And so the ball and polka party turned out very much as other balls. Those who had expected a great deal from it did not enjoy it much; while those who had no hand in getting it up had a good time, ate the most supper, had the least headache the next morning, and often spoke of it afterwards with pleasurable recollections. Among the former were Mr. Calhoun, Mr. Polk, and the floor committee; among the latter the modest young man, now sixty-five years of age, John C. Fremont, several people who did not part their hair in the middle, and a growing set who were friends of those who could not divide their crinkled hair as yet either way or any way.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ON THE AMERICAN HALF-SHELL.
The contrasted Beginning and End of the Half-Century.—What America brought to the New-Year’s Day of 1850 in the Raw, and what for the Grill of more refined Tastes.—Historical Stews, and their Foreign and Domestic Sauces.—What they were.—Attempts at, and Failures in, Insurrections in America.—Mechanical Inventions of the Half-Century; Steamboats, Telegraphs, Reapers, Sewing-Machines, etc.—Their Advantages.—Vestments and Investments.—Of Ether.—How Populations drifted to Cities.—Chicago bibulous and dropsical.—Public Men and their Versatile Principles.—Newspapers and their unfulfilled Prophecies.—Plutocracy.—Fashions and their Constancy to Change.—The Stormy Petrels of Commercial Disasters.—How Owners turn Wreckers.—Profits out of Losses.—Of Merchant Salvors.—The Effects of Gold Discoveries in California on Labor, Ladies’ Heads and Hearts.—Auriferous Marriages.—The Spite of Midas against Children.—Ecclesiastical Gardens in America.—The new Mormon Shrub of the Genus Polygamous.—Architectural Improvements.—American Houses and their Sites.—Farmsteads; their Better Complexion.—The Crops from the National Farms, the Sea and Land, in 1850.—Of American Literature, Science, Natural History, The Philosophies and other Branches of Knowledge, and their Cultivators, through the Half-Century.—Summary of the Bill of Fare for the Repast on the Half-Shell.—Its Character and Critics.
The nineteenth century began in America comparatively lean and unfattened, with but sixteen States, and a population of 5,305,939. When, on New Year’s day, 1850, it was taken up from its native beds, it had grown to thirty States, and a population of 23,191,876. It had gathered American history enough to be served up in every style to its hungry, impatiently waiting crowds of customers.
There was still plenty of it in the raw; heaps of materials swimming in abundant liquor; common work at rough, resisting nature, bivalved between the ordinary shells of laborious days and unwaking, sonorous nights; good honest-minded rough-handed labor, swinging the axe among Western settlements, and pricking gold, silver, and lead veins, and draining off their arterial currents into Atlantic bowls; shaggy-jacketed enterprise, brave in work, in patience, and cheerful endurance, quelling the rebellions of empty stomachs,—those quickly rising, wrathful, and speedily armed revolutionists,—and subjecting them to serve while the wheat ripened, and to wait upon a nourishing hope; and ploughmen planting broad and newly claimed fields with tasselled banners, and marching with their sheaved battalions to take growing towns and marts of business.
“A mighty maize, but not without a plan.”
Others there were drawing fresh, healthy milk, from the breasts of buxom mother Earths; pioneer, shaggy-coated energy, East as well as West, South as well as North, creating, organizing, and crystallizing around nuclei, snatching newly created words, as woman, from the ribs of necessities, and planting them amid the needs of freshly staked Edens; new-laid towns, from whose hasty nests speculators run cackling; mining villages, planted at sunset out of hand, watered by hot whiskeys, stimulated by the guano of revolvers, faro, monte, and warmly stirred politics, and growing over night into rough-timbered climbers up and up the mountain-side, to look over into the canyon beyond; hastily lit oil and other speculations, around whose flame the idle moths of the pulpit, the bar, and the counter fly and singe themselves until they fall helpless upon the table of others; struggling schools, churches, seminaries, and charities, reaching upwards to the sunlight, growing more graceful as they straighten away from their earthy roots, but still raw; and all the many-visaged, polysided life of fresh energy, struggling for the mastery over the down-wrestled but ever-rising work of new soils, wants, and needs, and destined, in spite of its great, rude, sinewy strength, to exhaust itself upon what time, patience, and long-applied skill shall shape into greater symmetry and proportion, and then to vanish away into the tomb of all ex-workmen.
