The Shakespeare Riots by Nigel Cliff

Author:Nigel Cliff [Cliff, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49783-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

“The country is disgraced in Europe,” he added; it had lost its “respectable position amongst the nations of the earth.”22

Bennett was not exaggerating. The London Times weighed in around the same time with a blast of withering scorn which was a fair sample of the anger rife among every class in England. “Frenchmen are sometimes impertinent, Irishmen impudent, Welshmen voluble, Englishmen blustering, Scotchmen cool,” it began, “but the conjoint coolness, blustering, volubility, impudence, and impertinence of a true Yankee has a height and depth and breadth about it which ‘flogs' each of these nations in their most characteristic accomplishment.” America, it pursued, was “a confederation of public bankrupts” who had coolly refused to pay their debts, not from necessity but because it suited them not to. They were swindlers and scoundrels, and some even had the cheek to demand that Britain, if it was really serious about abolition, unilaterally lift its import duties to help American business contemplate life without slavery, while in the next breath advocating U.S. protectionism as the proper response to British intransigence over Oregon: “This is, was, and will be, the American cry—‘Give! Give! Give!' But the English counter-cry will be—‘Pay! Pay! Pay!' Before you ask us to believe a single word you say—before you expect us to entertain a single argument you use—‘pay your debts.' Till then, you have no right to a place among honest nations—you have no claim to ordinary credit or common courtesy.”23

The world was becoming a smaller place. The new transatlantic steamers were shuttling passengers back and forth more quickly than ever, and thanks to relays of boats and coaches and the new telegraph wires, the newspapers they brought with them were flashed to newshungry editors before the steamers put into port. The disputes of the 1840s were thus conducted not in the careful language of diplomacy but in the invective of columnists, with one side lobbing accusations of flagitious crimes and the other side batting back still harder. In January 1844, as Macready was plowing through the woods to New Orleans, the New York Herald, the most widely distributed paper in America, had reprinted an even more savage piece of Yankee-bashing from the English Foreign Quarterly Review across its front page.* Americans, the writer averred, were all swagger and impudence: they were pigheaded and unscrupulous, “with an incredible genius for lying, a vanity elastic beyond comprehension, the hide of a buffalo, and the shriek of a steamengine.” The all-powerful vulgus had pulled everything down to its level; all dignity, truth, consistency, and courage had evaporated from public life, lynch law had replaced state law, Bowie knives glittered in the hands of murderers on the floor of Congress, and orators peppered their speeches with expletives and lies and stuffed their supporters' pockets with bribes. The people might be independent in the aggregate, but no individual dared stand up to the wishes of the mob, and the consequence was a deadening conformism and a “tangled and hideous democracy.” As for American literature,

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