AMERICAN ENGLISH

When James Monroe was reelected to the presidency in 1820, the United States had been a sovereign nation for more than four decades. It had its own monetary system and its own Constitution and government, but the nation still did not seem to have its own.... View more

AMERICAN ENGLISH

When James Monroe was reelected to the presidency in 1820, the United States had been a sovereign nation for more than four decades. It had its own monetary system and its own Constitution and government, but the nation still did not seem to have its own language. For some it was an important question: If no national language existed, should one be created to establish American identity? And if a national language already existed, what were its characteristics? Inseparable from these questions was the relation of American English to British English. Were they one language or two? Should the people of the United States conform to a British standard, or should they form their own? These questions were vigorously debated during the first half of the nineteenth century and continued to generate controversy decades after the Civil War.

As early as the 1780s patriots called for a national language to confirm America's independence from England. Among the first champions of the cause was Noah Webster (1758–1843), a graduate of Yale University and a lawyer, journalist, and teacher who was destined to become preeminent in the history of American English and immortalized in America's dictionaries. In his Dissertations on the English Language (1789), published more than a decade before his first dictionary, Webster declares: "Customs, habits, and language, as well as government should be national. America should have her own distinct from all the world. Such is the policy of other nations, and such must be our policy, before the states can be either independent or respectable" (p. 179). Supporters and opponents of Webster's position argued the point in letters, speeches, magazines, and books throughout the early years of the Republic.

By the second decade of the nineteenth century the range of attitudes was clear. Many Americans wanted their language to conform as closely as possible to British English so that British readers might continue readily to comprehend the writings of Americans and vice versa; so that Americans of the future could maintain contact with their literary heritage; and for the continued facility of commercial and cultural exchange between the nations. The distinguished philologist John Pickering (1777–1846), compiler of the first significant collection of Americanisms, Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to Be Peculiar to the United States of America (1816), repudiated the idea of a unique American language, warned against the natural tendency for that very thing to happen, and cited the "final separation of languages of Spain and Portugal" as an example to be avoided (Baron, p. 34).

Ardent patriots at the other extreme proposed abolishing English altogether, making French or Hebrew the national language, or inventing a new one. The majority of serious commentators took the middle ground, rejecting both colonialist dependence on England and the idea of a separate language. The respected poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Trumbull, the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, and the poet, editor, and critic James Russell Lowell held views similar to those expressed by John Marshall, chief justice of the Supreme Court, in 1821: "The English language is also ours; and the attempt to change it would be more than Quixotism. The attempt will be to preserve and improve it" (Read, p. 1158). Soon Webster too was no longer calling for a separate language. In 1831, in a letter to the editor of the Westminster Review, he wrote: "Our language is English. . . . It is desirable that the language on both sides of the Atlantic should remain the same . . . but some differences must necessarily exist" (Baron, p. 55). On one point all sides agreed: new words were required to denote activities and features of the landscape existing only in America. Thomas Jefferson, the most illustrious defender of innovation, made the case in a letter dated 16 August 1813 to the grammarian John Waldo, thanking him for his Rudiments of English Grammar (1811): "The new circumstances under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects." Then putting his principle into practice, he added, "Necessity obliges us to neologize" (13:340, 346), thus transforming the young noun "neologism" (coined in 1803), meaning "a new word, usage, or expression," into a verb meaning "create new words."

AMERICANISMS

The expansion of the English language in America to include thousands of words and phrases not known or current in England raised the vexing question of "Americanisms," a term that a Scotsman, the Reverend John Witherspoon (1723–1794)—a former president of Princeton University, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a member of the Continental Congress—claimed to have invented in 1781. In Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), an Americanism is simply "an American idiom." John Russell Bartlett (1805–1886) identified nine classes of Americanisms in the 1859 edition of his Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States. According to the Virginia Literary Museum and Journal of Belles Lettres, published in 1829–1830, Americanisms were of two kinds: "old words used in a new sense" and "new words of indigenous origin" (Mathews, p. 99). Whether or not they were called Americanisms, several classes of words or phrases that distinguished American English from British English were easily identified. The contact of Americans with different cultures enriched American English by hundreds of words derived from European languages, notably French, Dutch, German, and Spanish. But by far the greatest number of loanwords came from American Indian languages. In The English Language in America (1925), George Philip Krapp lists some 250 words of Indian origin, exclusive of proper names. Many remain current: for example such animal names as "caribou," "chipmunk," "hog," "moose," "opossum," "raccoon," "skunk," "woodchuck" (1:165–167).

More likely to be called Americanisms were words and phrases of English origin. H. L. Mencken in The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (1919) at one point lists words that were current in the United States in the nineteenth century but had become obsolete in England, among them "flap-jack," "molasses," "home-spun," "cesspool," "whittle," "hustle," "fall" (for "autumn") (p. 128). Conversely words "in full use in England," such as "yon," "yonder," and "over" (for "too") were becoming obsolete in America (North American Review, October 1860, p. 522). Americans did not hesitate to change the meaning of words still current in England. For instance, in nineteenth-century British, "plantation" meant primarily the act of planting seeds or placing plants into soil; it also meant the planting of persons in some locality, synonymous with "colonization." In America "plantation" came quickly to denote not an activity but a place—an estate or large farm. While in England a "creek" was an inlet of the sea, a narrow passage between islands, even a small port, in America the meaning of a rivulet or stream was firmly established by the eighteenth century. "Store" is another case in point. To the British the noun "store" meant a supply of something held for future use, as a store of food or clothing. "Store" carried a connotation of adequacy or abundance, so that if one had a "store" of food that meant the supply was large. In America "store" by the nineteenth century meant what the British called a "shop": a retail establishment where goods were sold. Numerous other words evolved so quickly and completely in America they soon required definition for the British to understand.