There, too, were heaped up and ready for the grill, and for tastes more refined, capital, massing itself into centripetal, compacting, aggregated wealth, touching large levers that swing inflowing products from port to port, across wide-reaching inland spaces, or over high mountains; multiform industries, translating and exchanging, without parallel, the growths of every parallel; and associated earnings of diligent thrift, extracting the best notions from hard, quartz-headed mountains. There was vivid and intelligent joint enterprise, which plunges beneath the waves, and places the sensitive nerves of thought below the gambols of the leviathan, for the especial benefit of gamblers in bonds, cotton, gold, and stocks; pries open the shut gates of science, and entices her occult learning to minister to the enlarging demands of commerce, agriculture, manufactures, and trade; sets in motion the steel fingers which pick, cull, card, spin, and weave the cotton, flax, silk, and wool, whose fabrics clothe us through all seasons; quickens the spindles, machines, and contrivances—busy everywhere—which create our necessaries and our luxurious comforts; drags our fuel from the tight clutches of the mine; adulterates our food and drinks; sews up our vestments and sometimes our investments, and supplies our dwellings with furniture, our stores with goods, our fields with mowers, reapers, steam-ploughs, and steam-impelling implements, and our grave-yards with monuments, hewn by machinery and chiselled by the nimble fingers of patented tools.
Historical stews, too, those fifty years had, of course, produced in abundance; some flavored with British, others with French sauces. Domestic ones, too, had simmered and sputtered; but, stirred by bayonet-shaped spoons, they had so far gone off in smoke as to leave only an insipid taste on the homely palate of our peace-loving household. Of these were the Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania, and Dorr’s Suffrage Rebellion in Rhode Island in 1842, made of very poor materials, and smothered with a rude domestic bread sauce, which, more like a poultice for the outside than a relishable compound for the inside, soon took away the vicious appetite. Indeed, since the Great Rebellion which severed the long threads that tied us to Great Britain, no insurrections have ever had any success in America. Sharp newspaper émeutes, looking like imminent war, yes; sectional animosities threatening, like the South Carolina chattering of 1832, to embroil a piece of us, yes; State grievances, bubbling up with heated convention resolves, until the steam of revolution almost arose from the agitated surface, yes, and often; and, to quote an example since 1850, even a land-wasting war of four years, reducing large plantations to cinders, and leaving in funereal gloom many hopes and households,—even this, yes; but a genuine, earnest, well-founded, and just revolt, rising from wrongs and oppressions, and appealing to armed manly protest, and resulting in deserved success, never, never!
Upon the half-shell were served some remarkable mechanical inventions. Water raised into steam was, in 1806, applied by Fulton to propel the first steamboat over water; an application never contemplated by the Constitution, but which, in spite of the many private constitutions suddenly broken up by it, the appalling increase in American biographies, and the wreck of matter thrown upon life-insurance reserves, must be kindly remembered as one of the great benefactions of genius to humanity. In 1832 Samuel F. B. Morse discovered the mode of electro-magnetizing thought, and of ticking down words at places where thoughts were seldom spontaneously produced. The wiry telegraph is daily bringing to light other incidental discoveries, which show how great benefits sometimes pendulate with petty remorses. There are developed at most stations a class of people, formerly unknown, and called “operators,” who believe that small accidents, in places unrewarded by the notice of geographers, are national; that the births, deaths, or marriages of owners of petroleum, fast horses, or other rapid stock, concern all readers of newspapers; that the time, age, and pedigree of quadrupeds, kept for jumping long spaces in a short time, and the weights of bipeds, sent to college to acquire an increase of their intellectual strength, but who punish instead an ash stick some four hours a day, by sweeping with it some frog-pond in the vicinity, are vital statistics; and that the election of constables, supervisors, aldermen, mayors, and members of Congress are matters which every intelligent patriot, instead of banishing from all recollection as speedily as possible, desires to have forced upon his journalistic readings. If Morse started, re-morse has often followed after, the telegraph.