned with by men of ambition. And how, pray, could the American General Knox, a former bookseller, have functioned so well as an artillery commander during the strife with England? “These things,” wrote Lafayette, “are very different from Europe. The master and the mistress sit down at table with you, do the honors of an excellent repast, and when you leave, you pay without bargaining. When you do not want to go to an inn, you find countryhouses where you are received with the attentions which you would have in Europe from a friend.”

For English visitors as well as French, it was hard to understand a people who had no tradition of feudality, no loyalty of peasant to the lord who protected him, or of tenant to landlord. Not only were the Americans without this tradition, handed down through the generations, but they had no acquaintance with it. Although born as colonials, they seemed to have been born free of the class above them. An English traveler, Francis Baily, put it down to the fact of easy subsistence. Because land could be acquired cheaply, men’s dependence on each other was “so trifling, that the spirit of servility to those above them so prevalent in European manners is wholly unknown, and [the Americans] pass their lives without any regard to the smiles or frowns of men in power.” Thomas Cooper said much the same thing. There were no Americans of great rank, Cooper wrote, nor many of great riches. “Nor have the rich the power of oppressing the less rich, for poverty such as in Great Britain is almost unknown.” The very term farmer, said Cooper, had in America another meaning. Whereas in England it signified a tenant, paying heavy rent to some lord and occupying an inferior rank in life, here in Pennsylvania a farmer was a landowner, equal to any man in the state, “having a voice in the appointment of his legislators, and a fair chance ... of becoming one himself. In fact, nine-tenths of the legislators of America are farmers.”

Barbé-Marbois has an anecdote wonderfully illustrative of the incomprehensibility of the American condition to a highly placed European. One fine September day in Massachusetts, he and his French companion walked from their country inn to a nearby valley, where numbers of men were busy getting in the harvest. Barbé-Marbois selected one of them — a well-clothed fellow, he said, probably the head farmer—and put a series of questions. Who possessed the high and low justice in his district, how much rent did he pay to the lord of the village, who had the right to payment of a fifth of a fifth? Was he allowed to hunt and fish, were the cider press, the tower, and the mill far away, was he allowed to have a dovecote, was the tithe heavy and forced labor frequent and painful? How many bushels of salt was he obliged to consume, how much was the tax on drinks, and was there capital punishment for those who were convicted of having tobacco plants in their gardens?

There is an element of fantasy in the scene: the sweating farmer, the two Frenchmen, polite, careful not to patronize. “At all these questions,” Barbé-Marbois continues, the man “started to laugh. . . . He told us that justice was neither high nor low in America, but perfectly fair and equal for everyone, and we could not make him understand at all what sort of beings lords of the village were. He continued to think that we were trying to talk to him about a justice of the peace, and he could not distinguish the idea of superiority from that of magistracy.”

FOREIGNERS who went south were shocked to see slave quarters at Mount Vernon, though they noted that Washington was benevolent toward his slaves and that, like Jefferson, he disapproved the institution. But how could the father of liberty not free these poor creatures? Did he fear a general insurrection as a result? Did he think liberation should be left to the Congress? That slavery was an evil all foreigners agreed. Yet the problem seemed too vast for discussion. Some slave owners were brutal, some kind; it was difficult to make an overall judgment, though it was agreed that any slave owner was unjustified by the tenets of human decency. Nicholas Cresswell, passing through Maryland, noted without comment that he had seen the hindquarters of a Negro chained to a tree “for murdering his overseer.”

When foreigners spoke of poverty in America, they meant the poverty of white men; they were continually surprised not to find more of it. Perhaps the travelers were comparing what they saw with conditions in Europe, where Americans in their turn had expressed shock at the terrible plight of the London poor, the Paris beggars. In Massachusetts, Barbé-Marbois and his companion, carrying their own supplies, one day discovered they had too much food with them. “We said to our host, ‘Give this to the poor.’ He hardly understood us, and no poor could be found.” Begging was unknown, said the Frenchman. From Boston to Philadelphia he had not seen a single pauper or met a “peasant” who was not well dressed or had not a good wagon or at least a good horse. Chastellux declared that in America no very poor people were to be seen. “Everyone enjoys easy circumstances.”

