Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
satire--attack on England. His desire to strip colonial loyalties
from the American. Influence on Freneau of the French Revolution.
_The National Gazette_--a leader of anti-Federalism. The
consequences. His growing reputation 368
2. Joel Barlow--Jacobin: Early career: his experience abroad and
his adoption of Jacobin views. Cost to his reputation. _Advice
to the Privileged Orders_: the doctrine of _res publica_; social
responsibility for the individual. _Letter to the National
Convention of France_, and the machinery of a democratic state.
_The Columbiad_--a republican poem 382
3. Hugh Henry Brackenridge--Free-Lance Democrat: An independent
critic of the shortcomings of democracy. _Modern Chivalry_--a
frontier book, a satire of current manners. Democracy must not be
sacrificed to selfish individualism--the folly of the political
climber and of the electorate. A notable book 390
Conclusion 397
Bibliography 399
Index 405
Book One • Liberalism and Puritanism
Common report has long made out Puritan New England to have been the
native seat and germinal source of such ideals and institutions as
have come to be regarded as traditionally American. Any critical study
of the American mind, therefore, may conveniently seek its beginnings
in the colonies clustered about Massachusetts Bay, and will inquire
into the causes of the pronounced singularity of temper and purpose
that marked off the New England settlements from those to the south,
creating a distinctive New England character, and disciplining it for
later conquests that were to set a stamp on American life. The course
of its somewhat singular development would seem from the first to have
been determined by an interweaving of idealism and economics--by the
substantial body of thought and customs and institutions brought from
the old home, slowly modified by new ways of life developing under the
silent pressure of a freer environment. Of these new ways, the first in
creative influence was probably the freehold tenure of landholdings,
put in effect at the beginning and retained unmodified for generations;
and the second was the development of a mercantile spirit that resulted
from the sterility of the Massachusetts soil, which encouraged the
ambitious to seek wealth in more profitable ways than tilling barren
acres. From these sources emerged the two chief classes of New England:
the yeomanry, a body of democratic freeholders who constituted the
rank and file of the people, and the gentry, a group of capable
merchants who dominated the commonwealth from early days to the
rise of industrialism. And it was the interweaving of the aims and
purposes of these acquisitive yeomen and gentry--harmonious for the
most part on the surface, yet driving in different directions--with
the ideal of a theocracy and the inhibitions of Puritan dogma, that
constitutes the pattern of life to be dealt with here. The Puritan
and the Yankee were the two halves of the New England whole, and to
overlook or underestimate the contributions of either to the common
life is grossly to misinterpret the spirit and character of primitive
New England. The Puritan was a contribution of the old world, created
by the rugged idealism of the English Reformation; the Yankee was a
product of native conditions, created by a practical economics.
Part One: The Puritan Heritage • 1620-1660
Chapter I • English Backgrounds
I
The body of thought brought to America by the immigrant Puritans, and
which gave a special cast to the New England mind, may be summed in
a phrase as Carolinian liberalism. It was the confused bequest of a
hundred years of English idealism, struggling with the knotty problems
of a complex society in transition from the old static feudal order to
the modern capitalistic; and it took a particular form and received a
narrow ideology from the current ecclesiastical disputes concerning the
nature and governance of the true church. It was exclusively a product
of the Reformation, unleavened by the spirit of the Renaissance. But
though English Puritanism was wholly theological in its immediate
origins, it gathered about it in the century and a half of its militant
career all the forces of unrest fermenting in England. Economics and
politics joined hands with theology; the center of gravity of the total
movement tended to sink lower in the social scale; and in the end all
England was involved in the great struggle.
In its deeper purpose Puritanism was a frank challenge of the
traditional social solidarity of English institutional life by an
emergent individualism, and far-reaching social readjustments followed
inevitably in its train. If the evolution of modern society is
conceived of as falling into two broad phases, the disintegration of a
corporate feudal order into unregimented individual members of society,
and the struggles of those free individuals to regroup themselves
in new social commonwealths, the historical significance of English
Puritanism may perhaps become clear: it was one of the disruptive
forces that disintegrated the traditional solidarity of church and
state by creating a revolutionary philosophy of individual rights that
purposed to free the individual, both as Christian and subject, from
subjection to a fixed corporate status. The sixteenth century had
announced the great doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, and
the seventeenth century was engaged in adapting the forms of social
and political institutions to that revolutionary principle. It was
concerned to discover a new system of social organization that should
adjust equitably the rights of the individual to the needs of the
political state and to society. To that end the whole theory of the
origin and functions of the political state must come in for review,
and a new conception of the rights of the individual subject-citizen
must be evolved.
