The Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters from an American Farmer

The Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters from an American Farmer

by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

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Title: Letters from an American Farmer

Author: Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

Release Date: November, 2003  [Etext #4666]

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by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

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HECTOR ST. JOHN DE CREVECOEUR

Teacher’s note: Our textbook excerpt is reprinted in 12pt bold, at the beginning here. It occurs about 1/3 of the way through Letters. After that is the complete unabridged version of this work.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER

In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have by some means

met together, and in consequence of various causes; to what purpose

should they ask one another what countrymen they are? Alas, two

thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch who wanders about, who

works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore

affliction or pinching penury; can that man call England or any

other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for him,

whose fields procured him no harvest, who met with nothing but the

frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and

punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of

this planet? No! urged by a variety of motives, here they came.

Every thing has tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of

living, a new social system; here they are become men: in Europe

they were as so many useless plants, wanting vegetative mould, and

refreshing showers; they withered, and were mowed down by want,

hunger, and war; but now by the power of transplantation, like all

other plants they have taken root and flourished!

Formerly they were

not numbered in any civil lists of their country, except in those of

the poor; here they rank as citizens. By what invisible power has

this surprising metamorphosis been performed? By that of the laws

and that of their industry. The laws, the indulgent laws, protect

them as they arrive, stamping on them the symbol of adoption; they

receive ample rewards for their labours; these accumulated rewards

procure them lands; those lands confer on them the title of freemen,

and to that title every benefit is affixed which men can possibly

require. This is the great operation daily performed by our laws.

From whence proceed these laws? From our government. Whence the

government? It is derived from the original genius and strong desire

of the people ratified and confirmed by the crown. This is the great

chain which links us all, this is the picture which every province

exhibits, Nova Scotia excepted.

There the crown has done all; either there were no people who had

genius, or it was not much attended to: the consequence is, that the

province is very thinly inhabited indeed; the power of the crown in

conjunction with the musketos has prevented men from settling there.

Yet some parts of it flourished once, and it contained a mild

harmless set of people. But for the fault of a few leaders, the

whole were banished. The greatest political error the crown ever

committed in America, was to cut off men from a country which wanted

nothing but men!

What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country

where he had nothing? The knowledge of the language, the love of a

few kindred as poor as himself, were the only cords that tied him:

his country is now that which gives him land, bread, protection, and

consequence: Ubi panis ibi patria, is the motto of all emigrants.

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European,

or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of

blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to

you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was

Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons

have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who,

leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives

new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new

government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an

American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater.

Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men,

whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the

world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along

with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry

which began long since in the east; they will finish the great

circle. The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they

are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which

has ever appeared, and which will hereafter become distinct by the

power of the different climates they inhabit. The American ought

therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either

he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry

follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is

founded on the basis of nature, SELF-INTEREST: can it want a

stronger allurement? Wives and children, who before in vain demanded

of him a morsel of bread, now, fat and frolicsome, gladly help their

father to clear those fields whence exuberant crops are to arise to

feed and to clothe them all; without any part being claimed, either

by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord. Here religion

demands but little of him; a small voluntary salary to the minister,

and gratitude to God; can he refuse these? The American is a new

man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new

ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile

dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a

very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.--This is an

American.

INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY WARREN BARTON BLAKE

INTRODUCTION

Hazlitt wrote that of the three notable writers whom the eighteenth

century had produced, in the North American colonies, one was "the

author (whoever he was) of the American Farmer's Letters."

Crevecoeur was that unknown author; and Hazlitt said further of him

that he rendered, in his own vividly characteristic manner, "not

only the objects, but the feelings, of a new country." Great is the

essayist's relish for passages descriptive of "a battle between two

snakes," of "the dazzling, almost invisible flutter of the humming-

bird's wing," of the manners of "the Nantucket people, their frank

simplicity, and festive rejoicings after the perils and hardships of

the whale-fishing." "The power to sympathise with nature, without

thinking of ourselves or others, if it is not a definition of

genius, comes very near to it," writes Hazlitt of our author. And

his references to Crevecoeur are closed with the remark: "We have

said enough of this ILLUSTRIOUS OBSCURE; for it is the rule of

criticism to praise none but the over-praised, and to offer fresh

incense to the idol of the day."

Others, at least, have followed that "rule of criticism," and the

American Farmer has long enjoyed undisturbed seclusion. Only once

since the eighteenth century has there been a new edition of his

Letters, that were first published at London in 1782, and reissued,

with a few corrections, in the next year. The original American

edition of this book about America was that published at

Philadelphia in 1793, and there was no reprint till 1904, [Footnote:

References may be found to American editions of 1794 and 1798, but

no copies of such editions are preserved in any library to which the

editor has had access.] when careless editing did all it could to

destroy the value of the work, the name of whose very author was

misstated. Yet the facts which we have concerning him are few enough

to merit truthful presentation.

Except by naturalisation, the author of Letters from an American

Farmer was not an American; and he was no ordinary farmer. Yet why

quarrel with him for the naming of his book, or for his signing it

"J. Hector Saint-John," when the "Hector" of his title-pages and

American biographers was only a prenom de faintaisie? We owe some

concessions to the author of so charming a book, to the eighteenth-

century Thoreau. His life is certainly more interesting than the

real Thoreau's--and would be, even if it did not present many

contradictions. Our records of that life are in the highest degree

inexact; he himself is wanting in accuracy as to the date of more

than one event. The records, however, agree that Crevecoeur belonged

to the petite noblesse of Normandy. The date of his birth was

January 31, 1735, the place was Caen, and his full name (his great-

grandson and biographer vouches for it) was Michel-Guillaume-Jean de

Crevecoeur. The boy was well enough brought up, but without more

than the attention that his birth gave him the right to expect; he

divided the years of his boyhood between Caen, where his father's

town-house stood, and the College du Mont, where the Jesuits gave

him his education. A letter dated 1785 and addressed to his children

tells us all that we know of his school-days; though it is said,

too, that he distinguished himself in mathematics. "If you only

knew," the reminiscent father of a family exclaims in this letter,

"in what shabby lodging, in what a dark and chilly closet, I was

mewed up at your age; with what severity I was treated; how I was

fed and dressed!" Already his powers of observation, that were so to

distinguish him, were quickened by his old-world milieu.

"From my earliest youth," he wrote in 1803, "I had a passion for

taking in all the antiques that I met with: moth-eaten furniture,

tapestries, family portraits, Gothic manuscripts (that I had learned

how to decipher), had for me an indefinable charm. A little later

on, I loved to walk in the solitude of cemeteries; to examine the

tombs and to trace out their mossy epitaphs. I knew most of the

churches of the canton, the date of their foundation, and what they

contained of interest in the way of pictures and sculptures."

The boy's gift of accurate and keen observation was to be tested

soon by a very different class of objects: there were to be no

crumbling saints and canvases of Bed-Chamber Grooms for him to study

in the forests of America; no reminders of the greatness of his

country's past, and the honour of his family.

From school, the future woodsman passed over into England. A distant

relative was living near Salisbury; for one reason or another the

boy was sent thither to finish his schooling. From England, with

what motives we know not, he set out for the New World, where he was

to spend his busiest and happiest days. In the Bibliotheca Americana

Nova Rich makes the statement that Crevecoeur was but sixteen when

he made the plunge, and others have followed Rich in this error. The

lad's age was really not less than nineteen or twenty. According to

the family legend, his ship touched at Lisbon on the way out; one

cannot decide whether this was just before or immediately after the

great earthquake. Then to New France, where he joined Montcalm.

Entering the service as cadet, he advanced to the rank of

lieutenant; was mentioned in the Gazette; shared in the French

successes; drew maps of the forests and block-houses that found

their way to the king's cabinet; served with Montcalm in the attack

upon Fort William Henry. With that the record is broken off: we can

less definitely associate his name with the humiliation of the

French in America than with their brief triumphs. Yet it is quite

certain, says Robert de Crevecoeur, his descendant, that he did not

return to France with the rag-tag of the defeated army. Quebec fell

before Wolfe's attack in September 1759; at some time in the course

of the year 1760 we may suppose the young officer to have entered

the British colonies; to have adopted his family name of "Saint

John" (Saint-Jean), and to have gradually worked his way south,

probably by the Hudson. The reader of the Letters hardly supposes

him to have enjoyed his frontier life; nor is there any means of

knowing how much of that life it was his fortune to lead. In time,

he found himself as far south as Pennsylvania. He visited

Shippensburg and Lancaster and Carlisle; perhaps he resided at or

near one of these towns. Many years later, when his son Louis

purchased a farm of two hundred acres from Chancellor Livingstone,

at Navesink, near the Blue Mountains, Crevecoeur the elder was still

remembered; and it may have been at this epoch that he visited the

place. During the term of his military service under Montcalm,

Crevecoeur saw something of the Great Lakes and the outlying

country; prior to his experience as a cultivator, and, indeed, after

he had settled down as such, he "travelled like Plato," even visited

Bermuda, by his own account. Not until 1764, however, have we any

positive evidence of his whereabouts; it was in April of that year

that he took out naturalisation papers at New York. Some months

later, he installed himself on the farm variously called Greycourt

and Pine-Hill, in the same state; he drained a great marsh there,

and seems to have practised agriculture upon a generous scale. The

certificate of the marriage of Crevecoeur to Mehitable Tippet, of

Yonkers is dated September 20, 1769; and of this union three

children were the issue. And more than children: for with the

marriage ceremony once performed by the worthy Tetard, a clergyman

of New York, formerly settled over a French Reformed Church at

Charleston, South Carolina, Crevecoeur is more definitely than ever

the "American Farmer"; he has thrown in his lot with that new

country; his children are to be called after their parent's adopted

name, Saint-John; the responsibilities of the adventurer are

multiplied; his life in America has become a matter more easy to

trace and richer, perhaps, in meaning.

II

One of the historians of American literature has written that these

Letters furnish "a greater number of delightful pages than any other

book written in America during the eighteenth century, save only

Franklin's Autobiography." A safe compliment, this; and yet does not

the very emptiness of American annals during the eighteenth century

make for our cherishing all that they offer of the vivid and the

significant? Professor Moses Coit Tyler long ago suggested what was

the literary influence of the American Farmer, whose "idealised

treatment of rural life in America wrought quite traceable effects

upon the imaginations of Campbell, Byron, Southey, Coleridge, and

furnished not a few materials for such captivating and airy schemes

of literary colonisation in America as that of 'Pantisocracy.'"

Hazlitt praised the book to his friends and, as we have seen,

commended it to readers of the Edinburgh Review. Lamb mentions it in

one of his letters--which is already some distinction. Yet when was

a book more completely lost to popular view--even among the books

that have deserved oblivion? The Letters were published, all the

same, at Belfast and Dublin and Philadelphia, as well as at London;

they were recast in French by the author, translated into German and

Dutch by pirating penny-a-liners, and given a "sequel" by a

publisher at Paris. [Footnote: Ouvrage pour servir de suite aux

Lettres d'un cultivateur Americain, Paris, 1785. The work so offered

seems to have been a translation of John Filson's History of

Kentucky (Wilmington, Del., 1784).]

The American Fanner made his first public appearance eleven years

before Chateaubriand found a publisher for his Essai sur les

Revolutions, wherein the great innovator first used the American

materials that he worked over more effectively in his travels,

tales, and memoirs. In Saint-John de Crevecoeur, we have a

contemporary--a correspondent, even--of Franklin; but if our author

shared many of poor Richard's interests, one may travel far without

finding a more complete antithesis to that common-sense philosopher.

Crevecoeur expresses mild wonderment that, while so many travellers

visit Italy and "the town of Pompey under ground," few come to the

new continent, where may be studied, not what is found in books, but

"the humble rudiments and embryos of society spreading everywhere,

the recent foundations of our towns, and the settlements of so many

rural districts." In the course of his sixteen or seventeen years'

experience as an American farmer he himself studied all these

matters; and he gives us a charming picture of them. Though his book

has very little obvious system, its author describes for us frontier

and farm; the ways of the Nantucket fishermen and their intrepid

wives; life in the Middle Colonies; the refinements and atrocities

of Charleston. Crevecoeur's account of the South (that he knew but

superficially and--who knows?--more, it may be, by Tetard's

anecdotes than through personal knowledge) is the least satisfactory

part of his performance. One feels it to be the most "literary"

portion of a book whose beauty is naivete. But whether we accept or

reject the story of the negro malefactor hung in a cage from a tree,

and pecked at by crows, it is certain that the traveller justly

regarded slavery as the one conspicuous blot on the new country's

shield. Crevecoeur was not an active abolitionist, like that other

naturalised Frenchman, Benezet of Philadelphia; he had his own

slaves to work his northern farms; he was, however, a man of humane

feelings--one who "had his doubts." [Footnote: In his Voyage dans la

Haute Pensylvanie (sic) et dans l'Etat de New York (Paris, 1801)

slavery is severely attacked by Crevecoeur. His descendant, Robert

de Crevecoeur, refers to him as "a friend of Wilberforce."] And his

narrative description of life in the American colonies in the years

immediately preceding the Revolution is one that social historians

cannot ignore.

Though our Farmer emphasises his plainness, and promises the readers

of his Letters only a matter-of-fact account of his pursuits, he has

his full share of eighteenth-century "sensibility." Since he is,

however, at many removes from the sophistications of London and

Paris, he is moved, not by the fond behaviour of a lap-dog, or the

"little arrangements" carters make with the bridles of their

faithful asses (that they have driven to death, belike), but by such

matters as he finds at home. "When I contemplate my wife, by my

fire-side, while she either spins, knits, darns, or suckles our

child, I cannot describe the various emotions of love, of gratitude,

or conscious pride which thrill in my heart, and often overflow in

voluntary tears ..." He is like that old classmate's of

Fitzgerald's, buried deep "in one of the most out-of-the-way

villages in all England," for if he goes abroad, "it is always

involuntary. I never return home without feeling some pleasant

emotion, which I often suppress as useless and foolish." He has his

reveries; but they are pure and generous; their subject is the

future of his children. In midwinter, instead of trapping and

"murthering" the quail, "often in the angles of the fences where the

motion of the wind prevents the snow from settling, I carry them

both chaff and grain: the one to feed them, the other to prevent

their tender feet from freezing fast to the earth as I have

frequently observed them to do." His love of birds is marked: this

in those provinces of which a German traveller wrote: "In the thrush

kind America is poor; there is only the red-breasted robin. ...

There are no sparrows. Very few birds nest in the woods; a solemn

stillness prevails through them, interrupted only by the screaming

of the crows." It is good, after such a passage as this has been

quoted, to set down what Crevecoeur says of the bird kingdom. "In

the spring," he writes, "I generally rise from bed about that

indistinct interval which, properly speaking, is neither night nor

day:" for then it is that he enjoys "the universal vocal choir." He

continues--more and more lyrically: "Who can listen unmoved, to the

sweet love-tales of our robins, told from tree to tree? Or to the

shrill cat birds? The sublime accents of the thrush from on high,

always retard my steps, that I may listen to the delicious music."

And the Farmer is no less interested in "the astonishing art which

all birds display in the construction of their nests, ill provided

as we may suppose them with proper tools; their neatness, their

convenience." At some time during his American residence he gathered

the materials for an unpublished study of ants; and his bees proved

an unfailing source of entertainment. "Their government, their

industry, their quarrels, their passions, always present me with

something new," he writes; adding that he is most often to be found,

in hours of rest, under the locust tree where his beehive stands.

"By their movements," says he, "I can predict the weather, and can

tell the day of their swarming." When other men go hunting game, he

goes bee-hunting. Such are the matters he tells of in his Letters.

One difference from the stereotyped "sensibility" of the old world

one may discover in the openness of Crevecoeur's heart; and that is

the completeness of his interest in all the humbler sorts of natural

phenomena. Nature is, for him, no mere bundle of poetic stage-

properties, soiled by much handling, but something fresh and

inviting and full of interest to a man alive. He takes more pleasure

in hunting bees than in expeditions with his dogs and gun; the king-

birds destroy his bees--but, he adds, they drive the crows away.

Ordinarily he could not persuade himself to shoot them. On one

occasion, however, he fired at a more than commonly impertinent

specimen, "and immediately opened his maw, from which I took 171

bees; I laid them all on a blanket in the sun, and to my great

surprise fifty-four returned to life, licked themselves clean, and

joyfully went back to the hive, where they probably informed their

companions of such an adventure and escape, as I believe had never

happened before to American bees." Must one regard this as a fable?

It is by no means as remarkable a yarn as one may find told by other

naturalists of the same century. There is, for example, that undated

letter of John Bartram's, in which he makes inquiries of his brother

William concerning "Ye Wonderful Flower;" [Footnote: see "A

Botanical Marvel," in The Nation (New York), August 5, 1909.] there

is, too, Kalm's report of Bartram's bear: "When a bear catches a

cow, he kills her in the following manner: he bites a hole into the

hide and blows with all his power into it, till the animal swells

excessively and dies; for the air expands greatly between the flesh

and the hide." After these fine fancies, where is the improbability

of Crevecoeur's modest adaptation of the Jonah-allegory that he

applies to the king-bird and his bees? The episode suggests, for

that matter, a chapter in Mitchell's My Farm at Edgewood. Mitchell,

a later American farmer, describes the same king-birds, the same

bees; has, too, the same supremely gentle spirit. "I have not the

heart to shoot at the king-birds; nor do I enter very actively into

the battle of the bees. ... I give them fair play, good lodging,

limitless flowers, willows bending (as Virgil advises) into the

quiet water of a near pool; I have even read up the stories of a

poor blind Huber, who so dearly loved the bees, and the poem of

Giovanni Rucellai, for their benefit." Can the reader state, without

stopping to consider, which author it was that wrote thus--Mitchell

or Crevecoeur? Certainly it is the essential modernity of the

earlier writer's style that most impresses one, after the charm of

his pictures. His was the age of William Livingston--later Governor

of the State of New Jersey; and in the very year when a London

publisher was bringing out the first edition of the Farmer's

Letters, Livingston, described on his title-page as a "young

gentleman educated at Yale College," brought out his Philosophic

Solitude at Trenton, in his native state. It is worth quoting

Philosophic Solitude for the sake of the comparison to be drawn

between Crevecoeur's prose and contemporary American verse:-

     "Let ardent heroes seek renown in arms,

     Pant after fame, and rush to war's alarms ...

     Mine be the pleasures of a RURAL life."

The thought is, after all, the same as that which we have found less

directly phrased in Crevecoeur. But let us quote the lines that

follow the exordium--now we should find the poet unconstrained and

fancy-free:--

     "Me to sequestred scenes, ye muses, guide,

     Where nature wantons in her virgin-pride;

     To mossy banks edg'd round with op'ning flow'rs,

     Elysian fields, and amaranthin bow'rs. ...

     Welcome, ye shades! all hail, ye vernal blooms!

     Ye bow'ry thickets, and prophetic glooms!

     Ye forests hail! ye solitary woods. ..."

and the "solitary woods" (rhyming with "floods") are a good place to

leave the "young gentleman educated at Yale College." Livingston

was, plainly enough, a poet of his time and place. He had a fine eye

for Nature--seen through library windows. He echoed Goldsmith and a

whole line of British poets--echoed them atrociously.

That one finds no "echoes" in Crevecoeur is one of our reasons for

praising his spontaneity and vigour. He did not import nightingales

into his America, as some of the poets did. He blazed away, rather,

toward our present day appreciation of surrounding nature--which was

not banal then. Crevecoeur's honest and unconventionalised love of

his rural environment is great enough to bridge the difference

between the eighteenth and the twentieth century. It is as easy for

us to pass a happy evening with him as it was for Thomas Campbell,

figuring to himself a realisation of Cowley's dreams and of

Rousseau's poetic seclusion; "till at last," in Southey's words,

"comes an ill-looking Indian with a tomahawk, and scalps me--a most

melancholy proof that society is very bad." It is the freshness, the

youthfulness, of these Letters, after their century and more of

dust-gathering, that is least likely to escape us. And this "Farmer

in Pennsylvania" is almost as unmistakably of kin with good Gilbert

White of Selborne as he is the American Thoreau's eighteenth-century

forerunner.

III

It is time, indeed, that we made the discovery that Crevecoeur was a

modern. He was, too, a dweller in the young republic--even before it

WAS a republic. Twice a year he had "the pleasure of catching

pigeons, whose numbers are sometimes so astonishing as to obscure

the sun in their flight." There is, then, no poetic licence about

Longfellow's description, in Evangeline, of how--

"A pestilence fell on the city Presaged by wondrous signs, and

mostly by flocks of wild pigeons, Darkening the sun in their flight,

with naught in their craws but an acorn."

Longfellow could have cited as his authority for this flight of

pigeons Mathew Carey's Record of the Malignant Fever lately

Prevalent, published at Philadelphia, which, to be sure, discusses a

different epidemic, but tells us that "amongst the country people,

large quantities of wild pigeons in the spring are regarded as

certain indications of an unhealthy summer. Whether or not this

prognostic has ever been verified, I cannot tell. But it is very

certain that during the last spring the numbers of these birds

brought to market were immense. Never, perhaps, were there so many

before."

Carey wrote in 1793, the year, as has been noted, of the first

American reprint of the Letters, that had first been published at

London. Carey was himself Crevecoeur's American publisher; and he

may well have thought as he wrote the lines quoted of Crevecoeur's

earlier pigeons "obscuring the sun in their flight." Crevecoeur had

by this time returned to France, and was never more to ply the

avocations of the American farmer. In the interval, much had

happened to this victim of both the revolutions. Though the Letters

are distinguished by an idyllic temper, over them is thrown the

shadow of impending civil war. The Farmer was a man of peace, for

all his experience under Montcalm in Canada (and even there his part

was rather an engineer's than a combatant's); he long hoped,

therefore, that peaceful counsels would prevail, and that England

and the colonies would somehow come to an understanding without

hostilities. Then, after the Americans had boldly broken with the

home government, he lent them all his sympathy but not his arms. He

had his family to watch over; likewise his two farms, one in Orange

County, New York, one in New Jersey. As it was, the Indians in the

royal service burned his New Jersey estate; and after his first

return to France (he was called thither by his father, we are told,

though we know nothing of the motives of this recall) he entered

upon a new phase of his career. "After his first return to France,"

I have said, as if that had been an entirely simple matter. One

cannot here describe all its alleged difficulties; his arrest at New

York as a suspected spy (though after having secured a pass from the

American commander. General MacDougal, he had secured a second pass

from General Clinton, and permission to embark for France); his

detention in the provost's prison in New York; the final embarkation

with his oldest son--this on September 1, 1780; the shipwreck which

he described as occurring off the Irish coast; his residence for

some months in Great Britain, and during a part of that time in

London, where he sold the manuscript of the Letters for thirty

guineas. One would like to know Crevecoeur's emotions on finally

reaching France and joining his father and relatives at Caen. One

would like to describe his romantic succour of five American seamen,

who had escaped from an English prison and crossed the Channel in a

sloop to Normandy. A cousin of one of these seamen, a Captain

Fellowes of Boston, was later to befriend Crevecoeur's daughter and

younger son in the new country; that was after the Loyalists and

their Indian allies had destroyed the Farmer's house at Pine Hill,

after his wife had fled to Westchester with her two children, and

had died there soon after, leaving them unprotected. But all this

must, in nautical phrase, "go by the board," including the novel

founded upon the episode. Nor can we linger over Crevecoeur's entry

into polite society, both in the Norman capital and at Paris. Fancy

the returned prodigal--if one may so describe him--in the salon of

Madame d'Houdetot, Rousseau's former mistress! He was fairly

launched, this American Farmer, in the society of the lettres.

"Twice a week," he wrote, some years after, "I went with M. de

Turgot to see the Duchesse de Beauvilliers, his sister; and another

twice-a-week I went with him to the Comte de Buffon's. ... It was at

the table of M. de Buffon, it was in his salon, during long winter

evenings, that I was awakened once more to the graces, the beauties,

the timid purity of our tongue, which, during my long sojourn in

North America, had become foreign to me, and of which I had almost

lost command--though not the memory."

Madame d'Houdetot presented Crevecoeur to the families of La

Rochefoucauld, Liancourt, d'Estissac, Breteuil, Rohan-Chabot,

Beauvau, Necker; to the academicians d'Alembert, La Harpe, Grimm,

Suard, Rulbriere; to the poet-academician Delille. We have in the

Memoires of Brissot an allusion to his entrance into this society,

under the wing of his elderly protectress:--

"Proud of possessing an American savage, she wished to form him, and

to launch him in society. He had the good sense to refuse and to

confine himself to the picked society of men of letters."

It was at a later period that Brissot and Crevecoeur were to meet;

their quarrel, naturally, came later still.

Madame d'Houdetot did more than entertain the Farmer, whose father

had been one of her oldest friends. She secured his nomination as

Consul-General to the United States, now recognised by France; it

was at New York that he took up residence. Through the influence of

Madame d'Houdetot and her friends, he retained the appointment

through the stormy years that followed, though in the end he was

obliged to make way for a successor more in sympathy with the

violent republicanism of the age. Throughout the years of the French

Revolution, the ex-farmer lived a life of retirement, and, if never

of conspicuous danger, of embarrassment enough, and of humiliation.

We need not discuss those years spent at Paris; or the visits paid,

after the close of the Revolution, to his son-in-law and daughter,

for his daughter Frances-America was married to a French Secretary

of Legation, who became a Count of the Empire. Now he was in Paris

or the suburbs; now in London, or Munich. Five years of the Farmer's

later life were spent at the Bavarian capital; Maximilian

entertained him there, and told him that he had read his book with

the keenest pleasure and great profit too. He busied himself in

preparing his three-volume Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie (sic) et

dans l'Etat de New York, and in adding to his paper on potato

culture,[Footnote: Traite de la Culture des Pommes de Terre, 1782.]

a second on the false acacia; but his best work was done and he knew

it. Crevecoeur lived on until 1813, dying in the same year with

Madame d'Houdetot, who was so much his elder. He paid a worthy

tribute to that lady's character; perhaps we do her an injustice in

knowing her only for the liaison with Jean-Jacques. He died on

November 12, 1813: member of agricultural societies and of the

Academy (section of moral and political science), and of Franklin's

Philosophical Society at Philadelphia. A town in Vermont had been

named St. Johnsbury in his honour; he had the freedom of more than

one New England city. It is, none the less, as the author of Letters

from an American Farmer, published in 1782, and written, for the

most part, years before that date, that we remember him--so far as

we do remember.

IV

Much remains unsaid--much, even, of the essential. Some of the facts

are still unknown; others may be looked for in the biography written

by his great-grandson, Robert de Crevecoeur, and published at Paris

some eighty years ago. There is hardly occasion to discuss here what

Crevecoeur did, as consul at New York, to encourage the exchange of

French manufactures and American exports; or to tell of his packet-

line--the first established between New York and a French port; or

to set down the story of his children; or to describe those last sad

years, at home and abroad, after the close of his consular career.

There is no room at all for the words of praise that were spoken of

the Letters by Franklin and Washington, who recommended them to

intending immigrants as a faithful, albeit "highly coloured"

picture. We must let the writings of the American Farmer speak for

themselves: they belong, after all, to literature.

It was a modest man--a modest life; a life filled, none the less,

with romantic incident. All this throws into relief the beauty of

its best fruits. Crevecoeur made no claim to artistry when he wrote

his simple, heartfelt Letters; and yet his style, in spite of

occasional defects and extra flourishes, seems to us worthy of his

theme. These Letters from an American Farmer have been an

inspiration to poets--and they "smell of the woods."