A traveler sees what he wishes to see, and the American curiosity concerning strangers was insatiable, especially in rural districts — which meant nearly everywhere. No European peasant, no British yeoman would have dared such questions. Isaac Weld traveled out into Lexington, Kentucky. “Of all the uncouth human beings I met with in America,” he writes, “these people from the western country were the most so; their curiosity was boundless. Frequently have I been stopped abruptly by one of them in a solitary part of the road, and in such a manner that had it been another country I should have imagined it was a highwayman that was going to demand my purse. . . . ‘Stop, Mister! why I guess now you be coming from the new state.’ ‘No Sir,’— ‘Oh! why then, pray now where might you be coming from?' ‘From the low country.'—‘Why you must have heard all the news then; pray now, Mister, what might the price of bacon be in those parts?' ‘Upon my word, my friend, I can’t inform you.’ —‘Aye, aye, I see, Mister, what might your name be?' — A stranger going the same way is sure of having the company of these worthy people, so desirous of information, as far as the next tavern, where he is seldom suffered to remain for five minutes till he is again assailed with the same question.”

Isaac Weld must have been a stiff young man. If he refused to talk, he was, he says, in danger of finding himself in a quarrel, especially when the company discovered that he was not an American.

For French and English alike it was upsetting to find no distinction in dress between maid and mistress, or between the lower orders and the first magistrate of the state. “Luxury,” wrote de Beaujour, “has penetrated to the cottage of the workingman.” Moreau was surprised that everyone

could read and write, “although almost no French sailor is able to do so.” It was noted that newspapers and gazettes were numerous and kept the people well informed; in the country they appeared weekly, in town twice a week, and in the large cities twice a day — “morning, noon and night,” wrote a Frenchman. From his lodgings in a small Massachusetts town, La Rochefoucauld wrote that the people in the house “busied themselves much with politics, and from the landlord to the housemaid they all read two newspapers a day.”

THESE observations were made along the Atlantic coastline. In the backland—“the great interior country,” as Gouverneur Morris called it — no schools existed. Life was rough, the labor backbreaking. Here a boy of fourteen was already a man, proficient with firearms, able to hunt, bring home game to eat, prepared if necessary to join the defense of his household against savages. American history is illumined by the miracle of men who grew up “in the forest” and emerged at manhood speaking excellent English, having been nourished on such prose as the King James Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, Addison’s essays, Milton, the heroic couplets of Pope. John Marshall at the age of twelve had never seen a schoolhouse. But under somebody’s instigation, probably his father’s, the boy already had transcribed Pope’s Essay on Man in toto and knew long passages by heart. On the Back River in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, Chancellor Wythe as a youth was taught Latin and the rudiments of Greek by his mother. All through the eighteenth century, travelers remarked on the purity of the American speech, its grammatical correctness, and the absence of local dialects. Cresswell in the 1770s went so far as to declare the Americans spoke better English than the English.

Nevertheless, these visitors must surely have been partly deaf, or moved only in the best circles. Evidence against them is abundant: in the phonetically spelled letters of soldiers during the war, in manuals prepared for the correction of speech. The Columbian Grammar, published at Boston in 1795, has a list of Improprieties: “acrost, bekays, chimbley, drowned, larnin’, ourn, yourn, theirn; cheer for chair, riz for risen, kivver for cover.” During the war, a brave infantryman at Bound Brook composed a “Song of the Minute Men”:

New Englanders said dew for do, tew for too. Noah Webster in his Dissertations on the English Language (1789) notes the keow of New England but defends it as no worse than the London skey for sky and kaynd for kind. As for the Easterners’ habit of saying this here country, that there man, Webster declares it coeval with the primitive Saxons. He wishes, however, that persons in the Middle States would not say fotch for fetch and cotched for caught, which latter “is more frequent and equally barbarous.” The people at large, remarks Webster, say admírable, dispútable, compáreable. And the people, Webster asserts, are right.

