![]() ![]() “Abraham Lincoln,” announced one British Tory parliamentarian, was a “railsplitter, bargee, and attorney…a man brought up in a rough way, a clever woodcutter” and “an incapable pretender.” He was proof (according to the then-current Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston) that putting “Power in the Hands of the Masses throws the Scum of the Community to the Surface.”Ī great deal of this contempt, both for Lincoln and for 19 th-century American culture, was cruelly undeserved. This image was not improved in European minds when, on the cusp of a national civil war, Americans inaugurated as their president a common trial lawyer with no university degree, a heavy backwoods twang, and a reputation for vulgar story-telling. ![]() “The Americans are a brave, industrious and acute people,” conceded Sydney Smith, the British clergyman and critic, but “who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue?” ![]() However much Americans boasted about the superiority of their republican political institutions in the Victorian Era, we never managed to escape the accusation that our politics had been bought at the price of cultural inferiority. ![]()
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