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THE AMERICANS
The Colonial Experience
THE
AMERICANS
The Colonial Experience
by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN
"It may be said, That in a Sort,
they began the World a New.*'
TARED ELIOT
Random House / New York
FIRST PRINTING
Copyright, 1958, by Daniel J. Boorstin
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Con-
ventions. Published in New York by Random House, Inc., and simultaneously
in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada, Limited.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-9884
Designed by Philip Grushkin
Manufactured in the United States of America
FOR Ruth
AN UNKNOWN COAST
Governor William Bradford, an eyewitness, reported the landing of
the Mayflower passengers on the American shore in mid-November 1620:
"They fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had
brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from
all the periles and miseries thereof, againe to set their feete on the firme
and stable earth, their proper elemente. . . . Being thus passed the vast
ocean, and a sea of troubles . . . they had now no freinds to wellcome
them, nor inns to entertaine or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no
houses or much less townes to repaire too, to seeke for succoure. It is
recorded in scripture as a mercie to the apostle and his shipwraked com-
pany, that the barbarians shewed them no smale kindnes in refreshing
them, but these savage barbarians, when they mette with them . . . were
readier to fill their sids full of arrows then otherwise. And for the season
it was winter, and they that know the winters of that cuntrie know them
to be sharp and violent, and subjecte to cruell and feirce stormes,
deangerous to travill to known places, much more to serch an unknown
coast. Besids, what could they see but a hidious and desolate wildernes,
full of wild beasts and willd men? and what multituds ther might be of
them they knew not. Nether could they, as it were, goe up to the tope of
Pisgah, to vew from this willdernes a more goodly cuntrie to feed their
hops; for which way soever they turnd their eys (save upward to the
heavens) they could have litle solace or content in respecte of any out-
ward objects. For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a
wetherbeaten face; and the whole countrie, full of woods and thickets,
represented a wild and savage heiw. If they looked behind them, ther was
the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a maine barr
and goulfe to seperate them from all the civill parts of the world.'*
Never had a Promised Land looked more unpromising. But within a
century and a half even before the American Revolution this for-
bidding scene had become one of the more "civill" parts of the world.
The large outlines of a new civilization had been drawn. How did it
happen?
CONTENTS
An Unknown Coast vii
BOOK ONE
THE VISION AND THE REALITY 1
"*-" -* ~~ ^
PART ONE
A CITY UPON A HILL: The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay 3
1. How Orthodoxy Made the Puritans Practical 5
2. The Sermon as an American Institution 10
3 . Search for a New England Way 15
4. Puritan Conservatism 20
5. How Puritans Resisted the Temptation of Utopia 29
PART TWO
THEJNWARD PLANTATION: The Quakers of Pennsylvania 33
6. The Quest for Martyrdom 35
7. Trials of Governing: The Oath- 40
8. Trials of Governing: Pacifism 48
9. How Quakers Misjudged the Indians 54
10. The Withdrawal 55
1 1 . The Curse of Perfectionism 63
PART THREE
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY: The Settlers of Georgia 71
12. The Altruism of an Unheroic Age 73
1 3 . London Blueprint for Georgia Utopia 80
14. A Charity Colony 84
15. Death of a Welfare Project 88
16. The Perils of Altruism 95
PART FOUR
TRANSPLANTERS: The Virginians 97
17. English Gentlemen, American Style 99
18. From Country Squire to Planter Capitalist 705
19. Government by Gentry 110
20. A Republic of Neighbors 116
21. "Practical Godliness": An Episcopal Church
Without Bishops 725
22. "Practical Godliness": Toleration Without a Theory 132
23. Citizens of Virginia 759
JBOOK TWO
VIEWPOINTS ANDjnVTTTJTTTONfi 145
PART FIVE
AN AMERICAN FRAME OF MIND 147
24. Wanted: A PMosophy of the Unexpected 749
25. The Appeal to Self-Evidence 752
26. Knowledge Comes Naturally 759
27. The Natural-History Emphasis 164
PART SIX
EDUCATING THE COMMUNITY 169
28. The Community Enters the University 777
29. Higher Education in Place of Higher Learning 775
30. The Ideal of the Undifferentiated Man 755
PART SEVEN
THE LEARNED LOSE THEIR MONOPOLIES 189
3 1 . The Fluidity of Professions 191
32. The Unspecialized Lawyer 795
33. The Fusion of Law and Politics 202
PART EIGHT
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 207
34. Nature-Healing and Simple Remedies 209
35. Focus on the Community 219
36. The General Practitioner 227
37. Learning from Experience 233
PART NINE
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 241
38. Popular Science : Astronomy for Everybody 243
39. Naive Insights and Ingenious Devices: Electricity 257
40. Backwoods Farming 259
BOOK THREE
LANGUAGE AND THE PRINTED WORD 267
PART TEN
THE NEW UNIFORMITY 269
41 . An American Accent 277
42. Quest for a Standard 277
43. Culture by the Book: The Spelling Fetish 284
PART ELEVEN
CULTURE WITHOUT A CAPITAL 291
44. "Rays Diverging from a Focus" 295
45. Boston's "Devout and Useful Books" 296
46. Manuals for Plantation Living 30 1
47. The Way of the Marketplace : Philadelphia 506
48. Poetry Without Poets 575
PART TWELVE
A CONSERVATIVE PRESS 317
49. The Decline of the Book 319
50. The Rise of the Newspaper 324
51. Why Colonial Printed Matter Was Conservative 529
52. "The Publick Printer" 335
341
PART THIRTEEN
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 343
53. Defensive War and Naive Diplomacy 345
54. Colonial Militia and the Myth of Preparedness 552
55. Home Rule and Colonial "Isolationism" 557
56. The Unprofessional Soldier 565
Acknowledgments 575
Bibliographical Notes 575
Index 423
BOOK ONE
THE VISION AND
THE REALITY
"England purchased for some of her subjects,
who found themselves uneasy at home, a great
estate in a distant country."
ADAM SMITH
AMERICA began as a sobering experience. The colonies were
a disproving ground for Utopias. In the following chapters we will
illustrate how dreams made in Europe the dreams of the Zionist,
the perfectionist, the philanthropist, and the transplanter were
dissipated or transformed by the American reality. A new civiliza-
tion was being born less out of plans and purposes than out of the
unsettlement which the New World brought to the ways of the Old.
PART ONE
A CITY UPON A HILL
The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay
"I write the Wonders of the Christian Religion,
flying from the depravations of Europe, to the
American Strand; and . . . wherewith His
Divine Providence hath irradiated an Indian
Wilderness."
COTTON MATHER
THE Arbella, a ship of three hundred and fifty tons, twenty-eight guns,
and a crew of fifty-two, during the spring of 1630 was carrying westward
across the Atlantic the future leaders of Massachusetts Bay Colony. The
ship had sailed from Cowes in the Isle of Wight, on March 29, and was
not to reach America till late June. Among the several ways of passing
the time, of cementing th? community and of propitiating God, perhaps
the most popular was the sermon. The leader of the new community,
John Winthrop, while preaching to his fellow-passengers, struck the key-
note of American history. "Wee shall be," Winthrop prophesied, "as a
Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall
deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause
him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and
a by-word through the world." No one writing after the fact, three
3
hundred years later, could better have expressed the American sense of
destiny. In describing the Puritan experience we will see how this sense
of destiny came into being, and what prevented it from becoming fanatical
or Utopian.
The Puritan beacon for misguided mankind was to be neither a book
nor a theory. It was to be the community itself. America had something
to teach all men: not by precept but by example, not by what it said but
by how it lived. The slightly rude question "What of it?" was thus, from
the earliest years, connected with belief in an American destiny.
How Orthodoxy Made the
Puritans Practical
NEVER WAS A PEOPLE more sure that it was on the right track. "That
which is our greatest comfort, and meanes of defence above all others,"
Francis Higginson wrote in the earliest days, in New-Englands Plantation,
"is, that we have here the true Religion and holy Ordinances of Almightie
God taught amongst us ... thus we doubt not but God will be with us,
and if God be with us, who can be against us?"
But their orthodoxy had a peculiar character. Compared with Ameri-
cans of the 18th or the 19th century, the Puritans surely were theology-
minded. The doctrines of the Fall of Man, of Sin, of Salvation, Predesti-
nation, Election, and Conversion were their meat and drink. Yet what
really distinguished them in their day was that they were less interested,
in theology itself, than in the application of theology to everyday life, and
especially to society/ From the 17th-century point of view their interest
in theology was practical. They were less concerned with perfecting their
formulation of the Truth than with making their society in America em-
body the Truth they already knew. Puritan New England was a noble
experiment in applied theology.
The Puritans in the Wilderness away from Old World centers of
5
6 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
learning, far from great university libraries, threatened daily by the
thousand and one hardships and perils of a savage America were poorly
situated for elaborating a theology and disputing its fine points. For such
an enterprise John Calvin in Switzerland or William Ames in Holland
was much better located. But for testing a theology, for seeing whether
Zion could be rebuilt if men abandoned the false foundations of the
centuries since Jesus for this New England offered a rare opportunity.
So it was that although the Puritans in the New World made the
Calvinist theology their point of departure, they made it precisely that
and nothing else. From it they departed at once into the practical life.
Down to the middle of the 18th century, there was hardly an important
work of speculative theology produced in New England.
It was not that the writing of books was impossible in the New World.
Rather, it was that theological speculation was not what interested the
new Americans. Instead, there came from the New England presses and
from the pens of New England authors who sent their works to England
an abundance of sermons, textual commentaries, collections of **provi-
dences," statutes, and remarkable works of history. With the possible
exception of Roger Williams, who was out of the stream of New England
orthodoxy anyway, Massachusetts Bay did not produce a major figure
in theology until the days of Jonathan Edwards in the mid-1 8th century.
And by then Puritanism was all but dead.
During the great days of New England Puritanism there was not a
single important dispute which was primarily theological. There were,
to be sure, crises over who should rule New England, whether John
Winthrop or Thomas Dudley or Harry Vane should be governor, whether
the power or representation of different classes in the community should
be changed, whether the Child Petition should be accepted, whether
penalties for crime should be fixed by statute, whether the assistants
should have a veto, whether outlying towns should have more representa-
tives in the General Court. Even the disputes with Anne Hutchinson and
Roger Williams primarily concerned the qualifications, power, and pres-
tige of the rulers. If, indeed, the Puritans were theology-minded, what
they argued about was institutions.
One gets the same impression in looking for evidences of political
speculation, for philosophical inquiry into the nature of community and
the function of government. Nothing in Puritanism itself was uncongenial
to such speculation; Puritans in England at the time were discussing the
fine points of their theory: What was the true nature of liberty? When
should a true Puritan resist a corrupt civil government? When should
diversity be tolerated? And we need not look only to giants like John
Milton. The debates among the officers in Cromwell's Puritan Army be-
A CITY UPON A HILL 7
tween 1647 and 1649 reveal how different their intellectual atmosphere
was from that of New England. They were not professional intellectuals,
but soldiers and men of action; yet even they stopped to argue the theory
of revolution and the philosophy of sovereignty.
In England, of course, "Puritanism" was much more complex than it
was in Massachusetts Bay Colony. It included representatives of a wide
range of doctrines, from presbyterians, independents, and separatists,
through levelers and millenarians. Which of these was at the center of
English Puritanism was itself a matter of dispute. Within the English
Puritan ranks, therefore, there was much lively debate. It was not only
criticism from fellow-Puritans that Cromwell and his men had to face.
They well knew that any community they built in England would have
to find some place for the dozens of sects from Quakers through Papists
who had made England their home. English Puritan literature in the
17th century sparkled with polemics.
Seventeenth-century America had none of the speculative vigor of Eng-
lish Puritanism. For Massachusetts Bay possessed an orthodoxy. During
the classic age of the first generation, at least, it was a community of self-
selected conformists. In 1637 the General Court passed an order pro-
hibiting anyone from settling within the colony without first having his
orthodoxy approved by the magistrates. Perhaps never again, until the
McCarran Act, were our immigrants required to be so aseptic. John
Winthrop was bold and clear in defense of the order. Here was a commu-
nity formed by free consent of its members. Why should they not exclude
dangerous men, or men with dangerous thoughts? What right had sup-
porters of a subversive Mr. Wheelwright to claim entrance to the colony?
"If we conceive and finde by sadd experience that his opinions are such,
as by his own profession cannot stand with externall peace, may we not
provide for our peace, by keeping off such as would strengthen him and
infect others with such dangerous tenets?"
In the eyes of Puritans this was the peculiar opportunity of New Eng-
land. Why not for once see what true orthodoxy could accomplish? Why
not in one unspoiled corner of the world declare a truce on doubts, on
theological bickering? Here at last men could devote thek full energy to
applying Christianity not to clarifying doctrine but to building Zion.
Nathaniel Ward was speaking for Puritan New England when, in his
Simple Cobler ofAggawam (1647) he declared, "I dare take upon me, to
be the Herauld of New-England so farre, as to proclaime to the world, in
the name of our Colony, that all Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and
other Enthusiasts, shall have free Liberty to keep away from us, and such
as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better."
The Puritans in New England were surprisingly successful for some
8 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
years at keeping their community orthodox. In doing so, they also made
it sterile of speculative thought. Their principal theological treatises were
works by William Ames (who never saw New England) and John Nor-
ton's Orthodox Evangelist, a rudimentary summary of the works of
English divines. In England the presbyterians and independents and
levelers within Puritanism were daring each other to extend and clarify
their doctrines; but we see little of this in America.
A dissension which in England would have created a new sect within
Puritanism, simply produced another colony in New England. The bound-
less physical space, the surrounding wilderness deprived the New England
ministry of the need to develop within its own theology that spaciousness,
that room for variation, which came to characterize Puritanism in Eng-
land. When Anne Hutchinson and her followers caused trouble by their
heterodox views and unauthorized evening meetings, she was tried and
"excommunicated." The result, as described by Winthrop, was that in
March 1638, "she . . . went by land to Providence, and so to the island
in the Naragansett Bay, which her husband and the rest of that sect had
purchased of the Indians, and prepared with all speed to remove unto."
The dissidence of Roger Williams the only movement within Massa-
chusetts Bay in the 17th century which promised a solid enrichment of
theory led to his banishment in October, 1635. It was only after
Williams' return to England and his developing friendship with John
Milton that he wrote his controversial books.
In New England the critics, doubters, and dissenters were expelled
from the community; in England the Puritans had to find ways of living
with them. It was in England, therefore, that a modern theory of toleration
began to develop. Milton and his less famous and less reflective con-
temporaries were willing to debate, as if it were an open question,
"whether the magistrate have, or ought to have, any compulsive and re-
strictive power in matters of religion." Such was the current of European
liberal thought in which Roger Williams found himself. But Williams was
banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony and became a by-word of
heterodoxy and rebellion. He died in poverty, an outcast from that
colony. If his little Providence eventually prospered, it was never to be
more than a satellite of the powerful orthodox mother-colony.
What actually distinguished that mother-colony in the great age of
New England Puritanism was its refusal, for reasons of its own, to
develop a theory of toleration. In mid-17th century England we note a
growing fear that attempts to suppress error would inevitably suppress
truth, a fear that magistrates' power over religion might give them tyranny
over conscience. "I know there is but one truth," wrote the author of one
A CITY UPON A HILL 9
of the many English pamphlets on liberty of conscience in 1645, "But this
truth cannot be so easily brought forth without this liberty; and a general
restraint, though intended but for errors, yet through the unskilfulness
of men, may fall upon the truth. And better many errors of some kind
suffered than one useful truth be obstructed or destroyed." In contrast,
the impregnable view of New England Puritanism was expressed in the
words of John Cotton:
The Apostle directeth, Tit. 3.10 and giveth the Reason, that in funda-
mentall and principall points of Doctrine or Worship, the Word of God
in such things is so cleare, that hee cannot but bee convinced in Con-
science of the dangerous Errour of his way, after once or twice Ad-
monition, wisely and faithfully dispensed. And then if any one persist,
it is not out of Conscience, but against his Conscience, as the Apostle
saith, vers. 11. He is subverted and sinneth, being condemned of Him-
selfe, that is, of his owne Conscience. So that if such a Man after such
Admonition shall still persist in the Errour of his way, and be there*
fore punished; He is not persecuted for Cause of Conscience, but for
sinning against his Owne Conscience.
The leaders of Massachusetts Bay Colony enjoyed the luxury, no longer
feasible in 17th century England, of a pure and simple orthodoxy.
The failure of New England Puritans to develop a theory of toleration,
or even freely to examine the question, was not in all ways a weakness.
It made their literature less rich and gave much of their writing a quaint
and crabbed sound, but for a time at least, it was a source of strength.
Theirs was not a philosophic enterprise; they were, first and foremost,
community-builders. The energies which their English contemporaries
gave to sharpening the distinctions between "compulsive" and "restric-
tive" powers in religion, between "matters essential" and "matters in-
different" and to a host of other questions which have never ceased to
bother reflective students of political theory, the American Puritans were
giving to marking off the boundaries of their new towns, to enforcing
their criminal laws, and to fighting the Indian menace. Their very ortho-
doxy strengthened their practical bent.
American Puritans were hardly more distracted from their practical
tasks by theology and metaphysics than we are today. They transcended
theological preoccupation precisely because they had no doubts and
allowed no dissent. Had they spent as much of their energy in debating
with each other as did their English contemporaries, they might have
lacked the singlemindedness needed to overcome the dark, unpredictable
perils of a wilderness. They might have merited praise as precursors of
modern liberalism, but they might never have helped f ound a nation.
10 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
2
The Sermon as an
American Institution
THE PRACTICAL TEMPER, strengthened by New England orthodoxy
and the opportunities of the New World, was not evidenced merely in
the absence of theoretical treatises and abstract disputation. The New
England sermon gave it vivid expression. During the first decades of
settlement, the New England mind found its perfect medium and achieved
its spectacular success in the sermon. This success would have been im-
possible without a firm orthodoxy and a practical emphasis. The Puritans
of Massachusetts Bay thus foreshadowed the circumstances which,
throughout American history, were to give peculiar prominence to the
spoken, as contrasted with the printed, word.
The scarcity of monumental volumes on theoretical questions and the
flood of spoken words have been complementary facts about Ameri-
can culture from the very beginning. The public speech, whether sermon,
commencement address, or whistle-stop campaign talk is a public affir-
mation that the listeners share a common discourse and a common body
of values. The spoken word is inevitably more topical than the printed
word: it attempts to explain the connection between the shared com-
munity values and the predicament of man at a particular time and place*
It is directed to people whom the speaker confronts, and to their current
problems.
In the doctrine of all protestantism there were, of course, special
reasons for the importance of preaching. If priestly intermediaries be-
tween each soul and God were to be dispensed with, the message of the
Gospel had to be brought home to each man. And what better means than
the spoken word, in which an eloquent and learned man established the
relation of the Word of God to the condition of those before him?
Moreover, the 17th century was the great age of English sermons and
not only among Puritans. It was the age of John Donne and Jeremy
Taylor, high Anglicans whose preachments were classics of the sermon
form. By the mid-17th century, English Puritans had developed so dis-
A CITY UPON A HILL 1 1
tinctive a style of prose for their sermons that an attentive listener could
discover the theology of a minister from the form of his preaching.
In contrast to the involved "metaphysical" style of Lancelot Andrewes
and John Donne, the Puritans developed a manner which came to be
known, in their own words, as the "plain" style. The rules of this style
were codified into preachers' manuals like William Perkins' Art of Proph-
ecying, an English handbook found on nearly every book-list in early
New England. The mark of the plain style was, of course, plainness. But
it was also marked by greater attention to persuasion and the practical
consequences of a doctrine than to the elaboration of the theory itself.
The Puritan sermon, as Perry Miller explains, was "more like a lawyer's
brief than a work of art." Its characteristic plan had three parts: "doc-
trines," "reasons," and "uses." The "doctrine" was what the preacher
discovered by "opening" a Biblical text, which was always the starting
point; the "reasons" supported the doctrine; and the "uses" were the
application of the doctrine to the lives of the listeners the "instruction"
which came out of the sermon.
Sermons in the plain style were in every way the opposite of high-
falutin. "Swelling words of humane wisedome," John Cotton said in
1642, "make mens preaching seeme to Christ (as it were) a blubber-lipt
Ministry." That was not the way of Christ, who, rather than give men "a
kind of intimation, afar off," had actually spoken "their own in English
as we say. ... He lets fly poynt blanck." The Puritan minister should not
quote in foreign languages: "So much Latine is so much flesh in a Ser-
mon."
While the metaphysical preacher depended for effect on intricate liter-
ary conceits, the Puritan minister used homely examples. "Gods Altar
needs not our pollishings," declared the preface to the Bay Psalm Book
(1640), the first book printed in the American colonies. Thus, Thomas
Hooker compared the resurrected body to "a great Onyon." Like an
onion hung up on the wall, the resurrected body grows "not because any
thing is added, but because it spreads itself further; so then there shall be
no new body, but the same substance enlarged and increased."
These qualities of the plain style were, as we know, general characteris-
tics of Puritan writing and thinking on both sides of the Atlantic. The
Americans had learned their rules from such English textbooks as Per-
kins, but there were additional reasons for such a style in the New World.
As Hooker explained at the beginning of Ms Survey of the Summe of
Church-Discipline ( 1 648 ) :
That the discourse comes forth in such a homely dresse and course
habit, the Reader must be desired to consider, It comes out of the
12 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
wildernesse, where curiosity is not studied. Planters if they can provide
cloth to go warm, they leave the cutts and lace to those that study to go
fine. . . . plainesse and perspicuity, both for matter and manner of
expression, are the things, that I have conscientiously indeavoured in
the whole debate: for I have ever thought writings that come abroad,
they are not to dazle, but direct the apprehension of the meanest, and I
have accounted it the chiefest part of Judicious learning, to make a
hard point easy and familiar in explication.
The simplicity of life in the wilderness, the homogeneity and smallness
of the community, and the strength of orthodoxy in the early years, all
made the plain style still more plain and virile in America.
