Dinsmore Documentation presents Classics of American Colonial History
| Author: | Kimball, Fiske |
| Title: | “Architecture in the History of the Colonies and of the Republic.” |
| Citation: | American Historical Review 27 (October 1921): 47-57 |
| HTML by Dinsmore Documentation * Added May 22, 2002 |
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47
ARCHITECTURE IN THE HISTORY OF THE COLONIES AND OF THE REPUBLIC1
THE artistic aspects of American history have received but scant attention from professional historians, and consideration of them occupies little space in general histories of the United States. In this respect they only share the neglect formerly suffered by other aspects than the political and military: by constitutional and institutional history, by economic history and the history of religions, the study of which has given great enrichment and truer perspective to the picture of historical evolution. For certain periods of the past even the part of artistic developments in this evolution is now well recognized as vital and significant: for ancient Greece, for the thirteenth century, for the Italian Renaissance. Appreciation of its importance in other periods, with exact study of its character, has increased so rapidly also during recent years that in 1909 Max Dvorák could suggest in seriousness that the history of art had assumed a leading position, such as had been held by the history of religions ten years earlier, by cultural and political history in the first half of the nineteenth century, and by economic and social history in the second half.2 In America it has been felt that the arts were of specially small historical importance, both because of the magnitude of the material problem of harnessing the new continent and because of the supposedly imitative and secondary character of artistic manifestations here in relation to those of Europe. Such a generalization, although it contains some elements of truth, has been derived chiefly a priori, with the most superficial examination of the artistic developments themselves. It is only in the last score of years, indeed, that any great beginning has been made even to provide the tools for serious study of the arts in America. Already it is becoming evident, however, that, down at least to 1830, the arts, especially architecture, occupied a place of much importance in American life, and that the relationship of American architecture to that of England and of Europe was by no means always backward and imitative. Under the division of historical sources customary since the time of Droysen—Überreste and Tradition—none of the Überreste from
48 the colonial period of an institutional nature is more conspicuous than the physical remains of colonial architecture. Even as an economic matter colonial housebuilding was of serious consequence. The first settlers of New Haven, founded 1636, were reproached for having “laid out too much of their stocks and estates in building of fair and stately houses”.3 The cost of the Miles Brewton house in Charleston, built 1765 to 1769, is given by Josiah Quincy, jr., as £8000 sterling.4 Elias Hasket Derby, the great merchant of Salem after the Revolution, with his wife, Elizabeth Crowninshield, had a passion for building not surpassed in degree-extravagant as this may sound-by earlier merchant princes like the Medici themselves. Besides the fine house built for him by his father, he undertook in succession three other splendid town houses. Many instances of similar enthusiasm for building could readily be cited, both in the North and in the South. It is the historical relationships between early American architecture and that of Europe, however, with which we shall here concern ourselves. The prevailing belief has been that our most worthy architecture was produced during the colonial period, and that conditions peculiar to America at that time gave it a character more nearly our own than that of any later phase of style. In the zone of pioneer settlement, frontier conditions are thought to have recalled primitive types into being, or caused borrowings from the Indians. In the buildings of more advanced communities, Puritanism is believed to have evoked a new type of religious edifice, and adaptation to wood as a building material is supposed to have brought appropriate changes in the proportions of classic architectural forms. Close study of the evidence forces the conclusion, on the contrary, that the special effect of these factors in colonial architecture has been much exaggerated. Whether in the first primitive shelters, or in the later buildings of the colonies, there was little on this side of the Atlantic which did not find its origin or its counterpart in provincial England or other parts of Europe of the same day. A truly American movement in architectural style appeared only after the Revolution, and then it assumed an historical importance which has been little suspected. In the manifesto of frontier significance there is a famous passage, which reads in part: “The wilderness masters the colonist. . . . It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs
