1833

 

Prudence Crandell opens a school for African American girls in Canterbury, Connecticut. McLaughlin explains: “She was cast into jail, and her school building was destroyed.” (45/343; this page number seems to be in error)

 

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The Domestic Manners of Americans by Frances Trollope is published. (Today, it is available online.) 

She was a bright little Englishwoman, who had come to this country and established a bazaar at Cincinnati, which proved a failure. So she sought revenge and wealth by a caricature sketch of our pioneer life, founded on fact, but very unpalatable. Expectoration was her pet abomination, and she was inclined to think that this “most vile and universal habit of chewing tobacco” was the cause of a remarkable peculiarity in the male physiognomy of Americans, the almost uniform thinness and compression of their lips. So often did Mrs. Trollope recur to this habit that she managed to give the impression that this country was in those days a sort of huge spittoon. (Benjamin Perley Poole, Reminiscences; Volume 1, p. 110.) 

Mrs. Trollope found much to complain about in America.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Retired, as I am, I wonder what pieces of Trollope’s work might resonate with students. 

A quick skimming of just the first three chapters turns up this, from Chapter II, an observation she makes during her visit to New Orleans. 

Of all the prejudices I have ever witnessed, this appears to me the most violent, and the most inveterate. Quadroon girls, the acknowledged daughters of wealthy American or Creole fathers, educated with all of style and accomplishments which money can procure at New Orleans, and with all the decorum that care and affection can give; exquisitely beautiful, graceful, gentle, and amiable, these are not admitted, nay, are not on any terms admissable, into the society of the Creole families of Louisiana. They cannot marry; that is to say, no ceremony can render an union with them legal or binding; yet such is the powerful effect of their very peculiar grace, beauty, and sweetness of manner, that unfortunately they perpetually become the objects of choice and affection. If the Creole ladies have privilege to exercise the awful power of repulsion, the gentle Quadroon has the sweet but dangerous vengeance of possessing that of attraction. The unions formed with this unfortunate race are said to be often lasting and happy, as far as any unions can be so, to which a certain degree of disgrace is attached. 

 

And this, from Chapter III, describing a group of Kentucky flatboat men, returning north on a steamboat: 

From the account given by a man servant we had on board, who shared their quarters, they are a most disorderly set of persons, constantly gambling and wrangling, very seldom sober, and never suffering a night to pass without giving practical proof of the respect in which they hold the doctrines of equality, and community of property. The clerk of the vessel was kind enough to take our man under his protection, and assigned him a berth in his own little nook; but as this was not inaccessible, he told him by no means to detach his watch or money from his person during the night. Whatever their moral characteristics may be, these Kentuckians are a very noble-looking race of men; their average height considerably exceeds that of Europeans, and their countenances, excepting when disfigured by red hair, which is not unfrequent, extremely handsome.

 

Mrs. Trollope was certainly offended by Americans’ eating habits, as she also notes in Chapter III: 

The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured, the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterwards with a pocket knife, soon forced us to feel that…the dinner hour was to be any thing rather than an hour of enjoyment.

 

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The land beyond the Mississippi remains largely uncharted, save for the work of the mountain men. Bernard DeVoto describes the type:

The mountain man’s eye had the Indian’s alertness, forever watching for the movement of boughs or grasses, for the passage of wildlife downwind, something unexplained floating in a stream, dust stirring in a calm, or the configuration of mere scratches on a cottonwood. His ear would never again hear church bells or the noises of a farm but, like the Indian’s, was tuned to catch any sound in a country where every sound was provisionally a death warning. He dressed like an Indian, in blankets, robes, buckskins, and moccasins, and it was sometimes his humor to grease his hair and stripe his face with vermilion. He lived like an Indian in bark huts or skin lodges, and married a succession of squaws. He thought like an Indian, propitiating the demons of the wild, making medicine, and consulting the omens. He had on call a brutality as instant as the Indian’s and rather more relentless. The Indians who had proved themselves his friends were his friends just so long as they seemed to be; all others were to be shot and scalped at sight. It was the Indian law, no violence to be left unavenged. (5/63)    

Crow wigwam by George Catlin.

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May 6: This could not happen today, nor would the assailant get off so lightly: 

Lt. [Robert] Randolph, angry at having been accused of embezzling money while aboard the U.S.S. Constitution took offense over his treatment. A court of inquiry acquitted him; but President Jackson ended up dismissing him from the Navy, regardless. In a cabin on a steamboat one day, Randolph pulled the President’s nose. He was immediately put ashore for his rudeness. (Benjamin Perley Poole, Reminiscences; Volume 1, pp. 122.)