It seemed indeed that a new language was being created. Thomas Jefferson was sensitive to it, impatient with reviewers in English journals who set themselves against what they called the adulteration of the language by American words. “The new circumstances in which we are placed,” Jefferson wrote to Washington, “call for new words, new phrases.” It was Noah Webster, however, who discovered in the American language more than a diversion or an expression of hatred for Britain. To Webster the American language constituted a philosophy and a most passionate creed. “Now is the time,” he wrote (1785), “and this the country in which we may expect success in attempting changes favorable to . . . establish a national language, as well as a national government.” As an independent people, Webster added, in all things we should be federal, be national. It was a word he liked to underline. Webster’s American Spelling Book went into millions of copies — fifteen million in its author’s lifetime, sixty million in a century; his American Dictionary made his name a household word. Webster’s philosophy of language went far beyond conventional philology. People of large fortunes and family distinction, he said, have a bold, independent way of speaking, as witness New England, where there are no slaves, few servants, and little talk of family descent. Here the people address each other very differently than in the South. Instead of saying you must, New Englanders ask, is it not best? — “or give their opinions with an indecisive tone; you had better, I believe.” This idea of equality of birth and fortune, says Webster, “gives a singular tone to their language and complexion to their manners.”

Nicholas Cresswell, during his travels, writes that the New Englanders “have a sort of whining cadence which I cannot describe.” On this peculiarity all agreed, although, like Cresswell, none could spell it out. If Roger Sherman of Connecticut spoke of his neighbor’s daughter, he pronounced it datter, if he spoke of cranberry sauce, he called it sass; with his neighbors he extolled the laws of God and natur.

Most Americans used the current eighteenthcentury pronunciation of sarve for serve, desarve for deserve, and said consate for conceit, desate for deceit. They also said obleege, and deef for deaf. They seem to have flattened the final a in America — at any rate they sang lustily, in welcome to General Washington:

French travelers, even those who spoke English, found they must acquire a new vocabulary, indigenous and colorful: backwoods, backcountry; catboat, pungey; bullfrog, eggplant, lightning bug, razorback. From the Indians there had been adapted a bewildering succession of proper nouns and place names. Impossible to spell this polyglot American language! French visitors, writing home, did the best they could: Jancky Dudle . . . Kentokey . . . the town of Norege, in Connecticut. Gentlemen wrote of those well-known Indian tribes, Scherokys and Tchactas.

EVEN before 1780 there had been at least seventeen colleges in America; after the war they sprang up everywhere, from Union College in New York State to Transylvania, “beyond the mountains.” The best known of the older institutions were of course Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Columbia, and “the colleges at Princeton, New Jersey.” Travelers visited these institutions, talked with the professors and were well impressed. In Philadelphia they called at the Library Company and were entertained by members of the American Philosophical Society, a learned sodality established by Dr. Franklin “for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge.”

No American would have denied that in his country, learning tended toward the useful. It seemed indeed that utility, the practical application of experimental theory, was part of the âme républicaine, Benjamin Franklin its prophet, and Philadelphia its natural center. Here was David Rittenhouse with his famous orrery and the telescope he had himself built to view the transit of Venus; here was Bartram’s Garden with its botanical collection, Dr. Benjamin Rush with his new treatments for the insane. These were the men whom, after Franklin, educated foreigners endeavored to meet.

Philadelphia boasted its College of Physicians, with the Doctors Morgan, Redman, Shippen, Hutchinson, Kuhn — bold, imaginative men, frequently quarrelsome among themselves, as befitted savants whose hearts were in their work. Dr. Adam Kuhn, with his gold-headed cane and gold snuffbox, his hair curled and powdered, was a sight for any sickroom. He and his brethren prescribed red bark, laudanum, and opium; they applied blisters and clysters, measured out vomits and cathartics, bled their patients for fevers — and for pleurisy, “by the quart,” one diarist noted later. Women in pregnancy and labor were bled because of plethora, Dr. Shippen said; too much blood. The good doctors came to childbirth with instruments rattling in their bags. It followed that young mothers died later of childbirth fever brought on by infection; in difficult cases the baby was extracted piecemeal with a hook. The horrors of treatment are indescribable: face cancers burned out with plasters, breasts removed while strong men sat on the patient’s feet or held her shoulders down.

