The Knickerbocker, Vol. 10, No. 5, November 1837

by Various

In the town of L—— you might have found, at the time I write of, a race peculiar to the soil of New-England; the descendants of old families, who have inherited wealth from their fathers, and with it a set of feelings that attaches them to old customs and habits. The furniture of their houses is antique, and they themselves are a little tinctured with puritanical manners. There are few places so aristocratic as this. They do not show their pride in equipage and dress, like new-born gentility, but in the distance of their manners, and the seclusion of their lives. A race has grown up and flocked in around these moss-covered families, which is thriving and industrious, but the line is strictly marked between them and the old settlers, who yet consider the land as their own, and themselves as the pillars of the place.

Some of the old men wear gold-headed canes and white-topped boots and cues, though the cocked-hat is obsolete; and the old ladies appear upon gala-days in brocade gowns, worn by their great-grand-mothers, for aught I know, with heads carried as none but old prim, stiff ladies know how to carry their heads: a little in the style, we may suppose, Jupiter carries his head, when he walks among the clouds, where there is no vulgar earth to look upon.

The morning after my arrival, I called upon Judge H——, the principal of the law school, and found him, Cincinnatus like, digging in his garden. He rested upon his spade, as I approached him; took my letter and read it; gave me his hand, when he had finished, and as I looked in his face, and saw his clear eye and benevolent countenance, I loved him. He was a spare man, with the air of a student about him; his face was pale, and worn with much thinking; his manners kind and winning, with the least affectation any one can imagine. He introduced me to his lovely family, and they made me feel at home in a moment, by the sincerity and unostentatiousness of their reception.

Some people, when a stranger is introduced to them, are chiefly occupied in making an impression upon him of their importance and dignity, while the best bred only think how he may be made easy and comfortable.

The judge pointed a boarding-house out to me, and appointed a time to talk farther with me, and I took my leave, thoroughly impressed with the idea that I was the happiest man in the world, and the judge and his family the best and most agreeable people. 'Now for a look at law-students at a law school,' thinks I.

I found a fine set of fellows here, from all parts of the United States. Here was a student from the West, with his dark eye and coal-black hair, and Indian-red cheeks. He was remarkable for his independence and fearlessness; for his up-and-down dealing, and for the originality of his figures, and the indifference all western men feel to weather, domestic comfort, and the elegancies of life. Then comes the hot-blooded Southerner, contending between his ignorance and his pride; for the Southerners, (although there are honorable exceptions,) who come to the North for an education, are too much gentlemen in their own sense, to be able to handle any thing heavier than a cigar; though now and then bolstered up to holding a pistol at some friend they have injured, for the sake of the éclat of the thing. We see enough of this race of spoiled children at college, where they attempt to lord it over the institution and its members. They mistake the contempt which permits their folly to pass unnoticed, for submission.

Here, too, appeared the yankee, with his honest phiz, from the green mountains of Vermont; with his heart in his hand; telling every body who will listen to him all his family affairs and domestic arrangements. Nevertheless he has his points of shrewdness. You are off your guard by his honest and simple confidence in you: find him at a nine-pin alley, and he is your man, as he says, ''at can knock 'em down.' Put him down to 'all fours,' and he will play game; but he does not aspire to whist or billiards; of the latter perhaps he never heard. But if you would see him in his glory, look at him at a scrub-race, mounted on one of his father's colts, taken without leave from the pasture; his hat a little on one side; his neck begirt with a colored handkerchief, the ends flying; the skirts of his coat pinned about in front, and he is in his element. A Vermonter is rarely a drunkard, away from his native state; but to him, and the smooth-faced, precise inhabitant of Connecticut, we are indebted for the bad odor in which yankees are held in the middle and southern states, among the lower order of people, by their sharp bargains, by biting those who intended to eat them up; for they are not always the aggressors in a bargain, beyond the latitude of trade law.

The strongest attachments of the Vermonter are for his horses and cattle, for he was brought up among them, and is taught to regard them as the sources of profit. Until the age of twenty-one, he is buckled close to the barn-yard and stables; but at that age, he is free, and goes from home to seek his fortune in the capacity of pedlar, clerk, student at medicine or law, or to college, if he has a bookish turn, but never as a servant.

Vermont is the most republican of any state in the Union. There, people are more upon an equality than elsewhere; the rate of intelligence, education, property, are more upon a par. It has no clownish aristocracy, like New-Hampshire; no mushroom importance, like New-York; no golden privileges, like Massachusetts; but simple and contented, intelligent and industrious, hospitable and honest, without pretensions and disdaining show, running into no wild chimeras of improvement, and only a little mad upon masonry, it stands firm as its own Green Mountains, full of the purest American character.

Here was the inhabitant of the coast, the polished New-Englander from sea-board, with his literature and his sectional pride, his love of the arts, his belief that Cambridge College is the first institution in the country, and the Unitarian doctrine the most splendid of religious speculation. He is small in stature, for the most part, and has an intellectual face, and a head full of bumps. His dress is simple and neat; his feet and hands are small, but his fingers are short and clumpish, showing that he is not anxious to talk of his grand-father. His manners are retiring and unobtrusive, not as if he lacked self-respect, but as if he feared others would not estimate him properly. It is his pride of character that keeps him silent, and causes him to stand aloof among strangers; for he would not be thought guilty of the vulgar habit of presumption, for his right hand. Show him that you respect him, and he is transformed in an instant; he is all openness and sociability, ready to be obliged, or to bestow favors. He sympathizes with you, till you almost love him like a brother—so aptly does he glide into the bent of your feelings. You will find him more literary than scientific; he writes better than he talks; judges better than he acts; for he is much given to impulse and enthusiasm of the subdued kind, which works like fire around his heart, while the exterior man—the surface of his demeanor—is calm and passionless; he thinks more than he says, and reads more than you have any idea of. His taste is refined, and his sensibility acute.