A New History of the United States

MR. MCMASTER gives notice of the school to which he belongs when he entitles his history of the United States A History of the People of the United States.¹ The late Mr. J. R. Green was not precisely a pioneer, but his brilliant history was so conspicuous an example of a mode of treatment which commends itself to the minds of men educated under democratic principles that it has served to stimulate other writers, and to make historical students take much more careful note than formerly of the multitudinous life which finds expression in the varied form of human activity, and to cease concerning themselves mainly with governmental development. The rise of this school of history is a distinct witness to the new reading of humanity which the present century has known. The growth of democratic ideas has given dignity to the study of the individual ; the emancipation of the intellect, which is a part of the great renaissance of modern times, has resulted in an intense inquiry into the reign of law : so that the most acceptable historian to-day, the one most in accord with the temper of the age, is he who is able to detect the operation of the greatest variety of individual life, and to discover the comprehensive laws which govern in the development of the nation.

A country like England, where the idea of government by class has not been so much overthrown by the violence of revolutions as displaced by the greater energy of democratic principles, offers a most attractive theme to the historian who would disclose the undercurrent of popular life and its gradual emergence into the light of day. A history of the English people is a protest against an interpretation of history which makes it the drama of kings, and its finest success is in tracing a confessed power back into periods when it was dumbly, unconsciously, working out its destiny. Dean Stanley leading a party of workingmen through Westminster Abbey, and discoursing upon the historic monuments to which they are heirs in common, is a fine picture of contemporary England; but by what steps were the figures in the picture brought together ? To tell that is to tell the history of the people of England.

The contrasts which such a picture suggests are abundant in English history, and they arrest the mind ; but is there an equally suggestive theme in

American history ? Is the history of the American people a protest against false views of that history which once prevailed ? Certainly not in so distinct a degree as may be averred of English history, although the habits of historical writing prevalent in one country have naturally influenced and largely determined the same habits in the other. Nevertheless, one is aware that Mr. McMaster has had a deliberate intention to recover in his history the true note which should be struck. “ In the course of this narrative,” he says at the outset, “ much, indeed, must be written of wars, conspiracies, and rebellions; of presidents, of congresses, of embassies, of treaties, of the ambition of political leaders in the senate-house, and of the rise of great parties in the nation, Yet the history of the people shall be the chief theme. At every stage of the splendid progress which separates the America of Washington and Adams from the America in which we live, it shall be my purpose to describe the dress, the occupations, the amusements, the literary canons, of the time ; to note the changes of manners and morals ; to trace the growth of that humane spirit which abolished punishment for debt, which reformed the discipline of prisons and of jails, and which has, in our own time, destroyed slavery and lessened the miseries of dumb brutes. Nor shall it be less my aim to recount the manifold improvements which in a thousand ways have multiplied the conveniences of life and ministered to the happiness of our race ; to describe the rise and progress of that long series of mechanical inventions and discoveries which is now the admiration of the world, and our just pride and boast; to tell how, under the benign influence of liberty and peace, there sprang up, in the course of a single century, a prosperity unparalleled in the annals of human affairs ; how, from a state of great poverty and feebleness, our country grew rapidly to one of opulence and power; how her agriculture and her manufactures flourished together; how, by a wise system of free education and a free press, knowledge was disseminated, and the arts and sciences advanced ; how the ingenuity of her people became fruitful of wonders far more astonishing than any of which the alchemists had ever dreamed.”

