The Stranger in America; or, Letters to a Gentleman in German: comprising sketches of the manners, society and national peculiarities of the United States

Letter I

Preliminary Remarks— Emperor of China and his Bio grapher — Modern Travellers — My own manner of Esti mating America — Institutions of this Country — My Long Residence in it — Effects on the Mind of a Summer in Phi ladelphia — Trade in Ice — Poem of the Fredoniad . 1

Letter II

Morning after a hotly Contested Election — Marathon men — Carroll of Carrollton — American Elections— Party Spirit — Lawful Opposition — Liberty in America—Govern ment of Law — Good Traits of the Americans — The Eastern Penitentiary — Penal Law — Affecting Incident . 25

Letter III

Trip to Niagara proposed — Private Conveyance of Let ters — Method of sitting in America — Exchange of News papers — Steamboats — Robert Fulton — Origm of great Discoveries — The River Delaware — Canals and Rail- CONTENTS. roads — Energy and Activity of the Americans — Their perpetual endeavours to improve — Division of Labour — Anecdote — Method of Transferring Baggage from the Steamboat to the Railway — Approach to New York by Water — Busy Scene — Peculiarity of the Situation of New York — Names of American Rivers . . .52

Letter IV

German Emigrants — National Cleanliness — Importance of Science — American Servants — Dress of American Wo men — Negro Servants ; their love of finery — Estimation of Women in America — Anecdotes — Ladies in the Senate — Age of Wigs — Universal application of the term, "Lady" — Female Inconsistency — Single Life and Mar ried Life — Self-possession of American Girls — Female Education in the States — Description of American Wo men — Beauty of English Ladies — Brightness of Mind — Tableaux Vivans — Infrequency of Unhappy Marriages — The beautiful Albanian — Thorwaldson's Rapture — Pas sage in a Work written by James Bonaparte in 1527 — Niggers 83

Letter V

A Spanish Merchant — Affecting Story of a Spanish Girl — Death at Sea— Burial in the Deep, or post mortem Pre servation in Spirits — Reflections — Termination of Nelson's Career CONTENTS. VIII

Letter VI

Old Letters— Their Charm— My Old Journal— A Coinci dence — My adventures in the Battle of Waterloo — Strange Contrasts — Napoleon's return from Elba — My Enlistment as a Volunteer — March from Berlin — Prince Bliicher — Our First Parade — Presentiments — Battle of Ligny — My Wound — Reception of the Wounded at Namur and Liege — Julie — Love 152

Letter VII

Return to my Comrades — A Soldier's Home — Typhus Fever— Old Frangois— My Restoration to Health — Return Home — My Reception — A Waterloo Dog — Rapid Communication between New York and Foreign Countries — Anecdote ........ 195 3

Letter VIII

Morning in a large City — Naples, Rome, London, Paris, and New York — Messenger Women — An Honest Cook — Markets — Italian Farmers — Love of Good Eating vindi cated — Importance of Gastric Concerns — Small Churches and large Markets — Moral Influence of Cookery . 209

Letter IX

Excursion at Sea— Grandeur and Beauty of the Ocean — Caspar Hauser — Irish Emigrants — A Faction-Fight — CONTENTS. Penny Magazine — Dictionnaire des Girovettes — The Ter rific Register — Temperature and Temper — Supreme excellence of Shakspeare — Appreciation in Germany of that great Poet 231

Letter X

Major Jack Downing's Letters — Authorship of Junius — Yankee Dialect — Cape Horn — American Steamboat — Animated Scene — Steamboats on the Hudson — Ladies in Mourning — A Type Merchant — The Rhine and the Hud son — Quick Eating — Music at Banquets — Washington Irving — Literary originality not common in America — Causes of this — Prison of Singsing — Frequent inconsistency between names and things — Contretemps in Tra velling — Reception on the Wharf in Albany . . 253