49 an Indian palisade around him.”5 Based primarily on an analysis of later Western conditions, this formula is applied also to the first colonial settlements. There it appears, however, that neither the first settlers nor the Indians of their day lived in log cabins at all. In some papers read at the Metropolitan Museum last spring, shortly to be published, we have collected the contemporary evidences regarding the first shelters of the colonists, and have shown the idea that they lived in log houses to have been an assumption of the middle of the last century. Contemporary descriptions also reveal that the Indian dwellings of the time, including the “longhouse” of the Iroquois, bore no resemblance to the log cabin. In the case of the Creek, who did occasionally employ the log house in the later eighteenth century, we find that, like so many other things, it was borrowed from the colonists. Moreover, the log house itself was no invention of necessity in the wilderness. It was brought from Europe by the Swedes and Finns of the Delaware, in whose country it was then the ordinary form of rural dwelling, and was gradually adopted by later English settlers as superior, in view of the cheapness of timber, to their own lighter forms of construction—huts of branches and turf in conical form, of wattle and clay, or of slabs stood vertically in the ground. The fundamental conception that the essence of American development lies in the return to primitive conditions along a frontier line might, of course, remain unaffected by these corrections of detail. So far as it has been held to apply to the original colonies, however, it involves a misconception of contemporary English conditions which deprives it of its supposed significance. For the colonial leaders, it is true, the primitive conditions were unaccustomed, but for the mass, the men who in England had been copy-holders and agricultural laborers, they were not more than a continuation of conditions at home. The gloomy picture of English agricultural life in the seventeenth century drawn by Thorold Rogers6 may be somewhat exaggerated, but in its main lines it is confirmed by the researches of Hasbach7 and other scholars. As late as 1690, over five hundred thousand houses in England, more than five-twelfths the total number, had only a single hearth.8 We
50 must take special note of the existence of large numbers of “borderers” or squatters on the commons, woods, and wastes, where they built themselves huts and perhaps cleared a little piece of land. Norden wrote, in his Surveyors’ Dialogues in 1602: “in some parts where I have travelled, where great and spacious wastes, mountains. forests and heaths are, . . . many cottages are set up, the people . . . living very hardly with oaten bread and sour whey and goats’ milk . . . as ignorant of God or of any civil course of life as the very savages.”9 The natural focusing of attention on the more pretentious buildings abroad has prevented us from realizing the almost inconceivable primitiveness of the humbler dwellings there at the time. Recent English students have shown that few of the existing cottages were erected before the seventeenth century, representing a rise in the culture stage of the higher English yeomanry, and replacing huts of just such character as those which the colonists first built. Indeed, it is clear that primitive methods of construction persisted in remote districts of England long after they had vanished from the older colonial settlements. Edward Johnson is supported by much other evidence, when he writes in 1654. “The Lord hath been pleased to turn all the wigwams, huts, and hovels, the English dwelt in at their first coming, into orderly, fair and well built houses.”10 In England, on the other hand, in the huts of charcoal-burners and barkpeelers we see types, still persisting to the days of photography, which were used by the first comers at Jamestown and Charleston. It would seem that the theory of the frontier as distinctively American had been elaborated without sufficient regard for historical relationships; that the concept of the frontier must be carried back into England itself, and that it did not constitute a specific differentia of colonial life. The key to early colonial development in architecture, indeed, would seem to be, not the handicaps, but rather the economic advantages of the common man in America. English students scarcely speak of emigration from economic motives as occurring before the later eighteenth century, or even before the nineteenth, attributing the earlier migrations to the colonies to religious or political motives. These were the motives of its leaders, to be sure, and of large numbers of freemen. but in the case of the great number of farm laborers, indented servants, and others whose passage money was paid for them, it was the prospect of better conditions of life which