In New England, the sermon was far more than a literary form. It
was an institution, perhaps the characteristic institution of Puritanism
here. It was the ritual application of theology to community-building and
to the tasks and trials of everyday life. It was not, as it was inevitably in
England, a mere sectarian utterance of a part of the community. It was
actually the orthodox manifesto and self-criticism of the community as a
whole, a kind of reiterated declaration of independence, a continual re-
discovery of purposes.
The pulpit, and not the altar, held the place of honor in the New
England meeting-house. So too the sermon itself, the specific application
of the Word of God, was the focus of the best minds of New England.
What most encouraged Higginson to believe his colony might become an
example of the true religion was not the simple rectitude of Puritan doc-
trine, but "that we have here the true Religion and holy Ordinances of
Almightie God taught amongst us: Thankes be to God, we have plentie of
Preaching, and diligent Cathechizing."
In England, after the collapse of the Puritan political program in 1660,
individual Puritans were thrown back upon themselves. They became
introspective: each Puritan sought, as in Grace Abounding, to perfect
himself, with scant regard to the community. In America, where the
Puritans were remote from English domestic politics, they remained free
to continue their social enterprise. The history of the New England pulpit
is thus an unbroken chronicle of the attempt of leaders in the New World
to bring their community steadily closer to the Christian model.
The New England meeting-house, like the synagogue on which it was
consciously modeled, was primarily a place of instruction. Here the com-
munity learned its duties. Here men found their separate paths to con-
version, so they could better build their Zion in the wilderness, a City
upon a Hill to which other men might in their turn look for instruction.
As the meeting-house was the geographical and social center of the New
England town, so the sermon was the central event in the meeting-house.
The sermon was as important a ritual as the occasions on which
A CITY UPON A HILL 13
ancient Mesopotamians learned from their priests the dooms passed in
the legislature of their Gods. In New England the ministers were, in their
own words, "opening" the texts of the Bible by which they had to live
and build their society. The sermons were thoroughly theological and yet
thoroughly practical: based on common acceptance of a theology, which
left to the minister only the discovery of its "uses" for converting saints
and building Zion.
The occasions of the sermon, most of which have been too easily for-
gotten, bear witness to its central place in the life of early New England.
There were two sermons on the Sabbath, and usually a lecture-sermon
on Thursday. Attendance was required by law; absence was punishable
by fine (an Act of 1646 fixed five shillings for each offense). The laws
described the Sabbath-ritual as "the publick ministry of the Word." There
was hardly a public event of which the most memorable feature was not
the sermon. Most distinctive, perhaps, were the election-day sermons, by
which the clergy affected the course of political events and which re-
mained a New England institution through the American Revolution.
These explained the meaning of the orthodox theology for the choices
before the voters, described the character of a good ruler and the mutual
duties of the people and their governors. The artillery sermons, which
were delivered on the occasion of the muster of the militia and their
election of officers, began in about 1659. In addition, the numerous (19
in Massachusetts Bay in 1639; 50 in 1675-76) Fast and Thanksgiving
Days were focused on the sermon, which explained to the people why
God was humbling or rewarding them.
Even when the occasion for a sermon was an English tradition, it
acquired new significance as a community ritual in New England. The
practice of preaching to a condemned man before the gallows, an old
English custom, took on new meaning in New England, because of the
smallness of the community and the strength of orthodoxy. Even the
condemned man himself participated actively.
We have an eye-witness account of what happened before the execu-
tion of the murderer James Morgan at Boston in 1686. "Morgan, whose
Execution being appointed on the llth of March, there was that Care
taken for his Soul that three Excellent Sermons were preached before
him, before his Execution; Two on the Lord's Day, and one just before
his Execution." The two Sabbath sermons, each a full hour in length,
were by Cotton Mather and Joshua Moody; the sermon at the gallows
by Increase Mather. So large an audience gathered to hear Joshua Moody
that when they assembled in the New Church of Boston the gallery
cracked, and the people were obliged to move to another hall. All the
sermons were passionate and eloquent, calling on the criminal to repent
14 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
while there was yet time and begging the congregation (that is, the whole
community) to profit by this example. In the final conversation between
Morgan and the minister who walked beside him to the gallows, Morgan
answered, "I hope I am sorry for all my sins, but I must especially bewail
my neglect of the means of grace. On Sabbath days I us'd to lie at home,
or be ill employ'd elsewhere, when I should have been at church. This
has undone me!"
Standing before the ladder of the gallows, and looking at the coffin
which he was soon to fill, Morgan sought to play his part in the ritual. He
seized his last opportunity to give the sermon which only he could give.
It was taken down by one of the listeners:
I pray God that I may be a warning to you all, and that I may be the
last that ever shall suffer after this manner. ... I beg of God, as I am a
dying man, and to appear before the Lord within a few minutes, that
you take notice of what I say to you. Have a care of drunkenness, and
ill company, and mind all good instruction; and don't turn your back
upon the word of God, as I have done. When I have been at meeting, I
have gone out of the meeting-house to commit sin, and to please the
lusts of my flesh. . . . O, that I may make improvement of this little,
little time, before I go hence and be no more! O, let all mind what I
am saying, now I am going out of this world! O, take warning by me,
and beg of God to keep you from this sin, which has been my ruine!
Such a sermon by a condemned man was by no means unique. Cotton
Mather filled twenty closely-printed pages of his Magnolia with "An
History of some Criminals Executed in New-England for Capital Crimes;
with some of their dying speeches."
For New England Puritans, the sermon had, of course, additional
drawing-power because of the scarcity of other amusements. It offered
an occasion to meet distant neighbors, to exchange news and gossip.
Without the sermon, the early New Englander would have had few
occasions of public drama. He had no newspapers, no theater, no movies,
no radio, no television. The lack of these gave the minister a special
opportunity to make his preaching fill the attention of his listeners. But
the hardships were many. For some years the New England meeting-
house had no artificial light and no heat. In the cold autumns and winters,
the walls were icy, winds howled, and drafts blew through cracks in the
loose clapboard walls. The hands of the earnest listeners were sometimes
so numb with cold that they could not take notes. It took decades for
the warm but dangerous foot-stove to appear and until the early 19th
century there were no open fireplaces. The benches were hard. When
pews were finally built (at the private expense of the occupants) they
A CITY UPON A HILL 15
enabled younger listeners to conceal their inattention, or to whisper
through the ornamented panels which separated them from neighbors,
their frosty breath giving an incriminating clue. To reach these inhospita-
ble meeting-houses, the early New Englander often had to pick his way,
sometimes for miles, across landscape without anything that could be
dignified as a road. In winter he went plunging through drifts; in the
spring and fall he was deep in mud. And for several decades the perils
of Indians were added to all the others. All this only underlines the im-
portance of the sermon and the meeting-house in the life of the New
England Puritan.
If attendance at the sermon was compulsory, it was expected to be
anything but perfunctory. The scarcity of books and the significance of
the subject induced many listeners to bring notebooks. A minister, com-
monly settled in a parish for his lifetime, did not look for a larger or
more wealthy congregation. Moreover, his audience was, for that age,
remarkably literate and attentive, and he could not hope to amuse or
divert them by "book reviews," by concert artists, or outside speakers.
All these circumstances served to hold the early New England preacher
to a high intellectual standard and encouraged him to make his perform-
ances merit their central place.
The New England sermon, then, was the communal ceremony which
brought a strong orthodoxy to bear on the minutiae of life the drowning
of a boy while skating on the Charles, an earthquake, a plague of
locusts, the arrival of a ship, the election of a magistrate, or the muster-
ing of militia. Theology was an instrument for building Zion in America.
3
Search for a
New England Way
To THE PURITANS and to many who came here after them, the
American destiny was inseparable from the mission of community-build-
ing. For hardly a moment in the history of this civilization would men
16 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
turn from the perfection of their institutions to the improvement of their
doctrine. Like many later generations of Americans, the Puritans were
more interested in institutions that functioned than in generalities that
glittered.
The phrase "The New England Way" was an earlier version, (not
entirely different in spirit though vastly different in content) of the
modern notion of an American Way of Life. What the Puritans wanted to
"purify" in the English church was not its theology but its policy, not its
theory but its practice. New Englanders were outspokenly conformist in
matters of doctrine. "Be it so that we are in the utmost parts of the
Earth;" explained John Norton, "we have onely changed our Climate,
not our mindes." Again and again when the leaders of American Puritan-
ism met, they proclaimed their orthodoxy.
This was revealed in the very form of their statements. The basic docu-
ments of New England Puritanism were not "creeds" but "platforms."
Nearly two centuries before the first American political party produced
its "platform" attesting to its greater concern for a program of action than
for a frame of thinking, American Puritans had struck off in the same
direction. The clearest statement of their religious purposes came out
of a meeting of the church elders in Cambridge in 1648, Published under
the title, "A Platform of Church Discipline," it came to be known as "The
Cambridge Platform." The ministers declared:
Our Churches here, as (by the grace of Christ) wee beleive & profess
the same Doctrine of the trueth of the Gospell, which generally is
received in all the reformed Churches of Christ in Europe: so especially,
wee desire not to vary from the doctrine of faith, & truth held forth
by the churches of our native country. . . . wee, who are by nature,
English men, doe desire to hold forth the same doctrine of religion
(especially in fundamental^) which wee see & know to be held by the
churches of England, according to the truth of the GospelL
What disturbed the people of New England, according to John Cotton's
preface, was "the unkind, & unbrotherly, & unchristian contentions of our
godly brethren, & countrymen, in matters of church-government." To the
improvement of church government, the New England clergy pledged
its efforts. The text of the "platform," the manifesto of New England
Congregationalism and its basis for over a half-century, was devoted only
to these practical ends.
The orthodoxy of New England churches is a refrain heard again and
again in the early synods. "As to matters of Doctrine," the ministers de-
clared in Boston in 1680, "we agree with other Reformed Churches:
Nor was it that, but what concerns Worship and Discipline, that caused
A CITY UPON A HILL 17
our Fathers to come into this wilderness, whiles it was a land not sown,
that so they might have liberty to practice accordingly." A half-century
later, in 1726, Cotton Mather insisted that still the doctrine of the
Church of England was more universally held and preached in New Eng-
land than in any nation, that their only "points peculiar" were those of
discipline.
/The Puritans' emphasis on way of life was so strong that it made any
generalized concept of "the church" seem unreal or even dangerous. They
became wary of using the word "church" to refer to those who subscribed
to a particular body of doctrine, or even to the building in which the con-
gregation met. New Englanders called their place of worship a "meeting-
house.' 1 It was a dangerous figure of speech, Richard Mather once ob-
served, to call that meeting-house a "church." "There is no just ground
from scripture to apply such a trope as church to a house for a public
assembly." For years, therefore, when the men of New England spoke
of what they had to offer the world, they referred neither to their "creed"
nor their "church," but to The New England Way.
Among the chief factors which pushed them in this direction were
the special character of their theology, in particular the "federal" idea,
and their colonial legal situation. The "federal" theology by which New
England Puritans lived was an iceberg of doctrine. Beneath the surface
was a dense theological mass, much larger and weightier than what pro-
jected above. A full exposition of that hidden base would be nothing less
than an anatomy of protestantism. The part which became visible and
prominent in New England life was the federal church-way, which came
to be known as Congregationalism.
The basic fact about Congregationalism was its emphasis on the going
relationship among men. Each church was not a part of a hierarchy, nor
a branch of a perfected institution, but a kind of club composed of
individual Christians searching for a godly way of life. The congrega-
tional church was a group of going concerns, not a monolithic establish-
ment. When they used the word at all, Puritans usually spoke of the
"churches" rather than the "church" of New England. What held them
together was no unified administrative structure, but a common quest,
a common way of living.
At the heart of the congregational idea was the unifying notion that a
proper Christian church was one adapted to the special circumstances of
its place and arising out of the continuing agreement of certain particular
Christians. What of the manner of church-worship? asked the opening
chapter of the Cambridge Platform. Its answer was simply that worship
"be done in such a manner, as all Circumstances considered, is most
18 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
expedient for edification: so, as if there bee no errour of man concerning
their determination, the determining of them is to be accounted as if it
were divine." The size of a congregation was also to be fixed by practical
considerations. "The matter of the Church in respect of its quantity ought
not to be of greater number then may ordinarily meet together conveni-
ently in one place: nor ordinarily fewer, then may conveniently carry on
Church-work." Each congregation had its own problems, "Vertues of
their own, for which others are not praysed: Corruptions of their owne,
for which others are not blamed."
A church was formed, then, not by administrative fiat nor by the ran-
dom gathering of professing Christians, but by the "covenanting" or agree-
ment of a group of "saints," that is, Christians who had had a special
"converting experience." The status of minister was not acquired from
a seminary or by the laying on of priestly hands. Rather it was a function
performed by a godly man in relation to a group of other men. To be a
minister at all a man had to be "called" by a group of Christians; when
that relation ceased, he was no longer a minister. In the congregational
polity, relations among men overshadowed inherited or anointed status:
the ways overshadowed the forms.
Not least important in encouraging this point of view was the Puritan
use of the Bible. If there was any codification of Puritan beliefs, it was
in the Word of God. The Puritans wished to be "guided by one rule, even
the Word of the most high." More perhaps than for any other Christians
of their age, the Bible was their guide. Through it, they explained in the
Cambridge Platform, every man could find the design of life and the
shape of the Truth:
The parts of Government are prescribed in the word, because the Lord
lesus Christ the King and Law-giver of his Church, is no less faithfull in
the house of God then was Moses, who from the Lord delivered a form
& pattern of Government to the Children of Israel in the old Testament:
And the holy Scriptures are now also soe perfect, as they are able to
make the man of God perfect & thoroughly furnished unto every good
work; and therefore doubtless to the well ordering of the house of God.
But to try to live by the Bible was vastly different from trying to live
by the Laws of the Medes and the Persians, by the Athanasian Creed, or
even by the Westminster Confession. For the Bible was actually neither
a codification nor a credo; it was a narrative. From this simple fact came
much of the special character of the Puritan approach to experience.
There were, of course, parts of the Bible (like Leviticus and Deuteron-
omy) which contained an explicit code of laws; the Puritans were at-
tracted to these simply because the commands were so clear. yThe Ten
A CITY UPON A HILL 19
Commandments were, of course, in the foreground of their thinking, but
the Bible as a whole was the law of their life.yFor answers to their prob-
lems they drew as readily on Exodus, Kings, or Romans, as on the less
narrative portions of the Bible. Their peculiar circumstances and their
flair for the dramatic led them to see special significance in these narrative
passages. The basic reality hi their life was the analogy with the Children
of Israel. They conceived that by going out into the Wilderness, they
were reliving the story of Exodus and not merely obeying an explicit
command to go into the wilderness. For them the Bible was less a body
of legislation than a set of binding precedents.
The result was that these Puritans were preoccupied with the similari-
ties in pairs of situations: the situation described in a Bible story and
that in which they found themselves. "Thou shalt not kill" was accepted
without discussion. What interested them, and what became the subject
of their debate was whether, and how and why, an episode hi the Bible
was like one in their own lives. The "great and terrible Earthquake"
of June 1, 1638 and the one of January 14, 1639 "which happened much
about the time the Lordly Prelates were preparing their injunctions for
Scotland" reminded Captain Edward Johnson of how "the Lord himselfe
. . . roared from Sion, (as in the dayes of the Prophet Amos)." Almost
every page of early New England literature provides an example. "The
rule that directeth the choice of supreame governors," wrote John Cotton,
"is of like aequitie and weight in all magistrates, that one of their brethren
(not a stranger) should be set over them, Deut. 17.15. and Jethroes
counsell to Moses was approved of God, that the judges, and officers to
be set over the people, should be men fearing God, Exod. 18.21. and
Solomon maketh it the joy of a commonwealth, when the righteous are in
authority, and their mourning when the wicked rule, Prov. 29.21. Job
34.30."
V What the Puritans had developed in America then, was a practical
common-law orthodoxy. Their heavy reliance on the Bible, and their
preoccupation with platforms, programs of action, and schemes of con-
federation rather than with religious dogma fixed the temper of then*
society, and foreshadowed American political life for centuries to come. ,
20 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
4
Puritan Conservatism
AMONG THE CIRCUMSTANCES which led the American Puritans to a
practical approach to their doctrine, none was more important than
the fact that they were colonials. However clear and dogmatic the dic-
tates of their religion, they did not consider themselves free to con-
struct their political institutions of whole cloth. Their fellow-Calvinists
in Geneva several decades before had been limited only by their private
aspirations and the demands of their dogma. But even in earliest New
England one can see the marks of that colonial situation which would
decisively affect all American political thought through the era of the
Revolution, and which helped shape the moderate, compromising, and
traditionalist character of our institutions.
The effects of this colonial situation can be seen, first, in the widely
accepted assumption that there were definite limits which the legislators
were not free to transgress this, in a word, was constitutionalism
and, second, in the idea that the primary and normal way of develop-
ing civil institutions was by custom and tradition rather than by legislative
or administrative fiat. These were rooted less in a deliberate political
preference than in the circumstance in which the New England Puritans
found themselves.
In the first charter of Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, King
Charles had authorized the General Court of the colony to make "all
Manner of wholesome and reasonable Orders, Lawes, Statutes, and
Ordinnces, Direccons, and Instruccons" but with the provision that
they be "not contrairie to the Lawes of this our Realme of England."
The colonists, though not lawyers, were of a decidedly legalistic turn
of mind; they took this limitation seriously. It was appealed to from all
sides, by the ruling clique as well as by the critics and rebels.
The story of the struggle for law in early New England has not yet
been fully told. But even what we already know shows that the rulers
of this Bible commonwealth were haunted by the skeleton of old English
institutions. At every point both rulers and rebels felt bound to assume
A CITY UPON A HILL 21
that an authentic Bible commonwealth could not depart far from the
ancient institutions of the mother country. As early as 1635, Winthrop
tells us, the deputies were worried that the magistrates "for want of
positive laws, in many cases, might proceed according to their discre-
tions." The remedy which they sought, and which they persuaded the
General Court to adopt, was plainly on the English pattern: "that some
men should be appointed to frame a body of grounds of laws, in resem-
blance to a Magna Charta, which . . . should be received for fundamental
laws."
The legislative history of early New England is the story of successive
attempts to provide, first, a "Magna Charta" for the inhabitants of Massa-
chusetts Bay Colony and, later, a handy compilation of their laws. The
small ruling group of early New England was not eager to embody its
institutions in an all-embracing code. Leaders like John Winthrop
doubted the wisdom of confining institutions by a pattern of words; they
also doubted their authority. They were hardly more worried that their
laws should be "scriptural," that is approved by the Bible, than that
they should be sufficiently English; and that any changes in English laws
should have ample warrant in local needs.
We have been almost blind to this side of early New England life.
Dazzled by the light they found in Scripture, we have failed to see the
steady illumination they found in old English example. For instance,
when historians came upon a little work by John Cotton entitled
Moses His Judicials, they hastily concluded that since it was Biblical
and dogmatic it must have been the Code of Massachusetts Bay. But
the evidence shows that his code was never adopted into law, and it
may never have been intended to be.
' The lawmakers of the colony, to the extent their knowledge allowed
and with only minor exceptions, actually followed English example.
Their colonial situation made them wary of trying to create institutions
according to their own notions, and alert to the need of adapting old
institutions to new conditions. They were among the first to take a con-
sciously pragmatic approach to the common law; and it was their colonial
situation which gave them the occasion. This spirit was well expressed
by John Winthrop in his account of the events of November, 1639:
The people had long desired a body of laws, and thought their condition
very unsafe, while so much power rested in the discretion of magistrates.
Divers attempts had been made at former courts [meetings of the legis-
lature], and the matter referred to some of the magistrates and some of
the elders; but still it came to no effect; for, being committed to the
care of many, whatsoever was done by some, was still disliked or
22 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
neglected by others. At last it was referred to Mr. Cotton and Mr.
Nathaniel Warde, etc., and each of them framed a model, which were
presented to this general court, and by them committed to the governour
and deputy and some others to consider of, and so prepare it for the
court in the 3d month next. Two great reasons there were, which
caused most of the magistrates and some of the elders not to be very
forward in this matter. [1 J One was, want of sufficient experience of the
nature and disposition of the people, considered with the condition of
the country and other circumstances, which made them conceive, that
such laws would be fittest for us, which should arise pro re nata upon
occasions, etc., and so the laws of England and other states grew, and
therefore the fundamental laws of England are called customs, con-
suetudines. 2. For that it would professedly transgress the limits of
our charter, which provide, we shall make no laws repugnant to the
laws of England, and that we were assured we must do. But to raise up
laws by practice and custom had been no transgression; as in our church
discipline, and in matters of marriage, to make a law, that marriages
should not be solemnized by ministers, is repugnant to the laws of
England; but to bring it to a custom by practice for the magistrates to
perform it, is no law made repugnant, etc.
It would be hard to find a better summary of the universal advantages
of customary law over the laws of code-makers.
Only a few years later a still more outspoken statement of their legal
philosophy appeared. In 1646 Dr. Robert Child and six others pre-
sented a petition to the General Court of Massachusetts Bay objecting
to many laws of the colony. The petitioners argued that because Massa-
chusetts Bay had made several drastic modifications of English law (for
example, in the criteria of church-membership and hence of citizen-
ship), the colony lacked "a setled forme of government according to the
lawes of England." But only a thoroughly English government, they
said, was "best agreeable to our English tempers."
The reply of the New England magistrates expressed their insistent
allegiance to English institutions. They offered a full-dress defense of
the Englishness of the government they had set up. Indeed, if a desperate
historian wanted to forge a document proving that the colonies accepted
English institutions as their standard, he could hardly do better than to
compose precisely the declaration which the General Court adopted in
reply to the Child petition. "For our government itselfe," the magistrates
argued, "it is framed according to our charter, and the fundamental
and common lawes of England, and carried on according to the same
(takeing the words of eternal truth and righteousness along with them,
as that rule by which all kingdomes and jurisdictions must render account
of every act and administration, in the last day) with as bare allowance
for the disproportion between such an ancient, populous, wealthy king*
A CITY UPON A HILL 23
dome, and so poore an infant thinne colonie, as common reason can
afford. And because this will better appeare by compareing particulars,
we shall drawe them into a parallel."
