4391 FOOD AND CLOTHING 363 walls; nor many books, nor any periodicals, to be seen (unless perhaps a small weekly paper). No woman had ever cooked by a stove. Household lights were dim, ill-smelling candles, molded in the home, or smoky wicks in whale-oil lamps. If a householder let his fire "go out," he borrowed live coals from a neighbor or struck sparks into tinder with flint and steel. If man or child had to have an arm amputated, or broken bones set, the pain had to be borne without the merciful aid of anæsthetics. The village shop made and sold shoes and hats. All the other clothing of the ordinary family was homemade, and from homespun cloth. The awkward shapes of coat and trousers that resulted from such tailoring long remained marked features in Yankee caricature. And says Professor McMaster, "Many a well-to-do father of a family of to-day expends each year on coats and frocks and finery a sum sufficient a hundred years ago to have defrayed the public expenses of a flourishing village, — schoolmaster, constable, and highways included." Farmer, mechanic, and "storekeeper" all had plain food in abundance, but in little variety. Breakfast, "dinner," and "supper" saw much the same combinations of salt pork, salt fish, potatoes and turnips, rye bread, and dried apples, with fresh meat for the town mechanic perhaps once a week. Among vegetables not yet known were cauliflower, sweet corn, lettuce, cantaloupes, rhubarb, and tomatoes; while tropical fruits, like oranges and bananas, were the rare luxuries of the rich. the rich could not have ice in summer. Even In all externals, life was to change more in the next hundred years than it had changed in the past thousand. 439. Political standards were low, as we have seen. Says Professor McMaster (With the Fathers, 71):-"In all the frauds and tricks that go to make up the worst form of 'practical politics' - the men who founded our State and National governments were always our equals and often our masters." To be sure there was less bribery than in more recent times The great corporations, - railways, municipal lighting companies, and so on, which, in their contest for special privileges, were to become the chief source of corrupting later legislatures and city councils, had not yet appeared. Public servants had infinitely less temptation to betray their trust for private gain than now; but public opinion as to the crime was far less sensitive than to-day. 440. For private life, drunkenness was the American vicewith victims in all classes and in almost every family. The diet (§ 438) created a universal craving for strong drink. Foreigners complained, too, of a lack of cleanliness, and were shocked by the brutal fights at public gatherings, with biting off of ears and gouging out of eyes as commonplace accompaniments. Likewise, they found American society coarse and immodest in conversation (like English society two generations earlier), but not immoral in conduct. As everywhere else in the world, barbarous legal punishments and loathsome jail life still flourished. The insane were caged, like wild beasts, in dungeons underneath the ordinary prisons; and debt brought more men to prison than any crime. 441. America was justly famous for its political writings in connection with the Revolution and the Constitution. Otherwise, after the death of Franklin, the country had had no man of letters; and it had little desire for literature. Painting reached a high point with Copley, Stuart, and Benjamin West; but these American artists could not earn a mechanic's living at home, and were forced to seek patronage in England. New England had developed her remarkable system of private endowed academies, for a few bright and energetic boys, as fitting schools for college; but the Boston Latin School was almost the only survivor of the Puritan attempt at public "grammar schools." Several more colleges had been organized toward 1800 (cf. § 198); but the instruction was barren, and attendance was meager. Harvard had a faculty of a president, three professors, and four tutors. The elementary schools, § 442] SIMPLE AND RUDE 365 even in New England, had decayed, commonly, into a twomonths' badly taught term in winter, for boys, and a like term, worse taught, in summer, for girls. In the South, North Carolina and Georgia were trying, rather feebly, to redeem the pledges of their democratic constitutions ($270). North Carolina had established fourteen academies, supported by land grants and State lotteries; and Georgia set aside large amounts of wild land and of confiscated Loyalist property to support schools and academies. That HARVARD COLLEGE ABOUT 1770. From an engraving by Paul Revere. State also planned a noble "university" - which was to comprise all the public schools of all grades. Distinct instruction in law and medicine was beginning in two or three of the larger colleges; but, for many years to come, most young men who wished to become lawyers or doctors, prepared themselves mainly by studying in the office of an older practitioner. Most colleges offered training in theology. 442. Three hopeful conditions in American life in 1800, not yet touched upon, explain in large measure the wonderful progress of our people in the century that followed. These were the abundance of free land, the intellectual activity among even the agricultural classes; and the peculiar American talent for mechanical invention. a. Free land, to be had for the taking, had been from the beginning the basis of American democracy. In colonial times it had protected the artisan against attempts by the aristocratic classes to keep down his wages by law-since he could lay aside his trade for a farm. So, too, in 1800, free land for some meant better wages and industrial freedom for all the working classes. True, wages and the standard of living were still low (§ 438); but this was because no great amount of wealth had been accumulated. Such wealth and comfort as existed was distributed less unequally than now. For the farming class itself, too, free land meant that only the best soils had to be used, and that, even on them, there was no such demand for costly fertilizing as in the Old World. Agriculture, the main American industry, was amazingly productive, even with the primitive methods of that day. This free land, however, was already becoming harder to get. At the close of the Revolution, Virginia and other States with large unsettled territory paid their soldiers largely in military "land warrants." Each such warrant authorized the holder to locate and get title to a certain amount of any wild public land that suited him. But such lands were mainly at some distance from the settlements, and multitudes of soldiers sold their land warrants—often for a song- to large speculators, who then secured vast tracts in the most desirable districts. As early as 1784, Washington declared that such "forestallers" had left hardly a valuable spot in Virginia's lands within reach of the Ohio. He had reason to know, for he was just back from the West where he himself had located enormous holdings, partly on military warrants purchased from soldiers. (Cf. § 334.) b. The second consideration was even more important. In every Old-World land the men who tilled the soil were a peasantry slow, stolid, unenterprising, wholly distinct from the rest of society. Here, in 1800, the men who tilled the soil -to quote Francis A. Walker's passage:— § 4421 THE LAND OF PROMISE 367 "were the same kind of men precisely as those who filled the professions: or were engaged in commercial or mechanical pursuits. Of two sons of the same mother, one [the weakling of the family perhaps, and so thought unfit for a farmer] became a lawyer, perhaps a judge, or went down to the city and became a merchant, or gave himself to political affairs and became a governor or a member of Congress. The other stayed upon the ancestral homestead, or made a new one for himself and his children out of the public domain, remaining all his life a plain hardworking farmer [the children of the two families mingling without suspicion of social or intellectual distinction]. . . . There was then no other country in the world, . . . where equal mental activity and alertness [were] applied to the soil as to trade and industry." c. Of mechanical insight and invention, to quote General Walker again, "There is only one nation in the world to the mass of whose population A COLONIAL SPINNING WHEEL, now preserved. in Daniel Webster's old home in Marshfield, Massachusetts. In Webster's boyhood, his. mother, in the farm home, spun the wool for his clothing on this wheel or on one like it. this form of genius can be attributed. That nation is our own. There are few Americans of American stock, at least through-out the Northern States, who have not mechanical aptitude in a measure which elsewhere would make them marked men. 'The American invents as the Greek chiselled, as the Venetian painted, as the modern Italian sings." FOR FURTHER READING.-Henry Adams' History of the United States during the First Administration of Thomas Jefferson, I, 1-74. The next hundred pages of the same is advisable also. This is the best reference on American conditions in 1800. Francis A. Walker's Making of a Nation (66-72) treats the matter of the last section more satisfactorily |