This is unquestionably a brilliant prospectus, and the spirit with which Mr. McMaster enters upon his task is so generous and enthusiastic that we are quite willing to forgive the somewhat extravagant terms in which he forecasts his work, especially as we find him, in the progress of the volume, ready with his indignation whenever the people, whose historian he is, deviates from the straight line which his opening paragraph almost intimates was the historic course. It is because of this high spirit and generous temper that we venture to believe in a slight falsification of the prospectus as the work shall proceed; for by the time Mr. McMaster has reached the end of his fifth volume he will have opportunity to revise his judgment as to the comparative unimportance in history of wars, conspiracies, rebellions, presidents, congresses, embassies, treaties, ambitions of political leaders, and the rise of great parties. The ease with which he sets all these aside is a mere rhetorical burst, borrowed from the creed of the school to which he belongs, and the style of the master on whose heels he treads. It is very true that in English history there is a people in distinction from a government; but no one, we are convinced, who is so honest as Mr. McMaster can make an exhaustive study of United States history without revealing the fundamental doctrine that the people constitutes the nation, and that there is no political order external to it. No doubt this truth is one which grows clearer in the progress of the nation, and yet the organic life of the people of the United States has always been an integrity ; it is merely a habit of mind borrowed from traditional study, which speaks of wars, presidents, congresses, and the like as if they were something foreign from the life of the people, or only incidental to it. There is a radical defect in any conception of the history of the United States which invests the political life and institutions and administration of government with any foreign property. It is a defect resident in much of our political thought, and it is slowly wearing away from our political consciousness ; but it ought to be wholly absent from the mind of a historical teacher, and we shall be greatly disappointed if Mr. McMaster does not himself abjure the heresy before he comes to the end of his work.

There is, indeed, one view in which an author, governed by such a notion, is in danger of missing the greatness of his subject altogether. The history of a nation is scarcely worth telling if it leave upon the mind the impression that an improved mower, or even a publicschool system, represents its highest attainment. There is a national life which surpasses any individual product, or any system which human ingenuity has evolved. It is in the realization of freedom, and has its record in public acts and the deliberate registration of the public conscience. A bill of rights is a more admirable representation of the life of the people than letters patent, and the organic unity of the nation has been found to mean more to the individual member of the nation than any well-ordered or comfortable life, however adorned by the arts and graces of civilization. It is for this reason that congresses and courts, proceeding from the people and responsible to them, may occupy the thought of an American historian of the people with far more just propriety than the same subjects may engage the attention of an historian of the English people.

The survey of the country with which Mr. McMaster opens his history gives the reader a cross-section of popular life immediately at the close of the war for independence. It was in Mr. McMaster’s plan to give rather an external view of the nation at that time ; and thus, while he portrays the American in his various phases of life, he omits altogether any view of him as a political animal. It belongs to such a survey to make the scene vivid by contrasting the conditions of life then with what is familiar to us now, and there is always danger of raising the lights and deepening the shades in the contrasted pictures ; but one comes to be a little cautious in accepting the colors as merely strong, and not false, when one observes Mr. McMaster’s occasional recklessness in handling facts. The treaty which secured the independence of the colonies did not “ clearly define the region given up by the mother country;” for Mr. McMaster will be compelled to relate, further on, how near we came once or twice to a war to determine just what the bounds were. “In New Hampshire,” he tells us, “ a few hardy adventurers had marked out the sites of villages in the Green Mountains;” a form of statement which certainly would leave in most readers’ minds the impression that the Green Mountains were to-day to be found in New Hampshire. “ In every city were to be seen women who had fled at the dead of night from their burning cabins; who had perhaps witnessed the destruction of Schenectady.” This “perhaps ” is a saving clause ; but any old woman who could, in 1784, remember the destruction of Schenectady must have been a hundred years old. “ Faneuil Hall, the Old South, the old State House, and a few other relics of ancient time still exist; but they exist in a state of ruinous decay, and before another generation has passed away old Boston will be known in tradition only.” Prophecy like this may be safe, but it should not be coupled with misrepresentation of fact. We suspect Mr. McMaster has not been in Boston lately, from the off-hand manner in which he says, in an explanatory foot-note, that “ the neck seems to have been quite a barrier to the daily travel between Boston and Charlestown.” It is in one of his vague generalizations, also, that he says of the New England minister of 1784, “ Compared with Cotton or Hooker, he had indeed made vast strides towards toleration. He was a very different man from the fanatics who burned Catholics at the stake [!], who drove out the Quakers, who sent Roger Williams to find an asylum among the Indians of Rhode Island, and sat in judgment on the witches of Salem and Andover.” But the supposed vast stride is nothing to Mr. McMaster’s stretcher.

