Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
homespun democracy. “Mr. Dudley’s principles, in government, were too
high for the Massachusetts people,” commented a later Tory, whose own
principles were high:
He found it difficult to maintain what appeared to him to be the
just prerogative of the crown, and at the same time to recover
and preserve the esteem of the country. The government had been
so popular [_i.e._ democratic] under the old charter, that the
exercise of the powers reserved to the crown by the new charter was
submitted to with reluctance.[131]
If “the prejudices against him were great,” some explanation is found
in a letter written by his son, Attorney-General Paul Dudley, to an
English friend, which came to the hands of Cotton Mather and was
published by him:
I refer you to Mr. -- for an Account of everything, especially
about the Government, and the Colledge; both which, are Discoursed
of here, in Chimney Corners, and Private Meetings, as confidently
as can be.... This Country will never be worth Living in, for
Lawyers and Gentlemen, till the _Charter_ is _Taken Away_. My
Father and I sometimes Talk of the Queen’s Establishing a _Court of
Chancery_ in this Country; I have Writ about it, to Mr. Blathwayt:
If the Matter should Succeed, you might get some Place worth your
Return; of which I should be very Glad.[132]
If New England had grown restive under the theocratic oligarchy, it had
no intention of being toryized by English placemen.
It was during these troubled years that a new force made its appearance
in Massachusetts which Sewall noted: “Sept. 25 [1690]. A printed
sheet entituled publick Occurrences comes out, which gives much
distaste because not Licensed....” A week later he added: “Print of
the Governour and Council comes out shewing their disallowance of
the Public Occurrences”; and the next day, “Mr. Mather writes a very
sharp letter about it.” This was Increase Mather, who would tolerate
no such lawlessness of the press, which must be kept as a private
preserve for the orthodox party. Against the Mather conservatism it
was impossible to make headway, and the little sheet did not come to
a second issue. Not till fourteen years later did Sewall set down a
similar note: “April 24 [1704]. I went to Cambridge.... I gave Mr.
Willard the first News-Letter that ever was carried over the River. He
shew’d it to the Fellows.” So began in America, at first unlawfully,
and then with due propriety, the work of making and publishing
newspapers. For seventy-two years thereafter, the _News-Letter_
was published continuously, justifying in all its utterances the
confidence of Boston conservatism, espousing naturally the Tory side
in the pre-Revolutionary quarrels, and coming to a sudden end on the
evacuation of Boston by General Gage.
On December 14, 1719, the _Boston Gazette_ entered the field as a
competitor for conservative readers, and two years later, August 17,
1721, the _New England Courant_ appeared, the first organ of the
opposition. It was edited by James Franklin, who possessed much of the
Franklin independence, untempered by the prudence of Benjamin; and he
set himself incautiously to the business of assailing the strait-laced
authorities of Boston. He got together a group of brisk young men,
known as the Hell-fire Club, who flung their vivacious satires at the
Mathers with such effect as to lead Cotton Mather to undertake the
following “Good Device”:
Warnings are to be given unto the wicked Printer, and his
Accomplices, who every week publish a vile Paper to lessen and
blacken the Ministers of the Town, and render their Ministry
ineffectual. A Wickedness never parall’d any where upon the Face of
the Earth.[133]
Although his prayers could not convert the wicked journalists, his
warnings availed with the magistrates, who took means to put a stop
to such disrespect. Twice Franklin was arraigned for contempt, and
once he spent four weeks in the common jail. By way of counterblast
to so disreputable a sheet, the _New England Weekly Journal_ appeared
on March 20, 1727, an eminently respectable sheet, edited by Mather
Byles and with such notable contributors as the Reverend Thomas Prince.
But with the coming of the _Journal_ with its staff of writers who
modeled their style upon the Augustan wits, we are in the mid-current
of the eighteenth century, that was to enlarge the influence of the
public press far beyond what could have been foreseen from its small
beginnings. It was to penetrate the inland villages and slowly wear
away their insularity of temper and outlook, bringing fresh ideas to
minds that had long stagnated. On the whole it was not a liberal press,
but its final effect was profoundly liberalizing.
Footnotes
[119] A similar plea had failed Dr. Church when he offended the
oligarchy twenty years before, who quite as arbitrarily had fined him
six hundred pounds.
[120] See the account in Palfrey, _History of Massachusetts_, Vol. II,
Book XII, p. 327; and in Wise, _Vindication of the Government of the
New England Churches, Introduction_. The current Tory interpretation of
the common law of sedition was severe. “In 1679, at the trial of Henry
Carr [Care], indicted for some passages in a weekly paper, the Lord
Chief Justice Scroggs declared it criminal at Common Law to ‘write on
the subject of government, whether in terms of praise or censure, it is
not material; for no man has a right to say anything of government’”
(_State Trials_, VII, 929; quoted in Schuyler, _The Liberty of the
Press in the American Colonies, etc._)
[121] See _Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings_, Second
Series, Vol. XV, pp. 283-296.
[122] _Vindication_, edition of 1860, pp. 50-53.
[123] _Ibid._, pp. 54-55.
