Tell it in Gath

Preface

THE seven chapters included in this book are an abridgment of ten comprised in its complete form. Stress of war-time conditions compelled the omission of a second chapter on Poe and of two others on the work and career of Whistler.

The aim of the work will be clear to all who share the author’s conviction that the world has long owed an unacknowledged debt to the genius of the Southern States of the American Union — a debt whose nature and extent he here attempts to indicate.

Acknowledgment is due the publishers, who have authorized the use of various quotations employed and essential to the verification of the contexts in which they occur, of the following works of reference : The Life of General Albert Sidney Johnston by William Preston Johnston, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman (D. Appleton & Co., New York) ; Battles and Leaders of the Civil War: “The Capture of Fort Donelson” by Gen. Lew Wallace, “Grant’s Last Campaign” by Gen. Horace Porter, “Was Either the Better Soldier?” by Col. T. A. Dodge (in Century Magazine , May, 1890), Life of Lincoln by Nicolay and Hay (Century Co., New York) ; History of the United States , Vol. Ill, by Julian Hawthorne (P. F. Collier & Son, New York) ; Vision of War and Why We Honor Thomas Paine by R. G. Ingersoll (C. P. Farrell, New York); Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Life of Edgar Allan Poe by G. Woodberry (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston).; Essays: “The Socialist Ideal” and “The Woman Question” by Paul Lafargue, Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels (C. H. Kerr & Co., Chicago); World's Famous Orations (Funk & Wagnalls); Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War by Col. G. F. R. Henderson (Longmans, Green & Co., New York); Cambridge Modern History , Vol. VII, The United States: A Political History by Goldwin Smith (Macmillan) ; Leaves of Grass and Specimen Days in America by Walt Whitman (David McKay, Philadelphia); The Army of the Potomac by Chauncey M. Depew (Penn Publishing Co., Philadelphia); Encyclopedia Americana.

J. A. O.

London, Canada, May 15, 1918.

Contents

Chapter Page

I. The Tradition of New England Ascendency ... 7

II. The Enigma of Puritanism 15

Chapter I The Tradition Of New England Ascendency

Doubtless the pleasure is as great Of being cheated as to cheat. — Hudibras.

Innocently accepted and credulously followed by historians and their readers, fashion has left us a rich and varied heritage of false record and absurd opinion. It is, indeed, the visible, yet unregarded source of what an English essayist has humorously named “the Mississippi of falsehood called history”; and as the current of the mighty river is clouded by the muddy waters of a huge confluent, SO' has history become but a turbid flood, in whose dreary course truth and fact are swallowed or swept along to voiceless oblivion wherever the stream of false tradition, Missouri-like, pours in to swell its volume and obliterate its landmarks.

The prevalence of such an influence renders difficult, if not impossible, any true understanding either of contemporary events and character, or of the past of which these are the outcome. In dress, manners, and the like, a dominating fashion may clearly betoken declining intelligence, servility of spirit, deterioration of character. In historical tradition and belief ^ it too frequently presents hidden obstructions to intelligent research and certain knowledge ; and thus remains a fertile source of unfortunate and mischievous misunderstanding, pitiful ignorance, grotesque confusion, and absurd bigotry. Invariably is this the case where history has been recorded in a fashion set and dictated by the blind spirit of clique or clan, which ever delights to decry worth and genius, while exalting noisy mediocrities and canting hypocrites.

Such a fashion is strikingly manifest among us today. It long has been, and it yet remains the practice of a majority of writers, native and foreign, to describe the United States as dominated by the spirit of Puritanism. To this imaginary fountain-head of virtues is traced every trait of the American character which inspires esteem abroad and true pride at home. To this mythical source is assigned every superior quality recognized as characteristic of the people of the United States — keen intelligence, unselfish public spirit, noble ambition, inventive talent, practical ability — in a word, every leading and striking feature that has won them the praise of the civilized world.

