University of Virginia Library

FAMILY AND ANCESTORS.

This is a tender subject, my dear Fritz; and it is
capital advice that the old Don gives his Squire:
little may be gained in broaching it, and much may
be lost. But my notices of the town-life would be
sadly incomplete, if I were to omit the consideration
of so important an element in the graduation
of our social scale.

The pride which induces a man to cherish the
memory of an honored, and respected ancestor, is
not an ignoble pride,—nor is it an unusual one;
and he must be a sot indeed who is insensible to
the regard, which by common acclaim should attach
to the name of his sire. But this ancestral
pride needs some caution in the using; it may
serve as the groundwork of very dangerous boastings,
and attract a degree of attention, or provoke
a contrast, that the boaster can very poorly bear.
A simpleton who should forever be declaiming upon
the talent of an ancestor, would only make his
weakness the more palpable, and draw down the
reproach of having harmed a great name, by association
with a pitiful soul. As he cannot be great

himself, it were much better that he did not trace
his descent from greatness.

Yet strange as it may seem, Fritz, these are the
very ones who are forever talking of their pedigree,
and raking up from their family tombs, a distinction
which could never belong to their family character.
Nothing indeed is more natural than for
the man, who has not within himself the means of
challenging popular esteem, to take it boldly from
the ashes of his fathers: necessity, in a measure,
justifies the action, and the theft of the bread of
ancestral distinction, is pardonable in those descendants,
who are starving under the hunger of contempt.

You may think, Fritz, that such observations
have no aptness in my studies of this Republican
town; but if so, you would be strangely mistaken.
Our Republicanism has not yet so far individualized
the man or the family, as to make either reliant
solely on their own action, name, or character,
for distinction.

We have not only the old and meritorious pride
in family names, honorably associated with our Colonial
History, but the importation of other foreign
luxuries has brought in its train, an immense
amount of the worship of family splendor and imaginary
genealogies; which as they make the basis

of much of the feudal aristocracy, are serving as
the apologies and adornments of our own. They
are just the apologies indeed, which are needed to
make it good, and render it effective among those
whom it is intended to impress.

A man's own distinction and successes are losing
their force amid the classified and billeted brilliants
of our upper circles. The homely honor of having
wrought out a name for one's self, or having accumulated,
by successful and public spirited enterprise,
a great estate, is beginning to lose ground
before that spirit of conventionality and foreign imitativeness,
which finds its best types in liveries,
spurious heraldry, or in the habit of display and of
exclusion.

Our rising men, of such callings as have heretofore
been reckoned outcast, are beginning to understand
this matter, and are learning that bravado,
and well-cut coats-of-arms are better worth, than
any study of refinement, or pretence for cultivation.
Families of our town will presently be known from
their crests, and all our brokers make their servingmen
conspicuous by a vulture stamped upon their
buttons. The Digg's livery, and the Mugg's coach
will be the best descriptive types of the respective
families, and will be as familiarly known as the
coat-collar of Northumberland, or the hat-band of

the Marquis of Westminster. All this serves as
the mark of a distinction, which might otherwise
escape notice, and secures to the offspring, a comfortable
ancestral basis, without any fees at the
herald's office.

But we are not yet so far gone in European notions,
nor so blinded by these miserable excuses
and cravings for title, but that their flimsiness is
sometimes seen through distinctly enough, to expose
the wretched poverty of what is behind. Imagine
an honest and respectable grocer, tailor, shop-keeper,
or whomever you please, not showing any
pride in that industry which has wrought out for
him an independence, nor making his tastes and
expenditures keep cheerful and honored company,
but like a scurvy coward that he is, turning his
back on the trade that has enriched him, and trying
to hide its remembrance by new-vamped crests,
and the blazonry of a coach panel! What sort of
manly republican independence is this? Let him
trick himself as he will, the peacocks, whose plumes
he has stolen, will have their peck at him, and
the sable jackdaws, to whose tribe he belongs, will
utterly despise him!

