ABSTRACT

Captain Basil Hall experienced America as if he were traveling through the history of civilization. The retired British naval officer visited the United States with his wife and child in 1827-28 with the intent, he claimed, to see the progress of the new nation with unbiased eyes. What he saw was a nation in every imaginable state of development. “In the course of 50 miles’ travelling,” in upstate New York, “we came repeatedly in sight of almost every successive period of agricultural advancement through which America has run, or is actually running …” The towns he sees have a “dreary aspect … much heightened by the black sort of gigantic wall formed of the abrupt edge of the forest, choked up with underwood, now for the first time exposed to the light of the sun.”1 He notes that the area has progressed from barbarism to a decent level of civilization in a rapid period of time. “The village of Utica stands a step higher in this progressive scale of civilisation” because it has churches and a college. But “what with towns and cities, Indians, forests, cleared log-houses, painted churches, villas, canals, and manufactories, and hundreds of thousands of human beings, starting into life, all within the ken of one day’s rapid journey, there was plenty of stuff for the imagination to work on.”2