Among the mechanical inventions, the gin for cleaning cotton-seeds out of the white tangle, combing the shock head of the old king, and thus making him at once a power and a presentable personage among other self-constituted sovereigns,—an invention wrought out in 1793 by a cute Yankee,—was one which, in its results directly on the material, and indirectly on the moral, condition of the United States stands eminently foremost. By the old hand-picking process, the slave had his hands full to separate the seeds from a single pound of cotton a day. The new mechanical picker cleaned six thousand six hundred pounds within the same time. The gin so intoxicated the planter, that he committed all sorts of political extravagances and uttered many maudlin ejaculations, until finally, in 1861, he threw himself down upon a bed of 3,400,000 bales in the condition of Noah when, after the flood, he became very hilarious in the presence of his children. Ham laughed exceedingly at the spectacle of the American Noah; but Japhet, after allowing the drunkenness four years to cool, at last put over the offensive nakedness a large patch-work blanket, reconstructed at a quilting-match in Washington. It is expected that hereafter his majesty will wear colors of a faster moral hue than before he so abused the gin.
Commerce, no longer tied up to the shore by the English navigation acts, began, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, to creep out from the commodious bays and harbors of our long, wavy coast; and soon, not content with these timorous tentatives, put on waistbands, top-gallant manners, and flaunting gear, and went boldly courting among the wine-cheeked nations, the silk-growing empires, and spicy-tongued kingdoms of the earth. Importations, of course, not only put many new things on, but in, the heads of the emancipated Americans, who showed their independence, then as now, by buying abroad liberally the things which they did not make or need here. In spite of sumptuary laws, which in some of the new States imposed fines for owning more than one silk gown in a family, and which banished jewelry from homes still innocent of aught but trinkets that cost less money than taste, the beaux and belles of the period whereof we speak began to put on hairs where nature had forgotten to furnish them, and supplied from Paris, in amounts limited it is true, appliances to remedy defects which fashion insisted had been left by the Creator, in making up woman from a sleepy man. Hoops every few years girdled the larger or smaller conceits of Madam Mode’s improved figures. Of course Paris was always finding mistakes in the original Eden pattern; and her customers were ever ready to try her suggestions as to the newest mode of correcting them. Top-gears naturally varied like the crescendo et diminuendo notes in music, or the equally flexible bars of the gold market, whose undulating lines draw such different tunes from its performers, and sometimes run so high as to take away all their breath. Tights, now unwhisperable except in veracious histories, held their own with elderly gentlemen to the very close of the century, and were clasped with silver enough to bring a smile, in our day, all over the wrinkling face of the Secretary of the Treasury. The wide-tailed coats and broad-lapelled vests of the respectable citizens of the Washington and Adams periods would, if worn now upon the platform of an equal rights convention, make the fame of their wearers, and insure full-length portraitures of their inner selves by conversation-drawing correspondents.
1769. School Days. 1869.
Another production of the eighteenth century was better material ways for translation over the surface of our rapidly augmenting areas. In 1732 enterprising stages took fourteen days from New York to Boston; but ere the cycle had rounded up to 1800, the time, by reason of better roads, was reduced one half. The hard earnings, trickling from the little heaps that labor had gathered up, began to flow out into turnpikes; and milestones chronicled spaces and pointed the fingers of Time to measures for ascertaining and so accelerating speed. The road-maker and the vehicle-propeller are the two Dioscuri of modern civilization. Whoever subtracts portions of the earth’s surface, be it solid or aqueous, from between separated States, communities, or individuals, multiplies the well-being and happiness of the human race. Could the tea raiser in China be placed alongside of the tea consumer in America, or the cotton manufacturer of Lowell within a half-hour’s delivery of his fabrics from their purchaser, the expenses of handling at either end, the long, costly, tedious voyages that now waste so much labor, time, and money, and the accumulated[accumulated] taxes upon the articles sold added by intermediate commissions, would be saved. The costs of translation are a necessary but onerous assessment upon productive industry. The greatest invention now needed is one which would so condense the earth’s bulk by improved and rapid communication, as to squeeze out the distances that separate nations and chill their natural outflow from themselves into others.
In 1700 the population of Boston was 7,000; that of New York 5,250, of which latter one in seven was colored; a proportion which was augmented in 1711 in favor of the blacks, by the establishment of a regular and public slave-market. An English traveller describes Boston in 1700 as a place whose “buildings are, like its women, neat and pretty; the streets of pebble, like the hearts of the men.” From such flinty masculines no wonder that the population only reached to 24,937 in the next one hundred years.
Among the leading productions of this century the establishment and growth of manufactures must be reckoned. Even before the Revolution, iron-mills at Salisbury, Connecticut, at Cold Spring, on the Hudson, at Valley Forge and Durham, Pennsylvania, had lifted their ponderous hammers to weld the fused ores, dragged out of our slightly tumbled beds by cars, and had commenced to fabricate instruments of husbandry, kitchen utensils, and other tripods on which sat, then as now, the Pythonesses of life, who not only interpret, but are themselves the oracles of fate. Our running streams soon coaxed cotton to take a turn around the spindles which Arkwright, in 1768, had so taught to whirl with their mechanical iron fingers, that one man could work a stubborn iron mule up to a capacity equal to one hundred and thirty of the human species. The cotton-gin, ere the century closed accounts with its busy customers, had handed over such clean cotton to the coquettish jennies, that very pretty yarns began to be spun along many gliding streams.
The habits prevailing through the eighteenth century were still transitional. It was the chrysalis film, covering the flitting worm which had succeeded the inert and slow-moving grub of the seventeenth, and which was soon to burst into the gayer, full-winged butterfly of the nineteenth cycle of time. What habits they had were of solid silver. The platings, spread over and hiding darker substances with polished surfaces, were not yet invented.
Morals, too, triturated by the ever-restless surges of time, like the pebbles on a shore which the industrious ocean ever scrubs and washes, became rounder and smoother, and lost something of those angular asperities which added nothing to their usefulness or strength.
If we take an account of the purely intellectual and literary stock on hand in America at the close of the century, we shall find that, while the one hundred years had been run on a slender and mainly upon borrowed capital, there were results in fabricated stuffs by no means discreditable, and in raw material a mass very pleasant to contemplate. To a large extent our literary manufactures were still imitations of English styles, with an increasing tendency to introduce American figures in the patterns. The first literary effort was in hymn and psalm books. The very first volume printed in this country was “The Bay Psalm-Book,” published, of course, near Boston (at Cambridge) in 1640; rather slow in metres, but which, before 1750, had run through seventy editions,—run in fact so well and fast that, like certain plays now, it forgot how or where to stop. Singing-books, as an intellectual circulation, thus went to the American head, and, without blowing the matter too much, we may reasonably assume that this tendency set up the American nose as an instrument of psalmody.