Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of revolution, exciting to unheard-of innovations in the fields of
politics and economics and religion and letters, giving rise to Jacobin
Clubs and Jeffersonian democracy, they set themselves seriously to
the work of barring its progress through their own little world. They
conveniently associated the economic unrest of post-war days, that
gave birth to a strange progeny in Rhode Island and New Hampshire and
Massachusetts, with the contamination of French atheism, charged all
unrest to the account of democracy, and hastened to put it down in the
name of law and righteousness. They hated new ways with the virtuous
hatred of the well-to-do, and dreamed of a future America as like the
past as one generation of oysters is like another.
There is a certain historical fitness in the fact that the Wits
should have arisen in Connecticut and been the intellectual children
of Yale. For generations the snug little commonwealth had been the
home of a tenacious conservatism, that clung to old ways and guarded
the institutions of the fathers with pious zeal. Nowhere else in New
England did the ruling hierarchy maintain so glacial a grip on society.
The Revolution of ’76 had only ruffled the surface on Connecticut life;
it left the social structure quite unchanged. The church retained its
unquestioned control of the machinery of the commonwealth; and the
church was dominated by a clerical aristocracy, hand in glove with a
mercantile aristocracy. Fresh currents of thought that were stirring
the pulpits of eastern Massachusetts--suggestions of an Arianism that
was to lead to the Unitarian schism--did not reach so far as New Haven,
and Yale was content to remain the bulwark of an obsolete Calvinism.
In such a soil Federalism would flourish like Jonah’s gourd; and it
exuded a special odor of sanctity from the Calvinism in which it was
rooted. To stout Federalists like Timothy Dwight, the current dogma of
total depravity sufficed to disprove the validity of all democratic
aspiration. It was a presumption little short of blasphemous to
assert that sinners are competent to manage the temporal affairs of
society. The doctrine of equalitarianism was a particular stench in the
nostrils of the aristocratic clergy, who disliked all leveling. The
Irish immigrants seem to have been the most offensive equalitarians.
A New England gentleman, traveling in Pennsylvania in the nineties,
wrote home: “I have seen many, very many Irishmen, and with a few
exceptions, they are ... the most God-provoking Democrats on this side
of Hell.” And in 1798 Harrison Gray Otis wrote: “If some means are not
adopted to prevent the indiscriminate admission of wild Irishmen and
others to the right of suffrage, there will soon be an end to liberty &
property.”[374] To prevent, if possible, such an unhappy outcome, the
upper classes of New England fell to organizing and drilling all the
elements of conservatism for a vigorous defense. They wrote and spoke
and preached, till the mind of respectable New England was saturated
with prejudice. The democratic principle was converted into a bogey to
frighten the simple. Such a hideous misshapen imp of darkness, such a
vile hag of anarchy had never before been painted for the imagination
of honest Yankees to shudder at; and if democracy seemed to them a
wild and fearsome thing making ready to destroy their venerated social
order, they only believed what the minister preached on the Sabbath and
the squire asserted on week days. The plebeian democrat, very likely
in debt, was quite overwhelmed by the organized forces of village
respectability.
In this great work of saving the commonwealth of Connecticut from the
pollutions of democracy the Hartford Wits were competent laborers. The
more important members of the group were John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight,
Joel Barlow, Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Richard Alsop, and
Theodore Dwight. To these may be added the names of Dr. Elihu Hubbard
Smith and Dr. Mason F. Cogswell, who were friends and occasional
collaborators. Nearly all were Yale men with a pronounced Yale
predilection for Calvinism and Federalism, admirable representatives
of the oligarchical upper class of the provincial Connecticut society.
Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, was a minister and
president of Yale; Hopkins, Smith and Cogswell were physicians of high
professional standing; Trumbull and Theodore Dwight were lawyers;
Barlow and Humphreys found their way into the diplomatic field, and
Alsop was a merchant. They were all comfortably well off and several
were wealthy. Alsop was one of the few millionaires of the time; Barlow
acquired a fortune in France; and Humphreys late in life established
a textile industry incorporated for half a million. Hot Federalists,
they found in Washington, Governor Trumbull, and Fisher Ames, their
political mentors and guides. The most active of the group politically,
was Theodore Dwight, who with his cousin Timothy was a director of
the Eagle Bank, a Federalist institution, and bitterly opposed to the
chartering of Republican banks. When one of the latter applied to the
legislature for a charter he denounced it as a “child of intrigue and
the mother of Discord.” He was deep in the Hartford Convention, serving
as its secretary and later as its historian. He denounced Jeffersonian
republicanism as seeking to “discredit the ministry, decry religion,
and destroy public worship,” and as he saw it spreading through New
England he attributed to it the certain decay of morality and the
impending break-up of family ties, exclaiming with somewhat extreme
vivacity: “The outlaws of Europe, the fugitives from the pillory and
the gallows, have undertaken to assist our own abandoned citizens, in
the pleasing work of destroying Connecticut.... Can imagination paint
anything more dreadful on this side of hell!”
