Chapter 1

Certain moral philosophers, with a due disdain of the flimsy foundations
of human pride, have shown that every man is equally descended from a
million of ancestors, within a given number of generations; thereby
demonstrating that no prince exists who does not participate in the
blood of some beggar, or any beggar who does not share in the blood
of princes. Although favored by a strictly vegetable descent myself, the
laws of nature have not permitted me to escape from the influence of
this common rule. The earliest accounts I possess of my progenitors
represent them as a goodly growth of the Linum Usitatissimum, divided
into a thousand cotemporaneous plants, singularly well conditioned, and
remarkable for an equality that renders the production valuable. In this
particular, then, I may be said to enjoy a precedency over the
Bourbons, themselves, who now govern no less than four different
states of Europe, and who have sat on thrones these thousand years.

{Linum Usitatissimum = Linum usitatissimum (Cooper's capitalization
varies) is the botanical name for the variety of flax from which linen is
made}

While our family has followed the general human law in the matter just
mentioned, it forms a marked exception to the rule that so absolutely
controls all of white blood, on this continent, in what relates to
immigration and territorial origin. When the American enters on the
history of his ancestors, he is driven, after some ten or twelve
generations at most, to seek refuge in a country in Europe; whereas
exactly the reverse is the case with us, our most remote extraction being
American, while our more recent construction and education have taken
place in Europe. When I speak of the "earliest accounts I possess of my
progenitors," authentic information is meant only; for, like other races,
we have certain dark legends that might possibly carry us back again to
the old world in quest of our estates and privileges. But, in writing this
history, it has been my determination from the first, to record nothing
but settled truths, and to reject everything in the shape of vague report
or unauthenticated anecdote. Under these limitations, I have ever
considered my family as American by origin, European by emigration,
and restored to its paternal soil by the mutations and calculations of
industry and trade.

The glorious family of cotemporaneous plants from which I derive my
being, grew in a lovely vale of Connecticut, and quite near to the banks
of the celebrated river of the same name. This renders us strictly
Yankee in our origin, an extraction of which I find all who enjoy it fond
of boasting. It is the only subject of self-felicitation with which I am
acquainted that men can indulge in, without