In a prose age, Crevecoeur lived a kind of pastoral poetry; in an

age largely blind, he saw the beauties of nature, less through

readings in the Nouvelle Heloise and Bernardin's Etudes than with

his own keen eyes; he was a true idealist, besides, and as such

kindles one's enthusiasm. The man's optimism, his grateful

personality, his saneness, too--for here is a dreamer neither idle

nor morbid--are qualities no less enduring, or endearing, than his

fame as "poet-naturalist." The American Farmer might have used

Cotton's Retirement for an epigraph on his title-page:--

     "Farewell, thou busy world, and may

     We never meet again,

     Here I can eat and sleep and pray. ..."

but for the fact that he found time to turn the clods, withal, and

eyes to watch the earth blackening behind the plough. "Our

necessities," wrote Poe, who contended, in a half-hearted way, that

the Americans of his generation were as poetical a people as any

other, "have been mistaken for our propensities. Having been forced

to make railroads, it has been deemed impossible that we should make

verse." But here was Saint-John de Crevecoeur writing, in the

eighteenth century, his idyllic Letters, while, if he did not build

railways, he interested himself in the experiments of Fitch and

Rumsey and Parmentier, and organised a packet-line between New York

and Lorient, in Brittany. This Crevecoeur should from the first have

appealed to the imagination--especially to the American imagination-

-combining as he did the faculty of the ideal and the achievement of

the actual. It is not too late for him to appeal to-day; in spite of

all his quaintness, Crevecoeur is a contemporary of our own.

WARREN BARTON BLAKE.

BRADFORD HILLS, WEST CHESTER,

PENNSYLVANIA.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Letters from an American Farmer (London), 1782, 1783; (Dublin),

1782; (Belfast), 1783; (Philadelphia), 1793; (New York), 1904;

(London), 1908; translated into French (with gratuitous additions)

as Lettres d'un cultivateur Americain (Paris), 1784 and 1787; into

German as Briefe eines Amerikanischen Landmanns (Leipzig), 1788,

1789. Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie et dans l'etat de New York

(Paris), 1801.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION by Warren Barton Blake

LETTER

   I. INTRODUCTION

  II. ON THE SITUATION, FEELINGS, AND PLEASURES OF AN AMERICAN

FARMER

 III. WHAT IS AN AMERICAN

  IV. DESCRIPTION OF THE ISLAND OF NANTUCKET, WITH THE MANNERS,

CUSTOMS, POLICY, AND TRADE OF THE INHABITANTS

   V. CUSTOMARY EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT OF THE INHABITANTS OF

NANTUCKET

  VI. DESCRIPTION OF THE ISLAND OF MARTHA'S VINEYARD, AND OF THE

WHALE FISHERY

 VII. MANNERS AND CUSTOMS AT NANTUCKET

VIII. PECULIAR CUSTOMS AT NANTUCKET

  IX. DESCRIPTION OF CHARLES-TOWN; THOUGHTS ON SLAVERY; ON PHYSICAL

EVIL; A MELANCHOLY SCENE

   X. ON SNAKES; AND ON THE HUMMING BIRD.

  XI. FROM MR. IW--N AL--Z, A RUSSIAN GENTLEMAN, DESCRIBING THE

VISIT HE PAID AT MY REQUEST TO MR. JOHN BERTRAM, THE

CELEBRATEDPENNSYLVANIA BOTANIST

 XII. DISTRESSES OF A FRONTIER MAN

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER;

DESCRIBING CERTAIN PROVINCIAL SITUATIONS, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS, NOT

GENERALLY KNOWN; AND CONVEYING SOME IDEA OF THE LATE AND PRESENT

INTERIOR CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE BRITISH COLONIES IN NORTH AMERICA.

WRITTEN FOR THE INFORMATION OF A FRIEND IN ENGLAND,

By J. HECTOR ST. JOHN, A FARMER IN PENNSYLVANIA

ADVERTISEMENT

[To the first edition, 1782.]

The following Letters are the genuine production of the American

Farmer whose name they bear. They were privately written to gratify

the curiosity of a friend; and are made public, because they contain

much authentic information, little known on this side the Atlantic;

they cannot therefore fail of being highly interesting to the people

of England, at a time when everybody's attention is directed toward

the affairs of America.

That these letters are the actual result of a private correspondence

may fairly be inferred (exclusive of other evidence) from the style

and manner in which they are conceived: for though plain and

familiar, and sometimes animated, they are by no means exempt from

such inaccuracies as must unavoidably occur in the rapid effusions

of a confessedly inexperienced writer.

Our Farmer had long been an eye-witness of transactions that have

deformed the face of America: he is one of those who dreaded, and

has severely felt, the desolating consequences of a rupture between

the parent state and her colonies: for he has been driven from a

situation, the enjoyment of which the reader will find pathetically

described in the early letters of this volume. The unhappy contest

is at length, however, drawing toward a period; and it is now only

left us to hope, that the obvious interests and mutual wants of both

countries, may in due time, and in spite of all obstacles, happily

re-unite them.

Should our Farmer's letters be found to afford matter of useful

entertainment to an intelligent and candid public, a second volume,

equally interesting with those now published, may soon be expected.

ADVERTISEMENT

[To the Second Edition, 1783.]

Since the publication of this volume, we hear that Mr. St. John has

accepted a public employment at New York. It is therefore, perhaps,

doubtful whether he will soon be at leisure to revise his papers,

and give the world a second collection of the American Farmer

Letters.

TO THE ABBE RAYNAL, F.R.S.

Behold, Sir, an humble American Planter, a simple cultivator of the

earth, addressing you from the farther side of the Atlantic; and

presuming to fix your name at the head of his trifling lucubrations.

I wish they were worthy of so great an honour. Yet why should not I

be permitted to disclose those sentiments which I have so often felt

from my heart? A few years since, I met accidentally with your

Political and Philosophical History, and perused it with infinite

pleasure. For the first time in my life I reflected on the relative

state of nations; I traced the extended ramifications of a commerce

which ought to unite but now convulses the world; I admired that

universal benevolence, that diffusive goodwill, which is not

confined to the narrow limits of your own country; but, on the

contrary, extends to the whole human race. As an eloquent and

powerful advocate you have pleaded the cause of humanity in

espousing that of the poor Africans: you viewed these provinces of

North America in their true light, as the asylum of freedom; as the

cradle of future nations, and the refuge of distressed Europeans.

Why then should I refrain from loving and respecting a man whose

writings I so much admire? These two sentiments are inseparable, at

least in my breast. I conceived your genius to be present at the

head of my study: under its invisible but powerful guidance, I

prosecuted my small labours: and now, permit me to sanctify them

under the auspices of your name. Let the sincerity of the motives

which urge me, prevent you from thinking that this well meant

address contains aught but the purest tribute of reverence and

affection. There is, no doubt, a secret communion among good men

throughout the world; a mental affinity connecting them by a

similitude of sentiments: then, why, though an American, should not

I be permitted to share in that extensive intellectual

consanguinity? Yes, I do: and though the name of a man who possesses

neither titles nor places, who never rose above the humble rank of a

farmer, may appear insignificant; yet, as the sentiments I have

expressed are also the echo of those of my countrymen; on their

behalf, as well as on my own, give me leave to subscribe myself,

Sir,

Your very sincere admirer,

J. HECTOR ST. JOHN. CARLISLE IN PENNSYLVANIA.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER

LETTER I

INTRODUCTION

Who would have thought that because I received you with hospitality

and kindness, you should imagine me capable of writing with

propriety and perspicuity? Your gratitude misleads your judgment.

The knowledge which I acquired from your conversation has amply

repaid me for your five weeks' entertainment. I gave you nothing

more than what common hospitality dictated; but could any other

guest have instructed me as you did? You conducted me, on the map,

from one European country to another; told me many extraordinary

things of our famed mother-country, of which I knew very little; of

its internal navigation, agriculture, arts, manufactures, and trade:

you guided me through an extensive maze, and I abundantly profited

by the journey; the contrast therefore proves the debt of gratitude

to be on my side. The treatment you received at my house proceeded

from the warmth of my heart, and from the corresponding sensibility

of my wife; what you now desire must flow from a very limited power

of mind: the task requires recollection, and a variety of talents

which I do not possess. It is true I can describe our American modes

of farming, our manners, and peculiar customs, with some degree of

propriety, because I have ever attentively studied them; but my

knowledge extends no farther. And is this local and unadorned

information sufficient to answer all your expectations, and to

satisfy your curiosity? I am surprised that in the course of your

American travels you should not have found out persons more

enlightened and better educated than I am; your predilection excites

my wonder much more than my vanity; my share of the latter being

confined merely to the neatness of my rural operations.

My father left me a few musty books, which his father brought from

England with him; but what help can I draw from a library consisting

mostly of Scotch Divinity, the Navigation of Sir Francis Drake, the

History of Queen Elizabeth, and a few miscellaneous volumes? Our

minister often comes to see me, though he lives upwards of twenty

miles distant. I have shown him your letter, asked his advice, and

solicited his assistance; he tells me, that he hath no time to

spare, for that like the rest of us must till his farm, and is

moreover to study what he is to say on the sabbath. My wife (and I

never do anything without consulting her) laughs, and tells me that

you cannot be in earnest. What! says she, James, wouldst thee

pretend to send epistles to a great European man, who hath lived

abundance of time in that big house called Cambridge; where, they

say, that worldly learning is so abundant, that people gets it only

by breathing the air of the place? Wouldst not thee be ashamed to

write unto a man who has never in his life done a single day's work,

no, not even felled a tree; who hath expended the Lord knows how

many years in studying stars, geometry, stones, and flies, and in

reading folio books? Who hath travelled, as he told us, to the city

of Rome itself! Only think of a London man going to Rome! Where is

it that these English folks won't go? One who hath seen the factory

of brimstone at Suvius, and town of Pompey under ground! wouldst

thou pretend to letter it with a person who hath been to Paris, to

the Alps, to Petersburg, and who hath seen so many fine things up

and down the old countries; who hath come over the great sea unto

us, and hath journeyed from our New Hampshire in the East to our

Charles Town in the South; who hath visited all our great cities,

knows most of our famous lawyers and cunning folks; who hath

conversed with very many king's men, governors, and counsellors, and

yet pitches upon thee for his correspondent, as thee calls it?

surely he means to jeer thee! I am sure he does, he cannot be in a

real fair earnest. James, thee must read this letter over again,

paragraph by paragraph, and warily observe whether thee can'st

perceive some words of jesting; something that hath more than one

meaning: and now I think on it, husband, I wish thee wouldst let me

see his letter; though I am but a woman, as thee mayest say, yet I

understand the purport of words in good measure, for when I was a

girl, father sent us to the very best master in the precinct.--She

then read it herself very attentively: our minister was present, we

listened to, and weighed every syllable: we all unanimously

concluded that you must have been in a sober earnest intention, as

my wife calls it; and your request appeared to be candid and

sincere. Then again, on recollecting the difference between your

sphere of life and mine, a new fit of astonishment seized us all!

Our minister took the letter from my wife, and read it to himself;

he made us observe the two last phrases, and we weighed the contents

to the best of our abilities. The conclusion we all drew made me

resolve at last to write.--You say you want nothing of me but what

lies within the reach of my experience and knowledge; this I

understand very well; the difficulty is, how to collect, digest, and

arrange what I know? Next you assert, that writing letters is

nothing more than talking on paper; which, I must confess, appeared

to me quite a new thought.--Well then, observed our minister,

neighbour James, as you can talk well, I am sure you must write

tolerably well also; imagine, then, that Mr. F. B. is still here,

and simply write down what you would say to him. Suppose the

questions be will put to you in his future letters to be asked by

his viva voce, as we used to call it at the college; then let your

answers be conceived and expressed exactly in the same language as

if he was present. This is all that he requires from you, and I am

sure the task is not difficult. He is your friend: who would be

ashamed to write to such a person? Although he is a man of learning

and taste, yet I am sure he will read your letters with pleasure: if

they be not elegant, they will smell of the woods, and be a little

wild; I know your turn, they will contain some matters which he

never knew before. Some people are so fond of novelty, that they

will overlook many errors of language for the sake of information.

We are all apt to love and admire exotics, tho' they may be often

inferior to what we possess; and that is the reason I imagine why so

many persons are continually going to visit Italy.--That country is

the daily resort of modern travellers.

James: I should like to know what is there to be seen so goodly and

profitable, that so many should wish to visit no other country?

Minister: I do not very well know. I fancy their object is to trace

the vestiges of a once flourishing people now extinct. There they

amuse themselves in viewing the ruins of temples and other buildings

which have very little affinity with those of the present age, and

must therefore impart a knowledge which appears useless and

trifling. I have often wondered that no skilful botanists or learned

men should come over here; methinks there would be much more real

satisfaction in observing among us the humble rudiments and embryos

of societies spreading everywhere, the recent foundation of our

towns, and the settlements of so many rural districts. I am sure

that the rapidity of their growth would be more pleasing to behold,

than the ruins of old towers, useless aqueducts, or impending

battlements.

James: What you say, minister, seems very true: do go on: I always

love to hear you talk.

Minister: Don't you think, neighbour James, that the mind of a good

and enlightened Englishman would be more improved in remarking

throughout these provinces the causes which render so many people

happy? In delineating the unnoticed means by which we daily increase

the extent of our settlements? How we convert huge forests into

pleasing fields, and exhibit through these thirteen provinces so

singular a display of easy subsistence and political felicity.

In Italy all the objects of contemplation, all the reveries of the

traveller, must have a reference to ancient generations, and to very

distant periods, clouded with the mist of ages.--Here, on the

contrary, everything is modern, peaceful, and benign. Here we have

had no war to desolate our fields: [Footnote: The troubles that now

convulse the American colonies had not broke out when this and some

of the following letters were written.] our religion does not

oppress the cultivators: we are strangers to those feudal

institutions which have enslaved so many. Here nature opens her

broad lap to receive the perpetual accession of new comers, and to

supply them with food. I am sure I cannot be called a partial

American when I say that the spectacle afforded by these pleasing

scenes must be more entertaining and more philosophical than that

which arises from beholding the musty ruins of Rome. Here everything

would inspire the reflecting traveller with the most philanthropic

ideas; his imagination, instead of submitting to the painful and

useless retrospect of revolutions, desolations, and plagues, would,

on the contrary, wisely spring forward to the anticipated fields of

future cultivation and improvement, to the future extent of those

generations which are to replenish and embellish this boundless

continent. There the half-ruined amphitheatres, and the putrid

fevers of the Campania, must fill the mind with the most melancholy

reflections, whilst he is seeking for the origin and the intention

of those structures with which he is surrounded, and for the cause

of so great a decay. Here he might contemplate the very beginnings

and outlines of human society, which can be traced nowhere now but

in this part of the world. The rest of the earth, I am told, is in

some places too full, in others half depopulated. Misguided

religion, tyranny, and absurd laws everywhere depress and afflict

mankind. Here we have in some measure regained the ancient dignity

of our species; our laws are simple and just, we are a race of

cultivators, our cultivation is unrestrained, and therefore

everything is prosperous and flourishing. For my part I had rather

admire the ample barn of one of our opulent farmers, who himself

felled the first tree in his plantation, and was the first founder

of his settlement, than study the dimensions of the temple of Ceres.

I had rather record the progressive steps of this industrious

farmer, throughout all the stages of his labours and other

operations, than examine how modern Italian convents can be

supported without doing anything but singing and praying.

However confined the field of speculation might be here, the time of

English travellers would not be wholly lost. The new and unexpected

aspect of our extensive settlements; of our fine rivers; that great

field of action everywhere visible; that ease, that peace with which

so many people live together, would greatly interest the observer:

for whatever difficulties there might happen in the object of their

researches, that hospitality which prevails from one end of the

continent to the other would in all parts facilitate their

excursions. As it is from the surface of the ground which we till

that we have gathered the wealth we possess, the surface of that

ground is therefore the only thing that has hitherto been known. It

will require the industry of subsequent ages, the energy of future

generations, ere mankind here will have leisure and abilities to

penetrate deep, and, in the bowels of this continent, search for the

subterranean riches it no doubt contains.--Neighbour James, we want

much the assistance of men of leisure and knowledge, we want eminent

chemists to inform our iron masters; to teach us how to make and

prepare most of the colours we use. Here we have none equal to this

task. If any useful discoveries are therefore made among us, they

are the effects of chance, or else arise from that restless industry

which is the principal characteristic of these colonies.

James: Oh! could I express myself as you do, my friend, I should not

balance a single instant, I should rather be anxious to commence a

correspondence which would do me credit.

Minister: You can write full as well as you need, and will improve

very fast; trust to my prophecy, your letters, at least, will have

the merit of coming from the edge of the great wilderness, three

hundred miles from the sea, and three thousand miles over that sea:

this will be no detriment to them, take my word for it. You intend

one of your children for the gown, who knows but Mr. F. B. may give

you some assistance when the lad comes to have concerns with the

bishop; it is good for American farmers to have friends even in

England. What he requires of you is but simple--what we speak out

among ourselves we call conversation, and a letter is only

conversation put down in black and white.

James: You quite persuade me--if he laughs at my awkwardness, surely

he will be pleased with my ready compliance. On my part, it will be

well meant let the execution be what it may. I will write enough,

and so let him have the trouble of sifting the good from the bad,

the useful from the trifling; let him select what he may want, and

reject what may not answer his purpose. After all, it is but

treating Mr. F. B. now that he is in London, as I treated him when

he was in America under this roof; that is with the best things I

had; given with a good intention; and the best manner I was able.

Very different, James, very different indeed, said my wife, I like

not thy comparison; our small house and cellar, our orchard and

garden afforded what he wanted; one half of his time Mr. F. B., poor

man, lived upon nothing but fruit-pies, or peaches and milk. Now

these things were such as God had given us, myself and wench did the

rest; we were not the creators of these victuals, we only cooked

them as well and as neat as we could. The first thing, James, is to

know what sort of materials thee hast within thy own self, and then

whether thee canst dish them up.--Well, well, wife, thee art wrong

for once; if I was filled with worldly vanity, thy rebuke would be

timely, but thee knowest that I have but little of that. How shall I

know what I am capable of till I try? Hadst thee never employed

thyself in thy father's house to learn and to practise the many

branches of house-keeping that thy parents were famous for, thee

wouldst have made but a sorry wife for an American farmer; thee

never shouldst have been mine. I married thee not for what thee

hadst, but for what thee knewest; doest not thee observe what Mr. F.

B. says beside; he tells me, that the art of writing is just like

unto every other art of man; that it is acquired by habit, and by

perseverance. That is singularly true, said our minister, he that

shall write a letter every day of the week, will on Saturday

perceive the sixth flowing from his pen much more readily than the

first. I observed when I first entered into the ministry and began

to preach the word, I felt perplexed and dry, my mind was like unto

a parched soil, which produced nothing, not even weeds. By the

blessing of heaven, and my perseverance in study, I grew richer in

thoughts, phrases, and words; I felt copious, and now I can

abundantly preach from any text that occurs to my mind. So will it

be with you, neighbour James; begin therefore without delay; and Mr.

F. B.'s letters may be of great service to you: he will, no doubt,

inform you of many things: correspondence consists in reciprocal

letters. Leave off your diffidence, and I will do my best to help

you whenever I have any leisure. Well then, I am resolved, I said,

to follow your counsel; my letters shall not be sent, nor will I

receive any, without reading them to you and my wife; women are

curious, they love to know their husband's secrets; it will not be

the first thing which I have submitted to your joint opinions.

Whenever you come to dine with us, these shall be the last dish on

the table. Nor will they be the most unpalatable, answered the good

man. Nature hath given you a tolerable share of sense, and that is

one of her best gifts let me tell you. She has given you besides

some perspicuity, which qualifies you to distinguish interesting

objects; a warmth of imagination which enables you to think with

quickness; you often extract useful reflections from objects which

presented none to my mind: you have a tender and a well meaning

heart, you love description, and your pencil, assure yourself, is

not a bad one for the pencil of a farmer; it seems to be held

without any labour; your mind is what we called at Yale college a

Tabula rasa, where spontaneous and strong impressions are delineated

with facility. Ah, neighbour! had you received but half the

education of Mr. F. B. you had been a worthy correspondent indeed.

But perhaps you will be a more entertaining one dressed in your

simple American garb, than if you were clad in all the gowns of

Cambridge. You will appear to him something like one of our wild

American plants, irregularly luxuriant in its various branches,

which an European scholar may probably think ill placed and useless.

If our soil is not remarkable as yet for the excellence of its

fruits, this exuberance is however a strong proof of fertility,

which wants nothing but the progressive knowledge acquired by time

to amend and to correct. It is easier to retrench than it is to add;

I do not mean to flatter you, neighbour James, adulation would ill

become my character, you may therefore believe what your pastor

says. Were I in Europe I should be tired with perpetually seeing

espaliers, plashed hedges, and trees dwarfed into pigmies. Do let

Mr. F. B. see on paper a few American wild cherry trees, such as

nature forms them here, in all her unconfined vigour, in all the

amplitude of their extended limbs and spreading ramifications--let

him see that we are possessed with strong vegetative embryos. After

all, why should not a farmer be allowed to make use of his mental

faculties as well as others; because a man works, is not he to

think, and if he thinks usefully, why should not he in his leisure

hours set down his thoughts? I have composed many a good sermon as I

followed my plough. The eyes not being then engaged on any

particular object, leaves the mind free for the introduction of many

useful ideas. It is not in the noisy shop of a blacksmith or of a

carpenter, that these studious moments can be enjoyed; it is as we

silently till the ground, and muse along the odoriferous furrows of

our low lands, uninterrupted either by stones or stumps; it is there

that the salubrious effluvia of the earth animate our spirits and

serve to inspire us; every other avocation of our farms are severe

labours compared to this pleasing occupation: of all the tasks which

mine imposes on me ploughing is the most agreeable, because I can

think as I work; my mind is at leisure; my labour flows from

instinct, as well as that of my horses; there is no kind of

difference between us in our different shares of that operation; one

of them keeps the furrow, the other avoids it; at the end of my

field they turn either to the right or left as they are bid, whilst

I thoughtlessly hold and guide the plough to which they are

harnessed. Do therefore, neighbour, begin this correspondence, and

persevere, difficulties will vanish in proportion as you draw near

them; you'll be surprised at yourself by and by: when you come to

look back you'll say as I have often said to myself; had I been

diffident I had never proceeded thus far. Would you painfully till

your stony up-land and neglect the fine rich bottom which lies

before your door? Had you never tried, you never had learned how to

mend and make your ploughs. It will be no small pleasure to your

children to tell hereafter, that their father was not only one of

the most industrious farmers in the country, but one of the best

writers. When you have once begun, do as when you begin breaking up

your summer fallow, you never consider what remains to be done, you

view only what you have ploughed. Therefore, neighbour James, take

my advice; it will go well with you, I am sure it will.--And do you

really think so, Sir? Your counsel, which I have long followed,

weighs much with me, I verily believe that I must write to Mr. F. B.

by the first vessel.--If thee persistest in being such a foolhardy

man, said my wife, for God's sake let it be kept a profound secret

among us; if it were once known abroad that thee writest to a great

and rich man over at London, there would be no end of the talk of

the people; some would vow that thee art going to turn an author,

others would pretend to foresee some great alterations in the

welfare of thy family; some would say this, some would say that: Who

would wish to become the subject of public talk? Weigh this matter

well before thee beginnest, James--consider that a great deal of thy

time, and of thy reputation is at stake as I may say. Wert thee to

write as well as friend Edmund, whose speeches I often see in our

papers, it would be the very self same thing; thee wouldst be

equally accused of idleness, and vain notions not befitting thy

condition. Our colonel would be often coming here to know what it is

that thee canst write so much about. Some would imagine that thee

wantest to become either an assembly-man or a magistrate, which God

forbid; and that thee art telling the king's men abundance of

things. Instead of being well looked upon as now, and living in

peace with all the world, our neighbours would be making strange

surmises: I had rather be as we are, neither better nor worse than

the rest of our country folks. Thee knowest what I mean, though I

should be sorry to deprive thee of any honest recreation. Therefore

as I have said before, let it be as great a secret as if it was some

heinous crime; the minister, I am sure, will not divulge it; as for

my part, though I am a woman, yet I know what it is to be a wife.--I

would not have thee, James, pass for what the world calleth a

writer; no, not for a peck of gold, as the saying is. Thy father

before thee was a plain dealing honest man, punctual in all things;

he was one of yea and nay, of few words, all he minded was his farm

and his work. I wonder from whence thee hast got this love of the

pen? Had he spent his time in sending epistles to and fro, he never

would have left thee this goodly plantation, free from debt. All I

say is in good meaning; great people over sea may write to our

town's folks, because they have nothing else to do. These Englishmen

are strange people; because they can live upon what they call bank

notes, without working, they think that all the world can do the

same. This goodly country never would have been tilled and cleared

with these notes. I am sure when Mr. F. B. was here, he saw thee

sweat and take abundance of pains; he often told me how the

Americans worked a great deal harder than the home Englishmen; for

there he told us, that they have no trees to cut down, no fences to

make, no negroes to buy and to clothe: and now I think on it, when

wilt thee send him those trees he bespoke? But if they have no trees

to cut down, they have gold in abundance, they say; for they rake it

and scrape it from all parts far and near. I have often heard my

grandfather tell how they live there by writing. By writing they

send this cargo unto us, that to the West, and the other to the East

Indies. But, James, thee knowest that it is not by writing that we

shall pay the blacksmith, the minister, the weaver, the tailor, and

the English shop. But as thee art an early man follow thine own

inclinations; thee wantest some rest, I am sure, and why shouldst

thee not employ it as it may seem meet unto thee.--However let it be

a great secret; how wouldst thee bear to be called at our country

meetings, the man of the pen? If this scheme of thine was once

known, travellers as they go along would point out to our house,

saying, here liveth the scribbling fanner; better hear them as usual

observe, here liveth the warm substantial family, that never

begrudgeth a meal of victuals, or a mess of oats, to any one that

steps in. Look how fat and well clad their negroes are.

Thus, Sir, have I given you an unaffected and candid detail of the

conversation which determined me to accept of your invitation. I

thought it necessary thus to begin, and to let you into these

primary secrets, to the end that you may not hereafter reproach me

with any degree of presumption. You'll plainly see the motives which

have induced me to begin, the fears which I have entertained, and

the principles on which my diffidence hath been founded. I have now

nothing to do but to prosecute my task--Remember you are to give me

my subjects, and on no other shall I write, lest you should blame me

for an injudicious choice--However incorrect my style, however

unexpert my methods, however trifling my observations may hereafter

appear to you, assure yourself they will all be the genuine dictates

of my mind, and I hope will prove acceptable on that account.

Remember that you have laid the foundation of this correspondence;

you well know that I am neither a philosopher, politician, divine,

nor naturalist, but a simple farmer. I flatter myself, therefore,

that you'll receive my letters as conceived, not according to

scientific rules to which I am a perfect stranger, but agreeable to

the spontaneous impressions which each subject may inspire. This is

the only line I am able to follow, the line which nature has herself

traced for me; this was the covenant which I made with you, and with

which you seemed to be well pleased. Had you wanted the style of the

learned, the reflections of the patriot, the discussions of the

politician, the curious observations of the naturalist, the pleasing

garb of the man of taste, surely you would have applied to some of

those men of letters with which our cities abound. But since on the

contrary, and for what reason I know not, you wish to correspond

with a cultivator of the earth, with a simple citizen, you must

receive my letters for better or worse.

