The Spirit of America

by Henry Van Dyke

There is a significant passage in the diary of John Adams, written just after the outbreak of mob violence against the loyalists in 1775. A man had stopped him, as he was riding along the highway, to congratulate him on the fury which the patriots and their congress had stirred up, and the general dissolution of the bonds of order.

“Oh, Mr. Adams, what great things have you and your colleagues done for us. We can never be grateful enough to you. There are no courts of justice now in this province, and I hope there will never be another.” Upon which the indignant Adams comments: “Is this the object for which I have been contending, said I to myself, for I rode along without any answer to this wretch; are these the sentiments of such people, and how many of them are there in this country? Half the nation for what I know: for half the nation are debtors, if not more; and these have been in all countries the sentiments of debtors. If the power of the country should get into such hands, and there is great danger that it will, to what purpose have we sacrificed our time, our health, and everything else?”

But the fears of the sturdy old Puritan and patriot were not realized. It was not into the hands of such men as he despised and dreaded, nor even into the hands of such men as Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s imaginary American,

“Enslaved, illogical, elate ...
Unkempt, disreputable, vast,”

that the power of the country fell. It was into the hands of men of a very different type, intelligent as well as independent, sober as well as self-reliant, inheritors of principles well-matured and defined, friends of liberty in all their policies, but at the bottom of their hearts lovers and seekers of tranquil order.

I hear the spirit of these men speaking in the words of him who was the chosen leader of the people in peace and in war. Washington retired from his unequalled public service with the sincere declaration that he wished for nothing better than to partake, “in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever favourite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labours, and dangers.”

In these nobly simple and eloquent words, the great American expresses clearly the fourth factor in the making of his country,—the love of common order. Here we see, in the mild light of unconscious self-revealment, one of the chief ends which the Spirit of America desires and seeks. Not merely a self-reliant life, not merely a life of equal opportunity for all, not merely an active, energetic life in which the free-will of the individual has full play, but also a life shared with one’s fellow-citizens under the benign influence of good laws, a life which is controlled by principles of harmony and fruitful in efforts coöperant to a common end, a life rangée, ordonnée, et solidaire,—this is the American ideal.

With what difficulty men worked out this ideal in outward things in the early days we can hardly imagine. Those little communities, scattered along the edge of the wilderness, had no easy task to establish and maintain physical orderliness. Nature has her own order, no doubt, but her ways are different from man’s ways; she is reluctant to submit to his control; she does not like to have her hair trimmed and her garments confined; she even communicates to man, in his first struggles with her, a little of her own carelessness, her own apparently reckless and wasteful way of doing things. “Rough and ready” is a necessary maxim of the frontier. It is hard to make a new country or a log cabin look neat.

To this day in America, even in the regions which have been long settled, one finds nothing like the excellent trimness, the precise and methodical arrangement, of the little farmsteads of the Savoy among which these lectures were written. My memory often went back, last summer, from those tiny unfenced crops laid out like the squares of a chess-board in the valleys, from those rich pastures hanging like green velvet on the steep hillsides, from those carefully tended forests of black firs, from those granges with the little sticks of wood so neatly piled along their sides under the shelter of the overhanging eaves, to the straggling fences, the fallow fields, the unkempt meadows, the denuded slopes, the shaggy underbrush, the tumbled woodpiles, and the general signs of waste and disorder which may be seen in so many farming districts of the United States. I asked myself how I could venture to assure a French audience, in spite of such apparent evidences to the contrary, that the love of order was a strong factor in the American spirit.