Abstract
In Edwards County, Illinois, an ‘English Prairie’ settlement was born in late 1817, months before Illinois became the westernmost state in the Union. Although historians have mostly forgotten this Anglo-American episode in the West, the English Prairie attracted the fervent attention of travelers and writers from its conception until the mid-1820s. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic followed the travails of a small number of British emigrants in Illinois, on the very edge of the English-speaking world. More than fifty contemporary books, articles, and pamphlets dealt exclusively or in large part with the English Prairie.2 Anglo-American commentaries regarding the English Prairie provide a window into post-war of 1812 perceptions of culture, religion, and polity. Given the insignificant number of actual settlers to Edwards County, the English Prairie was less a practical experiment in the settlement of western America than a new battlefield for the contest over the image of the United States in the Paper War, alternatively a symbol of either the potency of the American republic or the dangers of untethering civilization from European foundations. In addition, the episode provides a reminder that the Paper War cannot be understood as a binary conflict, as the most contentious debates were intra-British or between Americans.
Portions of this chapter appeared as ‘A New Albion in New America: British Periodicals and Morris Birkbeck’s English Prairie, 1818–1824’, American Nineteenth Century History, 9 (March 2008), 19–36.
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Notes
Charles Boewe, Prairie Albion: An English Settlement in Pioneer Illinois (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1962, reprint 1999), xi. Boewe gives the best overview of the episode, considering both the social history and cultural significance of the English Prairie. In his England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), James Chandler contextualizes the English Prairie within the political/economic crisis and rich intellectual environment of post-War Britain. See also James Hurt, ‘Reality and the Picture of Imagination: The Literature of the English Prairie’, The Great Lakes Review, 7 (Summer 1981), 1–24.
George Flower, History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois, founded in 1817 and 1818 by Morris Birkbeck and George Flower (Chicago: Fergus Print Co, 1882), 26–7; Frank Thistlethwaite, The Anglo-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), 48; Boewe, Prairie Albion, 6–7.
Mackintosh, ‘France’, Edinburgh Review, 24 (February 1815), 505–537, 520. Flower, History of the English Settlement, 26–7.
Boewe, Prairie Albion, 7; Eliza Julia Flower, Letters of an English Gentlewoman: Life on the Illinois-Indiana Frontier, 1817–1861, ed. Janet R. Walker and Richard W. Burkhardt (Muncie: Ball State University, 1991), 3.
For the friendship between Birkbeck and Coles, see Kurt E. Leichtle and Bruce Carveth, Crusade against Slavery: Edward Coles, Pioneer of Freedom (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011).
Morris Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey in America from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois (London: J. Ridgway, 1818), 28.
Richard Flower, Letters from Lexington and the Illinois, Containing a Brief Account of the English Settlement in the Latter Territory, and a Refutation of the Misrepresentations of Mr. Cobbett (1819; reprint, Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed. Early Western Travels, 1748–1846. vol. 10 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1904), 92. In sharp contrast, John Ruskin later refused to visit the United States because it lacked castles! Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Hating America: A History (New York: Oxford University Press), 54.
William Faux, Memorable Days: Being a Journal of a Tour to the United States, Principally Undertaken to Ascertain, by Positive Evidence, the Condition and Probable Prospects of British Emigrants; including Accounts of Mr. Birkbeck’s Settlement in the Illinois (London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1823), 266.
Brougham, ‘Notes on a Journey’, Edinburgh Review, 30 (June 1818), 134–135.
John Clive, Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1815 (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 95–9; Biancamaria Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15.
James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 453.
Quoted in David Paul Crook, American Democracy in English Politics, 1815–1850 (London: Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965), 101. The emphasis is mine.
Gifford and Barrow, ‘Birkbeck’s Notes’, Quarterly Review, 19 (April 1818), 55, 77, 62. See also Barrow, ‘Fearon’s Sketches’, Quarterly Review, 21 (January 1819), 151; Barrow, ‘Views, Visits, Tours’, Quarterly Review, 27 (April 1822), 78; Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey, 38–9.