How far is such an assumption justified by facts — how far is its existence due to the easily accepted propaganda of interested or partisan authors? Are we unquestioningly to believe that the main current of the national life of the American republic has taken its rise from the three or four New England states of the first Union? Is it quite certain that the contributions of these states to the greatness of the present Union so incomparably outweigh those of the other nine or ten? Are Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Maryland ; Pennsylvania and New York; New Jersey and Delaware little more than dust in history’s balance when set in counterpoise to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island — if Rhode Island, considering its origin, is rightly reckoned a Puritan state or colony ? Such a view finds no strong support in the facts of history. It can hardly be entertained without disregarding them.

Of those New England colonies, the strongholds of Puritanism in America, Massachusetts has stood first and foremost in the eye of the world ; and to her has been ascribed a greater share of national achievement and consequent influence than to any of her sisters, North or South. How was this estimate formed ? Why has it been so generally accepted as a true one ?

It may be assumed that throughout the English-speaking world there is little dissent from the judgment that in the Revolutionary War the colonies were mainly right and Great Britain mainly wrong. Few will freely question the truth or disapprove of the sentiment of Tennyson’s England and America in 1782. Mr. Kipling, indeed, has drawn a slightly different picture of the “strong sons” of the “strong mother of a lion line” in his versified commentary, The American. But then this author, consciously or otherwise, has drawn equally unflattering portraits of his own countrymen in other rhyming

The Tradition of New England Ascendency 9

commentaries such as The Puzzler , Hadramauti , etc. ; and it requires no profound study of his work-day philosophy to discern that he had, at any rate, a deep respect for the material side of American civilization; that he was, indeed, fascinated by the spectacle of its varied life and multifarious energies; and that he is, moreover, a worshipper of certain types of American character — as clearly appears, e. g., in his lines To Wolcott Balestier. Mr. Kipling is but one of thousands who halt between two contrary views of the United States and their people, but on the whole, perhaps, decidedly incline toward a favorable opinion. And like a trumpet-call to summon all such waverers to the standard of truth and right, come ringing down the years the clarion words of Daniel Webster:

“Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts. She needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for Independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every state from Maine to Georgia; and there they will lie forever. And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood, and full of its original spirit.”

With the echoes of this mighty utterance mingles the genial voice of Matthew Arnold uplifted to honor Emerson, and to style Franklin “the most considerable man that America has produced”; the persuasive accents of Ruskin acknowledging Lowell as his master; the austere tones of Goldwin Smith, chanting the praises of the Mayflower Pilgrims ; and a multitudinous murmur of other speech of varying distinctness but identical import; all pointing the mind to the apparently inevitable conclusion that even as Massachusetts has led New England so New England has led and guided the United States in the paths of enlightenment and civilization. We find ourselves encircled with a cloud of such witnesses. Who may question that their witness is true?

And yet the voice of doubt is not silenced even by this manifold testimony. Its disturbing whispers trouble us afresh ; for beyond this multitude of eloquent advocates is discerned a second array of silent witnesses whom none may challenge, confute, or pass over — the records of the period in question; and put to the test of the undisputed facts therein embodied and preserved for us, our inevitable conclusion, like Iago’s, at once appears, in essential particulars, “most lame and impotent.” Bring Webster’s generous vaunt to the proof of history. Examine his explicit and implied statements of the part played by Massachusetts in the American Revolution, and note the results of such inquiry.

Proceeding thus, it appears that Boston was indeed the scene of the first encounter between the colonists and British troops which ended in bloodshed. But the first organized American resistance to royal authority was made by the “Regulators” of North Carolina four years before Concord and Lexington were fought. Half the colonists who fought at Bunker Hill came from New Hampshire. There is nothing to prove that Massachusetts during the Revolution did more for Georgia and the other Southern colonies than Georgia, or Virginia, or the Carolinas freely did for Massachusetts. The first suggestion of a Declaration of Independence came neither from. Massachusetts, nor from Paine’s Common Sense , as the overzealous Colonel Ingersoll insisted, but from North Carolina; and Congress drew up the Declaration on the motion of the representatives of Virginia. Nor can Massachusetts be regarded as the originator of the American Constitution — a title to which Connecticut has a much better claim. If it be argued that Massachusetts was not invaded by the British after the evacuation of Boston, it must not be forgotten that New Hampshire was never invaded by them. And it is noteworthy that the Massachusetts tradition which would immortalize Lexington and Concord has little to say of Bennington, less of Saratoga, and never a word of King’s Mountain.

