JOHN BACH MCMASTER

(1852-)

HE change in aim and method of the modern historian has kept pace with the development of the democratic idea. Where before, in the study and writing of history, the doings of rulers and courts and the working of governmental machinery have been the chief points of interest, to the exclusion of the everyday deeds and needs of the nation, the tendency to-day is to lay emphasis on the life of the people broadly viewed, -the development of the social organism in all its parts. The feeling behind this tendency is based on a conviction that the true vitality of a country depends upon the healthy growth and general welfare of the great mass of plain folk,- the working, struggling, wealth-producing people who make it up. The modern historian, in a word, makes man in the State, irrespective of class or position, his subject for sympathetic portrayal.

This type of historian is represented by John Bach McMaster, whose History of the People of the United States' strives to give a picture of social rather than consti

tutional and political growth: those phases JOHN BACH MCMASTER of American history have been treated ably

by Adams, Schouler, and others. Professor McMaster, with admirable lucidity and simplicity of style, and always with an appeal to fact precluding the danger of the subjective writing of history to fit a theory, tells this vital story of the national evolution, and tells it as it has not been told before. The very title of his work defines its purpose. It is a history not of the United States, but of the people of the United States,-like Green's great History of the English People,' another work having the same ideal, the modern attitude. The period covered in Professor McMaster's plan is that reaching from the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 to the outbreak of the Civil War,-less than one hundred years, but a crucial time for the shaping of the country. The depiction of the formative time, the day of the pioneer and the settler,- of the crude beginnings of

civilization,― engages his particular attention and receives his most careful treatment. An example is given in the selection chosen from his work, which gains warmth and picturesqueness in this way. The first volume of his work appeared in 1883; the fourth (bringing the account down to 1821) in 1895. Several volumes must be forthcoming to complete the study. Professor McMaster has allowed himself space and leisure in order to make an exhaustive survey of the field, and a synthetic presentation of the material. His history when finished will be of very great value. His preparation for it began in 1870, when he was a young student, and it will be his life work and

monument.

John Bach McMaster was born in Brooklyn, June 29th, 1852; and received his education at the College of the City of New York, his graduation year being 1872. He taught a little, studied civil engineering, and in 1877 became instructor in that branch at Princeton. Thence he was called in 1883 to the University of Pennsylvania, to take the chair of American history, which he still holds. Professor McMaster is also an attractive essayist. His 'Benjamin Franklin as a Man of Letters' (1887) is an excellent piece of biography; and the volume of papers called 'With the Fathers' (1896) contains a series of historical portraits sound in scholarship and very readable in manner. In his insistence on the presenting of the unadorned truth, his dislike of pseudo-hero worship, Professor McMaster seems at times iconoclastic. But while he is not entirely free from prejudice, his intention is to give no false lights to the picture, and few historians have been broader minded and fairer.

TOWN AND COUNTRY LIFE IN 1800

From A History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War.' D. Appleton & Co., 1885. Copyright 1885, by John Bach McMaster.

WHAT

HAT was then known as the far West was Kentucky, Ohio, and central New York. Into it the emigrants came streaming along either of two routes. Men from New England took the most northern, and went out by Albany and Troy to the great wilderness which lay along the Mohawk and the lakes. They came by tens of thousands from farms and villages, and represented every trade, every occupation, every walk in life, save one: none were seafarers. No whaler left his vessel; no seaman deserted his mess; no fisherman of Marblehead or Gloucester exchanged the dangers of a life on the ocean for the

privations of a life in the West. Their fathers and their uncles had been fishermen before them, and their sons were to follow in their steps. Long before a lad could nib a quill, or make a pot-hook, or read half the precepts his primer contained, he knew the name of every brace and stay, every sail and part of a Grand Banker and a Chebacco, all the nautical terms, what line and hook should be used for catching halibut and what for mackerel and cod. If he ever learned to write, he did so at "writingschool," which, like singing-school, was held at night, and to which he came bringing his own dipped candle, his own paper, and his own pen. The candlestick was a scooped-out turnip, or a piece of board with a nail driven through it. His paper he ruled with a piece of lead, for the graphite lead-pencil was unknown. All he knew of theology, and much of his knowledge of reading and spelling, was gained with the help of the New England Primer. There is not, and there never was, a text-book so richly deserving a history as the Primer. The earliest mention of it in print now known is to be found in an almanac for the year 1691. The public are there informed that a second impres sion is "in press, and will suddenly be extant"; and will contain, among much else that is new, the verses John Rogers the Martyr made and left as a legacy to his children. When the second impression became extant, a rude cut of Rogers lashed to the stake, and while the flames burned fiercely, discoursing to his wife and nine small children, embellished the verses, as it has done in every one of the innumerable editions since struck off. The tone of the Primer is deeply religious. Two thirds of the four-and-twenty pictures placed before the couplets and triplets in rhyme, from

to

"In Adam's fall

We sinnèd all,"

"Zaccheus, he

Did climb a tree
Our Lord to see,"

represent Biblical incidents.