Americans were also prone to converting one part of speech to another. As Mencken points out, "The early Americans showed that spacious disregard for linguistic nicety which has characterized their descendants ever since. They reduced verb-phrases to simple verbs, turned verbs into nouns, nouns into verbs, and adjectives into either or both." He cites as examples the reduction of "to convey by deed" and "to lay on the table," which in American legal parlance became simply "to deed" and "to table" (p. 117). Among the slew of nouns that early became verbs are "to author," "to engineer," "to hog," "to scalp," and "to stump." Verbs that became adjectives by, as Mencken says, "shading down suffixes to a barbaric simplicity" are the likes of "classy," "scary," and "tasty" (p. 117).

American inventiveness shone further in forming compounds of English words, demonstrating "the national talent for condensing a complex thought . . . into a vivid and arresting image" (p. 142). Americans ate hoe-cake, corn-dodgers, pop-corn, egg-plant, and pea-nuts; some lived in the back-woods, others in bottom-lands; they cleared under-brush, burned pine-knots during cold-snaps, and traveled by bob-sled. They rough-housed and had housewarmings and spelling-bees. From the frontier steadily moving westward came a flood of expressions that became metaphors: "to cave in," "to bark up the wrong tree," "to take to the woods," "to darken one's door," "to fly off the handle," "to have a hard row to hoe." Political campaigns after the War of 1812 generated new compounds that endured: "gag-rule," "landslide," "dark-horse," "lame-duck," "on-the-fence." Verbs current in Andrew Jackson's administrations (1828–1836)—"to bolt," "to lobby," "to straddle"—remained staples of political talk. The gold rush of 1849 brought "prospector," "pan-out," "flash in the pan," and "strike it rich" into Americans' vocabulary. With the development of the railroads came more new compounds: "box-car," "hand-car," "round-trip," "cow-catcher."

The constant flow into the language of new words and phrases made inevitable a continuous debate about Americanisms. Which were acceptable? Which should be rejected? In the United States the arguments were exacerbated by the steady barrage of British criticism of American speech. The need to retaliate after defeat in two wars no doubt accounts in part for the savage attacks in the nineteenth century by English quarterlies and English travelers in the United States. But even observers who were most sympathetic to the Republic and were prepared to take a friendly interest in the new country made unfavorable comments. After visiting America in 1837–1838, Captain Frederick Marryat, a British naval officer and novelist, wondered at "how very debased the language has become in a short period in America" (Mathews, p. 131). He admired in American metaphors "an energy which is very remarkable" (p. 139) but noted that, while "their lower classes are more intelligible than ours," the "higher classes" often lapsed from the standard of the "well-educated English" (p. 131).

Hostile critics routinely denounced departures from British usage as barbarisms, corruptions, vulgarisms, and perversions. In Men and Manners in America (1833), for instance, Thomas Hamilton says: "The privilege of barbarizing the King's English is assumed by all ranks and conditions of men . . . . They assume unlimited liberty in the use of expect, reckon, guess and calculate" when what they mean is "think," "believe," or "suppose" (Mencken, p. 24). Marryat and other Englishmen were impressed by the prevalence of the all-purpose verb "to fix," which Godfrey Thomas Vigne identified in 1832 as meaning "to be done, made, mixed, mended, bespoken, hired, ordered, arranged, procured, finished, lent or given" (Mencken, p. 26). Such American substitutes for British words as "rooster" for "cock"—which by the 1820s had become a vulgar term for the male sex organ—"boss" for "master," and "help" for "servant" were also viewed with contempt, as was the promiscuous use of "lady" and "gentleman" applied to men and women of all ranks and conditions—all made more disagreeable by the "nasal twang" English travelers professed to hear everywhere in the United States. In The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), Charles Dickens puts the defense of America into the tobacco-stained mouth of an uncouth braggart politician, while the most cultured American character delivers criticism of his or her countrymen's manners and speech.

Americans did not stop reading Dickens's novels, but they defended themselves in other ways. Writers in the North American Review accused British observers of fabricating the American speech they criticized. One claimed that the novelist Frances (Fanny) Trollope, in her popular travel book Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), put into the mouths of Americans "English vulgarism[s] unknown in any part of the United States" (January 1833, p. 14). Others noted that British writers used many verbs, such as "advocate," "immigrate," and "progress," that they stigmatized as Americanisms, and that they perpetrated their own neologisms—"guardianize," "gutturality," "heathendom" (January 1847, p. 186)—and even more cumbersome and ridiculous constructions the likes of "cacodemonize," meaning "demonize," and "evangelizationeer," meaning "evangelist." These American critics pointed out that often words and phrases "charged as being new-invented barbarities of ours were mostly drawn from the pure wells of English undefiled, and had happened to be preserved in America while they were lost in England" (January 1833, p. 20). James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) mounts a detailed and lengthy defense of what he calls the Yankee dialect in the introduction to the second series of The Biglow Papers (1867), hoping to show that "the Yankee often has antiquity and very respectable literary authority on his side" (p. 217).