Letter XI

Music on board Steamboats — Weber's Hunters' Cho rus — Effect of Music on the Feelings — Universal circulation of Weber's Tune— Music the kindest of all Arts . TO WASHINGTON IRVING, ESQ. Sir, In dedicating the following pages to you, I know that I have but acted in accordance with the view of the author, which in this case entirely coincides with my own. Whether, in doing so, we meet your wishes is another question ; but it seemed so formal to ask your permission to dedicate so trifling a work to you, and this previous permission appears so decidedly to counteract the intended courtesy of a dedication, that I preferred to grace this volume with your name without your consent obtained beforehand. However you may differ from some opinions stated in the work, I beg you to accept its dedication to you as a token of admiration, which the author and his editor feel for the productions with which you DEDICATION. have enriched the literature of two great nations.

The token, I am aware, is very disproportionate to the meaning it is intended to convey, but may not even indistinct characters express a glowing sen tence ? I am, with great regard, Sir, Your most obedient servant, FRANCIS LIEBER. Philadelphia, Nov. 1834. THE STRANGER IN AMERICA.

Letter I

Preliminary Remarks — Emperor of China and his Biographer — Modern Travellers — My own n*">nner of Estimating America — Institutions of this Country — My Long Residence in it — Effects on the Mind of a Summer in Philadelphia — Trade in Ice — Poem of the Fredoniad. So you wish me, my dear friend, to write a whole " series of letters." Why, you seem to have studied with the Franciscans, with whom "begging boldly" is constitutional. " Vadatis pro eleemosyna confidenter,"* says their found er and saint in the constitution of the order. * '■ Go and beg boldly." — Editor. VOL. I. B o AGES CHARACTERISED And on what shall I write ? On the United States ? You give me a subject as vast as their territory, and surely you do not wish a series of letters running through six volumes as big and heavy as a novel of old !

Besides, a book of that size would be quite out of season. Now-a-days every thing, even commentaries on a code, must be twelve-moed out to the public. Nay, this diminutive size is too troublesome for many, may I not say for most, people ? They require their intellectual dishes to be chopped and minced into a newspaper pie. " Sir," said an old and thoroughly experienced editor lately to me, " an article calculated for being read ought never to exceed half a column," and he knows the palate of the public as well as any man in the meat or fruit market. Were I to write a history of modern civilization, I should follow the most philosophical rule, by making my division into periods according to striking mani festations of powerful and characteristic princi ples. I would call one of the great divisions the period of folios ; the time when contro versialists knew of no more poisonous arrow to bury in the heart of their opponent than to remind him that he had written but a quarto !

BY THE SIZE OF BOOKS. 3 See D'lsraeli's Curiosities, where he speaks of Nominalists. This huge folio age might go down to Cartesius or thereabouts.* Whatever was the subject, folio was the requisite form. Next is the epoch of quartos and the dawn of newspapers — small and single leaves, half ofthe first page occupied by a quaint title in letters phantastically ornamented. The discovery of a new world, and the news of all the wonders successively appearing to the European there were given to astounded mankind in little di- * Though our author seems to take the whole in joke, there is much scope for reflection in his remark ; and not only is the size of books characteristic of an age, hut also, and perhaps in a still greater degree, their price. But a few centuries ago, a breviary would be left to one heir as an equivalent for all the other personal property, even of considerable value, bequeathed to another.

At present we have Penny Magazines, Cyclopædias, Gazetteers, &c, accessible to the meanest. Knowledge, whilst soaring, on the one hand, to the highest regions, and expanding with increasing vigour in all directions, has, on the other hand, followed the general tendency of our age, that of popularization, while atfirst it greatly co-operatedin bringing it about. It is of no use to speak of " penny literature" with the sneer of learned aristocracy. The cheap catechisms which contain the simplest and most important principles of Christianity belong to the "penny literature;" and complaints, too, were raised in early times against the Christian religion, on account of its having no mystery for an initiated few. — Editor. b2 AGES CHARACTERISED minutive sheets, true "flying leaves,"* not so large as now the smallest handbill, which in forms you of a pocket having been picked or a colt having leaped a fence.