51 brought them to the New World. That conditions were better in fact has been well brought out by Bruce, in his Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century.11 We are apt to set down all the claims made in early colonial tracts as the exaggerations of promotion, and this may be perhaps urged against the author of Leah and Rachel (1656). who speaks of “the dull stupidity of people necessitated in England, who rather then [than] they will remove themselves, live here a base, slavish. penurious life. . . . Their condition . . . far below the meanest servant in Virginia”: and of the buildings in Virginia, so contrived “ that your ordinary houses in England are not so handsome”,12 The most accurate and objective of observers in New England, however, William Wood, writes in 1634, “He that hath understanding and industry, with a stock of £100 shall live better than he shall do here [in England] of £20 per annum”, and adds, “But many, I know, will say, If it be thus how comes it to pass then that they are so poor. To which I answer that they are poor but in comparison. Compare them with the rich merchants or great landed men in England, and then I know they will seem poor.”13 To all below the richer yeomen the free grant of virgin and wooded land in America meant a great improvement in their economic status, and even members of the lesser gentry who migrated soon found their means greatly increased. It is not surprising, therefore, to find—in contrast with the impression generally held—that the more permanent houses, generally framed structures of wood, which superseded the first shelters were not inferior in construction to those of corresponding social grades in the Old World. Mr. S. O. Addy, a pioneer student of humbler English dwellings, writes, “In historic times the houses of the English peasantry were mostly built of wood, stone being only used where wood could not be obtained. . . . Houses were built of wood even in places where stone was most abundant. and this kind of building continued to the close of the sixteenth century.”14 Innocent fixes the seventeenth century as the time during which other materials tended to supplant wood.15 The use of wood by the
52 colonists was thus not the adoption of an inferior material due to local conditions, but the perpetuation of English custom where the need for abandoning it was lacking. For the poorer man, indeed, it was even a step forward. The walls in the frame, or “half-timber”, houses of England were by no means always of burned brickwork beneath the plaster, as is commonly supposed in this country; wattle daubed with clay. laths with clay, clay alone, “cat and clay” rolled with straw, as well as sun-dried brick, were all in common use there in the seventeenth century. All these kinds of filling were also employed in the earliest American houses, but in the English colonies, at least after the very first years, were invariably covered with weather-boarding. This itself was not an American invention, but a feature early used in Kent and other English districts, even without any filling.16 Its universal adoption in America was perhaps partly the result of greater severity of climate, but the inadequacy of uncovered half-timber houses was felt in England also, and later led to widespread use of tiles as a wall covering. The colonial covering of wood may thus represent primarily an improvement in the standard of construction, made possible by the greater cheapness of lumber. The same certainty applies to the adoption of shingles for roofing. These, no new invention, were not so much a poor substitute for slate and tile as a better substitute for thatch, which continued to be the usual roofing for humbler dwellings in many districts of England until the later eighteenth century, and still remains in use there, whereas the last thatched roofs in the colonies vanished about 1670. Similarly, the wooden chimneys daubed with clay used in the early settlements were no mere makeshifts of the frontier. Instances may be multiplied where they remained in use in England in the nineteenth century,17 long after their disappearance from the older settlements on this side of the ocean. In the matter of style, at least, it will be supposed that the seventeenth-century houses of the colonies—which with their direct revelation of functional elements, their steep gables and leaded casements, represent in general a survival of medieval art—stood in arrears to England. It is true that Inigo Jones had introduced the academic style into England, with the Banqueting House at Whitehall, as early as 1619; but it is not so often observed how few and isolated were the works in this style there, down to the Great Fire. 16 Innocent, op. cit., pp. 116-118, He also writes us, coupling with his opinion that of Mr. J. Kenworthy: “We feel sure that such boarding was in use here long before the settlement of America.”
