January 2011

In October, 1818, a pale, spindle-legged young Virginia planter stood before the Prince George Agricultural Society and nervously read an essay he had prepared on calcareous manures. Edmund Ruffin was 24 then, small and sickly, with a preposterously long mane that hung far below his shoulders. His delivery was poor, but his eyes burned with zeal and impatience as he told new truths about the use of lime. When he finished speaking, he thanked his listeners and went home. It had been, he disappointedly believed, an academic exercise.

But Ruffin was wrong. Reprinted in a magazine in 1821, this obscure young man’s essay in time swept the South and made his name a household word. Expanded into a book, it ran to five editions in the next three decades. Farmers who scoffed at “book agriculture” clamored for it. They began beseeching him for answers to all their farming ills. Former President John Tyler, nearing the sunset of a long career, acclaimed emotionally: “You have done more good to the country than all our political great men put together.”

One of the genuine but little-known classics of Civil War literature is a book called The Battle of Gettysburg , written by a Northern soldier named Frank Aretas Haskell. Haskell fought in the battle, and less than two weeks after the fighting ceased he wrote a detailed account of what he had seen and experienced and sent the manuscript to his brother, back in Wisconsin.

One of the genuine but little-known classics of Civil War literature is a book called The Battle of Gettysburg , written by a Northern soldier named Frank Aretas Haskell. Haskell fought in the battle, and less than two weeks after the fighting ceased he wrote a detailed account of what he had seen and experienced and sent the manuscript to his brother, back in Wisconsin.

Whenever the Reverend John Eliot walked along the Indian trail from Roxbury to Dorchester Mill in the autumn weather, he tried to put the time to proper use by continuing the metrical version of the Psalms that he and Richard Mather and Thomas Weld were working on. His somber figure pinpointed the brightness of the afternoon as he strode along, heedless of the crickets’ antiphonal shrilling. Late goldenrod and Michaelmas daisies encroached on the way. brushing against his cloak. Slowly, so very slowly, the Old Testament lines formed themselves in his mind:

It all happened 94 years ago, and all of ihe men who were there are dead now; but the ground today is just the same, the sun still slants down in late afternoon from the crest of the blue mountain wall to the west, and quaint, archaic statues mark the places where living men once stormed and shouted at one another … and, taking everything together, Gettysburg today is a place where gallant spirits still tell their story of high sacrifice and undying devotion. There is a cemetery, there are gentle ridges rolling unbroken toward the sunset, and here and there one can find spots where everything that is significant in the American dream speaks to today’s world with an undying voice.

If Chicago has reason for remembering Valentine’s Day, New York has reason, too, for remembering a famous, less grisly fourteenth of February in her own annals. For on that clay in 1842 Manhattanites threw sophistication and decorum to the East River winds and put on a public reception that was to be the talk of the town for many a Knickerbocker moon. The occasion was the arrival of a distinguished British visitor, the creator of Pickwick and Little Nell, and the event was the Boz Ball.

Half-Horse, Half-Alligator

Central to the American experience is the fact that in this land men have had to create their own traditions. Out of a past still too close to be fully understood have come legends which turn into articles of faith before they are even complete. And no article of faith has had greater force with us than the one which centers about the era of the great frontier and its part in forming the American character.

The precise formulation of this article of faith was probably best undertaken by Frederick Jackson Turner, who saw the distinctive quality of American character and institutions as deriving from the frontier experience. What we believe in, do, and are, Turner suggested, can be understood only with reference to the western experience, which has been much more important than any heritage we have from European culture. Indeed, Turner saw American democracy itself as coming “stark and strong and full of life, from the American forest.”

In exploring the highways and byways of American politics, I have been drawn to the conclusion that there is more real conservation of ancient English institutions in the rich geological strata of American politics—at the state and county level, perhaps, even more than at the federal level—than there is in England itself. Americans come to Britain to see the roots of their political system in the past and find much to inspire them in symbols and relics and ritual and medieval mummery of one sort or another. But to see many historic British institutions working more robustly than they have worked in Britain for years and to rediscover the type of political conflict which characterized so much of British history, Englishmen should go to the New World. Many of the more bewildering and irritating features of American politics—the separation of powers between President and Congress, the odd two-party system which usually fails to polarize opinions—would be far less mysterious to Englishmen if they knew rather more than most of them do about their own political history.

This poem was not written for publication or to impress the constituents of the author, nor are these empty phrases. The gentleman from the Plymouth District of Massachusetts belonged to no party and meant every word he said. Placing duty before self, national interests before local, and justice before all, he served in the House through the long years between 1831 and 1848, when, at eighty, he died in honor at his post. No ordinary legislator, he had already been minister to Russia and the Court of St. James, professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard, secretary of state, and President of the United States. Who knows whether Congress will see the like again of such a poem or such a man as John Quincy Adams?