Next comes the period of octavos ; newspapers grow rapidly, so does the quantity of books. It is succeeded by the age of twelve-mos (as the booksellers classically call duodecimos ;) newspapers expand with the quickness of a new born butterfly, and stretch from the tree of knowledge like far-reaching palm-leaves, to overshadow civilization, which grows beneath ; and, at length, we arrive at our own time ; books have shrunk to 24mos, (yes, my friend, encyclopædias have been issued in 48mos,) and newspapers have grown so large that Dido would have made a better bargain than she did, had she asked for her colony as much land as can be covered by a London Extra Times, or a handbill of an American menagerie. I have lately seen one of eleven feet by nine and a half, and well executed, too. A German philosopher might develop some profound reasonings on this peculiar dimunition * The bookbinders call Hy-leaves the blank leaves between the printed pages of a hook and its cover. — Editor.

RY THE SIZE OF BOOKS. 5 on the one side and growth on the other. There must be some mysterious principle in this ten dency to the inverse ratio. Formerly, knowledge was hidden in deep and inaccessible wells, or it ran in contracted but deep channels ; now li terature often flows, like shallow water, over a whole country, sometimes irrigating,sometimes inundating, sometimes cboking, the germs of noble plants by the sterile sand which it de posits. In olden times, folios and quartos were often written on the most trifling things ; now loquacious editors tell us of a big pumpkin, a large turnip, a monstrous cabbage, or an excellent hat in that store, and good confec tionary in another, (which smacks of tasting it.) Of kings and princes other people tell us of their every step, and of every breath they draw.

The emperor of China manages this matter the best ; he has his biographer close at his heels, who notes down every trifle of his majesty's life. Editors do all this for them selves — they are their own historiographers; make us participate in all their personal diffi culties and quarrels, or tell us that they went a few days ago to such a place and found the dinner abundant, &c. Ecco a fair specimen of what you have to expect in letters of mine — excursions to the right and left, adhering to the subject like a member of Congress. I am in ordinary accustomed to such dead ahead scribbling, that in my letters I must be permitted to tack about after the manner of Commodore Trunnion, and to get at my point as besiegers do — in a zigzag. Do you agree to this ? I lay down my pen ; draw up your spectacles, and weigh the matter well.

It must be a treaty solemn as the paix cl auherge* between Yorick and the Piedmontese lady, clearly defined, well understood, and strictly observed. You say, yes ? You will not grumble and scold if I sometimes leap about like a chamois in its mountains ; or would the com parison with the noisy grasshopper be more in keeping ? You say yes ? Very well, then I return to my first subject : on what shall I write ? It is easy to take a passage in Liverpool for New York, to enjoy the aromatic rolls at breakfast, to go about and philosophize on every handbill, generalize every straw, explain every * The author probably calls this peace after the Treaty of the Bridge between Castile and Arragon by the mediation of France, because concluded on the bridge of the Bidassoa.— Editor. push you may get in a bustling street by the elementary principles of the government under which the society around you lives ; to deliver letters of recommendation and see how they operate, to talk about jolting stages and chewing passengers, to meditate on a baby and a hog, to deplore the want of wigs on the bench,* or pronounce a wise opinion on the number of copies of the fathers of the church in the United States, or sweepingly to declare all New Eng land to be inhabited by wretches prostrated before Mammon, their only god ; it is easy (I now speak of the most refined and exalted tra veller that ever visited this country, a reverend * We think the author must here have in his eye Captain Basil Hall, who, in his Travels in North America, raises a lament for the United States because the judges of this country have cast off their wigs.