American writers, including those with strong ties to England, defended American English in positive ways, by praising it and using it. Lowell urged American writers to seek language "at its living sources," in "our popular idiom . . . racy with life and vigor, and originality" (p. 214). He prophesied that the United States would be "past all question . . . the great home and centre" of the English language. In "The American Scholar" (1837) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) declares, "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe" (p. 47); he pronounces the style of Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and Edward Gibbon "cold and pedantic" (p. 46), declares that "Life is our dictionary" (p. 39), and exhorts American writers to celebrate "the near, the low, the common" (p. 45) in the language of everyday life. The genteel narrator of James Fenimore Cooper's (1789–1851) Leatherstocking Tales uses American words and colloquialisms without comment. His vocabulary in chapter 6 of The Pioneers (1823), describing a local doctor, includes "butternut," "home-spun," "jobber," "meetinghouse," "one-horse sleigh," "settlement," "to shoot up," and "to break the ice."

DEVELOPMENT OF STANDARD AMERICAN ENGLISH

Americans made their most important, far-reaching defense by promoting American English as one language, uniform throughout the country. Many prominent men, including John Adams, John Marshall, and James Fenimore Cooper, all of whom rejected the idea of a separate American language, concurred with Noah Webster's belief that "our political harmony is . . . concerned in a uniformity of language" (Dissertations, p. 20). Both English and American observers noted that differences in the speech of regions and classes were much greater in England than in the United States. Still the peculiarities of idiom and pronunciation marking speech in New England, the South, and the West were feared as sources of linguistic corruption and threats to national unity. The expansion of the United States to the Pacific Ocean, the arrival in the antebellum years of thousands of immigrants, and internal strife foreshadowing the Civil War made ever more urgent the need for one language to unify the nation.

The importance placed on a uniform language at once raised the question of establishing a standard. By what authority was a standard to be created and implemented? The one sustained effort to legislate uniformity was made by William S. Cardell (1780–1828), a grammarian who in 1820 proposed an American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres to establish the forms of good usage and thus, as he told Thomas Jefferson in a letter, to "maintain, as far as practicable, an English standard of writing and pronunciation, correct, fixed, and uniform, throughout our extensive territory" (Baron, p. 101). Cardell envisioned an American equivalent of the venerable Académie Française, or French Academy, founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu to establish and disseminate a standard language, to supplant regional dialects, and to publish an official exhaustive dictionary. Many leading citizens supported these aims, but no organization like the French Academy, which at the end of the twentieth century was publishing the ninth edition of its exhaustive dictionary, ever developed in the United States.

Webster remained aloof from Cardell's efforts, which failed after three years, but his American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828 and revised twice in his lifetime, became the single most important work in the development of Standard American English. Preceded by his American Spelling Book; or, First Part of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1787), his American Spelling Book, Containing the Rudiments of the English Language, for the Use of Schools in the United States (1804), and his Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), Webster's monumental two-volume work contained definitions of some seventy thousand words, including thousands appearing for the first time in any dictionary (Simpson, p. 141). In the preface to the American Dictionary, Webster states his aim "to ascertain the true principle of the language, in its orthography and structure; to purify it from some palpable errors, and reduce the number of its anomalies, thus giving it more regularity and consistency in its forms, both of words and sentences; and in this manner to furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue."

Webster opposed any standard created by British authority or by a privileged class of Americans. He favored a standard based on "the rules of the language itself, and the general practice of the nation" (Dissertations, p. 27); he sought a closer connection between spoken and written language; but his lifelong effort to eradicate localisms indicates a qualified acceptance of the usages of the common people as a standard. Other writers who were more conservative on language looked for their standard to "the class of highest cultivation as exerted especially through the medium of literature" (North American Review, January 1867, p. 53), "not the usage of the majority, but of the learned" (North American Review, July 1849, p. 98). Washington Irving warned that "any deviation on our part from the best London usage will be liable to be considered as a provincialism" (Read, p. 1165). In Notions of the Americans (1828), James Fenimore Cooper claimed that "the people of the United States . . . speak, as a body, an incomparably better English than the people of the Mother country" (pp. 361–362), but he was an exacting critic of the American penchant for euphemism (polite deflation), affectation (linguistic pretense), and "turgid abuse of terms" (American Democrat, p. 110). In his chapter "On Language" in The American Democrat (1838), Cooper cites departures from British definitions, calling them "popular abuses of significations." For instance, Americans use "park" when they mean "square," "pond" when they mean "lake," and "creek" when they mean "stream." "In pronunciation," Cooper says, "the faults are still more numerous" (p. 111), and he recommends the British pronunciation of "clerk" (clark), "gold" (goold), "lieutenant" (levtenant), and other words as being "more in conformity with polite usage" (p. 112).

