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Introduction
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In 1844 Harry McCall, a ne’er-do-well Philadelphian making the Grand Tour of Europe, wrote to tell his cousin Peter what his travels had taught him about Rome and the Romans. He was not impressed. “[W]e have no sympathies with these people,” he explained. “We are not of them—and a great change must take place before we are, if that ever happens.” But McCall’s quarrel was with Europe, not merely Italy. He dismissed it all, telling his cousin that his travels through Great Britain, France, Italy, and Greece had only intensified his already avid patriotism. He did not mind Paris, although he socialized with hardly any Parisians . He preferred the company of Americans, “swarms” of whom had descended on the city during the hot summer months, after the fashionable population had moved out into the countryside. Florence he admired for being unlike Rome. He credited its cultivated fields and contented people to the despotic yet “parental” government that ruled over Tuscany. Like so many Americans , he had great expectations for Greece and Constantinople, but the poverty and decay he saw there only produced “sickening disappointment.” Worst of all, however, was England. All of Europe was alien territory, irrelevant to the great drama unfolding across the Atlantic, but McCall reserved special venom for the English people. He resolved to be “an American, heart and soul” wherever he visited in Europe, but “particularly in England.”1 McCall’s implacable hostility to Europe raises some puzzling questions: If the Old World was irrelevant to the United States, what was he doing in that Roman café? Why did he exert so much effort, time, and treasure crossing the Atlantic at all? And why did he strain to deny any connection between the United States and Europe? This book provides answers to those questions. McCall likened Americans in Paris in 1844 to swarming insects. That image would hardly have seemed appropriate from the perspective of fifty years later, when nearly one hundred thousand Americans regularly crossed the sea in Introduction 2 Being American in Europe, 1750–1860 posh steamships to enjoy a tour of Europe. In the 1840s, roughly seven to nine thousand Americans crossed the Atlantic every year. Nevertheless, McCall’s language did accurately represent the spectacular growth of American travel to Europe since independence. No reliable statistics for the colonial period or early nineteenth century exist, but the number of American travelers, as well as their share of the population, was surely small. One careful study of American travelers to Great Britain between 1740 and 1776 identified just over one thousand individuals, nearly all elite white men. Another analysis estimated that just over five hundred American men resided at some time in London between 1770 and 1775. Travel intensified after independence, although international war, expense , and shipping limitations kept the numbers relatively low. The best estimates are that, before the end of the Napoleonic Wars, no more than two thousand Americans traveled overseas in any given year. In certain years the number may well have been half of that figure.2 Travel abroad accelerated after 1820, the date at which reasonably accurate conjectures can begin to be made. Between 1820 and the Civil War, the number of Americans traveling on the seas rose at an annual rate of 6.7 percent, although it did so unevenly. In 1821, about 2,100 Americans visited overseas destinations, the vast majority of whom sailed to Europe.3 By 1850 that number had more than sextupled. In 1825, a little less than seven hundred Americans registered in Paris lodgings. By the spring of 1848, Americans were entering Paris at the rate of three hundred per month. On the eve of the Civil War, nearly thirty thousand Americans traveled on the seas, about 90 percent of whom were headed to the Old World. The number of travelers spiked in the late 1830s and then again after 1849. Even so, travelers as a percentage of the overall population of the United States remained very small: about 0.02 percent in 1821, 0.06 percent in 1850, and 0.09 percent ten years later. That figure increased gradually, dipping only in the 1830s; by 1880 it had risen to 0.11 percent (for some perspective, in 1999 almost 9% of Americans visited a foreign destination). Although it is impossible to know how the social class profile of travelers evolved, it did diversify considerably in terms of gender. Overall, women constituted...