Every one to his taste ! But what must have been the Captain's feelings when the papers of his country informed him that the whig chancellor appeared in the House of Lords with a wig of considerably smaller size ; and, horribile dictu — when he read that the Bishop of Carlisle appeared in his place in the House of Lords without a wig; and, magis horribile dictu — when he found after a short time that the Bishop of Oxford had followed the ex ample of his right reverend brother of Carlisle ! Thou too, Brutus ! Orthodox Oxford ! Before we had become acquainted with Captain Hall's Travels, we read in the biography of Jovellanos that he was the first Spanish judge who attempted to appear without awig, gentleman,) to crowd a book with statements, which, to name them by their only befitting name, would require three little letters not very frequently used among gentlemen, though of and that it required the whole support of the premier, Count Aranda, to carry this innovation.

We smiled, we laughed at the strong predilections of mankind, at the tenacity with which we cling to errors, follies, evils, sins, hugging them as our dearest blessings, but, now we are better informed, we believe Jovellanos a demagogue, and his opponents sound politicians. They, with Hall and all who believe the British empire would crumble to pieces the very moment when no wig should be seen on the woolsack, have, undoubtedly, studied Lichtenberg's Physiognomy of queues, in which that distinguished writer not only proves the great importance of queues to the general welfare of mankind, but also shows how closely connected their form, twist, and bend, are with the dispositions, views, and desires of the wearer. The work is embellished with engravings representing the most important queues; it was written at the time, when, with innovations of all kinds, the cutting off of queues spread from France eastward.

A continuation of this instructive work ought speedily to be written, and who would do it better than the author of the above mentioned travels ? To say the truth, we have stopped sometimes at the windows of the hairdressers near the learned Inns in London, and silently meditated on the variety, beauty. utility, and superior importance of the wigs in la haute politique . There was the short and closely trimmed covering of a councilor's vertex ; the weightier one to cover the weightier head of the judge ; the flapping periwig of the chancellor, like a lion's mane; and — what is not surpassed in venerable heauty— a bishop's wig? Shall all this splendour pass away? Shall nothing remain with us but naked prose ? Shall life be great import ; or to tell us of foreigners in this country placed by the Yankees as outposts be fore their private fortresses, in order to examine visiters before they are allowed to approach the autochthones themselves, (pooh ! what an ass a man must be to use such a simile, which has no sense, to imagine the possibility of such an absurdity, or to believe others so brainless as to give credit to this clumsy story ;) it is very easy to make a trip of six weeks through the country and yet write a quarto volume, like stripped of all its characteristic ornaments, on which the poet may seize, by taking the sign for the thing?

Shall we be obliged to see all heads in hideous democratic nudity ? Shall the portrait of aTurenne soon stand before us as a beauty unattainable, yet admired, an Apollo of times gone by? Did not Frederic the Great conquer with the long spiral queues of his grenadiers ? Has Napoleon not won his victories with the short stout queues of his guards? Has Eugene not won his battles with flowing locks, slightly tied together? Did Marlborough expect assistance from Mars, with a head shorn like a sheep in June ? If the Romans have conquered the world trimmed like blackguards, what is it to us? they were heathens, and we are Christians. If Magna Charta was extorted by unpowdered heads, it is by well-wigged ones that it was expounded, developed, and applied. Can you imagine Blackstone or Mansfield looking otherwise than a weasel peeping out of a haystack ?

It is blasphemy to imagine them for a moment clipped and stripped of their exalted costume ! Honour for ever to the wig ! — Editor. b5 the clever author who described ajourney round his table : but to speak sensibly of a people and their institutions, to let the " guessing" and the chewing for a moment rest, and occupy our selves with matters of substantial value, to treat them merely with becoming attention and not in a flimsy flippant way, calculated to catch the many, not to gain the thinking, is, I say, by no means impossible, yet not very easy. It requires thinking, patience, a manly calmness, and some pains — requisites not as often met with as the extraordinary faculty enjoyed by some, who can throw off a book as readily as the deer throws off yearly its antlers. Such travellers resemble inexperienced youths, to whom every thing is new, every thing important ; to whom every thing affords the delightful pleasure of proving to themselves and the world their great sagacity by connecting every trifle with deep, hidden motives, first discovered by their own sharp sightedness.