Noah Webster came as close as any one person to creating the authority that determines correct usage. But in the absence of an academy or a court, schools were essential in forming and maintaining a national standard. As early as 1789, Webster declared that "nothing but the establishment of schools and some uniformity in the use of books, can annihilate differences in speaking and preserve the purity of the American tongue" (Dissertations, p. 19). In providing teachers and shaping the course of study, New England led the way as the region with the most elementary schools, grammar schools, and private academies as well as with the first two American universities, Harvard (1636) and Yale (1701). Of the standard textbooks studied by millions of children in the nineteenth century, the most nationalistic were Webster's American Spelling Books, followed by his Elementary Spelling Book (1829), which were designed to promote "a uniform national language" (Krapp 1:17). By the 1820s Webster had abandoned his promotion of phonetic spelling, but he established the simplified spellings that distinguish American from British usage, for example, "ax," "wagon," "mold," "medieval," "program," "mask," "check," and "traveled" instead of "axe," "waggon," "mould," "mediaeval," "programme," "masque," "cheque," and "travelled"; and the removal of "u" from "honour," "favour," "neigh-bour," and the like.

Despite such support for American English, Lindley Murray's English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners, first published in 1795 and based on the British grammar of Robert Lowth, bishop of London, remained the preferred school text for more than fifty years. Murray's belief that the standard of good English should be formed on "the practice of the best and most correct writers . . . corroborated by general usage" (Baron, p. 145) was shared by other American grammarians of the period, such as Samuel Kirkham, Goold Brown, and William Chauncey Fowler, who likewise sought to regulate language through rules and exercises. Grammarians differed about the legitimacy of certain words but uniformly condemned as substandard such locutions as "don't know as," "had went," and "us girls go." Some coinages—"funeralize," "happify," "questionize," "publishment"—were generally reviled before they expired. Other favorite targets of purists became accepted English by the end of the century. For instance, "talented" was at first reviled by both British and American grammarians because it was used as a past participle but did not derive from a verb. Although "talented" was widely regarded as an Americanism, in fact it was coined in England early in the seventeenth century, then fell into obscurity there while it was used with greater frequency in the United States. In 1855 the American Charles Astor Bristed defended it in "The English Language in America," saying that "it is of little use to inveigh against such words" (Mencken, p. 70), and by 1911 it had been sanctioned within the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary and inculcated in the speech of both nations. "Reliable," "influential," "lengthy," "jeopardize," and numerous other words have a similar history.

For decades schoolchildren all over the United States studied the "best and most correct writers" in William Holmes McGuffey's Eclectic Reader series, which also contained pronunciation tables and exercises in articulation. Many of the prose selections, drawn from "the purest fountains of English literature," were by British writers of the eighteenth century. The 1853 edition of McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader included selections by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Robert Walpole. Political writings of Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and Daniel Webster and seven essays by Washington Irving represented American prose.

An article called "Expression in America" in the May 1857 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine emphasized the authority of teachers and ministers in promoting a uniform standard of good usage: "Our schools, colleges, and churches are to decide the speech of the new generations, and our popular education is our national academy" (p. 845). Harper's itself—a periodical with a large national circulation, publishing fiction, poetry, and articles of general interest addressed to a wide audience—represented another institution important in forming Americans' linguistic standard. From its first issue in June 1850 the magazine ardently supported the cause of national unity and opposed sectionalism and "barbaric individualism" (January 1861, p. 262). To help readers acquire "a correct knowledge of English" (April 1860, p. 694) and thus to further the goal of "a pure national speech" (May 1857, p. 845), the magazine published reviews and articles that warned against corruption of the language by "verbal inflation" and "stereotyped grandiloquence" (November 1852, p. 780), the bombast of "the spread-eagle style," and the slang and cant generated by newspapers and political campaigns (February 1867, p. 322). Somewhat ironically, perhaps, a large percentage of the literature published in Harper's was by English writers, including such super-stars as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray.

Harper's editors stressed the need of "settling the question now so important to the whole nation: 'What language is to be spoken and written in America?'" (May 1857, p. 845). But by 1850 this question essentially had been answered. The rules of polite usage were well enough fixed to distinguish correct English from the vulgar and unschooled. American and British English would not become separate languages. Prophecies that language in America would become as different from British English as Dutch and Swedish are different from German never came to pass. But American English became clearly distinct from the Standard English of Great Britain by hundreds of well-established differences in vocabulary, idiom, spelling, and pronunciation. By mid-century American English had developed into a rich, unique language born of American inventiveness and the confluence of many cultures, a language flexible and capacious enough to accommodate the constant influx of new words and the controversies they generated, able to contain opposing impulses to expand and to regulate the language. In his essay "America's Mightiest Inheritance," published in 1856 in the newspaper Life Illustrated, Walt Whitman extols the American language—"so long in growing, so sturdy and fluent, so appropriate to our America and the genius of its inhabitants."

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AMATEURISM AND SELF-PUBLISHING

About halfway through Moby-Dick (1851), Ishmael pauses to describe a beggar on the London docks. A one-legged man holds up a picture "representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg" (p. 312). Not everyone believes this.... View more

AMATEURISM AND SELF-PUBLISHING

About halfway through Moby-Dick (1851), Ishmael pauses to describe a beggar on the London docks. A one-legged man holds up a picture "representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg" (p. 312). Not everyone believes this beggar's story, but, says Ishmael, "the time of his justification has now come" (p. 312). It is not that his story is true, but rather that "his three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping" (p. 312). In one sense this self-published artist is a perfect amateur—a man whose works of art would never be printed in the modest commercial establishments found in the dockside neighborhood of Wapping. But he is also a professional—an artist with commercial aspirations, trying to live by selling his works.