53 The number of country houses in the new manner before the Restoration may almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. The infiltration of the academic forms in the architecture of the provincial towns and small manor-houses, to say nothing of ordinary cottages, was slow.18 The persistence of the leaded casement may be taken as an illustration of this. Many English examples of mullioned casements are as late as 1730. The introduction of sash windows into the English provinces was very gradual.19 Thus the earlier houses of the colonies represented quite an equal stage of development in style with those of the same class in provincial England. The same was true of the churches, whether Anglican or dissenting. The only American church of the Anglican faith remaining from the seventeenth century, St. Luke’s, Smithfield, Virginia, is, to be sure, essentially Gothic in style, with projecting buttresses, and pointed mullioned arches; and the foundations of the church at Jamestown, built 1639-1647, show a plan wholly Gothic. This is no longer surprising, however, when we realize that the earliest academic church in England, St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, by Inigo Jones, was built only in 1631, and that it remained unique until after the Great Fire of 1666, when Wren began his London churches. Among students of English architecture20 it is a commonplace that Gothic remained the prevailing style for churches outside the capital throughout the century. The Puritan meeting-house of the colonies, as one sees it in the “Old Ship” at Hingham, Massachusetts, built 1680-1682—a squarish, barn-like structure, with the pulpit on one of the longer sides and galleries around the other three—has been represented in the chief discussions of American churches as a purely native creation: “In New England the earliest [church] buildings resembled no English buildings at all, either of the earlier or later type, but a style was evolved which was peculiar to the period.”21 “The meeting-house . . . knew no architectural tradition . . . for any existing tradition was inseparable from the religious persecution from which the early settlers had fled.”22 Such statements ignore completely
54 the existence in Europe for a century of a specifically Protestant type of house of worship, with galleries focussing on the pulpit. It had its beginnings in Luther’s chapel at Torgau, 1544, and was widely diffused in France after the Edict of Nantes, the most notable example there being the “Temple” at Charenton, built in 1623. In England the erection of such buildings was rarer down to 1689, first because of the capture of the official church by Protestantism and Puritanism, then, from the Restoration to the Toleration Act, because of prohibitions and persecutions. Examples still exist there. however, such as the Friar’s Street Chapel at Ipswich,23 with its Gothic casements, which reveal that the type was familiar there from an early time. Non-conformist houses of worship in America and in England were thus identical in scheme. The change to the academic style in the eighteenth century did not affect the essential parity between the architecture of the colonies and that of provincial England. The means of its adoption, as any widespread matter, and of its subsequent transformations, were the same in both—the books, so characteristic of the period, which made its forms universally accessible to intelligent workmen and even laymen. Whereas prior to 1700 little had been available in English works except the forms of the “five orders”, soon after that date there began to pour forth publications of contemporary designs both great and small. James Gibbs, in his folio Book of Architecture (1728), expressed the hope that it might be useful to gentlemen building in remote parts of the country, “where little assistance in design is to be secured”; and this was the special purpose of a multitude of smaller works, which supplied owners of less means with details of doorways, chimney-pieces, staircases, ceilings, and, after 1740, plans and elevations of whole houses in great variety. In the phase of style represented, these follow the changes which brought the lavish ornament of the rococo to England, and then replaced it by the ever-cooling chasteness of classicism. Such books were imported into America in great abundance, at dates very shortly after their publication.24 Comparison shows that in a large number of specific instances details of colonial buildings were copied directly from their plates. Every new English fashion had thus its reflection in the colonies. The success and rapidity with which these fashions were assimilated in the colonies was not substantially less than in provincial England, for buildings representing the same social grade. Many
55 colonial buildings have details of the classic orders applied in an isolated and ungrammatical way, but English buildings from the same period showing similar traits may readily be instanced. On the other hand American houses like Mount Airy, 1758—entirely of stone, closely akin in its design to a plate of Gibbs’s book—stand on the same artistic level with their true congeners, the best houses of the smaller English gentry of the day. For the churches, analogous relationships prevail. Thus St. Philip’s, Charleston, built in 1723, as shown in the Gentleman’s Magazine for June, 1753, was spoken of by an English contemporary as “a grand church resembling one of the new churches of London”,23 and its three tall porticoes, of a type adopted there only about 1720, give this much justification. Difference of material is generally supposed to have brought modification of the academic style in the colonies, the use of wood giving the orders more slender proportions and the detail a special delicacy. This idea, an outgrowth of nineteenth-century biologic theory, developed at a time when attention was focused chiefly on the colonial buildings of New England, and when the later history of English architecture was little known. It is true that the increasing cost of wood rendered frame-houses a rarity in England soon after the adoption of the academic style, whereas they continued in common use in America. Outside New England, however, the great majority of the finest colonial houses are of masonry, and in a number of these, such as Stratford, Carter’s Grove, and the Nelson house at Yorktown, doorways and other details, in some cases even cornices, are of brick and stone. On the other hand many Georgian houses in England have doorways and cornices of wood. in neither country are the forms and proportions of wooden details modified in the direction of slenderness prior to the advent of the Adam style. This attenuated version of the classic, based on Pompeian decoration, which had its beginnings only about 1760. appeared in the popular handbooks after 1780, and in America thus after the Revolution. The change of proportions which then first took place was English in its origin and independent of material.