They have not that experience which leads us to look at the essence of things, and to expect less variety in the ground-plan and springs of human affairs than their super ficial appearance would induce the staring no velty-hunter to expect. Two kinds of silly travellers (I do not speak, you will observe, of all the travellers who have written on this country ; very excellent men indeed have been amongst them) are, from time to time, thrown on our shore, almost pe riodically like the eruptions of the Geysers on Iceland. The one class arrives here with a ready-made opinion against the country they have yet to see, and a very high one in favour of themselves. They have not formed their opinion after a careful examination of all the necessary data, but because this opinion suits them, or, because they start from a pre-con ceived idea, vulgarly called prejudice.

What ever they are or may have been, students of mankind or not, whether they have read or seen much or little, as soon as they set foot on this shore, they are suddenly initiated into all branches of human industry and knowledge, know the principles of all occupations, and are judges of all sciences, all arts, and all institutions. But one art which they have never endeavoured to learn and practise is to take things as they are. A gentleman has been an officer in the army and has written a novel — two very good things ; he arrives here, and forthwith begins ; he speaks, now in a flippant, now in a dogmatic style, in one breath, about every thing that comes under his eye, and very many that do not come within the horizon of his vision — about science, arts, politics, trade, com merce, statistics, society, education, industry, history, laws, canals, railroads, scenery, agriculture, cookery, navigation, horses, morals, prisons, pauperism, about every thing on, above, and under the earth ; he is an adept in every subject cognizable by man.

A polyhis tor like Leibnitz would be but a schoolboy compared to a traveller of this kind. You know me, my dear friend, too well to suspect me of criticizing others merely because they criticize the United States. Nothing is farther from me; do I always praise this country . If a man prefer a monarchy to a republic, why not ; let him state his reasons, and try to make out his case by taking the Ameri cans as an example. One of my best friends in Rome was a Dominican, and with more than one royalist I am on terms of intimacy. Let me but see sincerity, the wish to arrive at truth, and readiness to acknowledge it, and I am satisfied. I am, indeed, not one of those who believe that every institution here is incompre hensible to all human beings except the natives of this country. The institutions of the United States are the work of man, and can be under stood by men, if they are founded in reason ; but the action of a cotton spinning machine cannot be comprehended in half an hour by one previously unacquainted with it, nor a nation with all its various aspects within a day.

I love spirited animadversion dearly ; but let it be spirited, and not a bubble of vanity, and, above all, let it abstain from positive falsehoods with which the reverend tourist has seen fit to grace every page of his classical production. The other kind of travellers arrives with an opinion equally ready, but enthusiastically in favour of the country. They expect — Heaven knows what. The most phantastic illusions fill their brains. They believe to find at every corner at least one Aristides, on every farm a Cincinnatus, and every street-sweeper with silk ribands, couleur de rose, flowing from his li berty cap, which he would be as far from doffing before Gessler's hat on the pole as was William Tell. When I was in Liverpool, I visited, with a friend of mine and another young man, a self-deceiver of this kind, the packet which was to carry me the next day to this shore.

The first thing we happened to see on board this noble and elegant vessel was an old hat, belonging, perhaps, to the "doctor."* "What," exclaimed my friend, apparently surprised, " an old hat in youthful America !" I thought it a good hit, but it had no effect on the enthusiast ; he continued to believe that heroes and matchless citizens were stalking about here arm in arm with pure philanthropists and neversullied politicians. He crossed the Atlantic, and what was the consequence I need not say. I undertake to foretell of every European arriving here what he will think and say of this country a year hence, if he will fairly tell me at the time what he expects to find. I have done it often, and never failed. With me it was different. I came here ex pecting little, because I expected little from man.

I had lived in many countries and in a great variety of situations ; I had already * It is a strange yet quite general custom with American and English sailors to call the cook, especially when a black man, "the doctor." — Editor. learned to sail, when occasion required it, with a jury-mast on the wide sea of life, nor was its daily tread-mill altogether unknown to me. Experience and reality had already forced upon me, young as I was, that patient shoulder shrugging way of regarding matters and things, which, bitter as it may be, no thinking man, whose lot it is to see mankind through the microscope, can help arriving at. Recollect what men of all ages have said, from Solomon down to the last sage. I think, then, that I took things a little more as they are than many others do ; and this may be the cause of my having arrived at different conclusions.

