PREFATORY.

TREATING THE READER TO AN ACCOUNT OF THE AUTHOR, AND OF THE PLAN, OBJECT, AND PRINCIPLES OF THIS HISTORY.

The Author, proposing to be intimate with the Reader, deems an Introduction desirable.—Born Early and Poor.—How the Two Facts were managed and overcome.—School Days and Nights.—College Lines, crooked and straight.—Father’s Face against his.—A New American Decalogue.—Into the Married and other States and Territories.—Settling down.—Advantages of a Sub-urban Residence.—Outside and Inside Views of the Author’s Head.—Plans and Purposes of the Work.—Laughing Facts.—Roman Precedents.—Impartiality holding the Shears and Tape.—Sources of our Information.—Acknowledgments to Smith and Brown.—Our Illustrations.

The Reader scrapes Acquaintance with the Author.

Due it is alike to the originality and dignity of this work, and to the respectability, comfort, and good understanding of the reader and ourself, that a formal introduction should take place at the very outset.

For although we feel sure that withoutthis we shall, after keeping company together a few evenings, exchange confidences and hearts with each other for life, yet to avoid needless suspicions,—mute and silent though they be,—and to obviate the hazards and discomforts of injurious side-glances, interrogative of my origin, person, parentage, education, and moral character,—which thepaterfamiliasmay, and naturally would, cast upon a new teacher, who offers to take a place in his household, sit in one corner of the family room when the lamps are lit, and to sleep in the spare bedroom when they are turned down,—I propose to state at once who it is that comes with this friendly audacity, what are his intentions, and how he expects to behave himself in a relation at once so familiar and responsible, viz. that of a good-natured, equable, humorous companion and friend, indicating and painting facts in a pleasant, genial, and healthy way.

First, then, as to ourself. I say not myself; for this would be to roll immediately my complex egoism out of the manifold garments which a historian wears of course; but I say Ourself, that gathered, round Impersonation which may be well supposed to be a crystallized something, like a cunning frost-work on the long window-panes of history,—an armless hand writingMeneand other hieroglyphics on the wall, or a Briareus with his hundred hands, heads, and feet, running in a hundred different ways, staring through a hundred telescopes at the calm ages, and writing with a century of hands the doings, undoings, and misdoings of the race. This manifold, dignified mystery I mean to put on and wear after this chapter; butin order to insure the confidence which I now seek, I shall slip, for a few minutes, out of my state gear, and taking your hand,—now no longer withheld nor even hesitatingly given,—look trustingly into your eyes, and mention a few of those particulars of myself, which you have a gracious right to know, in order to judge of my standing in the world, my intellectual competency and fitness, and the plumptitude of my moral proportions.

I was born very early in life; so early, in fact, that although present, and making such an effort as befitted my first appearance, I was so inexpressibly interested in the matter, that I forgot my future office, that of recorder of passing events. The fact of my birth—a fact which is apt to happen to most people—is not perhaps so singular as that, being born in the United States, I contrived to live beyond the first five years, that fatal semi-decade. I ought, perhaps, now to add, in order to quiet any apprehensions after my last alarming remark, that “I still live”; and that, having survived the perils and plums of parental kindness in infancy, I hope to outlive the equally fatal neglect and indifference which marks our treatment of old age.

My parents, at the time I was given to the world, were poor, and, therefore, not respectable. They had been simple enough to marry young, and for love; and although they had mated each other well, they had failed to put a yoke upon the neck of fortune. These early struggles, however, stiffened in them the moral elements, and marbleized, so to speak, the soft woods of their country natures, making a substance very different from that thin, moral veneering which is upholsteredfrom the beechen groves that timber the sunny slopes of life. Both of them were Presbyterians; always attending the Sunday services, sitting in a gallery seat, close to the pulpit, and so taking the brunt of the hard blows which were rightfully felt in, and—I sometimes thought—spent themselves upon, our uncushioned pew.

An offer from my father’s brother, who had become rich in mercantile business, drew my father and the family in my fifth year to the city of Philadelphia. With this change of base came sharper tactics against the army of poverty; and at last, by fighting it on the same line, although it took all the summer of his life, he achieved the victory. I was then sent to the best schools; took lessons at home in some branches from a private teacher; took—I own it now—lessons in other branches privately, out of the house, without my father’s knowledge, although at his expense for the tuition; and at last I went to college.

Hard study, matched by an irrepressible love of pranks at night; a knowledge of Euclid’s lines and clothes line; of belles-lettres and unlettered belles; of geometrical and other squares; of chemistry applied to known uses and to experiments for which there were no precedents in the books; prizes offered by the faculty, and prizes offered by Mrs. Green and Mrs. White in the persons of their handsome daughters,—these all braided together the threads of my university life into a pattern which, if not unusual, was made up principally of figures little admired at home.

My father was not at all pleased with the well-red bill I brought with me, and quite as little with theunsigned ones which followed me, from college; and, concluding that I might run my own face for a while, set his sharply against me.

I took to teaching; sounding over again the shallow depths of old studies, but often striking the lead on the rocky bottom of a temper too long indulged not to be stern when touched by children’s thoughtlessness.

My father’s death cast upon me responsibilities for my mother and the estate, which dropped the curtain upon my dream-life, and lifted it from the long perspective of actual work and business cares. Among my father’s papers I found the following original document, which I reproduce here, as showing his shrewdness of observation, and the character of the parent who helped to form some elements of my own.

“A New American Decalogue.

“Hear, O Jonathan, the commandments which thou hast made,—teaching them to thy infants, thy Freedmen, thy Irishmen, thy office-holders,—the asses within thy gates.

“Thou shalt have no other God but Gain. Trade, and labor, husband-ry and all other brokerage, shall be his profits.

