are aware by the traditions of Puritanism which it was supposed the Yankees inherited. They recalled the story of how Bradford stopped Christmas revelers and sent them to work; they pictured Puritan children as forbidden to laugh and talk on the Sabbath day; and some may have heard the story of how Washington, while president, was once stopped by a Connecticut tithing man who must be informed why His Excellency fared forth on the Lord's Day instead of resting at his inn or attending public worship.10 Two remarks may be made on this point. First, while Puritanism unquestionably had a somber discipline, there was not lacking even among Puritans the play instinct which persisted in cropping out despite all efforts of the authorities at repression. Second, the nineteenth century Yankees register a wide departure from early Puritanism in their social proclivities, and the difference was particularly marked in the West. Even church services were modified to fit the needs of the less resolute souls. Music became an important feature and it was adapted more or less to special occasions." Sunday Blue Laws were gradually relaxed, though never abandoned in principle. Well-to-do city people allowed themselves vacation trips, visits to watering places, and to scenic wonders like Niagara Falls.12 In town and country alike dancing became an amusement of almost universal vogue, though protested by some religionists, and rural neighborhoods found bowling such a fascinating game for men and boys that the almanac maker thought well to caution his readers against over-indulgence therein.13 Ball playing, picnicing, sleighing, coasting, skating were 10 The story was printed in the Columbian Centinel, Boston, December, 1789. "See Diary of Sarah Connell Ayer (Portland, Me., 1910), 227. 12 See Almon Danforth Hodges and His Neighbors (Boston, 1909), 217-218. 13 "At sun two hours high," says the Farmer's Almanack, 1815, "the day is finished and away goes men and boys to the bowling alley. Haying, hoeing, plowing, sowing all must give way to sport and toddy. Now this is no way for a farmer. It will do for the city lads to sport and relax in this way, and so there are proper times and seasons for farmers to take pleasure of this sort, for I agree that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." among the outdoor sports much indulged in by Yankees, while family and neighborhood visiting, the quilting bee, donation parties, church socials, and the like furnished indoor recreation. The circus and the "cattle show" were events in the western Yankeeland equal in social significance to Artillery Day in Boston. Thus, while it is true that Yankees were a sober people, of prevailingly serious mien and purpose, they were not averse to the relaxations of play and recreation. The question whether or not the Yankees were fun loving cannot be answered by yes or no. If we mean by fun the rollicking joviality characteristic of irresponsible, carefree folk, the answer is no. Many Yankees found their best fun in work or business. To the David Harum type, which was fairly numerous, a horse trade was more fun than a picnic. Some Boston merchants were so immersed in their business that, though very pious, they nevertheless spent Sunday afternoon going over their books and writing business letters.14 Being serious minded, they tended to make their chief concern an obsession, and could hardly be happy away from it. But the majority were quite as ready to amuse themselves out of working hours, as are the Italians or other social stocks that have a reputation for fun and frolic. The Yankees also found intellectual enjoyment in culti vating quickness of retort, in giving utterance to clever if homely aphorisms, and in a kind of whimsical humor. These traits emerge in their vernacular literature like "Major Jack Downing's" Thirty Years out of the Senate, and especially Lowell's Biglow Papers. "The squire'll have a parson in his barn a preachin' to his cattle one o' these days, see if he don't," said one of "Tim Bunker's" shiftless neighbors by way of summarizing the squire's over-niceness in caring for his Jersey cows. "Ez big ez wat hogs dream 14 See Hodges and His Neighbors, 94. on when they're most too fat to snore"; "that man is mean enough to steal acorns from a blind hog"; "the coppers ain't all tails"; "pop'lar as a hen with one chicken"; "quicker'n greased lightnin'”; “a hen's time ain't much"; "handy as a pocket in a shirt"; "he's a whole team and the dog under the wagon"; "so thievish they had to take in their stone walls at night"; "so black that charcoal made a chalk mark on him"; "painted so like marble that it sank in water"-the above are all Yankeeisms of approved lineage and illustrate