On 10 July 1764 the Board of Trade ordered the circulation of a plan for the future management of Indian affairs among the Governors and Indian Superintendents of the North American colonies and requested their comments and criticisms. Diplomatic, territorial and commercial relations with the Indians were to be conducted in future by imperial officials, who would assume powers previously wielded by the colonies. Less than four years later, on 7 March 1768, the Board recommended that responsibility for management of Indian relations be returned to the colonies. The Superintendents retained only the role of conducting diplomatic negotiations with die Indians in cases where more than one colony was concerned and were to be stripped of direct authority. The failure of this attempt to introduce imperial regulation of Indian affairs both reflected and confirmed the intractable problem posed by the west in the years before the Revolution.

The authors are graduates of the University of Southampton. Both are now at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where Alan Day is completing his doctoral research in the History Department and Katherine Day is a special student in the Social Relations Department. They wish to acknowledge with gratitude the many valuable criticisms and suggestions made at various stages of this paper's composition by Dr Philip S. Haffenden of the University of Southampton and Dr Jack P. Greene and the Early American History Seminar of the Johns Hopkins University.

In the year of Lexington, the irascible Dr Johnson wrote to a correspondent: ‘The Americans, sir, are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.’ Extreme in his Tory views, Johnson nevertheless reflected popular sentiment concerning the American colonies and their pretensions to independence, and his bias was to be reflected in many of the writings of the first historians who attempted to account for the late destruction of the first British empire.

At the seventy-ninth annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1964, a panel of scholars enlivened one of the sessions with a heated debate over the effects of ethnic assimilation in American culture. The topic of debate, ‘Beyond the Melting Pot: Irish and Jewish Separateness in American Society’, focused on a recent controversial study of ethnic mixture in New York City by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both sociologists. Glazer and Moynihan in their book Beyond the Melting Pot traced the ‘role of ethnicity’ in the seaboard city. The melting pot ‘did not happen’, they concluded, ‘at least not in New York and, mutatis mutandis, in those parts of America which resemble New York’. This frontal assault on the concept of Americanization, long a cherished ideal in the United States, drew a sharp reaction from several panellists, especially William V. Shannon, editorial writer for die New York Times and author of The American Irish, and Irving Greenberg, professor of history at Yeshiva University. Both Shannon and Greenberg insisted that Irishmen and Jews had indeed been assimilated in American society, either for better or for worse. At this point, the discussion degenerated into the traditional moralistic debate on the merits and demerits of assimilation. Reflecting the divergent views of their colleagues in the history profession, Shannon praised assimilation and Greenberg condemned it.

One of the most interesting and intense of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's various friendships, and one which especially affected the poet, sprang from his association with the American cosmopolite, Washington Allston. Though largely forgotten now, or ignored if remembered, Allston was an artist of great prominence in the first half of the nineteenth century, acclaimed in the United States as the foremost American painter. His writings—consisting mainly of a slender volume of verse, The Sylphs of the Seasons, and an Italian revenge tale, Monaldi—were also highly praised in journals and among the literati. But when the ‘historical style’, a term applied to romantic idealism in painting, went out of fashion, Allston's high standing as painter went with it; nor were his writings of the volume or quality to sustain a literary reputation. There exists no doubt, though, that Allston was the first skilled all-round American painter, for the simple reason that no American before him had painted competently such a broad range of subjects in the different genres. Neither is there any doubt as to Allston's influence upon contemporary artists and writers. He was a catalyst who seemed to stir others to expression wherever he went. His 1839 exhibition of paintings in Boston caused a mild sensation and was written about by Margaret Fuller, James Freeman Clarke, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Elizabeth Peabody. Washington Irving's story ‘The Wife’ in The Sketch-Book was based on Allston's married life.

In ‘For the Union Dead’ Robert Lowell evokes a landscape which is symbolic in both a social and an historical sense. His aim in doing so seems to be to test the relevance of the traditional ideals of freedom and racial equality in contemporary American society. The landscape is arid and undermined by a garage which stands for the destructive and unreasoned actions of a city enslaved by the motives of affluence. Two major symbols stand together over the abyss of the underground garage, the Statehouse and a bas-relief of Colonel Shaw. The first stands for the actual administration of the ideals of democracy as expressed in the constitution, while the second represents the deepest convictions of American liberalism which motivated the North during the Civil War. This article explores the historical relevance of the death of Colonel Shaw, who was ‘a martyr’ for the cause of die Negro soldiers he led into battle. This is done through historical documents, and through an examination of James Russell Lowell's ‘Memoriae Positum’ which is a celebration of the death of Shaw. The conclusions drawn indicate that Robert Lowell's poem is ambiguous in its treatment of die material relating to Shaw, that he is far less certain as to the relevance of liberalism either to die historical development of American society, or to the disintegrating contemporary scene. Robert Lowell is forced to accept the unreality of claims made for the racial equality, either supposedly realized or hoped for. His vision extends into the future and contemplates social disintegration in the image of atomic destruction which illustrated the destructive power of American idealism in die last war.