TRAVELS OF FOUR YEARS AND A HALF IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DURING 1798, 1799, 1800,

1801, AND 1802.

BY

JOHN DAVIS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY

A. J. MORRISON

αλλά πολύ

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

1909

OF

FOUR YEARS AND A HALF

IN THE

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA;

DURING 1798, 1799, 1800, 1801, and 1802.

DEDICATED BY PERMISSION TO

THOMAS JEFFERSON, Esq.

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

BY JOHN DAVIS.

Je ne connais sur la machine ronde

Rien que deux peuples differens:

Savoir les hommes bons, & les hommes mechants.

BEAUMARCHAIS.

LONDON:

SOLD BY T. OSTELL, AVE-MARIA-LANE, AND T. HURST, PATER-NOSTER-ROW; B. DUGDALE, AND J. JONES, DUBLIN; AND H. CARITAT, NEW-YORK;

FOR

R. EDWARDS, printer, BROAD-STREET, BRISTOL.

1803.

INTRODUCTION

AMONG the number of non-official inspectors who came from Europe to the United States between the year 1776 and the year 1802-the quarter-century elapsed between the Declaration of Independence and the incorporation of the vague West -there was not one whose record of his observations is uninteresting. The great Experiment attracted men of a superior type to see what the new nation was; or, of those who found themselves landed in America at that time it was the man of ordered intellect, open-minded, who set down memoranda. The result is a series of documents, a book for every year almost, which if not an absolute registry for that era of origins is beyond question an extraordinary repository, both as fact and by comparison, for when before have the beginnings of a nation been journalized?

The impulse to the keeping of a day-book may be of several sorts, the purely business, the scientifically objective, the literary-facts for profit, facts as facts, and facts somewhat as drama. This book by John Davis is for that period fairly unique as the work of a Traveller who was professedly literary, who cared little for the political aspects of what he saw and asked no place among statisticians. Crèvecœur and Chateaubriand were sentimentalists, but Crèvecœur is very disquisitional and Cha

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