LETTER II

ON THE SITUATION, FEELINGS, AND PLEASURES, OF AN AMERICAN FARMER

As you are the first enlightened European I have ever had the

pleasure of being acquainted with, you will not be surprised that I

should, according to your earnest desire and my promise, appear

anxious of preserving your friendship and correspondence. By your

accounts, I observe a material difference subsists between your

husbandry, modes, and customs, and ours; everything is local; could

we enjoy the advantages of the English farmer, we should be much

happier, indeed, but this wish, like many others, implies a

contradiction; and could the English farmer have some of those

privileges we possess, they would be the first of their class in the

world. Good and evil I see is to be found in all societies, and it

is in vain to seek for any spot where those ingredients are not

mixed. I therefore rest satisfied, and thank God that my lot is to

be an American farmer, instead of a Russian boor, or an Hungarian

peasant. I thank you kindly for the idea, however dreadful, which

you have given me of their lot and condition; your observations have

confirmed me in the justness of my ideas, and I am happier now than

I thought myself before. It is strange that misery, when viewed in

others, should become to us a sort of real good, though I am far

from rejoicing to hear that there are in the world men so thoroughly

wretched; they are no doubt as harmless, industrious, and willing to

work as we are. Hard is their fate to be thus condemned to a slavery

worse than that of our negroes. Yet when young I entertained some

thoughts of selling my farm. I thought it afforded but a dull

repetition of the same labours and pleasures. I thought the former

tedious and heavy, the latter few and insipid; but when I came to

consider myself as divested of my farm, I then found the world so

wide, and every place so full, that I began to fear lest there would

be no room for me. My farm, my house, my barn, presented to my

imagination objects from which I adduced quite new ideas; they were

more forcible than before. Why should not I find myself happy, said

I, where my father was before? He left me no good books it is true,

he gave me no other education than the art of reading and writing;

but he left me a good farm, and his experience; he left me free from

debts, and no kind of difficulties to struggle with.--I married, and

this perfectly reconciled me to my situation; my wife rendered my

house all at once cheerful and pleasing; it no longer appeared

gloomy and solitary as before; when I went to work in my fields I

worked with more alacrity and sprightliness; I felt that I did not

work for myself alone, and this encouraged me much. My wife would

often come with her knitting in her hand, and sit under the shady

trees, praising the straightness of my furrows, and the docility of

my horses; this swelled my heart and made everything light and

pleasant, and I regretted that I had not married before.

I felt myself happy in my new situation, and where is that station

which can confer a more substantial system of felicity than that of

an American farmer, possessing freedom of action, freedom of

thoughts, ruled by a mode of government which requires but little

from us? I owe nothing, but a pepper corn to my country, a small

tribute to my king, with loyalty and due respect; I know no other

landlord than the lord of all land, to whom I owe the most sincere

gratitude. My father left me three hundred and seventy-one acres of

land, forty-seven of which are good timothy meadow, an excellent

orchard, a good house, and a substantial barn. It is my duty to

think how happy I am that he lived to build and to pay for all these

improvements; what are the labours which I have to undergo, what are

my fatigues when compared to his, who had everything to do, from the

first tree he felled to the finishing of his house? Every year I

kill from 1500 to 2000 weight of pork, 1200 of beef, half a dozen of

good wethers in harvest: of fowls my wife has always a great stock:

what can I wish more? My negroes are tolerably faithful and healthy;

by a long series of industry and honest dealings, my father left

behind him the name of a good man; I have but to tread his paths to

be happy and a good man like him. I know enough of the law to

regulate my little concerns with propriety, nor do I dread its

power; these are the grand outlines of my situation, but as I can

feel much more than I am able to express, I hardly know how to

proceed.

When my first son was born, the whole train of my ideas were

suddenly altered; never was there a charm that acted so quickly and

powerfully; I ceased to ramble in imagination through the wide

world; my excursions since have not exceeded the bounds of my farm,

and all my principal pleasures are now centred within its scanty

limits: but at the same time there is not an operation belonging to

it in which I do not find some food for useful reflections. This is

the reason, I suppose, that when you was here, you used, in your

refined style, to denominate me the farmer of feelings; how rude

must those feelings be in him who daily holds the axe or the plough,

how much more refined on the contrary those of the European, whose

mind is improved by education, example, books, and by every acquired

advantage! Those feelings, however, I will delineate as well as I

can, agreeably to your earnest request.

When I contemplate my wife, by my fire-side, while she either spins,

knits, darns, or suckles our child, I cannot describe the various

emotions of love, of gratitude, of conscious pride, which thrill in

my heart and often overflow in involuntary tears. I feel the

necessity, the sweet pleasure of acting my part, the part of an

husband and father, with an attention and propriety which may

entitle me to my good fortune. It is true these pleasing images

vanish with the smoke of my pipe, but though they disappear from my

mind, the impression they have made on my heart is indelible. When I

play with the infant, my warm imagination runs forward, and eagerly

anticipates his future temper and constitution. I would willingly

open the book of fate, and know in which page his destiny is

delineated; alas! where is the father who in those moments of

paternal ecstasy can delineate one half of the thoughts which dilate

his heart? I am sure I cannot; then again I fear for the health of

those who are become so dear to me, and in their sicknesses I

severely pay for the joys I experienced while they were well.

Whenever I go abroad it is always involuntary. I never return home

without feeling some pleasing emotion, which I often suppress as

useless and foolish. The instant I enter on my own land, the bright

idea of property, of exclusive right, of independence exalt my mind.

Precious soil, I say to myself, by what singular custom of law is it

that thou wast made to constitute the riches of the freeholder? What

should we American farmers be without the distinct possession of

that soil? It feeds, it clothes us, from it we draw even a great

exuberancy, our best meat, our richest drink, the very honey of our

bees comes from this. privileged spot. No wonder we should thus

cherish its possession, no wonder that so many Europeans who have

never been able to say that such portion of land was theirs, cross

the Atlantic to realise that happiness. This formerly rude soil has

been converted by my father into a pleasant farm, and in return it

has established all our rights; on it is founded our rank, our

freedom, our power as citizens, our importance as inhabitants of

such a district. These images I must confess I always behold with

pleasure, and extend them as far as my imagination can reach: for

this is what may be called the true and the only philosophy of an

American farmer.

Pray do not laugh in thus seeing an artless countryman tracing

himself through the simple modifications of his life; remember that

you have required it, therefore with candour, though with

diffidence, I endeavour to follow the thread of my feelings, but I

cannot tell you all. Often when I plough my low ground, I place my

little boy on a chair which screws to the beam of the plough--its

motion and that of the horses please him; he is perfectly happy and

begins to chat. As I lean over the handle, various are the thoughts

which crowd into my mind. I am now doing for him, I say, what my

father formerly did for me, may God enable him to live that he may

perform the same operations for the same purposes when I am worn out

and old! I relieve his mother of some trouble while I have him with

me, the odoriferous furrow exhilarates his spirits, and seems to do

the child a great deal of good, for he looks more blooming since I

have adopted that practice; can more pleasure, more dignity be added

to that primary occupation? The father thus ploughing with his

child, and to feed his family, is inferior only to the emperor of

China ploughing as an example to his kingdom. In the evening when I

return home through my low grounds, I am astonished at the myriads

of insects which I perceive dancing in the beams of the setting sun.

I was before scarcely acquainted with their existence, they are so

small that it is difficult to distinguish them; they are carefully

improving this short evening space, not daring to expose themselves

to the blaze of our meridian sun. I never see an egg brought on my

table but I feel penetrated with the wonderful change it would have

undergone but for my gluttony; it might have been a gentle useful

hen leading her chickens with a care and vigilance which speaks

shame to many women. A cock perhaps, arrayed with the most majestic

plumes, tender to its mate, bold, courageous, endowed with an

astonishing instinct, with thoughts, with memory, and every

distinguishing characteristic of the reason of man. I never see my

trees drop their leaves and their fruit in the autumn, and bud again

in the spring, without wonder; the sagacity of those animals which

have long been the tenants of my farm astonish me: some of them seem

to surpass even men in memory and sagacity. I could tell you

singular instances of that kind. What then is this instinct which we

so debase, and of which we are taught to entertain so diminutive an

idea? My bees, above any other tenants of my farm, attract my

attention and respect; I am astonished to see that nothing exists

but what has its enemy, one species pursue and live upon the other:

unfortunately our kingbirds are the destroyers of those industrious

insects; but on the other hand, these birds preserve our fields from

the depredation of crows which they pursue on the wing with great

vigilance and astonishing dexterity.

Thus divided by two interested motives, I have long resisted the

desire I had to kill them, until last year, when I thought they

increased too much, and my indulgence had been carried too far; it

was at the time of swarming when they all came and fixed themselves

on the neighbouring trees, from whence they catched those that

returned loaded from the fields. This made me resolve to kill as

many as I could, and I was just ready to fire, when a bunch of bees

as big as my fist, issued from one of the hives, rushed on one of

the birds, and probably stung him, for he instantly screamed, and

flew, not as before, in an irregular manner, but in a direct line.

He was followed by the same bold phalanx, at a considerable

distance, which unfortunately becoming too sure of victory, quitted

their military array and disbanded themselves. By this inconsiderate

step they lost all that aggregate of force which had made the bird

fly off. Perceiving their disorder he immediately returned and

snapped as many as he wanted; nay, he had even the impudence to

alight on the very twig from which the bees had drove him. I killed

him and immediately opened his craw, from which I took 171 bees; I

laid them all on a blanket in the sun, and to my great surprise 54

returned to life, licked themselves clean, and joyfully went back to

the hive; where they probably informed their companions of such an

adventure and escape, as I believe had never happened before to

American bees! I draw a great fund of pleasure from the quails which

inhabit my farm; they abundantly repay me, by their various notes

and peculiar tameness, for the inviolable hospitality I constantly

show them in the winter. Instead of perfidiously taking advantage of

their great and affecting distress, when nature offers nothing but a

barren universal bed of snow, when irresistible necessity forces

them to my barn doors, I permit them to feed unmolested; and it is

not the least agreeable spectacle which that dreary season presents,

when I see those beautiful birds, tamed by hunger, intermingling

with all my cattle and sheep, seeking in security for the poor

scanty grain which but for them would be useless and lost. Often in

the angles of the fences where the motion of the wind prevents the

snow from settling, I carry them both chaff and grain; the one to

feed them, the other to prevent their tender feet from freezing fast

to the earth as I have frequently observed them to do.

I do not know an instance in which the singular barbarity of man is

so strongly delineated, as in the catching and murthering those

harmless birds, at that cruel season of the year. Mr.---, one of the

most famous and extraordinary farmers that has ever done honour to

the province of Connecticut, by his timely and humane assistance in

a hard winter, saved this species from being entirely destroyed.

They perished all over the country, none of their delightful

whistlings were heard the next spring, but upon this gentleman's

farm; and to his humanity we owe the continuation of their music.

When the severities of that season have dispirited all my cattle, no

farmer ever attends them with more pleasure than I do; it is one of

those duties which is sweetened with the most rational satisfaction.

I amuse myself in beholding their different tempers, actions, and

the various effects of their instinct now powerfully impelled by the

force of hunger. I trace their various inclinations, and the

different effects of their passions, which are exactly the same as

among men; the law is to us precisely what I am in my barn yard, a

bridle and check to prevent the strong and greedy from oppressing

the timid and weak. Conscious of superiority, they always strive to

encroach on their neighbours; unsatisfied with their portion, they

eagerly swallow it in order to have an opportunity of taking what is

given to others, except they are prevented. Some I chide, others,

unmindful of my admonitions, receive some blows. Could victuals thus

be given to men without the assistance of any language, I am sure

they would not behave better to one another, nor more

philosophically than my cattle do.

The same spirit prevails in the stable; but there I have to do with

more generous animals, there my well-known voice has immediate

influence, and soon restores peace and tranquillity. Thus by

superior knowledge I govern all my cattle as wise men are obliged to

govern fools and the ignorant. A variety of other thoughts crowd on

my mind at that peculiar instant, but they all vanish by the time I

return home. If in a cold night I swiftly travel in my sledge,

carried along at the rate of twelve miles an hour, many are the

reflections excited by surrounding circumstances. I ask myself what

sort of an agent is that which we call frost? Our minister compares

it to needles, the points of which enter our pores. What is become

of the heat of the summer; in what part of the world is it that the

N. W. keeps these grand magazines of nitre? when I see in the

morning a river over which I can travel, that in the evening before

was liquid, I am astonished indeed! What is become of those millions

of insects which played in our summer fields, and in our evening

meadows; they were so puny and so delicate, the period of their

existence was so short, that one cannot help wondering how they

could learn, in that short space, the sublime art to hide themselves

and their offspring in so perfect a manner as to baffle the rigour

of the season, and preserve that precious embryo of life, that small

portion of ethereal heat, which if once destroyed would destroy the

species! Whence that irresistible propensity to sleep so common in

all those who are severely attacked by the frost. Dreary as this

season appears, yet it has like all others its miracles, it presents

to man a variety of problems which he can never resolve; among the

rest, we have here a set of small birds which never appear until the

snow falls; contrary to all others, they dwell and appear to delight

in that element.

It is my bees, however, which afford me the most pleasing and

extensive themes; let me look at them when I will, their government,

their industry, their quarrels, their passions, always present me

with something new; for which reason, when weary with labour, my

common place of rest is under my locust-tree, close by my bee-house.

By their movements I can predict the weather, and can tell the day

of their swarming; but the most difficult point is, when on the

wing, to know whether they want to go to the woods or not. If they

have previously pitched in some hollow trees, it is not the

allurements of salt and water, of fennel, hickory leaves, etc., nor

the finest box, that can induce them to stay; they will prefer those

rude, rough habitations to the best polished mahogany hive. When

that is the case with mine, I seldom thwart their inclinations; it

is in freedom that they work: were I to confine them, they would

dwindle away and quit their labour. In such excursions we only part

for a while; I am generally sure to find them again the following

fall. This elopement of theirs only adds to my recreations; I know

how to deceive even their superlative instinct; nor do I fear losing

them, though eighteen miles from my house, and lodged in the most

lofty trees, in the most impervious of our forests. I once took you

along with me in one of these rambles, and yet you insist on my

repeating the detail of our operations: it brings back into my mind

many of the useful and entertaining reflections with which you so

happily beguiled our tedious hours.

After I have done sowing, by way of recreation, I prepare for a

week's jaunt in the woods, not to hunt either the deer or the bears,

as my neighbours do, but to catch the more harmless bees. I cannot

boast that this chase is so noble, or so famous among men, but I

find it less fatiguing, and full as profitable; and the last

consideration is the only one that moves me. I take with me my dog,

as a companion, for he is useless as to this game; my gun, for no

man you know ought to enter the woods without one; my blanket, some

provisions, some wax, vermilion, honey, and a small pocket compass.

With these implements I proceed to such woods as are at a

considerable distance from any settlements. I carefully examine

whether they abound with large trees, if so, I make a small fire on

some flat stones, in a convenient place; on the fire I put some wax;

close by this fire, on another stone, I drop honey in distinct

drops, which I surround with small quantities of vermilion, laid on

the stone; and then I retire carefully to watch whether any bees

appear. If there are any in that neighbourhood, I rest assured that

the smell of the burnt wax will unavoidably attract them; they will

soon find out the honey, for they are fond of preying on that which

is not their own; and in their approach they will necessarily tinge

themselves with some particles of vermilion, which will adhere long

to their bodies. I next fix my compass, to find out their course,

which they keep invariably straight, when they are returning home

loaded. By the assistance of my watch, I observe how long those are

returning which are marked with vermilion. Thus possessed of the

course, and, in some measure, of the distance, which I can easily

guess at, I follow the first, and seldom fail of coming to the tree

where those republics are lodged. I then mark it; and thus, with

patience, I have found out sometimes eleven swarms in a season; and

it is inconceivable what a quantity of honey these trees will

sometimes afford. It entirely depends on the size of the hollow, as

the bees never rest nor swarm till it is all replenished; for like

men, it is only the want of room that induces them to quit the

maternal hive. Next I proceed to some of the nearest settlements,

where I procure proper assistance to cut down the trees, get all my

prey secured, and then return home with my prize. The first bees I

ever procured were thus found in the woods, by mere accident; for at

that time I had no kind of skill in this method of tracing them. The

body of the tree being perfectly sound, they had lodged themselves

in the hollow of one of its principal limbs, which I carefully sawed

off and with a good deal of labour and industry brought it home,

where I fixed it up again in the same position in which I found it

growing. This was in April; I had five swarms that year, and they

have been ever since very prosperous. This business generally takes

up a week of my time every fall, and to me it is a week of solitary

ease and relaxation.

The seed is by that time committed to the ground; there is nothing

very material to do at home, and this additional quantity of honey

enables me to be more generous to my home bees, and my wife to make

a due quantity of mead. The reason, Sir, that you found mine better

than that of others is, that she puts two gallons of brandy in each

barrel, which ripens it, and takes off that sweet, luscious taste,

which it is apt to retain a long time. If we find anywhere in the

woods (no matter on whose land) what is called a bee-tree, we must

mark it; in the fall of the year when we propose to cut it down, our

duty is to inform the proprietor of the land, who is entitled to

half the contents; if this is not complied with we are exposed to an

action of trespass, as well as he who should go and cut down a bee-

tree which he had neither found out nor marked.

We have twice a year the pleasure of catching pigeons, whose numbers

are sometimes so astonishing as to obscure the sun in their flight.

Where is it that they hatch? for such multitudes must require an

immense quantity of food. I fancy they breed toward the plains of

Ohio, and those about lake Michigan, which abound in wild oats;

though I have never killed any that had that grain in their craws.

In one of them, last year, I found some undigested rice. Now the

nearest rice fields from where I live must be at least 560 miles;

and either their digestion must be suspended while they are flying,

or else they must fly with the celerity of the wind. We catch them

with a net extended on the ground, to which they are allured by what

we call TAME WILD PIGEONS, made blind, and fastened to a long

string; his short flights, and his repeated calls, never fail to

bring them down. The greatest number I ever catched was fourteen

dozen, though much larger quantities have often been trapped. I have

frequently seen them at the market so cheap, that for a penny you

might have as many as you could carry away; and yet from the extreme

cheapness you must not conclude, that they are but an ordinary food;

on the contrary, I think they are excellent. Every farmer has a tame

wild pigeon in a cage at his door all the year round, in order to be

ready whenever the season comes for catching them.

The pleasure I receive from the warblings of the birds in the

spring, is superior to my poor description, as the continual

succession of their tuneful notes is for ever new to me. I generally

rise from bed about that indistinct interval, which, properly

speaking, is neither night or day; for this is the moment of the

most universal vocal choir. Who can listen unmoved to the sweet love

tales of our robins, told from tree to tree? or to the shrill cat

birds? The sublime accents of the thrush from on high always retard

my steps that I may listen to the delicious music. The variegated

appearances of the dew drops, as they hang to the different objects,

must present even to a clownish imagination, the most voluptuous

ideas. The astonishing art which all birds display in the

construction of their nests, ill provided as we may suppose them

with proper tools, their neatness, their convenience, always make me

ashamed of the slovenliness of our houses; their love to their dame,

their incessant careful attention, and the peculiar songs they

address to her while she tediously incubates their eggs, remind me

of my duty could I ever forget it. Their affection to their helpless

little ones, is a lively precept; and in short, the whole economy of

what we proudly call the brute creation, is admirable in every

circumstance; and vain man, though adorned with the additional gift

of reason, might learn from the perfection of instinct, how to

regulate the follies, and how to temper the errors which this second

gift often makes him commit. This is a subject, on which I have

often bestowed the most serious thoughts; I have often blushed

within myself, and been greatly astonished, when I have compared the

unerring path they all follow, all just, all proper, all wise, up to

the necessary degree of perfection, with the coarse, the imperfect

systems of men, not merely as governors and kings, but as masters,

as husbands, as fathers, as citizens. But this is a sanctuary in

which an ignorant farmer must not presume to enter.

If ever man was permitted to receive and enjoy some blessings that

might alleviate the many sorrows to which he is exposed, it is

certainly in the country, when he attentively considers those

ravishing scenes with which he is everywhere surrounded. This is the

only time of the year in which I am avaricious of every moment, I

therefore lose none that can add to this simple and inoffensive

happiness. I roam early throughout all my fields; not the least

operation do I perform, which is not accompanied with the most

pleasing observations; were I to extend them as far as I have

carried them, I should become tedious; you would think me guilty of

affectation, and I should perhaps represent many things as

pleasurable from which you might not perhaps receive the least

agreeable emotions. But, believe me, what I write is all true and

real.

Some time ago, as I sat smoking a contemplative pipe in my piazza, I

saw with amazement a remarkable instance of selfishness displayed in

a very small bird, which I had hitherto respected for its

inoffensiveness. Three nests were placed almost contiguous to each

other in my piazza: that of a swallow was affixed in the corner next

to the house, that of a phebe in the other, a wren possessed a

little box which I had made on purpose, and hung between. Be not

surprised at their tameness, all my family had long been taught to

respect them as well as myself. The wren had shown before signs of

dislike to the box which I had given it, but I knew not on what

account; at last it resolved, small as it was, to drive the swallow

from its own habitation, and to my very great surprise it succeeded.

Impudence often gets the better of modesty, and this exploit was no

sooner performed, than it removed every material to its own box with

the most admirable dexterity; the signs of triumph appeared very

visible, it fluttered its wings with uncommon velocity, an universal

joy was perceivable in all its movements. Where did this little bird

learn that spirit of injustice? It was not endowed with what we term

reason! Here then is a proof that both those gifts border very near

on one another; for we see the perfection of the one mixing with the

errors of the other! The peaceable swallow, like the passive Quaker,

meekly sat at a small distance and never offered the least

resistance; but no sooner was the plunder carried away, than the

injured bird went to work with unabated ardour, and in a few days

the depredations were repaired. To prevent however a repetition of

the same violence, I removed the wren's box to another part of the

house.

In the middle of my new parlour I have, you may remember, a curious

republic of industrious hornets; their nest hangs to the ceiling, by

the same twig on which it was so admirably built and contrived in

the woods. Its removal did not displease them, for they find in my

house plenty of food; and I have left a hole open in one of the

panes of the window, which answers all their purposes. By this kind

usage they are become quite harmless; they live on the flies, which

are very troublesome to us throughout the summer; they are

constantly busy in catching them, even on the eyelids of my

children. It is surprising how quickly they smear them with a sort

of glue, lest they might escape, and when thus prepared, they carry

them to their nests, as food for their young ones. These globular

nests are most ingeniously divided into many stories, all provided

with cells, and proper communications. The materials with which this

fabric is built, they procure from the cottony furze, with which our

oak rails are covered; this substance tempered with glue, produces a

sort of pasteboard, which is very strong, and resists all the

inclemencies of the weather. By their assistance, I am but little

troubled with flies. All my family are so accustomed to their strong

buzzing, that no one takes any notice of them; and though they are

fierce and vindictive, yet kindness and hospitality has made them

useful and harmless.

We have a great variety of wasps; most of them build their nests in

mud, which they fix against the shingles of our roofs, as nigh the

pitch as they can. These aggregates represent nothing, at first

view, but coarse and irregular lumps, but if you break them, you

will observe, that the inside of them contains a great number of

oblong cells, in which they deposit their eggs, and in which they

bury themselves in the fall of the year. Thus immured they securely

pass through the severity of that season, and on the return of the

sun are enabled to perforate their cells, and to open themselves a

passage from these recesses into the sunshine. The yellow wasps,

which build under ground, in our meadows, are much more to be

dreaded, for when the mower unwittingly passes his scythe over their

holes they immediately sally forth with a fury and velocity superior

even to the strength of man. They make the boldest fly, and the only

remedy is to lie down and cover our heads with hay, for it is only

at the head they aim their blows; nor is there any possibility of

finishing that part of the work until, by means of fire and

brimstone, they are all silenced. But though I have been obliged to

execute this dreadful sentence in my own defence, I have often

thought it a great pity, for the sake of a little hay, to lay waste

so ingenious a subterranean town, furnished with every conveniency,

and built with a most surprising mechanism.

I never should have done were I to recount the many objects which

involuntarily strike my imagination in the midst of my work, and

spontaneously afford me the most pleasing relief. These appear

insignificant trifles to a person who has travelled through Europe

and America, and is acquainted with books and with many sciences;

but such simple objects of contemplation suffice me, who have no

time to bestow on more extensive observations. Happily these require

no study, they are obvious, they gild the moments I dedicate to

them, and enliven the severe labours which I perform. At home my

happiness springs from very different objects; the gradual unfolding

of my children's reason, the study of their dawning tempers attract

all my paternal attention. I have to contrive little punishments for

their little faults, small encouragements for their good actions,

and a variety of other expedients dictated by various occasions. But

these are themes unworthy your perusal, and which ought not to be

carried beyond the walls of my house, being domestic mysteries

adapted only to the locality of the small sanctuary wherein my

family resides. Sometimes I delight in inventing and executing

machines, which simplify my wife's labour. I have been tolerably

successful that way; and these, Sir, are the narrow circles within

which I constantly revolve, and what can I wish for beyond them? I

bless God for all the good he has given me; I envy no man's

prosperity, and with no other portion of happiness than that I may

live to teach the same philosophy to my children; and give each of

them a farm, show them how to cultivate it, and be like their

father, good substantial independent American farmers--an

appellation which will be the most fortunate one a man of my class

can possess, so long as our civil government continues to shed

blessings on our husbandry. Adieu.

LETTER III

WHAT IS AN AMERICAN

I wish I could be acquainted with the feelings and thoughts which

must agitate the heart and present themselves to the mind of an

enlightened Englishman, when he first lands on this continent. He

must greatly rejoice that he lived at a time to see this fair

country discovered and settled; he must necessarily feel a share of

national pride, when he views the chain of settlements which

embellishes these extended shores. When he says to himself, this is

the work of my countrymen, who, when convulsed by factions,

afflicted by a variety of miseries and wants, restless and

impatient, took refuge here. They brought along with them their

national genius, to which they principally owe what liberty they

enjoy, and what substance they possess. Here he sees the industry of

his native country displayed in a new manner, and traces in their

works the embryos of all the arts, sciences, and ingenuity which

nourish in Europe. Here he beholds fair cities, substantial

villages, extensive fields, an immense country filled with decent

houses, good roads, orchards, meadows, and bridges, where an hundred

years ago all was wild, woody, and uncultivated! What a train of

pleasing ideas this fair spectacle must suggest; it is a prospect

which must inspire a good citizen with the most heartfelt pleasure.

The difficulty consists in the manner of viewing so extensive a

scene. He is arrived on a new continent; a modern society offers

itself to his contemplation, different from what he had hitherto

seen. It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess

everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no

aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no

ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very

visible one; no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great

refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed

from each other as they are in Europe. Some few towns excepted, we

are all tillers of the earth, from Nova Scotia to West Florida. We

are a people of cultivators, scattered over an immense territory,

communicating with each other by means of good roads and navigable

rivers, united by the silken bands of mild government, all

respecting the laws, without dreading their power, because they are

equitable. We are all animated with the spirit of an industry which

is unfettered and unrestrained, because each person works for

himself. If he travels through our rural districts he views not the

hostile castle, and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay-

built hut and miserable cabin, where cattle and men help to keep

each other warm, and dwell in meanness, smoke, and indigence. A

pleasing uniformity of decent competence appears throughout our

habitations. The meanest of our log-houses is a dry and comfortable

habitation. Lawyer or merchant are the fairest titles our towns

afford; that of a farmer is the only appellation of the rural

inhabitants of our country. It must take some time ere he can

reconcile himself to our dictionary, which is but short in words of

dignity, and names of honour. There, on a Sunday, he sees a

congregation of respectable farmers and their wives, all clad in

neat homespun, well mounted, or riding in their own humble waggons.

There is not among them an esquire, saving the unlettered

magistrate. There he sees a parson as simple as his flock, a farmer

who does not riot on the labour of others. We have no princes, for

whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the most perfect society now

existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be; nor is

this pleasing equality so transitory as many others are. Many ages

will not see the shores of our great lakes replenished with inland

nations, nor the unknown bounds of North America entirely peopled.

Who can tell how far it extends? Who can tell the millions of men

whom it will feed and contain? for no European foot has as yet

travelled half the extent of this mighty continent!

The next wish of this traveller will be to know whence came all

these people? they are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French,

Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race

now called Americans have arisen. The eastern provinces must indeed

be excepted, as being the unmixed descendants of Englishmen. I have

heard many wish that they had been more intermixed also: for my

part, I am no wisher, and think it much better as it has happened.

They exhibit a most conspicuous figure in this great and variegated

picture; they too enter for a great share in the pleasing

perspective displayed in these thirteen provinces. I know it is

fashionable to reflect on them, but I respect them for what they

have done; for the accuracy and wisdom with which they have settled

their territory; for the decency of their manners; for their early

love of letters; their ancient college, the first in this

hemisphere; for their industry; which to me who am but a farmer, is

the criterion of everything. There never was a people, situated as

they are, who with so ungrateful a soil have done more in so short a

time. Do you think that the monarchical ingredients which are more

prevalent in other governments, have purged them from all foul

stains? Their histories assert the contrary.

