January 2011

Even today it is not always easy to see just what was going on in the Gilded Age. We think of it as a time of vulgarity, strife, and self-seeking; we often are as dismayed when we look back on it as the reformers were when they looked out on it; and in general we see little good in it. John A. Garraty takes a fresh look at the period in The New Commonwealth, 1877–1890 , and his stimulating book makes an excellent companion piece to Mr. Sproat’s.

It is Mr. Garraty’s notion that when they seemed to be engaged in a brutal devil-take-the-hindmost race Americans were actually learning how to work together.

O n cold, foggy morning in March, 1791, a young French military engineer in the service of the United States government rode out on horseback to a stretch of farmland between the Potomac and Anacostia rivers to contemplate the wide sweep of boulevard he would cut through alder and blackberry bushes as the great ceremonial way of a nation. It would be, he wrote later in his imperfect English to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, ”… a grand and majestic avenue … as grand as it will be agreeable and convenient … and all along iicle of which may be placed play houses, room of assembly, ;iccadeinies and all such sort of places as may be attractive to the learned and afford diversion to the idle.” The young Frenchman, Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a veteran of the American Revolution, had been commissioned by President Washington to plan a Federal City on the banks of the Potomac, and this majestic: and convenient street was to be the grand thoroughfare of the new national capital.

The emotion stirred up in Irish hearts by New York City’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade, probably the oldest and largest annual ethnic demonstration in America, was described a few years ago by the late Tim Costello. Tim was a dignified saloon keeper who frowned on most of the usual outbursts of Gaelic sentimentality; the singing of “Mother Machree,” for example, left him unmoved. “Nobody ever mentions Father Machree,” he often complained. “The poor man was undoubtedly working himself to the bone, trying to hold the family together, while Mother Machree was gabbing with the neighbor women, and all the dishes piled up in the sink.”

The first summer William A. Barnhill packed up his 5-by-y-inth view camera and glass plates and headed for the mountains of North Carolina, Woodrow Wilson was President of the United States, Henry Ford’s Model T was rolling off the Highland Park assembly line in ever-increasing numbers, and Congress had just passed the income-tax amendment to the Constitution. The twentieth century was well into its second decade and America had become a modern nation.

Barnhill’s destination, which was nearly equidistant from Detroit and Washington, was as far removed from modern times as it was possible to be in the United States. Western North Carolina lay in the heart of the southern Appalachians—an immense, homogeneous region that sprawled over eight states. It was a territory larger than New England, peopled by some three million Americans of colonial ancestry and predominantly British stock, but of this area the average citizen knew about as much as he did of Zanzibar or Zara.

This article is the first in a new series that will appear frequently in AMERICAN HERITAGE. "Before the Colors Fade" is the title of a recent biography of General George S. Patton, Jr. and is used with the kind permission of the author, Fred Ayer, Jr., and the publisher, Houghton Mifflin. --The Editors

Sin, the conviction of sin, the assurance of punishment for sin, pervaded pioneer America like the fever and ague, and took nearly as many victims. Taught that in Adam’s fall we had sinned all, threatened with hell-fire by revivalist preachers, tortured by the guilt of intimate offenses, earnest youths whipped themselves into madness and suicide, and died crying that they had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is unforgivable, though no one knows quite what it is.

The year 1831 was known as the Great Revival, when itinerant evangelists powerfully shook the bush and gathered in a great harvest of sinners. In September of that year John Humphrey Noyés, a twenty-yearold Dartmouth graduate and a law student in Putney, Vermont, attended such a revival. He was in a mood of metaphysical despair, aggravated by a severe cold. During the exhortings the conviction of salvation came to him. Light gleamed upon his soul. “Ere the day was done,” he wrote later, “I had concluded to devote myself to the service and ministry of God.”

“Here we are in the most miserable station in the world, attempting the impossible—the suppression of the slave trade. We look upon the aflair as complete humbug.… So long as a slave worth a few dollars here fetches £80£–100 in America, men and means will be found to evade even the strictest blockade.” So wrote an officer serving with the British antislavcry patrol along the coast of West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. And a humbug, very largely, it was; just as seventy years later the American attempt to suppress rumrunners was a humbug as long as people kept buying and drinking. The slave markets in Bra/il, Cuba, and the American South still nourished, and the more difficult it was to get a cargo of slaves to market, the more lucrative the venture became.

Lewis Mumford, one of the true savants of the twentieth century, is best known as a critic of modern culture against the background of Western social history. Among his many notable books are The City in History (1961), which won a National Book Award, The Conduct of Life (1951), and The Myth of the Machine (1967). For a new edition of the essays and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson to be published soon by Doubleday, Mr.