The magistrates printed in parallel columns the English institutions
with their New England counterparts listed opposite. They began with
the Magna Charta: on the left-hand side were its main provisions; on
the right-hand side the "Fundamental^ of Massachusetts," that is, the
corresponding provisions of colonial law. Next came the leading rules
of English common law; arranged opposite were their counterparts in
the Massachusetts "Fundamentalist This exhibit proved more than any
argument.
The legislators did confess their weaknesses. They explained that they
were mere "novices" in the law, and "therefore such faileings [as] may
appeare either in our collection of those lawes, or in comforming our
owne to that patterne are to be imputed to our own want of skLlL If
we had able lawyers amongst us, we might have been more exact." If they
had not succeeded in producing an American replica, it was certainly
not for any lack of will to do so. But there had not been much time, and
they had been poor in professional legal talent. "Rome was not built in
a day," the magistrates reminded the Child petitioners. "Let them pro-
duce any colonie or commonwealth in the world, where more hath beene
done in 16 yeares."
The most important of the early compilations of Massachusetts law
was The Book of the General Lawes and Liberty es of 1648 which was
to be the basis of later legislation and which influenced the laws of other
colonies, including Connecticut and New Haven. The preface published
by the General Court apologized for the inadequacy of the compilation
both as a reproduction of English institutions and as an adaptation to
colonial conditions.
We have not published it as a perfect body of laws sufficient to carry on
the Government established for future times, nor could it be expected
that we should promise such a thing. For if it be no disparagement to
the wisedome of that High Court of Parliament in England that in four
hundred years they could not so compile their lawes, and regulate pro-
ceedings in Courts of justice &c: but that they had still new work to
do of the same kinde almost every Parliament: there can be no just
cause to blame a poor Colonie (being unfurnished of Lawyers and
Statesmen) that in eighteen years hath produced no more, nor better
rules for a good, and setled Government then this Book holds forth:
nor have you (our Brethren and Neighbours) any cause, whether you
look back upon our Native Country, or take your observation by other
States, & Common wealths in Europe) to complaine. . . .
24 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay said that they started from "the
lawes of God" rather than the laws of Englishmen. Yet in their eyes,
the two seemed happily to coincide:
That distinction which is put between the Lawes of God and the lawes
of men, becomes a snare to many as it is mis-applyed in the ordering
of their obedience to civil Authentic ; for when the Authorise is of
God and that in way of an Ordinance Rom. 13.1. and when the adminis-
tration of it is according to deductions, and rules gathered from the word
of God, and the clear light of nature in civil nations, surely there is no
humane law that tendeth to common good (according to those princi-
ples) but the same is mediately a law of God, and that in way of an
Ordinance which all are to submit unto and that for conscience sake.
Rom. 13.5.
Their satisfaction was as great as that of Sir William Blackstone a
century later and of conservative English lawyers ever since, in discover-
ing that scriptural law and/or natural law happened already to be em-
bodied in the English rules.
Scholarly dispute as to whether early New England law was primarily
scriptural or primarily English is beside the point. For early New Eng-
landers these two turned out to be pretty much the same. Very little of
their early legal literature attempted to construct new institutions from
Biblical materials. They were trying, for the most part, to demonstrate
the coincidence between what the scriptures required and what English
law had already provided.
We have at least one valuable witness on this matter. Thomas
Lechf ord had had some legal training in England, and although he was
in Massachusetts Bay only from 1638 to 1641, those were the crucial
years when the Body of Liberties of 1641 was put together. Partly
through his own forwardness and partly from the scarcity of legal talent
in the colony, he was intimately connected with its legal history. But,
because neither his theology nor his method of persuading jurors was
orthodox, the magistrates disbarred him and censured him for meddling
in church affairs. These and other irritations led him to return to England
permanently, where in 1642 he issued a little book, Plain Dealing: or
Newes from New-England. Its object (stated on the title-page) was to
give "A short view of New-Englands present Government, both Ec-
clesiasticall and Civil, compared with the anciently-received and estab-
lished Government of England." Lechford an unsympathetic, if not
actually malicious, observer was distinguished from his contemporaries
by some legal knowledge and by personal experience with New England
institutions. His book is an informed, though not dispassionate, account
A CITY UPON A HILL 25
of deviations, which he eagerly sought out, of New English from Old
English laws.
Lechford's main complaint was, of course, about the churches of
Massachusetts Bay. On the one hand, their membership requirements
were too strict: it was not enough for a person to be of blameless conduct
or to subscribe to the articles of faith. The applicants for church-mem-
bership had to satisfy the Elders and then the whole congregation of "the
worke of grace upon their soules, or how God hath beene dealing with
them about their conversion .... that they are true beleevers, that they
have beene wounded in their hearts for their originall sinne, and actuaU
transgressions, and can pitch upon some promise of free grace in the
Scripture, for the ground of their faith, and that they finde their hearts
drawne to beleeve in Christ Jesus, for their justification and salvation
and that they know competently the summe of Christian faith." This pro-
cedure, Lechford observed, was evil even inhuman for sometimes a
master would be admitted and not his servant, sometimes the servant
alone, sometimes a husband and not his wife, sometimes a child and not
his parent. The effects of these restrictions were far-reaching since no
one could be a "freeman" of the colony unless he had been admitted to
the church. And only "freemen" could vote or hold office.
On the other hand Lechford thought the government of New England
churches was too democratical, for there were no bishops, and how
could a church be well-ordered where in effect every church-member
was a bishop? Yet this was precisely what the congregational organization
amounted to. "If the people may make Ministers, or any Ministers make
others without an Apostolicall Bishop, what confusion will there be?
If the whole Church, or every congregation, as our good men think, have
the power to the keyes, how many Bishops then shall we have?"
Although the congregational churches of New England never acquired
a bishop, even before the end of the 17th century their practical, com-
promising spirit had led them to modify the strict requirements for
church-membership to which Lechford and other English critics ob-
jected. By the ingenious doctrine of the "Half-Way Covenant," first
officially proposed in the meeting of ministers in 1662, they created a
new class of church-membership for those who had not had the intense
"converting experience" but who were descended from those who had
had the experience. In this way they kept the church-benches filled with-
out abandoning their ideal of a purified church where only "Visible
Saints" could be full members.
A careful look at Lechford's criticism of the laws of New England
impresses one with how little they deviated from English practice. Even
26 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
these deviations were easily explained by life in a wilderness colony, and
would be removed as soon as the New Englanders could manage it.
His first objection was the "want of proceeding duly upon record"
the legal proceedings were carried on orally rather than by exchange of
documents. According to Lechford, this tended to make the government
arbitrary, depriving the parties and judges of a clear understanding of
the issues and making it more difficult to formulate precedents. His
second objection, akin to the first, was the prohibition of paid attorneys
and advocates. He declared hired lawyers "necessary to assist the poore
and unlearned in their causes, and that according to the warrant and
intendment of holy Writ, and of right reason. I have knowne by ex-
perience, and heard divers have suffered wrong by default of such in
New England. . . . But take heede my brethren, despise not learning, nor
the worthy Lawyers of either gown, lest you repent too late."
Both these divergences from English practice were due to the lack
of trained lawyers. Lechford himself was one of the very few men of
legal training in Boston; even judges were commonly untrained in the
law. Complex legal documents could not be drawn, nor professional legal
counsel given, except by trained lawyers; and, for all practical purposes,
such were not to be found in New England.
The magistrates of New England were soon to remove the differences
of which Lechford complained. The Body of Liberties of 1641 (Liberty
No. 27) provided that if the plaintiff filed a written declaration, the
defendant was to have "libertie and time to give in his answer in write-
ings, And soe in all further proceedings betwene partie and partie." A law
of 1647 which described the evils to which Lechford referred, went still
further, requiring such a written declaration to be filed in all civil cases
in due time before court opened, so that the defendant would have time
to prepare his written answer. But such procedures could not be legislated
into being if the community lacked qualified persons to put them into
practice. Therefore this requirement was omitted from later compilations
of the laws, and it was decades before written "pleadings" (the technical
documents which lawyers exchange during a lawsuit) became common.
Meanwhile, the absence of written pleadings sometimes gave New Eng-
land litigants the advantage of having their cases judged on their sub-
stance, while English lawyers and judges might quibble over the forms of
documents. Increasing commerce and the growing number of men with
legal training soon led the legislature of Massachusetts Bay to remove
Lechford's other objection: by 1648 it had become legal to employ paid
attorneys.
Legal proceedings of the early years give us the impression of a people
A CITY UPON A HILL 27
without much legal training and with few lawbooks who were trying to
reproduce substantially what they knew "back home." Far from being a
crude and novel system of popular law, or an attempt to create institu-
tions from pure Scripture, what they produced was instead a layman's
version of English legal institutions. The half-remembered and half-
understood technical language of English lawyers was being roughly
applied to American problems. Much remains to be learned of the law
of those days; and the very characteristics we have described (the lack
of written pleadings, for example) handicap the historian. Cases were
not printed; judges did not give reasons for their decisions. Even in the
1670's judicial precedents (English or colonial) or English statutes were
not yet being cited.
But the colonists did use the peculiar technical resources of English
law, even while employing them handily for many novel purposes. In the
records of the decisions of the Suffolk County Courts between 1671 and
1680, about eighty per cent of the civil suits were framed as "actions
on the case." That was one of the classic English "forms of action" which
had had a specific technical meaning, and hence only limited use.
English lawyers had been trained to consider the "action on the case" as a
highly specialized piece of legal artillery, suitable only for shooting at a
particular species of game; American lawyers who lacked the advantages
(and prejudices) of a good professional training were successfully em-
ploying it to hit almost any kind of creature in the woods. In this (as in
their casual attitude toward the written pleadings of a case) they were,
from the point of view of a modern lawyer, far in advance of their age.
But for the historian of American institutions this is less important than
two other facts: (1) New Englanders were using this half-understood
technical language of English law to express an English message; the
rights which they protected were fundamentally English legal rights
what in England would have been protected by an action of "covenant,"
or "debt," or "ejectment," or "trespass." (2) New Englanders, by using
this language after their own fashion, thought they were being English.
They were more conscious of the fact that they were speaking English than
that they were speaking with an American accent.
Whenever the rulers of New England found themselves and their laws
under attack, their first defense was to show how closely their rules ad-
hered to those of England. The General Court of Massachusetts Bay
always argued that the coincidence of New English and Old English laws
was remarkable. When hard pressed they went on to argue that even the
apparent deviations from English law were themselves justified by the
laws of England, under which "the city of London and other corporations
28 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
have divers customs and by-laws differing from the common and statute
laws of England."
The scarcity of English lawbooks troubled them. The General Court
on November 11, 1647 "to the end we may have the bettr light for
making and proceeding about laws" ordered the purchase of two copies
each of six technical English legal works: Coke on Littleton, The Book
of Entries, Coke on Magna Charta, New Terms of the Law, Dalton's
Justice of the Peace, and Coke's Reports. The form of early Massachu-
setts legal documents (deeds, powers of attorney, leases, bonds, partner-
ship agreements, etc.) suggests that they were copied from the same
handbooks which guided English lawyers.
If we do not look at the form or language of their law but at its sub-
stance, we are again impressed by how few changes were made in New
England\The most dramatic and most obvious were in the list of capital
crimes. To those crimes punishable by death under the laws of England,
the colonists by 1648 had added a number of others, including idolatry
(violations of the First Commandment) , blasphemy, man-stealing (from
Exod. 21.16), adultery with a married woman, perjury with intent to
secure the death of another, the cursing of a parent by a child over 16
years of age (Exod. 21.17) , the offense of being a "rebellious son" (Deut.
21.20.21), and the third offense of burglary or highway robbery. These
were clear cases where the laws of Scripture were allowed to override the
laws of England./*
But before we attach too much significance to these deviations, we must
remember that in the law of capital crimes, both Englishmen and Ameri-
cans were accustomed to the greatest divergence between practice and
theory in those days. In England the merciful fictions of "benefit of clergy"
nullified the letter of the law; in New England the practice of public con-
fession perhaps accomplished a similar result. All this, of course, made
the New England modifications of the criminal law still less significant.
This was a realm where people were accustomed to unenf creed rules and
where Scriptural orthodoxy could be purchased with the least change in
the actual ways of daily life.
A CITY UPON A HILL 29
5
How Puritans Resisted the
Temptation of Utopia
IF THERE WAS ever a people whose intellectual baggage equipped
them for a journey into Utopia it was the New England Puritans. In their
Bible they had a blueprint for the Good Society; their costly expedition to
America gave them a vested interest in believing it possible to build Zion
on this earth. In view of these facts 'it is remarkable that there was so
little of the Utopian in their thinking about society. There are a number
of explanations for this. The English law was a powerful and sobering
influence: colonists were persuaded by practical interests such as the
retention of their charter and the preservation of their land-titles, as well
as by their sentimental attachment to the English basis of their legal sys-
tem. The pessimism, the vivid sense of evil, which was so intimate a part
of Calvinism discouraged daydreams. Finally, there was the overwhelming
novelty and insecurity of life in the wilderness which made the people
more anxious to cling to familiar institutions, and led them to discover a
new coincidence between the laws of God and the laws of England (and
hence of New England) .
The peculiar character of their Biblical orthodoxy nourished a prac-
tical and non-Utopian frame of mind. Their political thought did not turn
toward delineating The Good Society, precisely because the Bible had
already offered the anatomy of Zion. Moreover, the Bible was a narrative
and not a speculative work; theirs was at most a common-law utopianism,
a utopianism of analogies in situation rather than of dogmas, principles,
and abstractions.
Perhaps because their basic theoretical questions had been settled,
the Puritans were able to concentrate on human and practical problems.
And strangely enough, those problems were a preview of the ones which
would continue to trouble American political thought. They were con-
cerned less with the ends of society than with its organization and less
with making the community good than with making it effective, with in-
30 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
suring the integrity and self-restraint of its leaders, and with preventing
its government from being oppressive.
The problems which worried the Puritans in New England were three.
The first was how to select leaders and representatives. From the be-
ginning what had distinguished the Puritans (and had laid them open to
attack by Lechford and others) was their strict criterion of church-mem-
bership, their fear that if the unconverted could be members of the
church they might become its rulers. Their concept of a church was, in
its own very limited way, of a kind of ecclesiastical self-government:
there were to be no bishops because the "members" of each church were
fit to rule themselves. Many of the major disputes of early New England
were essentially debates over who were fit rulers and how they should
be selected. The early political history of Massachusetts Bay could almost
be written as a history of disagreements over this problem. What were to
be the relations between the magistrates and the deputies? How many
deputies from each town? Many of their sermons and even their "specula-
tive" writings were on this subject.
Their second concern was with the proper limits of political power.
This question was never better stated than by John Cotton. "It is there-
fore most wholsome for Magistrates and Officers in Church and Com-
mon-wealth, never to affect more liberty and authority then will do them
good, and the People good; for what ever transcendant power is given,
will certainly over-run those that give it, and those that receive it: There
is a straine in a mans heart that will sometime or other runne out to ex-
cesse, unlesse the Lord restraine it, but it is not good to venture it: It is
necessary therefore, that all power that is on earth be limited. . . ." The
form of the early compilations of their laws shows this preoccupation.
The first compilation of Massachusetts law (1641) was known, signif-
icantly, as "The Body of Liberties" and managed to state the whole of
the legal system in terms of the "liberties" of different members of the
community. It began with a paraphrase of Magna Charta, followed by
the limitations on judicial proceedings, went on to the "liberties" of free-
men, women, children, foreigners, and included those "of the brute
creature." Even the law of capital crimes was stated in the form of
"liberties," and the church organization was described as "the Liberties
the Lord Jesus hath given to the Churches." The preamble to this first
Body of Liberties would have been impressive, even had it not come out
of the American wilderness :
The free fruition of such liberties Immunities and priveledges as hu-
manitie, Civilitie, and Christianitie call for as due to every man in his
place and proportion without impeachment and Infringement hath ever
A CITY UPON A HILL 31
bene and ever will be the tranquillitie and Stabilitie of Churches and
Commonwealths. And the deniall or deprivall thereof, the disturbance
if not the mine of both.
The Puritan's third major problem was, what made for a feasible
federal organization? How should power be distributed between local
and central organs? Congregationalism itself was an attempt to answer
this question with specific institutions, to find a means by which churches
could extend "the free hand of fellowship" to one another without binding
individual churches or individual church-members to particular dogmas
or holding them in advance to the decisions of a central body. The prac-
tical issues which did not fall under either of the two earlier questions
came within this class. What power, if any, had the General Court of the
colony over the town of Hingham in its selection of its captain of militia?
This was the occasion when one of the townspeople "professeth he will
die at sword's point, if he might not have the choice of his own officers."
Or, what was the power of the central government to call a church
synod? The deputies of the towns (in a dispute over the character of their
union which foreshadowed the issues of the Revolution and the Civil
War) were willing to consider an invitation to send delegates, but objected
to a command.
All the circumstances of New England life tradition, theology, and
the problems of the new world combined to nourish concern with such
practical problems. It is easy to agree with Lechford's grudging compli-
ment that "wiser men then they, going into a wildernesse to set up another
strange government differing from the setted government here, might
have falne into greater errors then they have done."
PART TWO
THE INWARD PLANTATION
The Quakers of Pennsylvania
"My friends . . . going over to plant, and make
outward plantations in America, keep your own
plantations in your hearts, with the spirit and
power of God, that your own vines and lilies
be not hurt."
GEORGE FOX
IN 1681, when William Perm received his charter for Pennsylvania from
Charles II, many features of Quakerism seemed to suit it for a New
World mission. The Quakers possessed a set of attitudes which fit later
textbook definitions of American democracy.
Belief in Equality. No Christian sect was more insistent on a belief hi
equality. John Woolman complained in a sermon in Maryland (1757)
"that Men having Power too often misapplied it; that though we made
Slaves of the Negroes, and the Turks made Slaves of the Christians, I
believed that Liberty was the natural Right of all Men equally."
Informality. They believed in simplicity and informality in dress and
language, and opposed ceremoniousness of all kinds. We cannot discover
their teachings from any formal creed.
33
Toleration. Believing all men essentially good, the Quakers were less
disturbed than most other people by doctrinal differences. William Perm's
Frame of Government in 1682 guaranteed religious freedom to all "who
confess and acknowledge the one Almighty and Eternal God . . . and
hold themselves obliged, in conscience, to live peaceably and justly in
civil society." While the Puritans believed the Indians to be cohorts of
the devil and had no patience with any people who differed in the slightest
from their doctrine, the Quakers were impressed by the extent to which
the Indian religion resembled their own. They welcomed men of all sects.
The Quakers lacked neither courage nor energy. It was not so much
the actual content of their creed as the uncompromising obstinacy with
which they hung on to it, and their attitude toward themselves, that were
decisive. The two flaws fatal to the influence of this remarkable people on
American culture were, first, an urge toward martyrdom, and a preoccu-
pation with the purity of their own souls; and, second, a rigidity in all their
beliefs. The first led their vision away from the community and inward
to themselves; the second hardened them against the ordinary accommo-
dations of this world. Neither the martyr nor the doctrinaire could flourish
on American soil.
The Quest for
Martyrdom
To THE PILGRIMS, the Puritans, and the Quakers, America seemed
an opportunity to create a society according to plan. Their escape from
persecution was perhaps less significant to them than their ascent to rule.
America was not merely a way out of prison; it offered a throne in the
wilderness. Such swift changes of fortune have always strained the char-
acters of men, and never were changes more dizzying than those which
occurred on American soil in the earliest colonial years.
The Puritans, by building institutions in New England, had nourished
a worldly human pride which diluted their sense of providence and their
faith in the omnipotence of God. The Puritan success was accompanied,
if not actually made possible, by the decline of American Puritanism as
an uncompromising theology. Quaker success offers a dramatic con-
trast, for when the opportunities of governing came to them, they pre-
ferred to conserve a pure Quaker sect rather than build a great community
with a flavor of compromised Quakerism.
English Quakerism had begun as a protest movement. The Quakers
believed, in George Fox's classic phrase, "that every man was enlightened
by the divine Light of Christ" but that theology, like most other human
35
36 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
knowledge, simply obscured men's vision. Fox, the founder of English
Quakerism, said in his Journal:
These three, the physicians, the priests, and the lawyers, ruled the
world out of the wisdom, out of the faith, and out of the equity and
law of God; one pretending the cure of the body, another the cure of
the soul, and the third the protection of the property of the people. But
I saw they were all out of the wisdom, out of the faith, out of the equity
and perfect law of God.
In England Quakers remained a minority, raising an accusing and
critical voice. In America the earliest Quaker voices had much the same
sound. While others saw an opportunity here to pursue their orthodoxy
unmolested, the Quakers engaged in a relentless quest for martyrdom.
Their spirit was expressed by William Dewsbury, a leading English
Quaker who helped ship immigrants to America, when he said that he
"as joyfully entered prisons as palaces, and in the prison-house, I sang
praises to my God and esteemed the bolts and locks upon me as jewels."
From this point of view the earliest Quaker immigrants to the American
colonies sought, and found, adornment aplenty. In colonial Rhode Island,
where the rulers refused to persecute them, Quakers were unwilling to
stay. "We finde that in those places where these people aforesaid, in this
coloney, are most of all suffered to declare themselves freely, and are only
opposed by arguments in discourse," observed the Rhode Island Court of
Trial, "there they least of all desire to come."
The story of earliest Quaker activities in America is puzzling to anyone
unacquainted with the mystic spirit and the character of the martyr. It
is not merely that these men and women preferred "to die for the whole
truth rather than live with a half-truth." One after another of them seemed
to lust after hardships, trudging thousands of wilderness miles, risking
Indians and wild animals, to find a crown of martyrdom. Never before
perhaps have people gone to such trouble or traveled so far for the joys
of suffering for their Lord. The courage and persistence shown by 17th-
century American Quakers in seeking out the whipping-post or the
gallows is equaled only in Cortes' quest for the treasure of the Aztecs
or Ponce de Le6n's search for the Fountain of Youth. Never was a
reward sought more eagerly than the Quakers sought out their crown of
thorns.
