A Manual of American Literature

by Unknown

Some Other Writers.—More than a generation of Williams College men sat under the teaching of Arthur Latham Perry (1830–1905), for thirty-eight years professor of history and political economy. Perry published his “Elements of Political Economy” in 1865; some twenty editions have since appeared. His advocacy of free trade in the sixties cost him many friends. He published also a work on “International Commerce” (1866) and smaller treatises on political economy. Elisha Mulford (1833–1885), a graduate of Yale College and an Episcopal clergyman, was the author of two highly powerful and stimulating books: “The Nation” (1870), dealing with the philosophy of the state, and “The Republic of God” (1880), a religious work of similar character. William Graham Sumner (born in 1840) became prominent for his advocacy of free trade and of the gold standard. Graduating at Yale in 1863, he studied at Göttingen and Oxford, then took orders in the Episcopal Church. Since 1872 he has been professor of political and social science at Yale. He has written “A History of American Currency” (1874), “Lectures on the History of Protection in the United States” (1875), “What Social Classes Owe Each Other” (1882), “Collected Essays in Political and Social Science” (1885), “The Financier and Finances of the American Revolution” (1892), and “A History of Banking in the United States” (1896). Another well known political economist is Richard Theodore Ely (born in 1854), a graduate of Columbia College (1876) and of Heidelberg (Ph.D. summa cum laude, 1879), who, as director of the School of Economics, Political Science, and History in the University of Wisconsin, has trained more teachers of economic science than any other American living and has exerted marked influence on the thought of his time. He has to his credit a long list of valuable publications; some of them are “French and German Socialism in Modern Times” (1883), “The Labour Movement in America” (1886), “Taxation in American States and Cities” (1888), “Socialism, an Examination of Its Nature, Its Strength, and Its Weakness, with Suggestions for Social Reform” (1894), “The Social Law of Service” (1896), and “Monopolies and Trusts” (1900). The tendency of the Government to regulate economic movements is in harmony with a doctrine of which he has been a bold champion. Another equally high authority on trusts and currency problems is Jeremiah Whipple Jenks (born in 1856), since 1891 professor of political economy at Cornell University. His “The Trust Problem” (1900) and “Trusts and Industrial Combinations” (1900) have circulated widely. President Woodrow Wilson (born in 1856) of Princeton, discussed elsewhere as a historian, must also be mentioned here for his standard work on “The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics” (1889), “An Old Master, and Other Political Essays” (1893), and “Mere Literature, and Other Essays,” in which large and sound views of government and its functions are set forth in a clear and attractive style.

Ethnological and Linguistic Science.—In the broad field of ethnological research the work of American scholars has been chiefly devoted to the native and primitive races of America. This offers, as has been pointed out by Mr. McGee,[23] “the finest field the world affords,” exhibiting nearly every stage of development and nearly every type of mankind; and American contributions to ethnology and anthropology have been correspondingly important. The names of Gallatin, Schoolcraft, Morgan, Powell, Brinton, will be at once recalled; probably the last named is our best known ethnologist. In the science of language our showing is, in point of numbers, somewhat more creditable. The lexicographical work of Webster, Worcester, Whitney, and March, and the grammatical work of Child and Gildersleeve have been recognised and appreciated the world over. In these sciences America’s debt to Germany is a heavy one. Most of our greater teachers of language received their professional training in Germany; and while fewer of our students now go to Germany for the doctor’s degree, the influence of German scholarship is still strongly felt among us.

Pierre Étienne Duponceau.—Duponceau (1760–1844) was one of the pioneers of American philology. Born in France, he came to America in 1777 as secretary to Baron Steuben, served in the American army as captain till 1781, and afterward practised law in Philadelphia, becoming well known. He wrote treatises on law: “Exposition sommaire de la constitution des États-Unis d’Amérique” (1837); and in linguistics: “English Phonology” (1818), “Mémoire sur le système grammatical des languages de quelques nations indiennes de l’Amérique du Nord” (1838), which was awarded a medal by the French Institute, and “A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing” (1838).

Albert Gallatin.—The long and illustrious political career of Albert Gallatin (1761–1849) must not detain us here. Most of his literary and ethnological work was done in his later years. In 1836 he published his “Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within the United States, East of the Rocky Mountains, and in the British and Russian Possessions in North America.” In 1845 appeared his “Notes on the Semi-Civilised Nations of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America.” He founded the American Ethnological Society in 1842; and he is rightly known and will be remembered as the father of American ethnology.