There are statements of a loose character, which irritate one because they are just true enough to read well, and yet do not stand for exact historical knowledge. When Mr. McMaster says, “ New England had been settled by the Puritans, and there the leveling spirit, the stern theology, the rigid and straitlaced morality, were as unyielding as ever” (in 1784), he is rhetorical and conventional, and shows that he is not acquainted with the changes in New England life apparent upon any honest reading of its history. When he is drawing a picture of the industry of New England, at the same time he is misleading by the half truth of his statement: “ New England produced scarce enough corn and rye for the needs of her citizens. Beyond a few stately trees, suitable for masts for his majesty’s ships of war, the Eastern States grew nothing the mother country wished to buy. These men built ships, sailed the ocean, caught fish, extracted oil from the blubber of whales, put up great warehouses, and kept great shops.” But in belittling the agriculture of the Eastern States, he succeeds also in turning away attention from the fisheries and commerce. He gives the impression that books in Boston, at that time, were a ragged regiment of unreadable literature, and intimates that, because many of the books would be very dull now, they were good for nothing then; but the evidences are clear that the literature of the time was abundant in Boston then. A circulating library of twelve hundred volumes and a bookseller’s stock of ten thousand books could not have made a despicable show. It is the misfortune of such contrasts of the past with the present that they ignore many of the relative conditions of life. It may be a marvelous thing that the telegraph can now carry a message in a twinkling from one city to another; but before we commiserate our ancestors, who had no telegraph, we need to find out how much they required one. The same consideration applies when we find Mr. McMaster representing the New England minister as in the depths of poverty, because Dr. Buckminster never had more than six or seven hundred dollars a year, and the ordinary clergyman saw little money. But the small salary and the absence of money did not mean what they would to-day, for the minister had his farm, and the demands upon his purse were far less than they now are : the whole order of the society in which he moves has changed. Mr. McMaster’s wish to make a point leads him into other sweeping statements. “ There did not then exist in the country,” he says, “a single piece of architecture which, when tried even by the standard of that day, can be called respectable ; ” and yet some of these pieces, both in whole or in detail, are accepted as standards to-day, and architects study to reproduce their features in the latest buildings which they put up. He draws a forlorn picture of the mechanic’s life, without stove, coal, or matches. But was the rich man of the same day any better off ?

A carelessness in minute points makes us a little reluctant to commit ourselves to Mr. McMaster when we cannot verify his authorities. Twice he speaks of Symbert when he means Smybert; he says that Honorius was Noah Webster’s pen name, when it was Honestus. While the proposition to make the President’s term one of seven years is given in detail, there is no hint of the change to four years, nor of the erection of the electoral college. So important a matter as the treatment of slavery in the ordinance of 1787 is passed over in silence.

In pursuance of his general plan, Mr. McMaster naturally has recourse for much of his material to the newspapers of the day, which supply him with curious information, and especially with the drift of public sentiment. This reference to newspapers undoubtedly has enabled him to make a livelier narrative, but the instances of carelessness which we have noted would lead us to doubt his caution in making use of such dubious authorities. It may be, however, — for we do not pretend to have verified his newspaper references, — that he depends upon them rather for the embellishment of his narrative, while he relies upon more formal annals for his main historic facts. He makes no reference, for instance, to Minot, in his animated account of Shays’ rebellion, yet a comparison with Minot’s history leads one pretty definitely to the conclusion that it furnished Mr. McMaster with a guide through the scenes.

The spirited style of the book makes the petty inaccuracies very irritating. The transitions are admirably managed, so that the reader is led dexterously from one subject to another, and he would like to surrender himself to so entertaining a guide; but when he finds that flourishes and antithetical phrases are made to do service for exact details of fact, he begins to distrust his leader, and to be uncomfortable lest he should be receiving impressions which a more accurate knowledge of history would show him to be false. We do not wish Mr. McMaster to be any less picturesque, but we wish he were not so eager to make points, and that he would employ contrasts less in his pictures. Since he has engaged upon this important task of writing a history of the people of the United States in five volumes, he is not likely to be followed immediately by any one else in the same track, and the readableness of his work will doubtless make it a popular one for some time to come. All the more is it to be desired that he should scrutinize his authorities and present his facts with accuracy. Few students will follow him through the files of papers in order to test his fidelity, and we must ask him, therefore, to honor the trust which readers will repose in him.