The English "Friends" (as the Quakers called themselves) were proud
of the abuse willingly suffered by American Quakers at the hands of the
New England Puritans. As early as 1659, Humphrey Norton's New
England's Ensigne made a by-word of their suffering. And George Bishop,
also in England, prepared a Book of Martyrs, first published in 1661, and
later several times reprinted, under the title New England Judged by the
THE INWARD PLANTATION 37
Spirit of the Lord. In this thick volume he collected harrowing tales of
the punishment of Quaker visitors to Massachusetts Bay.
A few examples will give a hint of the Friends' bizarre and dauntless
spirit. In 1658, Sarah Gibbons and Dorothy Waugh left Rhode Island,
where they were not being molested, and traveled mostly on foot from
Newport to Salem in Massachusetts. Groping through March blizzards
and sleeping in the woods, they eventually reached their destination,
and they preached undisturbed for about two weeks. Then they "felt
moved" to go to Boston, where they received the expected barbaric
whipping before being sent packing back to Rhode Island. In the summer
of the same year Josiah Coale and Thomas Thurston traveled even
farther to suffer for the Truth. They walked from Virginia to New Engs,
land "through Uncouth Passages, Vast Wildernesses, Uninhabited Coun-
tries." The Susquehanna Indians took pity on them, guiding them to New
Amsterdam and nursing Thurston when he was critically ill. Like so
many others, these two men felt what the Quakers called "the fire and
the hammer" in their souls. Finally reaching New England, they preached,
first to the Indians and then to the white colonists, until they were com-
mitted to prison and driven at last from the colony.
One of the most persistent of the martyrs was Christopher Holder,
"valiant apostle of New England Quakerism," who had arrived in 1656
from England to preach the gospel of his sect. In Salem, one Sunday
morning in September 1657, he was bold enough to speak a few words
after the minister had done. He did not get very far before someone seized
him by the hair, and "His Mouth violently stopp'd with a Glove and
Hancjkerchief thrust thereinto with much Fury, by one of your Church-
Members And Commissioners." Although he had already been at least
once expelled, he and his companion had continued their preaching. They
were conveyed to Boston, where the exasperated Governor and Deputy-
Governor of the colony inflicted on them a brutal punishment which went
even beyond all existing laws. Merely reading the account is strong
medicine, but it contributes to our understanding of the price the Quakers
sought to pay for their Truth. First the two Quakers were given thirty
stripes apiece with a three-cord knotted whip, during which one of the
spectators fainted. Then they were confined to a bare cell, without
bedding, for three days and nights without food or drink. After that they
were imprisoned during nine weeks of the New England winter with-
out any fire. By special order the prisoners were whipped twice each week,
the first time with fifteen lashes and each succeeding time by three
additional. Having miraculously survived this ordeal, Holder took ship
for Barbados, where he spent the remainder of the winter before return-
ing to Rhode Island to preach his gospel without molestation. But this did
38 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
not satisfy him. In August 1658 he was arrested in Dedham, Massachu-
setts, and again taken to Boston, where one of his ears was cut off.
The New England Puritan leaders were not sadists. But they too were
single-minded men; they had risked everything and traveled three thou-
sand miles for their own opportunity. They wanted to be let alone to pur-
sue their orthodoxy and to build Zion according to their model. What
right had the Quakers (or anyone else) to interfere? The Puritans had
not sought out the Quakers in order to punish them; the Quakers had
come in quest of punishment. Why could not these zealots stay in Rhode
Island where they were tolerated, and allow the Puritans to go about
their business? Or, as a Puritan minister said in defending the 117 blows
with a tarred rope which had brought the Quaker William Brend near
to death, he "indeavoured to beat the Gospel ordinances black and blew,"
and it seemed but just to beat him black and blue.
In trying to keep the Quakers away, the governors of Massachusetts
Bay were at their wits' end. They showed how little they understood the
problem by increasing the legal penalties against intruders. Had they
known the Quakers better they might have foreseen that this could only
make their colony more attractive to seekers of martyrdom. There was
very little popular enthusiasm in Massachusetts Bay for the death penalty
against Quakers, but it was enacted in 1658, having passed the House of
Deputies by a majority of only one vote.
It was not long before another group of Quakers, inspired by what their
own historian called an unquenchable fibre, departed from the safety of
Rhode Island and arrived in Boston. They were "commissioned" by God;
they came to "look your Bloody Laws in the Face." Unflinching before
the threat of death, they came prepared. Alice Cowland even brought
linen for wrapping the dead bodies of those who were expected to be
martyred. One of these unwelcome visitors, William Robinson, wrote in
the Boston jail late in 1659:
In Travelling betwixt Newport in Rhode Island, and Daniel Gold's
House, with my dear Brother, Christopher Holder, the Word of the
Lord came expressly to me which did fill me immediately with Life
and Power, and heavenly love, by which he constrained me and com-
manded me to pass to the Town of Boston, my life to lay down in His
will, for the Accomplishing of his Service, that he had there to perform
at the Day appointed. To which heavenly Voice I presently yielded
Obedience, not questioning the Lord how He would bring the Thing to
pass . . . and willingly was I given up from that time, to this Day, the
Will of the Lord to do and perform, what-ever became of my Body. . . ,
I being a Child, and durst not question the Lord in the least, but rather
willing to lay down my Life, than to bring Dishonour to the Lord.
THE INWARD PLANTATION 39
The story of Mary Dyer, who left her husband in Newport to court
danger and defy evil in Boston, demonstrates both the uneasiness of the
Puritans in crowning the Quaker martyrs and the persistence of the
Quakers in earning that crown. Her story, one of the most impressive in
all the annals of martyrdom, is worth recounting. Shortly after arriving
in Boston in the early fall of 1659, she and her companions (including an
eleven-year old girl, Patience Scott) were banished on pain of death.
After only a brief stay in Newport, she returned to Boston. "Your end
shall be frustrated, that think to restrain them, you call Cursed Quakers,
from coming among you, by any Thing you can do to them," she ex-
plained, "Yea, verily, he hath a Seed here among you, for whom we have
suffered all this while, and yet Suffer." She was tried on October 19,
1659, along with William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson, who
had shared her mission. The next day, after a sermon cursing them,
Governor Endicott pronounced their death sentence. "The Will of the
Lord be done," Mary Dyer replied, and as the marshal took her away,
she stolidly remarked, "Yea, joyfully shall I go."
A week later the three Quakers were to be executed. Mary Dyer
marched to the gallows between the two young men condemned with
her, while drums beat loudly to prevent any words they might preach on
the way from being heard by the watching crowd. When an official asked
Mrs. Dyer if she did not feel shame at walking publicly between two young
men, she answered, "It is an Hour of the greatest Joy I can enjoy in this
World. No Eye can see, No Ear can hear, No Tongue can speak, No
Heart can understand the sweet incomes and refreshings of the Spirit
of the Lord which I now enjoy." Still the Puritan officials tried to deprive
her of the martyr's ecstasy. The two men were executed, and Mary Dyer
was mounted on the gallows, her arms and legs bound and her face
covered with a handkerchief as the final preparation for hanging. Then,
as if by a sudden decision, she was reprieved from the gallows.
This barbarous proceeding, as we now know, had been planned in ad-
vance. During Mary Dyer's trial, the Massachusetts General Court had
secretly recorded their judgment that she be banished; but they had also
provided that she be present at the execution of the others and be pre-
pared as if for her own hanging. Her reprieve was surely due, in part,
to the uneasiness of citizens who still recalled their own sufferings in
England.
Mary Dyer's response to this act of grace was thoroughly in character.
She refused to accept the reprieve unless the law itself was repealed. But
the determined judges sent her off on horseback in the direction of Rhode
Island. If they thought they could so easily be rid of Mary Dyer, they
were mistaken. "She said," records John Taylor, one of her fellow
40 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Quaker missionaries, "that she must go and desire the repeal of that
wicked law against God's people and offer up her life there." On May 21,
1660, less than a year after her banishment from the colony, the irrepres-
sible Mary Dyer returned to Boston and once more heard her sentence of
death. But now, insisted Governor Endicott, it was to be executed.
Again there were pleas for her life. And again, as she stood on the ladder
of the gallows, she was offered her life if she would just leave the colony.
But this time she was not to be thwarted. "Nay," she declared, "I can-
not. ... In obedience to the will of the Lord God I came and in his will
I abide faithful to death." And she was hanged.
However hard we may find it to understand the motives of the Quakers
in their American quest for martyrdom, we must admire their courage.
As William Brend wrote:
I further Testify, in the Fear of the Lord, and witness God, with a Pen
of Trembling, That the Noise of the whip on my Back, all the Imprison-
ments, and Banishing upon pain of Death ... did no more affright me,
through the Strength and Power of God in me, than if they had
threatened to have bound a Spider's Web to my Finger.
Even the sympathetic Quaker historian Rufus Jones describes as an
"almost excessive Quaker frankness" the spirit which moved Josiah
Southwick after his successive whippings to tell his persecutors that "it
was no more terrifying unto him, than if ye had taken a Feather and
blown it up in the Air, and had said, Take heed it hurteth him not."
Trials of Governing:
The Oath
THE MORTAL TEST of Quakers in America was not at the whipping-
post or on the gallows. To such ordeals European life had accustomed
them, and they endured their suffering with courageous dignity in the
New World. As the Quakers suffered they simply strengthened their own
THE INWARD PLANTATION 41
faith and the admiration of their spectators. By the middle of the 18th
century, there were more Quakers in the Western Hemisphere than in all
Britain. More significantly, in America they possessed a community of
their own, or at least one in which they held the powers of government.
European life had not trained the Quakers to sit in the seats of power;
this was to be the novel test provided by America a test which, in many
important ways, they were to fail.
The reasons for their failure teach a great deal about the limitations of
their doctrine and about the special requirements of American commu-
nity life. Before the founding of Pennsylvania, the "tragic collision"
with the New England Puritans helped keep Quakerism alive. In the early
creative period of Quakerism their leaders were moved by a gospel-sense,
by a belief that they had good news for all mankind: they had discovered
the World-Church and were trying to show the presence of God in all
humanity.
But as the idea of being a "peculiar people" began to dominate them,
they became more interested in asserting and perfecting their truth than in
diffusing it throughout the world. The very ways which earlier Quakers
had used to show contempt for rank and custom gradually became them-
selves customs as rigid as those they were meant to displace. The Quaker's
refusal to remove his hat became as arrogant and purposeless as the non-
Quaker's insistence on hat-honor. The drab costume of the Quaker,
meant at first to express indifference to outward garments, became a
uniform to which the Quaker attached more importance than his neigh-
bors did to their gayer garments. Silence became a "form" of worship,
and even the spontaneity of Quaker sermons became compulsory. The
same paradox existed in nearly every distinguishing feature of Quaker
life, from their use of "thee" and "thou" to their ways of marriage and
burial.
While the dogmas of Quakerism grew more fixed and uncompromising,
those of Puritanism tended more and more toward compromise. Puritan-
ism proverbially rigid and dogmatic expanded and adapted; while
Quakerism traditionally formless, spontaneous, and universal built a
wall around itself. This is the story of one of the greatest lost opportuni-
ties in all American history.
In the late 17th century, Quakerism had many qualities which would
have suited it to become tite dominant American religion. In the Old
World it was notorious for its contempt of forms and hierarchies, for its
fluidity, and for its antipathy to dogma. But its promise was not to be
fulfilled. Its very formlessness, its mysticism, its insistence on personal
rectitude and purity were to be its undoing as a community-building re-
42 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
ligion in America. And because the uncompromising spirit of William
Brend, Mary Dyer and their fellow martyrs continued to dominate them,
the Society of Friends was doomed to become a minor, however pure,
enclave in American civilization. '
Some Quaker historians have suggested that it was the "failure" of
Quakerism as a religion that accounted for its ultimate ineffectiveness in
American life. They have implied that the Society of Friends allowed the
letter to kill the spirit of their religion; that because they became untrue
to their own teachings they betrayed their cause and failed in their mission
to the world. It is certainly clear, as Frederick B. Tolles has shown, that
the center of American Quaker life tended to shift "from Meetinghouse
to Counting-house" and that numerous Friends left the Society for the
more respectable and less demanding ranks of the Presbyterians and
Episcopalians. But this is only part of the story. It is more useful to note
how the Quakers weakened themselves and their cause not by being
false to their teachings, but by being too true to them. The teachings
which for George Fox, John Woolman, and other great Quaker prophets
expressed a vital spirit were now congealed into absolutes. By the early
18th century, American Quakers were no longer Searchers for the Truth
but were its self-righteous Heralds. They were enforcers rather than
devotees of the Gospel.
For some years after the founding of the colony in 1682 an informed
observer might well have imagined that Quakerism would remain an
expanding and creative force in American life. While William Penn was
a man of courage and of principle, he was by no means an unworldly or
inflexible man and he was anything but doctrinaire in government. The
prosperity of the colony in 1739, according to Andrew Hamilton, an
eminent Pennsylvania lawyer of the day, was less due to material circum-
stances than to "the constitution of Mr. Penn."
In the wise preface to his "Frame of Government for Pennsylvania,"
dated April 25, 1682, Penn actually apologized for specifying any par-
ticular form of institutions. Men, he said, were always inclined to arrogate
too much knowledge to themselves, especially when they prescribed a
specific political form as the cure-all for social ills. There were three
reasons why such efforts were misguided:
First, That the age is too nice and difficult for it; there being nothing
the wits of men are more busy and divided upon. It is true, they seem
to agree to the end, to wit, happiness; but, in the means, they differ, as
to divine, so to this human felicity; and the cause is much the same, not
always want of light and knowledge, but want of using them rightly. . . .
Secondly, I do not find a model in the world, that time, place, and some
THE INWARD PLANTATION 43
singular emergencies have not necessarily altered; nor is it easy to frame
a civil government, that shall serve all places alike.
Thirdly, I know what is said by the several admirers of monarchy,
aristocracy and democracy . . . when men discourse on the subject.
But I chuse to solve the controversy with this small distinction, and it
belongs to all three: Any government is free to the people under it
(whatever be the frame) where the laws rule, and the people are a party
to those laws, and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion.
But, lastly, when all is said, there is hardly one frame of government
in the world so ill designed by its first founders, that, in good hands,
would not do well enough; and story tells us, the best, in ill ones, can
do nothing that is great or good; witness the Jewish and Roman states.
Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them; and as
governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined
too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men, than men upon
governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad; if
it be ill, they will cure it. But, if men be bad, let the government be never
so good, they will endeavour to warp and spoil it to their turn.
The first half-century of Pennsylvania history was strikingly prosper-
ous. "From a wilderness," Richard Townsend observed in 1727, "the
Lord, by his good hand of providence, hath made it a fruitful field." Still,
during these years there was a great deal of party strife, which had very
early led William Perm himself to plead with the colonists that "for the
love of God, me, and the poor country" they "be not so Governmentish."
But the two principal parties the democratic and extremist "country
party" led by David Lloyd and the conservative party of city merchants
led by James Logan were Quaker, While there were bitter disputes as
to which Quaker group should dominate, it was the Quakers who held
the reins of government securely.
Almost from the beginning the Quakers realized that their religious
doctrines, if construed strictly, would put difficulties in the way of their
running a government. It was one thing to live by Quaker principles,
quite another to rule by them. Even in the earliest years, they were able
to govern onjy by compromising one principle after another. Not only
were they often driven to use fictions and evasions in defending the
colony against external enemies, but in the domestic government of the
colony also they had to come to terms with the non-Quaker ethic.
The matter of oaths provides an excellent example of how the smallest
scruple, if dogmatically held, can produce a creeping paralysis that soon
ramifies into all institutions. From the earliest English days of the sect,
Quakers had stood against the taking of oaths. In 1656, George Fox had
been made to answer to an English court for his "seditious" paper against
44 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
oath-taking, in which he expressed the classic Quaker position. "Take
heed of giving people oaths to swear," Fox warned, "for Christ our Lord
and Master saith, 'Swear not at all; but let your communication be yea,
yea, and nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.' "
It was the "light in every man" which gave him the truth and made him
testify to it; oaths and swearing were but "idle words" for which men
would answer on the Day of Judgment. The only Biblical justification
for swearing was in the Old Testament, and those commandments were
directed only to the Jews. But what was the word of Jeremiah to count
against that of Jesus and James, who had expressly forbidden all swear-
ing? Once committed to this position, the Quakers adhered to it with a
scrupulous orthodoxy that amazes our age of figurative interpretation.
To the scriptural and theological arguments the Quakers added others
which hardened their orthodoxy into obstinacy. There was the common-
sense objection that no oath could turn a liar into a man of truth. "He
that makes no conscience of that law that forbids lying," asked Penn,
"will he make any conscience of forswearing?" From the notion that
oaths were futile, Quakers came to believe that oaths were actually
vicious. Somewhat petulantly, they objected that requiring a man to be
sworn to provide legal insurance of his truthfulness, somehow implied
that he was a liar when not under oath.
By the "Great Law" of 1682 the Quakers in Pennsylvania provided
that men give testimony by "solemnly promising to speak the truth, the
whole truth and nothing but the truth." They established severe penalties
for falsehood to replace those for perjury. In 1685 the provincial council
refused to administer an oath to the King's Collector of Customs, despite
the fact that he brought with him instructions to be sworn. In England a
law of 1689 permitted Quakers to make a simple affirmation "in the
presence of Almighty God" where others were required to swear; but at
the same time the law prohibited Quakers from giving evidence in
criminal cases, from serving as jurors or from holding any public office.
Nevertheless in Pennsylvania Quakers were actually allowed to go on
serving in their Assembly. They ran the government without oaths until
1693, when Penn was deprived of his proprietorship; then they dis-
fcovered the meaning of the fact that they were not independent of English
law.
As the non-Quaker population of Pennsylvania, including many Irish
and Germans, increased, they added their objections to those of the
English. Could rulers be trusted who refused to swear allegiance to the
Crown? Could one believe witnesses or jurors who found subtle reasons
for not taking the harmless traditional oaths? Quaker refusal to adminis-
THE INWARD PLANTATION 45
ter oaths became as controversial as their refusal to take them. The
Quaker majority in the Pennsylvania Assembly for some time success-
fully fought off attempts to disqualify them from office because of their
refusal to take or administer oaths; but their efforts at formalizing an
"affirmation" as a substitute for the oath were frustrated in England.
In 1703, a number of Quaker members of the governor's council in
Pennsylvania were disturbed to learn of a certain order of the English
Lords of Trade and Plantations: Quakers might qualify for office by a
legally prescribed affirmation in place of an oath, but all other persons
required by the laws of England to take an oath or willing to do so,
must have it administered to them "otherwise all their proceedings are
declared to be null and void." In Pennsylvania this rule created the un-
welcome alternatives of chaos or the expulsion of Quakers from office.
In some counties, like Chester and Bucks, it became difficult to find
enough persons fit to serve as justices who were willing to administer
an oath. "Our Friends can no more be concerned in administering an
oath than they can take one," members of the council observed, "and
in all actions where the case pinches either party, if they can, from
any corner of the government, bring in an evidence that demands an
oath, the cause must either drop, or a fit number of persons must be
there, always to administer it, though only, perhaps, on account of such
an evidence." Technicality was piled on technicality. The non-Quakers
(knowing that only two members of the provincial council lacked
scruples against swearing) insisted that, in order for the government of
the colony to proceed, a quorum of at least five members of the council
would have to take the oath. Richard Halliwell, one of the non-Quaker
party, "insultingly made his boast that they had now laid the govern-
ment on its back, and left it sprawling, unable to move hand or foot."
To add to the confusion, the oath became an issue within the Quaker
community itself. In 1704, David Lloyd, Quaker leader of the anti-
proprietary party, publicly complained against William Penn that he
had not succeeded in securing relief for Quakers from the administering
of oaths and that as a result Quakers had been compelled to give up their
offices.
Some Quaker office-holders began to compromise, either administering
the oath themselves or allowing others to administer it under their au-
thority. Some resigned. Meanwhile, the most influential Quaker voices
from across the Atlantic counseled intransigence and purity of principle.
Penn himself urged that Quakers in office neither resign nor compromise
their opposition to oaths. "I desire you," he wrote from England, "to
pluck up that English and Christian courage to not suffer yourselves to be
46 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
thus treated and put upon. Let those factious fellows do their worst ... I
will bear you out." For many years the oath issue kept the political pot
boiling. Penn argued that the charter had granted the Quaker community
freedom from oaths; the Attorney-General in London argued that since
the law of England required juries to be sworn in capital cases, no
colonial charter could change so fundamental a requirement. Others ar-
gued that there was ample precedent for affirmations instead of oaths.
And so it went, with the Quaker Assembly passing laws on the subject
which were sometimes vetoed by the Governor and which, even when
approved by him, were repeatedly repealed by the Crown. This was far
from an academic question. Since Quakers could not give evidence in
court, until some satisfactory provision was made for Quaker scruples
there was no security even against murder in a predominantly Quaker
community.
Not until 1718 did a law apparently meeting Quaker demands escape
repeal by the Crown. This law allowed the affirmation in place of the
oath for witnesses and office-holders and established the same penalties
for false affirmations as for perjury. But Quaker purists were still not
satisfied, for the legal form of affirmation still included the phrase "in
the name of Almighty God." James Logan and some others showed a
more compromising spirit, "However unfit were that affirmation for
Friends in England, yet here, where such a rotten or insensible generation
shelter themselves under the name, there is a necessity for a greater
security." The six words referring to the Deity had become controversial
within the Quaker community; the Yearly Meeting of 1710 had pur-
posely avoided a decision and urged Friends on both sides to show
charity. This controversy, which seemed to many but a verbal quibble,
was finally settled by the Law of 1725 which omitted from the form of
affirmation any reference to God and which secured the approval of the
King.
That enactment of 1725 has remained substantially the basis of
Pennsylvania law on the subject until the present day. Anyone required
to swear an oath could, at his option, take an affirmation instead, but no
official could refuse to administer an oath to a person who so preferred.
