16 Willian Brown Meloney: The Heritage of Tyre, New York, 1916, p. 15.
17 Despite his implacable hostility to American innovations, Southey was himself a busy inventor of uncouth neologisms. In The Doctor (1834–37), says George H. McKnight in Modern English in the Making, he used agathokakological, cacodemonize, dendanthropology, gelastics, kittenship, magnisonant and critikin, and even in the Quarterly Review, the very G.H.Q. of anti-American pedantry, he used doniv-orous, humgig, frizzgig and evangelizationeer.
18 In his Travels in North America in the Years 1841–42; London, 1845; New York, 1852, p. 53.
19 It is reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931, p. 48 ff.
20 The Oxford Dictionary traces amendable to 1589, antithetical to 1583, imprescriptible to 1562, bailment to 1554, bailee to 1528 and appellor to c. 1400. The following were also in use before Webster’s time: absorbable, 1779; admissibility, 1778; statement, 1775; acidulous, 1769; achromatic, 1766; aneurismal, 1757; accompaniment, 1756; indorsee, 1754; animalize, 1741; arborescent, 1675.
21 Thornton’s last example of the use of to compromit is dated 1842; of to happify, 1857, and of to ambition, 1861. So far as I know, no one has ever attempted to compile anything approaching a complete list of obsolete Americanisms, but a number are given in The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp, Vol. I, Ch. II. They include spong, a strip of meadow; bolts, timber cut into lengths; while in the sense of until; hole, a synonym of spong (it survives in a few geographical names, e.g., Woods Hole); shruffe, the undergrowth of a swamp; cohoss, a bend in a river; folly, a word of undetermined meaning, maybe from the Dutch vallje, a little valley; seater, a settler; and crickthatch, salt-water grass. Some of these were old English words that survived in America longer than in England.
22 The Biglow Papers, Series II, 1866, pref.
23 In a letter to his sister Hannah, dated May 30, 1831, Macaulay told her of a visit to Holland House and a conversation with Lady Holland, who objected to various words, beginning with constituency, and going on to influential, talented and gentlemanly. Macaulay argued in favor of talented, saying that its root “first appeared in theological writing,” and was taken from the Parable of the Talents. “She seemed surprised by this theory,” he wrote to his sister, “never having, so far as I could judge, heard of the parable.” Talented is sometimes listed as an Americanism, but it actually arose in England, c. 1825.
24 Franklin, incidentally, also invented the harmonica and its name. But his harmonica was not the mouth-organ that we know today, but a sort of improvement on the old musical-glasses. Moreover, he called it the armonica, not the harmonica. This was in 1762. The term went over into English very quickly, and had ceased to be an Americanism before 1800. Later it seems to have become changed to harmonicon. But the prevalent present form is harmonica, and it now designates not only a mouth-organ, but also one of the organ-stops. The Oxford Dictionary’s first example of mouth-organ is dated c. 1668. In Germany, where most mouth-organs come from, the instrument is called the harmonika. Whether the name was borrowed from Franklin or invented independently I do not know.
25 Reprinted in Helpful Hints in Writing and Reading, comp. by Grenville Kleiser; New York, 1911, pp. 15–17.
26 A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England, Forum, Oct., 1886.
27 Edward S. Gould: Good English, or Popular Errors in Language; New York, 1867, pp. 25–27. So recently as 1918 an Anglophil reviewer denounced me for using it in a book, and hinted that I had borrowed it from the German standpunkt.
28 The English Language in America Vol. I, pp. 85–6. Lott appears in the Connecticut Code of 1650. See the edition of Andrus: Hartford, 1822. On page 35 is “their landes, lotts and accommodations.” On page 46 is “meadow and home lotts” American conveyancers, in describing real property, still usually speak of “all that lot or parcel of land,” though in the Southwest, so I am told by Mr. Maury Maverick, the more prosaic “the following described real estate” is coming in. Lot has begotten a number of derivations, e.g., back-lots, building-lot, front-lot, side-lot, pasture-lot, garden-lot, house-lot and house and lot.