Small wonder people did not summon the doctor unless they had to. Neighbors dosed each other with rhubarb and senna, castor oil, Daffy’s Elixir, tea made of quashee root or nettles; they made plasters of honey and flour, onion, garlic, and deer fat. Elizabeth Drinker of Philadelphia, considered an authority in physic, noted that she had cured a very bad sty with a rotten apple, and a child’s deeply bruised foot with cataplasms of cow dung. Often enough people called in quacks; a governor’s daughter had her son’s lame foot triumphantly cured by an Indian powwow doctor. For the jaundice, an infusion, in white wine, of goose dung and earthworms was said to be helpful.

Filth was thrown into the streets, wells contaminated by backyard privies. Typhoid, malaria, smallpox, the bloody flux, the putrid sore throat (diphtheria) swept through the cities in summer like a scythe. Rickets and scurvy abounded. These were the good old days, so often lamented by moderns of a romantic turn. One is almost surprised that fifty-five delegates survived to maturity and the Federal Convention. A Virginia innkeeper and his wife told Chastellux they had had fourteen children, none of whom lived to the age of two.

Nevertheless, physicians worked hard, risked their lives in time of pestilence, studied day and night to learn, dissect, discover, cure. And physicians did not grow rich. The receipt books of the grandest show payments in sugar, wine — “a red cow as per agreement.” Dr. Rush bled many patients to death in the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. But he had vision nonetheless and desired to change the entire emphasis of learning in America, and not only in medicine. He proposed the founding of a postgraduate college to prepare youths for public life. Why, demanded Rush, should young men study Greek particles and the conformation of the ruins at Palmyra when they should be acquiring “those branches of knowledge which increase the conveniences of life, lessen human misery, improve our country, promote population, exalt the human understanding, and establish domestic and political happiness?”

Sir Francis Bacon had cherished a like vision, a century and a half before. Yet even Dr. Rush’s dream came too soon, too early. The American people were not yet ready. General Washington wished to establish a national university, erected and supported by Congress. At the Federal Convention, young Charles Pinckney proposed it as part of his original plan. But though Pinckney and Madison were to bring it up again in August and September (careful to call it federal, not national), the motion in the end was voted down on the grounds that Congress would have sufficient power itself to found a university.

AMERICA in 1787 was on the verge, the very brink, of industrial and scientific expansion. Still recovering from war, with the scars visible wherever British armies had marched, the states within a decade were to see vast changes: turnpikes built and canals, fulfilling Washington’s dream of opening up the Western country. They were to see the utilization of coal, which as yet, men said, served only to put fires out. In the 1790s, Eli Whitney would introduce his cotton gin and Samuel Slater set up a spinning factory with the machinery whose plans he had carried in his head from England. Americans of 1787 showed immense pride of country, bombastic and touching. Moreau was disturbed by the virulence of state pride, resulting in contempt for other districts, particularly between “Easterners” and Southerners. A grave fault, the Frenchman called it. “The faint differences between the various states,” he said, “are not at all marked by politeness. They have the same form of government, the same ideas, the same notions — and the residents of each one have the highest opinion of themselves and their section.” A Philadelphian told Moreau that America wouldn’t change places with any country on earth — no, sir!

The bragging and the boasting were in truth part of a young vigor, a young defiance. America must shout aloud her name, her independence. All the world must be informed of her grandiose new plans, which encompassed a continent and concerned nothing less than the equality of men. “We are making experiments,” Franklin had said.