In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have by some means

met together, and in consequence of various causes; to what purpose

should they ask one another what countrymen they are? Alas, two

thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch who wanders about, who

works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore

affliction or pinching penury; can that man call England or any

other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for him,

whose fields procured him no harvest, who met with nothing but the

frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and

punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of

this planet? No! urged by a variety of motives, here they came.

Every thing has tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of

living, a new social system; here they are become men: in Europe

they were as so many useless plants, wanting vegetative mould, and

refreshing showers; they withered, and were mowed down by want,

hunger, and war; but now by the power of transplantation, like all

other plants they have taken root and flourished!

Formerly they were

not numbered in any civil lists of their country, except in those of

the poor; here they rank as citizens. By what invisible power has

this surprising metamorphosis been performed? By that of the laws

and that of their industry. The laws, the indulgent laws, protect

them as they arrive, stamping on them the symbol of adoption; they

receive ample rewards for their labours; these accumulated rewards

procure them lands; those lands confer on them the title of freemen,

and to that title every benefit is affixed which men can possibly

require. This is the great operation daily performed by our laws.

From whence proceed these laws? From our government. Whence the

government? It is derived from the original genius and strong desire

of the people ratified and confirmed by the crown. This is the great

chain which links us all, this is the picture which every province

exhibits, Nova Scotia excepted.

There the crown has done all; either there were no people who had

genius, or it was not much attended to: the consequence is, that the

province is very thinly inhabited indeed; the power of the crown in

conjunction with the musketos has prevented men from settling there.

Yet some parts of it flourished once, and it contained a mild

harmless set of people. But for the fault of a few leaders, the

whole were banished. The greatest political error the crown ever

committed in America, was to cut off men from a country which wanted

nothing but men!

What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country

where he had nothing? The knowledge of the language, the love of a

few kindred as poor as himself, were the only cords that tied him:

his country is now that which gives him land, bread, protection, and

consequence: Ubi panis ibi patria, is the motto of all emigrants.

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European,

or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of

blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to

you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was

Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons

have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who,

leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives

new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new

government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an

American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater.

Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men,

whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the

world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along

with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry

which began long since in the east; they will finish the great

circle. The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they

are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which

has ever appeared, and which will hereafter become distinct by the

power of the different climates they inhabit. The American ought

therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either

he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry

follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is

founded on the basis of nature, SELF-INTEREST: can it want a

stronger allurement? Wives and children, who before in vain demanded

of him a morsel of bread, now, fat and frolicsome, gladly help their

father to clear those fields whence exuberant crops are to arise to

feed and to clothe them all; without any part being claimed, either

by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord. Here religion

demands but little of him; a small voluntary salary to the minister,

and gratitude to God; can he refuse these? The American is a new

man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new

ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile

dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a

very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.--This is an

American.

British America is divided into many provinces, forming a large

association, scattered along a coast 1500 miles extent and about 200

wide. This society I would fain examine, at least such as it appears

in the middle provinces; if it does not afford that variety of

tinges and gradations which may be observed in Europe, we have

colours peculiar to ourselves. For instance, it is natural to

conceive that those who live near the sea, must be very different

from those who live in the woods; the intermediate space will afford

a separate and distinct class.

Men are like plants; the goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds

from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. We are

nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we

inhabit, the government we obey, the system of religion we profess,

and the nature of our employment. Here you will find but few crimes;

these have acquired as yet no root among us. I wish I was able to

trace all my ideas; if my ignorance prevents me from describing them

properly, I hope I shall be able to delineate a few of the outlines,

which are all I propose.

Those who live near the sea, feed more on fish than on flesh, and

often encounter that boisterous element. This renders them more bold

and enterprising; this leads them to neglect the confined

occupations of the land. They see and converse with a variety of

people, their intercourse with mankind becomes extensive. The sea

inspires them with a love of traffic, a desire of transporting

produce from one place to another; and leads them to a variety of

resources which supply the place of labour. Those who inhabit the

middle settlements, by far the most numerous, must be very

different; the simple cultivation of the earth purifies them, but

the indulgences of the government, the soft remonstrances of

religion, the rank of independent freeholders, must necessarily

inspire them with sentiments, very little known in Europe among

people of the same class. What do I say? Europe has no such class of

men; the early knowledge they acquire, the early bargains they make,

give them a great degree of sagacity. As freemen they will be

litigious; pride and obstinacy are often the cause of law suits; the

nature of our laws and governments may be another. As citizens it is

easy to imagine, that they will carefully read the newspapers, enter

into every political disquisition, freely blame or censure governors

and others. As farmers they will be careful and anxious to get as

much as they can, because what they get is their own. As northern

men they will love the cheerful cup. As Christians, religion curbs

them not in their opinions; the general indulgence leaves every one

to think for themselves in spiritual matters; the laws inspect our

actions, our thoughts are left to God. Industry, good living,

selfishness, litigiousness, country politics, the pride of freemen,

religious indifference, are their characteristics. If you recede

still farther from the sea, you will come into more modern

settlements; they exhibit the same strong lineaments, in a ruder

appearance. Religion seems to have still less influence, and their

manners are less improved.

Now we arrive near the great woods, near the last inhabited

districts; there men seem to be placed still farther beyond the

reach of government, which in some measure leaves them to

themselves. How can it pervade every corner; as they were driven

there by misfortunes, necessity of beginnings, desire of acquiring

large tracts of land, idleness, frequent want of economy, ancient

debts; the re-union of such people does not afford a very pleasing

spectacle. When discord, want of unity and friendship; when either

drunkenness or idleness prevail in such remote districts;

contention, inactivity, and wretchedness must ensue. There are not

the same remedies to these evils as in a long established community.

The few magistrates they have, are in general little better than the

rest; they are often in a perfect state of war; that of man against

man, sometimes decided by blows, sometimes by means of the law; that

of man against every wild inhabitant of these venerable woods, of

which they are come to dispossess them. There men appear to be no

better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the

flesh of wild animals when they can catch them, and when they are

not able, they subsist on grain. He who would wish to see America in

its proper light, and have a true idea of its feeble beginnings and

barbarous rudiments, must visit our extended line of frontiers where

the last settlers dwell, and where he may see the first labours of

settlement, the mode of clearing the earth, in all their different

appearances; where men are wholly left dependent on their native

tempers, and on the spur of uncertain industry, which often fails

when not sanctified by the efficacy of a few moral rules. There,

remote from the power of example and check of shame, many families

exhibit the most hideous parts of our society. They are a kind of

forlorn hope, preceding by ten or twelve years the most respectable

army of veterans which come after them. In that space, prosperity

will polish some, vice and the law will drive off the rest, who

uniting again with others like themselves will recede still farther;

making room for more industrious people, who will finish their

improvements, convert the loghouse into a convenient habitation, and

rejoicing that the first heavy labours are finished, will change in

a few years that hitherto barbarous country into a fine fertile,

well regulated district. Such is our progress, such is the march of

the Europeans toward the interior parts of this continent. In all

societies there are off-casts; this impure part serves as our

precursors or pioneers; my father himself was one of that class, but

he came upon honest principles, and was therefore one of the few who

held fast; by good conduct and temperance, he transmitted to me his

fair inheritance, when not above one in fourteen of his

contemporaries had the same good fortune.

Forty years ago this smiling country was thus inhabited; it is now

purged, a general decency of manners prevails throughout, and such

has been the fate of our best countries.

Exclusive of those general characteristics, each province has its

own, founded on the government, climate, mode of husbandry, customs,

and peculiarity of circumstances. Europeans submit insensibly to

these great powers, and become, in the course of a few generations,

not only Americans in general, but either Pennsylvanians,

Virginians, or provincials under some other name. Whoever traverses

the continent must easily observe those strong differences, which

will grow more evident in time. The inhabitants of Canada,

Massachusetts, the middle provinces, the southern ones will be as

different as their climates; their only points of unity will be

those of religion and language.

As I have endeavoured to show you how Europeans become Americans; it

may not be disagreeable to show you likewise how the various

Christian sects introduced, wear out, and how religious indifference

becomes prevalent. When any considerable number of a particular sect

happen to dwell contiguous to each other, they immediately erect a

temple, and there worship the Divinity agreeably to their own

peculiar ideas. Nobody disturbs them. If any new sect springs up in

Europe it may happen that many of its professors will come and

settle in American. As they bring their zeal with them, they are at

liberty to make proselytes if they can, and to build a meeting and

to follow the dictates of their consciences; for neither the

government nor any other power interferes. If they are peaceable

subjects, and are industrious, what is it to their neighbours how

and in what manner they think fit to address their prayers to the

Supreme Being? But if the sectaries are not settled close together,

if they are mixed with other denominations, their zeal will cool for

want of fuel, and will be extinguished in a little time. Then the

Americans become as to religion, what they are as to country, allied

to all. In them the name of Englishman, Frenchman, and European is

lost, and in like manner, the strict modes of Christianity as

practised in Europe are lost also. This effect will extend itself

still farther hereafter, and though this may appear to you as a

strange idea, yet it is a very true one. I shall be able perhaps

hereafter to explain myself better; in the meanwhile, let the

following example serve as my first justification.

Let us suppose you and I to be travelling; we observe that in this

house, to the right, lives a Catholic, who prays to God as he has

been taught, and believes in transubstantiation; he works and raises

wheat, he has a large family of children, all hale and robust; his

belief, his prayers offend nobody. About one mile farther on the

same road, his next neighbour may be a good honest plodding German

Lutheran, who addresses himself to the same God, the God of all,

agreeably to the modes he has been educated in, and believes in

consubstantiation; by so doing he scandalises nobody; he also works

in his fields, embellishes the earth, clears swamps, etc. What has

the world to do with his Lutheran principles? He persecutes nobody,

and nobody persecutes him, he visits his neighbours, and his

neighbours visit him. Next to him lives a seceder, the most

enthusiastic of all sectaries; his zeal is hot and fiery, but

separated as he is from others of the same complexion, he has no

congregation of his own to resort to, where he might cabal and

mingle religious pride with worldly obstinacy. He likewise raises

good crops, his house is handsomely painted, his orchard is one of

the fairest in the neighbourhood. How does it concern the welfare of

the country, or of the province at large, what this man's religious

sentiments are, or really whether he has any at all? He is a good

farmer, he is a sober, peaceable, good citizen: William Penn himself

would not wish for more. This is the visible character, the

invisible one is only guessed at, and is nobody's business. Next

again lives a Low Dutchman, who implicitly believes the rules laid

down by the synod of Dort. He conceives no other idea of a clergyman

than that of an hired man; if he does his work well he will pay him

the stipulated sum; if not he will dismiss him, and do without his

sermons, and let his church be shut up for years. But

notwithstanding this coarse idea, you will find his house and farm

to be the neatest in all the country; and you will judge by his

waggon and fat horses, that he thinks more of the affairs of this

world than of those of the next. He is sober and laborious,

therefore he is all he ought to be as to the affairs of this life;

as for those of the next, he must trust to the great Creator. Each

of these people instruct their children as well as they can, but

these instructions are feeble compared to those which are given to

the youth of the poorest class in Europe. Their children will

therefore grow up less zealous and more indifferent in matters of

religion than their parents. The foolish vanity, or rather the fury

of making Proselytes, is unknown here; they have no time, the

seasons call for all their attention, and thus in a few years, this

mixed neighbourhood will exhibit a strange religious medley, that

will be neither pure Catholicism nor pure Calvinism. A very

perceptible indifference even in the first generation, will become

apparent; and it may happen that the daughter of the Catholic will

marry the son of the seceder, and settle by themselves at a distance

from their parents. What religious education will they give their

children? A very imperfect one. If there happens to be in the

neighbourhood any place of worship, we will suppose a Quaker's

meeting; rather than not show their fine clothes, they will go to

it, and some of them may perhaps attach themselves to that society.

Others will remain in a perfect state of indifference; the children

of these zealous parents will not be able to tell what their

religious principles are, and their grandchildren still less. The

neighbourhood of a place of worship generally leads them to it, and

the action of going thither, is the strongest evidence they can give

of their attachment to any sect. The Quakers are the only people who

retain a fondness for their own mode of worship; for be they ever so

far separated from each other, they hold a sort of communion with

the society, and seldom depart from its rules, at least in this

country. Thus all sects are mixed as well as all nations; thus

religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of

the continent to the other; which is at present one of the strongest

characteristics of the Americans. Where this will reach no one can

tell, perhaps it may leave a vacuum fit to receive other systems.

Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction, are the

food of what the world commonly calls religion. These motives have

ceased here; zeal in Europe is confined; here it evaporates in the

great distance it has to travel; there it is a grain of powder

inclosed, here it burns away in the open air, and consumes without

effect.

But to return to our back settlers. I must tell you, that there is

something in the proximity of the woods, which is very singular. It

is with men as it is with the plants and animals that grow and live

in the forests; they are entirely different from those that live in

the plains. I will candidly tell you all my thoughts but you are not

to expect that I shall advance any reasons. By living in or near the

woods, their actions are regulated by the wildness of the

neighbourhood. The deer often come to eat their grain, the wolves to

destroy their sheep, the bears to kill their hogs, the foxes to

catch their poultry. This surrounding hostility immediately puts the

gun into their hands; they watch these animals, they kill some; and

thus by defending their property, they soon become professed

hunters; this is the progress; once hunters, farewell to the plough.

The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable; a hunter

wants no neighbour, he rather hates them, because he dreads the

competition. In a little time their success in the woods makes them

neglect their tillage. They trust to the natural fecundity of the

earth, and therefore do little; carelessness in fencing often

exposes what little they sow to destruction; they are not at home to

watch; in order therefore to make up the deficiency, they go oftener

to the woods. That new mode of life brings along with it a new set

of manners, which I cannot easily describe. These new manners being

grafted on the old stock, produce a strange sort of lawless

profligacy, the impressions of which are indelible. The manners of

the Indian natives are respectable, compared with this European

medley. Their wives and children live in sloth and inactivity; and

having no proper pursuits, you may judge what education the latter

receive. Their tender minds have nothing else to contemplate but the

example of their parents; like them they grow up a mongrel breed,

half civilised, half savage, except nature stamps on them some

constitutional propensities. That rich, that voluptuous sentiment is

gone that struck them so forcibly; the possession of their freeholds

no longer conveys to their minds the same pleasure and pride. To all

these reasons you must add, their lonely situation, and you cannot

imagine what an effect on manners the great distances they live from

each other has! Consider one of the last settlements in its first

view: of what is it composed? Europeans who have not that sufficient

share of knowledge they ought to have, in order to prosper; people

who have suddenly passed from oppression, dread of government, and

fear of laws, into the unlimited freedom of the woods. This sudden

change must have a very great effect on most men, and on that class

particularly. Eating of wild meat, whatever you may think, tends to

alter their temper: though all the proof I can adduce, is, that I

have seen it: and having no place of worship to resort to, what

little society this might afford is denied them. The Sunday

meetings, exclusive of religious benefits, were the only social

bonds that might have inspired them with some degree of emulation in

neatness. Is it then surprising to see men thus situated, immersed

in great and heavy labours, degenerate a little? It is rather a

wonder the effect is not more diffusive. The Moravians and the

Quakers are the only instances in exception to what I have advanced.

The first never settle singly, it is a colony of the society which

emigrates; they carry with them their forms, worship, rules, and

decency: the others never begin so hard, they are always able to buy

improvements, in which there is a great advantage, for by that time

the country is recovered from its first barbarity. Thus our bad

people are those who are half cultivators and half hunters; and the

worst of them are those who have degenerated altogether into the

hunting state. As old ploughmen and new men of the woods, as

Europeans and new made Indians, they contract the vices of both;

they adopt the moroseness and ferocity of a native, without his

mildness, or even his industry at home. If manners are not refined,

at least they are rendered simple and inoffensive by tilling the

earth; all our wants are supplied by it, our time is divided between

labour and rest, and leaves none for the commission of great

misdeeds. As hunters it is divided between the toil of the chase,

the idleness of repose, or the indulgence of inebriation. Hunting is

but a licentious idle life, and if it does not always pervert good

dispositions; yet, when it is united with bad luck, it leads to

want: want stimulates that propensity to rapacity and injustice, too

natural to needy men, which is the fatal gradation. After this

explanation of the effects which follow by living in the woods,

shall we yet vainly flatter ourselves with the hope of converting

the Indians? We should rather begin with converting our back-

settlers; and now if I dare mention the name of religion, its sweet

accents would be lost in the immensity of these woods. Men thus

placed are not fit either to receive or remember its mild

instructions; they want temples and ministers, but as soon as men

cease to remain at home, and begin to lead an erratic life, let them

be either tawny or white, they cease to be its disciples.

Thus have I faintly and imperfectly endeavoured to trace our society

from the sea to our woods! yet you must not imagine that every

person who moves back, acts upon the same principles, or falls into

the same degeneracy. Many families carry with them all their decency

of conduct, purity of morals, and respect of religion; but these are

scarce, the power of example is sometimes irresistible. Even among

these back-settlers, their depravity is greater or less, according

to what nation or province they belong. Were I to adduce proofs of

this, I might be accused of partiality. If there happens to be some

rich intervals, some fertile bottoms, in those remote districts, the

people will there prefer tilling the land to hunting, and will

attach themselves to it; but even on these fertile spots you may

plainly perceive the inhabitants to acquire a great degree of

rusticity and selfishness.

It is in consequence of this straggling situation, and the

astonishing power it has on manners, that the back-settlers of both

the Carolinas, Virginia, and many other parts, have been long a set

of lawless people; it has been even dangerous to travel among them.

Government can do nothing in so extensive a country, better it

should wink at these irregularities, than that it should use means

inconsistent with its usual mildness. Time will efface those stains:

in proportion as the great body of population approaches them they

will reform, and become polished and subordinate. Whatever has been

said of the four New England provinces, no such degeneracy of

manners has ever tarnished their annals; their back-settlers have

been kept within the bounds of decency, and government, by means of

wise laws, and by the influence of religion. What a detestable idea

such people must have given to the natives of the Europeans! They

trade with them, the worst of people are permitted to do that which

none but persons of the best characters should be employed in. They

get drunk with them, and often defraud the Indians. Their avarice,

removed from the eyes of their superiors, knows no bounds; and aided

by the little superiority of knowledge, these traders deceive them,

and even sometimes shed blood. Hence those shocking violations,

those sudden devastations which have so often stained our frontiers,

when hundreds of innocent people have been sacrificed for the crimes

of a few. It was in consequence of such behaviour, that the Indians

took the hatchet against the Virginians in 1774. Thus are our first

steps trod, thus are our first trees felled, in general, by the most

vicious of our people; and thus the path is opened for the arrival

of a second and better class, the true American freeholders; the

most respectable set of people in this part of the world:

respectable for their industry, their happy independence, the great

share of freedom they possess, the good regulation of their

families, and for extending the trade and the dominion of our mother

country.

Europe contains hardly any other distinctions but lords and tenants;

this fair country alone is settled by freeholders, the possessors of

the soil they cultivate, members of the government they obey, and

the framers of their own laws, by means of their representatives.

This is a thought which you have taught me to cherish; our

difference from Europe, far from diminishing, rather adds to our

usefulness and consequence as men and subjects. Had our forefathers

remained there, they would only have crowded it, and perhaps

prolonged those convulsions which had shook it so long. Every

industrious European who transports himself here, may be compared to

a sprout growing at the foot of a great tree; it enjoys and draws

but a little portion of sap; wrench it from the parent roots,

transplant it, and it will become a tree bearing fruit also.

Colonists are therefore entitled to the consideration due to the

most useful subjects; a hundred families barely existing in some

parts of Scotland, will here in six years, cause an annual

exportation of 10,000 bushels of wheat: 100 bushels being but a

common quantity for an industrious family to sell, if they cultivate

good land. It is here then that the idle may be employed, the

useless become useful, and the poor become rich; but by riches I do

not mean gold and silver, we have but little of those metals; I mean

a better sort of wealth, cleared lands, cattle, good houses, good

clothes, and an increase of people to enjoy them.

There is no wonder that this country has so many charms, and

presents to Europeans so many temptations to remain in it. A

traveller in Europe becomes a stranger as soon as he quits his own

kingdom; but it is otherwise here. We know, properly speaking, no

strangers; this is every person's country; the variety of our soils,

situations, climates, governments, and produce, hath something which

must please everybody. No sooner does an European arrive, no matter

of what condition, than his eyes are opened upon the fair prospect;

he hears his language spoke, he retraces many of his own country

manners, he perpetually hears the names of families and towns with

which he is acquainted; he sees happiness and prosperity in all

places disseminated; he meets with hospitality, kindness, and plenty

everywhere; he beholds hardly any poor, he seldom hears of

punishments and executions; and he wonders at the elegance of our

towns, those miracles of industry and freedom. He cannot admire

enough our rural districts, our convenient roads, good taverns, and

our many accommodations; he involuntarily loves a country where

everything is so lovely. When in England, he was a mere Englishman;

here he stands on a larger portion of the globe, not less than its

fourth part, and may see the productions of the north, in iron and

naval stores; the provisions of Ireland, the grain of Egypt, the

indigo, the rice of China. He does not find, as in Europe, a crowded

society, where every place is over-stocked; he does not feel that

perpetual collision of parties, that difficulty of beginning, that

contention which oversets so many. There is room for everybody in

America; has he any particular talent, or industry? he exerts it in

order to procure a livelihood, and it succeeds. Is he a merchant?

the avenues of trade are infinite; is he eminent in any respect? he

will be employed and respected. Does he love a country life?

pleasant farms present themselves; he may purchase what he wants,

and thereby become an American farmer. Is he a labourer, sober and

industrious? he need not go many miles, nor receive many

informations before he will be hired, well fed at the table of his

employer, and paid four or five times more than he can get in

Europe. Does he want uncultivated lands? thousands of acres present

themselves, which he may purchase cheap. Whatever be his talents or

inclinations, if they are moderate, he may satisfy them. I do not

mean that every one who comes will grow rich in a little time; no,

but he may procure an easy, decent maintenance, by his industry.

Instead of starving he will be fed, instead of being idle he will

have employment; and these are riches enough for such men as come

over here. The rich stay in Europe, it is only the middling and the

poor that emigrate. Would you wish to travel in independent

idleness, from north to south, you will find easy access, and the

most cheerful reception at every house; society without ostentation,

good cheer without pride, and every decent diversion which the

country affords, with little expense. It is no wonder that the

European who has lived here a few years, is desirous to remain;

Europe with all its pomp, is not to be compared to this continent,

for men of middle stations, or labourers.

An European, when he first arrives, seems limited in his intentions,

as well as in his views; but he very suddenly alters his scale; two

hundred miles formerly appeared a very great distance, it is now but

a trifle; he no sooner breathes our air than he forms schemes, and

embarks in designs he never would have thought of in his own

country. There the plenitude of society confines many useful ideas,

and often extinguishes the most laudable schemes which here ripen

into maturity. Thus Europeans become Americans.

But how is this accomplished in that crowd of low, indigent people,

who flock here every year from all parts of Europe? I will tell you;

they no sooner arrive than they immediately feel the good effects of

that plenty of provisions we possess: they fare on our best food,

and they are kindly entertained; their talents, character, and

peculiar industry are immediately inquired into; they find

countrymen everywhere disseminated, let them come from whatever part

of Europe. Let me select one as an epitome of the rest; he is hired,

he goes to work, and works moderately; instead of being employed by

a haughty person, he finds himself with his equal, placed at the

substantial table of the farmer, or else at an inferior one as good;

his wages are high, his bed is not like that bed of sorrow on which

he used to lie: if he behaves with propriety, and is faithful, he is

caressed, and becomes as it were a member of the family. He begins

to feel the effects of a sort of resurrection; hitherto he had not

lived, but simply vegetated; he now feels himself a man, because he

is treated as such; the laws of his own country had overlooked him

in his insignificancy; the laws of this cover him with their mantle.

Judge what an alteration there must arise in the mind and thoughts

of this man; he begins to forget his former servitude and

dependence, his heart involuntarily swells and glows; this first

swell inspires him with those new thoughts which constitute an

American. What love can he entertain for a country where his

existence was a burthen to him; if he is a generous good man, the

love of this new adoptive parent will sink deep into his heart. He

looks around, and sees many a prosperous person, who but a few years

before was as poor as himself. This encourages him much, he begins

to form some little scheme, the first, alas, he ever formed in his

life. If he is wise he thus spends two or three years, in which time

he acquires knowledge, the use of tools, the modes of working the

lands, felling trees, etc. This prepares the foundation of a good

name, the most useful acquisition he can make. He is encouraged, he

has gained friends; he is advised and directed, he feels bold, he

purchases some land; he gives all the money he has brought over, as

well as what he has earned, and trusts to the God of harvests for

the discharge of the rest. His good name procures him credit. He is

now possessed of the deed, conveying to him and his posterity the

fee simple and absolute property of two hundred acres of land,

situated on such a river. What an epocha in this man's life! He is

become a freeholder, from perhaps a German boor--he is now an

American, a Pennsylvanian, an English subject. He is naturalised,

his name is enrolled with those of the other citizens of the

province. Instead of being a vagrant, he has a place of residence;

he is called the inhabitant of such a county, or of such a district,

and for the first time in his life counts for something; for

hitherto he has been a cypher. I only repeat what I have heard many

say, and no wonder their hearts should glow, and be agitated with a

multitude of feelings, not easy to describe. From nothing to start

into being; from a servant to the rank of a master; from being the

slave of some despotic prince, to become a free man, invested with

lands, to which every municipal blessing is annexed! What a change

indeed! It is in consequence of that change that he becomes an

American. This great metamorphosis has a double effect, it

extinguishes all his European prejudices, he forgets that mechanism

of subordination, that servility of disposition which poverty had

taught him; and sometimes he is apt to forget too much, often

passing from one extreme to the other. If he is a good man, he forms

schemes of future prosperity, he proposes to educate his children

better than he has been educated himself; he thinks of future modes

of conduct, feels an ardour to labour he never felt before. Pride

steps in and leads him to everything that the laws do not forbid: he

respects them; with a heart-felt gratitude he looks toward the east,

toward that insular government from whose wisdom all his new

felicity is derived, and under whose wings and protection he now

lives. These reflections constitute him the good man and the good

subject. Ye poor Europeans, ye, who sweat, and work for the great--

ye, who are obliged to give so many sheaves to the church, so many

to your lords, so many to your government, and have hardly any left

for yourselves--ye, who are held in less estimation than favourite

hunters or useless lap-dogs--ye, who only breathe the air of nature,

because it cannot be withheld from you; it is here that ye can

conceive the possibility of those feelings I have been describing;

it is here the laws of naturalisation invite every one to partake of

our great labours and felicity, to till unrented, untaxed lands!

Many, corrupted beyond the power of amendment, have brought with

them all their vices, and disregarding the advantages held to them,

have gone on in their former career of iniquity, until they have

been overtaken and punished by our laws. It is not every emigrant

who succeeds; no, it is only the sober, the honest, and industrious:

happy those to whom this transition has served as a powerful spur to

labour, to prosperity, and to the good establishment of children,

born in the days of their poverty; and who had no other portion to

expect but the rags of their parents, had it not been for their

happy emigration. Others again, have been led astray by this

enchanting scene; their new pride, instead of leading them to the

fields, has kept them in idleness; the idea of possessing lands is

all that satisfies them--though surrounded with fertility, they have

mouldered away their time in inactivity, misinformed husbandry, and

ineffectual endeavours. How much wiser, in general, the honest

Germans than almost all other Europeans; they hire themselves to

some of their wealthy landsmen, and in that apprenticeship learn

everything that is necessary. They attentively consider the

prosperous industry of others, which imprints in their minds a

strong desire of possessing the same advantages. This forcible idea

never quits them, they launch forth, and by dint of sobriety, rigid

parsimony, and the most persevering industry, they commonly succeed.