Observe, Fritz, that I am throwing out no sneers
upon any particular calling or trade. It would ill
become me, a pamphleteer, without name (and as

my honored friend, Mrs. K—, alledges, `not in
society'[2] ), to be so bold. Why should we, indeed,
in any manner decry, or make light of those envied
possibilities which our blessed Republic guaranties,
and which will make the coal-boy of to-day, the
judge, or the millionaire of to-morrow? There is no
trade, and no profession, which is not respectable
for an American, except the trade of pretence, and
the trade of dishonesty.

And it is this very pretence, my dear Fritz, that
I want most to rebuke; it is the covering up of the
individual, and his personal acts or acquisitions, with
the patched and parti-colored coat of an adopted
European artificiality; it is the shame for what we
are, and the pretension to what we are not. That
American must be weak indeed, who wishes to
prop up his republican manhood on the rotten stilts
of an extinct feudalism! I will not envy him if
he stands, nor pity him if he falls.

My up-stairs neighbor, the gray-haired lodger,
with whom I have had frequent conversations on
this, as well as kindred topics, considers himself,
by virtue of a name bearing the Dutch prefix of
Van, one of the `old families;' and though he is as

poor as a Christian need be, he yet looks with ineffable
disdain upon what he calls the pretenders of
the day. His name, and a snuff-box, are all that
have come down to him from a glorious ancestry.
He cherishes both with equal pride and tenderness,
and never taps at his box without thanking Heaven
that he was born a Van.

He of course reckons the broad-skirted Dutchmen
as the elder members of our aristocracy, and
is disposed to look with strong sentiments of distrust
upon any which does not smack of the old
Dutch flavor. He affects great indifference at
sight of the equipages and houses of our up-town
great, and talks complacently of the time when our
neighborhood was the centre of wealth and respectability.
Indeed, he humors his fancy with the idea
that a large proportion of it still remains, though I
must confess that we have but a scurvy set of
neighbors. I am strongly inclined to think that
the old gentleman, with all his pride, would be
tempted to give up his broad skirts, and the Van
to his name, if he could only secure a good slice
each day from the comfortable dinners that our
parvenus are consuming; for the love of the luxury
that wealth brings, is, I find, a most prevalent
affection, as well of old families, as of new ones;
and nothing will so reconcile most men to lack of

ancestral badges, and a sounding name, as a plentiful
provision of all the comforts of life, and a free
license to indulge.

Among the pleasant little artifices which are
adopted by those emulous of ancestral honors, is
that of changing the name, by transposition of a
letter or two, into something having strong affinities
with the great names of history: this practice,
if followed up with philologic attention, will result
before many generations, in an entire transformation,
and in the open possession of an ancestral root and
tree, that will most amply repay the pains-taking.
A change of pronunciation, if insisted on, will not
unfrequently do wonders, in giving an air to a man's
title; and if sufficiently romantic, or illustrious, it
may serve to christen a country-seat, or a town residence—much
to the undisguised admiration of the
suburban classes.

Wealth of itself, is not understood to create any
immediate ancestral claims; time enough must
elapse for the life and death of an hypothecated
ancestry; which time has been shortened down in
some instances to the very brief period of three or
four winters. A short period, it is true, as the
world goes generally; but we `manage those
things better in our town.'

I do not mean to say, Fritz, that wealth supposes

no ancestry at all, which to be sure, would leave
a frightful hiatus for modesty to tumble in; but it
is such as is not suited to the boasts of the heir;
and might possibly be as irksome to his pride as
that hinted at in the French couplet:

What particular action, or claims upon distinction,
are of the best complexion to make up a good,
compact, ancestral reputation, I can hardly tell.
Services rendered the state would of course weigh
considerably; but if I might be permitted to judge
from existing examples, I should say that the accomplishment
of nothing, either for the state or the
town, was nearly as good. Be as it may, however,
distinguished families are multiplying like witchcraft.
New families are dying out, and old ones
are sprouting all over the town. They will presently
become as plentiful as they are in Virginia.

You have heard, Fritz, Southey's bad story of
the New Gate Calendar—how it was bought up
by American Colonists, looking up their genealogies.
If the Messrs. Harper would undertake a reprint,
and the Tribune and Courier give their favorable
notices, we have no doubt but it would
prove a profitable venture.