29 Hutchinson’s Diary, Vol. I, p. 171; London, 1883–6. A great many derivatives go back to the same era, e.g., corn-husk, corn-shuck, corn-crib, corn-stalk, corn-broom, corn-brake, corn-fritter, corn-fodder, corn-grater, corn-hook, corn-juice, corn-knife, corn-starch, pop-corn, corn-cob, corn-cake, corn-pone, corn-cutter, corn-dodger, corn-fed, corn-meal, corn-snake. Some of these have since become obsolete. “The American colonists,” says Allen Walker Read in The Comment of British Travelers on Early American Terms Relating to Agriculture, Agricultural History, July, 1933, “have never taken kindly to the word [maize]. … Even today [it] is wholly a book word in America.”
30 The definitions are from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1914) and Webster’s New International Dictionary (1934), respectively.
31 Samuel Sewall: Diary, April 14, 1712: “I lay’d a Rock in the Northeast corner of the Foundation of the Meeting-House.”
32 Immigration, 2nd ed.; New York, 1913, p. 4. Sir J. R. Seeley says, in The Expansion of England (2nd ed.; London, 1895, p. 84) that the emigration from England to New England, after the meeting of the Long Parliament (1640), was so slight for a full century that it barely balanced “the counter-movement of colonists quitting the colony.” Richard Hildreth, in his History of the United States, Vol. I, p. 267, says that the departures actually exceeded the arrivals. See also The Founding of New England, by James Truslow Adams; Boston, 1921, p. 221 ff.
33 Sydney George Fisher: The True Story of the American Revolution; Phila. and London, 1902, p. 27. See also John T. Morse’s Life of Thomas Jefferson in the American Statesmen series (Boston and New York, 1898), p. 2. Morse points out that Washington, Jefferson and Madison belonged to this new aristocracy, not to the old one.
34 The American Spirit in Literature; New Haven, 1918, p. 61.
35 Since this statement appeared in my last edition Mr. Meyer Isenberg of Chicago has called my attention to what may be an echo of Shakespeare in Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1735: “A ship under sail and a big-bellied woman are the handsomest things that can be seen in common.” Mr. Isenberg believes that this may have been suggested by Titania’s speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II, Sc. 1, beginning “Set your heart at rest.” But even if this be true, Franklin may have encountered the idea at second hand. He said in his Autobiography: “At the time I established myself in Philadelphia (1723) there was not a good bookseller’s shop in any of the colonies to the southward of Boston. In New York and Philadelphia the printers were indeed stationers, but they sold only paper, almanacs, ballads, and a few common school-books. Those who loved reading were obliged to send for their books to England.”
36 See The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, p. 119. Francis Jeffrey, writing on Franklin in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1806, hailed him as a prodigy who had arisen “in a society where there was no relish and no encouragement for literature.”
37 There is a detailed and excellent account of it in Modern English in the Making, by George H. Mc-Knierht; New York, 1028, Ch. XI ff.
38 See Adjectives — and Other Words, by Ernest Weekley; London, 1930, p. 37. Also, McKnight, pp. 372 and 412. McKnight says that among the other words “branded at one time or another by Eighteenth Century purists either as cant or as slang or as ‘low’ ” were banter, cocksure, dumbfounded, enthusiasm, extra, flimsy, flippant, flirtation, gambling, helter-skelter, humbug, jilt, mob, nervous, pell-mell, prig, quandary, shabby, sham, shuffle, topsy-turvy, touchy, turtle and twang,
39 Sir William Craigie discusses this matter in The Study of American English, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXVII, 1927, p. 199 ff. “The colonists,” he says, “were too few in number, and many of them too unlettered, to bring with them the whole of that marvellous language of which even Shakespeare could not exhaust the riches. It may safely be said that no colony ever car
ries with it the whole of its mother tongue, and this is all the more certain when that tongue has attained a high level of literary development.… It is necessary to draw a distinction between the potential and actual possession of the colonists and their immediate descendants. They had a heritage which was larger than they were able to occupy to the full.”