Their astonishment at their first arrival from Germany is very

great--it is to them a dream; the contrast must be powerful indeed;

they observe their countrymen flourishing in every place; they

travel through whole counties where not a word of English is spoken;

and in the names and the language of the people, they retrace

Germany. They have been an useful acquisition to this continent, and

to Pennsylvania in particular; to them it owes some share of its

prosperity: to their mechanical knowledge and patience it owes the

finest mills in all America, the best teams of horses, and many

other advantages. The recollection of their former poverty and

slavery never quits them as long as they live.

The Scotch and the Irish might have lived in their own country

perhaps as poor, but enjoying more civil advantages, the effects of

their new situation do not strike them so forcibly, nor has it so

lasting an effect. From whence the difference arises I know not, but

out of twelve families of emigrants of each country, generally seven

Scotch will succeed, nine German, and four Irish. The Scotch are

frugal and laborious, but their wives cannot work so hard as German

women, who on the contrary vie with their husbands, and often share

with them the most severe toils of the field, which they understand

better. They have therefore nothing to struggle against, but the

common casualties of nature. The Irish do not prosper so well; they

love to drink and to quarrel; they are litigious, and soon take to

the gun, which is the ruin of everything; they seem beside to labour

under a greater degree of ignorance in husbandry than the others;

perhaps it is that their industry had less scope, and was less

exercised at home. I have heard many relate, how the land was

parcelled out in that kingdom; their ancient conquest has been a

great detriment to them, by over-setting their landed property. The

lands possessed by a few, are leased down ad infinitum, and the

occupiers often pay five guineas an acre. The poor are worse lodged

there than anywhere else in Europe; their potatoes, which are easily

raised, are perhaps an inducement to laziness: their wages are too

low, and their whisky too cheap.

There is no tracing observations of this kind, without making at the

same time very great allowances, as there are everywhere to be

found, a great many exceptions. The Irish themselves, from different

parts of that kingdom, are very different. It is difficult to

account for this surprising locality, one would think on so small an

island an Irishman must be an Irishman: yet it is not so, they are

different in their aptitude to, and in their love of labour.

The Scotch on the contrary are all industrious and saving; they want

nothing more than a field to exert themselves in, and they are

commonly sure of succeeding. The only difficulty they labour under

is, that technical American knowledge which requires some time to

obtain; it is not easy for those who seldom saw a tree, to conceive

how it is to be felled, cut up, and split into rails and posts.

As I am fond of seeing and talking of prosperous families, I intend

to finish this letter by relating to you the history of an honest

Scotch Hebridean, who came here in 1774, which will show you in

epitome what the Scotch can do, wherever they have room for the

exertion of their industry. Whenever I hear of any new settlement, I

pay it a visit once or twice a year, on purpose to observe the

different steps each settler takes, the gradual improvements, the

different tempers of each family, on which their prosperity in a

great nature depends; their different modifications of industry,

their ingenuity, and contrivance; for being all poor, their life

requires sagacity and prudence. In the evening I love to hear them

tell their stories, they furnish me with new ideas; I sit still and

listen to their ancient misfortunes, observing in many of them a

strong degree of gratitude to God, and the government. Many a well

meant sermon have I preached to some of them. When I found laziness

and inattention to prevail, who could refrain from wishing well to

these new countrymen, after having undergone so many fatigues. Who

could withhold good advice? What a happy change it must be, to

descend from the high, sterile, bleak lands of Scotland, where

everything is barren and cold, to rest on some fertile farms in

these middle provinces! Such a transition must have afforded the

most pleasing satisfaction.

The following dialogue passed at an out-settlement, where I lately

paid a visit:

Well, friend, how do you do now; I am come fifty odd miles on

purpose to see you; how do you go on with your new cutting and

slashing? Very well, good Sir, we learn the use of the axe bravely,

we shall make it out; we have a belly full of victuals every day,

our cows run about, and come home full of milk, our hogs get fat of

themselves in the woods: Oh, this is a good country! God bless the

king, and William Penn; we shall do very well by and by, if we keep

our healths. Your loghouse looks neat and light, where did you get

these shingles? One of our neighbours is a New-England man, and he

showed us how to split them out of chestnut-trees. Now for a barn,

but all in good time, here are fine trees to build with. Who is to

frame it, sure you don't understand that work yet? A countryman of

ours who has been in America these ten years, offers to wait for his

money until the second crop is lodged in it. What did you give for

your land? Thirty-five shillings per acre, payable in seven years.

How many acres have you got? An hundred and fifty. That is enough to

begin with; is not your land pretty hard to clear? Yes, Sir, hard

enough, but it would be harder still if it were ready cleared, for

then we should have no timber, and I love the woods much; the land

is nothing without them. Have not you found out any bees yet? No,

Sir; and if we had we should not know what to do with them. I will

tell you by and by. You are very kind. Farewell, honest man, God

prosper you; whenever you travel toward----, inquire for J.S. He

will entertain you kindly, provided you bring him good tidings from

your family and farm. In this manner I often visit them, and

carefully examine their houses, their modes of ingenuity, their

different ways; and make them all relate all they know, and describe

all they feel. These are scenes which I believe you would willingly

share with me. I well remember your philanthropic turn of mind. Is

it not better to contemplate under these humble roofs, the rudiments

of future wealth and population, than to behold the accumulated

bundles of litigious papers in the office of a lawyer? To examine

how the world is gradually settled, how the howling swamp is

converted into a pleasing meadow, the rough ridge into a fine field;

and to hear the cheerful whistling, the rural song, where there was

no sound heard before, save the yell of the savage, the screech of

the owl or the hissing of the snake? Here an European, fatigued with

luxury, riches, and pleasures, may find a sweet relaxation in a

series of interesting scenes, as affecting as they are new. England,

which now contains so many domes, so many castles, was once like

this; a place woody and marshy; its inhabitants, now the favourite

nation for arts and commerce, were once painted like our neighbours.

The country will nourish in its turn, and the same observations will

be made which I have just delineated. Posterity will look back with

avidity and pleasure, to trace, if possible, the era of this or that

particular settlement.

Pray, what is the reason that the Scots are in general more

religious, more faithful, more honest, and industrious than the

Irish? I do not mean to insinuate national reflections, God forbid!

It ill becomes any man, and much less an American; but as I know men

are nothing of themselves, and that they owe all their different

modifications either to government or other local circumstances,

there must be some powerful causes which constitute this great

national difference.

Agreeable to the account which several Scotchmen have given me of

the north of Britain, of the Orkneys, and the Hebride Islands, they

seem, on many accounts, to be unfit for the habitation of men; they

appear to be calculated only for great sheep pastures. Who then can

blame the inhabitants of these countries for transporting themselves

hither? This great continent must in time absorb the poorest part of

Europe; and this will happen in proportion as it becomes better

known; and as war, taxation, oppression, and misery increase there.

The Hebrides appear to be fit only for the residence of malefactors,

and it would be much better to send felons there than either to

Virginia or Maryland. What a strange compliment has our mother

country paid to two of the finest provinces in America! England has

entertained in that respect very mistaken ideas; what was intended

as a punishment, is become the good fortune of several; many of

those who have been transported as felons, are now rich, and

strangers to the stings of those wants that urged them to violations

of the law: they are become industrious, exemplary, and useful

citizens. The English government should purchase the most northern

and barren of those islands; it should send over to us the honest,

primitive Hebrideans, settle them here on good lands, as a reward

for their virtue and ancient poverty; and replace them with a colony

of her wicked sons. The severity of the climate, the inclemency of

the seasons, the sterility of the soil, the tempestuousness of the

sea, would afflict and punish enough. Could there be found a spot

better adapted to retaliate the injury it had received by their

crimes? Some of those islands might be considered as the hell of

Great Britain, where all evil spirits should be sent. Two essential

ends would be answered by this simple operation. The good people, by

emigration, would be rendered happier; the bad ones would be placed

where they ought to be. In a few years the dread of being sent to

that wintry region would have a much stronger effect than that of

transportation.--This is no place of punishment; were I a poor

hopeless, breadless Englishman, and not restrained by the power of

shame, I should be very thankful for the passage. It is of very

little importance how, and in what manner an indigent man arrives;

for if he is but sober, honest, and industrious, he has nothing more

to ask of heaven. Let him go to work, he will have opportunities

enough to earn a comfortable support, and even the means of

procuring some land; which ought to be the utmost wish of every

person who has health and hands to work. I knew a man who came to

this country, in the literal sense of the expression, stark naked; I

think he was a Frenchman, and a sailor on board an English man-of-

war. Being discontented, he had stripped himself and swam ashore;

where, finding clothes and friends, he settled afterwards at

Maraneck, in the county of Chester, in the province of New York: he

married and left a good farm to each of his sons. I knew another

person who was but twelve years old when he was taken on the

frontiers of Canada, by the Indians; at his arrival at Albany he was

purchased by a gentleman, who generously bound him apprentice to a

tailor. He lived to the age of ninety, and left behind him a fine

estate and a numerous family, all well settled; many of them I am

acquainted with.--Where is then the industrious European who ought

to despair?

After a foreigner from any part of Europe is arrived, and become a

citizen; let him devoutly listen to the voice of our great parent,

which says to him, "Welcome to my shores, distressed European; bless

the hour in which thou didst see my verdant fields, my fair

navigable rivers, and my green mountains!--If thou wilt work, I have

bread for thee; if thou wilt be honest, sober, and industrious, I

have greater rewards to confer on thee--ease and independence. I

will give thee fields to feed and clothe thee; a comfortable

fireside to sit by, and tell thy children by what means thou hast

prospered; and a decent bed to repose on. I shall endow thee beside

with the immunities of a freeman. If thou wilt carefully educate thy

children, teach them gratitude to God, and reverence to that

government, that philanthropic government, which has collected here

so many men and made them happy. I will also provide for thy

progeny; and to every good man this ought to be the most holy, the

most powerful, the most earnest wish he can possibly form, as well

as the most consolatory prospect when he dies. Go thou and work and

till; thou shalt prosper, provided thou be just, grateful, and

industrious."

HISTORY OF ANDREW, THE HEBRIDEAN

Let historians give the detail of our charters, the succession of

our several governors, and of their administrations; of our

political struggles, and of the foundation of our towns: let

annalists amuse themselves with collecting anecdotes of the

establishment of our modern provinces: eagles soar high--I, a

feebler bird, cheerfully content myself with skipping from bush to

bush, and living on insignificant insects. I am so habituated to

draw all my food and pleasure from the surface of the earth which I

till, that I cannot, nor indeed am I able to quit it--I therefore

present you with the short history of a simple Scotchman; though it

contain not a single remarkable event to amaze the reader; no

tragical scene to convulse the heart, or pathetic narrative to draw

tears from sympathetic eyes. All I wish to delineate is, the

progressive steps of a poor man, advancing from indigence to ease;

from oppression to freedom; from obscurity and contumely to some

degree of consequence--not by virtue of any freaks of fortune, but

by the gradual operation of sobriety, honesty, and emigration. These

are the limited fields, through which I love to wander; sure to find

in some parts, the smile of new-born happiness, the glad heart,

inspiring the cheerful song, the glow of manly pride excited by

vivid hopes and rising independence. I always return from my

neighbourly excursions extremely happy, because there I see good

living almost under every roof, and prosperous endeavours almost in

every field. But you may say, why don't you describe some of the

more ancient, opulent settlements of our country, where even the eye

of an European has something to admire? It is true, our American

fields are in general pleasing to behold, adorned and intermixed as

they are with so many substantial houses, flourishing orchards, and

copses of woodlands; the pride of our farms, the source of every

good we possess. But what I might observe there is but natural and

common; for to draw comfortable subsistence from well fenced

cultivated fields, is easy to conceive. A father dies and leaves a

decent house and rich farm to his son; the son modernises the one,

and carefully tills the other; marries the daughter of a friend and

neighbour: this is the common prospect; but though it is rich and

pleasant, yet it is far from being so entertaining and instructive

as the one now in my view.

I had rather attend on the shore to welcome the poor European when

he arrives, I observe him in his first moments of embarrassment,

trace him throughout his primary difficulties, follow him step by

step, until he pitches his tent on some piece of land, and realises

that energetic wish which has made him quit his native land, his

kindred, and induced him to traverse a boisterous ocean. It is there

I want to observe his first thoughts and feelings, the first essays

of an industry, which hitherto has been suppressed. I wish to see

men cut down the first trees, erect their new buildings, till their

first fields, reap their first crops, and say for the first time in

their lives, "This is our own grain, raised from American soil--on

it we shall feed and grow fat, and convert the rest into gold and

silver." I want to see how the happy effects of their sobriety,

honesty, and industry are first displayed: and who would not take a

pleasure in seeing these strangers settling as new countrymen,

struggling with arduous difficulties, overcoming them, and becoming

happy.

Landing on this great continent is like going to sea, they must have

a compass, some friendly directing needle; or else they will

uselessly err and wander for a long time, even with a fair wind: yet

these are the struggles through which our forefathers have waded;

and they have left us no other records of them, but the possession

of our farms. The reflections I make on these new settlers recall to

my mind what my grandfather did in his days; they fill me with

gratitude to his memory as well as to that government, which invited

him to come, and helped him when he arrived, as well as many others.

Can I pass over these reflections without remembering thy name, O

Penn! thou best of legislators; who by the wisdom of thy laws hast

endowed human nature, within the bounds of thy province, with every

dignity it can possibly enjoy in a civilised state; and showed by

thy singular establishment, what all men might be if they would

follow thy example!

In the year 1770, I purchased some lands in the county of----, which

I intended for one of my sons; and was obliged to go there in order

to see them properly surveyed and marked out: the soil is good, but

the country has a very wild aspect. However I observed with

pleasure, that land sells very fast; and I am in hopes when the lad

gets a wife, it will be a well-settled decent country. Agreeable to

our customs, which indeed are those of nature, it is our duty to

provide for our eldest children while we live, in order that our

homesteads may be left to the youngest, who are the most helpless.

Some people are apt to regard the portions given to daughters as so

much lost to the family; but this is selfish, and is not agreeable

to my way of thinking; they cannot work as men do; they marry young:

I have given an honest European a farm to till for himself, rent

free, provided he clears an acre of swamp every year, and that he

quits it whenever my daughter shall marry. It will procure her a

substantial husband, a good farmer--and that is all my ambition.

Whilst I was in the woods I met with a party of Indians; I shook

hands with them, and I perceived they had killed a cub; I had a

little Peach brandy, they perceived it also, we therefore joined

company, kindled a large fire, and ate an hearty supper. I made

their hearts glad, and we all reposed on good beds of leaves. Soon

after dark, I was surprised to hear a prodigious hooting through the

woods; the Indians laughed heartily. One of them, more skilful than

the rest, mimicked the owls so exactly, that a very large one

perched on a high tree over our fire. We soon brought him down; he

measured five feet seven inches from one extremity of the wings to

the other. By Captain----I have sent you the talons, on which I have

had the heads of small candlesticks fixed. Pray keep them on the

table of your study for my sake.

Contrary to my expectation, I found myself under the necessity of

going to Philadelphia, in order to pay the purchase money, and to

have the deeds properly recorded. I thought little of the journey,

though it was above two hundred miles, because I was well acquainted

with many friends, at whose houses I intended to stop. The third

night after I left the woods, I put up at Mr.----'s, the most worthy

citizen I know; he happened to lodge at my house when you was

there.--He kindly inquired after your welfare, and desired I would

make a friendly mention of him to you. The neatness of these good

people is no phenomenon, yet I think this excellent family surpasses

everything I know. No sooner did I lie down to rest than I thought

myself in a most odoriferous arbour, so sweet and fragrant were the

sheets. Next morning I found my host in the orchard destroying

caterpillars. I think, friend B., said I, that thee art greatly

departed from the good rules of the society; thee seemeth to have

quitted that happy simplicity for which it hath hitherto been so

remarkable. Thy rebuke, friend James, is a pretty heavy one; what

motive canst thee have for thus accusing us? Thy kind wife made a

mistake last evening, I said; she put me on a bed of roses, instead

of a common one; I am not used to such delicacies. And is that all,

friend James, that thee hast to reproach us with?--Thee wilt not

call it luxury I hope? thee canst but know that it is the produce of

our garden; and friend Pope sayeth, that "to enjoy is to obey." This

is a most learned excuse indeed, friend B., and must be valued

because it is founded upon truth. James, my wife hath done nothing

more to thy bed than what is done all the year round to all the beds

in the family; she sprinkles her linen with rose-water before she

puts it under the press; it is her fancy, and I have nought to say.

But thee shalt not escape so, verily I will send for her; thee and

she must settle the matter, whilst I proceed on my work, before the

sun gets too high.--Tom, go thou and call thy mistress Philadelphia.

What. said I, is thy wife called by that name? I did not know that

before. I'll tell thee, James, how it came to pass: her grandmother

was the first female child born after William Penn landed with the

rest of our brethren; and in compliment to the city he intended to

build, she was called after the name he intended to give it; and so

there is always one of the daughters of her family known by the name

of Philadelphia. She soon came, and after a most friendly

altercation, I gave up the point; breakfasted, departed, and in four

days reached the city.

A week after news came that a vessel was arrived with Scotch

emigrants. Mr. C. and I went to the dock to see them disembark. It

was a scene which inspired me with a variety of thoughts; here are,

said I to my friend, a number of people, driven by poverty, and

other adverse causes, to a foreign land, in which they know nobody.

The name of a stranger, instead of implying relief, assistance, and

kindness, on the contrary, conveys very different ideas. They are

now distressed; their minds are racked by a variety of

apprehensions, fears, and hopes. It was this last powerful sentiment

which has brought them here. If they are good people, I pray that

heaven may realise them. Whoever were to see them thus gathered

again in five or six years, would behold a more pleasing sight, to

which this would serve as a very powerful contrast. By their

honesty, the vigour of their arms, and the benignity of government,

their condition will be greatly improved; they will be well clad,

fat, possessed of that manly confidence which property confers; they

will become useful citizens. Some of the posterity may act

conspicuous parts in our future American transactions. Most of them

appeared pale and emaciated, from the length of the passage, and the

indifferent provision on which they had lived. The number of

children seemed as great as that of the people; they had all paid

for being conveyed here. The captain told us they were a quiet,

peaceable, and harmless people, who had never dwelt in cities. This

was a valuable cargo; they seemed, a few excepted, to be in the full

vigour of their lives. Several citizens, impelled either by

spontaneous attachments, or motives of humanity, took many of them

to their houses; the city, agreeable to its usual wisdom and

humanity, ordered them all to be lodged in the barracks, and plenty

of provisions to be given them. My friend pitched upon one also and

led him to his house, with his wife, and a son about fourteen years

of age. The majority of them had contracted for land the year

before, by means of an agent; the rest depended entirely upon

chance; and the one who followed us was of this last class. Poor

man, he smiled on receiving the invitation, and gladly accepted it,

bidding his wife and son do the same, in a language which I did not

understand. He gazed with uninterrupted attention on everything he

saw; the houses, the inhabitants, the negroes, and carriages:

everything appeared equally new to him; and we went slow, in order

to give him time to feed on this pleasing variety. Good God! said

he, is this Philadelphia, that blessed city of bread and provisions,

of which we have heard so much? I am told it was founded the same

year in which my father was born; why, it is finer than Greenock and

Glasgow, which are ten times as old. It is so, said my friend to

him, and when thee hast been here a month, thee will soon see that

it is the capital of a fine province, of which thee art going to be

a citizen: Greenock enjoys neither such a climate nor such a soil.

Thus we slowly proceeded along, when we met several large Lancaster

six-horse waggons, just arrived from the country. At this stupendous

sight he stopped short, and with great diffidence asked us what was

the use of these great moving houses, and where those big horses

came from? Have you none such at home, I asked him? Oh, no; these

huge animals would eat all the grass of our island! We at last

reached my friend's house, who in the glow of well-meant

hospitality, made them all three sit down to a good dinner, and gave

them as much cider as they could drink. God bless this country, and

the good people it contains, said he; this is the best meal's

victuals I have made a long time.--I thank you kindly.

What part of Scotland dost thee come from, friend Andrew, said Mr.

C.? Some of us come from the main, some from the island of Barra, he

answered--I myself am a Barra man. I looked on the map, and by its

latitude, easily guessed that it must be an inhospitable climate.

What sort of land have you got there, I asked him? Bad enough, said

he; we have no such trees as I see here, no wheat, no kine, no

apples. Then, I observed, that it must be hard for the poor to live.

We have no poor, he answered, we are all alike, except our laird;

but he cannot help everybody. Pray what is the name of your laird?

Mr. Neiel, said Andrew; the like of him is not to be found in any of

the isles; his forefathers have lived there thirty generations ago,

as we are told. Now, gentlemen, you may judge what an ancient family

estate it must be. But it is cold, the land is thin, and there were

too many of us, which are the reasons that some are come to seek

their fortunes here. Well, Andrew, what step do you intend to take

in order to become rich? I do not know, Sir; I am but an ignorant

man, a stranger besides--I must rely on the advice of good

Christians, they would not deceive me, I am sure. I have brought

with me a character from our Barra minister, can it do me any good

here? Oh, yes; but your future success will depend entirely on your

own conduct; if you are a sober man, as the certificate says,

laborious, and honest, there is no fear but that you will do well.

Have you brought any money with you, Andrew? Yes, Sir, eleven

guineas and an half. Upon my word it is a considerable sum for a

Barra man; how came you by so much money? Why seven years ago I

received a legacy of thirty-seven pounds from an uncle, who loved me

much; my wife brought me two guineas, when the laird gave her to me

for a wife, which I have saved ever since. I have sold all I had; I

worked in Glasgow for some time. I am glad to hear you are so saving

and prudent; be so still; you must go and hire yourself with some

good people; what can you do? I can thresh a little, and handle the

spade. Can you plough? Yes, Sir, with the little breast plough I

have brought with me. These won't do here, Andrew; you are an able

man; if you are willing you will soon learn. I'll tell you what I

intend to do; I'll send you to my house, where you shall stay two or

three weeks, there you must exercise yourself with the axe, that is

the principal tool the Americans want, and particularly the back-

settlers. Can your wife spin? Yes, she can. Well then as soon as you

are able to handle the axe, you shall go and live with Mr. P. R., a

particular friend of mine, who will give you four dollars per month,

for the first six, and the usual price of five as long as you remain

with him. I shall place your wife in another house, where she shall

receive half a dollar a week for spinning; and your son a dollar a

month to drive the team. You shall have besides good victuals to

eat, and good beds to lie on; will all this satisfy you, Andrew? He

hardly understood what I said; the honest tears of gratitude fell

from his eyes as he looked at me, and its expressions seemed to

quiver on his lips.--Though silent, this was saying a great deal;

there was besides something extremely moving to see a man six feet

high thus shed tears; and they did not lessen the good opinion I had

entertained of him. At last he told me, that my offers were more

than he deserved, and that he would first begin to work for his

victuals. No, no, said I, if you are careful and sober, and do what

you can, you shall receive what I told you, after you have served a

short apprenticeship at my house. May God repay you for all your

kindnesses, said Andrew; as long as I live I shall thank you, and do

what I can for you. A few days after I sent them all three to----,

by the return of some waggons, that he might have an opportunity of

viewing, and convincing himself of the utility of those machines

which he had at first so much admired.

The further descriptions he gave us of the Hebrides in general, and

of his native island in particular; of the customs and modes of

living of the inhabitants; greatly entertained me. Pray is the

sterility of the soil the cause that there are no trees, or is it

because there are none planted? What are the modern families of all

the kings of the earth, compared to the date of that of Mr. Neiel?

Admitting that each generation should last but forty years, this

makes a period of 1200; an extraordinary duration for the

uninterrupted descent of any family! Agreeably to the description he

gave us of those countries, they seem to live according to the rules

of nature, which gives them but bare subsistence; their

constitutions are uncontaminated by any excess or effeminacy, which

their soil refuses. If their allowance of food is not too scanty,

they must all be healthy by perpetual temperance and exercise; if

so, they are amply rewarded for their poverty. Could they have

obtained but necessary food, they would not have left it; for it was

not in consequence of oppression, either from their patriarch or the

government, that they had emigrated. I wish we had a colony of these

honest people settled in some parts of this province; their morals,

their religion, seem to be as simple as their manners. This society

would present an interesting spectacle could they be transported on

a richer soil. But perhaps that soil would soon alter everything;

for our opinions, vices, and virtues, are altogether local: we are

machines fashioned by every circumstance around us.

Andrew arrived at my house a week before I did, and I found my wife,

agreeable to my instructions, had placed the axe in his hands, as

his first task. For some time he was very awkward, but he was so

docile, so willing, and grateful, as well as his wife, that I

foresaw he would succeed. Agreeably to my promise, I put them all

with different families, where they were well liked, and all parties

were pleased. Andrew worked hard, lived well, grew fat, and every

Sunday came to pay me a visit on a good horse, which Mr. P. R. lent

him. Poor man, it took him a long time ere he could sit on the

saddle and hold the bridle properly. I believe he had never before

mounted such a beast, though I did not choose to ask him that

question, for fear it might suggest some mortifying ideas. After

having been twelve months at Mr. P. R.'s, and having received his

own and his family's wages, which amounted to eighty-four dollars;

he came to see me on a week-day, and told me, that he was a man of

middle age, and would willingly have land of his own, in order to

procure him a home, as a shelter against old age: that whenever this

period should come, his son, to whom he would give his land, would

then maintain him, and thus live altogether; he therefore required

my advice and assistance. I thought his desire very natural and

praiseworthy, and told him that I should think of it, but that he

must remain one month longer with Mr. P. R., who had 3000 rails to

split. He immediately consented. The spring was not far advanced

enough yet for Andrew to begin clearing any land even supposing that

he had made a purchase; as it is always necessary that the leaves

should be out, in order that this additional combustible may serve

to burn the heaps of brush more readily.

A few days after, it happened that the whole family of Mr. P. R.

went to meeting, and left Andrew to take care of the house. While he

was at the door, attentively reading the Bible, nine Indians just

come from the mountains, suddenly made their appearance, and

unloaded their packs of furs on the floor of the piazza. Conceive,

if you can, what was Andrew's consternation at this extraordinary

sight! From the singular appearance of these people, the honest

Hebridean took them for a lawless band come to rob his master's

house. He therefore, like a faithful guardian, precipitately

withdrew and shut the doors, but as most of our houses are without

locks, he was reduced to the necessity of fixing his knife over the

latch, and then flew upstairs in quest of a broadsword he had

brought from Scotland. The Indians, who were Mr. P. R.'s particular

friends, guessed at his suspicions and fears; they forcibly lifted

the door, and suddenly took possession of the house, got all the

bread and meat they wanted, and sat themselves down by the fire. At

this instant Andrew, with his broadsword in his hand, entered the

room; the Indians earnestly looking at him, and attentively watching

his motions. After a very few reflections, Andrew found that his

weapon was useless, when opposed to nine tomahawks; but this did not

diminish his anger, on the contrary; it grew greater on observing

the calm impudence with which they were devouring the family

provisions. Unable to resist, he called them names in broad Scotch,

and ordered them to desist and be gone; to which the Indians (as

they told me afterwards) replied in their equally broad idiom. It

must have been a most unintelligible altercation between this honest

Barra man, and nine Indians who did not much care for anything he

could say. At last he ventured to lay his hands on one of them, in

order to turn him out of the house. Here Andrew's fidelity got the

better of his prudence; for the Indian, by his motions, threatened

to scalp him, while the rest gave the war hoop. This horrid noise so

effectually frightened poor Andrew, that, unmindful of his courage,

of his broadsword, and his intentions, he rushed out, left them

masters of the house, and disappeared. I have heard one of the

Indians say since, that he never laughed so heartily in his life.

Andrew at a distance, soon recovered from the fears which had been

inspired by this infernal yell, and thought of no other remedy than

to go to the meeting-house, which was about two miles distant. In

the eagerness of his honest intentions, with looks of affright still

marked on his countenance, he called Mr. P. R. out, and told him

with great vehemence of style, that nine monsters were come to his

house--some blue, some red, and some black; that they had little

axes in their hands out of which they smoked; and that like

highlanders, they had no breeches; that they were devouring all his

victuals, and that God only knew what they would do more. Pacify

yourself, said Mr. P. R., my house is as safe with these people, as

if I was there myself; as for the victuals, they are heartily

welcome, honest Andrew; they are not people of much ceremony; they

help themselves thus whenever they are among their friends; I do so

too in their wigwams, whenever I go to their village: you had better

therefore step in and hear the remainder of the sermon, and when the

meeting is over we will all go back in the waggon together.