The eifect of this rule was to force the most stiff-necked Friends out of
judicial and some other offices. The Quaker Yearly Meetings stuck to
their principles; some even advised their members not to vote for Quakers
for offices in which they might be tempted to violate their principle
against administering oaths. A few kept their offices and disobeyed the
rules, but generally Quakers refused to accept magistracies. Even in
solidly Quaker communities, therefore, some offices were perforce not
THE INWARD PLANTATION 47
filled by men of that religion. And here the matter stood. The best com-
promise the Quaker rulers of Pennsylvania could manage was one which
permitted anybody but a strict Quaker to be a judge. To the Society of
Friends even this somehow seemed a victory of principle.
But this is not the end of the story. The full moral of the Quaker
experience can be understood only in the light of the price they paid for
preserving their scruple against oaths. Never has there been a better
example of the futility of trying to govern by absolutes, and of the price
in self-deception paid by those who try to do so. Even from their begin-
ning as a sect in England, the Quakers had a strong tradition against the
taking of human life for any reason whatever, whether in war or in peace.
This naturally inclined them against capital punishment, and Pennsyl-
vania's basic Great Law of 1682, shaped and passed under Penn's
personal influence, had made a spectacular departure from English
criminal law on this very point. Instead of the numerous capital crimes
in the England of that day, only treason and murder were punishable by
death in Pennsylvania. So the law remained for over thirty years. But
English opponents of the Quakers used this, like everything else distinc-
tive about them, to label them as dangerous anarchists. The matter was
dramatized in 1715 when Jonathan Hayes, a well-known citizen, was
murdered in Chester County. This happened at the height of the oath
controversy, when Deputy-Governor Charles Gookin had held that the
English requirements applied in Pennsylvania. Because of the predomi-
nance of Quakers in that part of the country, if Hayes's murderers were
to be brought to trial at all, judges, probably witnesses, and some jurors
would have to be Quakers; but since Quakers refused to take the re-
quired oaths, no trial was possible and the prisoners suspected of the
crime were released on bail for three years. Meanwhile, Deputy-Gov-
ernor William Keith came to ofllce, and the case was revived amid
familiar charges that the Quakers' exemption from oaths encouraged
crime. Hayes's murderers were executed before their appeal could be
heard in England, and when the news reached London that British
subjects were being executed in Pennsylvania on the verdict of unsworn
juries, there was an angry outcry. Here was more ammunition for the
anti-Quaker party.
It was just at this time, moreover, that the recurrent threat to exclude
Quakers from office altogether by insisting on the oath came to a head.
The prospect frightened the Quaker Assembly. They were therefore
ready to listen to the Governor's suggestion that, if they gave in on the
question of capital punishment, they might secure a compromise on the
matter of the oath. All that was required was to adopt the criminal laws
48 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
of England, which would automatically make many more crimes punish-
able by death. The Pennsylvania Quakers were persuaded. And so the
Act of 1718 which allowed persons to take office without an oath also
assimilated the capital laws of Quaker Pennsylvania and those of Eng-
land. While the evidence for such a bargain is circumstantial, it is over-
whelming. As Quaker historians somewhat ambiguously boast, the Act
of 1718 was drawn by a Quaker lawyer, was passed by a Quaker As-
sembly, and was not protested by the Quaker Meetings.
Thus, to remain "pure" in the matter of oaths, the Quakers bargained
the lives of all those men and women who might be convicted of any
one of a dozen miscellaneous crimes. The episode was not merely a
testimony against absolutes as guides to political behavior. It showed how
zealous men might sacrifice the welfare and even the lives of their fellow-
men to the overweening purity of their own consciences.
8
Trials of Governing:
Pacifism
MEN WHO SET too much store by their dogmas and who will not
allow themselves to be guided by the give-and-take between ideas and
experience are likely to suffer defeat in one way, if not another. The
Quakers had set out with at least one more very clear dogma: pacifism.
In 1650, George Fox had gone to jail in England rather than take up arms
for the Commonwealth against Charles Stuart. He recorded in his Journal
for 1664 the classic Quaker position which was to be the most important
and most continuous of all their beliefs:
We are peaceable, and seek the peace, good and welfare of all, as in our
lives and peaceable carriages is manifested, ... We are heirs of the
gospel of peace, which is the power of God. . . . Fbr Christ said, *His
kingdom was not of this world, if it were his servants would fight.'
Therefore he bid Peter, 'put up his sword; for,' said he, 'he that taketh
the sword shall perish by the sword.' Here is the faith and patience of
THE INWARD PLANTATION 49
the saints, to bear and suffer all things, knowing vengeance is the Lord's,
and he will repay it to them that hurt his people and wrong the inno-
cent; therefore cannot we avenge but suffer for his name's sake. . . .
The doctrine of Christ, who never sinned, is to love one another,' and
those who are in this doctrine hurt no man, in which we are, in Christ,
who is our life.
But reciting this doctrine in England, where a Quaker might have to go
to jail for it, was different from insisting on it in America, where it
might cost the lives of non-Quakers. The Quakers who governed Pennsyl-
vania until the middle of the 18th century held powers of life and death
over the community, especially over the backwoods settlers who were
menaced by the hostile French and scalp-hungry Indians. The central
geographic position of the Quaker colony, the special importance of the
Indian groups (the so-called Six Nations, and the Delawares) with whom
they had to deal, and the critical necessity for American control of the
rivers on the western border all these magnified the Quaker decisions of
peace or war for Pennsylvania into decisions for the British Empire and
world politics.
The Quakers discovered that they were less free (for example, to be
pacifists) as rulers of a province than when they had been a persecuted
minority. "I wish thee could find more to say for our lying so naked and
defenceless," James Logan from Philadelphia begged William Penn in
England (September 2, 1703), "I always used the best argument I could,
and when I pleaded that we were a peaceable people, had wholly re-
nounced war, and the spirit of it; that we were willing to commit our-
selves to the protection of God alone. . . .When I pleaded this, I really
spoke my sentiments; but this will not answer in English government,
nor the methods of this reign. Their answer is, that should we lose our
lives only, it would be little to the crown, seeing 'tis our doing, but
others are involved with us, and should the enemy make themselves
master of the country it would too sensibly touch England in the rest
of her colonies."
For many years Pennsylvania Quakers evaded this issue: they were
careful that their "Deputy-Governor" (the person holding the executive
powers in America on behalf of the Proprietors) be a non-Quaker and
therefore a person whose scruples would not conflict with the ordinary
business of government. Of over a dozen Deputy-Governors between the
founding of the colony and the Quaker abdication in 1756, only one
(Thomas Lloyd) was a Quaker. Thus, for a while in Pennsylvania, the
Quakers were able to run the government and still keep their own
consciences unsoiled.
50 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Sooner or later, however, the Pennsylvania Quakers would have to
choose between clear alternatives both equally unwelcome. Theo-
retically, but only theoretically, there was a third possibility: if they
could have cut themselves off both from England and from the increasing
non-Quaker population, they might have been able to conduct their "holy
experiment" in att its purity. But this was an unreal possibility. By the
mid-1 8th century the only alternatives were compromise or withdrawal
from government.
It would be difficult to find a more tangled story in all American
history than that of how the Quakers, in 1756, finally made their choice.
A host of conflicting factions and interests were involved. The issue of
pacifism was inevitably bound up with the question of taxes, and nothing
arouses moral fervor more effectively than finding reasons not to pay
taxes. The political conflicts in Pennsylvania were also involved with the
struggle against the Proprietors, with the antagonism of the Irish and
German settlers toward the English, with the question of currency re-
form, and with the fight of Presbyterians and Anglicans against Quakers.
Yet, from the Quaker point of view, one could hardly find a story
which had a simpler theme. The essential issue was pacifism. If the
Quakers had sought to create an environment in which to try their
pacifism, they could hardly have done better than invent the circum-
stances of provincial Pennsylvania. In Europe in the 17th and early 18th
century, before the days of a universal manpower draft, the Quaker
principle against war could not be severely tested. In all the countries of
Western Europe they were a small minority; there could only be a few
causes cgtebres, like the harrying of George Fox during the common-
wealth. Not until the Quakers held power in an American province did
their problem affect a whole community. Here the question of peace or
war faced them directly and repeatedly: in Britain's battle for empire in
which they were both a garrison and a valuable stake, and as an aspect
of self-defense from the bloody attacks of natives.
Whatever other evils of European life the Quaker immigrants to Penn-
sylvania had managed to escape, war was surely not one of them. A bare
list of the imperial conflicts in America which put colonials on the
battle-line might have appalled men with much less distaste for war than
the Friends. The half-understood purposes of a government three thou-
sand miles across the ocean involved the Quakers again and again. The
colony had been bora for less than a decade when, in April 1689, they
received word of the English declaration of war against the French,
which was the beginning of King William's War. To the English request
that the Quakers arm for defense and set up a militia, one of the mem-
THE INWARD PLANTATION 51
bers of their Governor's Council replied that he saw no danger "but from
the Bears & Wolves." As a matter of conscience the Quakers then refused
to take action. Within another dozen years, England was again fighting
France, now together with Spain, in the War of the Spanish Succession,
known in America as Queen Anne's War. Although this war was duly
"proclaimed" in Pennsylvania, the Quaker Assembly repeatedly refused
to enact military laws, with the familiar explanation, "were it not that
the raising money to hire men to fight or kill one another, is matter of
Conscience to us and against our Religious Principles, we should not be
wanting, according to our small abilities, to Contribute to those designs."
Queen Anne's War came to an end in 1713 and for a happy interlude of
twenty-five years the policies of empire did not thrust war upon the
colonies. But this was only an interlude. The period of gravest trial, still
to come, would bring the wars of empire to the front and back doors of
the colony.
The dress rehearsal for the decisive trial of Quakerism began in 1739,
with the outbreak of war with Spain, in the so-called War of Jenkins'
Ear, which became the War of the Austrian Succession, called in the
colonies King George's War. While the earlier "involvement" of the
province in the struggles of the mother country may have seemed merely
technical, the consequences of membership in the British Empire were
now more immediate and more serious. France and Spain, both with
vast interests in America, were at war with England, and hence with
Pennsylvania, whether or not the Quakers wished it so. Colonial wars
were becoming an integral part of European politics. In fact, Spanish
privateers were to be found on the Delaware River. What would the
Quakers in control of the Pennsylvania Assembly do about it?
There followed the familiar struggle between a non-Quaker Governor
who was trying to harmonize the policy of the colony with that of the
Empire, and the die-hard Quakers whose prime concern was to keep
inviolate their pacifist principle. For a while in 1741, the Quakers suc-
ceeded in paralyzing the government, withholding the Governor's salary,
and preventing any legislation. They were aided in their policies by many
of the German settlers whom they had alarmed with rumors. The Gover-
nor's plan for a militia, they said, would bind settlers to royal governors
in a slavery as brutal as "they were formerly under to their princes in
Germany . . . the expense would impoverish them, and ... if any other
than Quakers should be chosen upon the assembly they would be dragged
down from their farms and obliged to build forts as a tribute for their
being admitted to settle in the province." This whispering campaign
produced fears of riot and violence within the colony.
52 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Not until 1745 did Governor Thomas finally secure an appropriation
for the purposes of the war: a grant of 4,000 for "Bread, Beef, Pork,
Flour, Wheat or other Grain" for the garrison at Louisbourg, which was
now in the hands of the English. The "other Grain" was apparently
intended to be gunpowder. The Quakers had earlier actually aided the
defense of the colony but then too only by subterfuge or by appropria-
tions made for unspecified purposes. In 1693 their money was given
ostensibly "to feed the hungry and clothe the naked" Indians; in 1701,
money was appropriated for a fort, but only "as far as their religious
principles would permit"; in 1709, they provided money for an expedi-
tion against Nova Scotia, for "although they could not bear arms, their
duty was to support the Queen's government by money"; in 1740 the
money raised was "for the use of the King, for such purposes as he
should direct" and so it had gone. For the later difficulties some have
blamed the tactless Governor, but these may better be explained by the
fact that the Quakers "measured thek merit by the extent of suffering
for conscience sake."
Perhaps the most significant result of the struggle in 1745 was the
emergence of a strong compromise party under the leadership of Benja-
min Franklin. With a broad popular base, equally opposed to the self-
interest of the Proprietors and to the fanaticism of Quaker extremists,
Franklin's party would eventually displace the rigid rule of the Quaker
minority. In 1747, during the continuing controversy over defense,
Franklin published Plain Truth, one of his shrewdest political pamphlets.
Neither pro- nor anti-Quaker, the pamphlet gave a full, fair and even
prophetic picture of the colony and its need for defense. Pennsylvania's
fortunate geographic situation at the center of the colonies had explained
thek repose: "and tho' our Nation is engag'd in a bloody War, with two
great and powerful Kingdoms, yet, defended, in a great Degree, from
the French on the one Hand, by the Northern Provinces, and from the
Spaniards on the other by the Southern, at no small Expence to each, our
People have, till lately, slept securely in thek Habitations." Pennsylvania,
the only British colony which had made no provision for defense, had
relied on the length and difficulty of its bay and river to protect it
naturally from any enemy.
Franklin argued that this feeling of security was not justified in 1747,
even if it had been before, for the colony had become rich enough to
repay the effort of plunder. There had been two decades of peace, but "it
is a long Peace indeed, as well as a long Lane, that has no Ending," and
now the colony must expect the French to show increasing ingenuity and
success in stirring up the Indians. "How soon may the Mischief spread to
THE INWARD PLANTATION 53
our Frontier Counties? And what may we expect to be the Consequence,
but deserting of Plantations, Ruin, Bloodshed, and Confusion!" The sea-
board would suffer more of what it had tasted in the preceding summer,
when privateers invaded Delaware Bay and plundered plantations near
Newcastle. Preparedness was the only answer:
The Enemy, no doubt, have been told, that the People of Pennsylvania
are Quakers, and against all Defence, from a Principle of Conscience;
this, tho' true of a Part, and that a small Part only of the Inhabitants,
is commonly said of the Whole; and what may make it look probable
to Strangers, is, that in Fact, nothing is done by any Part of the People
towards their Defence. But to refuse Defending one's self, or one's
Country, is so unusual a Thing among Mankind, that possibly they may
not believe it, till by Experience they find, they can come higher and
higher up our River, seize our Vessels, land and plunder our Plantations
and Villages, and retire with their Booty unmolested. Will not this con-
firm the Report, and give them the greatest Encouragement to strike
one bold Stroke for the City, and for the whole Plunder of the River?
It was the plain duty of government to protect the people; no private
religious scruple could relieve a legislator of that duty. Franklin urged
the Quaker legislators "that if on account of their religious Scruples, they
themselves could do no Act for our Defence, yet they might retire; re-
linquish their Power for a Season, quit the Helm to freer Hands during
the present Tempest." The public funds raised from all the people had
been spent by the Quakers to secure the enjoyment of their own religion,
to oppose anti-Quaker petitions, and to put themselves in a favorable
light at the English court. How could they justify their refusal to use
these funds for the benefit and defense of all?
The solution, Franklin concluded, was simply for the Quakers to with-
draw and allow others to rule and defend the colony. If the Quakers
were beyond their rights in sacrificing the whole community for their
private religious principles, non-Quakers would be stupid to fail to defend
the colony simply because they might save the Quakers along with
themselves. Franklin drew up a plan of association to raise money
voluntarily for defense, and it was not long before a militia of 10,000 men
was organized.
But King George's War was only a rehearsal. The real trial of the
Quaker pacifist spirit did not come until large-scale massacres by Indians
spread terror along the western border of the colony. That was in the
latter part of 1755, when the defeat of the British General Braddock
enabled the French to use Fort Duquesne as a base for marauding
parties. In addition, the French incited the Delawares to thwart the
54 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Proprietary purchase of western Pennsylvania from the Six Nations by
sudden and bloody attacks. The first reaction of the Quakers of eastern
Pennsylvania was incredulity: surely their old friends the Delawares
could not be committing massacres. Showing their usual reluctance to
believe ill of their fellowmen, the Quakers insisted that the Indians'
grievances must have stemmed from recent unfair treatment by the
English themselves.
9
How Quakers Misjudged
the Indians
THE POLITICAL SUCCESS, even the very survival of an American
colony, often depended on a realistic estimate of the Indian. But the
Quakers' view of the Indian was of a piece with their attitude toward
war: it was unrealistic, inflexible, and based on false premises about
human nature. The problem was never better summarized than in the
speech by Teedyuscung, Chief of the Delawares, at a conference with
Pennsylvania leaders in July 1756. In his hand he held a belt of wampum,
which had lately been given him by the Iroquois: a large square rep-
resented the land of the Indians; on one side stood an Englishman and
on the other a Frenchman both ready to seize the land. Chief
Teedyuscung pleaded that the Pennsylvanians show their friendship by
guaranteeing that no more land would be taken from the Indians. While
the Chiefs description was an oversimplification he had surely stated the
heart of the matter. The increasing, westward-flowing population of the
Province was passing like a tidal wave over Indian lands. The troubles
of the Indians could no longer be reduced to niceties of protocol, to
maxims of fair play, or to clich6s of self-reproach. Here was one of those
great conflicts in history when a mighty force was meeting a long-un-
moved body; either the force had to be stopped or the body had to move.
But the Quakers chose not to see it that way. Their policy in this
THE INWARD PLANTATION 55
crisis of the affairs of Pennsylvania showed a spectacular, if not al-
together surprising, failure of practical vision. They seemed as blind to
the long-term problems and interests of the Indians as to the character
of these unfamiliar people with whom they were dealing. In 1748, for
example, the Quaker Assembly had refused to vote money for the
defense of Philadelphia, but appropriated 500 for the Indians, ac-
companying it by the pious wish that the money be used to "supply them
with necessaries towards acquiring a livelihood and cultivate the friend-
ship between us and not to encourage their entering into a war." How
could Quaker men of the world have failed to guess that Indian lead
and powder would not be used solely to shoot bear and deer? For that
failure of practical judgment Irish and German settlers on the western
border would have to pay dearly. Some years later, in the fall of 1756,
when the Quaker Assembly in Philadelphia heard of the bloodbath in
the west, they at once began to investigate the source of Indian
grievances. Instead of providing for military defense, the Assembly pro-
duced a bill for the better regulation of trade with the Indians, authoriz-
ing commissioners who would see that the Indians were fairly treated
and enacting such guarantees as maximum prices on goods sold to them.
Such admirable measures were small comfort to backwoodsmen who saw
their homes in flames, their crops ruined, their wives and children
scalped or captured.
The political conflict between the non-Quaker Deputy-Governor
Robert Hunter Morris and the Quaker Assembly came to the fore.
The Deputy-Governor, in defense of the Proprietors, declared that
Indian grievances against the Proprietors had nothing to do with the
massacres and that the real trouble lay in Quaker pacifism which had
left the province defenseless. On the other side, the Quakers traced all
ills to the wicked policies of the Proprietors. In the middle stood Franklin,
who now had a considerable following among the less orthodox Quakers;
he did not oppose a more just Indian policy, but he demanded im-
mediate measures for military defense. Still the minority of die-hard
Quakers which controlled the Assembly would not budge from its tradi-
tional pacifism, though the whole border might burn for it.
The massacres continued; panic gripped western Pennsylvania. Murder
was rampant; whole townships were broken up, their populations driven
from their homes. George Stevenson wrote from York, on November 5,
1755, that the real question there was "whether we shall stand or run?
Most are willing to stand, but have no Arms nor Ammunition." The
government gave no answer to appeals. "People from Cumberland are
going thro this Town hourly in Droves and the Neighbouring Inhabits
56 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
are flocking into this Town Defenseless as it is." While settlers on the
border suffered the murderous blows of the tomahawk, those further
east had the burden of supporting growing numbers of refugees.
It is hardly surprising that the patience of the people of Pennsylvania
had worn thin. Toward the end of November 1755, about three hundred
desperate Germans from the west arrived in Philadelphia to demand
action of the Assembly. They succeeded in frightening the Assembly
into a show of compliance and, through the Provincial Agent, petitioned
the English Privy Council to remedy their defenseless condition. These
months saw a growing and unprecedented division of sentiment within
the Quaker community itself. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in Sep-
tember still evaded the issue by refusing to take a position on the large
military appropriation needed for defense. Many would have agreed with
Israel Pemberton that the events of the summer and fall of 1755 had
"produc'd a greater & more fatal change both with respect to the state
of our affairs in general & among us as a Society than seventy preceding
years."
By July 1756, the French commandant at Fort Duquesne reported
with satisfaction that he had "succeeded in ruining the three adjacent
provinces, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, driving off the inhabi-
tants, and totally destroying the settlements over a tract of country thirty
leagues wide reckoning from the line of Fort Cumberland. . . . The
Indian villages are full of prisoners of every age and sex. The enemy has
lost far more since the battle than on the day of his defeat."
But still the Quakers had not been shocked into discovering the weak-
nesses of their idealized Indians. They seemed indifferent to the fact
that the Indian leaders with whom they dealt were sometimes half-
demented with drink. For example, the wildly contradictory demands of
their good friend Teedyuscung, while the Quakers were purporting to
represent him in late July 1756, were made while he was under the in-
fluence of liquor. But somehow, whether from optimism, pity, or blind-
ness, the Quakers were not prepared to take this fact into account.
The needs of the London Government and the policies of Virginia and
Maryland identified Pennsylvanians in the eyes of the Indians with British
expansion, and with land-grabbing enterprises like the Ohio Company,
however much the people of Pennsylvania might deplore it. Indian
politics were no simple matter: a gesture of friendship to one tribe might
be taken as a declaration of wax by that tribe's enemies. By choosing an
alliance in 1742 with the Iroquois, for example, Pennsylvania had willy-
nilly become involved in the troubles between the Iroquois and the
Delawares and thus sowed seeds of trouble to be reaped thirteen years
THE INWARD PLANTATION 57
later. When, in 1756, the Quakers were present at negotiations with
Teedyuscung, Chief of the Delawares, they pressed their non-Quaker
Governor to conclude a peace treaty, but Governor Morris had the good
sense to see that such a separate peace would probably incense the
powerful Iroquois. This was all an intricate and delicate business not
to be settled by moral slogans or abstract principles.
