At his death, Robert Carter, who had been Rector of the College, Speaker of the Burgesses, President of the Council, Acting Governor of Virginia, and Proprietor of the Northern Neck, was described in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1732 as the possessor of an estate of 300,000 acres of land, about 1,000 slaves, and ten thousand pounds. Pliny the Younger might well have been proud of such an estate. On a substantial basis like this, a Palladian mansion was possible; and up and down the land, wherever the means justified the end, Palladian mansions were built.
The really striking thing about the architecture of Manorial America with its great dignity and its sometimes striking beauty of detail or originality of design—as in the staircase at Berry Hill which creates a flaring pattern like butterfly’s wings—the striking thing is the fact that the work is not the product of a specialized education; it is rather the outcome of a warm, loving, and above all intelligent commerce with the past, in the days before Horseback Hall had become as aimless and empty as Heartbreak House. Mr. Arthur T. Bolton, the biographer of the brothers Adam, has exhibited letters from Robert Adam’s patrons in England which mark their avid and precise interest in classical forms; and without doubt a little digging would uncover similar examples in America.
These educated eighteenth-century gentlemen, these contemporaries of “Junius” and Gibbon, who had read Horace and Livy and Plutarch, had one foot in their own age, and the other in the grave of Rome. In America, Thomas Jefferson exemplified this whole culture at its best and gave it a definite stamp: he combined in almost equal degrees the statesman, the student, and the artist. Not merely did Jefferson design his own Monticello; he executed a number of other houses for the surrounding gentry—Shadwell, Edgehill, Farrington—to say nothing of the Virginia State Capitol and the church and university at Charlottesville. It was Jefferson who in America first gave a strict interpretation to classicism; for he had nothing but contempt for the free, Georgian vernacular which was making its way among those who regarded the classical past as little more than a useful embellishment.
The contrast between the classical and the vernacular, between the architecture of the plantation and the architecture of the village, between the work of the craftsman, and the work of the gentleman and the professional architect, became even more marked after the Revolutionary War. As a result of that re-crystallization of American society, the conditions of classical culture and classical civilization were for a short time fused in the activities of the community, even in the town. One may express the transformation in a crude way by saying that the carpenter-builder had been content with a classical finish; the architects of the early republic worked upon a classical foundation. It was the Revolution itself, I believe, that turned the classical taste into a myth which had the power to move men and mold their actions.
The merchant who has spent his hours in the counting house and on the quay cannot with the most lofty effort convert himself into a classical hero. It is different with men who have spent long nights and days wrangling in the State House, men who have ridden on horseback through a campaign, men who have plotted like Catiline and denounced like Cicero, men whose daily actions are governed with the fine resolution of a Roman general or dictator. Unconsciously, such men want a stage to set off and magnify their actions. King Alfred can perhaps remain a king, though he stays in a cottage and minds the cakes on the griddle; but most of us need a little scenery and ritual to confirm these high convictions. If the tailors had not produced the frock-coat, Daniel Webster would have had to invent one. The merchant wants his little comforts and conveniences; at most, he desires the architect to make his gains conspicuous; but the hero who has drawn his sword or addressed an assembly wants elbow room for gestures. His parlor must be big enough for a public meeting, his dining room for a banquet. So it follows that whereas under pre-Revolutionary conventions even civic buildings like Independence Hall in Philadelphia are built on a domestic scale, the early republican architecture is marked by the practice of building its domestic dwellings on a public scale. The fine houses of the early republic all have an official appearance; almost any house might be the White House.
Even when Dickens made his first visit to America, the classical myth and the classical hero had not altogether disappeared: one has a painful memory of the “mother of the modern Gracchi,” and one sees how the republican hero had been vulgarized into a Jacksonian caricature like General Cyrus Choke. For a whole generation the classical myth held men in its thrall; the notion of returning to a pagan polity, quaintly modified by deism, was a weapon of the radical forces in both America and France. Jean Jacques himself preached the virtues of Sparta and Rome in Le Contrat Social, as well as the state of nature which he praised in Emile; and, in general, “radicalism” associated itself with the worship of rule and reason, as opposed to the caprice, the irrationality, the brute traditionalism of what the children of that age then characterized as “Gothic superstition.” Almost within his lifetime Washington became Divus Cæsar, and if a monument was not built to him immediately, a city was named after him, as Alexandria had been named after Alexander. Did not the very war-veterans become the Society of the Cincinnati; did not the first pioneers on the westward march sprinkle names like Utica and Ithaca and Syracuse over the Mohawk trail; and did not a few ex-soldiers go back to their Tory neighbor’s plow? As Rome and Greece embodied the political interests of the age, so did classical architecture provide the appropriate shell. Even those who were not vitally touched by the dominant interests of the period were not immune to the fashion, once it had been set.
II
In New England, not unnaturally, the influence of the merchant prevailed in architecture for a longer time, perhaps, than it did elsewhere. Samuel McIntire, a carver of figureheads for ships and moldings for cabins, provided an interior setting in the fashion of Robert Adam, which enabled the merchant of Salem to live like a lord in Berkeley Square; and Bulfinch, a merchant’s son, began by repairing his father’s house, went on a grand tour of Europe, and returned to a lucrative practice which included the first monument on Bunker Hill, and the first theater opened in Boston. Under McIntire’s assiduous and scholarly hands, the low-lying traditional farmhouse was converted into the bulky square house with its hipped roof, its classical pilasters, its frequently ill-proportioned cupola, its “captain’s walk,” or “widow’s walk.” The merchant with his eye for magnitude lords it over the farmer with his homely interest in the wind and the weather; and so McIntire, the last great figure in a dying line of craftsmen-artists, is compelled to make up by wealth of ornament a beauty which the earlier provincial houses had achieved by adaptation to the site without, and to subtlety of proportion within. The standard of conspicuous waste, as Mr. Thorstein Veblen would call it, spread from the manor to the city mansion.
Throughout the rest of the country, the pure classical myth created the mold of American architecture, and buildings that were not informed by this myth attempted some sort of mimicry, like the mansion Squire Jones built for Marmaduke Temple in Cooper’s The Pioneers. There are churches standing in New Jersey and New York, for example, built as late as 1850, which at a distance have the outlines and proportions of classic buildings, either in the earlier style of Wren, or in the more severe and stilted Greek manner favored by a later generation. It is only on closer inspection that one discovers that the ornament has become an illiterate reminiscence; that the windows are bare openings; that the orders have lost their proportions, and that, unlike the wandering mechanic, who “with a few soiled plates of English architecture” helped Squire Jones, the builder could no longer pretend to talk learnedly “of friezes, entablatures, and particularly of the composite order.” Alas for a bookish architecture when the taste for reading disappears!