Twelve "words of six syllables" are given in the spelling lesson. Five of them are- abomination, edification, humiliation, mortification, purification. More than half the book is made up of the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, some of Watts's hymns, and the whole of that great Catechism which one hundred and twenty divines spent five years in preparing.

XVI-595

There too are Mr. Rogers's verses, and John Cotton's 'Spiritual Milk for American Babes'; exhortations not to cheat at play, not to lie, not to use ill words, not to call ill names, not to be a dunce, and to love school. The Primer ends with the famous dialogue between Christ, Youth, and the Devil.

Moved by pity and a wish to make smooth the rough path to learning, some kind soul prepared 'A Lottery-Book for Children.' The only difficulty in teaching children to read was, he thought, the difficulty of keeping their minds from roaming; and to "prevent this precipitancy" was the object of the 'Lottery-Book.' On one side of each leaf was a letter of the alphabet; on the other two pictures. As soon, he explained, as the child could speak, it should thrust a pin through the leaf from the side whereon the pictures were, at the letter on the other, and should continue to do this till at last the letter was pierced. Turning the leaf after each trial, the mind of the child would be fixed so often and so long on the letter that it would ever after be remembered.

The illustrations in the book are beneath those of a patentmedicine almanac, but are quite as good as any that can be found in children's books of that day. No child had then ever seen such specimens of the wood-engraver's and the printer's and the binder's arts as now, at the approach of every Christmas, issue from hundreds of presses. The covers of such chap-books were bits of wood, and the backs coarse leather. On the covers was sometimes a common blue paper, and sometimes a hideous wallpaper, adorned with horses and dogs, roosters and eagles, standing in marvelous attitudes on gilt or copper scrolls. The letterpress. of none was specially illustrated, but the same cut was used again and again to express the most opposite ideas. A woman with a dog holding her train is now Vanity, and now Miss Allworthy going abroad to buy books for her brother and sister. A huge vessel with three masts is now a yacht, and now the ship in which Robinson Crusoe sailed from Hull. The virtuous woman that is a crown to her husband, and naughty Miss Kitty Bland, are one and the same. Master Friendly listening to the minister at church now heads a catechism, and now figures as Tommy Careless in the 'Adventures of a Week.' A man and woman feeding beggars become, in time, transformed into a servant introducing two misers to his mistress. But no creature played so many parts as a bird, which after being named an eagle, a cuckoo, and a kite, is called finally Noah's dove.

Mean and cheap as such chap-books were, the peddler who hawked them sold not one to the good wives of a fishing village. The women had not the money to buy with; the boys had not the disposition to read. Till he was nine, a lad did little more than watch the men pitch pennies in the road, listen to sea stories, and hurry, at the cry of "Rock him," "Squail him," to help his playmates pelt with stones some unoffending boy from a neighboring village. By the time he had seen his tenth birthday he was old enough not to be seasick, not to cry during a storm at sea, and to be of some use about a ship; and went on his first trip to the Banks. The skipper and the crew called him "cut-tail"; for he received no money save for the fish he caught, and each one he caught was marked by snipping a piece from the tail. After an apprenticeship of three or four years the "cut-tail" became a "header," stood upon the same footing as the sharesmen," and learned all the duties which a "splitter" and a "salter" must perform. A crew numbered eight; four were "sharesmen" and four were apprentices; went twice a year to the Banks, and stayed each time from three to five months.

Men who had passed through such a training were under no temptation to travel westward. They took no interest, they bore no part in the great exodus. They still continued to make their trips and bring home their "fares"; while hosts of New-Englanders poured into New York, opening the valleys, founding cities, and turning struggling hamlets into villages of no mean kind. Catskill, in 1792, numbered ten dwellings and owned one vessel of sixty tons. In 1800 there were in the place one hundred and fifty-six houses, two ships, a schooner, and eight sloops of one hundred tons each, all owned there and employed in carrying produce to New York. Six hundred and twenty-four bushels of wheat were brought to the Catskill market in 1792. Fortysix thousand one hundred and sixty-four bushels came in 1800. On a single day in 1801 the merchants bought four thousand one hundred and eight bushels of wheat, and the same day eight hundred loaded sleighs came into the village by the western road. In 1790 a fringe of clearings ran along the western shore of Lake Champlain to the northern border, and pushed out through the broad valley between the Adirondacks and the Catskills to Seneca and Cayuga Lakes. In 1800 the Adirondack region was wholly surrounded. The emigrants had passed Oneida Lake, had passed Oswego, and skirting the shores of Ontario