Some initiative by the Quakers was urgent if they were not to lose all
popular support at a time when the colony was panicked by Indian
violence. They chose to take this initiative entirely outside the govern-
ment, even in competition with it, when, in July of 1756, they formed the
"Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the
Indians by Pacific Measures." Through this non-governmental associa-
tion the Quakers intended to deal with the Indians and to pacify them
without sacrifice of principles. Despite their noble intentions, the Quakers 1
activities among the Indians in those desperate times can hardly be
called anything but meddling. The Governors of Pennsylvania, however
tactless or ineffective, did at least see quite accurately the character of
the Indian problem. The Friendly Association succeeded only in further
confusing matters, in leading the Indians to distrust those rulers of Penn-
sylvania with whom they would finally have to deal, and in postponing
any arrangement satisfactory to the new settlers of Pennsylvania.
On one occasion during the slippery negotiations of 1756, the
Quakers persuaded the Delaware Indians to designate Israel Pemberton,
a Quaker leader, as the representative with whom the Governor of
Pennsylvania would have to deal in all Indian affairs. This ambiguous
confidence pleased the Quakers, but they had only the vaguest notion
of whom or what they were representing. Actually they were in no
position to serve either the Indians or the people of Pennsylvania. They
simply complicated the Governor's problem and led him to threaten
that he would treat them as enemies of the King if they did not cease
their tampering.
The Quaker preoccupation with their principles blinded them to the
most obvious facts. In April 1751, for example, the Quaker Assembly,
refusing the offer of the Proprietors of the Province to help build a fort,
showed their usual complacency. "As we have always found that sincere,
upright Dealing with the Indians, a friendly Treatment of them on all
Occasions, and particularly in relieving their Necessities at proper Times
by suitable Presents, have been the best Means of securing their Friend-
ship, we could wish our Proprietaries had rather thought fit to join with
us in the Expence of those presents, the Effects of which have at all Times
so manifestly advanced their Interests with the Security of our Frontier
58 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Settlements." Even after the storm broke on the frontier and after the
western inhabitants of Pennsylvania had begun to reap the fiery harvest
of a half -century of Quaker generosity and non-resistance to the Indians,
many Quakers remained blind to the practical moral of it all. One of the
most fantastic examples of this blindness is found in the journal of Daniel
Stanton, one of the numerous itinerant Quaker zealots who carried the
messages of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to remote parts of America.
To him the relatively small number of Quakers massacred by the Indians
during the frontier attacks of 1755-56 was a testimony of God's approval
of the Quaker policy. He could not deny that the Indians had been "an
heavy rod of chastisement on this land; yet remarkable it was, that
through the protection of Almighty, which was as the shadow of a mighty
rock in a wearied land, few called by our name were ill used during aU
this calamity." A more valid explanation of Quaker luck, though less
flattering to their self-righteousness, was that almost all the Quakers were
then living in the eastern portion of the province, separated by two
hundred miles of mountainous and river-traced terrain from the "barbar-
ous and cruel enemy."
Franklin was not impressed by the fact that the Quakers on the eastern
seaboard had, by good luck or God's grace or whatever other means,
still escaped the fury of the Indians. He was more concerned, in August
1756, to see "our frontier people continually butchered," and he
lamented the delays in fighting back. "In short," Franklin concluded with
characteristic directness, "I do not believe we shall ever have a firm peace
with the Indians, till we have well drubbed them."
10
The Withdrawal
BY THE SPRING of 1756, even the die-hard Quakers in Pennsyl-
vania were beginning to wonder whether they could long continue to
hold both the reins of government and the principles of their religion.
As early as 1702, James Logan reported to William Penn that governing
THE INWARD PLANTATION 59
was "ill-fitted to their principles," and events of the first half of the 18th
century confirmed the accusation now repeated by their enemies that "to
govern is absolutely repugnant to the avowed principles of Quakerism."
At the moment of crisis, the conflict was no longer simply between a
Quaker oligarchy in Pennsylvania and a hard-headed imperial govern-
ment in London. In Pennsylvania three parties contested. Benjamin
Franklin's popular party included broad-minded Quakers among others
and was opposed equally to religious absolutes and oligarchic rule. They
proposed a militia bill making all men subject to military duty (com-
mutable by a fine) with officers democratically elected by the soldiers.
Quakers would not have to bear arms, but they would be required to
help pay for defense. Against Franklin's party were the Quaker
extremists, led by such unbending pacifists as Israel Pemberton, who had
refused to pay any tax to be used for any military purpose. Against
both of them stood the Proprietors and their Governor, who were un-
willing that the Proprietors bear the Quakers' share of the costs. They
feared the democratic method of electing militia-officers, but had no
sympathy for pacifism.
Despite the growing opposition, the increasing non-Quaker population
of the Province, and the exasperation of successive Governors, the
Quakers were still in control at the beginning of 1756. In that year the
Quakers, probably comprising less than one-fourth the population, held
twenty-eight of the thirty-six seats in the Pennsylvania Assembly. Of
that number, the die-hards were the most influential and active.
As news of the border massacres reached London, agitation against
Quaker rule was redoubled; the English government again threatened
some decisive measure, such as permanent disqualification of Quakers
from holding office in Pennsylvania. Opinion on both sides of the ocean
seemed to support such a measure. Dr. John Fothergill, a weighty mem-
ber of the London Yearly Meeting, summarized the Proprietary case
against the Quakers:
The point upon which all rested, was you are unfit for government. You
accept our publick trust, which at the same time you acknowledge you
cannot discharge. You owe the people protection, & yet withhold them
from protecting themselves. Will not all the blood that is spilt lye at
your doors? and can we, say they, sit still and see the province in danger
of being given up to a merciless enemy without endeavoring its rescue.
Several practical considerations became important: fear of the law dis-
qualifying Quakers, hope that some blame for the Indian massacres
might be shifted to other shoulders by putting the government in non-
Quaker hands, and a desire to keep open the possibility of return to
60 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
power at a later time. All these combined with the desire to preserve
inviolate the principle of pacifism.
London Quakers urged the Quakers of Pennsylvania to abdicate
quickly while there was still time to hand to others some of the blame
for bloodshed. They busied themselves on the backstairs of the govern-
ment in London, and finally negotiated a bargain with Lord Granville,
President of the Privy Council: if he would see that the Quakers were
not disqualified from officeholding, they would see that the Friends in
Pennsylvania withdrew from the Provincial Assembly. Dr. John Pother-
gill in London wrote to Israel Pemberton explaining the need for with-
drawal, and the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting wrote back their pledge
that everything would be done to induce Quakers not to hold office in
time of war. But this pledge did not satisfy the London Friends, who
promptly sent over two of their number, John Hunt and Christopher
Wilson, to see that the promise was fulfilled, and to try to heal the
breaches within the Quaker community in Pennsylvania.
In late spring of 1756, when the Governor and Council declared war
against the Delaware and Shawnee Indians, matters came to a head. On
June 4, 1756, six leading Quakers in the Assembly offered their resigna-
tions. They complacently disavowed "any Design of involving the House
in unnecessary Trouble" but, they declared, "as many of our Constituents
seem of Opinion that the present Situation of Public Affairs call upon
us for Services in a military Way, which, from a Conviction of Judgment,
after mature Deliberation, we cannot comply with, we conclude it most
conducive to the Peace of our own Minds, and the Reputation of our
religious Profession, to permit in our Resolutions of resigning our Seats,
which we accordingly now do; and request these our Reasons may be
entered on the Minutes of the House." Quaker rule in the Pennsylvania
government, after a stormy three-quarters of a century, thus came to an
end not by defeat but by abdication.
London Quakers breathed a sigh of relief. In the colony men of all
persuasions were glad to be disburdened of doctrinaire principles. Frank-
lin reported with audible pleasure that "all the stiff rump, except one
that would be suspected of opposing the service from religious motives,
have voluntarily quitted the Assembly; and 'tis proposed to chuse
Churchman [Anglicans] in their places." These changes would finally
"promise us some fair weather which I have long sigh'd for."
Franklin might well have been pleased; it was his party that profited
most from the withdrawal. In the special election to replace the strict
Quakers, six reliable Franklin men were chosen. And in October came
the regular elections for the thirty-six members of the Assembly. The
THE INWARD PLANTATION 61
emissaries from the London Yearly Meeting did not arrive in time to
persuade the Quakers not to vote for Quakers or, preferably, not to vote
at all. In the final count, despite a temporary coalition of Franklin and
the Proprietary party (who cordially hated each other) sixteen Quaker
Assemblymen were elected. This was, of course, a measure of the re-
luctance of Quakers to acquiesce in the decision made for them by Israel
Pemberton and other intransigents. Soon after the votes were counted,
Hunt and Wilson, the English Quaker emissaries, added their voices to
Pemberton's. Each of the elected Quakers was called individually before
the Quaker Meeting for Sufferings to persuade him to resign. Four did so,
leaving twelve professed Quaker Assemblymen of whom, as both
Quakers and their enemies were pleased to discover, only eight were in
good standing in the Society of Friends.
Even though people continued to speak of the "Quaker Assembly" at
least until 1776, this was only because many of the members still pre-
ferred to take an affirmation or were related somehow to earlier
Quakers. In fact, the dramatic withdrawal of 1756 was much more than
a gesture; it was an abdication of political power by the Philadelphia
Yearly Meeting, the highest authority of Quakers in Pennsylvania. Some
pseudo- and semi-Quakers continued to seek and to hold political power
in the Assembly, but these were disavowed by the orthodox. Strict
Quakers made it plain that they were neither represented by these back-
sliders nor responsible for their decisions. The die-hards went on "labour-
ing" among all good Friends to keep them from standing for the
Assembly or voting for any Quakers who stood. There were already
hints that some of these Quaker leaders looked to the day when the end
of war in the colony would enable them to resume power.
That day was never to come, for the reins of government cannot be
picked up and laid aside at will. The Quaker abdication, with its avowal
of the inconsistency between their principles and the responsibilities of
government, was perhaps the greatest evidence of practical sense they
were ever to give. But their secret hope of returning to power with the
peace of the 1760's showed their fundamental failure to understand
society and its problems.
Whatever chance there may have been for such a political comeback
was smashed by the American Revolution: the Quaker principle against
war was also a principle against revolution. "The setting up and putting
down Kings and governments," their Yearly Meeting had declared nearly
a century before, "is God's peculiar prerogative, for causes best known to
himself." As the Quakers had tried to remain neutral in the plots and
counterplots of troubled England during the 17th century, so they sought
62 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
neutrality during the days of the American Revolution. Again they were
less concerned with complex questions of government than with whether
any law violated their private Quaker consciences. As the Revolution
approached, the Yearly Meeting asked of every Monthly Meeting, "Are
Friends careful not to defraud the King of his Dues?" Some of the more
far-sighted Friends in England, aware that the cause of liberty in England
was bound up with the success of the American cause, urged the Ameri-
can Friends not to obstruct it. But the Americans looked to their con-
sciences, were scrupulously subservient to all non-military requirements
of the English government, and were, on the whole, equally uncoopera-
tive with the British and the American armies. They refused to pay taxes
and fines levied by the American government, and were, understandably,
labeled as Tories. To the charge of fanaticism hung on them in 1756 was
now added the greater odium of treason.
After the Quakers withdrew from government in 1756 they gave much
of their great energy to the purification of their own sect. By 1777 the
Yearly Meeting called for "a reformation." If they could not rule the
Province, they must at least not cease to be a "peculiar people," Some
of the Quarterly Meetings, like that at Chester, sought "a revival of
ancient simplicity in plainness of apparel, household furniture, the educa-
tion of youth, and a due and wakeful attendance of our religious meet-
ings." They sought, for example, to remove and abolish gravestones, as
simply another of the vanities of this world. They attempted to increase
the religious influence in their education. They began more intensively
"to labour for a Reformation in Respect to the Distiling and Use of
Spirituous Liquors amongst Friends and the Polluting Practice of keeping
Taverns, Beerhouses, etc.," and they were beginning to report "a number
of Friends having Used Spirituous Liquors very Sparingly in the time of
our late Harvest and others have with great satisfaction used none at all."
They intensified their effort to secure the freedom of all slaves held by
Quakers. In a word, they undertook to build a wall around the Society
of Friends against all alien influences, opposing even attendance at the
religious services of other sects. There is no denying that their abdication
of political power led them to look more closely into their own hearts
and to preserve more strictly the tenets of their sect.
Fortunately for the Society of Friends, and for the Province of Penn-
sylvania, the Quakers did not withdraw entirely from communal con-
cerns. Some of them became prosperous merchants and enterprising men
of science. The humanitarian currents within Pennsylvania Quakerism
grew stronger as the political currents weakened. During the 18th century
they gave increasingly of themselves in the growing movement against
THE INWARD PLANTATION 63
slavery and the slave-trade, in the building of hospitals, and in the
humanizing of prisons and insane-asylums. Many surviving institutions,
like the Philadelphia Lying-in Hospital, are monuments to the effective-
ness of Quakers in one small area of the practical world. But that very
success, which was a measure of what the Quakers no longer gave to
politics, was a fitting, if ironical, criterion of the unfitness of their dogmas
for the larger tasks of building a new society in a new world.
11
The Curse of Perfectionism
IN THE PERSPECTIVE of European history, the Quaker withdrawal
is simply another example of the failure of a religious sect to hold control
of a government. In the perspective of American history it is a good deal
more: it illustrates the special trials of dogmas in America, marked in
this instance by the peculiar contradictions within the Quaker teachings
themselves. Quaker experience in Pennsylvania can be described in
terms of three tendencies which will help us understand what caused
the Quakers to fail in government and what helped them continue,
despite heavy trials, to be dedicated Quakers.
Self-Purity and Perfectionism. Although Penn had originally set him-
self the task of a holy experiment, of building a community on Friendly
foundations, leading Quakers of Pennsylvania showed an unremitting
preoccupation, sometimes close to obsession, with the purity of their own
souls. On more than one occasion, we have seen, the Quakers in power
seemed more anxious for their own principles than for the welfare, or
even the survival, of the Province itself. Before expressing unqualified
admiration for such steadfastness, we might well examine its implications
for the survival of a sturdy Quakerism and for the daily lives of those
many others who, according to the Quakers themselves, had a right to
live and prosper in America. Somehow, whenever tested, the Quakers
chose the solution which kept themselves pure, even though others might
have to pay the price. To avoid taking oaths, Quakers sacrificed the hu-
64 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
manity of criminal laws. While die-hard Quakers kept free of the taint of
militarism and preserved inviolate their testimony against war, hundreds
of innocent women and children were being massacred by Indians in
western Pennsylvania. And so it went. Numerous Quaker preachers who
came from England to harden the obstinacy of the Friends of Pennsyl-
vania exhorted them to "walk in white" at any cost. Even in the wilder-
ness they must be "as a lily amongst thorns."
Repeatedly they were urged to "mind their own business as Friends do
everywhere else." For a Quaker to mind his own business meant for him
to pursue the purity of his principles. This turning inward brought blind-
ness to the facts of life about him to the character of Indians, to the
threat on the western borderlands, to the self-interest of other men. His
resignation to the will of God made him indifferent to the stream of
everyday life.
"Let's do our duty," William Penn had urged as early as 1701, "and
leave the rest with God." Battles should be fought not by men but by
God; governments should be raised up and torn down by Him alone. Men
like Franklin, "who can have no Confidence that God will protect those
that neglect the use of rational Means for their Security," might be
continually faced with moral problems. But Quakers thought all such
problems could be settled in advance. John Woolman and his fellow
Quaker Saints, striving "for a perfect Resignation ... a Belief, that
whatever the Lord might be pleased to allot for me, would work for
Good," induced men to furbish their own souls while the community
shifted for itself. Yet neither self-purity nor resignation to God's unaided
will could build a wall against fighting enemies. Nor construct a com-
munity in the wilderness.
Cosmopolitanism. One of the distinctive features of the Pennsylvania
experiment was that American Quakers were subject to constant persua-
sion, surveillance, and scrutiny from afar. The powerful rulers of the
London Yearly Meeting were remote from the perils, opportunities, and
challenges of America; yet their influence was a check on what might
have been the normal adaptation of Quaker doctrines to life in America.
The Society of Friends had become a kind of international conspiracy
for Peace and for primitive Christian perfection. Some years after the
Revolution, Thomas Jefferson called them "a religious sect . . . acting
with one mind, and that directed by the mother society in England. Dis-
persed, as the Jews, they still form, as those do, one nation, foreign to the
land they live in. They are Protestant Jesuits, implicitly devoted to the
will of their superior, and forgetting all duties to their country in the exe-
THE INWARD PLANTATION 65
cution of the policy of their order." Emissaries from the London Yearly
Meeting tried to shape Pennsylvania policy in the interests of the inter-
national Quaker community. Only occasionally and by chance, as when
they urged the Pennsylvania Quakers to widen their use of capital punish-
ment in order to avoid the oath, did that interest happen to lead to
compromise. More often, they pushed American Friends toward rigid
orthodoxy. In the tense days of 1756, Dr. John Fothergill from London
and the two emissaries, John Hunt and Christopher Wilson, added their
voices to those of American extremists; they urged Quakers to withdraw
from government so they might preserve their pacifist principles in-
violate. In this, the interest of the English Quaker community was
dominant.
Pressure from England was not merely occasional. A constant flow of
itinerant ministers carried the "refreshing" currents of world Quakerism
even into the smaller villages and the back country. In the period of less
than a century between the founding of Pennsylvania and the outbreak
of the American Revolution, well over a hundred Quaker men and
women ministers came from abroad, mostly from England. The leading
historian of colonial Quakerism, Frederick B. Tolles, has described how
an "Atlantic Community" of the Society of Friends emerged during this
period. After 1670 the eyes of English Quakers were turned westward.
Traveling preachers built and preserved that transoceanic community
and, in George Keith's words, "kept the Quakers so strong in counte-
nance." The fact that they were often preaching to the converted did not
mean that they retailed flabby platitudes. They preached strong medicine.
The spirit of the earlier Quaker martyrs lived on in them. Their cheerful-
ness was as remarkable as their courage. One of them, Samuel Fothergill,
the brother of Dr. John Fothergill, wrote his wife in 1755:
I have now travelled 2550 miles, upon the continent of America; of
which, one horse has carried me 1750; he is an excellent creature, and
providentially put into my hands by a friend near Philadelphia. He cost
me about five pounds sterling; he travels with great ease and safety, and
sometimes, like his master, with hard fare, and sometimes none at all,
but we both jog on contentedly.
But, contented or not, these ministers had set themselves a grim task: to
be Jeremiahs in the wilderness, recalling American Quakers to their
mission as a peculiar people.
Thek dominant theme was a warning against the temptations of pros-
perity and a plea for the primitive virtues of the Society of Friends. Some,
like Thomas Chalkley, who came over from England in 1698, stayed on;
a member of the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting for over forty years, he
66 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
never lost the spirit of the missionary, the zealot, and the prophet. He
recorded in his journal for 1724:
I was concerned at that Meeting at Philadelphia to let the People know,
That as God had blessed the People of that City, and the Province,
with spiritual and temporal Blessings, and made the Land naturally
fruitful, to the Inriching many of the Inhabitants, he now expected
Fruits from them of Piety and Virtue; and that if there was not a
stricter walking with God in Christ Jesus, they might expect his divine
Hand, which had visited them with Favours from Heaven above, and
from the Earth beneath, would visit them with a Rod in it, and that he
had already given them some gentle Strokes therewith.
Such Jeremiads were of course familiar enough to Puritan New England,
and might have had little effect in Pennsylvania had they not been
coupled there with a menacing insistence on certain otherworldly
dogmas. Prominent among them was, of course, the principle of pacifism.
As early as 1739, with King George's War in the offing, Chalkley traveled
about the province urging Friends to hold themselves aloof. Visiting
ministers from England, like William Reckitt who first came in 1756,
went about reproaching the people of Pennsylvania for worrying over
defense of the colony "in which several had been meddling and con-
cerning themselves." So the Pure Truth was replenished from abroad and
the people were saved from the curse of prudence.
The plea for universalism had the simultaneous effects of strengthening
Quakerism and of weakening its influence in American society. For
Friends in Pennsylvania, the close tie to England was a tie to orthodoxy,
an anchor against the winds and currents of the New World. Isaac Norris,
the Philadelphia Quaker, preened himself and criticized the provincialism
of New England Christianity. "Your New England ministers, so called,"
he wrote in 1700, "seem to have much zeal for religion, but have a
peculiar talent in the application and practice; and by looking no farther
than their own narrow limits, do not consider the universality of
God's love to the creation." Yet without that very talent for "application
and practice" no ministry could incorporate its teachings into the social
mind.
Insularity. As the Quakers of Philadelphia deferred to the London
Yearly Meeting, they insulated themselves from their neighbors, whom
they had to understand if they were to rule the broad province of Penn-
sylvania. To the Quakers, their obstinacy doubtless seemed a purity
of principle and their rigidity a steadfastness in belief. But some of
their more perceptive contemporaries saw the perils hidden in these
virtues. William Penn himself wrote in exasperation from England in
1705:
THE INWARD PLANTATION 67
There is an excess of vanity that is apt to creep in upon the people in
power in America, who, having got out of the crowd in which they
were lost here, upon every little eminency there, think nothing taller
than themselves but the trees, and as if there were no after superior
judgment to which they should be accountable; so that I have some-
times thought that if there was a law to oblige the people in power, in
their respective colonies, to take turns in coming over for England, that
they might lose themselves again amongst the crowds of so much more
considerable people at the custom-house, exchange, and Westminster
Hall, they would exceedingly amend in their conduct at their return, and
be much more discreet and tractable, and fit for government. In the
mean time, pray help to prevent them not to destroy themselves.
During those great crises which put their principles to the test, strict
Pennsylvania Quakers looked down their noses at neighbors who had
lost the character of a peculiar people, and had become "as salt which
hath lost its savour." Policies which Benjamin Franklin opposed be-
cause they set Quakers apart were, for that very reason, favored by men
like the visiting missionary Samuel Fothergill. He hoped that the passing
of the hated militia tax would separate the sheep from the goats, the
true believers from the hypocrites, and so be a "winnowing of the peo-
ple." To Fothergill and his like, resignation from government seemed
not a flight from responsibility but a symbol of the desire to "live in peace
and quietness, minding their own business as Friends do everywhere
else."