[124] _Ibid._, p. 60.
[125] _The Churches Quarrel Espoused_, p. 116.
[126] _Ibid._, p. 209.
[127] A gratuitous insult, as Wise was well known.
[128] “Letter to Robert Wodrow, September 17, 1715:” _Diary_, in
_Massachusetts Historical Collections_, Seventh Series, Vol. VIII, p.
327.
[129] _Ibid._, p. 450.
[130] The account with affidavits is given in Sewall, _Diary_, Vol. II,
pp. 144-147.
[131] Hutchinson, _History of Massachusetts Bay Colony_, Vol. II, p.
148.
[132] Sewall, _Diary_, Vol. II, Introduction, p. 109.
[133] _Diary_, Vol. II, p. 663.
Book Two • The Colonial Mind
The undistinguished years of the early and middle eighteenth century,
rude and drab in their insularity, were the creative springtime of
democratic America--plebeian years that sowed what after times were
to reap. The forgotten men and women of those silent decades wrote
little, debated little, very likely thought little; they were plain
workmen with whom ideas counted for less than the day’s work. The stir
of achievement filled the land, daily penetrating farther into the
backwoods and bringing new farmlands under the plow. The stern demands
of necessity held men in their grip, narrowing the horizon of their
minds, and obscuring the vision of their larger accomplishment. Along
the Appalachian watershed a vast drama, magnificent in the breadth and
sweep of its movement, was being enacted by players unconscious of
their parts. Not until long after they had gone to their graves were
the broad lines of that drama revealed. Today it is plain that those
unremembered years were engaged in clearing away encumbrances more
significant than the great oaks and maples of the virgin wilderness:
they were uprooting ancient habits of thought, destroying social
customs that had grown old and dignified in class-ridden Europe. A
new psychology was being created by the wide spaces that was to be
enormously significant when it came to self-consciousness. If this
middle eighteenth century wrote little literature, it created and
spread among a vigorous people something of far greater importance to
America, the psychology of democratic individualism.
From this determining influence--too little recognized by later
generations--the creative outlines of our history have taken shape.
American ideals and institutions emerged in large part from the silent
revolution which during the middle eighteenth century differentiated
the American from the transplanted colonial; a change that resulted
from an amalgam of the older English stock with other races, and the
subjection of this new product on a great scale to the influence of
diffused landholding. From these two major facts of a new race and
a free environment came the social and political philosophy of older
America, to which we have traditionally applied the term democratic,
and which unconsciously wove itself into our daily intercourse and ways
of thinking.
Part One: The Mind in the Making • 1720-1763
Chapter I • Colonial Backgrounds
I • New Stock
Immigration in the eighteenth century was almost wholly economic in
motive. The reports of free land and free opportunity in America
penetrated to remote hamlets of Great Britain, and more slowly to
the continent, and drew hither a rude influx of the dispossessed and
disinherited of Europe. From the hopeless poverty of great masses
of old-world laborers, increasing numbers sought escape through
emigration, accepting the hardships and uncertainties of the migration
in the hope of bettering themselves ultimately. A host of English
nondescripts--broken men, bond servants, “gaol birds,” the lees and
settlings of the old world--came overseas, voluntarily or under
duress, in numbers running into the hundred thousands, and shared with
German peasants from the Palatine, or Scotch-Irish from Ulster, the
back-breaking labor of subduing the wilderness. About these unfortunate
men and women no romance has gathered; tradition and history have not
remembered their names or glorified their deeds; yet their blood runs
in the veins of most Americans today of the older stock, and their
contribution to our common heritage was great and lasting.
Of the different racial strains that mingled their blood with the
earlier English--Irish, Huguenot-French, German, Scotch-Irish--the last
was by far the most important. Not since 1630, when the _Lady Arbella_
and her companion vessels brought the Puritans to Massachusetts Bay,
had there been an event so momentous to America as the arrival in 1718
of some four thousand Scotch-Irish from Ulster, the vanguard of an
army which by the time of the Revolution had risen to approximately
two hundred thousand, or more than twelve times the number of English
who settled Massachusetts. They were desperately poor; the available
lands near the coast were already preëmpted; so armed with axes, their
seed potatoes, and the newly invented rifle, they plunged into the
backwoods to become our great pioneering race. Scattered thinly through
a long frontier, they constituted the outposts and buffer settlements
of civilization. A vigorous breed, hardy, assertive, individualistic,
thrifty, trained in the democracy of the Scottish kirk, they were the
material out of which later Jacksonian democracy was to be fashioned,
the creators of that “western type which in politics and industry
became ultimately the American type.”[134]
Next to the Scotch-Irish, who for the most part were free peasants,
the most important addition to eighteenth-century America were the
indented servants. Mostly from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany,
they represented all trades and some of the professions. The white
slavers of the times were well organized and plied a brisk trade with
satisfactory profits; and in consequence, a steady stream of indented
servants poured into America to turn the wheels of colonial industry.
In his history of the German redemptioners, Diffenderfer has printed a
number of newspaper advertisements which throw a curious light upon the
traffic: here are two: