Not long ago a distinguished New Yorker, manager for many years of the great National Horse Show, was asked for his opinion of the famous, vanished carriage-building firm of Rrewster it Company. Wouldn’t he describe them as “the Tiffany of the carriage business”? Not at all, he replied. “Rather, I would say that Tiffany is the Rrewster of the jewelry trade.”
Running through the dark center of American history there is a vivid red thread of tragedy. Deep in the national subconscious lies the stain put there by the fact that through nearly half of its independent existence the nation had to live with an intolerable thing which could neither be rationally justified nor peacefully disposed of—the institution of human slavery. Men a century ago referred to it delicately as “the peculiar institution,” and they had found the precise expression for it. It was peculiar: in its continued existence, and in the effect which it had on the men who had to live with it and, finally, on their descendants.
Ever since the white men first fell upon them, the Indians of what is now the United States have been hidden from white men’s view by a number of conflicting myths. The oldest of these is the myth of the Noble Red Man or the Child of Nature, who is credited either with a habit of flowery oratory of implacable dullness or else with an imbecilic inability to converse in anything more than grunts and monosyllables.
That first myth was inconvenient. White men soon found their purposes better served by the myth of ruthless, faithless savages, and later, when the “savages” had been broken, of drunken, lazy good-fornothings. All three myths coexist today, sometimes curiously blended in a schizophrenic confusion such as one often sees in the moving pictures. Through the centuries the mythical figure has been variously equipped; today he wears a feather headdress, is clothed in beaded buckskin, dwells in a tepee, and all but lives on horseback.
Captain Allan McLane rode out before dawn of June 16, 1778, to keep a dangerous rendezvous. With his cavalry he had been probing the British perimeter around Philadelphia, trying to learn for General Washington at Valley Forge whether the enemy was about to evacuate the city. The previous day a young girl had slipped through the British lines and had told McLane that her father would bring him “important intelligence” between daybreak and sunrise on the sixteenth. They were to meet at the “Horse House” near the Rising Sun Tavern in the countryside north of Germantown.
McLane, whose daring sorties and hairbreadth escapes had made him one of the most romantic figures in the Continental Army, rode to the appointment fully aware that it might be a carefully baited British trap. And so he took precautions. He ordered his entire troop to follow at a distance and to conceal themselves behind the tavern. He placed two vedettes on the lane leading past the tavern between the Old York and Frankfort roads, with orders to fire their pistols at the first sign of the enemy. Then he rode on alone.
In all the history of the American frontier, only two bands of pioneers achieved near-perfect order while advancing westward and planting their settlements. One was made up of the Puritans who founded their wilderness Zion on the shores of Massachusetts Bay during the early Seventeenth Century. Welded into a tight-knit social group by a fanatical faith in their God and His earthly prophets, and sensing that the bleak land where chance had cast them could be tamed only by community effort, they showed few of the individualistic traits normal among frontiersmen; instead each subordinated his personal ambitions in the interest of the welfare of all.
He was tall and he was homely, but in a way people generally find endearing. Amid all those high stocks and flowing locks, among all those grim statesmen and noble Romans who populated the first five decades of our Nineteenth-Century political life, his is one ol the lew genial figures. Over the gap of a century, he is still warm and likeable; a modern man might, one senses, sit down with him and not be lectured, orated at, or peppered with platitudes. A senator at 29 (a little illegally, since the Constitution requires a hoary 30), elected Speaker of the House the day he first took his seat in it, at 34, he seemed marked lor the highest America offers. That he fell short and never made the presidency, and took it with good humor, won him the nation’s heart. The people loved Henry Clay.
“The man who really fought the Civil War, whether he tame from the North or from the South, was pretty largely a sweaty private in a somewhat heterogeneous uniform, a man who could get by on parade when he had to hut who spent most of his time slogging it out in mud. dust, rain, sleet, blistering sunshine, or other uncomfortable conditions. He rarely bothered to strike an attitude, and although artists forever tried to giorify him he mostly was an unglamourous individual who did the best he could, kept his mouth shut, and paid the price lor what lias since become known as a very romantic and picturesque war.
Maybe Mrs. Stowe wasn’t so big, after all. She fulminated against slavery, and a great many high-minded people listened and took fire, but the blaze that finally killed slavery was not really kindled that way. New England was the big center of abolitionist fervor, but slavery really died because of the Middle West, which had small use for fervor (outside of New England enclaves like Ohio’s Western Reserve) but which was firmly attached to the cash-and-carry sentiments which had been built into it from the beginning. Slavery at last came to its end largely because the Middle West would not put up with it any longer. This is probably a slight overstatement, like most flat pronouncements, but there is a good deal to it.