I found that the Americans have their good and bad points of character. I have won friends among them, whom 1 shall dearly love wher ever I maybe, even among the proscribed New Englanders. Their country I have found wanting in many interesting things and abounding in others. It is true, here is no gallery of pictures or great collection of statues to delight your friend, whom you know to have spent days and days in the Vatican, feeding his soul upon those realized perfections, which Nature seems continually to strive for, INSTITUTIONS OF AMERICA. but which to conceive is left to the human mind. Suppose, however, I were obliged to live in a European provincial town, what should I have there ? Say, what has a man who lives in Manchester or Breslau? I find that people often compare America with Eu rope, when they mean London, Paris, or Rome.

The great interest of this country lies in its institutions. There the observer of society and student of mankind finds enough with which to occupy himself. You may observe at once, in this country, some of the boldest applications of principles, the most recently developed, and the first manifestations, the first pulsations, so to speak, of those principles of life which lie at the bottom of every political society. You may see in the farthest west, beyond the boundaries of organized society, the incipient stages of political relations, of law and justice laid bare, as if prepared for the student of history, and of the gradual development of man as a member of political society. Perhaps all this would become clearer to you, should I write you about the regulators and the manner in which communities, beyond the INSTITUTIONS OF AMERICA. 17 limits of established law, meet the imperious necessity of dealing out justice; of this kind was one of the most interesting cases that ever came to my knowledge, when, lately, the assembled men of a district arrested, tried, and executed a murderer.

By what right . — By the right to punish crime, natural, indis pensable, and inalienable to every society, and growing out of the necessity, both physical and moral, of punishment. The United States form a republic of thirteen millions of inhabitants, founded on broader principles of liberty than any former political society. This is a fact, and is it not interesting to study how so great a fact came to pass ? But you will agree that, with a subject matter of this kind, institutions and their operations must be studied, which is what most travellers are not very willing to do. My habits and occupations have afforded me the opportunity of collecting more materials in regard to the United States than, perhaps, ever a native of a foreign country had either the disposition or opportunity to collect ; whilst my long resi dence here, together with some additional causes, have rendered me intimately acquainted IS QUALIFICATIONS OF THE AUTHOR. with the whole social life of the Americans.

I can say, in this respect, of them what Byron said of his acquaintance with the Italians. If, then, you do not think me quite destitute of skill and a habit of observation, you may possibly, as you in fact intimate in your letter, consider me, in some measure, qualified to give a correct picture of this, at least, interesting country. But I could not do it, even if so many travellers had not given me a distaste for this kind of authorship. I dislike the idea of being classed among the travellers by profession. They are, next to the Bedouins, the most dangerous class of people to deal with, and I no longer permit one of them to ap proach me with his pencil unsheathed. " Lay down your arms," I cry, " come like an honest man, but no stabbing in the back, and you are welcome ; don't drink my wine, and go many thousand miles off and say you drank cider; and put things into my mouth which never dropped from my lips."

Yet I might give a work, treating of the country, its institutions, and the true state of its civilization, without any gossip of the kind. This could be properly done only in a work STATE OF THEOLOGY. 19 similar to that of Goede on England ;* and still deeper than that ought it to enter into all important matters. The time to do this has not yet come for me, and I dislike exceedingly to be half understood. A true and clear picture of the state of religion, theology, and church affairs, alone would require half a volume. If I say that theology, catholic and protestant, is at least a century behind the theology of Germany — I speak here of the science as such, and of the general state only, because who does not know the distinguished merits of a Stuart in Andover — that we meet with the same controversial views and limited philological knowledge which existed with us at that time, my assertions would be immediately extended, and conclusions made, to which I should be very unwilling to subscribe.