As this scene suggests, it was not always easy to separate the amateur from the professional in the literary worlds of the first half of the nineteenth century. According to the literary historian William Charvat, the figure of the professional author in the United States emerged in the 1820s and 1830s, when for the first time it became possible to imagine writing as a full-time occupation. Professional writing, Charvat suggested, "provides a living for the author, like any other job; . . . it is a main and prolonged, rather than intermittent or sporadic, resource for the writer; . . . it is produced with the hope of extended sale in the open market, like any article of commerce; and . . . it is written with reference to buyers' tastes and reading habits" (p. 3).

AMATEURS AND THE LITERARY MARKETPLACE

Charvat defined the professional author, but what did it mean to be an amateur author? Was an amateur a part-time author, a one-time author, a poor, incompetent, or unpaid author, or merely a gentleman whose wealth freed him from the need to sell his work? Was an amateur an aspiring professional author? Or was an amateur one who was outside an emerging literary establishment—a woman, an African American, a former slave, a Native American, or a working person with experience and a few ideas who found a friendly printer willing to set words in type? Some amateurs surely wrote because they loved the craft; other were self-published writers; and still others occupied the low ranks of a literary establishment.

Many who commented on amateur authorship in the early years of the nineteenth century viewed amateurism with the disdain of aspiring professionals. In the summer of 1845, an author calling himself "Mimin" described for readers of United States Magazine and Democratic Review "the various divisions and subdivisions into which the trade of authorship is divided." "We recognize two classes," he wrote, "authors by profession, and amateur writers: those who regard study and composition as the business of their lives, and those who look upon them merely as incidental occupations." Amateurs, Mimin argued, plagued professionals, distorting the literary marketplace by selling their works on the cheap. The flood of cheap works undermined the value of good literature and, worse, stalled the development of a national culture sure to grow when all readers read great art. "An amateur in almost every walk is regarded as much inferior to the working member of the craft," he concluded (pp. 62–63).

Mimin's description makes clear that by the mid-1840s, those calling themselves amateurs were neither above nor outside the market. As magazine publishing expanded in the 1840s and 1850s, editors picked up cheap materials both from foreign periodicals and from homegrown amateurs. Proprietors took advantage of the aspirations of amateurs who were happy just to appear in print and paid very little for the poems and essays they published. As one would expect, editors often had kind words for amateur contributors. The Southern Literary Messenger, for example, boasted that its "CONTRIBUTORS are numerous, embracing Professional and Amateur Writers of the First Distinction." In a column assessing contemporary liter-ary production, the editors of the Cincinnati-based Ladies' Repository praised the "literary ability displayed" in several works of history and biography, "written all of them by amateur authors," evidence, according to the editors, that "there is still a vast amount of undeveloped history in every part of the country, inviting the appreciative labors of our writers, while the fields of biography are alike extensive and rich in the most interesting forms of historical matter. Into these it is hoped our non-professional writers will freely enter" ("New York Literary Correspondence," p. 634).

And enter they did. Writers calling themselves amateurs found opportunities in the expanding world of early-nineteenth-century publishing and began developing the stylistic markers that set off their works as the products of amateurs. The South Carolina poet William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870) imagined the amateur as a "gentleman in night-gown and slippers." But he also noted that amateurs presented their tales as told "by one who apologized . . . for this wandering into forbidden grounds—possibly alleging a vacant mind, or an erring mood, for the solitary trespass; and promising if forgiven for this, never, in like manner, to offend again" (p. 14).

Apologies proved useful to amateur and self-published authors, offering an opening gambit that led them before the public. Consider, for example, the preface a writer calling herself Hannah Crafts attached to her unpublished novel, The Bondwoman's Narrative (c. 1850s), perhaps the first novel written by an African American woman. "In presenting this record of plain unvarnished facts to a generous public I feel a certain degree of diffidence and self-distrust. I ask myself for the hundredth time How will such a literary venture, coming from a sphere so humble be received?" (p. 3). Crafts uses the few lines of her preface to accomplish several things. She apologizes for coming before the public, but at the same time, she enlists her public's generosity, praising her readers' virtues before they have even begun to read her tale. She also calls attention to her own humble social position and pledges, as do most mid-century amateurs, to confine herself to the facts, to those things about which she can claim a special, experiential knowledge. Experiential knowledge became another mark of the amateur.

CIVIL WAR WRITING

When Simms assessed the state of American authorship in 1844, he singled out the War of 1812 as central to the development of professional writing in the United States. It was no accident, he said, that James Fenimore Cooper's career followed "closely upon the footsteps of war!" (p. 12). The war cut off the supply of British books, and just as the embargo on British goods encouraged domestic manufacture, so the embargo on British ideas encouraged American authors. In some ways, the Civil War played a similar role in the history of amateur authorship, creating a demand for the unvarnished accounts of soldiers' wartime experiences. Books and stories by Union soldiers who were captured and confined in Confederate prisons offer particularly instructive examples of midcentury amateur authorship. Prisoner writers apologized, testifying that they appeared in print only at the urgent "solicitation of friends." "Without any aspirations whatever, to literary notoriety, I have endeavored to give a plain, unvarnished narrative of facts and incidents of prison life, as they occurred, under my observation, during twenty-two months in various rebel prisons," one typical account, written by A. C. Roach, a former prisoner, begins (p. 4).