This insularity of the Pennsylvania Quakers took several forms. In the
first place, it was geographical. For a number of reasons they were not
swept along in the westward current which carried wave after wave of
Irish, Scotch-Irish, and Germans across the Allegheny Mountains to the
outposts of western Pennsylvania. From the beginning they settled and
prospered for the most part either hi Philadelphia and its environs or in
one of the three "Quaker" counties of Philadelphia, Chester, and Bucks,
tightly clustered on the eastern seaboard. Quakers did not settle hi
western Pennsylvania until about 1770, a fact which gave substance to
the charge that Quakers grew fat in the warm metropolis while others
risked everything. More serious, it kept them from sharing the common
and characteristic experience of the people of their province in their
age. Had they gone along with the Irish and Germans to live in the
back country, the Pennsylvania Friends might better have comprehended
the attitudes of western settlers toward the Indians, and they might have
found reasons to be less unbending in their pacifist orthodoxy.
Even their belief in religious toleration, which had been embodied hi
Perm's first Frame of Government and continued as a principle, helped
put the Quakers in a minority and, eventually, in an isolated position.
68 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
While most Quakers remained in their original eastern settlements, a
motley flood of Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and even Catho-
lics, poured in around them. Within less than a half -century after found-
ing Pennsylvania, Quakers could only describe themselves (in Perm's
prophetic phrase) as "Dissenters in our own country."
Quaker discipline required Friends to set themselves apart. Inter-
marriage with non-Quakers was frowned on or prohibited; a young
Friend would be officially warned against the charms of the particular
non-Friend whom he had been courting. The Quaker Meetings, ostensibly
for reasons of peace and good fellowship, required their members to
submit disputes to arbitration by the Meeting itself rather than use the
regular courts of law. They even organized the "Friendly Association"
which they set up to deal with the Indians outside the government. In
these ways they put themselves outside the law, confined by ghetto walls
built by their principles and cemented by the purity of their consciences.
It is possible that Quakers might have broken down these walls and
become more infused by a worldly spirit, had they tried to proselytize.
But concern for their own purity overshadowed their desire to improve
their community. The Quakers who traveled to Massachusetts Bay went
not so much to make converts, as to give their bodies in testimony to
their Truth. Perhaps no sect of equal size has had so many "missionaries,"
yet none has sought fewer converts. Quaker missionaries, whether from
abroad or from within the province, were for the most part missionaries to
the Quakers. Instead of urging the Truth upon their unenlightened
neighbors, energetic Quaker missionaries visited one Quaker Meeting
after another hoping to save the Society of Friends from trifling faults.
Their self-righteousness and their rigidity are symbolized by an anec-
dote which John Churchman relates. During his ministerial wanderings
in the 1750's he came to know a thoughtful and studious barber whose
shop he patronized. On one occasion the barber proudly showed his
visitor a difficult work in algebra which he had been studying on his own.
"I said it might be useful to some," Churchman answered sanctimoni-
ously, "but that I could take up grubbing, or follow the plough, without
studying algebra; as he might also shave a man, &c. without it. Be-
sides I found it a more profitable and delightful study, to be quietly em-
ployed in learning the law of the Lord written in mine own heart, so that
I might walk before him acceptably." In such a situation, a Puritan might
have admired the barber's industry, have expressed interest in his subject,
and finally perhaps have noted that God himself was the greatest of all
algebraists. The intellectual and dogmatic character of Puritanism had
shown the enquiring Puritan a path to God from every little fact. But
THE INWARD PLANTATION 69
the Quaker was preoccupied with his rites of self-purification. With the
obstinacy of the mystic he refused to admit the existence of the enemy's
cudgel, even though his own or another's head be broken by it. The close
alliance with English Quakerism and the insularity of American Quaker-
ism preserved his dogma from the most corrosive of all tests, the acid of
everyday experience.
Finally, the Quakers made a dogma of the absence of dogma. It was a
primary article of their creed that a true Christian could have no creed.
This deprived the Quaker of that theological security which had enabled
the Puritan gradually to adapt Calvinism to American life. The Quaker
was haunted by fear that every compromise was a defeat, that to modify
anything might be to lose everything. Because his doctrine was suffused
with the haze of mystical enthusiasm, he could not discern clearly which
were the foundations and buttresses of his cathedral and which the orna-
mental gargoyles.
PART THREE
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY
The Settlers of Georgia
"It is a melancholy thing to see how zeal for
a good thing abates when the novelty is over,
and when there is no pecuniary reward attend-
ing the service."
EARL OF EGMONT
SOMETHING about the fabled lushness and tropical wealth of Georgia
inspired both extravagance and rigidity in the plans of those who wished
to develop it. The supposed prodigality of the land seduced men to be-
lieve that they could cut the colony to their own pattern. These early
planners combined a haziness about the facts of life in Georgia with a
precision in their schemes for that life. What cosmopolitanism and self-
purity did to Pennsylvania, paternalism and philanthropy did to Georgia.
How and why Georgia became the victim of its benefactors, and what
that story tells us of the character of American life, is the subject of the
following chapters.
71
12
The Altruism of an
Unheroic Age
THE VIRTUES, like the vices, of any age bear its peculiar flavor. The
swashbuckling grandeur of the projects of Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir
Francis Drake expressed the aspirations and daring of Elizabethan Eng-
land. The clarity, simplicity, and doggedness of the purposes of William
Bradford and John Winthrop were that special combination of grand end
and commonplace means which characterized the England of Oliver
Cromwell. Similarly the altruism of the founders of the Georgia colony
in 1732 was a touchstone of the limited aspiration of the England of
that day.
In England, the middle decades of the 18th century were distinctly
unheroic. It was an age more concerned about living within its spiritual
and intellectual means than with seeking unfamiliar horizons. Its aes-
thetic ideals were sobriety and good sense; never were people more con-
tent that their reach should not exceed their grasp. They were as
thoroughly reconciled to the narrow limits of life as was Alexander Pope
to the confinement of the heroic couplet. It was an age which chose
David Hume for its arbiter of Truth, Dr. Samuel Johnson for its arbiter
of Beauty, and Pamela and Tom Jones for its epics. There was probably
73
74 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
never an age with more limited possibilities nor one which so thoroughly
exploited them. There has probably never been an age with a more
narrow imagination, nor one which used its imagination more robustly.
In English domestic politics, the second quarter of the century was
corrupt and pettifogging. If Sir Robert Walpole was effective as England's
"first Prime Minister" it was as much because of his readiness to per-
suade with pensions, peerages, and ecclesiastical sinecures, as because of
his other political talents. The prevalent cynicism was expressed in the
facetious rumor on the death of the Queen in 1737 that there had been
prepared a third place in the royal burial vault "designed by his
Majesty for Sir Robert Walpole; so that when both the latter die there
will lie together, King, Queen and Knave." The machinery of parliamen-
tary politics worked by corrupt bargains, patronage, and influence.
The philanthropy of the age was directed toward the removal of
poverty, especially those forms of poverty and of vice which were
an eyesore to a gentleman walking the streets of London or which added
to the cost, danger, and stench of life in the great city. One of the
largest English philanthropic enterprises was the so-called Charitable
Corporation, incorporated in 1707 with a capital of 30,000, which it
increased to 600,000 through small loans to the poor and to small
tradesmen. In 1731 it was discovered that the cashier and storekeeper
had made themselves beneficiaries of the Charitable Corporation by
absconding with 570,000 of its capital. The resulting debate in the
House of Commons was somewhat restrained by the fact that relatives of
members of the House were among the culprits.
In such an atmosphere of selfishness and cynicism, some poets and
social critics looked hopefully westward. Contemporary Europe seemed
almost a perfect contrasting background for any grand gesture of truly
disinterested philanthropy. Bishop Berkeley, himself promoter of a
Bermuda project, wrote in 1726:
There shall be sung another golden age,
The rise of Empire and of arts,
The good and great inspiring epic rage
The wisest heads and noblest hearts.
Not such as Europe breeds in her decay,
Such as she bred when fresh and young,
When heavenly flame did animate her clay,
By future poets shall be sung.
Westward the course of Empire takes its way,
The four first acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day,
The world's great effort is the last.
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY 75
We cannot find it hard to understand, then, why the proposal in 1730
to establish a colony to be called Georgia between the Altamaha and the
Savannah Rivers, south of the Carolinas, made such a welcome impres-
sion on the English mind: Georgia, alone of all the continental American
colonies, was sponsored by men who promised to make no profit from
the undertaking. The rare example of a vast enterprise with a thoroughly
altruistic motive became the subject of much poetry and self-congratula-
tion.
General James Oglethorpe was in many ways an appealing figure, and
enthusiasts were ready to invest him with the heroic qualities for which
the age was starved. No sensitive observer could fail to note the contrast
between the selfless zeal of the Trustees of Georgia and the cynical spirit
of many leading figures in English public life. "They have, for the benefit
of mankind," we read in a promotional pamphlet reputedly written by
Oglethorpe himself, "given up that ease and indolence to which they were
entitled by their fortunes and the too prevalent custom of their native
country. " It would be hard to find another venture of 18th-century
colonizing and empire-building whose leaders were more disinterested or
more free of sordid motives. Nevertheless, although the motives of the
founders of the colony were altrustic, they were still distinctly this-
worldly. Their altruism bore the birthmark of the age: it was practical,
limited, and without any of the theological fantasy or grandiloquence
which had flavored the older colonies. The fulfillment of the colony
would properly be measured by its strength and prosperity.
Almost from the beginning, plans for a colony south of the Carolinas
had been embellished with extravagant hopes for that "Most delightful
Country of the Universe." In 1717, even before Oglethorpe, Sir Robert
Montgomery had published a blueprint for such a colony. The prospec-
tive investor was assured "That Nature has not bless'd the World with
any Tract, which can be preferable to it, that Paradise with all her
Virgin Beauties, may be modestly suppos'd at most but equal to its Native
Excellencies." The promotional literature for Georgia fifteen years later
seemed to qualify its extravagances only to make them more credible.
The author of A New and Accurate Account of the Provinces of South
Carolina and Georgia (1733) promised a climate matchlessly temperate,
a land where "all things will undoubtedly thrive . . . that are to be found
in the happiest places under the same latitude." The woods were easily
cleared, and the oranges, lemons, apples, pears, peaches, and apricots
were "so delicious that whoever tastes them will despise the insipid
watery taste of those we have in England" and yet so abundant that
men fed them to the hogs. Wild game, fowl, and fish easily supplied a
bounteous table. "Such an air and soil can only be fitly described by a
76 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
poetical pen, because there is but little danger of exceeding the truth."
The reader who comes to the history of Georgia, after seeing the
dogmatic clarity with which the New England Puritans built their "city
upon a hill" or the mystic grandeur which enveloped the Pennsylvania
Quakers' hope for a community of peace and brotherhood, cannot fail to
be interested, and puzzled, by the curious combination of sentimental
vagueness and detailed concreteness of the aspirations for Georgia.
Founders of other colonies tried to follow large blueprints of the Truth;
the promoters of Georgia started with detailed, almost petty, specifica-
tions.
There is a remarkably intimate record of the motives of the founders
in the diary of Lord Percival, first Earl of Egmont, who, with Oglethorpe,
was among the leading spirits. His private journal displays the prosaic
patchwork of motives which stirred English life in the Age of Walpole:
the incongruous combination of corruption, sycophancy, virtue, hard-
headedness, honor, and philanthropy. On one page he reveals his strenu-
ous effort to wangle an Irish earldom for himself so that his children
might marry into families of solid wealth; on another he worries over the
spiriflessness of religion in his day. At one time he describes his own
attempt to buy an official post in the East India Company for a cousin;
at another he denounces the unprincipled behavior of his Prime Minister.
On one page he maliciously gossips about the amours of the Prince of
Wales, on another he reveals his own efforts to gain the favor of the
Prince. Never did an age display a more engaging ambidexterity.
Out of the mouth of Egmont came the authentic aspiration of the day:
at once vague, secular, common-sensical, and practical. "Ah, Madam,"
he told the Queen, " 'tis for persons in high station, who have the means
in their hands to do good." This aspiration needed no particular theology
to support it. Sensible Englishmen, exasperated by the wild fanaticism
which had turned England upside down in the Age of Cromwell, were
glad to see reformers fenced about with moderation and common sense.
In the lexicon of the Age of Walpole, to do good was to do certain very
specific things. And whatever one might have criticized in the project for
Georgia, one could hardly deny that it was detailed, concrete, and intel-
ligible to a man of good sense.
General Oglethorpe was an imperious and tough-minded military
man of good will, endowed with a zest for action and a strong body that
carried him into his 90th year. Yet he possessed, in BoswelTs phrase,
an "uncommon vivacity of mind and variety of knowledge" which earned
him a place in Dr. Johnson's circle of dinner-companions beside Edmund
Burke and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Johnson warmly admired Oglethorpe; no
man's life, he said, could be more interesting, and he even offered to write
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY 77
the General's biography. Many admired Oglethorpe's combination of
an active temperament with what Alexander Pope called a "strong
benevolence of soul" a benevolence without the severity of a Crom-
well, the passion of a Bunyan or the subtlety of a Milton. Such a
virtue commended itself to an unheroic age.
The promises and the weaknesses of the Georgia venture were sym-
bolized in its two leaders: Lord Percival, the wealthy aristocrat, inter-
ested in doing good for his fellow Englishmen and in strengthening his
nation, insofar as this could be accomplished from an upholstered chair
in a town-house, on the floor of Parliament or in a coffee-house, or from
the lordly ease of his Irish estates; and General Oglethorpe, the man of
action, clear and specific in his purposes, arbitrary and impatient, and
unbending with the doctrinaire rigidity of the completely "practical" man.
Together Percival and Oglethorpe expressed the combination of vague-
ness and concreteness which was the virtue and the fault of 18th-century
humanitarianism. Their enterprise was to suffer because of the haziness
of their purpose of doing good; it was also to suffer because of the
excessively detailed specifications of the particular good deeds they were
bent on doing. Compared with the Puritans or Quakers, they were
clearly men of this world, neither befuddled by theological dogma nor
distracted by mystic enthusiasm. Actually their crucial mistake was in
having made specific plans too far in advance and too far from the scene
of the experiment plans which they sanctified as though they were
principles.
Of the twenty-one trustees named in the Georgia Charter of 1732, all
had been active earlier in purely charitable ventures. Ten of them had
been members of the House of Commons committee on the state of the
jails (1729); some were interested in the Parliamentary committee to
relieve imprisoned debtors; all had been associates of Dr. Thomas Bray
in his enterprise to convert Negroes in the British Plantations, and some
were active supporters of the protestant missionary societies of the day.
But as the project for the new colony moved from dream into reality, its
prudential aspect became more and more important.
A strong colony of English families on the river Savannah (which
marked the southern boundary of Carolina) would protect the border-
lands from Indian, Spanish, and French invasions; and improvement of
these lands would enrich Great Britain. How this was to be accomplished
was agreed upon in advance by Oglethorpe and other respectable asso-
ciates of Lord Percival:
It is proposed the families there settled shall plant hemp and flax to be
sent unmanufactured to England, whereby in time much ready money
will be saved in this Kingdom, which now goes out to other countries
78 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
for the purchase of these goods, and they will also be able to supply us
with a great deal of good timber. Tis possible too they may raise white
mulberry trees and send us good raw silk. But at the worst they will be
able to live there, and defend that country from the insults of their
neighbours, and London will be eased of maintaining a number of
families which being let out of gaol have at present no visible way to
subsist.
Oglethorpe himself never neglected to emphasize the practical purpose of
the enterprise. In his now-classic statement of purposes (in a letter to
Bishop Berkeley in May, 1731), he boasted the motives of "charity and
humanity," but he also declared that to this undertaking Englishmen
would "owe the preserving of their people, the increasing the consump-
tion of their manufactures, and the strengthening their American
dominions. Mankind will be obliged to it, for the enlarging civility,
cultivating wfld countries, and founding of colonies, the posterity of
whom may in all probability be powerful and learned nations." The
official statement of purpose in the preamble to the Royal Charter of the
colony (June 9, 1732) recorded His Majesty's desire to relieve the plight
of his poor subjects "through misfortune and want of employment, re-
duced to great necessity," by offering them the opportunity to support
themselves comfortably in a new land. To settle the regions south of
Carolina would at the same time "increase the trade, navigation, and
wealth of these our realms." These purposes were repeated with monoto-
nous regularity on the floor of the House of Commons when the Trustees
of Georgia made their periodic appeals for money.
The promotional literature of the Trustees sometimes seems crudely
calculating. In A New and Accurate Account of the Provinces of South
Carolina and Georgia, written perhaps by Oglethorpe, "the benefits which
may arise to Great Britain by peopling this fruitful continent" were
reduced to simple arithmetic. "A man who is equal in ability, only to
the fourth part of a laborer, (and many such" there are,) we will suppose
to earn four-pence per diem, five pounds per annum, in London; his wife
and a child of above seven years old four-pence per diem more: upon a
fair supposition (because it is the common cause) he has another child
too young to earn any thing. These live but wretchedly at an expense
of twenty pounds per annum, to defray which they earn ten pounds; so
that they are a loss to the rich and industrious part of the nation of
ten pounds per annum." In Georgia this same family could raise rice and
com and tend cattle, earning from the prodigal fertility of the soil not
less than sixty pounds per annum. The moral was obvious. How im-
provident to lay out ten pounds every year to support a family on charity
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY 7
when barely twice that amount spent transporting them to Georgia would
make them permanently self-supporting and an asset to the British
economy! "England will grow rich by sending her Poor Abroad."
Roman precedent appealed to these empire-builders. "The Roman
state discharged not only its ungovernable distressed multitude, but also
its emeriti, its soldiers, which had served long and well in war, into
colonies upon the frontiers of their empire. It was by this policy that
they elbowed all the nations round them." From the Georgia outpost the
British people could also expand. Despite their occasional protests to
the contrary, their ancient model was surely not Jesus but Caesar.
The Trustees and Common Council of Georgia went to great trouble
in selecting settlers. Although one of their stated purposes had been to
provide refuge for foreign Protestants, they distrusted "enthusiasts who
take it in their head that everything which comes uppermost is the im-
mediate impulse of the spirit of God." They agreed to send over the
Protestants who had been persecuted by the Archbishop of Salzburg,
only after they were satisfied of their industry and sobriety. Whenever
possible they interviewed a prospective emigrant. They were careful not
to encourage the emigration of men who were already earning their own
livings (and so were already useful in Great Britain) ; they chose from
needy applicants only those likely to strengthen a frontier outpost. Again
and again the Trustees rejected applicants whose only fault was that they
"could get their bread at home." TTiey did not forget that Parliament was
supporting their project (by a sum which eventually amounted to over
130,000) in the hope, as one member put it, that they would "carry
off the numbers of poor children and other poor that pester the streets
of London."
While unwilling to enrich the prosperous, the Trustees were equally
wary of subsidizing the vicious. They wished, in Oglethorpe's phrase, to
help "such as were most distressed, virtuous and industrious." They
investigated the moral character of applicants and the circumstances
which accounted for their distress. They even advertised the names of
prospective emigrants in London newspapers a fortnight before departure
so that creditors and deserted wives might have ample warning. Very
few, perhaps not over a dozen, imprisoned debtors were brought to
Georgia. Even these were chosen because they showed promise of be-
coming sturdy colonists.
80 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
13
London Blueprint for
Georgia Utopia
WHEN Sir Robert Montgomery in 1717 offered his romantic plan
for a Margravate of Azilia, he insisted that the disappointments of all
earlier colonies in that land "of natural Sweetness and Beauties" had been
the result only of "a want of due Precaution in their Forms of Settling."
"Men once got together, 'tis as easy to dispose them regularly, and with
due Regard to Order, Beauty, and the Comforts of Society, as to leave
them to the Folly of fixing at Random, and destroying their Interest by
indulging their Humour." In the area which was to become Georgia,
Montgomery therefore proposed a geometric scheme of settlement de-
lineated in a drawing accompanying his pamphlet.
No plan could have been neater, more concrete, or more fantastic.
Each district was to be laid out as a precise square, in each quarter of
which was centered a square park for cattle to graze in. The remainder
of the district was divided into numerous smaller squares. "The 116
Squares, Each of which has a House in the Middle, are, Every one a
Mile on Each Side, or 640 Acres in a Square, bating only for the High
Ways, which divide them; These are the Estates, belonging to the Gentry
of the District, who, being so confin'd to an Equality in Land, will be
profitably Emulous of out doing Each other in Improvement, since that
is the only way, left them to grow richer than their Neighbours." The
Governor-in-Chief was to be placed exactly in the center of a system of
radiating paths and clearings: "By these means the labouring People
(being so dispos'd, as to be always watchful of an Enemies Approach)
are themselves within the Eye of those, set over them, and All together
under the Inspection of their Principal." Montgomery looked forward to
the time when the whole colony would be covered by such checkerboard
villages. Never had anyone better mapped the geography of a pipe-
dream.
The plans of Oglethorpe and the Trustees of Georgia differed from the
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY 81
earlier scheme of Montgomery not in spirit, but in execution. Conviction
that they were doing good for the settlers, for the neighboring colonies,
and for all Great Britain hardened their obstinacy against the facts of
life in Georgia.
The basic error of the Trustees, from which many other evils flowed,
was the rigidity of their rules for the ownership, use, sale, and inheritance
of Georgia's primary resource land. By preventing the free accumula-
tion, exchange, and exploitation of the land they stultified the life of the
colony.
What could most profitably be grown in that remote part of the New
World? How many acres did a man need for subsistence? The Trustees
knew the answer to neither of these questions nor, for that matter, to
any of the other elementary problems of land-use or natural resources
in their colony. Their sin was not so much that they were ignorant (al-
though they might have done more to acquaint themselves with the
facts), but that they acted as if they did know, and by their laws imposed
their ignorance upon the settlers. Had they been more willing to learn
the lessons of the New World, their enterprise might have had a different
end.
