SOURCE: "Knickerbocker Whiggery," in The Raven and the Whale, Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1956, pp. 23-35.

In this excerpt, Miller examines the Knickerbocker writers' explicit conservatism and how it manifested itself in their art and criticism, particularly their fierce nationalism and cultural nativism which, Miller explains, they had to espouse in the full knowledge of their own and their country's literary and cultural debt to England.

The first fact [Lewis Gaylord] Clark's gossip pages [in the Knickerbocker] make clear is that his band [of New Yorkers] were, to a man, Whigs. Secondly, they were professing Christians, most of them Episcopalians, apt to be "high-church" in complexion, partisans of Bishop Hobart. Clark professed from the beginning that he would avoid party rancor "and occupy a broad, neutral literary ground, on which all parties in politics, and men of all creeds in religion, might meet like brothers," but only a Whig could...