John D. Sherwood

“ To every thoughtful man, who moves about our rapidly dissolving surfaces, where the railroad car is the kaleidoscope which turns up the bits of humanity in new combinations, a wife is necessary to put up a monument over him; for moving on is such a fixed law,—the only fixed thing in America, except debt and live corruption,—that while he was turning his majority, all his family relations would have gone to other States. ”

“ No sooner was there a scrubbing and house-cleaning among the old folks on the Thames, Seine, Scheldt, or Rhine, than the brooms were got out on the Hudson, the James, and Connecticut, and up they all went at that standing bother of our colonial housewives, the nest of lively French flies in our northeast corner, or at those old yellow-legged Dutch hornets that had settled down on Manhattan and Long Island. ”

“ We cannot write more lucidly the history of the John Smith of Pocahontas fame. It grows mythical the more we look at it; an abstraction dancing over the coals of the early settlement of Virginia, a face and figure flitting like a twisting flame, up, around, and through the grate; seeming as we try to fix our attention upon him like a dozen different men, one falling in love with the young squaw, another surveying the James and Rappahannock, another mastering the turbulent spirits of a dissolute and discontented settlement ”

“ We also feel obliged to deny the merit accorded by some to Bishop Berkeley, of having made the first discovery of America. This notion of some rests all its weight on the strength of those lines, “Westward the star of empire takes its way.” But those were not the first lines that were carried ashore and made fast to our continent, nor this the earliest star which appeared over our American boards.
Much as we should love, in the interest of modern historical research, to invent a new discoverer for America, candor compels us to award the glory still to Christopher Columbus. ”

“ A Mayflower drifted, in December, across seas, and floating against Plymouth Rock, struck its tiny anchors in it, and, with Yankee enterprise, climbed all over it, covering its rugged clefts and bare surface with a mass of luxuriant flowers, with which also sprang up tangling weed-growths, all of which have since been dried and attracted great attention, much sneezing, some sneering, and great use of handkerchiefs to preserve the odor of, or prevent the smell of, what has penetrated all departments of American history. ”

“ Most of the business in the United States, north of Washington, is carried on after an express and accelerated fashion, which is impatient of holidays, and rides over the Fourth of July even, as ruthlessly as an express-train over the human obstruction which thus gets forwarded on his journey out of the United States with a despatch almost enviable to the survivors. Even the Federal Constitution prescribes “speedy trials” as a right, and treats a man as injured who does not go it in a capital way, when on that precipitous road, with a final rush. ”

“ On the next page of our album is our great-great-grand and good mother Mrs. Martha Washington. We love so much to look at her sweet, handsome face, full of a large, generous, grandmotherly nature as a wide and deep bowl heaped with ripe strawberries laughing through unstinted masses of rich yellow, unwatered cream. We feel at once that there is amply enough to go round the largest old-fashioned family, and no fear, if visitors come in, of its not holding out, or of a scarcity for the kitchen. She was called Lady Washington, because they could not help it ”

“ Sadder than a professed comedy or a prepared funeral oration over a rich but bad man is the unsatisfied ambition of such tough athletes in the political arena, who, after a long life of great rough play, break up into common earth, and form the subjects for Commencement day or prize compositions in an open grove, where young ladies in white, bound in blue-belting-ribbons, summon their uneasy ghosts before the dull-eyed umpires. From what a cold well-depth sprang to the curb of Webster’s lips those soliloquizing words which, a few days before his death, overflowed from a disappointed life. ”

“ And so the accidental birth of a daughter, instead of a son, to Charles VI. of Austria, was an unfortunate windfall, which in 1744 raised a tempest of war that enveloped all Europe, and swept with fury over their Transatlantic Colonies. The entire Continent was marshalled into two hostile camps for eight years; England, France, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Holland, and nearly all the minor states, let out their best blood,—the heart’s,—or crippled the best limbs of their young and middle-aged men, spent all their available cash, and mortgaged the future ”

“ Worsted in square fighting, squadron to squadron, and vessel to vessel, the enemy—not having the fear of this History before their eyes, and finding it easier to harass unarmed merchantmen and to pillage unprotected coasts—ravaged the Chesapeake, burned the Capitol at Washington,—whose corner-stone had been laid by the great American himself in 1793,—and laid in ashes the President’s house. ”