These various half-forgotten circumstances were known to Webster, and it is plain that he meant to claim for Massachusetts no more than that she had played a distinguished — not a preeminent part in the Revolution. He himself, be it added, though Senator from Massachusetts in his later years, was not a native of that state.

Facts of this kind emerge like rocks and boulders from the black depths of the rushing stream of tradition while it sweeps from generation to generation like a river in flood. But as the waters ebb, such stones of historic truth are found aligned

The Tradition of New England Ascendency 1 1

with others left dry by the falling tide of rhapsodizing romance, and now afford a safe passage by which the baffled wayfarer in a wilderness of fable may cross to the opposite shore with a sense of glad relief. And here, amid the serene atmosphere of majestic heights which overlook the mazy channel of the raging flood that lately barred his path, he surveys from a secure vantage-ground the scenes of his recent wanderings and enforced delay as trivial features of an incomparably wider and grander prospect.

The false tradition born of ignorant prejudice may conceal or distort the facts of given cases. It cannot affect the universal truths of history, which are felt even by those who cannot explain or understand them. The Puritanical tradition of envious calumny and flippant exaggeration which wars against all greatness that its authors cannot understand, is powerless to efface the memory of Shakespeare and Sidney, Montrose and Falkland in the Old World. Nor is its power of mischief greater in the New. Whether in American or English history its crooked course is readily traced ; and to do so is no> doubtful venture for any who* know its source, and the conditions by which its direction is determined.

No sooner, indeed, is one of its fables exploded than it invents another. No sooner has a convincing answer been made to one of its solemn queries than it propounds a second. But the second fable is hoist with its own petard, and the second interrogation suggests the refutation of the falsehood which it transparently masks. Such is the case of the fictions foisted upon the credulous by those who portray Puritanism as the eternal protagonist of American virtue, honor, and independence. It is well to note such questions as are propounded in indirect defence of their theory.

Granting that in point of mere military renown the part which she played during the Revolution did not distinguish Massachusetts above the other New England colonies; can it be doubted, say these theorists, that in those colonies rather than in any others, was embodied and enshrined the newborn spirit of American liberty; and that New England, if not the head and front, was surely the heart and soul of that energetic and triumphant resistance to British aggression which finally established American independence? Is not the significant circumstance that New England was so little invaded indubitable evidence of this fact? Did not the invader recoil from her borders even as the host of Xerxes from the orecinct of Delphi?

The answer is not far to seek. It cannot be forgotten that during the years 1775-1780 Great Britain was directing her attack not only against the four New England communities, but also upon the other nine Southern and central colonies. Any serious attempt to subdue the entire insurgent domains, occupying as they did the whole Atlantic seaboard from New Brunswick to Florida, had to shape itself in accordance with the maxim, “Divide and command.” And a glance at the map of the Atlantic States will show that the New England colonies lay aside from the path of any invasion which, aiming at more than local and temporary victories, was designed to break the colonies’ line of defence, and lay the axe to the root of their opposition by separating them one from another and preventing their cooperation, as the necessary preliminary to dispersing their armies, securing their strongholds, and ending their resistance. Such an invasion was that of Burgoyne, which began and ended on the soil of New York; and that of Cornwallis, which ran its course in Virginia and the Carolinas. The invasion, even the conquest of New England, would have left the central and Southern colonies untouched, without in the least abridging their offensive or defensive activities. To her advantageous position in the arena of conflict rather than to the superior genius or valor of her soldiers, New England owed her immunity from invasion during this period.