"I had no thoughts of publishing a book until several weeks after my escape," Willard Glazier confessed. "I kept a diary, or journal, from the time of my capture. After reading portions of it to some of my friends, they persuaded me to amplify and put it in a readable form" (p. vii). To reassure readers that his amplifications had not gone beyond the bounds of his experience, Glazier, like many of his fellow amateurs, made sure to offer a provenance for his literary production. "The rough manuscript was, for the most part, written during my imprisonment at Columbia, sitting on the ground, and writing on my knee. Captain Kelly, 1st Kentucky Cavalry, brought a part of that manuscript through the lines by concealing it in the crown of an old regulation hat. I escaped with the remainder concealed in the lining of my jacket" (pp. vii–viii). He also gave his manuscript an aura of authenticity by describing the nearly heroic measures behind the simplest acts of composition. "I had no pencil of my own," he notes in the middle of an account of a night spent in a swamp. But his companion "had a short piece which he kindly lent me. Having no knife, I was obliged to sharpen it by picking the wood away from the lead with my finger nails" (p. 251). Such details often give immediacy to amateur accounts. And immediacy, not literary polish or philosophical insight, was the chief selling point of amateur tales. As good amateurs, these writers pledged to confine themselves to things they had seen, heard, or felt, leaving the work of describing the war's larger meanings to professional writers.

Working within the bounds of a carefully constructed modesty, former prisoners took their accounts of experience into the postwar literary marketplace. A few prisoners' stories appeared with the imprint of such New York houses as Harper & Brothers, but more were the work of hometown presses and newspaper printing offices—outfits such as the Methodist Book Concern of Cincinnati, the Railroad City Publishing House of Indianapolis, or the Daily Wisconsin Printing House in Milwaukee. Narratives by former prisoners appeared in congressional reports and popular magazines; they appeared as straightforward commercial publications with commissioned illustrations, as bound journalism, as subscription volumes, and as self-published books and cheap pamphlets that former soldiers hawked themselves on street corners and in railroad stations. As Melville's Ishmael might have remarked, their stories were often just as good as those published in the big commercial houses.

Although some differences between amateurs and professionals may have been clear by the end of the century, questions about the relations between the two remained. Writing in Scribner's Magazine in 1893, the novelist William Dean Howells (1837–1920) described the "The Man of Letters as a Man of Business." He called up that older vision of the amateur as the artist outside the market. "People feel that there is something profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue," he wrote. "Most of all, the artist himself feels this" (p. 429). Business had taken over the arts, Howells wrote. In a better world, artists—even professional artists—retained an amateur's love for their work. It was as amateurs that artists had access to the muses who had been chased from America's noisy commercial culture. The literary world Howells surveyed had not been made to suit the professionals, as Mimin imagined them. Howells looked at a world dominated by hacks and proposed that the best defense of the profession might just be to make peace with its amateurs.

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"AIN'T I A WOMAN?"

Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883) made the speech associated with the refrain "Ain't I a woman?" in May 1851, in Akron, Ohio, where she gained fame for eloquently and powerfully bringing together the issues of.... View more

"AIN'T I A WOMAN?"

Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883) made the speech associated with the refrain "Ain't I a woman?" in May 1851, in Akron, Ohio, where she gained fame for eloquently and powerfully bringing together the issues of women's rights and slavery. Although Sojourner Truth was already a popular preacher, abolitionist, and woman's rights spokesperson in the East, she was unknown to westerners outside of the abolitionist movement headed by William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879). Her Akron speech and other lectures while touring in Ohio as part of Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society made her as popular in the West as she was in the East.

EARLY LIFE

Sojourner Truth, whose given name was Isabella, was born in slavery in New York's Dutch-speaking Hudson River valley. As a child, Isabella was nurtured on her mother's African mysticism and learned rudimentary Christianity from the white mistresses in the household engaged in training their own children. Sold away at age twelve, she had three owners within a year: an Englishman who beat her for not speaking English; a kind but uneducated lower-class Dutch farmer; and finally a well-to-do farmer, John Dumont. At the Dumont farm she married another slave, Thomas, and had five children. She remained Dumont's slave from late 1810 to 1826, when she fled with her baby daughter to the home of an antislavery Dutch farmer, whose last name, Van Wagenen, she took as her own. She was freed after New York State passed an antislavery law in 1827. That year she also experienced a cathartic baptism of the spirit and accepted Christian conversion. Her profession of faith evolved into a belief that she had received a special calling from God, manifested in the miraculous retrieval of her young son Peter, who had been sold into southern slavery; she fought in court for Peter's successful release in the winter of 1828.

In 1828 Isabella also moved to New York City, where she joined the African Methodist Church, called Zion's. She soon gravitated toward the Perfectionists, a radical Methodist offshoot of Charles Grandison Finney's Great Western Revival. Although unable to read and write, Isabella quickly became well known and much respected among the Methodists. As a popular revival preacher, the influence of her speaking brought many converts to the Christian faith. She also worked among prostitutes and the poor and was briefly ensnarled in a notorious religious cult. During her fifteen years in New York City, Isabella continued honing her speaking skills and biblical knowledge. In June 1843 she had a spiritual revelation that she experienced as the voice of God, beckoning her into service as a sojourner for truth. Thus she changed her name and embarked on her lifelong social justice mission.

