Made In America (31 page)

The same applies to jelly roll, as in the lyrics

Among the many hundreds of neologisms created in America
by blacks we find to
blow one’s top, gimme five
for a handshake and
high five
for a congratulatory hand slap,
honky
(of unknown significance),
ragtime
(also obscure, but possibly arising from its ragged syncopation; it was first recorded in 1896),
right on, uptight, jive, be cool, bad mouth, bad
in the sense of good,
get down
in the sense of to attend to pleasures, and
cool
in the sense of being admirable.

Finally, a word needs to be said about descriptive terms for black people.
Negro
is Spanish and Portuguese for
’black’,
and first noted in English in 1555.
Nigger
appeared in 1587 and was not at first a pejorative term but simply a variant pronunciation of
Negro. Sambo,
a Nigerian word meaning ‘second son’, was not originally pejorative either. Blacks were generally called
blacks
(or, more politely,
coloureds)
until the 1880s when
negro
became the preferred term. It wasn’t usually capitalized until the 1930s.
Uncle Tom
comes of course from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s popular novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
though its use in the general sense of a servile black hasn’t been found earlier than 1922.

On 8 January 1815 General Andrew Jackson led American troops in a stormy rout of the British at the Battle of New Orleans. It was a decisive triumph – or would have been had there been anything to be decisive about. Unknown to the combatants on both sides, the War of 1812 had been amicably concluded over port and brandy two weeks earlier with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent. More than two thousand men died fighting a battle in a war that was over.
¹

I bring this up here to make the point that, throughout the early American period, communications were a perennial problem. If winds were unfavourable it could take months to cross the Atlantic. In December 1606, when John Smith and his party set off to found Jamestown, the winds proved so ‘unprosperous’, as he rather mildly put it, that it took them six weeks just to get out of sight of England. A good crossing, such as that of the
Mayflower
Pilgrims, would take eight or nine weeks, but crossings of six or seven months were by no means unknown.
²

In such circumstances food rotted and water grew brackish. If the captain or shipowner was unscrupulous, the food was often rotten to begin with. Journals of the time are full of baleful remarks. ‘What with the heat and dampness, even the
biscuit was so full of worms that, God help me, I saw many wait until nightfall to eat the porridge made of it so as not to see the worms,’ wrote one dismayed mariner.
³
Personal hygiene became an impossibility. Lice grew ‘so thick that they could be scraped off the body’.
⁴
Occasionally circumstances would be so dire that sailors would refuse to put to sea and would ‘strike’, or lower the sails to show their defiance, which explains why workers today who withhold their labour are said to be
on strike.
⁵

For mariners conditions were challenging enough, but for passengers unaccustomed to the perils of the sea the experience all too often proved unbearable. One ship sailing from Leyden to Virginia in the winter of 1618 set off with 180 people. By the time it reached the New World all but fifty had perished.
⁶
The passengers of the
Sea-Flower,
sailing out of Belfast in 1741, were so consumed with hunger that they ate their dead. Throughout the whole of the early colonial period, the problem with populating the New World wasn’t so much one of finding people willing to go but of keeping them alive before and after they got there.

The Atlantic was an equally exasperating barrier to the spread of news. Rarely did a letter posted in Boston in November reach London before the following spring. In 1745 the Board of Trade in London wrote to the governor of North Carolina asking him, a trifle peevishly, why it hadn’t heard from him for three years.
⁷
Even news of crucial import was frequently delayed. No one in America knew of the Stamp Act or its subsequent withdrawal for two months after both events. The Bastille was stormed in July 1789, but President Washington, newly inaugurated, didn’t learn of it until the following autumn.