a characteristic type of Yankee humor. The example below is of a rarer sort. "Pretty heavy thunder you have here," said the English Captain Basil Hall to a lounger in front of a Massachusetts tavern. "Waal, we do," came the drawling reply, "considerin' the number of the inhabitants.' About the time that Yankees began to emigrate to Wisconsin a talented French writer, Michel Chevalier, gave the world a brilliant and on the whole favorable characterization of them. "The Yankee," he says, "is reserved, cautious, distrustful; he is thoughtful and pensive, but equable; his manners are without grace, modest but dignified, cold, and often unprepossessing; he is narrow in his ideas, but practical, and possessing the idea of the proper, he never rises to the grand. He has nothing chivalric about him and yet he is adventurous, and he loves a roving life. His imagination is active and original, producing, however, not poetry but drollery. The Yankee is the laborious ant; he is industrious and sober and, on the sterile soil of New England, niggardly; transplanted to the promised land in the west he continues moderate in his habits, but less inclined to count the cents. In New England he has a large share of prudence, but once thrown into the midst of the treasures of the west he becomes a speculator, a gambler even, although he has a great horror of cards, dice, and all games of chance and even of skill except the innocent game of bowls." Chevalier also says: "The fusion of the European with the Yankee takes place but slowly, even on the new soil of the west; for the Yankee is not a man of promiscuous society; he believes that Adam's oldest son was a Yankee." The Yankee was not more boastful than other types of Americans, though his talent for exaggerative description was marked. Yet he had a pronounced national obsession and was uncompromising in his patriotism: "This land o'ourn, I tell ye's got to be a better country than man ever see," was put into a Yankee's mouth by one of their own spokesmen and represents the Yankee type of mild jingoism. It is full cousin to that other sentiment which also this writer assigns to him: Resolved, that other nations all, if set longside of us, For vartoo, larnin, chiverlry, aint noways wuth a cuss.15 These are but cruder expressions of ideas dating from the Revolutionary War, and of which Timothy Dwight, who was not a poet by predestination, gave us in verse a noble example: Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise, The queen of the world, and child of the skies! It need not be supposed that all Yankees who came to Wisconsin or other western states were familiar with these glowing lines. But it is almost certain that, in the common schools of Yankeedom, most of them had thrilled to the matchless cadences of Webster's reply to Hayne. What more was needed, by way of literary support, to a pride of country which, if a trifle ungenerous to others, was based on facts all had experienced. 15 J. R. Lowell, Biglow Papers. THE GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC1 HOSEA W. ROOD A UNIQUE ORGANIZATION The Grand Army of the Republic is entirely unlike any society that ever existed before it. Nothing of the kind could come from any but a volunteer army of citizen soldiers-men who fought for principles dear to them. There is no other nation-wide organization of old men. It is now sixty-one years since the beginning of the War for the Union, fifty-seven since our army was disbanded; and a hundred thousand of its members are still compactly bound together, their objects being to perpetuate the spirit of patriotism, to preserve the fraternal relations of those days when as boys and young men they served and suffered together in what was to them a holy cause, to give aid to those who are so unfortunate as to need help, and to honor the memory of their heroic dead. Truly it is a unique organization. And it is as systematically organized today as was the army in which its members served more than half a century ago. To be sure, most of the posts are dwindling away-one by one going out of existence. So it was with our companies and regiments in war times. But while they could be recruited, we cannot. We are not far away from the inevitable. Yet we do not mourn because of it. When an aged good man dies we do not mourn his loss. We attend his funeral and say it was beautiful-beautiful in the memory of what he had been, the good he had done. So may it be with the passing of the Grand Army of the Republic. OUR ALLIED SOCIETIES The allied societies of the Grand Army of the Republic are the Woman's Relief Corps, the Ladies of the Grand 1 For the preceding installment on this subject, see ante, 280-294 (March, 1923). |