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.—Among the most prominent of early American ethnologists was Henry R. Schoolcraft (1793–1864). His grandfather, James Calcraft, formerly a British soldier under Marlborough, had kept a large school in Albany County, New York, and because of this his name was changed to Schoolcraft. At an early age Henry Schoolcraft became a student of mineralogy, chemistry, natural philosophy, and medicine. In connection with his father’s glass-making enterprises in New Hampshire, Vermont, and western New York, he was engaged for some time in building glass-works, and in 1817 began to publish a work on “Vitreology.” Conceiving a desire to travel in the Far West, he started in 1818 on a journey down the Ohio and up the Mississippi. A book resulting from this, on the mineralogy of the West, made him well known. Another expedition was described in “Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley” (1825). In 1828 he was the leader in founding the Michigan Historical Society and in 1832 he helped found the Algic Society, for the reclamation and study of the Indians. A narrative of his work and experiences was embodied in “Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes on the American Frontiers, 1812 to 1842,” a work full of the flavour of the primitive West. Other works were “Algic Researches” (1839), a collection of Indian allegories and legends; “Oneota, or The Characteristics of the Red Race in America” (1844–1845); “The Red Race of America” (1847); and “American Indians, their History, Condition, and Prospects” (1850), an immense work covering a wide range of subjects. His books did much to promote knowledge of Indian life and thought.

Charles Pickering.—Another well-known ethnologist, Charles Pickering (1805–1878), born in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, graduated at Harvard College in 1823 and took his degree in medicine in 1826. He accompanied Commodore Wilkes in the Vincennes on its exploring voyage around the world in 1838–1842 and later visited India and Eastern Africa. His great work was “The Races of Man and their Geographical Distribution” (1848); later works of importance were “The Geographical Distribution of Animals and Man” (1854) and “The Geographical Distribution of Plants” (1861).

Lewis Henry Morgan.—Lewis H. Morgan (1818–1881), born at Aurora on Cayuga Lake, New York, and graduated from Union College in 1840, became interested in studying the Indians through having organised a society called “The Grand Order of the Iroquois,” which he wished to model after the ancient Iroquois Confederacy. The first literary fruits of his studies were his “Letters on the Iroquois” (in The American Review in 1847). Finding that he must neglect his law practice or abandon his Indian studies, he determined to publish all his materials and then cleave to law. In 1851, then, appeared “The League of the Iroquois,” in which were fully explained the organisation and government of the celebrated Iroquois Confederacy, and which formed the first scientific account of an Indian tribe. A few years later, urged by Henry, Agassiz, and others, he took up his studies again, and began an investigation which was extended to embrace the whole world, and which resulted in his scholarly “Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family,” published in 1871, as No. 17 of the Smithsonian “Contributions to Knowledge.” In 1881 he gathered his materials on tribal organisation into an epoch-making philosophical treatise on “Ancient Society,” which materially helped to lay the foundations of our modern science of governmental institutions.

John Wesley Powell.—Major John W. Powell (1834–1902) became conspicuous both as a geologist and an anthropologist. He studied at two or three small Western colleges, served in the Civil War, and then taught geology in two Illinois universities. In 1867 he travelled in the Colorado Rockies and thenceforward for many years was busied with surveys and explorations of the Far West. From 1881 till 1894 he was director of the United States Geological Survey, resigning to become director of the Bureau of Anthropology. He made many important contributions to the sciences which interested him, publishing “Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries” (1875), “Report on the Geology of the Uinta Mountains” (1876), “Report on the Arid Region of the United States” (1879), “Introduction to the Study of the Indian Languages” (1880), “Studies in Sociology” (1887), “Canyons of the Colorado” (1895), and “Physiographic Processes, Physiographic Features, and Physiographic Regions of the United States” (1895).

Daniel Garrison Brinton.—Daniel G. Brinton (1837–1899) of Philadelphia was one of the leading archæologists of the New World. Graduating at Yale in 1858 and at the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, in 1860, he served as a surgeon in the war and from 1867 to 1887 was editor of The Medical and Surgical Reporter. From 1886 until his death he was professor of American linguistics and archæology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has to his credit a long list of important books and papers, only a few of which can be mentioned here. He began to publish in 1859 (“The Floridian Peninsula, Its Literary History, Indian Tribes, and Antiquities”). From boyhood he took a deep interest in the study of the American Indians; and in 1868 he published “The Myths of the New World.” He also wrote, on Indian subjects, “American Hero Myths” (1882), “The American Race” (1892), and numerous ethnological and linguistic papers. He also both edited (for the most part) and published “The Library of Aboriginal American Literature” in eight volumes (1882–1885). In the controversies between science and theological dogma he was a pronounced radical. Along with his scientific labours Dr. Brinton found time for some studies in poetry, especially of Browning and Whitman.