What other foundations remain for that widespread belief that throughout the Revolution the example of Puritan New England, led by Massachusetts, inspired and sustained the other American colonies? In what leaders, by what measures and policies was the genius of New England Puritanism most genuinely and conspicuously revealed at this crisis of a nation’s existence ?

Of the five men by whom the Declaration of Independence was drawn up, Adams and Franklin were natives of Massachusetts. But Franklin was at this time a citizen and representative of Pennsylvania, and hardly more a Puritan than his English admirer, the author of the Age of Reason. The writer of the Declaration was Jefferson, a Virginian, as also was Patrick Henry, the foremost orator of the American Revolution.

To Virginia, not to Massachusetts, nor to New England at large, the insurgent colonies turned for a captain to com-

The Tradition of New England Ascendency 13

mand and direct their confederate forces. The name of Washington cannot be spoken without recalling the praises which he drew from men of other lands. Byron sang of his “all- 5 cloudless glory.” Even Green, that mild partisan of Puritanism, warms to reticent enthusiasm as in his Short History of the English People he records of the great American that “no nobler figure ever stood in the forefront of a nation’s life”; and pauses to dwell upon “the grandeur of soul which lifts his figure, with all the simple majesty of an ancient statue, out of the smaller passions, the meaner impulses of the world around him.” Among such “smaller passions” and “meaner impulses” may be reckoned those which actuated John Adams and John Hancock of Massachusetts in their absurd and envious hostility to Washington ; or those which bore fruit in the machinations of Charles Lee, and the conspirators of the Conway Cabal, that “excellent plot” of New England contrivance, which aimed to supersede Washington by the worthy English military amateur, Horatio Gates, at this time regarded as the conqueror of Saratoga, and soon to emerge in the South as the hero of Camden.

The character and exploits of the New England commanders afford convincing evidence that throughout the Revolution American Puritanism was a minor factor in the field of war. Ethan Allen was no Puritan, and hardly ranks higher than Anthony Wayne. The services of John Stark to the cause of American independence cannot well bear comparison with those rendered by Greene; while Benedict Arnold, without palliation of his treason, may be accounted a victim of the same narrow envy of great qualities, the same timorous and ignorant misconception of great measures, which in England thwarted Cromwell and overthrew the ministry of the elder Pitt; and in America hampered Washington and relegated John Paul Jones to obscurity.

New England generally, and Massachusetts in particular, did less to defeat the British forces, and suffered less in the cause of American independence than their sister colonies, notably those of the South. The records of the time have established this as an outstanding fact of the war of the American Revolution.

So much, then, for the claim that the sacred fires of republican liberty in the New World were kindled and guarded by the Puritans of New England. How, then, has a claim so at variance with the truth been accepted at face value by the world at large?

Some hint of an explanation may be found in a passage from the words of Webster to which a former reference was made. “There is her [Massachusetts’] history; the world knows it by heart.” In this patriotic hyperbole lies a clue to the mystery of the sic vos non vobis of Puritanism in the New World during the period of the Revolutionary War. The history of Massachusetts to which Webster referred as being a matter of universal knowledge is, of course, her history throughout that time. If the world does not know that by heart, the fault assuredly does not lie with her poets, orators or annalists then or now. Immersed in the Psalms of David and the Proverbs of Solomon, the Puritan and his descendants grew wholly oblivious of such vulgar, profane, and godless proverbs as “Self-praise is no recommendation”; but sang many a psalm of praise to' himself ; and as a result, the Anglo- Saxon world has taken him largely on his own pious valuation ever since. What men will believe when duly impressed upon them with the timely repetition, adroit omissions, and ponderous gravity so congenial to partisan advocates, is truly marvelous. A book was once written called “The Age of Reason,” and another “The Age of Fable.” The records of Puritanism on two' continents furnish abundant materials for a third, which might well bear the title “The Age of Myth.”

Having dealt with this chapter of his chronicles, it will not be amiss to glance briefly at the previous and subsequent history of the Puritan in England and America.

Chapter II

Falstaff : Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying! This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth, and the feats he hath done about Turnbull street; and every third word a lie, duer paid to the hearer than the Turk’s tribute. — Henry IV, Part II, Act iii, Scene 2.