Barrow, ‘Inchiquen’s Favourable View of the United States’, Quarterly Review, 10 (January 1814), 527.
Sydney Smith, ‘America’, Edinburgh Review, 33 (1820), 429.
Smith, ‘America’, 430; Smith, ‘Travellers in America’, Edinburgh Review, 31 (December 1818), 144–145.
Reviewers of this era took extreme latitude within their articles, often showing an ignorance of the book under examination, a larger goal being to score debate points in broader polemics. As seen above, the Edinburgh Review gave Birkbeck the given name Moses in the review of his book on France. The Quarterly Review’s January 1814 review of Charles Jared Ingersoll’s Inchiquin’s Letters misspelled the title of the American book as Inchiquen’s Letters. Sydney Smith’s flippant remark that, ‘I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so’ had a grain of truth for this generation of literary men. Quoted in Hesketh Pearson, The Smith of Smiths, being the Life, Wit and Humor of Sydney Smith (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934), 54.
Fearon’s critique of the West built on previous accounts by Charles William Janson and Thomas Ashe, both of whom portrayed the American frontier as a violent, forbidding place, unworthy for emigrants. Janson, Stranger in America: Containing Observations Made During a Long Residence in that Country (London: James Cundee, 1807); Ashe, Travels in America, Performed in 1806 … (London: Richard Phillips, 1809).
Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement 1783–1867 (London: Longmans, Green, 1959), 208.
Jeffrey, ‘State of the Country’, Edinburgh Review, 32 (October 1819), 293; Chandler, England in 1819, 20–22, 84.
Geoffrey Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age: The Development of a Conservative Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), Chapter 3, ‘Bellum Servile’, 141–170, connects the economic/political crisis and Britain’s leading literary figures.
Fearon’s letters, along with the growing chorus of criticism against the English Prairie, may have had some effect. Only a portion of the thirty-nine families made the trip to Illinois, excluding Mr Thompson. Only years later did Thompson’s two sons emigrate to Edwards County to live on the land they had inherited: Jane Rodman, ‘The English Settlement in Southern Illinois as Viewed by English Travelers, 1815–1825’, Indiana Magazine of History, 44 (March 1948), 59; Flower, History of the English Settlement, 321.
‘Birkbeck’s Letters from Illinois’, Eclectic Review, 10 (August 1818), 171.
Mill, ‘Democracy in America’, Edinburgh Review, 72 (October 1840), 2.
Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge: University Press, 1995), 164, 157–158.
‘Parkinson’s Tour in America’, Edinburgh Review, 7 (October 1805), 29–30.
‘Michaux’s Travels in America’, Edinburgh Review, 7 (October 1805), 162–163. In his An Appeal to the Judgments of Great Britain (Philadelphia, 1819), Robert Walsh boasted of victorious American armies in the War of 1812 being led by ‘generals that distil brandy, and the colonels that feed pigs’. British observers must have been ‘astonished’ (210).
Mackintosh, ‘Universal Suffrage’, Edinburgh Review, 31 (December 1818), 200–201.
‘Birkbeck’s Letters from Illinois’, Edinburgh Monthly Review, 1 (January 1819), 8, 12, 15, 16.
‘Fearon’s Sketches of America’, Anti-Jacobin Review, 55 (February 1819), 530.
‘Extracts of Letters from the Illinois’, Monthly Repository, 14 (November 1819), 690–692. ‘Letters from the Back Settlements of America’, Monthly Repository, 15 (October 1820), 602–612.
‘Review. — Flower’s Letters from the Illinois, 1820, 1821’, Monthly Repository, 17 (April 1822), 241.
