The Spirit of America

by Henry Van Dyke

The Americans did not propose to conquer new rights and privileges, but to defend old ones.

The claim of Washington and Adams and Franklin and Jefferson and Jay and Schuyler and Witherspoon was that the kings of England had established the colonies in certain liberties which the Parliament was endeavouring to take away. These liberties, the Americans asserted, belonged to them not only by natural right, but also by precedent and ancient tradition. The colonists claimed that the proposed reorganization of the colonies, which was undertaken by the British Parliament in 1763, was an interruption of their history and a change in the established conditions of their life. They were unwilling to submit to it. They united and armed to prevent it. They took the position of men who were defending their inheritance of self-government against a war of subjugation disguised as a new scheme of imperial legislation.

Whether they were right or wrong in making this claim, whether the arguments by which they supported it were sound or sophistical, we need not now consider. For the present, the point is that the claim was made, and that the making of it is one of the earliest and clearest revelations of the Spirit of America.

No doubt in that struggle of defence which we are wont to call, for want of a better name, the Revolution, the colonists were carried by the irresistible force of events far beyond this position. The privilege of self-government which they claimed, the principle of “no taxation without representation,” appeared to them, at last, defensible and practicable only on the condition of absolute separation from Great Britain. This separation implied sovereignty. This sovereignty demanded union. This union, by the logic of events, took the form of a republic. This republic continues to exist and to develop along the normal lines of its own nature, because it is still animated and controlled by the same Spirit of America which brought it into being to embody the soul of the people.

I am quite sure that there are few, even among Americans, who appreciate the literal truth and the full meaning of this last statement. It is common to assume that the Spirit of 1776 is an affair of the past; that the native American stock is swallowed up and lost in our mixed population; and that the new United States, beginning, let us say, at the close of the Civil War, is now controlled and guided by forces which have come to it from without. This is not true even physically, much less is it true intellectually and morally.

The blended strains of blood which made the American people in the beginning are still the dominant factors in the American people of to-day. Men of distinction in science, art, and statesmanship have come from abroad to cast their fortunes in with the republic,—men like Gallatin and Agassiz and Guyot and Lieber and McCosh and Carl Schurz,—and their presence has been welcomed, their service received with honour. Of the total population of the United States in 1900 more than 34 per cent were of foreign birth or parentage. But the native stock has led and still leads America.

There is a popular cyclopædia of names, called Who’s Who in America, which contains brief biographies of some 16,395 living persons, who are supposed to be more or less distinguished, in one way or another, in the various regions in which they live. It includes the representatives of foreign governments in the United States, and some foreign authors and business men. It is not necessary to imagine that all who are admitted to this quasi-golden book of “Who’s-who-dom” are really great or widely famous. There are perhaps many of whom we might inquire, Which is who, and why is he somewhat? But, after all, the book includes most of the successful lawyers, doctors, merchants, bankers, preachers, politicians, authors, artists, and teachers,—the people who are most influential in their local communities and best known to their fellow-citizens. The noteworthy fact is that 86.07 per cent are native Americans. I think that a careful examination of the record would show that a very large majority have at least three generations of American ancestry on one side or the other of the family.

Of the men elected to the presidency of the United States there has been only one whose ancestors did not belong to America before the Revolution,—James Buchanan, whose father was a Scotch-Irish preacher who came to the New World in 1783. All but four of the Presidents of the United States could trace their line back to Americans of the seventeenth century.

But it is not upon these striking facts of physical heredity that I would rest my idea of an American people, distinct and continuous, beginning a conscious life at some time antecedent to 1764 and still guiding the development of the United States. I would lay far more stress upon intellectual and spiritual heredity, that strange process of moral generation by which the qualities of the Spirit of America have been communicated to millions of immigrants from all parts of the world.

Since 1820 about twenty-six million persons have come to the United States from foreign lands. At the present moment, in a population which is estimated at about ninety millions, there are probably between thirteen and fifteen millions who are foreign-born. It is an immense quantity for any nation to digest and assimilate, and it must be confessed that there are occasional signs of local dyspepsia in the large cities. But none the less it may be confidently affirmed that the foreign immigration of the past has been thoroughly transformed into American material, and that the immigration of the present is passing through the same process without any alarming interruption.