In the War of 1812 some part of what the South had suffered during the Revolution fell to the lot of New England; and as a most natural consequence, New England waxed impatient of a strife that brought no profit, present or prospective. Her impatience found partial vent in that mysterious conclave known to' history as the Hartford Convention, assembled while the war was at its height, and pointing out the path of secession until the victory of New Orleans cast a damper upon its proceedings. On the ocean her sailors won unfading laurels in this second encounter with England. Less glorious were the exploits of her captains by land. From the same Connecticut town went forth Hull, the captor of the Guerriere, and Hull, the captive of Detroit. On the battlefields of this war less is heard of her soldiers than of the riflemen of Kentucky and other Southern states, who made their presence memorable at New Orleans and the Thames. Foremost of American generals of the time were Andrew Jackson, of Tennessee; Scott, a Virginian; and Brown, a Pennsylvanian.

Thirty years later New England is found opposed to any invasion of Mexico ; but not thrilled with horror at the prospect of hostilities with Great Britain, as a means of determining the disputed boundary of Oregon. Fifteen years more and the Union, as it then existed, has gone down before the long-gathering storm of the Civil War. When her actual performances are set against her claims of achievement at this time, New England’s part in the mighty struggle provokes a puzzled smile. Before the dread appeal to arms, how valiant in speech, how wise in counsel and in action her champions of negro emancipation — Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Sumner,

Wendell Phillips, Horace Greeley, John Browfc, et hoc gems omne! Throughout the long and ever doubtful conflict how modestly retiring her illustrious captains — Pope, Hooker, Butler! Of the foremost champions of the Federal cause, Lincoln was born in Kentucky, of Virginian ancestry; while Tennessee claims as her sons Farragut and Thomas, “the Rock of Chickamauga.” Yet we are assured that the victory of the North was a crowning triumph for the New England Puritan — who, by the bye, was supposed to abhor crowns and all such as wear them. One knows not whether most to admire the greatness of his victories, or the trifling exertions which he put forth to win them.

“But,” triumphantly rejoin the panegyrists of Puritanism, “the victory of the North in the American Civil War was moral and spiritual, not merely material ; and in its moral and spiritual aspects that victory is New England’s. The scales of a callous and ignorant indifference fell from the eyes of the generation that first read Uncle Tom's Cabin . Then was it that with shuddering souls they saw in all its loathsomeness the hideous, shameless, odious moral deformity of negro slavery. Then was it that the battle of negro emancipation was fought and won in the hearts and minds of the nation. The victory of the North on the battlefield was. but a corollary of that glorious spiritual success. John Brown died the death of a felon, but his soul marched on to final triumph in the van of the legions that conquered at Gettysburg and Appomattox.”

Even thus has the saintly exaltation of a righteous enthusiasm rendered these ardent spirits generous before they are just. They forget that Lincoln, far from treading in the steps of John Brown, explicitly declared his disapproval of the spirit and methods of that duly canonized worthy. They are also oblivious of the fact that Horace Greeley and Wendell Phillips were conspicuous among the hostile critics whose censure fell upon Lincoln’s policy on the question of slavery. The “Uncle Tom” of Mrs. Stowe’s romance embodies that author’s conception of an ideal negro> slave. Her Dred is the story of such a leader in negro emancipation as she hoped to see rise among the blacks themselves. / But a good song is as true as any novel — no song could well contain less truth than Uncle Tom's Cabin — and how many plantation melodies may be invoked as evidence that the negro loved the life and conditions from which Mrs. Stowe and the abolitionists were fain to “free” him.

Everybody knows Uncle Tom’? Cabin. But then, everybody knows “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground,” “The Suwanee River,” “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” and other such songs quite as well as that equivocal romance, or even better. And the testimony of fact is more in favor of the story told by the songs than of that related or implied in the novel. Throughout the Civil War while the masters fought and fell on far-away battlefields, or languished and died in prisons more remote, the slaves never rose to break their chains ; nor did any “Dred” spring up among them to point the way to “freedom.” Dred and Uncle Tom’s Cabin are skillfully written political tracts of the period to which they belong — historical romances admirably designed to spread broadcast partisan errors, the political first-fruits of this author's malignant genius.