The Edinburgh Review ignored important books on the United States when political pragmatism dictated. Brougham promised a review of François de ChassebŃuf, Comte de Volney’s book on the United States, Tableau du climat et du sol des Etats-Unis d’Amérique (1803). The Edinburgh Review never published a review of Volney’s work, the author’s political radicalism and religious skepticism likely being a liability in Britain’s paper wars. See Brougham, ‘Davis’s Travels in America’, Edinburgh Review, 2 (July 1803), 453.
William Charvat, ‘Francis Jeffrey in America’, New England Quarterly, 14 (June 1941), 309–34.
Mill, Autobiography, (New York: Columbia, 1924), 66.
Bingham, ‘Travels of Duncan, Flint, and Faux’, Westminster Review, 1 (January 1824), 109–10.
William Cobbett, Preface to Journal made during a Tour in the Western Countries of America, by Thomas Hulme, Vol. 10 of Early Western Travels 1748–1846. ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1904), 21.
Thomas Hulme, Journal made during a Tour in the Western Countries of America, Vol. 10 of Early Western Travels 1748–1846, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1904), 26.
Wright, Views of Society and Manners, a Series of Letters from that Country to a Friend in England, During the Years 1818, 1819, and 1820 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), 132, 261, 262.
‘Birkbeck’s Notes on a Journey in America’, Monthly Review, 85 (February 1818), 163.
Peacock, Letters to Edward Hookham & Percy B. Shelley, 78, as quoted in Dorothy Anne Dondore, Prairie and the Making of Middle America: Four Centuries of Description (New York: Antiquarian Press, 1961), 169.
‘A Western Hermit’, Kaleidoscope; or, Literary and Scientific Mirror, 4 (July 15, 1823), 13.
‘Birkbeck’s Notes on a Journey in America’, Anti-Jacobin Review, 52 (August 1818), 495.
See Birkbeck’s An Appeal to the People of Illinois on the Question of a Convention (Shawneetown, Illinois: C. Jones, 1823).
‘English Settlements in Illinois’, Alexandria Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 19 (February 18, 1819), 2.
‘Emigration’, New-York Daily Advertiser, 2 (November 17, 1818), 2.
Seybert, Statistical Annals of the United States: Embracing Views of the Population, Commerce, Navigation, Fisheries, Public Lands, Post-Office Establishment, Revenues, Mint, Military and Naval Establishment, Expenditures, Public Debt and Sinking Fund, of the United States of America (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1818).
‘Late accounts from England’, Daily National Intelligencer, 7 (January 23, 1819), 3.
‘British Settlement in Illinois’, Niles’ Weekly Register, 18 (April 15, 1820), 117.
Marshall Foletta, Coming to Terms with Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 228–31.
W. T. Spooner, ‘Birkbeck’s Letters’, North American Review, 8 (1819), 359. Likewise, John Bristed, a naturalized citizen and Federalist, complained that Birkbeck’s otherwise ‘valuable and interesting’ Notes on a Journey contained ‘some Jacobin slang against England’. Bristed, America and Her Resources (London: Henry Colburn, 1818), 10.
Everett, ‘Faux’s Memorable Days in America’, North American Review, 19 (July 1824), 92–125.
Everett, ‘Views of Society and Manners in America’, North American Review, 14 (January 1822) 15–26.
There was inevitably some geographical bias in American criticism of the English Prairie. Many thoughtful Americans, including James Fenimore Cooper — no minor image-maker of the American West — believed that the West had become disproportionately large in the making of images of America, a phenomenon readily apparent to readers of British periodical literature from the period. Unfortunately, as Cooper later explained in his Notions of the Americans (1828): ‘Nearly all of the English travellers who have written of America pass lightly over this important section of the Union [New England].’ Suspicious of what he presumed to be an ‘unworthy motive’, Cooper lamented: ‘Volumes have been written concerning the half-tenanted districts of the West, while the manners and condition of the original States, where the true effects of the American system can alone be traced, are usually disposed of in a few hurried pages’; James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans: Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 91–2.
‘Notes on a Journey in America’, Analectic Magazine, 10 (November 1817), 488.