Within America matters were, if anything, worse. Often letters never found their destination and when they did it was not uncommon for a year to elapse before they received a reply. Letters routinely began with a summation of the fate of
previous correspondence, as in this note from Thomas Jefferson, writing from Philadelphia in 1776, to William Randolph in Virginia: ‘Dear Sir, Your’s of August
¹
received in this place, that of Nov. 24th. is just now come to hand; the one of October I imagine has miscarried.‘
⁸

There was good reason for the difficulty: until well after the time of the Revolution, America had virtually no highways worthy of the name. Such roads as existed were often little more than Indian trails, seldom more than fifteen inches wide and fraught with the obvious peril that you might at any time run into a party of Indians, not necessarily a thing you would wish for in the middle of the wilderness even in times of peace. One such trail was the Natchez Trace –
trace
here being used in the sense of something that describes a line – which covered the five hundred miles of risky nowhere between Nashville and Natchez. It was principally used by boatmen who would float freight down the Mississippi on rough rafts, sell their goods, break up the rafts for lumber and hike back. Even in the more built-up East, such roads as existed would routinely disappear at riverbanks or dissolve into a confusion of forks. Signposts, maps and other aids to the bewildered traveller were all but unknown. (The first book of road maps would not be published until 1789.) When Jefferson travelled from Virginia to Philadelphia for the second Continental Congress he had to twice employ guides to show him the way along particular stretches and this on one of America’s better-travelled routes.
⁹
Until well into the nineteenth century, it was as cheap to send a ton of goods across the Atlantic as it was to move it thirty miles overland.
¹⁰

With no roads to speak of, people travelled from place to place within America by ocean-going coaster or, more often than not, didn’t go at all. Samuel Adams did not set foot out of Massachusetts – indeed didn’t mount a horse – until he was in his fifties, and there was nothing especially unusual in
that.
¹¹
In 1750, the whole of Massachusetts could boast just six passenger coaches.
¹²
In Virginia, according to a contemporary account, most people had never seen any four-wheeled vehicle but a wagon and many had not seen even that.
¹³

In the circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that American English became particularly rich in terms for unsophisticated rustics.
Yokel,
a word of uncertain provenance (it may come from the German
Jokel,
a diminutive
of Jakob),
entered American English in 1812.
Hick,
a shortening of
Richard,
is older still, dating from fourteenth-century England and common in America from its earliest days. Among other similar words were
hayseed, bumpkin, rube
(from
Reuben), country jake
and
jay
(which eventually gave us the term
jaywalker
– that is, an innocent who doesn’t know how to cross a city street).
Hillbilly,
perhaps surprisingly, doesn’t appear to have entered the language until 1904 and didn’t become widespread until the 1930s. By 1905 such uninformed rustics were said to come from
the sticks.
The expression derives from a slang term used by lumbermen for a forest. More recent still is
boondocks.
It is a Philippines word for mountain and entered English only in 1944.

Until the closing years of the eighteenth century the only real roads in America were the sixty-two-mile-long Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike
(turnpike
is a British term dating from 1678, and so called because the way was blocked by a studded pole, or
pike,
which was turned to allow passage once a toll was paid), the Boston Post Road between Boston and New York, the Wilderness Road into the Kentucky territory blazed by Daniel Boone, and the Great Road connecting Philadelphia with the mouth of the Conestoga River. The covered wagons built to negotiate the Great Road were at first called freighters. Later they came to be known as Conestogas, after the Pennsylvania town where they were built. Coincidentally, the town also became
famous for a distinctive torpedo-shaped cigar. It was called, naturally, the Conestoga cigar, but the name was soon shortened to stogy (or stogie), and, fittingly, became a favourite of the Conestoga drivers along the Great Road.
¹⁴
An unusual feature of Conestoga wagons was that they were built with their brakes and ‘lazy boards’ – a kind of extendable running-board – on the left-hand side. If there was a particular reason for putting them there, it has since been forgotten. With drivers compelled to sit on the left, they tended to drive on the right so that they were positioned near the centre of the road, which is why, it appears, Americans abandoned the British custom of driving on the left.

