: in
such books as Paulding's story of _Westward Ho!_ and his poem, _The
Backwoodsman_, 1818; or as Timothy Flint's _Recollections_, 1826, and
his _Geography and History of the Mississippi Valley_, 1827. It was
not an age of great books, but it was an age of large ideas and
expanding prospects. The new consciousness of empire uttered itself
hastily, crudely, ran into buncombe, "spread-eagleism," and other noisy
forms of patriotic exultation; but it was thoroughly democratic and
American. Though literature--or at least the best literature of the
time--was not yet emancipated from English models, thought and life, at
any rate, were no longer in bondage--no longer provincial. And it is
significant that the party in office during these years was the
Democratic, the party which had broken most completely with
conservative traditions. The famous "Monroe doctrine" was {406} a
pronunciamento of this aggressive democracy, and though the Federalists
returned to power for a single term, under John Quincy Adams
(1825-1829,) Andrew Jackson received the largest number of electoral
votes, and Adams was only chosen by the House of Representatives in the
absence of a majority vote for any one candidate. At the close of his
term "Old Hickory," the hero of the people, the most characteristically
democratic of our Presidents, and the first backwoodsman who entered
the White House, was borne into office on a wave of popular enthusiasm.
We have now arrived at the time when American literature, in the higher
and stricter sense of the term, really began to have an existence. S.
G. Goodrich, who settled at Hartford as a bookseller and publisher in
1818, says, in his _Recollections_: "About this time I began to think
of trying to bring out original American works. . . . The general
impression was that we had not, and could not have, a literature. It
was the precise point at which Sidney Smith had uttered that bitter
taunt in the _Edinburgh Review_, 'Who reads an American book?' . . .
It was positively injurious to the commercial credit of a bookseller to
undertake American works." Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the first
American author whose books, as _books_, obtained recognition abroad;
whose name was thought worthy of mention beside the names of English
contemporary authors, like Byron, Scott, and Coleridge. He was also
the first American writer whose writings are still read {407} for their
own sake. We read Mather's _Magnalia_