‘Notes on a Journey in America’, Port-Folio, 5 (March 1818), 216.
‘Letter from Morris Birkbeck’, Port-Folio, 250 (February 1823), 138.
‘Review. — Flower’s Letters from the Illinois, 1820, 1821’, 242.
William Cobbett, A Year’s Residence in America (London: Chapman, n.d.), 238, 241, 244. Faux referred to the Cobbett-Birkbeck controversy; Memorable Days, 260, 286.
William Cobbett, A Year’s Residence, 241, 242. Pennsylvania was not Cobbett’s first choice for prospective British settlers. Long Island was Cobbett’s America. As he explained in a letter to a friend: ‘If this untaxed, beautiful, fertile, and salubrious island were inhabited by Englishmen, it would very far surpass the garden of Eden; for here the trees produce golden fruit, and we are forbidden to eat none of them’; James Sambrook, William Cobbett (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 94, citing William Reitzel (ed.), The Autobiography of William Cobbett: The Progress of a Plough-boy to a Seat in Parliament (London: Faber, 1967), 262.
Dorothy Anne Dondore, The Prairie and the Making of Middle America: Four Centuries of Description (Cedar Rapids: Torch Press, 1926), 166.
Cobbett’s preoccupation with rutabagas ‘can today be of interest only to historians of agriculture (if to them!)’; J. E. Morpurgo, ‘Introduction’ to William Cobbett, A Year’s Residence in the United States of America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 13.
Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), especially Chapter 2, ‘Historical Background: Cobbett’; Leonora Nattrass, William Cobbett: The Politics of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 129–131.
‘Messrs Birkbeck and Flower’, Cobbett’s Weekly Register, 41:6 (February 9, 1822), 369–370.
‘Weld’s Travels through North America [part II]’, Anti-Jacobin Review, 2 (March 1799), 241.
‘Janson’s Stranger in America’, Annual Review and History of Literature, 6 (January 1807), 48.
Charles F. Grece, Facts and Observations Respecting Canada, and the United States of America: Affording a Comparative view of the Inducements to Emigration Presented in Those Countries (London: J. Harding, 1819), 7.
‘Duncan’s Travels in North America’, British Review, and London Critical Journal, 22 (May 1824), 148–149, 154.
‘Birkbeck’s Address, and Sketches of Upper Canada’, Monthly Review (March 1823), 250–256; ‘Memorable Days in America’, Monthly Review, 102 (December 1823), 443–445.
C. B. Johnson, Letters from the British Settlement in Pennsylvania (London: John Miller, 1819), especially Letter XIV, ‘Remarks on Birkbeck’s Letters’.
‘Emigrant’s Guide’, Analectic Magazine, 11 (May 1818), 374.
‘A Visit to North America and the English Settlements in Illinois’, Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review, 184 (November 23, 1822), 739.
‘A Visit to North America and the English Settlements in Illinois’, Literary Gazette, 226 (February 23, 1822), 114.
‘An Address to the Farmers of Great Britain’, Literary Gazette, 298 (October 5, 1822), 626.
Marcus Lee Hansen, The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860: A History of the Continuing Settlement of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), 118; Wilbur S. Shepperson, Emigration and Disenchantment: Portraits of Englishmen Repatriated (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), 47.
Cobbett, Rural Rides (London: Macdonald, 1958), 298–299.
William Cobbett, Rural Rides (London: William Cobbett, 1830), 10.
‘Judge Hall — Letters from the West’, Quarterly Review, 39 (April 1829), 353.
‘Rambles in America’, Monthly Review, 3 (September 1832), 59.
‘A Visit to the Illinois’, Monthly Magazine, or, British Register, 14 (October 1828), 430–435.
William B. Cairns, British Criticisms of American Writings 1783–1815 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1918), 10.
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© 2012 Joseph Eaton
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Eaton, J. (2012). A Blessing to the Whole Earth: Birkbeck’s English Prairie. In: The Anglo-American Paper War. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283962_4
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