Forty Years of American Life (1821-1861)
by
[Stackpole, $3.00]
THE wisest man I ever knew, before he died in the decade following the war of 1914-1918, told me that the wisest man he ever knew said to him before he died in the decade preceding the war of 1861-1865: ‘I have lived through the best years this country has ever seen or ever will see. That crushing pronouncement embodies the very mood and intention of Forty Years of American Life. 1821-1861, which that vivacious journalistreformer-expatriate Thomas Low Nichols published in London in 1864, and which is at last made available in his native country in a reprint ot the revised and expanded London edition of 1876.
Nichols, one of the most interesting of halfforgotten Americans, was that rare bird, a liberal and reformer with a sense of humor and even of fun. He grew up on a farm in the Connecticut River valley hamlet of Orford, New Hampshire, educated himself for medicine at Dartmouth College, switched to general and then to political journalism, and had his fling at a motley of reforms ranging from mere vegetarianism to perfectionist socialism after the pattern of Fourier. He traveled widely in his own country, saw everything, knew everybody (including Poe, Melville, Halleck, Garrison, James Gordon Bennett, Beecher, and several successive Presidents), and wrote with racy fluency. When he had outlived most of his youthful enthusiasms he became a Roman Catholic. In 1861 he revolted against the whole conception of brotherhood enforced by the bayonet and, with his reformist wife, migrated to England, where he devoted the rest of his days to successful writing and the cause of public health.
Forty Years of American Life is an animated full-length portrait of his native land. It was drawn frankly for transatlantic readers, but the lapse of time has made it both enlivening and instructive for cisatlantic ones. It is crammed with bits that amuse, stimulate, or provoke: his eyewitness’s account of Garrison mobbed in Boston; his singularly detached contemporary interpretation of Beecher; his idyllic opening summary of northern New England farm life a century ago; his glimpses of life and travel in the South, on the Mississippi, the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal.
And he had a keen car for anecdote; it is to him that we owe the Niagara joke about the tailor who cried, ’Gods, what a place to sponge a coat!' and the evocation of the Reverend Doctor Charles Finney, a clergyman capable of public prayer in this confidential strain: ’O Lord, I have been walking down Broadway to-day, and I have seen a good many of my friends and Thy friends, and I wondered, O Lord! if they seemed as poor, and vapid, and empty, and worldly to Thee as they did to me.’
But what brings these forty eminently readable chapters to sharpest focus for us of to-day is their circumstantial review of a decadence that touched bottom in the corruption, profiteering, tyranny, and opportunism of the war. Witness these levelheaded remarks about 1861; —
It was useless then, in America, to write about anything but the war; and somewhat dangerous for a Northern man to write what did not suit the Government. The freedom of the press was, for the time, suspended. If a newspaper doubted that the South could be conquered in ninety days, it was excluded from the mails. If it questioned the right or the policy of invading the South and restoring amity and unity by ravage and plunder, it was seized by the police. If the editor persisted in his delusion that the press was free, he was sent, down to Fort Lafayette, on an island in New York Bay, lodged in a casemate and fed on the rations of a common soldier, until the Government forgot who he was and for what he had been imprisoned.
This passage is but one of a hundred that ring disconcertingly familiar to modern libertarian idealists with a propensity for imagining that their pet emotions and disillusionments are something quite new to history.
WILSON FOLLETT