II.

“Graven images and pictures other than greenbacks and fractional currency thou shalt not make.

“These shalt continue to be unlike anything elsewhere, in the heavens above or in the earth beneath; and to them, therefore, thou mayst bow down thyselfunto the thirty-third or thirty-fourth generation, using up in their pursuit all thy soles, thy health, and thy neighbor as thyself.

III.

“Thou shalt not mistake any other god for the aforesaid, such as Religion, True Worship, Charity, Virtue, Obedience, Truth; for Gain, being a jealous God, requires all your time, strength, health, soul, and body, and will show no mercy upon those who keep not his day-book, ledger, and cash-books.

IV.

“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it wholly to thyself.

“Honor thy children, bowing down to them and worshipping them, giving them what they least require, that their days may be the shortest, in the United States, of all lands whatsoever.

VI.

“Thou shalt not kill the goose which lays the golden eggs.

VII.

“Thou shalt commit adulterations with almost everything in the earth beneath, and especially by the waters which are throughout the world.

VIII.

“Thou shalt steal whenever an official opportunity offers.

“Making a Cæsar of thyself, thou shalt render unto him all the money that is brought unto thee.

IX.

“Thou shalt forbear all witness against thy neighbor; lest thy time be consumed needlessly in the public service, and he afterwards, also, witness against thee.

“Thou shalt acquire so much by the foregoing commandments, as not to covet thy neighbor’s house and lot, nor any other real or un-real estate of his whatsoever.”

Settling up the property which my father had accumulated, although disregarding this code, and unsettling myself, I roamed abroad long and widely; practically dog-earing in Europe, Asia, and Africa the leaves of that illuminated volume of travel which I had all my life been intent to own.

Then came marriage,—religious convictions,—studying for the ministry,—children in the house,—studying them, and how to feed them,—ordination,—a call to a rus-urban congregation in the vicinity of New York,—only a short hour’s ride on a rail, and well feathered, without tar, by plentiful dust,—preaching to an assemblage, gathered from behind sharp counters on week-days, to measure my discourses critically, and to secure their money’s worth on Sundays,—and all the nameless little experiences that roll over the cog-wheels of a suburban parson’s life. Two bronchial attacks commissioned me to lookup a better throat,—once in a journey to South America, and once across the prairies to California.

These experiences, added to their predecessors, have accumulated, with my readings, the materials for a history which the leisure half-hours, paragraphed between the compact duties of my thirty years of ministerial work, have permitted me to put together, and which now, dear reader, I place, as mycor cordium, in your hands.

It is the cream, skimmed from my carefully kept dairy; or rather the condensed milk of my very being, left at your door, to make your tea pleasanter, and your pudding sweeter and richer.

As you may be curious to possess, and I am most happy of an opportunity to get off my latest photogram, I add, as an item serving to assist you in making up the sum of my qualifications, this

External View of the Author’s Head,

bare-ly remarking that as its unfurnished state may disappoint you, I will endeavor to restore your pleasing illusion, by giving you gratuitously

An Inside View,

flattering myself that, although you may find nothing in it, you will at least confess, that seldom dare an author venture upon such an exposure of his stock in trade.

Having now furnished all the main elements which will enable my pupil readers to outline my intellectual portraiture, having frankly shown four sides of myself,—a lower side and an upper side, an outside and inside,—being the only sides, I trust, that I shall take in this history, I crave leave now to add,secondly, a word as to the plan, object, and principles of this history. They are, in brief, to put facts, veritable and authentic facts, whether agreeable or disagreeable in themselves, in that pleasing dress that will make them welcome visitors to the drawing-room, good chums in the bedchamber, chatty companions in the cars, on steamers and steamboats, jolly physiciansto the dyspeptically lean, and pleasantly wise counsellors to the troubled.

I feel so sure that, as not one of the illuminated readers of these chronicles has ever mistaken dulness for wisdom, so not one will need be reminded that the most solid and trusted truths may wear the smiles of joy and hilarity.

The Romans on their solemn festival days were wont to carry in their processions the images of their ancestors, even those long deceased, wreathed with flowers. So carry we the images of the Past, garlanded with the rosy links of fun and jollity.

We shall not be tempted by the lure of originality, nor even by the attractive ambition of gaining credit for profound critical and historical acumen, to follow the late fashion of dressing up stale and unwholesome characters in fine clothes and qualities. We shall neither foist the virtuous regimentals and well-earned epaulettes of Washington upon Benedict Arnold, nor tease history to fling a mantle of false charity over Burr’s treason. We shall not worry the public conscience into any praise, however faint, of the crimson waistcoat of Mr. Jefferson Davis, nor waste any admiration upon the spotted neck-tie, perhaps too loosely drawn, of Jacob Thompson. Impartial justice shall hold our tape and handle our shears.

It is usual for historians to indicate the sources of their information; but as we have refused no means of enriching these annals, using for that purpose whatever materials our multiform reading could supply, from the Ramayana, the great Sanscrit epic, impressed on wax, down to the last published child’s primer, printedon patented wooden paper, we could not name all our authorities without giving a catalogue inconvenient for our publishers, and too long for the abridged lives of our readers. We cannot, however, refrain from acknowledging our obligations to John Smith, Esq., for original information, novel ideas, and new turns of thought around old notions, running through every page of this history; to Mr. Jones, for valuable public documents; and to Mr. Brown, the well-known sexton of Grace Church, New York, who in the course of his lifelong diggings, has exhumed several pieces of Americans, whom we have reconstructed and preserved in our historical cases.

As to the illustrations which flash upon and light up our pages, they will speak for themselves; if they do not, any word of ours would be,Vox et preterea nihil.

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