At their return, Mr. P. R., who speaks the Indian language very

well, explained the whole matter; the Indians renewed their laugh,

and shook hands with honest Andrew, whom they made to smoke out of

their pipes; and thus peace was made, and ratified according to the

Indian custom, by the calumet.

Soon after this adventure, the time approached when I had promised

Andrew my best assistance to settle him; for that purpose I went to

Mr. A. V. in the county of----, who, I was informed, had purchased a

tract of land, contiguous to----settlement. I gave him a faithful

detail of the progress Andrew had made in the rural arts; of his

honesty, sobriety, and gratitude, and pressed him to sell him an

hundred acres. This I cannot comply with, said Mr. A. V., but at the

same time I will do better; I love to encourage honest Europeans as

much as you do, and to see them prosper: you tell me he has but one

son; I will lease them an hundred acres for any term of years you

please, and make it more valuable to your Scotchman than if he was

possessed of the fee simple. By that means he may, with what little

money he has, buy a plough, a team, and some stock; he will not be

incumbered with debts and mortgages; what he raises will be his own;

had he two or three sons as able as himself, then I should think it

more eligible for him to purchase the fee simple. I join with you in

opinion, and will bring Andrew along with me in a few days.

Well, honest Andrew, said Mr. A. V., in consideration of your good

name, I will let you have an hundred acres of good arable land, that

shall be laid out along a new road; there is a bridge already

erected on the creek that passes through the land, and a fine swamp

of about twenty acres. These are my terms, I cannot sell, but I will

lease you the quantity that Mr. James, your friend, has asked; the

first seven years you shall pay no rent, whatever you sow and reap,

and plant and gather, shall be entirely your own; neither the king,

government, nor church, will have any claim on your future property:

the remaining part of the time you must give me twelve dollars and

an half a year; and that is all you will have to pay me. Within the

three first years you must plant fifty apple trees, and clear seven

acres of swamp within the first part of the lease; it will be your

own advantage: whatever you do more within that time, I will pay you

for it, at the common rate of the country. The term of the lease

shall be thirty years; how do you like it, Andrew? Oh, Sir, it is

very good, but I am afraid, that the king or his ministers, or the

governor, or some of our great men, will come and take the land from

me; your son may say to me, by and by, this is my father's land,

Andrew, you must quit it. No, no, said Mr. A. V., there is no such

danger; the king and his ministers are too just to take the labour

of a poor settler; here we have no great men, but what are

subordinate to our laws; but to calm all your fears, I will give you

a lease, so that none can make you afraid. If ever you are

dissatisfied with the land, a jury of your own neighbourhood shall

value all your improvements, and you shall be paid agreeably to

their verdict. You may sell the lease, or if you die, you may

previously dispose of it, as if the land was your own. Expressive,

yet inarticulate joy, was mixed in his countenance, which seemed

impressed with astonishment and confusion. Do you understand me

well, said Mr. A. V.? No, Sir, replied Andrew, I know nothing of

what you mean about lease, improvement, will, jury, etc. That is

honest, we will explain these things to you by and by. It must be

confessed that those were hard words, which he had never heard in

his life; for by his own account, the ideas they convey would be

totally useless in the island of Barra. No wonder, therefore, that

he was embarrassed; for how could the man who had hardly a will of

his own since he was born, imagine he could have one after his

death? How could the person who never possessed anything, conceive

that he could extend his new dominion over this land, even after he

should be laid in his grave? For my part, I think Andrew's amazement

did not imply any extraordinary degree of ignorance; he was an actor

introduced upon a new scene, it required some time ere he could

reconcile himself to the part he was to perform. However he was soon

enlightened, and introduced into those mysteries with which we

native Americans are but too well acquainted.

Here then is honest Andrew, invested with every municipal advantage

they confer; become a freeholder, possessed of a vote, of a place of

residence, a citizen of the province of Pennsylvania. Andrew's

original hopes and the distant prospects he had formed in the island

of Barra, were at the eve of being realised; we therefore can easily

forgive him a few spontaneous ejaculations, which would be useless

to repeat. This short tale is easily told; few words are sufficient

to describe this sudden change of situation; but in his mind it was

gradual, and took him above a week before he could be sure, that

without disturbing any money he could possess lands. Soon after he

prepared himself; I lent him a barrel of pork, and 200 lb. weight of

meal, and made him purchase what was necessary besides.

He set out, and hired a room in the house of a settler who lived the

most contiguous to his own land. His first work was to clear some

acres of swamp, that he might have a supply of hay the following

year for his two horses and cows. From the first day he began to

work, he was indefatigable; his honesty procured him friends, and

his industry the esteem of his new neighbours. One of them offered

him two acres of cleared land, whereon he might plant corn,

pumpkins, squashes, and a few potatoes, that very season. It is

astonishing how quick men will learn when they work for themselves.

I saw with pleasure two months after, Andrew holding a two-horse

plough and tracing his furrows quite straight; thus the spade man of

the island of Barra was become the tiller of American soil. Well

done, said I, Andrew, well done; I see that God speeds and directs

your works; I see prosperity delineated in all your furrows and head

lands. Raise this crop of corn with attention and care, and then you

will be master of the art.

As he had neither mowing nor reaping to do that year, I told him

that the time was come to build his house; and that for the purpose

I would myself invite the neighbourhood to a frolic; that thus he

would have a large dwelling erected, and some upland cleared in one

day. Mr. P. R., his old friend, came at the time appointed, with all

his hands, and brought victuals in plenty: I did the same. About

forty people repaired to the spot; the songs, and merry stories,

went round the woods from cluster to cluster, as the people had

gathered to their different works; trees fell on all sides, bushes

were cut up and heaped; and while many were thus employed, others

with their teams hauled the big logs to the spot which Andrew had

pitched upon for the erection of his new dwelling. We all dined in

the woods; in the afternoon the logs were placed with skids, and the

usual contrivances: thus the rude house was raised, and above two

acres of land cut up, cleared, and heaped.

Whilst all these different operations were performing, Andrew was

absolutely incapable of working; it was to him the most solemn

holiday he had ever seen; it would have been sacrilegious in him to

have denied it with menial labour. Poor man, he sanctified it with

joy and thanksgiving, and honest libations--he went from one to the

other with the bottle in his hand, pressing everybody to drink, and

drinking himself to show the example. He spent the whole day in

smiling, laughing, and uttering monosyllables: his wife and son were

there also, but as they could not understand the language, their

pleasure must have been altogether that of the imagination. The

powerful lord, the wealthy merchant, on seeing the superb mansion

finished, never can feel half the joy and real happiness which was

felt and enjoyed on that day by this honest Hebridean: though this

new dwelling, erected in the midst of the woods, was nothing more

than a square inclosure, composed of twenty-four large clumsy logs,

let in at the ends. When the work was finished, the company made the

woods resound with the noise of their three cheers, and the honest

wishes they formed for Andrew's prosperity. He could say nothing,

but with thankful tears he shook hands with them all. Thus from the

first day he had landed, Andrew marched towards this important

event: this memorable day made the sun shine on that land on which

he was to sow wheat and other grain. What swamp he had cleared lay

before his door; the essence of future bread, milk, and meat, were

scattered all round him. Soon after he hired a carpenter, who put on

a roof and laid the floors; in a week more the house was properly

plastered, and the chimney finished. He moved into it, and purchased

two cows, which found plenty of food in the woods--his hogs had the

same advantage. That very year, he and his son sowed three bushels

of wheat, from which he reaped ninety-one and a half; for I had

ordered him to keep an exact account of all he should raise. His

first crop of other corn would have been as good, had it not been

for the squirrels, which were enemies not to be dispersed by the

broadsword. The fourth year I took an inventory of the wheat this

man possessed, which I send you. Soon after, further settlements

were made on that road, and Andrew, instead of being the last man

towards the wilderness, found himself in a few years in the middle

of a numerous society. He helped others as generously as others had

helped him; and I have dined many times at his table with several of

his neighbours. The second year he was made overseer of the road,

and served on two petty juries, performing as a citizen all the

duties required of him. The historiographer of some great prince or

general, does not bring his hero victorious to the end of a

successful campaign, with one half of the heart-felt pleasure with

which I have conducted Andrew to the situation he now enjoys: he is

independent and easy. Triumph and military honours do not always

imply those two blessings. He is unencumbered with debts, services,

rents, or any other dues; the successes of a campaign, the laurels

of war, must be purchased at the dearest rate, which makes every

cool reflecting citizen to tremble and shudder. By the literal

account hereunto annexed, you will easily be made acquainted with

the happy effects which constantly flow, in this country, from

sobriety and industry, when united with good land and freedom.

The account of the property he acquired with his own hands and those

of his son, in four years, is under:

                                                        Dollars

 The value of his improvements and lease                225

 Six cows, at 13 dollars                                78

 Two breeding mares                                     50

 The rest of the stock                                  100

 Seventy-three bushels of wheat                         66

 Money due to him on notes                              43

 Pork and beef in his cellar                            28

 Wool and flax                                          19

 Ploughs and other utensils of husbandry                31

---

240 pounds Pennsylvania currency--dollars               640

LETTER IV

DESCRIPTION OF THE ISLAND OF NANTUCKET, WITH THE MANNERS, CUSTOMS,

POLICY, AND TRADE OF THE INHABITANTS

The greatest compliment that can be paid to the best of kings, to

the wisest ministers, or the most patriotic rulers, is to think,

that the reformation of political abuses, and the happiness of their

people are the primary objects of their attention. But alas! how

disagreeable must the work of reformation be; how dreaded the

operation; for we hear of no amendment: on the contrary, the great

number of European emigrants, yearly coming over here, informs us,

that the severity of taxes, the injustice of laws, the tyranny of

the rich, and the oppressive avarice of the church; are as

intolerable as ever. Will these calamities have no end? Are not the

great rulers of the earth afraid of losing, by degrees, their most

useful subjects? This country, providentially intended for the

general asylum of the world, will flourish by the oppression of

their people; they will every day become better acquainted with the

happiness we enjoy, and seek for the means of transporting

themselves here, in spite of all obstacles and laws. To what purpose

then have so many useful books and divine maxims been transmitted to

us from preceding ages?--Are they all vain, all useless? Must human

nature ever be the sport of the few, and its many wounds remain

unhealed? How happy are we here, in having fortunately escaped the

miseries which attended our fathers; how thankful ought we to be,

that they reared us in a land where sobriety and industry never fail

to meet with the most ample rewards! You have, no doubt, read

several histories of this continent, yet there are a thousand facts,

a thousand explanations overlooked. Authors will certainly convey to

you a geographical knowledge of this country; they will acquaint you

with the eras of the several settlements, the foundations of our

towns, the spirit of our different charters, etc., yet they do not

sufficiently disclose the genius of the people, their various

customs, their modes of agriculture, the innumerable resources which

the industrious have of raising themselves to a comfortable and easy

situation. Few of these writers have resided here, and those who

have, had not pervaded every part of the country, nor carefully

examined the nature and principles of our association. It would be a

task worthy a speculative genius, to enter intimately into the

situation and characters of the people, from Nova Scotia to West

Florida; and surely history cannot possibly present any subject more

pleasing to behold. Sensible how unable I am to lead you through so

vast a maze, let us look attentively for some small unnoticed

corner; but where shall we go in quest of such a one? Numberless

settlements, each distinguished by some peculiarities, present

themselves on every side; all seem to realise the most sanguine

wishes that a good man could form for the happiness of his race.

Here they live by fishing on the most plentiful coasts in the world;

there they fell trees, by the sides of large rivers, for masts and

lumber; here others convert innumerable logs into the best boards;

there again others cultivate the land, rear cattle, and clear large

fields. Yet I have a spot in my view, where none of these

occupations are performed, which will, I hope, reward us for the

trouble of inspection; but though it is barren in its soil,

insignificant in its extent, inconvenient in its situation, deprived

of materials for building; it seems to have been inhabited merely to

prove what mankind can do when happily governed! Here I can point

out to you exertions of the most successful industry; instances of

native sagacity unassisted by science; the happy fruits of a well

directed perseverance. It is always a refreshing spectacle to me,

when in my review of the various component parts of this immense

whole, I observe the labours of its inhabitants singularly rewarded

by nature; when I see them emerged out of their first difficulties,

living with decency and ease, and conveying to their posterity that

plentiful subsistence, which their fathers have so deservedly

earned. But when their prosperity arises from the goodness of the

climate, and fertility of the soil; I partake of their happiness, it

is true; yet stay but a little while with them, as they exhibit

nothing but what is natural and common. On the contrary, when I meet

with barren spots fertilised, grass growing where none grew before;

grain gathered from fields which had hitherto produced nothing

better than brambles; dwellings raised where no building materials

were to be found; wealth acquired by the most uncommon means: there

I pause, to dwell on the favourite object of my speculative

inquiries. Willingly do I leave the former to enjoy the odoriferous

furrow, or their rich valleys, with anxiety repairing to the spot,

where so many difficulties have been overcome; where extraordinary

exertions have produced extraordinary effects, and where every

natural obstacle has been removed by a vigorous industry.

I want not to record the annals of the island of Nantucket--its

inhabitants have no annals, for they are not a race of warriors. My

simple wish is to trace them throughout their progressive steps,

from their arrival here to this present hour; to inquire by what

means they have raised themselves from the most humble, the most

insignificant beginnings, to the ease and the wealth they now

possess; and to give you some idea of their customs, religion,

manners, policy, and mode of living.

This happy settlement was not founded on intrusion, forcible

entries, or blood, as so many others have been; it drew its origin

from necessity on the one side, and from good will on the other; and

ever since, all has been a scene of uninterrupted harmony.--Neither

political, nor religious broils; neither disputes with the natives,

nor any other contentions, have in the least agitated or disturbed

its detached society. Yet the first founders knew nothing either of

Lycurgus or Solon; for this settlement has not been the work of

eminent men or powerful legislators, forcing nature by the

accumulated labours of art. This singular establishment has been

effected by means of that native industry and perseverance common to

all men, when they are protected by a government which demands but

little for its protection; when they are permitted to enjoy a system

of rational laws founded on perfect freedom. The mildness and

humanity of such a government necessarily implies that confidence

which is the source of the most arduous undertakings and permanent

success. Would you believe that a sandy spot, of about twenty-three

thousand acres, affording neither stones nor timber, meadows nor

arable, yet can boast of an handsome town, consisting of more than

500 houses, should possess above 200 sail of vessels, constantly

employ upwards of 2000 seamen, feed more than 15,000 sheep, 500

cows, 200 horses; and has several citizens worth 20,000 pounds

sterling! Yet all these facts are uncontroverted. Who would have

imagined that any people should have abandoned a fruitful and

extensive continent, filled with the riches which the most ample

vegetation affords; replete with good soil, enamelled meadows, rich

pastures, every kind of timber, and with all other materials

necessary to render life happy and comfortable: to come and inhabit

a little sandbank, to which nature had refused those advantages; to

dwell on a spot where there scarcely grew a shrub to announce, by

the budding of its leaves, the arrival of the spring, and to warn by

their fall the proximity of winter. Had this island been contiguous

to the shores of some ancient monarchy, it would only have been

occupied by a few wretched fishermen, who, oppressed by poverty,

would hardly have been able to purchase or build little fishing

barks; always dreading the weight of taxes, or the servitude of men-

of-war. Instead of that boldness of speculation for which the

inhabitants of this island are so remarkable, they would fearfully

have confined themselves, within the narrow limits of the most

trifling attempts; timid in their excursions, they never could have

extricated themselves from their first difficulties. This island, on

the contrary, contains 5000 hardy people, who boldly derive their

riches from the element that surrounds them, and have been compelled

by the sterility of the soil to seek abroad for the means of

subsistence. You must not imagine, from the recital of these facts,

that they enjoyed any exclusive privileges or royal charters, or

that they were nursed by particular immunities in the infancy of

their settlement. No, their freedom, their skill, their probity, and

perseverance, have accomplished everything, and brought them by

degrees to the rank they now hold.

From this first sketch, I hope that my partiality to this island

will be justified. Perhaps you hardly know that such an one exists

in the neighbourhood of Cape Cod. What has happened here, has and

will happen everywhere else. Give mankind the full rewards of their

industry, allow them to enjoy the fruit of their labour under the

peaceable shade of their vines and fig-trees, leave their native

activity unshackled and free, like a fair stream without dams or

other obstacles; the first will fertilise the very sand on which

they tread, the other exhibit a navigable river, spreading plenty

and cheerfulness wherever the declivity of the ground leads it. If

these people are not famous for tracing the fragrant furrow on the

plain, they plough the rougher ocean, they gather from its surface,

at an immense distance, and with Herculean labours, the riches it

affords; they go to hunt and catch that huge fish which by its

strength and velocity one would imagine ought to be beyond the reach

of man. This island has nothing deserving of notice but its

inhabitants; here you meet with neither ancient monuments, spacious

halls, solemn temples, nor elegant dwellings; not a citadel, nor any

kind of fortification, not even a battery to rend the air with its

loud peals on any solemn occasion. As for their rural improvements,

they are many, but all of the most simple and useful kind.

The island of Nantucket lies in latitude 41 degrees 10 minutes. 60

miles S. from Cape Cod; 27 S. from Hyanes or Barnstable, a town on

the most contiguous part of the great peninsula; 21 miles E. by S.

from Cape Pog, on the vineyard; 50 E. by S. from Wood's Hole, on

Elizabeth Island; 80 miles S. from Boston; 120 from Rhode Island;

800 N. from Bermudas. Sherborn is the only town on the island, which

consists of about 530 houses, that have been framed on the main;

they are lathed and plastered within, handsomely painted and boarded

without; each has a cellar underneath, built with stones fetched

also from the main: they are all of a similar construction and

appearance; plain, and entirely devoid of exterior or interior

ornament. I observed but one which was built of bricks, belonging to

Mr.----, but like the rest it is unadorned. The town stands on a

rising sandbank, on the west side of the harbour, which is very safe

from all winds. There are two places of worship, one for the society

of Friends, the other for that of Presbyterians; and in the middle

of the town, near the market-place, stands a simple building, which

is the county court-house. The town regularly ascends toward the

country, and in its vicinage they have several small fields and

gardens yearly manured with the dung of their cows, and the soil of

their streets. There are a good many cherry and peach trees planted

in their streets and in many other places; the apple tree does not

thrive well, they have therefore planted but few. The island

contains no mountains, yet is very uneven, and the many rising

grounds and eminences with which it is filled, have formed in the

several valleys a great variety of swamps, where the Indian grass

and the blue bent, peculiar to such soils, grow with tolerable

luxuriancy. Some of the swamps abound with peat, which serves the

poor instead of firewood. There are fourteen ponds on this island,

all extremely useful, some lying transversely, almost across it,

which greatly helps to divide it into partitions for the use of

their cattle; others abound with peculiar fish and sea fowls. Their

streets are not paved, but this is attended with little

inconvenience, as it is never crowded with country carriages; and

those they have in the town are seldom made use of but in the time

of the coming in and before the sailing of their fleets. At my first

landing I was much surprised at the disagreeable smell which struck

me in many parts of the town; it is caused by the whale oil, and is

unavoidable; the neatness peculiar to these people can neither

remove nor prevent it. There are near the wharfs a great many

storehouses, where their staple commodity is deposited, as well as

the innumerable materials which are always wanted to repair and fit

out so many whalemen. They have three docks, each three hundred feet

long, and extremely convenient; at the head of which there are ten

feet of water. These docks are built like those in Boston, of logs

fetched from the continent, filled with stones, and covered with

sand. Between these docks and the town, there is room sufficient for

the landing of goods and for the passage of their numerous carts;

for almost every man here has one: the wharfs to the north and south

of the docks, are built of the same materials, and give a stranger,

at his first landing, an high idea of the prosperity of these

people; and there is room around these three docks for 300 sail of

vessels. When their fleets have been successful, the bustle and

hurry of business on this spot for some days after their arrival,

would make you imagine, that Sherborn is the capital of a very

opulent and large province. On that point of land, which forms the

west side of the harbour, stands a very neat lighthouse; the

opposite peninsula, called Coitou, secures it from the most

dangerous winds. There are but few gardens and arable fields in the

neighbourhood of the town, for nothing can be more sterile and sandy

than this part of the island; they have, however, with unwearied

perseverance, by bringing a variety of manure, and by cow-penning,

enriched several spots where they raise Indian corn, potatoes,

pumpkins, turnips, etc. On the highest part of this sandy eminence,

four windmills grind the grain they raise or import; and contiguous

to them their rope walk is to be seen, where full half of their

cordage is manufactured. Between the shores of the harbour, the

docks, and the town, there is a most excellent piece of meadow,

inclosed and manured with such cost and pains as show how necessary

and precious grass is at Nantucket. Towards the point of Shemah, the

island is more level and the soil better; and there they have

considerable lots well fenced and richly manured, where they

diligently raise their yearly crops. There are but very few farms on

this island, because there are but very few spots that will admit of

cultivation without the assistance of dung and other manure; which

is very expensive to fetch from the main. This island was patented

in the year 1671, by twenty-seven proprietors, under the province of

New York; which then claimed all the islands from the Neway Sink to

Cape Cod. They found it so universally barren and so unfit for

cultivation, that they mutually agreed not to divide it, as each

could neither live on, nor improve that lot which might fall to his

share. They then cast their eyes on the sea, and finding themselves

obliged to become fishermen, they looked for a harbour, and having

found one, they determined to build a town in its neighbourhood and

to dwell together. For that purpose they surveyed as much ground as

would afford to each what is generally called here a home lot. Forty

acres were thought sufficient to answer this double purpose; for to

what end should they covet more land than they could improve, or

even inclose; not being possessed of a single tree, in the whole

extent of their new dominion. This was all the territorial property

they allotted; the rest they agreed to hold in common, and seeing

that the scanty grass of the island might feed sheep, they agreed

that each proprietor should be entitled to feed on it if he pleased

560 sheep. By this agreement, the national flock was to consist of

15,120; that is the undivided part of the island was by such means

ideally divisible into as many parts or shares; to which

nevertheless no certain determinate quantity of land was affixed;

for they knew not how much the island contained, nor could the most

judicious surveyor fix this small quota as to quality and quantity.

Further they agreed, in case the grass should grow better by

feeding, that then four sheep should represent a cow, and two cows a

horse: such was the method this wise people took to enjoy in common

their new settlement; such was the mode of their first

establishment, which may be truly and literally called a pastoral

one. Several hundred of sheep-pasture titles have since been divided

on those different tracts, which are now cultivated; the rest by

inheritance and intermarriages have been so subdivided that it is

very common for a girl to have no other portion but her outset and

four sheep pastures or the privilege of feeding a cow. But as this

privilege is founded on an ideal, though real title to some unknown

piece of land, which one day or another may be ascertained; these

sheep-pasture titles should convey to your imagination, something

more valuable and of greater credit than the mere advantage arising

from the benefit of a cow, which in that case would be no more than

a right of commonage. Whereas, here as labour grows cheaper, as

misfortunes from their sea adventures may happen, each person

possessed of a sufficient number of these sheep-pasture titles may

one day realise them on some peculiar spot, such as shall be

adjudged by the council of the proprietors to be adequate to their

value; and this is the reason that these people very unwillingly

sell those small rights, and esteem them more than you would

imagine. They are the representation of a future freehold, they

cherish in the mind of the possessor a latent, though distant, hope,

that by his success in his next whale season, he may be able to

pitch on some predilected spot, and there build himself a home, to

which he may retire, and spend the latter end of his days in peace.

A council of proprietors always exists in this island, who decide

their territorial differences; their titles are recorded in the

books of the county, which this town represents, as well as every

conveyance of lands and other sales.

This island furnishes the naturalist with few or no objects worthy

observation: it appears to be the uneven summit of a sandy submarine

mountain, covered here and there with sorrel, grass, a few cedar

bushes, and scrubby oaks; their swamps are much more valuable for

the peat they contain, than for the trifling pasture of their

surface; those declining grounds which lead to the seashores abound

with beach grass, a light fodder when cut and cured, but very good

when fed green. On the east side of the island they have several

tracts of salt grasses, which being carefully fenced, yield a

considerable quantity of that wholesome fodder. Among the many ponds

or lakes with which this island abounds, there are some which have

been made by the intrusion of the sea, such as Wiwidiah, the Long,

the Narrow, and several others; consequently those are salt and the

others fresh. The former answer two considerable purposes, first by

enabling them to fence the island with greater facility; at peculiar

high tides a great number of fish enter into them, where they feed

and grow large, and at some known seasons of the year the

inhabitants assemble and cut down the small bars which the waves

always throw up. By these easy means the waters of the pond are let

out, and as the fish follow their native element, the inhabitants

with proper nets catch as many as they want, in their way out,

without any other trouble. Those which are most common, are the

streaked bass, the blue fish, the tom-cod, the mackerel, the tew-

tag, the herring, the flounder, eel, etc. Fishing is one of the

greatest diversions the island affords. At the west end lies the

harbour of Mardiket, formed by Smith Point on the south-west, by Eel

Point on the north, and Tuckanut Island on the north-west; but it is

neither so safe nor has it so good anchoring ground, as that near

which the town stands. Three small creeks run into it, which yield

the bitterest eels I have ever tasted. Between the lots of Palpus on

the east, Barry's Valley and Miacomet pond on the south, and the

narrow pond on the west, not far from Shemah Point, they have a

considerable tract of even ground, being the least sandy, and the

best on the island. It is divided into seven fields, one of which is

planted by that part of the community which are entitled to it. This

is called the common plantation, a simple but useful expedient, for

was each holder of this track to fence his property, it would

require a prodigious quantity of posts and rails, which you must

remember are to be purchased and fetched from the main. Instead of

those private subdivisions each man's allotment of land is thrown

into the general field which is fenced at the expense of the

parties; within it every one does with his own portion of the ground

whatever he pleases. This apparent community saves a very material

expense, a great deal of labour, and perhaps raises a sort of

emulation among them, which urges every one to fertilise his share

with the greatest care and attention. Thus every seven years the

whole of this tract is under cultivation, and enriched by manure and

ploughing yields afterwards excellent pasture; to which the town

cows, amounting to 500 are daily led by the town shepherd, and as

regularly drove back in the evening. There each animal easily finds

the house to which it belongs, where they are sure to be well

rewarded for the milk they give, by a present of bran, grain, or

some farinaceous preparation; their economy being very great in that

respect. These are commonly called Tetoukemah lots. You must not

imagine that every person on the island is either a landholder, or

concerned in rural operations; no, the greater part are at sea;

busily employed in their different fisheries; others are mere

strangers, who come to settle as handicrafts, mechanics, etc., and

even among the natives few are possessed of determinate shares of

land: for engaged in sea affairs, or trade, they are satisfied with

possessing a few sheep pastures, by means of which they may have

perhaps one or two cows. Many have but one, for the great number of

children they have, has caused such sub-divisions of the original

proprietorship as is sometimes puzzling to trace; and several of the

most fortunate at sea, have purchased and realised a great number of

these original pasture titles. The best land on the island is at

Palpus, remarkable for nothing but a house of entertainment. Quayes

is a small but valuable track, long since purchased by Mr. Coffin,

where he has erected the best house on the island. By long

attention, proximity of the sea, etc., this fertile spot has been

well manured, and is now the garden of Nantucket. Adjoining to it on

the west side there is a small stream, on which they have erected a

fulling mill; on the east is the lot, known by the name of Squam,

watered likewise by a small rivulet, on which stands another fulling

mill. Here is fine loamy soil, producing excellent clover, which is

mowed twice a year. These mills prepare all the cloth which is made

here: you may easily suppose that having so large a flock of sheep,

they abound in wool; part of this they export, and the rest is spun

by their industrious wives and converted into substantial garments.