Later generations remember best the massive character of Timothy
Dwight, a man endowed with all the Connecticut virtues and walking
amongst his fellows with magnificent confidence in his powers.
A great preacher, an authoritative theologian, a distinguished
administrator--“every inch a college president”--a ready counselor on
any knotty point be it in law or politics or finance or agriculture or
_belles lettres_, a born leader of men, and by way of recreation an
inditer of Hebraic epics and huge didactic poems and ample Connecticut
pastorals, a confirmed traveler observing the manner of life in many
commonwealths and preserving his observations in solid volumes--he was
a man to compel the admiration of his fellows and put his stamp upon
his age. So vast was the contemporary reputation of Timothy Dwight, and
so many-sided, it may seem ironical that time should have shrunk him
to the narrow compass of a paragraph in our literary history. And yet
the more curiously one considers the work of the great president of
Yale, the more insistent become one’s doubts concerning the fineness
of this nugget of Connecticut gold. It shows very suspicious signs of
tarnish. His commanding presence and authoritative manner, his sonorous
eloquence, his forwardness in defense of what few doubted, his vehement
threshing of straw long since reduced to chaff, his prodigious labors,
his abundant printing, no longer seem so authentic a seal of greatness
as they seemed to his open-mouthed contemporaries; and one suspects
that he impressed his fellow citizens by the completeness with which
he measured up to every Connecticut ideal, rather than by the creative
vigor of his mind. The great Timothy, in short, seems to a later
generation to have been little more than a walking repository of the
venerable Connecticut _status quo_.
The intellectual inquisitiveness that gave birth to disintegrating
theory in the mind of his grandfather Jonathan Edwards, and made him a
profoundly revolutionary influence in his time, was wholly lacking in
the grandson. The latter refused to follow the questioning intellect
into unsurveyed fields. He would not meddle with change. His mind
was closed as tight as his study windows in January. He read widely
in the fields of rationalism, but he read only to refute. Now and
then to be sure, certain generous promptings visited him: he spoke
out against slavery; he encouraged the higher education of women.
But from such temptations to become a living voice he turned away to
follow the main-traveled road of Connecticut prejudice. His eyes were
fixed lovingly upon the past, and his fondest dreams for his native
commonwealth hovered about the ideal of a church-state which John
Cotton had labored to establish and Increase Mather to preserve. It
is with those capable theocrats of Massachusetts Bay, rather than
with Thomas Hooker of Hartford, that he is to be associated. Two
men could scarcely be more alike than Timothy Dwight and Increase
Mather; their careers ran in similar lines; each was the unmitered
pope of his generation, and each owed his extraordinary influence
to the same sterling qualities. As ecclesiastical politicians they
drew no line between religious and secular affairs, but were prompt
with a hand in every affair of the commonwealth. They spoke and
wrote with unquestioned authority. They regarded the minister as the
responsible leader of society who must not suffer his flock to be
led astray. The church was the guardian of morality, and the state
was its secular arm. The true faith must not be put in jeopardy by
unfaith. To Timothy Dwight infidelity and democracy went hand in
hand, and to suffer the commonwealth to fall under the control of
the godless meant the end of all morality and religion. To uphold the
established order--of which he was a distinguished member--was for him
the first of Christian duties. A stalwart Federalist, he was a good
hater of all Jacobins. His detestation of Jefferson was virulent and
he swallowed the nastiest tales about the great Virginian without a
qualm, never doubting their authenticity. It was sometimes hinted that
he was too much the aristocrat to feel the warmest sympathy for the
unprosperous, and there seems to have been ground for the suspicion.
The unprosperous were likely to be infected with Jeffersonian heresies,
and as he watched them being drawn off to the York-state frontier,
he rejoiced that their voting power was no longer to be feared. Such
restless spirits, he pointed out, “are impatient of the restraints of
law, religion, and morality; grumble about the taxes, by which Rulers,
Ministers, and Schoolmasters are supported.... We have many troubles
even now; but we should have many more, if this body of foresters had
remained at home.”[375] If the disaffected did not like the way the
Congregational-Federalist party managed the good state of Connecticut,
it were a godsend if they should remove beyond its boundaries.
But it is with the literary work of Timothy Dwight that we are more
immediately concerned, and in all his abundant output, totaling
fourteen volumes and perhaps as much more in manuscript, the same
solid qualities are revealed. It is the occasional work of a man
wanting humor, playfulness, grace, lacking subtlety and creative
suggestiveness, but with a shrewd common sense, a great vigor, and a
certain grandiose imagination. A sonorous declaimer, he dearly loved
combat and the shock of marshaled argument. He went out of his way
to invite majestic effects. In _The Conquest of Canaan_ he described
so many thunderstorms that Trumbull suggested he ought to furnish a
lightning rod with the poem. Such a man could not move easily in narrow
spaces. An epic was none too slight to contain his exuberant rhetoric.
His ready versification, one often feels, runs like a water pipe with
the faucet off; the words flow in an unbroken stream with never a pause