40 McKnight, Ch. X, deals with Shakespeare’s English at length. It was by no means untutored; in fact, the Bard was a consummate master of the rhetoric fashionable in the London of his time. But his genius was too vast to endure its bonds, and so he helped himself to the riches of the common speech. “The effect produced” says McKnight, “is like that of the renewed metaphors to be heard in modern times in the speech of the frontier, where, free from the blighting influence of learning, forms of language are created afresh.” All the characters that purists complain of in modern American are to be found in full flower in Elizabethan English — the bold interchange of parts of speech, the copious coinage of neologisms, the disregard of nice inflections, the free use of prepositions, and the liking for loan-words. “The general impression,” says McKnight, “is that of a language little governed as yet by rules, but on account of its very irregularity, flexible, and, therefore, adaptable to the expression of varied meaning.” See also Shakespeare’s English, by George Gordon, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXIX, 1928.
41 Examples of its use in the American sense are to be found in Gen. XLVIII, 1; II Kings VIII, 7; John XI, 1, and Acts IX, 37.
42 J. O. Halliwell (Phillips): A Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, Containing Words Now Obsolete in England All of Which are Familiar and in Common Use in America, 2nd ed.; London, 1850. See also Gilbert M. Tucker’s American English; New York, 1921, p. 39 ff.
43 The Study of American English, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXVII, 1927, p. 201.
44 A Contribution to an Essex Dialect Dictionary, Supplement III; Colchester, 1922.
45 Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, Vol. IV, N.S., 1893.
46 Is American English Archaic?, Southwest Review, Summer, 1927, p. 296.
IV
THE PERIOD OF GROWTH
I. A NEW NATION IN THE MAKING
Sufficient evidence has been set forth, I take it, to show that the English of the United States had begun to be recognizably differentiated from the English of England by the opening of the Nineteenth Century. But as yet its free proliferation was impeded by two factors, the first being the lack of a national literature of any expanse and dignity and the second being an internal political disharmony which greatly conditioned and enfeebled the national solidarity. During the actual Revolution common aims and common dangers forced the Americans to show a more or less united front, but once they had achieved political independence they developed conflicting interests, and out of those conflicting interests came suspicions and hatreds which came near wrecking the new Confederation more than once. Politically, their worst weakness, perhaps, was an inability to detach themselves wholly from the struggle for domination then going on in Europe. The surviving Loyalists of the revolutionary era — estimated by some authorities to have constituted fully a third of the total population in 1776 — were ardently in favor of England, and such patriots as Jefferson were as ardently in favor of France. This engrossment in the rivalries of foreign nations was what Washington warned against in his Farewell Address. It was at the bottom of such bitter animosities as that between Jefferson and Hamilton. It inspired and perhaps excused the pessimism of such men as Burr. Its net effect was to make it difficult for the people of the new nation to think of themselves, politically and culturally, as Americans pure and simple.1 Their state of mind, vacillating, uncertain, alternately timorous and pugnacious, has been well described by Henry Cabot Lodge in his essay on “Colonialism in America.”2 Soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, someone referred to the late struggle, in Franklin’s hearing, as the War for Independence. “Say, rather, the War of the Revolution,” said Franklin. “The War for Independence is yet to be fought.”
“That struggle,” adds B. J. Lossing in “Our Country” (1873), “occurred, and that independence was won, by the Americans in the War of 1812.” In the interval the New Republic had passed through a period of Sturm und Drang whose gigantic perils and passions we have begun to forget — a period in which disaster ever menaced, and the foes within were no less bold and pertinacious than the foes without. Jefferson, perhaps, carried his fear of “monocrats” to the point of monomania, but under it there was undoubtedly a body of sound fact. The poor debtor class (including probably a majority of the veterans of the Revolution) had been fired by the facile doctrines of the French Revolution to demands which threatened the country with bankruptcy and anarchy,3 and the class of property-owners, in reaction, went far to the other extreme. On all sides, indeed, there flourished a strong British party, and particularly in New England, where the so-called codfish aristocracy (by no means extinct today) exhibited an undisguised Anglomania, and looked forward confidently to a rapprochement with the mother country.4 This Anglomania showed itself, not only in ceaseless political agitation, but also in an elaborate imitation of English manners.
