The lectures of Emerson, the speeches of Webster,
the stories of Hawthorne, the political verse of Whittier and
Lowell, presupposed a keen, reflecting audience, mentally and
morally exigent. The spread of the Lyceum system along the line
of westward emigration from New England as far as the Mississippi
is one tangible evidence of the high level of popular
intelligence. That there was much of the superficial and the
spread-eagle in the American life of the eighteen-forties is
apparent enough without the amusing comments of such English
travellers as Dickens, Miss Martineau, and Captain Basil Hall.
But there was also genuine intellectual curiosity and a general
reading habit which are evidenced not only by a steady growth of
newspapers and magazines but also by the demand for substantial
books. Biography and history began to be widely read, and it was
natural that the most notable productiveness in historical
writing should manifest itself in that section of the country
where there were libraries, wealth, leisure for the pursuits of
scholarship, a sense of intimate concern with the great issues
of the past, and a diffusion of intellectual tastes throughout
the community.
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