A SOJOURNER FOR TRUTH

Traveling through Long Island, Connecticut, and western Massachusetts and preaching abolition all the way, the anointed Sojourner Truth worked just enough to "pay tribute to Caesar" (Gilbert, p. 82). She survived on the kindness of strangers and drew strength from her authority as God's messenger. A great favorite at camp meetings, revivals, and among reformers, this tall, commanding figure had a dignified manner, a gift of prayer, and a remarkable talent for singing. Most of all, Sojourner's conversations, sermons, lessons of wisdom and faith, and her remarkable biblical interpretations deeply impressed her listeners.

In March 1844 Sojourner Truth settled in the utopian community known as the Northampton Association in western Massachusetts. In this haven of "isms" she met many reformers, including William Lloyd Garrison, president of the American Anti-Slavery Society; Abby Kelley Foster, the American Society's only female lecturer; Frederick Douglass, the American Society's only self-emancipated lecturer; and Olive Gilbert, a New England reformer to whom Sojourner would dictate her autobiographical Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave (1850). Sojourner Truth made her first recorded abolitionist speech in August 1844 in Northampton. The following May she was a featured speaker at the American Anti-Slavery national convention in New York City. Sojourner published her Narrative and began a New England speaking tour in 1850, just as the notorious Fugitive Slave Law was passed, requiring citizens of free states to assist in the recovery of runaway bondpeople. In late October 1850 she was a featured speaker at the first National Woman's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. Two significant issues at this meeting had not been part of the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, in which the participants of the New York State convention demanded a reevaluation of the social condition and legal rights of women. One was a specific resolution about wrongs inflicted upon enslaved women and the other was a demand for women's suffrage. In February 1851 Sojourner Truth joined the antislavery campaign through western New York with the British abolitionist and Member of Parliament George Thompson, Abby Kelley Foster, Stephen S. Foster, and Frederick Douglass. The tour culminated in meetings in Syracuse and Rochester, New York, where western abolitionists invited Sojourner to come and lecture in Ohio.

AIN'T I A WOMAN?

Antislavery and women's rights were generally unpopular causes in Ohio. The large majority of whites in the state were proslavery Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and Baptists. Some however, were members of the Free Soil Party, a newly formed coalition organized around nonextension of slavery, maintaining slavery where it existed, and excluding free blacks from the territories for the sake of the union. Ohio's small white liberal element included abolitionists, Underground Railroad workers, and radical women's rights activists. They were mainly Quakers, Moravians, German Pietists, Unitarians, Universalists, Shakers, and other dissenting sects living in northern Ohio, called the Western Reserve. Although Ohio's first constitution, in 1802, had abolished slavery, beginning in 1804 the state passed "Black Laws" that denied to blacks all civil and educational rights and prohibited black settlement without a $500 bond and a white patron. Bloody riots occurred in Cincinnati in 1829, 1836, and 1841, causing many blacks either to leave the state or to arm themselves. The state's minuscule progressive element made small gains: in 1848 some Black Laws, including denial of education, were repealed, and in 1850 Ohio women were the first to campaign for the vote, joining blacks in a bid for a universal suffrage amendment to the new state constitution. Their failure led to the convening of the 1850 national woman's convention in Worcester, followed by the 1851 regional meeting in Akron.

Sojourner Truth arrived in Ohio to lecture for the antislavery cause in May 1851, stopped in Cleveland, and spoke among the black population. Hearing of the women's convention, and deeply interested in women's rights, she went on to Akron. As the story goes, the convention president, Frances Gage, and the convention secretary, Hannah Cutler, entered the hotel lobby and saw a tall black woman walking back and forth, carrying a basket of books. Embarrassed by the presence of a black woman, the two white Free Soil antislavery women ignored Sojourner, walking right past her into the parlor. Truth followed them, introduced herself, and explained her abolitionist mission. Gage and Cutler each bought a copy of Sojourner Truth's Narrative and assumed that was the end of her business at the convention.

The convention participants and their cause were not well received in Akron. The women had access to only one church, the Universalist, and only one hotel in the city was willing to rent rooms to the delegates. The convention was also divided ideologically. The Michigan radical Emma Coe compared women's position to that of southern slaves. She was sarcastic and bitter in accusing men of twofold injustices toward women—depriving them of education, then calling them incapable imbeciles. Jane Swisshelm, the Free Soil editor of a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, newspaper, the Saturday Visitor, strongly objected to the stance represented by Coe. Swisshelm insisted that she did not want to relinquish her femininity. The disagreement among the women on the platform created disquiet within the audience of females while some male clergy interrupted them and shouted disapproval.

Sojourner Truth sat on the steps leading to the pulpit, fanning herself with her sunbonnet, watching everything and occasionally interjecting comments. As the three-way battle waxed heavy between moderate and radical women, and between the sexes, one clergyman told the women to go home to their husbands and children because Jesus and all of his apostles were men. From her position near the platform, Sojourner shouted that the men claim all for themselves. An Oberlin student, Sallie Holley, who had left school for three days to attend the woman's convention, later wrote that the biblical edict against women speaking in public was strongly upheld in Ohio by the large presence of clerics there—making Truth's alacrity at taking on the clerics all the more impressive. As the exchanges heated, Sojourner Truth asked to address the entire audience, and Frances Gage gave her the floor. Jane Swisshelm in the Saturday Visitor later criticized Gage's handling of the convention and ignoring of parliamentary rules, but the moment gave rise to the opportunity for Truth to make her riveting speech, which became known by the refrain "Ain't I a woman?" (or "A'rn't I a woman?") and secured her legendary place in history.