This is the sufficient explanation of the close interweaving of
theology and politics that marked the broadening movement of English
Puritanism. Unless one keeps in mind the social forces that found it
convenient to array themselves in Puritan garb, the clear meaning of it
all will be lost in the fogs of Biblical disputation, and some of the
ablest men the English race has ever bred will be reduced to crabbed
theologians involved in tenuous subtleties and disputing endlessly over
absurd dogmas. But tenacious disputants though they certainly were,
pursuing their subtleties into the last refuge and cranny of logic,
those Puritan dogmatists were very far from being vain practitioners of
eccentricity. It is the manner and dress and not the matter of their
argument that is strange; and if we will resolutely translate the old
phrases into modern equivalents, if we will put aside the theology and
fasten attention on the politics and the economics of the struggle, we
shall have less difficulty in discovering that the new principle for
which those old Puritans were groping was the later familiar doctrine
of natural rights; and the final end and outcome of their concern
for a more equitable relation of the individual to society, was the
principle of a democratic commonwealth, established in the conception
of political equalitarianism. Here are liberalisms in plenty to reward
the search for the inner core of Puritanism. There was gunpowder packed
away in Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, and the
explosion that resulted made tremendous breaches in the walls of a
seemingly impregnable feudalism. An intellectual like Roger Williams,
who had thought his way resolutely to the logical outcome of the
reforming principles, could not fail to be reckoned a firebrand by his
generation. The doctrine of “thorough” was dangerously revolutionary.
If the economics of England had not been in a state of flux during the
century following the accession of Elizabeth, the Puritan movement
would not have moved forward by successive stages to the explosion
of the Civil War. But because, as later in France, a rising economic
order was restive under the restrictions of an outworn order, the
Puritan protest found capable allies at hand, and supported by the
money and arms of the commercial interests, it passed under the control
of the latter and set about the great business of making England over
in accordance with the new plans and specifications. On the whole
it is no mistake to regard the Puritan revolution as primarily a
rebellion of the capable middle class, whose growing trade interests
demanded a larger measure of freedom than a paternal king and a landed
aristocracy were willing to grant; and its significant contributions
to the modern world were the two systems it did so much to further:
the system of capitalism and the system of parliamentary government.
From the Puritan conception of the stewardship of talents came a new
ethic of work that provided a sanction for middle-class exploitation,
by supplanting the medieval principle of production for consumption
with the capitalistic principle of production for profit; and from the
conception of the dignity of the individual came the sanction for the
self-pride of the merchant that sustained him in his encounters with a
domineering aristocracy. A prosperous merchant who accounted himself
a son of God and who was persuaded that he was fighting for a freer
England was no mean foe to be awed by the rustlings of a Cavalier. The
London burgesses were the backbone of Puritanism in the days before the
movement passed into the extremer form of Independency and was taken
over by the sectarian radicals; and the Presbyterian middle-phase of
Puritanism spread widely amongst the middle class throughout central
and southern England. But in unloosing the traditional social bonds
Puritanism awakened aspirations that in the end proved hostile to the
middle-class program. It created bitter partisan divisions; it set the
social underling and the aristocrat apart from the middle-class core,
and created those major political parties that have since carried on
the parliamentary struggle. Inevitably it sharpened class alignments,
and the reactions of those alignments vitally affected the development
of New England. The struggles in Massachusetts can scarcely be
understood unless they are set against the greater struggles then going
forward in England.
The three parties that emerged from the theological disputes, Anglican,
Presbyterian, and Independent, followed, in the main, broad social
cleavages and corresponded roughly to the later political divisions
of Tory, Whig, and Democrat. The first stoutly upheld the absolutist
principle in church and state. It stood for Bishop and King. Numbering
probably a large majority of the English people, and led by the
hereditary masters of England, it was dominated by the feudal spirit of
corporate unity. It believed that social order, the loyal subjection
of subject to ruler, was possible only through a coalescence of
church and state. The subject-citizen was born into the one as he
was born into the other, and owed allegiance both to his spiritual
and temporal overlords. Authority, whether in church or state, was
of divine origin, and Bishop and King were the Lord’s anointed,
answerable for their stewardship only to God. The second party was
a compromise between aristocracy and democracy. It substituted the
principle of elective stewardship for divine right. Rejecting the