56 derivation of both from English handbooks. Such a theory arises merely because appreciation of these smaller English houses, which have been eclipsed by their great neighbors, has only come after the colonial work has long been familiar. Despite minor local traditions, dialects, which existed in the colonies as in different English districts, the colonial style had thus always as its ideal, conformity to current English usage. It does not constitute America’s characteristic achievement in architecture. A true contribution to artistic development in the world at large is to be found rather in the classical style of the early republic. The Declaration of Independence was felt by its authors to apply in artistic matters also. Thus while minor craftsmen for a time continued traditions essentially colonial and English, the leaders sought to establish an architecture which should not be borrowed from contemporary European styles, but should be founded on the authority of the ancients, in whose republics the new states were felt to have their closest analogy. The initiative of amateurs and laymen such as Jefferson and Nicholas Biddle established the form of the classic temple as a single unconditional ideal for all classes of buildings. The Capitol at Richmond was modelled on the Maison Carrée, the Library of the University of Virginia on the Pantheon in Rome, the second Bank of the United States on the Parthenon at Athens. Jefferson even housed the professors at the university in little temples, and Biddie built himself a residence on the pattern of the “Theseum”. The classical revival was, to be sure, a movement which had its beginnings abroad, and which there also had the same ultimate ideal, the temple. By priority in embodiment of this ideal, however, and by greater literalness and universality in its realization, America reveals an independent initiative. The origin and antecedents of American classic buildings we have discussed in detail elsewhere.27 It will suffice here to recall that the Virginia Capitol, designed in 1785, preceded the Madeleine in Paris, first of the great European temple-reproductions, by twenty-two years; and that the Bank of the United States, built 1819 to 1826, antedated the corresponding foreign versions of the Parthenon, the National Monument at Edinburgh, and the Walhalla at Regensburg, by ten years or more. The adoption of the temple form there for buildings devoted to practical use came later, in the Birmingham Town Hall (1831). Belief that
57 American example was influential In England is justified by a reference to the Bank of the United States in a London newspaper of 1837, which states that it “excels in elegance, and equals in utility, the edifice, not only of the Bank of England, but that of any banking house in the world”.28 American domestic buildings of the second quarter of the century, from “Arlington” and “Andalusia” to obscure houses of the Northwest, represent an extreme of classicism which has no parallel elsewhere. Criticism of such buildings from a functional viewpoint is irrelevant to historical consideration, which is concerned only with determining and understanding the actual course of evolution. Whatever be thought of them, there can be no doubt that they endowed America with an architectural tradition unsurpassed in the qualities of monumentality and dignity. It is only this unequalled heritage of classical monuments from the formative period of the nation which can explain America’s leadership in the new classical revival of the present. When this began in the ‘nineties, the characteristic striving elsewhere was toward differentiation, toward original forms expressive of the novel elements in modern life, rather than toward unity, and emphasis on the elements of continuity with the past. The influence of the Chicago Exposition, to which the revival is usually ascribed, is not enough to account for its native vitality, or for the distinguishing austerity of its work. These are due to familiarity with, and to the special character of, the early buildings of the republic—factors which have given the classical revival a nationalistic sanction. Abroad, this modern architecture of America has made a deep impression and, at least in England, it has already had a marked effect. Many of the most gifted of the younger English architects have visited this country, and are actively engaged in promoting at home a similar return to the classic style of the early nineteenth century. The “balance of trade” with England is now favorable to America in artistic influence also. Thus it is not the colonial style, but the classic architecture of the republic, in its two incarnations, old and new, which is a true contribution of America to universal development, a contribution well deserving to be recognized, even by the general historian. FISKE KIMBALL.
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Dinsmore Documentation presents
Classics of American Colonial History