America Climbs the Cornstalk 83 



duced the Concord philosophers, divines and abolitionists who 

 crowned this country during the nineteenth century was the 

 direct fruitage of cornfields which never made possible the 

 lavish expenditure and waste that formed a picturesque back- 

 ground of southern plantation life. 



By no stretch of eugenics could Emerson have come out of 

 Virginia, nor Lee from Connecticut. 



It is interesting to speculate on the problematical divergence 

 of the New England character had the Pilgrims found there a 

 teemful soil. How long would the stern Separatist creed have 

 held its integrity against the insidious influences of great 

 natural plenty? There were Puritans who settled in Virginia. 

 Alexander Whitaker who preached in Jamestown's wooden 

 church was one. But the difference between the Low Church, 

 fox-hunting, toddy-drinking parsons of the Tidewater parishes 

 and the Higginsons, Mathers, and Edwards who preached Uni- 

 tarianism and Congregational freedom of conscience from the 

 pulpits of starched, white churches scattered through Massa- 

 chusetts and Connecticut bears a direct relation to the differ- 

 ence in yield per acre between southern and northern corn- 

 lands. 



Out of the same meagerly filled harvest baskets came the 

 passionate individualism which illumined New England's re- 

 ligious and social thought. Where the corn shoots twenty feet 

 high into the sun, and every ear yields five hundredfold, the 

 stature of the planter is dwarfed. Man is made more than a lit- 

 tle lower than the grain he hoes. This had happened in the 

 Valley of Mexico; it was to happen in the valleys of Tidewater 

 Virginia. But beside the chary corn-hills in the fields north of 

 Point Judith man's stature reached to the stars. 



New England never bowed the knee to Coatlicue, or paid 

 the toll exacted by her terrible fecundity. There were no 

 exuberant harvests to reduce man to vassalage. The New Eng- 

 land earth was a stepmother; a conscientious, Puritan foster- 

 parent who did her duty justly, but without sentimentality, 



