As a magnet, laid amid a heap of iron-filings, gathers them all to itself in close-fitting unity, so the figure of John Smith crystallizes about it the elements of the early settler’s life in Virginia. Nor upon the banks of the Chickahominy alone does John Smith stalk in romantic proportions; but through all times, in every kingdom, state, city, and village, at all epochs, and in every shade of barbarism or civilization, is he found. New York holds 187; Philadelphia, 231; Boston, 35; Brooklyn, 118; London, 480; and every capital in the world its own appropriate complement.
No railroad can be run that does not touch his farm; no joke that does not skim his peculiarities; no portrait that does not contain his features; no conductor’s stealings that does not comprise his contributions; no miller’s breakfast-bell that does not toll the knell of a portion of his grist.
As dyers classify mankind by the color of their skins, wine-growers belt the world by isothermal vine-lines, and lawyers divide the human race into plaintiffs and defendants, so the historian, straining his telescopic gaze over the centuries and the globe, and discarding the division of the species into “mankind and the Beecher family,”—no longer appropriate since the publication of “Norwood” reduced the latter down to the common level,—justly sweeps all mankind into two great classes, the Smiths and the rest of creation.
And so John Smith finds appropriate place, not only in every history, but a special niche and chapter to himself. We might perhaps have put this select mention of a great public benefactor, an erudite scholar, and universal toiler, into a note, smothered up in an appendix, dimmed by the milky-way of small asterisks, and hazily obscured by countless references and authorities; but this injustice to the merits of an ancient family, whose tombs mound every churchyard, and whose door-plates shine on almost every house in our cities and towns not appropriated to drugs, groceries, or confectioneries, would, we are persuaded, sorely wound the public conscience.
The origin of the Smiths, like that of so many other distinguished families, is involved in distressing doubt. Audacious investigation, with a natural wish to penetrate to the roots, and too fearless of consequences where prudence perhaps might be better satisfied with a limited view of ancestry, has pressed its inquiries up and down genealogical trees until it has unearthed Smiths at the base, Smiths in the sap, Smiths up the stump, and even Smiths dangling at the end of the branches. No nation looks down in theory from such lofty heights of indifference upon ancestral distinctions as the American; none can better afford to cut down their genealogical, as they do their natural, forests; yet none are so fond of looking up to these airy and waving altitudes, and none that more carefully spare the tree which in youth sheltered them, and which waves, like the flag, long and fruity to their eyes. An American book of leading families would be larger than the London Directory, and make the fortune of even the Congressional Printer. True, the family herald would in nearly all these cases, like the chroniclers of ancient states, and the biographer of the Smiths, be obliged to substitute foggy conjecture for well-defined tracings. They would all find that their researches would, if carried back far enough, converge to the same focal point; and if produced at equal distances in the future, diffuse themselves into a common social, monetary, and undistinguishing equality: for families and states are much like boys at the ends of a balanced board, now up, now down, at one time touching the ground, then curving upward through medium spaces to a culminating point, while some one at the other end is noiselessly passing through a reversed career.
And so John Smith balances and pendulates on the same board with a Van Rensselaer, John Brown with a Tozewell, Mr. Snooks with a Winthrop, and John Doe with a Hampton.
There is, we think, but little doubt that the Hebrew Samson, the Greek Hercules, the Spanish Cid, the Scandinavian Thor, and the English Arthur of the Round Table, were each the John Smith of his nation and time, a multiform unity swinging round the circle of varied labor, hard work, and heroic deeds, accomplishing under one name—a family one, possessed at various times by several individuals—the work of all reapers, sewing-machines, cow-milkers, cotton and woollen factories. These national heroes, like the John Smiths, their descendants now, were arrayed in warm climates in a fragmentary style of short dress; in the middle regions in a Highland garb, appropriately frilled or furred; and in the north with a canine material, heroic in quality, and modishly artistical,—a bark.
The most reliable studies trace the smith genealogy back to Vulcan’s workshop, the original Smith being one of those employed on designs for Achilles’s shield,—a claim which experts in coats-of-arms will not readily stamp as a forge-ry.
Original Full-length Portrait of John Smith.
(p. 110)