I have often wondered, my dear Fritz, what a

curious figure the ancestors of our ladies and gentlemen
of ton would cut, if suffered to come up to
the light, and mingle for a little time in the festivities
of the town. Not that they would be cordially
welcomed by all their distinguished issue, for we
fancy that many a poor knight of the needle, or
awl, would be shuffled off very unceremoniously
and very unfilially, into the basement rooms.

In one quarter we should see a broad-skirted old
Dutchman, in cocked hat, and with cane mounted
with buck-horn, wheezing and puffing down some
dim business alley in search of his great-grandson,
or perhaps coming upon him in his dancing practice,
and uttering an indignant `Dunder and
Blixem,' at the unscrupulous familiarity of the
Saracco women. In another direction we might
find some great expounder of colonial jurisprudence,
searching out his descendants among the newly rich,
emulous of rivaling the show of their neighbors,
and not at all, of sustaining the intellectual dignity
of the name. A humble, dapper little fellow, of
a century back, familiar in his day with shears or
yard-stick, and who had left a company of dapper
girls comfortably at the counter, would burst upon
his great-grandchildren amid all the brilliancy of
the Opera, and watch with wondering eyes at their
well-modulated applause of such music as he surely

never heard before death,—and it would be uncharitable
to suppose he had heard such since.

Some rusty old coachman might resume his place
upon the box of a carriage, in which the pink of
our fashion, his posterity, are rustling in silks; and
many a grandpapa would, if invited filially to the
home of his descendants, whet an appetite with
French ragouts, that in the old reign of the flesh
had sated itself on cheese and Dutch herring.

But quite the worst of it all would be, that the poor
ancestry would be wished heartily back to the hottest
of places, rather than have their insignificance, and
real presence, mar the lustre of our `old families.'
There would be such bitter tears shed over their
reappearance, as never watered their funeral or
tombs; and the unoffending little cobblers would
be hurried off to their leather and lapstone, as peremptorily
as when old Peter Stuyvesant caught
them at their political meddling.

Yet this revival, Fritz, of the true state and pomp
of our ancestry would be a most republican display:—great
because of its diversity, and of the
proof it would offer of that social elasticity, which
belongs to our scheme, and which will ensure to
industry and integrity, whatever may be its station,
wealth and honor. Alas, for human nature, that
it should blush for its necessities, and that such effort

should be made to hide an origin, which is
perhaps the only basis of its honor!

And in this connection, my dear Fritz, I cannot
forbear turning my glass toward that painful
tragedy whose blood and mystery have not yet
passed from the minds of men. I allude to a recent
murder, which may be traced back, step by
step, to the impulses of a social pride; a desire to
blend, and be even with that assumed and admitted
aristocracy, which, though it might have been
based on refinement, needed, in the judgment of
the unfortunate culprit, the trappings of wealth for
its sustenance.

If social education and popular habit had not
grafted upon him the inevitable necessity of doing
something more than regular performance of duty,
and basing his position upon something more showy
than gentlemanly address, the motive would have
been wanting to those first oversteppings of the
means of living, to that obliquity which induced
unfairness of commercial dealing, and to the final
issue of the dreadful tragedy. Dr. Webster (if
guilty) is as much the victim of our social heresies,
as he is of a brutal passion. If men had been respected
more entirely for what they are, and not for
what their habirations or their dinners are, Dr.
Webster might still have been the respectable lecturer,

the successful subduer of his own passions,
and the esteemed father. But the obeisance paid
to wealth and to genteel living, was strong enough
and general enough to bear him down in its tide;
and in the fear of being submerged, he must needs
thrust another under—to the grave.

It is idle to say that he would have been as much
respected, if his living had been modest and commensurate
with his means; probably he might have
been; but the popularity and commonness of an
opposing opinion, making its manifestations most
strong and patent, seduced him from such belief—
to his fall.

Not one bankruptcy in five but owes its origin
to the same social causes; and the `getting into
society' with curtains and coaches, is a fallacy
that is `getting' a great many very fast out of the
bounds of honesty and independence.

Nor will I forbear, Fritz, to enter my testimony
with pride, to the dignity of that Court which has
not been shaken by prominence of social position,
and which has weighed talent and scientific attainment
as nothing, when opposed to those great interests
of humanity and common justice which our
Republican rule professes to protect.