“ Lying under cold snow-white sheets, with jealous neighbors, the French settlers of Canada and Acadia, ready to put pins in the youngster and keep her crying, and if possible to stunt her growth, Maine was longest in her cradle of any of the infant settlements. As early as 1602 some Frenchmen landed on her coast, but only remained long enough to make a few eyelet-holes in that watery frill which the busy but chill fingers of the Atlantic has wrought upon her eastern hem. ”

“ As candid historians, we cannot withhold our pencils from sketching the portraits of these burly friends of the early years of America; these large-hearted souls, who, sitting at home over their comfortable cannel-coal fires, piled cheerily up with the dividends from the stock of some of the companies formed for planting these shores, which they would not touch until it got up to par, and who then, fearing that their attachments might not be appreciated, cried out their undeviating devotion in voices that fairly drowned all others. ”

“ To protect slavery—however repugnant—where it existed in the old States was felt very universally in the North to be a duty imposed by law, equity, and good neighborhood; but to batter down a barrier which had been erected by both North and South, every timber in which had been paid for by a price given and accepted, shook nearly all consciences into sad action. Wherever the waters swept there were land-slides from Democratic grounds. The shield against agitation now crumbled like the stricken dike. ”

“ This year was made memorable by the establishment of a wonderful republic for Ireland in Union Square, New York, and the quiet election, without any votes, of Mr. Roberts to be its head; an Irish invention, for the easy solution of that perplexing question of how to get enough votes, most praiseworthy. The novel mode of raising an army, and of replenishing a treasury, whose invisible outflow was so steady and well regulated that it never perplexed Wall Street, were admirable illustrations of the good-nature of the friendly sons and daughters of Saint Patrick. ”

“ The shoemaker, blacksmith, or carpenter, smothered for three hundred and sixty-four days under his own waxed ends, cindery veneering, or plane modesties, has suddenly, on that prolific day, been so brought out on a prancing horse, or caught such a gleam from his well-scoured sword, resting on his trusty thigh, or left to play loose between his crooked legs, as to aspire to be road-master, town-reeve, supervisor of the county, assemblyman, representative in Congress, and even United States senator. ”

“ As dyers classify mankind by the color of their skins, wine-growers belt the world by isothermal vine-lines, and lawyers divide the human race into plaintiffs and defendants, so the historian, straining his telescopic gaze over the centuries and the globe, and discarding the division of the species into “mankind and the Beecher family,”—no longer appropriate since the publication of “Norwood” reduced the latter down to the common level,—justly sweeps all mankind into two great classes, the Smiths and the rest of creation. ”

“ Silent tears, shed in secret household places over brothers and sons hung up on high hills for stealing or trespass, began to gather, like the waters of fountains hidden away in the depths of valleys, and to create that large American river, Public Sentiment,—larger than the Hudson, the Ohio, or the Mississippi,—which, rising and rising, has swept so many abuses and errors into the gulfs of time. ”

“ We can, however, now dismiss these tantalizing fixities of events, which have run before us, and left us the wearisome business of catching up to them; and leaving them to overtake us, if they can, to write up a future history of events, which ought to happen, and which will greatly disappoint the sanguine expectations of Americans if they do not. The excuse for failure will be lessened by the outlined path which we here stretch downward into the wooded future. ”

“ With greater wealth had come, of course, into America greater variety of aspirations, tastes, modes of display, versatility of social invention and experiment. Most of our leading public men had lived long enough to have as many principles as they could number decades, as many heads as the hydra, as unlike each other as in cheap weeklies, and yet at one period or another a faithful likeness. Good-natured voters, who could recall twenty years of ballot experience, could remember a vote given for and against almost every Whig and Democratic chief. ”

“ The flush is not likely to be left unsummoned so long as the enemies of New England have any ink left, or so long as her own gifted sons preserve in choicest amber the well-embalmed and dramatic specimens.
In 1635 Roger Williams, illuminated by principles of religious toleration, unkindled as yet in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts Bay, Salem, and Boston, carried his softly burning torch out of the reach of the chill breath of the General Court, which sought in vain to blow out the wavering flame. ”