VERSIONS OF TRUTH

History has two versions of "Ain't I a Woman?" both relatively succinct by contrast with the full oration given by Truth at the Akron convention. An account by Frances Gage was published twelve years after the fact, during the Civil War, as a correction to comments made by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her highly publicized but distorted recollection of meeting Truth in 1855, and Gage's version of the speech established the way in which Truth's words are remembered. Stowe, in her Atlantic Monthly article titled "Sojourner Truth: The Libyan Sibyl," presents Truth disparagingly, as an oversized, humorous African-born oddity, possessing naive religious faith and speaking in droll, thick, almost incomprehensible southern dialect. Stowe attributes Truth as saying at Akron, "Sisters, I a'n't clear what you'd be after. Ef women want any rights, more'n dey's got, why don't dey 'jes' take 'em, an' not be talkin' about it." The April 1863 publication of Stowe's article led Gage to publish her own recollection in the National Anti-Slavery Standard on 2 May 1863. In recounting Truth's words Gage liberally added rhetorical flourish, dialect, and the ringing refrain "And a'rn't I a woman?" But a report in the Salem, Ohio, Anti-Slavery Bugle, published on 21 June 1851—about three weeks after the Akron meeting—is certainly the most authentic. It does not have a refrain, does not express Truth in dialect, and states that she said "I am a woman's rights," reflecting a common phrase used by female reformers. Nevertheless, in comparing the two versions, only one definite factual falsehood exists: Gage attributes thirteen children to Sojourner Truth, something she obviously copied from Stowe's article. In general, the Bugle and Gage versions correspond in content and meaning.

Whatever the exact words of her presentation, Sojourner Truth memorably fused issues of color, slavery, work, and gender under the rubric of spirituality. She had done this on other occasions, including the 1850 national woman's convention. Although not in the Bugle account, contemporary sources support Gage's comment that Sojourner Truth said she never found a man willing to help her over mud puddles and bad roads—as a retort to Jane Swisshelm's insistence that such assistance was a woman's privilege. Sojourner's point was that black women were no less female even though not placed on a pedestal. Here she might easily have interjected the phrase "And a'rn't I a woman?" Both accounts emphasize labor in the same way, although Gage insists that Sojourner (uncharacteristically) "bared her right arm to the shoulder." Truth suggested that although her enslaved sisters worked like mules and were strong and hardy, they were still women. Both accounts address education, except that Gage, again copying Stowe, resorts to minstrelsy: "'Den dey talks 'bout dis ting in de head—what dis dey call it?' 'Intellect,' whispered some one near. 'Dat's it honey. What's dat got to do with women's rights or niggers' rights?'" This demeaning language was tailored for white nineteenth-century audience appeal. Yet Gage, like the Bugle, emphasizes Sojourner's main remark, which followed up Emma Coe's emphasis of unequal educational opportunity: If women's intellectual capacity held only a pint, and men's a quart, why could women not have their measure full?

The two accounts agree that the speech emphasized the spiritual role of women, one of Sojourner Truth's favorite topics. The Bugle notes that Truth called women the most steadfast followers of Jesus, and she used the example of Lazarus' sisters. Because they approached Christ with faith and love, Lazarus arose as Jesus wept. In both accounts, Sojourner Truth reminded the critical ministers and her conflicted sisters that Christ was born of a woman, through Immaculate Conception. Where, she challenged, was man's part?

By both accounts, Sojourner Truth skillfully rebuked the men in the audience for belittling the convention and its goals. Yet as an accomplished orator, Sojourner Truth did not leave even detractors on a sour note. Both accounts reveal her biblical olive branch. The ministers maintained that human depravity rested upon the sins of Eve. Since Eve was powerful enough to upset the world, said Sojourner Truth, the daughters of Eve deserve the opportunity to set it right side up again.

Frances Gage's account fizzles out apologetically, claiming she could not follow Sojourner through it all. She does recall long continuous cheering and some crying among the women. Resorting (as she had earlier in the same account) to the figure of Stowe's imaginary black Amazon, Gage concludes that Sojourner Truth took all the white women up into "her strong arms and carried us safely." The Bugle however, provides a finale befitting Sojourner Truth's manner of connecting race, slavery, and gender. Assertive women had men between a rock and a hard place. Beset by the bondpeople on one side and their own women on the other, white men, said Truth, were in a "tight place," and surely caught between "a hawk and a buzzard."

The authors of the multivolume History of Woman's Suffrage (1881–1922) chose to use Frances Gage's version rather than the the report from the Anti-Slavery Bugle. History may never know if Sojourner Truth actually used the refrain "Ain't I a woman?" However, the account in the Bugle calls Truth's remarks "one of the most unique and interesting speeches of the Convention," asserting that it had a powerful effect on the audience. Truth's pointed aptness and originality were instrumental in getting the most radical resolutions through the convention over the objections of moderate women. Indeed, a number of contemporary newspapers commented on the impact and influence of the speech (although Jane Swisshelm's paper was not among them—she wrote only that a tall black woman was at the convention, selling books). Gage's recollection that Sojourner Truth's words became a profound inspiration for Ohio women is supported by the farewell Truth received when she left the state, nearly two years later: the women of Ashtabula County honored her departure with a gift of a huge silk banner labeled "Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?"

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