# A History of American Literature/Chapter 7

VII.
THE FIRST CREATIVE PERIOD.
1812–1837.
The War of 1812. — (See "Effect of the War of 1812 on the Consolidation of the Union," J. H. U. Studies, V., 251.) The quarter of a century following the organization of the United States government had been a period of hesitancy and doubt, during which rapid national development and an independent literature were impossible. The workings of the new government, so unlike anything else in the history of nations, had been watched with breathless interest. Would the new Constitution survive a crisis? Would it stand the searching tests of time? Could the nation ever hope to take a secure place beside the powers of Europe?
The second war with England shed a flood of light upon many of these questions; its conclusion opened a new era in American history. In the words of Senator Benton:
"It immensely elevated the national character, and, as a consequence, put an end to insults and outrages to which we had been subject.1809–1817. Madison's Administration 1814. Washington burned by the British. No more impressments; no more searching our ships; no more killing; no more carrying off to be forced to serve on British ships against their own country. The national flag became respected. It became an Ægis of those who were ​1815. Jackson's victory at New Orleans. 1817–1825. Monroe's Administration. 1825–1829. Adams's Administration. 1829–1837. Jackson's Administration. under it. The national character appeared in a new light abroad, we were no longer considered as a people so addicted to commerce as to be insensible to insult.... It was a war necessary to the honor and interest of the United States and was bravely fought and honorably concluded, and marks a proud era in our history." — Thirty Years' View.}}
The New Era. — The period opening with the close of this war and ending with the financial crash of 1837 has been called, in the words of President Monroe, "the era of good feeling." The doubt and hesitancy of an earlier day had vanished and now patriotism fairly effervesced from the people. It was the day of turgid Fourth-of-July oratory, of "spread-eagle" prophecy, of great expectations. With confidence in the government came new intellectual activity.Thirteen States admitted before the end of the period: 1791. Vermont. 1792. Kentucky. 1796. Tennessee. 1802. Ohio. 1812. Louisiana. 1816. Indiana. 1817. Mississippi. 1818. Illinois. 1819. Alabama. 1820. Maine. 1820. Missouri. 1836. Arkansas. 1837. Michigan. An independent literature began to be the end of the dreamed of. On all sides resounded the hum and activity of a new intellectual life.
Immigration. — During the period a new and important factor appeared in American history in the shape of a rapidly increasing immigration from Europe. During two weeks in the summer of 1817, there arrived from the Old World 2,272 people seeking homes in America, and from that time until the present immigrants by the shipload from every quarter of the earth have poured constantly upon us. A part of this motley, polyglot crowd joined the stream of emi​grants that soon began to pour into the West, until whole sections and even States became dominated by them. New England and the Middle States were inundated until they were in danger of losing their individuality. As yet it is impossible to estimate the widespread influence that this factor has had upon American history and development.
(See Roosevelt's Winning of the West. Also Irving's Captain Bonneville, and A Tour on the Prairies; Paulding's Westward Ho! Parkman's Oregon Trail; Goodrich's Recollections of a Lifetime; Flint's Recollections; Drake's Making of the Great West; Benton's Thirty Years' View, and standard biographies of Jackson, Adams, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, Benton, and Lewis Cass.)
The purchase of the vast Louisiana territory, and the resulting Lewis and Clarke expedition, turned the eyes of all the East westward, and after the cold summer of 1816 and the late spring of 1817, with its attendant famine, a general exodus, which soon assumed enormous proportions, began from the Atlantic States. All through the period long trains of white-topped emigrant wagons, often containing whole communities with all their possessions, were rolling toward the Mississippi. It was literally a "Wild West" that received them. Everything beyond Eastern New York was the primeval wilderness represented in Cooper's novels. In 1825, ​when the Erie canal was opened, it ran its entire length through virgin forests. The fertile valleys of the Central States wore wild land over which herds of buffaloes swarmed. Beyond the Mississippi only a few hardy adventurers had dared to venture. The settlers followed the parallels of latitude. Little New England villages sprung up about the Great Lakes; the Virginians poured into Kentucky and the neighboring regions; while the Carolinas and Georgia sent their settlers into the territory to the south.
The conditions throughout the period were wild and picturesque. It was another colonial era. The new and strange environment; the Indians and the abundant fauna; the rush and excitement of border life; the new villages springing up by every stream, were but the repetition of the conditions and experience of two centuries before.
Inventions. — Another element, that must be considered if we would understand the spirit of the age, was the general introduction of several world-1794. Whitney's cotton gin. 1807. Fulton runs his steamboat from New York to Albany. 1830. First passenger train in America. 1834. Morse invents the telegraph. 1844. First telegraph line — Washington to Baltimorerevolutionizing inventions. Whitney's cotton gin marks an era in the history of the South; the steamboat was a powerful factor in the development of our commerce. It brought Europe many days nearer America, and, plying on the Mississippi and its branches, it greatly aided in opening up the great West. The most rapid development followed the introduction of the railroad, and when Morse had perfected the telegraph, the modern era had begun.
​Literary Conditions. — (See Godwin's Bryant. For Epoch in English Literature, see Arnold, Ch. VII.; Taine, Ch. XVI.) When, as late as 1820, Sidney Smith, in the columns of the Edinburgh Review, asked his famous question, "Who reads an American book?" there was, at least on his side of the Atlantic, but one answer. Franklin had been admired throughout England and France as a scientist and a statesman, and Edwards had commanded respect as a metaphysician, but no other American writers were known in Europe. The literary outlook, even when viewed by American eyes, was far from being a bright one. The most patriotic citizen of the new republic could but admit that every literary production in America had been merely a feeble imitation of some English model, and that the charge, as Lowell expressed it, that
was true in every particular.
At the close of the Revolutionary period even the imitators had ceased to write; literary production of every variety had come almost to a dead stop, and those who predicted that America could evolve a native literature only after centuries had abundant ground for argument.
The literary situation in America at the close of the Revolutionary period has been admirably summed up by R. H. Stoddard.
​Authorship, as a craft, had no followers except Charles Brockden Brown, who was still editing the Literary Magazine, and perhaps John Dennie, who was editing the Portfolio. The few poets of which America boasted were silent. Trumbull, the author of M'Fingal, which was published the year before Irving's birth, was a judge of the Superior Court; Dwight, whose Conquest of Canaan was published three years later, was merely the president of Yale College; Barlow, whose Vision of Columbus was published two years later still, and who had returned to this country after shining abroad as a diplomatist, was living in splendor on the banks of the Potomac and brooding over that unreadable poem which he expanded into the epic of the Columbiad; and Freneau, by all odds the best of our early versifiers, who had published a collection of his effusions in 1795, had abandoned the muses and was sailing a sloop between Savannah, Charleston, and the West Indies; Pierpont, who was two years younger than Irving, was a private tutor in South Carolina; Dana was a student at Harvard, and Bryant, a youth of twelve at Cummington, was scribbling juvenile poems which were being published in a newspaper at Northampton.. Everybody who read fiction was familiar with the novels of Fielding and Smollett, and lovers of political literature were familiar with the speeches of Burke and the letters of Junius. Everybody read (or could read) the poetical works of Cowper and Burns, Campbell's Pleasures of Hope, and Scott's Lay of the Lust Minstrel, and whatever else in the shape of verse American publishers thought it worth their while to reprint for them." — Life of Irving.
The publication, in 1809, of Knickerbocker's History of New York, Irving's first important work, marks the opening of a new era. "It was," writes Professor Beers, "the first American book, in the higher departments of literature, which needed no apology and stood squarely on its own legs." Its date is the birth date of American literature.