The first sign of the dawn of a new national order came with the election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency in 1800. The issue in the campaign was a highly complex one, but under it lay a plain conflict between democratic independence on the one hand and subservience to English precept and example on the other; and with the Alien and Sedition Laws about his neck, so vividly reminiscent of the issues of the Revolution itself, Adams went down to defeat. Jefferson was violently anti-British and pro-French; he saw all the schemes of his political opponents, indeed, as English plots; he was the man who introduced the bugaboo into American politics. His first acts after his inauguration were to abolish all ceremonial at the court of the Republic, and to abandon spoken discourses to Congress for written messages. That ceremonial, which grew up under Washington, was an imitation, he believed, of the formality of the abhorrent Court of St. James; as for the speeches to Congress, they were palpably modeled upon the speeches from the throne of the English kings. Both reforms met with wide approval; the exactions of the English, particularly on the high seas, were beginning to break up the British party. But confidence in the solidarity and security of the new nation was still anything but universal. The surviving doubts, indeed, were strong enough to delay the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for more direct elections of President and Vice-President, until the end of 1804, and even then three of the five New England States rejected it,5 and have never ratified it, in fact, to this day. Democracy was still experimental, doubtful, full of gunpowder. In so far as it had actually come into being, it had come as a boon conferred from above. Jefferson, its protagonist, was the hero of the populace, but he was not a part of the populace himself, nor did he ever quite trust it.
It was reserved for Andrew Jackson, a man genuinely of the people, to lead the rise of the lower orders and give it dramatic effectiveness. Jackson was the archetype of the new American who appeared after 1814 — ignorant, pushful, impatient of restraint and precedent, an iconoclast, a Philistine, an Anglophobe in every fiber. “He was,” says his biographer, James Parton, “the most American of Americans — an embodied Declaration of Independence — the Fourth of July incarnate.” He came from the extreme backwoods, and his youth was passed, like that of Abraham Lincoln after him, amid surroundings but little removed from savagery. Thousands of other young Americans of the same sort were growing up at the same time — youngsters filled with a vast impatience of all precedent and authority, revilers of all that had come down from an elder day, incorrigible libertarians. They swarmed across the mountains and down the great rivers, wrestling with the naked wilderness and setting up a casual, impromptu sort of civilization where the Indian still menaced. Schools were few and rudimentary; there was not the remotest approach to a cultivated society; any effort to mimic the amenities of the East, or of the m
other country, in manner or even in speech, met with instant derision. It was in these surroundings and at this time that the thoroughgoing American of tradition was born; “blatant, illogical, elate,” “greeting the embarrassed gods” uproariously, and matching “with Destiny for beers.” Jackson was unmistakably of that company in every instinct and idea, and it was his fate to give a new and unshakable confidence to its aspiration at the Battle of New Orleans. Thereafter all doubts began to die out; the new Republic was turning out a success. And with success came a great increase in the national egoism. The hordes of pioneers rolled down the Western valleys and on to the great plains.6 America began to stand for something quite new in the world — in government, in law, in public and private morals, in customs and habits of mind, in the minutiæ of social intercourse. And simultaneously the voice of America began to take on its characteristic tone-colors, and the speech of America began to differentiate itself unmistakably from the speech of England. The average Philadelphian or Bostonian of 1790 had not the slightest difficulty in making himself understood by a visiting Englishman. But the average Ohio boatman of 1810 or plainsman of 1815 was already speaking a dialect that the Englishman would have shrunk from as barbarous and unintelligible, and before long it began to leave its marks, at first only faintly but in the end very clearly, upon a distinctively national literature. That literature, however, was very slow in coming to a dignified, confident and autonomous estate. Down to Jefferson’s day it was predominantly and indeed almost wholly polemical, and hence lacking in anything properly describable as æsthetic value; he himself, an insatiable propagandist and controversialist, was one of its chief ornaments. “The novelists and the historians, the essayists and the poets, whose names come to mind when American literature is mentioned,” said Barrett Wendell, “have all flourished since 1800.”7
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