Though it surprises most people to hear it, roads in America are effectively a twentieth-century phenomenon. Instead of having a lot of roads, America fell into the habit of having a few roads but giving them lots of names. The great National Road, the first real long-distance highway in America, was also variously known as the Cumberland Road, the Great Western Road, Uncle Sam’s Road, the Ohio Road, and the Illinois Road. Begun in 1811 in Cumberland, Maryland, it ran for 130 miles to Wheeling, West Virginia, and eventually stretched on across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and as far west as Vandalia, Illinois, which it reached in mid-century and then terminated, its function abruptly overtaken by steamboats and railways. Much of this road would become Highway 40, but not for another seventy years. For the moment, long-distance road travel in America was dead.

Such highways as existed were not only few and far between, but perilous, uncomfortable and slow. Early coaches (the word comes from
Kocs,
a town in Hungary where the first such carriages were built; how it then became attached to a person who trains football players and the like is a mystery) were decidedly short on comfort, largely because a seemingly obvious invention – the elliptical spring
– occurred to no one before 1804 and didn’t become common on vehicles until much later. The best roads, called corduroy roads because they were made of felled trees laid side by side giving a ribbed effect like corduroy, were torturous enough, but they were a rarity. Most were simply rough clearings through the wilderness. That perhaps doesn’t sound too bad, but bear in mind that the technology of the time didn’t allow the easy removal of tree stumps. Even on the great National Road, the pride of the American highway system, the builders were permitted to leave stumps up to fifteen inches high – slightly under knee height. Imagine if you will bouncing for day after day over rocks, fallen branches, and tree stumps in an unsprung carriage and you may get some notion of the arduousness of a long-distance trip in nineteenth-century America.

Something of the flavour of the undertaking is reflected in the candid name of the most successful of the stagecoach companies running along the National Road: the Shake Gut Line. (It was an age of colourful names. The Shake Gut’s principal rival was the June Bug Line, so called because its rivals predicted that it would survive no longer than the average June bug. They were wrong.) Coaches not only shook their occupants mercilessly, but routinely overturned. In 1829, according to Paul Johnson, ‘a man travelling from New York to Cincinnati and back reported the coach had been overturned nine times’.
¹⁵

It is perhaps little wonder then that when railways (and to a lesser extent steamboats and canal barges) began to provide an alternative form of transportation, people flocked to them. Even so, early trains were also slow, uncomfortable and dangerous. Cars were connected by nothing more sophisticated than chains, so that they were constantly shunting into one another, jarring the hapless occupants. Front-facing passengers had the choice of sitting with the windows closed – not an attractive option in hot weather – or suffering the
assault of hot cinders, jocularly called ‘eyedrops’, that blew in a steady stream back from the locomotive (a word coined in 1657 to describe any kind of motion, but first applied to railway engines in 1815). Fires, derailments and breakdowns were constant possibilities, and until late in the nineteenth century even the food was a positive hazard. Until 1868 when a new word and phenomenon entered the language – the dining-car – customers were permitted to detrain at way stations and given twenty minutes to throw a meal down their gullets. The proprietors of these often remote and Godforsaken outposts offered what food they could get their hands on – or, more often, get away with. Diners at Sidney, Nebraska, were routinely fed what most presumed to be chicken stew; in fact, its basic component was prairie dog.
¹⁶
Some said they were lucky to get that.

Despite the discomforts, the railways became hugely popular and offered many thousands of people their first chance to leave home. By 1835, according to one estimate, fifty times as many people were travelling by rail as had travelled by all other means put together just five years earlier. From virtually nothing in 1830, the mileage of American railways rose to 30,000 by 1860 – that is, more than all the rest of the world put together
¹⁷
– and to a staggering 200,000 by 1890. Rail travel so dominated American travel that for four generations
road
meant
railroad.
¹⁸
What Americans now call roads were more generally known as
trails,
as in the Oregon and Santa Fe trails.