A History of the American People

it. The moral point, so important to De Tocqueville, entirely escaped her. What she noted was the
manners. She thought it outrageous that the only form of garbage collection in Cincinnati were
the pigs (this was true of New York, too, until 1830). She found it was petty treason' to call a servant such:help' was the only acceptable term, an early example of Political Correctness.
Moreover, such was the American mobility of labor that it was impossible to hire a help' except for a short term, and in the process of engagement it was thehelp' not the mistress who dictated
terms. Thus the first she engaged, when asked what she expected per annum, replied: Oh Gimini! You be a downright Englisher, sure enough. I should like to see a young lady engage by a year in America! I hope I shall get a husband before many months, or I expect I shall be an outright old maid, for I be most seventeen already. Besides, mayhap I may want to go to school. You must just give me a dollar and a half a week, and mother's slave, Phillis, must come over once a week, I expect, from the other side of the water to help me clean.' Mrs Trollope started to write down such things, for her letters home, otherwise her London friends would not believe her; and from this came Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832, which was an immediate bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, made Mrs Trollope the most hated author in America, and still makes American hackles rise today. Her criticisms were all calculated to wound. The Americans were rude, ill-bred, pushy, and coarse. They had no fun and no sense of humor:I never saw a population so divested of gaiety: there is
no trace of this feeling from one end of the Union to the other.' Americans were totally self-
absorbed, uninterested in the outside world, and with a hugely inflated idea of their own
importance and merits. The women were ignorant, the men disgusting. She excepted a few
bookish men from this censure, adding that America was a signal proof of the immense value of literary habits' not only inenlarging the mind' but in purifying the manners.' She added:I not
only never met a literary man who was a chewer of tobacco or a whiskey drinker, but I never met
any who were not, who had escaped these degrading habits.’
Here we come to it; if there was one thing English visitors could not stand about America, it
was the habit of spitting. The English middle and upper classes had cured themselves of public
spitting in the 1760s-it was one of the great turning-points of civilization-so that by the 1780s,
they were already censorious of the French, and other Continentals, for continuing it: Dr Johnson
was particularly severe on this point. In the United States, however, the spitting habit was com
pounded by the business of chewing tobacco, which in the first half of the 19th century was
carried on by three-quarters of the males and even by some females. Hence spitting became an
almost continuous process, and where spittoons of enormous size were not provided in large
numbers, the results were catastrophic to sensitive souls. It was the first thing all the English,
from Dickens to Thackeray, noticed and commented on, and English lady travelers, like Mrs
Trollope, were especially offended. When she, and others, were shown round the Senate, their
eyes were glued to the gigantic brass spittoons attached to every member's desk.
That was a pity, because the Senate of those days, and for several decades afterwards, was a
remarkable institution, perhaps the greatest school of oratory since Roman times. And its finest
hour was 1850, when the last Great Compromise on slavery was debated, attacked, defended,
and carried. The background was extremely complicated-the reader will have gathered by now
that everything to do with slavery in America was complicated-and the Compromise itself was
complex. The old Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had prohibited slavery in the new Northwest,
and all the states created there were free. In most of the other acquisitions America had made, the
whole of the Louisiana Purchase, Florida, and Texas, forms of slavery had existed under the
French or Spaniards, so maintaining it there, or reimposing it as in Texas, did not appear so