To the south-east is a great division of the island, fenced by

itself, known by the name of Siasconcet lot. It is a very uneven

track of ground, abounding with swamps; here they turn in their fat

cattle, or such as they intend to stall-feed, for their winter's

provisions. It is on the shores of this part of the island, near

Pochick Rip, where they catch their best fish, such as sea bass,

tew-tag, or black fish, cod, smelt, perch, shadine, pike, etc. They

have erected a few fishing houses on this shore, as well as at

Sankate's Head, and Suffakatche Beach, where the fishermen dwell in

the fishing season. Many red cedar bushes and beach grass grow on

the peninsula of Coitou; the soil is light and sandy, and serves as

a receptacle for rabbits. It is here that their sheep find shelter

in the snow storms of the winter. At the north end of Nantucket,

there is a long point of land, projecting far into the sea, called

Sandy Point; nothing grows on it but plain grass; and this is the

place from whence they often catch porpoises and sharks, by a very

ingenious method. On this point they commonly drive their horses in

the spring of the year, in order to feed on the grass it bears,

which is useless when arrived at maturity. Between that point and

the main island they have a valuable salt meadow, called Croskaty,

with a pond of the same name famous for black ducks. Hence we must

return to Squam, which abounds in clover and herds grass; those who

possess it follow no maritime occupation, and therefore neglect

nothing that can render it fertile and profitable. The rest of the

undescribed part of the island is open, and serves as a common

pasture for their sheep. To the west of the island is that of

Tackanuck, where in the spring their young cattle are driven to

feed; it has a few oak bushes and two fresh-water ponds, abounding

with teals, brandts, and many other sea fowls, brought to this

island by the proximity of their sand banks and shallows; where

thousands are seen feeding at low water. Here they have neither

wolves nor foxes; those inhabitants therefore who live out of town,

raise with all security as much poultry as they want; their turkeys

are very large and excellent. In summer this climate is extremely

pleasant; they are not exposed to the scorching sun of the

continent, the heats being tempered by the sea breezes, with which

they are perpetually refreshed. In the winter, however, they pay

severely for those advantages; it is extremely cold; the northwest

wind, the tyrant of this country, after having escaped from our

mountains and forests, free from all impediment in its short

passage, blows with redoubled force and renders this island bleak

and uncomfortable. On the other hand, the goodness of their houses,

the social hospitality of their firesides, and their good cheer,

make them ample amends for the severity of the season; nor are the

snows so deep as on the main. The necessary and unavoidable

inactivity of that season, combined with the vegetative rest of

nature, force mankind to suspend their toils: often at this season

more than half the inhabitants of the island are at sea, fishing in

milder latitudes.

This island, as has been already hinted, appears to be the summit of

some huge sandy mountain, affording some acres of dry land for the

habitation of man; other submarine ones lie to the southward of

this, at different depths and different distances. This dangerous

region is well known to the mariners by the name of Nantucket

Shoals: these are the bulwarks which so powerfully defend this

island from the impulse of the mighty ocean, and repel the force of

its waves; which, but for the accumulated barriers, would ere now

have dissolved its foundations, and torn it in pieces. These are the

banks which afforded to the first inhabitants of Nantucket their

daily subsistence, as it was from these shoals that they drew the

origin of that wealth which they now possess; and was the school

where they first learned how to venture farther, as the fish of

their coast receded. The shores of this island abound with the soft-

shelled, the hard-shelled, and the great sea clams, a most

nutritious shell-fish. Their sands, their shallows are covered with

them; they multiply so fast, that they are a never-failing resource.

These and the great variety of fish they catch, constitute the

principal food of the inhabitants. It was likewise that of the

aborigines, whom the first settlers found here; the posterity of

whom still live together in decent houses along the shores of

Miacomet pond, on the south side of the island. They are an

industrious, harmless race, as expert and as fond of a seafaring

life as their fellow inhabitants the whites. Long before their

arrival they had been engaged in petty wars against one another; the

latter brought them peace, for it was in quest of peace that they

abandoned the main. This island was then supposed to be under the

jurisdiction of New York, as well as the islands of the Vineyard,

Elizabeth's, etc., but have been since adjudged to be a part of the

province of Massachusetts Bay. This change of jurisdiction procured

them that peace they wanted, and which their brethren had so long

refused them in the days of their religious frenzy: thus have

enthusiasm and persecution both in Europe as well as here, been the

cause of the most arduous undertakings, and the means of those rapid

settlements which have been made along these extended sea-shores.

This island, having been since incorporated with the neighbouring

province, is become one of its counties, known by the name of

Nantucket, as well as the island of the Vineyard, by that of Duke's

County. They enjoy here the same municipal establishment in common

with the rest; and therefore every requisite officer, such as

sheriff, justice of the peace, supervisors, assessors, constables,

overseer of the poor, etc. Their taxes are proportioned to those of

the metropolis, they are levied as with us by valuations, agreed on

and fixed, according to the laws of the province; and by assessments

formed by the assessors, who are yearly chosen by the people, and

whose office obliges them to take either an oath or an affirmation.

Two thirds of the magistrates they have here are of the society of

Friends.

Before I enter into the further detail of this people's government,

industry, mode of living, etc., I think it accessary to give you a

short sketch of the political state the natives had been in, a few

years preceding the arrival of the whites among them. They are

hastening towards a total annihilation, and this may be perhaps the

last compliment that will ever be paid them by any traveller. They

were not extirpated by fraud, violence, or injustice, as hath been

the case in so many provinces; on the contrary, they have been

treated by these people as brethren; the peculiar genius of their

sect inspiring them with the same spirit of moderation which was

exhibited at Pennsylvania. Before the arrival of the Europeans, they

lived on the fish of their shores; and it was from the same

resources the first settlers were compelled to draw their first

subsistence. It is uncertain whether the original right of the Earl

of Sterling, or that of the Duke of York, was founded on a fair

purchase of the soil or not; whatever injustice might have been

committed in that respect, cannot be charged to the account of those

Friends who purchased from others who no doubt founded their right

on Indian grants: and if their numbers are now so decreased, it must

not be attributed either to tyranny or violence, but to some of

those causes, which have uninterruptedly produced the same effects

from one end of the continent to the other, wherever both nations

have been mixed. This insignificant spot, like the sea-shores of the

great peninsula, was filled with these people; the great plenty of

clams, oysters, and other fish, on which they lived, and which they

easily catched, had prodigiously increased their numbers. History

does not inform us what particular nation the aborigines of

Nantucket were of; it is however very probable that they anciently

emigrated from the opposite coast, perhaps from the Hyannees, which

is but twenty-seven miles distant. As they then spoke and still

speak the Nattick, it is reasonable to suppose that they must have

had some affinity with that nation; or else that the Nattick, like

the Huron, in the north-western parts of this continent, must have

been the most prevailing one in this region. Mr. Elliot, an eminent

New England divine, and one of the first founders of that great

colony, translated the Bible into this language, in the year 1666,

which was printed soon after at Cambridge, near Boston; he

translated also the catechism, and many other useful books, which

are still very common on this island, and are daily made use of by

those Indians who are taught to read. The young Europeans learn it

with the same facility as their own tongues; and ever after speak it

both with ease and fluency. Whether the present Indians are the

decendants of the ancient natives of the island, or whether they are

the remains of the many different nations which once inhabited the

regions of Mashpe and Nobscusset, in the peninsula now known by the

name of Cape Cod, no one can positively tell, not even themselves.

The last opinion seems to be that of the most sensible people of the

island. So prevailing is the disposition of man to quarrel, and shed

blood; so prone is he to divisions and parties; that even the

ancient natives of this little spot were separated into two

communities, inveterately waging war against each other, like the

more powerful tribes of the continent. What do you imagine was the

cause of this national quarrel? All the coast of their island

equally abounded with the same quantity of fish and clams; in that

instance there could be no jealousy, no motives to anger; the

country afforded them no game; one would think this ought to have

been the country of harmony and peace. But behold the singular

destiny of the human kind, ever inferior, in many instances, to the

more certain instinct of animals; among which the individuals of the

same species are always friends, though reared in different

climates: they understand the same language, they shed not each

other's blood, they eat not each other's flesh. That part of these

rude people who lived on the eastern shores of the island, had from

time immemorial tried to destroy those who lived on the west; those

latter inspired with the same evil genius, had not been behind hand

in retaliating: thus was a perpetual war subsisting between these

people, founded on no other reason, but the adventitious place of

their nativity and residence. In process of time both parties became

so thin and depopulated, that the few who remained, fearing lest

their race should become totally extinct, fortunately thought of an

expedient which prevented their entire annihilation. Some years

before the Europeans came, they mutually agreed to settle a

partition line which should divide the island from north to south;

the people of the west agreed not to kill those of the east, except

they were found transgressing over the western part of the line;

those of the last entered into a reciprocal agreement. By these

simple means peace was established among them, and this is the only

record which seems to entitle them to the denomination of men. This

happy settlement put a stop to their sanguinary depredations, none

fell afterward but a few rash imprudent individuals; on the

contrary, they multiplied greatly. But another misfortune awaited

them; when the Europeans came they caught the smallpox, and their

improper treatment of that disorder swept away great numbers: this

calamity was succeeded by the use of rum; and these are the two

principal causes which so much diminished their numbers, not only

here but all over the continent. In some places whole nations have

disappeared. Some years ago three Indian canoes, on their return to

Detroit from the falls of Niagara, unluckily got the smallpox from

the Europeans with whom they had traded. It broke out near the long

point on Lake Erie, there they all perished; their canoes, and their

goods, were afterwards found by some travellers journeying the same

way; their dogs were still alive. Besides the smallpox, and the use

of spirituous liquors, the two greatest curses they have received

from us, there is a sort of physical antipathy, which is equally

powerful from one end of the continent to the other. Wherever they

happen to be mixed, or even to live in the neighbourhood of the

Europeans, they become exposed to a variety of accidents and

misfortunes to which they always fall victims: such are particular

fevers, to which they were strangers before, and sinking into a

singular sort of indolence and sloth. This has been invariably the

case wherever the same association has taken place; as at Nattick,

Mashpe, Soccanoket in the bounds of Falmouth, Nobscusset,

Houratonick, Monhauset, and the Vineyard. Even the Mohawks

themselves, who were once so populous, and such renowned warriors,

are now reduced to less than 200 since the European settlements have

circumscribed the territories which their ancestors had reserved.

Three years before the arrival of the Europeans at Cape Cod, a

frightful distemper had swept away a great many along its coasts,

which made the landing and intrusion of our forefathers much easier

than it otherwise might have been. In the year 1763, above half of

the Indians of this island perished by a strange fever, which the

Europeans who nursed them never caught; they appear to be a race

doomed to recede and disappear before the superior genius of the

Europeans. The only ancient custom of these people that is

remembered is, that in their mutual exchanges, forty sun-dried

clams, strung on a string, passed for the value of what might be

called a copper. They were strangers to the use and value of wampum,

so well known to those of the main. The few families now remaining

are meek and harmless; their ancient ferocity is gone: they were

early christianised by the New England missionaries, as well as

those of the Vineyard, and of several other parts of Massachusetts;

and to this day they remain strict observers of the laws and customs

of that religion, being carefully taught while young. Their

sedentary life has led them to this degree of civilisation much more

effectually, than if they had still remained hunters. They are fond

of the sea, and expert mariners. They have learned from the Quakers

the art of catching both the cod and whale, in consequence of which,

five of them always make part of the complement of men requisite to

fit out a whaleboat. Many have removed hither from the Vineyard, on

which account they are more numerous on Nantucket, than anywhere

else.

It is strange what revolution has happened among them in less than

two hundred years! What is become of those numerous tribes which

formerly inhabited the extensive shores of the great bay of

Massachusetts? Even from Numkeag (Salem), Saugus (Lynn), Shawmut

(Boston), Pataxet, Napouset (Milton), Matapan (Dorchester),

Winesimet (Chelsea), Poiasset, Pokanoket (New Plymouth), Suecanosset

(Falmouth), Titicut (Chatham). Nobscusset (Yarmouth), Naussit

(Eastham), Hyannees (Barnstable), etc., and many others who lived on

sea-shores of above three hundred miles in length; without

mentioning those powerful tribes which once dwelt between the rivers

Hudson, Connecticut, Piskataqua, and Kennebeck, the Mehikaudret,

Mohiguine, Pequods, Narragansets, Nianticks, Massachusetts,

Wamponougs, Nipnets, Tarranteens, etc.--They are gone, and every

memorial of them is lost; no vestiges whatever are left of those

swarms which once inhabited this country, and replenished both sides

of the great peninsula of Cape Cod: not even one of the posterity of

the famous Masconomeo is left (the sachem of Cape Ann); not one of

the descendants of Massasoit, father of Metacomet (Philip), and

Wamsutta (Alexander), he who first conveyed some lands to the

Plymouth Company. They have all disappeared either in the wars which

the Europeans carried on against them, or else they have mouldered

away, gathered in some of their ancient towns, in contempt and

oblivion: nothing remains of them all, but one extraordinary

monument, and even this they owe to the industry and religious zeal

of the Europeans, I mean the Bible translated into the Nattick

tongue. Many of these tribes giving way to the superior power of the

whites, retired to their ancient villages, collecting the scattered

remains of nations once populous; and in their grant of lands

reserved to themselves and posterity certain portions, which lay

contiguous to them. There forgetting their ancient manners, they

dwelt in peace; in a few years their territories were surrounded by

the improvements of the Europeans; in consequence of which they grew

lazy, inactive, unwilling, and unapt to imitate, or to follow any of

our trades, and in a few generations, either totally perished or

else came over to the Vineyard, or to this island, to re-unite

themselves with such societies of their countrymen as would receive

them. Such has been the fate of many nations, once warlike and

independent; what we see now on the main, or on those islands, may

be justly considered as the only remains of those ancient tribes.

Might I be permitted to pay perhaps a very useless compliment to

those at least who inhabited the great peninsula of Namset, now Cape

Cod, with whose names and ancient situation I am well acquainted.

This peninsula was divided into two great regions; that on the side

of the bay was known by the name of Nobscusset, from one of its

towns; the capital was called Nausit (now Eastham); hence the

Indians of that region were called Nausit Indians, though they dwelt

in the villages of Pamet, Nosset, Pashee, Potomaket, Soktoowoket,

Nobscusset (Yarmouth).

The region on the Atlantic side was called Mashpee, and contained

the tribes of Hyannees, Costowet, Waquoit, Scootin, Saconasset,

Mashpee, and Namset. Several of these Indian towns have been since

converted into flourishing European settlements, known by different

names; for as the natives were excellent judges of land, which they

had fertilised besides with the shells of their fish, etc., the

latter could not make a better choice; though in general this great

peninsula is but a sandy pine track, a few good spots excepted. It

is divided into seven townships, viz. Bamstable, Yarmouth, Harwich,

Chatham, Eastham, Pamet, Namset, or Province town, at the extremity

of the Cape. Yet these are very populous, though I am at a loss to

conceive on what the inhabitants live, besides clams, oysters, and

fish; their piny lands being the most ungrateful soil in the world.

The minister of Namset or Province Town, receives from the

government of Massachusetts a salary of fifty pounds per annum; and

such is the poverty of the inhabitants of that place, that, unable

to pay him any money, each master of a family is obliged to allow

him two hundred horse feet (sea spin) with which this primitive

priest fertilises the land of his glebe, which he tills himself: for

nothing will grow on these hungry soils without the assistance of

this extraordinary manure, fourteen bushels of Indian corn being

looked upon as a good crop. But it is time to return from a

digression, which I hope you will pardon. Nantucket is a great

nursery of seamen, pilots, coasters, and bank-fishermen; as a

country belonging to the province of Massachusetts, it has yearly

the benefit of a court of Common Pleas, and their appeal lies to the

supreme court at Boston. I observed before, that the Friends compose

two-thirds of the magistracy of this island; thus they are the

proprietors of its territory, and the principal rulers of its

inhabitants; but with all this apparatus of law, its coercive powers

are seldom wanted or required. Seldom is it that any individual is

amerced or punished; their jail conveys no terror; no man has lost

his life here judicially since the foundation of this town, which is

upwards of an hundred years. Solemn tribunals, public executions,

humiliating punishments, are altogether unknown. I saw neither

governors, nor any pageantry of state; neither ostentatious

magistrates, nor any individuals clothed with useless dignity: no

artificial phantoms subsist here either civil or religious; no

gibbets loaded with guilty citizens offer themselves to your view;

no soldiers are appointed to bayonet their compatriots into servile

compliance. But how is a society composed of 5000 individuals

preserved in the bonds of peace and tranquillity? How are the weak

protected from the strong?--I will tell you. Idleness and poverty,

the causes of so many crimes, are unknown here; each seeks in the

prosecution of his lawful business that honest gain which supports

them; every period of their time is full, either on shore or at sea.

A probable expectation of reasonable profits, or of kindly

assistance, if they fail of success, renders them strangers to

licentious expedients. The simplicity of their manners shortens the

catalogues of their wants; the law at a distance is ever ready to

exert itself in the protection of those who stand in need of its

assistance. The greatest part of them are always at sea, pursuing

the whale or raising the cod from the surface of the banks: some

cultivate their little farms with the utmost diligence; some are

employed in exercising various trades; others again in providing

every necessary resource in order to refit their vessels, or repair

what misfortunes may happen, looking out for future markets, etc.

Such is the rotation of those different scenes of business which

fill the measure of their days; of that part of their lives at least

which is enlivened by health, spirits, and vigour. It is but seldom

that vice grows on a barren sand like this, which produces nothing

without extreme labour. How could the common follies of society take

root in so despicable a soil; they generally thrive on its exuberant

juices: here there are none but those which administer to the

useful, to the necessary, and to the indispensable comforts of life.

This land must necessarily either produce health, temperance, and a

great equality of conditions, or the most abject misery. Could the

manners of luxurious countries be imported here, like an epidemical

disorder they would destroy everything; the majority of them could

not exist a month, they would be obliged to emigrate. As in all

societies except that of the natives, some difference must

necessarily exist between individual and individual, for there must

be some more exalted than the rest either by their riches or their

talents; so in this, there are what you might call the high, the

middling, and the low; and this difference will always be more

remarkable among people who live by sea excursions than among those

who live by the cultivation of their land. The first run greater

hazard, and adventure more: the profits and the misfortunes

attending this mode of life must necessarily introduce a greater

disparity than among the latter, where the equal divisions of the

land offers no short road to superior riches. The only difference

that may arise among them is that of industry, and perhaps of

superior goodness of soil: the gradations I observed here, are

founded on nothing more than the good or ill success of their

maritime enterprises, and do not proceed from education; that is the

same throughout every class, simple, useful, and unadorned like

their dress and their houses. This necessary difference in their

fortunes does not however cause those heart burnings, which in other

societies generate crimes. The sea which surrounds them is equally

open to all, and presents to all an equal title to the chance of

good fortune. A collector from Boston is the only king's officer who

appears on these shores to receive the trifling duties which this

community owe to those who protect them, and under the shadow of

whose wings they navigate to all parts of the world.

LETTER V

CUSTOMARY EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT OF THE INHABITANTS OF NANTUCKET

The easiest way of becoming acquainted with the modes of thinking,

the rules of conduct, and the prevailing manners of any people, is

to examine what sort of education they give their children; how they

treat them at home, and what they are taught in their places of

public worship. At home their tender minds must be early struck with

the gravity, the serious though cheerful deportment of their

parents; they are inured to a principle of subordination, arising

neither from sudden passions nor inconsiderate pleasure; they are

gently held by an uniform silk cord, which unites softness and

strength. A perfect equanimity prevails in most of their families,

and bad example hardly ever sows in their hearts the seeds of future

and similar faults. They are corrected with tenderness, nursed with

the most affectionate care, clad with that decent plainness, from

which they observe their parents never to depart: in short, by the

force of example, which is superior even to the strongest instinct

of nature, more than by precepts, they learn to follow the steps of

their parents, to despise ostentatiousness as being sinful. They

acquire a taste for neatness for which their fathers are so

conspicuous; they learn to be prudent and saving; the very tone of

voice with which they are always addressed, establishes in them that

softness of diction, which ever after becomes habitual. Frugal,

sober, orderly parents, attached to their business, constantly

following some useful occupation, never guilty of riot, dissipation,

or other irregularities, cannot fail of training up children to the

same uniformity of life and manners. If they are left with fortunes,

they are taught how to save them, and how to enjoy them with

moderation and decency; if they have none, they know how to venture,

how to work and toil as their fathers have done before them. If they

fail of success, there are always in this island (and wherever this

society prevails) established resources, founded on the most

benevolent principles. At their meetings they are taught the few,

the simple tenets of their sect; tenets as fit to render men sober,

industrious, just, and merciful, as those delivered in the most

magnificent churches and cathedrals: they are instructed in the most

essential duties of Christianity, so as not to offend the Divinity

by the commission of evil deeds; to dread his wrath and the

punishments he has denounced; they are taught at the same time to

have a proper confidence in his mercy while they deprecate his

justice. As every sect, from their different modes of worship, and

their different interpretations of some parts of the Scriptures,

necessarily have various opinions and prejudices, which contribute

something in forming their characters in society; so those of the

Friends are well known: obedience to the laws, even to non-

resistance, justice, goodwill to all, benevolence at home, sobriety,

meekness, neatness, love of order, fondness and appetite for

commerce. They are as remarkable here for those virtues as at

Philadelphia, which is their American cradle, and the boast of that

society. At schools they learn to read, and to write a good hand,

until they are twelve years old; they are then in general put

apprentices to the cooper's trade, which is the second essential

branch of business followed here; at fourteen they are sent to sea,

where in their leisure hours their companions teach them the art of

navigation, which they have an opportunity of practising on the

spot. They learn the great and useful art of working a ship in all

the different situations which the sea and wind so often require;

and surely there cannot be a better or a more useful school of that

kind in the world. Then they go gradually through every station of

rowers, steersmen, and harpooners; thus they learn to attack, to

pursue, to overtake, to cut, to dress their huge game: and after

having performed several such voyages, and perfected themselves in

this business, they are fit either for the counting house or the

chase.

The first proprietors of this island, or rather the first founders

of this town, began their career of industry with a single whale-

boat, with which they went to fish for cod; the small distance from

their shores at which they caught it, enabled them soon to increase

their business, and those early successes first led them to conceive

that they might likewise catch the whales, which hitherto sported

undisturbed on their banks. After many trials and several

miscarriages, they succeeded; thus they proceeded, step by step; the

profits of one successful enterprise helped them to purchase and

prepare better materials for a more extensive one: as these were

attended with little costs, their profits grew greater. The south

sides of the island from east to west, were divided into four equal

parts, and each part was assigned to a company of six, which though

thus separated, still carried on their business in common. In the

middle of this distance, they erected a mast, provided with a

sufficient number of rounds, and near it they built a temporary hut,

where five of the associates lived, whilst the sixth from his high

station carefully looked toward the sea, in order to observe the

spouting of the whales. As soon as any were discovered, the sentinel

descended, the whale-boat was launched, and the company went forth

in quest of their game. It may appear strange to you, that so

slender a vessel as an American whale-boat, containing six

diminutive beings, should dare to pursue and to attack, in its

native element, the largest and strongest fish that nature has

created. Yet by the exertions of an admirable dexterity, improved by

a long practice, in which these people are become superior to any

other whale-men; by knowing the temper of the whale after her first

movement, and by many other useful observations; they seldom failed

to harpoon it, and to bring the huge leviathan on the shores. Thus

they went on until the profits they made, enabled them to purchase

larger vessels, and to pursue them farther, when the whales quitted

their coasts; those who failed in their enterprises, returned to the

cod-fisheries, which had been their first school, and their first

resource; they even began to visit the banks of Cape Breton, the

isle of Sable, and all the other fishing places, with which this

coast of America abounds. By degrees they went a-whaling to

Newfoundland, to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, to the Straits of

Belleisle, the coast of Labrador, Davis's Straits, even to Cape

Desolation, in 70 degrees of latitude; where the Danes carry on some

fisheries in spite of the perpetual severities of the inhospitable

climate. In process of time they visited the western islands, the

latitude of 34 degrees famous for that fish, the Brazils, the coast

of Guinea. Would you believe that they have already gone to the

Falkland Islands, and that I have heard several of them talk of

going to the South Sea! Their confidence is so great, and their

knowledge of this branch of business so superior to that of any

other people, that they have acquired a monopoly of this commodity.

Such were their feeble beginnings, such the infancy and the progress

of their maritime schemes; such is now the degree of boldness and

activity to which they are arrived in their manhood. After their

examples several companies have been formed in many of our capitals,

where every necessary article of provisions, implements, and timber,

are to be found. But the industry exerted by the people of

Nantucket, hath hitherto enabled them to rival all their

competitors; consequently this is the greatest mart for oil,

whalebone, and spermaceti, on the continent. It does not follow

however that they are always successful, this would be an

extraordinary field indeed, where the crops should never fail; many

voyages do not repay the original cost of fitting out: they bear

such misfortunes like true merchants, and as they never venture

their all like gamesters, they try their fortunes again; the latter

hope to win by chance alone, the former by industry, well judged

speculation, and some hazard. I was there when Mr.----had missed one

of his vessels; she had been given over for lost by everybody, but

happily arrived before I came away, after an absence of thirteen

months. She had met with a variety of disappointments on the station

she was ordered to, and rather than return empty, the people steered

for the coast of Guinea, where they fortunately fell in with several

whales, and brought home upward of 600 barrels of oil, beside bone.

Those returns are sometimes disposed of in the towns on the

continent, where they are exchanged for such commodities as are

wanted; but they are most commonly sent to England, where they

always sell for cash. When this is intended, a vessel larger than

the rest is fitted out to be filled with oil on the spot where it is

found and made, and thence she sails immediately for London. This

expedient saves time, freight, and expense; and from that capital

they bring back whatever they want. They employ also several vessels

in transporting lumber to the West Indian Islands, from whence they

procure in return the various productions of the country, which they

afterwards exchange wherever they can hear of an advantageous

market. Being extremely acute they well know how to improve all the

advantages which the combination of so many branches of business

constantly affords; the spirit of commerce, which is the simple art

of a reciprocal supply of wants, is well understood here by

everybody. They possess, like the generality of Americans, a large

share of native penetration, activity, and good sense, which lead

them to a variety of other secondary schemes too tedious to mention:

they are well acquainted with the cheapest method of procuring

lumber from Kennebeck river, Penobscot, etc., pitch and tar, from

North Carolina; flour and biscuit, from Philadelphia; beef and pork,

from Connecticut. They know how to exchange their cod fish and West-

Indian produce, for those articles which they are continually either

bringing to their island, or sending off to other places where they

are wanted. By means of all these commercial negotiations, they have

greatly cheapened the fitting out of their whaling fleets, and

therefore much improved their fisheries. They are indebted for all

these advantages not only to their national genius but to the

poverty of their soil; and as proof of what I have so often

advanced, look at the Vineyard (their neighbouring island) which is

inhabited by a set of people as keen and as sagacious as themselves.

Their soil being in general extremely fertile, they have fewer

navigators; though they are equally well situated for the fishing

business. As in my way back to Falmouth on the main, I visited this

sister island, permit me to give you as concisely as I can, a short

but true description of it; I am not so limited in the principal

object of this journey, as to wish to confine myself to the single

spot of Nantucket.

LETTER VI

DESCRIPTION OF THE ISLAND OF MARTHA'S VINEYARD; AND OF THE WHALE

FISHERY

This island is twenty miles in length, and from seven to eight miles

in breadth. It lies nine miles from the continent, and with the

Elizabeth Islands forms one of the counties of Massachusetts Bay,

known by the name of Duke's County. Those latter, which are six in

number, are about nine miles distant from the Vineyard, and are all

famous for excellent dairies. A good ferry is established between

the Edgar Town, and Falmouth on the main, the distance being nine

miles. Martha's Vineyard is divided into three townships, viz.

Edgar, Chilmark, and Tisbury; the number of inhabitants is computed

at about 4000, 300 of which are Indians. Edgar is the best seaport,

and the shire town, and as its soil is light and sandy, many of its

inhabitants follow the example of the people of Nantucket. The town

of Chilmark has no good harbour, but the land is excellent and no

way inferior to any on the continent: it contains excellent

pastures, convenient brooks for mills, stone for fencing, etc. The

town of Tisbury is remarkable for the excellence of its timber, and

has a harbour where the water is deep enough for ships of the line.