Littie time was left, in all this, for the fine arts. Here, literature was not a trade or a means of livelihood, as in Europe. “Literature in America is an amusement only,” wrote Thomas Cooper. Barbé-Marbois, praising the absence of poverty, reluctantly admits that if he has seen no beggar in America, neither has he met a Gluck, a Greuze or Bouchardon, or the author of literary masterpieces. Chastellux attributes this to the absence of rich patrons. Benjamin Franklin confessed that the New World had no place for artists. Such artistic geniuses as had arisen in America, he said, uniformly quit their country for Europe, where they could be more suitably rewarded.

It was John Adams who made the truest observation. In Paris he viewed the Tuileries, the public squares and gardens, ornamented with “very magnificent statues.” Troubled, Adams wrote home to his wife that it was not indeed the fine arts which our country required. “The mechanic arts arc those which we have occasion for in a country as yet simple and not far advanced in luxury. I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

FOREIGN visitors to the states, for all their philosophical discussions upon this new man, the American, found time to discourse eloquently on American women. Some thought the Boston girls prettiest, others the Philadelphians. On a fine winter day along the north sidewalk of Market Street between Third and Fifth, writes Moreau with careful historical precision, “one can see four hundred young persons, each of whom would certainly be followed on any Paris promenade.” These maidens, so charming and adorable at fifteen, unfortunately will be “faded at twentythree, old at thirty-five, decrepit at forty or fortyfive.” And how extraordinary that a woman should leave her hair its natural color! Rouge was proscribed and so was powder. The prudery of young American matrons was unconscionable. When a gentleman at an evening party inquired if French ladies rode horseback, hearing that they did, “like men . . . all the women blushed,” writes Barbé-Marbois, “hid themselves behind their fans and finally burst into laughter. They cannot understand how a woman can make her toilet before a man, or even how she can dress herself in the presence of her husband.”

All this was very ridiculous, said Moreau. He had seen a woman make her brother leave the room while she changed the diaper of her son, aged five weeks. Certain words were forbidden: garter, legs, knees, shirt. American women divided their bodies in two: from the head to the waist was stomach, the rest was ankles. In God’s name how could a doctor guess the location of a female ailment? “He is forbidden the slightest touch,” writes Moreau. “His patient, even at the risk of her life, leaves him in the vaguest doubt.”

And what a pity the Americans servilely followed the English custom of sending the women from table at the end of dessert! Surely, wrote Chastellux, “every amusement which separates men from women is contrary to the welfare of society, calculated to render one of the sexes boorish and the other dull, and to destroy, in short, that sensibility, the source of which Nature has placed in interchange between the sexes.” There was an awful solemnity to young American ladies. When one of them at a soiree was urged to sing, she sat on her chair straight as a poker, her eyes fixed upon the floor. “One waited until her voice began to proclaim that she was not petrified.”

The visitors were experiencing at best a provincial society. Men and women had not had time to acquire the poise, the light laughter and badinage of Parisian drawing rooms. In these American cities, Chastellux adds, “if society becomes easy and gay there, if they learn to appreciate pleasure when it comes without being formally invited, then one will be able to enjoy all the advantages resulting from their customs and manners without having to envy anything in Europe.”

The Frenchmen were only discovering what one is bound to find in a young civilization and a raw new world: rigidity, clannishness, suspicion of the stranger. Easy gaiety and easy laughter, the absence of prudery — did these belong then to rank, to money, to a conscious knowledge of power and place? Simplicity of manners, Quaker plainness, New England ladies with unpowdered hair, young wives and young husbands with austere morals, “men of principle” — one could not look for this and sophisticated elegance all in one place and time. French visitors were bored by the simplicity and stiffness, but they acknowledged a corresponding significance. “These same men,” wrote BarbéMarbois, “who open their doors themselves, who go on foot to judge the people, who buy their own food, are those who have brought about this Revolution.” It was these men who, when necessary, raised a musket and marched on the enemy. “And between ourselves,” finished Barbé-Marbois, “I am not sure that people who have porters, stewards, butlers, and covered carriages with springs, would have offered the same resistance to despotism.”