Much the same may be said of the histories — or what pass for such — in which Puritanism is glorified. The narrow scope and paltry purpose of these labored partisan pamphlets present a ludicrous but significant contrast to the spirit, purpose and vision of Herodotus or Thucydides. So well have these chroniclers done their business that any observant reader will find in their chaotic narratives ten reasons for despising and loathing Puritanism and its devotees to one for liking or even tolerating them. On their pages the Puritan is made a subject of universal admiration, now for his transcendent meekness, now for his insane savagery; and the absurdly futile attempt is made to fuse a jumble of incongruous character-sketches into' one consistent body of historical narrative as a means of establishing doctrines which are best refuted by merely stating them ; for the apostles of these doctrines are but the foremost of flocks ready to pitch into' any slough of preposterous error whither the bell-wethers of their belief have preceded them. And the shallow, ignorant vanity which is the root of their belief is also the bond that unites them in spirit to those Puritans whom they profess to admire.

“The whole history of English progress since the Restoration, on its moral and spiritual side, has been the history of Puritanism.” Such are the words with which Green concludes one chapter of his Short History of the English People. Need any one be surprised to find him, further on, beginning another in this fashion ?

“The history of France has little result beyond France

itself. German or Italian history has no direct issue outside the bounds of Germany and Italy. But England is only a small part of the outcome of English history. Its greater issues lie not within the narrow limits of the mother island, but in the destinies of nations yet to be. The struggles of her patriots, the wisdom of her statesmen, the steady love of liberty and law in her people at large, were shaping in the past of our little island the future of mankind.”

Such is the conclusion drawn by this historian as the end of his narrative approaches ; and such his estimate of his own country and its people among the nations of the world and the races of mankind. If his judgment is true, the annals of those nations and races are but a dull story of laggards in the arena of history — a superfluous record of a foreign field trailing behind the English Eclipse. The opinions of other peoples, or of foreign historians, upon the question are merely irrelevant. Neither can the parts played by Scotland, Wales, or Ireland in British or American history be accounted considerable. And Green’s comparison is stated so as to imply much more than this, viz., either the influence of Greece, Rome, and Palestine in “shaping the future of mankind” — subsequent to the discovery of America — has been insignificant, or has been exerted mainly, if not altogether, through England. Such is the dogma which Green’s history was written to establish, which alone gives that work coherence and a semblance of unity, and according to the truth or falsehood of which it must be judged. His dogma, admits of no qualification of the terms in which it is set forth, and must be accepted or rejected in toto. Either England is the great original and sole leader of modern civilization, or she is not. Such is the dilemma imposed upon his readers by this philosophic historian and eulogist of Puritanism.

With no less assurance has he asserted that even as England has “shaped the destinies of mankind,” so has Puritanism led and guided the progress of modern England and America. Recalling this, one also recalls that America was discovered by an Italian ; that Tyndale’s translation of the Bible came to England, according to Green’s own statement, “as part of the Lutheran movement”; and that the influence of a Frenchman, John Calvin, cannot be disregarded either in the Old World or the New. Yet Green would have us believe that the history of France, Germany and1 Italy “has little result” outside those countries.

Descending from general to particular statements, one finds this sober historian indulging in the following flamboyant assertion, “Humiliating, as it was, England could have borne fifty such calamities as the surrender at Yorktown.” This statement suggests certain significant details of the event thus mentioned. Yorktown was besieged and taken by a force of nine thousand Americans and seven thousand French troops under Washington and Rochambeau. Some seven thousand British troops were taken prisoners when Cornwallis surrendered. It follows, then, according to Green’s statement, that England, without encountering national disaster, could have sustained at this time the loss of three hundred and fifty thousand soldiers — a force immensely larger than any she has ever put in the field before 1900.