The stock of the island is 20,000 sheep, 2000 neat cattle, beside

horses and goats; they have also some deer, and abundance of sea-

fowls. This has been from the beginning, and is to this day, the

principal seminary of the Indians; they live on that part of the

island which is called Chapoquidick, and were very early

christianised by the respectable family of the Mahews, the first

proprietors of it. The first settler of that name conveyed by will

to a favourite daughter a certain part of it, on which there grew

many wild vines; thence it was called Martha's Vineyard, after her

name, which in process of time extended to the whole island. The

posterity of the ancient Aborigines remain here to this day, on

lands which their forefathers reserved for themselves, and which are

religiously kept from any encroachments. The New England people are

remarkable for the honesty with which they have fulfilled, all over

that province, those ancient covenants which in many others have

been disregarded, to the scandal of those governments. The Indians

there appeared, by the decency of their manners, their industry, and

neatness, to be wholly Europeans, and nowise inferior to many of the

inhabitants. Like them they are sober, laborious, and religious,

which are the principal characteristics of the four New England

provinces. They often go, like the young men of the Vineyard, to

Nantucket, and hire themselves for whalemen or fishermen; and indeed

their skill and dexterity in all sea affairs is nothing inferior to

that of the whites. The latter are divided into two classes, the

first occupy the land, which they till with admirable care and

knowledge; the second, who are possessed of none, apply themselves

to the sea, the general resource of mankind in this part of the

world. This island therefore, like Nantucket, is become a great

nursery which supplies with pilots and seamen the numerous coasters

with which this extended part of America abounds. Go where you will

from Nova Scotia to the Mississippi, you will find almost everywhere

some natives of these two islands employed in seafaring occupations.

Their climate is so favourable to population, that marriage is the

object of every man's earliest wish; and it is a blessing so easily

obtained, that great numbers are obliged to quit their native land

and go to some other countries in quest of subsistence. The

inhabitants are all Presbyterians, which is the established religion

of Massachusetts; and here let me remember with gratitude the

hospitable treatment I received from B. Norton, Esq., the colonel of

the island, as well as from Dr. Mahew, the lineal descendant of the

first proprietor. Here are to be found the most expert pilots,

either for the great bay, their sound, Nantucket shoals, or the

different ports in their neighbourhood. In stormy weather they are

always at sea, looking out for vessels, which they board with

singular dexterity, and hardly ever fail to bring safe to their

intended harbour. Gay-Head, the western point of this island,

abounds with a variety of ochres of different colours, with which

the inhabitants paint their houses.

The vessels most proper for whale fishing are brigs of about 150

tons burthen, particularly when they are intended for distant

latitudes; they always man them with thirteen hands, in order that

they may row two whale-boats; the crews of which must necessarily

consist of six, four at the oars, one standing on the bows with the

harpoon, and the other at the helm. It is also necessary that there

should be two of these boats, that if one should be destroyed in

attacking the whale, the other, which is never engaged at the same

time, may be ready to save the hands. Five of the thirteen are

always Indians; the last of the complement remains on board to steer

the vessel during the action. They have no wages; each draws a

certain established share in partnership with the proprietor of the

vessel; by which economy they are all proportionately concerned in

the success of the enterprise, and all equally alert and vigilant.

None of these whalemen ever exceed the age of forty: they look on

those who are past that period not to be possessed of all that

vigour and agility which so adventurous a business requires. Indeed

if you attentively consider the immense disproportion between the

object assailed and the assailants; if you think on the diminutive

size, and weakness of their frail vehicle; if you recollect the

treachery of the element on which this scene is transacted; the

sudden and unforeseen accidents of winds, etc., you will readily

acknowledge that it must require the most consummate exertion of all

the strength, agility, and judgment, of which the bodies and minds

of men are capable, to undertake these adventurous encounters.

As soon as they arrive in those latitudes where they expect to meet

with whales, a man is sent up to the mast head; if he sees one, he

immediately cries out AWAITE PAWANA, here is a whale: they all

remain still and silent until he repeats PAWANA, a whale, when in

less than six minutes the two boats are launched, filled with every

implement necessary for the attack. They row toward the whale with

astonishing velocity; and as the Indians early became their fellow-

labourers in this new warfare, you can easily conceive how the

Nattick expressions became familiar on board the whale-boats.

Formerly it often happened that whale vessels were manned with none

but Indians and the master; recollect also that the Nantucket people

understand the Nattick, and that there are always five of these

people on board. There are various ways of approaching the whale,

according to their peculiar species; and this previous knowledge is

of the utmost consequence. When these boats are arrived at a

reasonable distance, one of them rests on its oars and stands off,

as a witness of the approaching engagement; near the bows of the

other the harpooner stands up, and on him principally depends the

success of the enterprise. He wears a jacket closely buttoned, and

round his head a handkerchief tightly bound: in his hands he holds

the dreadful weapon, made of the best steel, marked sometimes with

the name of their town, and sometimes with that of their vessel; to

the shaft of which the end of a cord of due length, coiled up with

the utmost care in the middle of the boat, is firmly tied; the other

end is fastened to the bottom of the boat. Thus prepared they row in

profound silence, leaving the whole conduct of the enterprise to the

harpooner and to the steersman, attentively following their

directions. When the former judges himself to be near enough to the

whale, that is, at the distance of about fifteen feet, he bids them

stop; perhaps she has a calf, whose safety attracts all the

attention of the dam, which is a favourable circumstance; perhaps

she is of a dangerous species, and it is safest to retire, though

their ardour will seldom permit them; perhaps she is asleep, in that

case he balances high the harpoon, trying in this important moment

to collect all the energy of which he is capable. He launches it

forth--she is struck: from her first movements they judge of her

temper, as well as of their future success. Sometimes in the

immediate impulse of rage, she will attack the boat and demolish it

with one stroke of her tail; in an instant the frail vehicle

disappears and the assailants are immersed in the dreadful element.

Were the whale armed with the jaws of a shark, and as voracious,

they never would return home to amuse their listening wives with the

interesting tale of the adventure. At other times she will dive and

disappear from human sight; and everything must give way to her

velocity, or else all is lost. Sometimes she will swim away as if

untouched, and draw the cord with such swiftness that it will set

the edge of the boat on fire by the friction. If she rises before

she has run out the whole length, she is looked upon as a sure prey.

The blood she has lost in her flight, weakens her so much, that if

she sinks again, it is but for a short time; the boat follows her

course with almost equal speed. She soon re-appears; tired at last

with convulsing the element; which she tinges with her blood, she

dies, and floats on the surface. At other times it may happen that

she is not dangerously wounded, though she carries the harpoon fast

in her body; when she will alternately dive and rise, and swim on

with unabated vigour. She then soon reaches beyond the length of the

cord, and carries the boat along with amazing velocity: this sudden

impediment sometimes will retard her speed, at other times it only

serves to rouse her anger, and to accelerate her progress. The

harpooner, with the axe in his hands, stands ready. When he observes

that the bows of the boat are greatly pulled down by the diving

whale, and that it begins to sink deep and to take much water, he

brings the axe almost in contact with the cord; he pauses, still

flattering himself that she will relax; but the moment grows

critical, unavoidable danger approaches: sometimes men more intent

on gain, than on the preservation of their lives, will run great

risks; and it is wonderful how far these people have carried their

daring courage at this awful moment! But it is vain to hope, their

lives must be saved, the cord is cut, the boat rises again. If after

thus getting loose, she re-appears, they will attack and wound her a

second time. She soon dies, and when dead she is towed alongside of

their vessel, where she is fastened.

The next operation is to cut with axes and spades, every part of her

body which yields oil; the kettles are set a boiling, they fill

their barrels as fast as it is made; but as this operation is much

slower than that of cutting up, they fill the hold of their ship

with those fragments, lest a storm should arise and oblige them to

abandon their prize. It is astonishing what a quantity of oil some

of these fish will yield, and what profit it affords to those who

are fortunate enough to overtake them.

The river St. Lawrence whale, which is the only one I am well

acquainted with, is seventy-five feet long, sixteen deep, twelve in

the length of its bone, which commonly weighs 3000 lbs., twenty in

the breadth of their tails and produces 180 barrels of oil: I once

saw 16 boiled out of the tongue only. After having once vanquished

this leviathan, there are two enemies to be dreaded beside the wind;

the first of which is the shark: that fierce voracious fish, to

which nature has given such dreadful offensive weapons, often comes

alongside, and in spite of the people's endeavours, will share with

them their prey; at night particularly. They are very mischievious,

but the second enemy is much more terrible and irresistible; it is

the killer, sometimes called the thrasher, a species of whales about

thirty feet long. They are possessed of such a degree of agility and

fierceness, as often to attack the largest spermaceti whales, and

not seldom to rob the fishermen of their prey; nor is there any

means of defence against so potent an adversary. When all their

barrels are full, for everything is done at sea, or when their

limited time is expired and their stores almost expended, they

return home, freighted with their valuable cargo; unless they have

put it on board a vessel for the European market. Such are, as

briefly as I can relate them, the different branches of the economy

practised by these bold navigators, and the method with which they

go such distances from their island to catch this huge game.

The following are the names and principal characteristics of the

various species of whales known to these people:

The St. Lawrence whale, just described.

The disko, or Greenland ditto.

The right whale, or seven feet bone, common on the coasts of this

country, about sixty feet long. The spermaceti whale, found all over

the world, and of all sizes; the longest are sixty feet, and yield

about 100 barrels of oil.

The hump-backs, on the coast of Newfoundland, from forty to seventy

feet in length.

The finn-back, an American whale, never killed, as being too swift.

The sulphur-bottom, river St. Lawrence, ninety foot long; they are

but seldom killed, as being extremely swift.

The grampus, thirty feet long, never killed on the same account.

The killer or thrasher, about thirty feet; they often kill the other

whales with which they are at perpetual war.

The black fish whale, twenty feet, yields from eight to ten barrels.

The porpoise, weighing about 160 lb.

In 1769 they fitted out 125 whalemen; the first fifty that returned

brought with them 11,000 barrels of oil. In 1770 they fitted out 135

vessels for the fisheries, at thirteen hands each; four West-

Indiamen, twelve hands; twenty-five wood vessels, four hands;

eighteen coasters, five hands; fifteen London traders, eleven hands.

All these amount to 2158 hands, employed in 197 vessels. Trace their

progressive steps between the possession of a few whale-boats, and

that of such a fleet!

The moral conduct, prejudices, and customs of a people who live two-

thirds of their time at sea, must naturally be very different from

those of their neighbours, who live by cultivating the earth. That

long abstemiousness to which the former are exposed, the breathing

of saline air, the frequent repetitions of danger, the boldness

acquired in surmounting them, the very impulse of the winds, to

which they are exposed; all these, one would imagine must lead them,

when on shore, to no small desire of inebriation, and a more eager

pursuit of those pleasures, of which they have been so long

deprived, and which they must soon forego. There are many appetites

that may be gratified on shore, even by the poorest man, but which

must remain unsatisfied at sea. Yet notwithstanding the powerful

effects of all these causes, I observed here, at the return of their

fleets, no material irregularities; no tumultuous drinking

assemblies: whereas in our continental towns, the thoughtless seaman

indulges himself in the coarsest pleasures; and vainly thinking that

a week of debauchery can compensate for months of abstinence,

foolishly lavishes in a few days of intoxication, the fruits of half

a year's labour. On the contrary all was peace here, and a general

decency prevailed throughout; the reason I believe is, that almost

everybody here is married, for they get wives very young; and the

pleasure of returning to their families absorbs every other desire.

The motives that lead them to the sea, are very different from those

of most other sea-faring men; it is neither idleness nor profligacy

that sends them to that element; it is a settled plan of life, a

well founded hope of earning a livelihood; it is because their soil

is bad, that they are early initiated to this profession, and were

they to stay at home, what could they do? The sea therefore becomes

to them a kind of patrimony; they go to whaling with as much

pleasure and tranquil indifference, with as strong an expectation of

success, as a landsman undertakes to clear a piece of swamp. The

first is obliged to advance his time, and labour, to procure oil on

the surface of the sea; the second advances the same to procure

himself grass from grounds that produced nothing before but hassocks

and bogs. Among those who do not use the sea, I observed the same

calm appearance as among the inhabitants on the continent; here I

found, without gloom, a decorum and reserve, so natural to them,

that I thought myself in Philadelphia. At my landing I was cordially

received by those to whom I was recommended, and treated with

unaffected hospitality by such others with whom I became acquainted;

and I can tell you, that it is impossible for any traveller to dwell

here one month without knowing the heads of the principal families.

Wherever I went I found a simplicity of diction and manners, rather

more primitive and rigid than I expected; and I soon perceived that

it proceeded from their secluded situation, which has prevented them

from mixing with others. It is therefore easy to conceive how they

have retained every degree of peculiarity for which this sect was

formerly distinguished. Never was a bee-hive more faithfully

employed in gathering wax, bee-bread, and honey, from all the

neighbouring fields, than are the members of this society; every one

in the town follows some particular occupation with great diligence,

but without that servility of labour which I am informed prevails in

Europe. The mechanic seemed to be descended from as good parentage,

was as well dressed and fed, and held in as much estimation as those

who employed him; they were once nearly related; their different

degrees of prosperity is what has caused the various shades of their

community. But this accidental difference has introduced, as yet,

neither arrogance nor pride on the one part, nor meanness and

servility on the other. All their houses are neat, convenient, and

comfortable; some of them are filled with two families, for when the

husbands are at sea, the wives require less house-room. They all

abound with the most substantial furniture, more valuable from its

usefulness than from any ornamental appearance. Wherever I went, I

found good cheer, a welcome reception; and after the second visit I

felt myself as much at my ease as if I had been an old acquaintance

of the family. They had as great plenty of everything as if their

island had been part of the golden quarter of Virginia (a valuable

track of land on Cape Charles): I could hardly persuade myself that

I had quitted the adjacent continent, where everything abounds, and

that I was on a barren sand-bank, fertilised with whale oil only. As

their rural improvements are but trifling, and only of the useful

kind, and as the best of them are at a considerable distance from

the town, I amused myself for several days in conversing with the

most intelligent of the inhabitants of both sexes, and making myself

acquainted with the various branches of their industry; the

different objects of their trade; the nature of that sagacity which,

deprived as they are of every necessary material, produce, etc., yet

enables them to flourish, to live well, and sometimes to make

considerable fortunes. The whole is an enigma to be solved only by

coming to the spot and observing the national genius which the

original founders brought with them, as well as their unwearied

patience and perseverance. They have all, from the highest to the

lowest, a singular keenness of judgment, unassisted by any

academical light; they all possess a large share of good sense,

improved upon the experience of their fathers; and this is the

surest and best guide to lead us through the path of life, because

it approaches nearest to the infallibility of instinct. Shining

talents and University knowledge, would be entirely useless here,

nay, would be dangerous; it would pervert their plain judgment, it

would lead them out of that useful path which is so well adapted to

their situation; it would make them more adventurous, more

presumptuous, much less cautious, and therefore less successful. It

is pleasing to hear some of them tracing a father's progress and

their own, through the different vicissitudes of good and adverse

fortune. I have often, by their fire-sides, travelled with them the

whole length of their career, from their earliest steps, from their

first commercial adventure, from the possession of a single whale-

boat, up to that of a dozen large vessels! This does not imply,

however, that every one who began with a whale-boat, has ascended to

a like pitch of fortune; by no means, the same casualty, the same

combination of good and evil which attends human affairs in every

other part of the globe, prevails here: a great prosperity is not

the lot of every man, but there are many and various gradations; if

they all do not attain riches, they all attain an easy subsistence.

After all, is it not better to be possessed of a single whale-boat,

or a few sheep pastures; to live free and independent under the

mildest governments, in a healthy climate, in a land of charity and

benevolence; than to be wretched as so many are in Europe,

possessing nothing but their industry: tossed from one rough wave to

another; engaged either in the most servile labours for the smallest

pittance, or fettered with the links of the most irksome dependence,

even without the hopes of rising?

The majority of those inferior hands which are employed in this

fishery, many of the mechanics, such as coopers, smiths, caulkers,

carpenters, etc., who do not belong to the society of Friends, are

Presbyterians, and originally came from the main. Those who are

possessed of the greatest fortunes at present belong to the former;

but they all began as simple whalemen: it is even looked upon as

honourable and necessary for the son of the wealthiest man to serve

an apprenticeship to the same bold, adventurous business which has

enriched his father; they go several voyages, and these early

excursions never fail to harden their constitutions, and introduce

them to the knowledge of their future means of subsistence.

LETTER VII

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS AT NANTUCKET

As I observed before, every man takes a wife as soon as he chooses,

and that is generally very early; no portion is required, none is

expected; no marriage articles are drawn up among us, by skilful

lawyers, to puzzle and lead posterity to the bar, or to satisfy the

pride of the parties. We give nothing with our daughters, their

education, their health, and the customary out-set, are all that the

fathers of numerous families can afford: as the wife's fortune

consists principally in her future economy, modesty, and skilful

management; so the husband's is founded on his abilities to labour,

on his health, and the knowledge of some trade or business. Their

mutual endeavours, after a few years of constant application, seldom

fail of success, and of bringing them the means to rear and support

the new race which accompanies the nuptial bed. Those children born

by the sea-side, hear the roaring of its waves as soon as they are

able to listen; it is the first noise with which they become

acquainted, and by early plunging in it they acquire that boldness,

that presence of mind, and dexterity, which makes them ever after

such expert seamen. They often hear their fathers recount the

adventures of their youth, their combats with the whales; and these

recitals imprint on their opening minds an early curiosity and taste

for the same life. They often cross the sea to go to the main, and

learn even in those short voyages how to qualify themselves for

longer and more dangerous ones; they are therefore deservedly

conspicuous for their maritime knowledge and experience, all over

the continent. A man born here is distinguishable by his gait from

among an hundred other men, so remarkable are they for a pliability

of sinews, and a peculiar agility, which attends them even to old

age. I have heard some persons attribute this to the effects of the

whale oil, with which they are so copiously anointed in the various

operations it must undergo ere it is fit either for the European

market or the candle manufactory.

But you may perhaps be solicitous to ask, what becomes of that

exuberancy of population which must arise from so much temperance,

from healthiness of climate, and from early marriage? You may justly

conclude that their native island and town can contain but a limited

number. Emigration is both natural and easy to a maritime people,

and that is the very reason why they are always populous,

problematical as it may appear. They yearly go to different parts of

this continent, constantly engaged in sea affairs; as our internal

riches increase, so does our external trade, which consequently

requires more ships and more men: sometimes they have emigrated like

bees, in regular and connected swarms. Some of the Friends (by which

word I always mean the people called Quakers) fond of a

contemplative life, yearly visit the several congregations which

this society has formed throughout the continent. By their means a

sort of correspondence is kept up among them all; they are generally

good preachers, friendly censors, checking vice wherever they find

it predominating; preventing relaxations in any parts of their

ancient customs and worship. They everywhere carry admonition and

useful advice; and by thus travelling they unavoidably gather the

most necessary observations concerning the various situations of

particular districts, their soils, their produce, their distance

from navigable rivers, the price of land, etc. In consequence of

informations of this kind, received at Nantucket in the year 1766, a

considerable number of them purchased a large track of land in the

county of Orange, in North Carolina, situated on the several spring

heads of Deep River, which is the western branch of Cape Fear, or

North-West River. The advantage of being able to convey themselves

by sea, to within forty miles of the spot, the richness of the soil,

etc., made them cheerfully quit an island on which there was no

longer any room for them. There they have founded a beautiful

settlement, known by the name of New Garden, contiguous to the

famous one which the Moravians have at Bethabara, Bethamia, and

Salem, on Yadkin River. No spot of earth can be more beautiful; it

is composed of gentle hills, of easy declivities, excellent low

lands, accompanied by different brooks which traverse this

settlement. I never saw a soil that rewards men so early for their

labours and disbursements; such in general with very few exceptions,

are the lands which adjoin the innumerable heads of all the large

rivers which fall into the Chesapeak, or flow through the provinces

of North and South Carolina, Georgia, etc. It is perhaps the most

pleasing, the most bewitching country which the continent affords;

because while it preserves an easy communication with the sea-port

towns, at some seasons of the year, it is perfectly free from the

contagious air often breathed in those flat countries, which are

more contiguous to the Atlantic. These lands are as rich as those

over the Alleghany; the people of New Garden are situated at the

distance of between 200 and 300 miles from Cape Fear; Cape Fear is

at least 450 from Nantucket: you may judge therefore that they have

but little correspondence with this their little metropolis, except

it is by means of the itinerant Friends. Others have settled on the

famous river Kennebeck, in that territory of the province of

Massachusetts, which is known by the name of Sagadahock. Here they

have softened the labours of clearing the heaviest timbered land in

America, by means of several branches of trade which their fair

river, and proximity to the sea affords them. Instead of entirely

consuming their timber, as we are obliged to do, some parts of it

are converted into useful articles for exportation, such as staves,

scantlings, boards, hoops, poles, etc. For that purpose they keep a

correspondence with their native island, and I know many of the

principal inhabitants of Sherburn, who, though merchants, and living

at Nantucket, yet possess valuable farms on that river; from whence

they draw great part of their subsistence, meat, grain, fire-wood,

etc. The title of these lands is vested in the ancient Plymouth

Company, under the powers of which the Massachusetts was settled;

and that company which resides in Boston, are still the granters of

all the vacant lands within their limits.

Although this part of the province is so fruitful, and so happily

situated, yet it has been singularly overlooked and neglected: it is

surprising that the excellence of that soil which lies on the river

should not have caused it to be filled before now with inhabitants;

for the settlements from thence to Penobscot are as yet but in their

infancy. It is true that immense labour is required to make room for

the plough, but the peculiar strength and quality of the soil never

fails most amply to reward the industrious possessor; I know of no

soil in this country more rich or more fertile. I do not mean that

sort of transitory fertility which evaporates with the sun, and

disappears in a few years; here on the contrary, even their highest

grounds are covered with a rich moist swamp mould, which bears the

most luxuriant grass, and never-failing crops of grain.

If New Gardens exceeds this settlement by the softness of its

climate, the fecundity of its soil, and a greater variety of produce

from less labour; it does not breed men equally hardy, nor capable

to encounter dangers and fatigues. It leads too much to idleness and

effeminacy; for great is the luxuriance of that part of America, and

the ease with which the earth is cultivated. Were I to begin life

again, I would prefer the country of Kennebeck to the other, however

bewitching; the navigation of the river for above 200 miles, the

great abundance of fish it contains, the constant healthiness of the

climate, the happy severities of the winters always sheltering the

earth with a voluminous coat of snow, the equally happy necessity of

labour: all these reasons would greatly preponderate against the

softer situations of Carolina; where mankind reap too much, do not

toil enough, and are liable to enjoy too fast the benefits of life.

There are many I know who would despise my opinion, and think me a

bad judge; let those go and settle at the Ohio, the Monongahela, Red

Stone Creek, etc., let them go and inhabit the extended shores of

that superlative river; I with equal cheerfulness would pitch my

tent on the rougher shores of Kennebeck; this will always be a

country of health, labour, and strong activity, and those are

characteristics of society which I value more than greater opulence

and voluptuous ease.

Thus though this fruitful hive constantly sends out swarms, as

industrious as themselves, yet it always remains full without having

any useless drones: on the contrary it exhibits constant scenes of

business and new schemes; the richer an individual grows, the more

extensive his field of action becomes; he that is near ending his

career, drudges on as well as he who has just begun it; nobody

stands still. But is it not strange, that after having accumulated

riches, they should never wish to exchange their barren situation

for a more sheltered, more pleasant one on the main? Is it not

strange, that after having spent the morning and the meridian of

their days amidst the jarring waves, weary with the toils of a

laborious life, they should not wish to enjoy the evenings of those

days of industry in a larger society, on some spots of terra firma,

where the severity of the winters is balanced by a variety of more

pleasing scenes, not to be found here? But the same magical power of

habit and custom which makes the Laplander, the Siberian, the

Hottentot, prefer their climates, their occupations, and their soil,

to more beneficial situations, leads these good people to think,

that no other spot on the globe is so analagous to their

inclinations as Nantucket. Here their connections are formed; what

would they do at a distance removed from them? Live sumptuously, you

will say, procure themselves new friends, new acquaintances, by

their splendid tables, by their ostentatious generosity, and by

affected hospitality. These are thoughts that have never entered

into their heads; they would be filled with horror at the thought of

forming wishes and plans so different from that simplicity, which is

their general standard in affluence as well as in poverty. They

abhor the very idea of expending in useless waste and vain luxuries,

the fruits of prosperous labour; they are employed in establishing

their sons and in many other useful purposes: strangers to the

honours of monarchy they do not aspire to the possession of affluent

fortunes, with which to purchase sounding titles, and frivolous

names!

Yet there are not at Nantucket so many wealthy people as one would

imagine after having considered their great successes, their

industry, and their knowledge. Many die poor, though hardly able to

reproach Fortune with a frown; others leave not behind them that

affluence which the circle of their business and of their prosperity

naturally promised. The reason of this is, I believe, the peculiar

expense necessarily attending their tables; for as their island

supplies the town with little or nothing (a few families excepted)

every one must procure what they want from the main. The very hay

their horses consume, and every other article necessary to support a

family, though cheap in a country of so great abundance as

Massachusetts; yet the necessary waste and expenses attending their

transport, render these commodities dear. A vast number of little

vessels from the main, and from the Vineyard, are constantly

resorting here, as to a market. Sherburn is extremely well supplied

with everything, but this very constancy of supply, necessarily

drains off a great deal of money. The first use they make of their

oil and bone is to exchange it for bread and meat, and whatever else

they want; the necessities of a large family are very great and

numerous, let its economy be what it will; they are so often

repeated, that they perpetually draw off a considerable branch of

the profits. If by any accidents those profits are interrupted, the

capital must suffer; and it very often happens that the greatest

part of their property is floating on the sea.

There are but two congregations in this town. They assemble every

Sunday in meeting houses, as simple as the dwelling of the people;

and there is but one priest on the whole island. What would a good

Portuguese observe?--But one single priest to instruct a whole

island, and to direct their consciences! It is even so; each

individual knows how to guide his own, and is content to do it, as

well as he can. This lonely clergyman is a Presbyterian minister,

who has a very large and respectable congregation; the other is

composed of Quakers, who you know admit of no particular person, who

in consequence of being ordained becomes exclusively entitled to

preach, to catechise, and to receive certain salaries for his

trouble. Among them, every one may expound the Scriptures, who

thinks he is called so to do; beside, as they admit of neither

sacrament, baptism, nor any other outward forms whatever, such a man

would be useless. Most of these people are continually at sea, and

have often the most urgent reasons to worship the Parent of Nature

in the midst of the storms which they encounter. These two sects

live in perfect peace and harmony with each other; those ancient

times of religious discords are now gone (I hope never to return)

when each thought it meritorious, not only to damn the other, which

would have been nothing, but to persecute and murther one another,

for the glory of that Being, who requires no more of us, than that

we should love one another and live! Every one goes to that place of

worship which he likes best, and thinks not that his neighbour does

wrong by not following him; each busily employed in their temporal

affairs, is less vehement about spiritual ones, and fortunately you

will find at Nantucket neither idle drones, voluptuous devotees,

ranting enthusiasts, nor sour demagogues. I wish I had it in my

power to send the most persecuting bigot I could find in----to the

whale fisheries; in less than three or four years you would find him

a much more tractable man, and therefore a better Christian.

Singular as it may appear to you, there are but two medical

professors on the island; for of what service can physic be in a

primitive society, where the excesses of inebriation are so rare?

What need of galenical medicines, where fevers, and stomachs loaded

by the loss of the digestive powers, are so few? Temperance, the

calm of passions, frugality, and continual exercise, keep them

healthy, and preserve unimpaired that constitution which they have

received from parents as healthy as themselves; who in the

unpolluted embraces of the earliest and chastest love, conveyed to