The Trustees' plan would have served just as well for a colony on the
borders of Timbuktoo. In any border colony, they reasoned, the popula-
tion should be prepared for defense. On each parcel of land, therefore,
an able-bodied man should reside. Since there should be no gaps through
which an enemy might penetrate, each man should possess only a small
parcel of land. Since everyone should be industrious, the parcels should
not be so large that any owner might live in indolence off the labor of
others on his land. To prevent speculation or emigration, land should
not be salable.
Guided by these specifications, the Trustees devised a system of land
tenure which they imposed on the colony. They limited the size of
individual holdings to no more than 500 acres. Each family going "on the
charity" received a grant of 50 acres which was neither salable nor
divisible. Land, held by a tenure which the lawyers of the day called "tail
male," could not be willed; it could be inherited only by a male heir. If
the deceased tenant had only daughters, or if a son did not want to work
the land himself, the land reverted to the Trustees.
The Trustees sitting in London saw the Negro as a menace to their
scheme. "It was thought the white man, by having a negro slave, would
be less disposed to labor himself; and that his whole time must be em-
ployed in keeping the negro to work, and in watching against any danger
82 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
he or his family might apprehend from the slave, and that the planter's
wife and children would by the death, or even the absence of the planter,
be at the mercy of the negro." The Londoners thought the possession of
Negroes would promote absentee ownership, and that, in time of war,
the Negroes would be the logical allies of any invaders threatening the
security of the colony. Moreover, the Trustees reasoned, "the produces
designed to be raised on the colony would not require such labor as to
make negroes necessary for carrying them on." To prohibit slavery and
to forbid the importation of Negroes was therefore integral to the whole
design.
The paternal interest of the London Trustees led them beyond land
and labor to morals. To preserve the colonists against luxury and in-
dolence, they sought to protect them against strong drink. Soldier-
settlers had to be sober to defend the border. The problem of drunken-
iiess, which was still far from solved in London, seemed easily soluble
in a new colony. The Trustees aimed to dispose of it by their Act of
1735, which declared that "no Rum, Brandies, Spirits or Strong Waters"
could be brought into Georgia, that kegs of such liquors found in the
colony should be publicly destroyed, and that sale of liquor should be
punished as a crime.
The fantastic neatness of the Trustees' scheme for the strength and
virtue of the colonists was equaled only by their plans for Georgia's
place in the economy of Great Britain, According to the mercantilist
theory expounded by the propagandists for Georgia, "It is at all times our
interest to naturalize as much as we can the products of other countries;
especially such as we purchase of foreigners with ready money, or other-
wise to our disadvantage. . . . Because by so doing we not only gain a
new provision for our poor, and an increase of our people by increasing
their employment, but by raising such materials ourselves, our manu-
factures come cheaper to us, whereby we are enabled to cope with other
nations in foreign markets, and at the same time prevent our home con-
sumption of them being a luxury too prejudicial to us." Luckily for the
logic of their scheme but not for the future of their enterprise one
product, silk, seemed perfectly suited to become Georgia's staple product.
In such pamphlets as Reasons for establishing the Colony of Georgia,
with regard to the Trade of Great Britain (London, 1773), the friends of
Georgia developed the economic argument. The annual cost of Italian,
French, Dutch, Indian and Chinese silks imported into Great Britain,
they pointed out, amounted to 500,000. This large sum of foreign
exchange or bullion could be saved by simply raising enough silk in
Georgia. Such a silk industry, furthermore, would provide employment
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY 83
for at least 20,000 people in the colony during the four months of the
silk season and for at least 20,000 more in England the year round.
Italian competition, they argued, could be easily defeated because in
Georgia land could be had for the asking and the precious mulberry
leaves grew wild. They even hoped to export silk from Great Britain and
eventually capture the European market.
What evidence had nourished these hopes? There was the tradition,
which had gained all the authenticity of legend, that in Georgia mulberry
trees grew wild and in great abundance. The promoters had not yet dis-
covered that it was the black mulberry (with leaves too harsh for silk-
worms) which flourished in their colony rather than the white mulberry.
As early as 1609 adventurers to Virginia listing the "most excellent fruites
by planting in Virginia" had reported "silke-worms, and plenty of mul-
berie-trees, whereby ladies, gentlewomen and little children (being set
in the way to do it) may bee all imploied with pleasure, making silke
comparable to that of Persia, Turkey, or any other." Much publicity had
been given to the fact that in 1660 the coronation robe of Charles II
was woven of Virginia silk. "The air, as it is healthy for man, (the
latitude about thirty-two,)" the promoters of Georgia argued, "is also
proper for the silk worms." Sir Thomas Lombe, who had won fame by
smuggling himself into an Italian silk mill in 1718 and taking the secrets
to England, was probably the foremost English authority on the manu-
facture of silk. Engaged as adviser to the Trustees, he wrote a strong
testimonial as rich in enthusiasm as it was poor in first-hand knowledge
to the possibilities of silk-culture in Georgia.
From such threads of legend, hope, and half-truth, the Trustees wove
their illusions. The forty-odd thousand persons to be engaged in silk-
production would include many not otherwise employable. 4< Nor need
they be the strongest, or most industrious part of mankind; it must be a
weak hand indeed that cannot earn bread where silk-worms and white
mulberry trees are so plenty. Most of the poor in Great Britain, who are
maintained by charity, are capable of this, though not of harder labor."
The Trustees fastened these illusions on the unfortunate settlers of
Georgia. Not only did they encourage silk-culture by a guaranteed in-
flated price and by bounties and prizes for the product delivered in Eng-
land, but they even wrote into land-grants provisions requiring each
grantee, in order to validate his claim, to plant at least 50 white mul-
berry trees on every 50 acres; every grantee of 500 acres had to plant
2000 trees within twenty years. When the laws against holding Negroes
were revised, each planter was required to possess one female Negro well-
trained in silk-culture to every four male Negroes. When at long last the
84 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Trustees provided a representative assembly, they required that to serve
in it an inhabitant must have planted at least 100 white mulberry trees
on each 50 acres of his land.
Had the Trustees succeeded in building Georgia according to their
blueprint, it would have been a neat, antiseptic, efficient, and thoroughly
dull community. Its people would have been settled along the border on
equal plots of land, each defended by an able-bodied man fit for the
militia. A sober, unenvious, industrious population would have worked
with uniform zeal while, of course, they would lack ambition to accumu-
late more land, to move to better land, or to rise in the social scale. Such
a cheerful and diligent people would be immune to fatigue, boredom, or
despair, and hence would not need strong drink. There would be no
merchants from neighboring colonies to sell Negroes, rum, or superior
land. The people, possessed of equable temperaments in an equable
climate, would employ their women, their children, and their aged in the
care and feeding of silkworms, because silk was, after all, so valuable
to the economy of the empire. The Georgians were to be ignorant of or
indifferent to the profits of other enterprises.
The only flaw in this scheme was that it had to be carried out by real
people at some real place on earth. And there never was a people or a
place suited to this purpose least of all the unhappy refugees from 18th-
century London who had been transported to the pine-barrens of
Georgia.
14
A Charity Colony
LONDON PHILANTHROPISTS were trying to make Georgia fulfill a
European dream. They were less interested in what was possible in
America than in what had been impossible in Europe. Thek ideals for the
new colony were the Englishman's picture of what such a colony ought
to be: protector of the frontier, refuge for the unfortunate and unem-
ployed of London, and source of valued semi-tropical products. In a
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY 85
sense, of course, the dreams of New England Puritans and Pennsylvania
Quakers were also woven from European experience, but they possessed
a theological generality.
No features of English society in the 18th century were more valued
than security and dependence. Security came from the assurance of living
in a network of familiar and predictable relationships. Squire Allworthy
and Squire Western in Fielding's Tom Jones were symbols of the security
which the English middle class could enjoy for itself and could, inci-
dentally, confer on its dependent classes. The substantial squire who
was a justice-of-the-peace, a pillar of respectability, a doer of good, a
protector of the weak, and a defender of the national interest was no mere
fiction. The obverse of the security he symbolized was dependence. It
was the dependence of the honest peasant on his squire, of the squire on
the noble lord, of the rector on his bishop, of the writer on his patron,
and even the dependence of the noble Lord Egmont on Sir Robert Wai-
pole and the Crown as the fountains of honor and profit These and a
thousand other dependencies gave English life the security and comfort
it held for many. Such a system required, of course, the willingness
of each party to accept the role assigned him by others. Nothing perhaps
was more characteristic of English life, nor did anything more sharply
distinguish it from life in the New World, than this set of well-assured
relationships. Except for the people dislocated by enclosures or by early
industrialism and for occasional vagrants, each man knew what was
expected of him; and by doing that he could count on living respectably
for his station in life.
For men who had been caught in this ancient web, much of the appeal
of America was escape. Franklin, advising prospective immigrants to
America, did not lure them with the paternal bounty of a just employer
rather with the fluidity and the promise of life here. It was precisely this
openness which fired Crevecoeur's enthusiasm later in the century: in
America the servile European could begin to have his will of the world
always at some risk of course but that was what made him an
American. The flavor of American life was compounded of risk,
spontaneity, independence, initiative, drift, mobility, and opportunity.
Even the American ideal of equality could not be imposed from above.
But the Georgia settlers suffered from the fact that they were in the
hands of benefactors. While investors seek profits, benefactors pursue an
abstract purpose. Investors are not unduly inquisitive about the conduct
of their enterprises if they yield fair returns. But the benefactor's dividend
is in doing good in his own special way. The Trustees of Georgia were no
exception.
86 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
The philanthropic motive of the founders was written into the very
charter of the colony, which provided that no Trustee could hold any
office, own any land, or gain any profit under it. Whatever the Trustees
did was supposed to be solely for the benefit of the settlers or of Great
Britain. Despite the storms of protest that battered the Georgia Trustee-
ship, no credible evidence was ever offered that any of the Trustees had,
even in spirit, violated the terms of his trust.
The Trustees themselves contributed heavily to the support of the
colony. Oglethorpe, as he on one occasion declared, had "not only
ventured his life and health" and reputation but within five years of the
founding had laid out 3000 of his own money; by 1744 he had ad-
vanced, mostly for military purposes, over 90,000, all of which
Parliament later repaid by unanimous vote. The people of England made
numerous contributions in small sums without expecting to be repaid.
Lord Egmont notes in his diary that one evening in June 1733, "an
unknown hand sent me by a porter 30 for the poor of Georgia." All
over England sermons were delivered appealing for contributions. Again
and again the Trustees were approached by people like Sir Edward
Debouverie, whose father had left a general bequest of 500 for chari-
table uses, who gave the whole sum plus a similar amount of his own.
The 18,000 raised by private subscription in the first eight years ex-
pressed the friendly interest of hundreds of parishioners who had been
stirred to put their few shillings into collection-plates.
But much more was needed. Private charity could not support so
vast an enterprise. The philanthropic purposes of the venture, together
with its importance to imperial defense, repeatedly led members of Parlia-
ment to support Georgia by direct parliamentary grants in sums which
before the Trusteeship had expired totaled over 130,000. Never before
except for purely military purposes had the British Government sup-
ported any of its colonies with public funds.
Crucial consequences flowed from these subsidies. Since Georgia's
public expenses were covered by the gifts of charitable individuals or by
governmental appropriations from England, there was no need for the
colonists to pay taxes; and hence no representative assembly was needed
to levy taxes. For many years there was no foundation for self-govern-
ment in Georgia. The settlers of the colony, who would otherwise pre-
sumably have been confined to a London jail or have wandered the
streets without employment, were public beneficiaries. As wards of the
community, they were without any right to complain.
London philanthropists had carefully provided for the needs of the
colonists as they saw them. We have some notion of the extent of that
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY 87
care from the "Rules for the year 1735," as recorded by Francis Moore,
who was the keeper of the stores:
The Trustees intend this year to lay out a county, and build a new
town in Georgia.
They will give to such persons as they send upon the charity, To every
man, a watch-coat; a musket and bayonet; a hatchet; a hammer; a
handsaw; a shod shovel or spade; a broad hoe; a narrow hoe; a gimlet;
a drawing knife; an iron pot, and a pair of pot-hooks; a frying pan;
and a public grindstone to each ward or village. Each working man will
have for his maintenance in the colony for one year (to be delivered in
such proportions, and at such times as the Trust shall thfofr proper)
312 Ibs. of beef or pork; 104 Ibs. of rice; 104 Ibs. of Indian corn or
peas; 104 Ibs. of flour; 1 pint of strong beer a day to a man when he
works and not otherwise; 52 quarts of molasses for brewing beer; 16
Ibs. of cheese; 12 Ibs. of butter; 8 oz. of spice; 12 Ibs. of sugar; 4 gallons
of vinegar; 24 Ibs. salt; 12 quarts of lamp oil, and 1 Ib. spun cotton; 12
Ibs. of soap.
To the mothers, wives, sisters or children of such men for one year,
that is to say, to every person of the age of 12 years and upwards, the
following allowance, (to be delivered as before,) 260 Ibs. of beef or
pork; 104 Ibs. of rice; 104 Ibs. of Indian corn or peas; 104 Ibs. of flour;
52 quarts of molasses for brewing beer; 16 Ibs. of cheese; 12 Ibs. of
butter; 8 oz. of spice; 12 Ibs. of sugar; 4 gallons of vinegar; 24 Ibs. of
salt; 6 quarts of lamp oil; half Ib. of spun cotton; 12 Ibs. of soap.
For every person above the age of seven, and under the age of twelve,
half the said allowance, being esteemed half a head.
And for every person above the age of two, and under the age of
seven, one third of said allowance, being esteemed one third of a head.
The trustees pay their passage from England to Georgia; and in the
voyage they will have in every week four beef days, two pork days, and
one fish day. . . .
Such provisions for the emigrants to Georgia have more the ring of a
well-run jail or of a mercenary army than of a colony of free men seeking
their fortune in a new world.
The minutes of the Trustees and their Common Council (the govern-
ing body of Georgia which met in London) reek with paternalism.
Thomas Causton, official storekeeper of the colony, had reportedly
declared in public that the colonists "had neither lands, rights or posses-
sions; that the trustees gave and that the trustees could freely take away."
If an officer had been brave beyond the call of duty, Oglethorpe appealed
to the Trustees to reward him because "no Society can subsist without
rewarding those Who do well, and punishing those Who do ill." If there
was to be a schoolmaster or a midwife at Savannah, the Trustees in
88 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
London had to include compensation in the year's budget. The Trustees
appropriated a saucepan as solemnly as they did the material for making
bodices for twenty-six of the women from Salzburg. In a word, the Trus-
tees had taken upon themselves control of the daily lives of people whom
they barely knew, living in a land they themselves had never seen.
"The Board will always do what is right," declared the Trustees
unanimously at a meeting in July 1735, "and the people should have
confidence in us." This arrogance, or at best, condescension, in the rulers
bred dependence and discontent in the ruled. Georgia settlers complained
of their food, shelter, and equipment, and awaited, or demanded, reme-
dies from the good fathers in distant London. After the first year of
guaranteed subsistence, settlers who found the going rough demanded
another year's security. The Trustees had little choice but to comply. The
efforts of the Trustees to keep the colonists happy and well-supplied
postponed the day of their independence.
As early as 1739, Lord Percival saw financial trouble ahead if the
paternalistic policy were continued. While the sponsors found themselves
more and more deeply involved, the colonists were neither prosperous
nor hopeful. In Georgia these needy English city-folk suffered not only
from their common weaknesses of character, but from lack of the special
skills of the backwoodsman. Before long the Trustees had to concede
that the poor "who had been useless in England, were inclined to be
useless in Georgia likewise."
15
Death of a Welfare Project
EVEN IF the Trustees had found colonists who believed that "the
Board will always do what is right," they would have failed, for they
would have set up a docile principality instead of an enterprising colony.
The colonists were also cursed by the universal ills of bureaucracy:
pettiness, arbitrariness, corruption. The rations promised to settlers "on
the charity" were kept in storehouses and were dispensed by men who
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY 89
could not resist using some supplies for their own purposes. There was,
for example, the case of Thomas Causton, whom Oglethorpe had left
as bailiff and storekeeper of the colony in 1734. Having the power to
give or to deny supplies, he became one of the most hated men in
Georgia. No one in Causton's unenviable position could have satisfied
both his London employers and his Georgia wards, and it was not long
before he was the butt of assorted accusations: bad beef, short rations,
profiteering, and bribery. Most of these accusations seem to have been
well-founded, but because Causton, as deputy of the London Trustees,
possessed the power of government he could prevent his own punish-
ment.
The most basic, most ill-conceived, and most disastrous of the
Trustees' plans concerned the land. Fifty acres of Georgia pine-barren
proved insufficient to support a family. Yet the work of clearing the
trees and of planting the crops was more than enough to occupy an able-
bodied man assisted only by his family. Whether a people more ascetic,
more industrious, or more heroic might have managed is beside the point,
for the Trustees had set themselves the task of colonizing a particular
kind of person.
Their rigid provisions for manning the frontier had incidentally removed
much of the incentive to increase the productivity of the colony. A
settler who had no male heir or whose son did not want to farm the land
would discover after years of labor that he was not allowed to sell his
property. Why should he improve his property for the benefit of the
Trustees? Since settlers were supposed to be soldiers in "Frontier Garri-
sons," each exchange of land was a matter of governmental policy, to be
approved in London only after proof that it served the public interest.
The records of the London meetings are full of quibbles over the transfer
of fifty-acre parcels.
The Trustees came to discover that they had assumed a responsibility
they could neither fulfill nor abandon. Each enforcement of their system
seemed to make every later exception more unfair. In 1738, for example,
the people of the little Georgia town of Hampstead, complaining that
their land was pine-barren, petitioned for something better in exchange.
The matter was considered by the Trustees in Oglethorpe's house in
London:
He said he knew the land at Hampstead perfectly well, and it was
indeed most of it pine barren, but with pains might be rendered very
fruitful as other pine land had been rendered by others; that if these
people were humoured in this, there would not be a man in the Colony
but would desire to remove to better land, who yet have at present no
90 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
thoughts of it. That the disorder this would occasion in the Colony is
unexpressible. That we ought to consider that if these men were allowed
to remove to new land, they would expect a new allowance of provision
for a year, which we are not in a condition to give, and the same would
be expected by others.
The disgruntled colonists thus found themselves shackled to plots of
unfertile land. Since the law prevented their adding to these parcels, or
selling or exchanging them, the only alternative was flight.
Although settlers accepted the need for a limit on the amount of land
to be held by any individual "as it is preventive of those unreasonable,
and even impolitic monopolies of land, which have greatly retarded the
strength and improvement of other places" this was far different from
an enforced equality. Where, they asked, was the incentive for the in-
dustrious if not hi the opportunity to better his condition? "There being
many lazy fellows in the number," a Captain Pury reported to the
Trustees in 1733 on arrival from Georgia, "and others not able to work,
those who work stoutly think it unreasonable the other should enjoy the
fruits of their labour, and when the land is cleared, have an equal share
and chance when lots are cast for determining each person's division."
When clamor from Georgia increased, Oglethorpe tried to convince
the other Trustees that complaints came only from the shiftless and the
self-seeking, the "disaffected" who had been stirred up by land-specula-
tors from South Carolina. It was not until 1738 that the Trustees began a
series of modifications in Georgia's land-policy, regarding each as if it
were a sacrifice of principle. In 1738, the Trustees permitted females to
inherit land in Georgia; the next year tenants without natural heirs were
allowed to will their lands; in 1740 leases were allowed and fewer im-
provements were required; and in the following year the maximum hold-
ing was increased from 500 to 2000 acres. Recognizing differences in the
quality of parcels, the Trustees gradually allowed a freer exchange of
pine-barren for more fertile land, and granted an additional fifty acres to
those who had fenced and cultivated their original grants. Quit rents were
first reduced, and later abolished. It was not until 1750, when the
Trustees were about to give up their charter, that tenure of land in the
colony was increased to an absolute inheritance. Now finally a Georgian
could buy, sell, lease, exchange, or will his land like that in any of the
other American colonies. But Oglethorpe remained sullen and resistant,
arguing that only the strict regulation of the land had preserved the
colony from invasion.
Oglethorpe was right in believing that the whole system would have
to be abandoned if any part of it were given up. All the illusions had been
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY 91
woven together; they would unravel at the same time. For example, as
soon as the size of the individual land-holding was increased, many
arguments against the use of Negro laborers were destroyed and strong
new arguments created in favor of allowing their importation. Larger
holdings required more and cheaper labor. Year after year, colonists in
northern Georgia, prodded by Carolina Negro-merchants, protested to
London that lack of Negroes caused the colony's stagnation and dis-
content. In London in March 1748, the Trustees resolved "never to
permit the Introduction of Negroes into the Colony of Georgia, as the
Danger which must arise from them in a Frontier Town is so evident;
And as the People, Who continue to clamour for Negroes declare that the
Colony can never succeed without the use of them, it is evident they don't
intend by their own Industry to contribute to its Success, and must
therefore rather hinder than promote it." They advised any who could
not succeed without Negroes to go elsewhere. It was only two years later,
in 1750, that the Trustees retreated fully; explaining that conditions in
the colony had changed, they threw open the door to a slave economy.
In their plans for Georgia's morals, the Trustees had no more success.
It was one thing to pass a well-phrased Act "for Suppressing the odious
and loathsome Sin of Drunkenness" but quite another to enforce it on a
population sparsely spread over hills and swamps. One correspondent
reminded the Trustees that poverty, distress and frustrated hopes always
drove men to drink "to keep up their Courage." Even in England most
people had nothing to choose but either to be "quite Forlorn without
hopes or Mad with Liquor. Now to bring them [the Georgia settlers] to
a proper medium would be to give them Sound & Strong reasons to hope
for better times & by degrees to humor them with proper Notions Such
as are the most usefull to them."
There were also sober objections to prohibiting traffic in rum. Because
timber was the most likely export of the colony, and its logical market
was the sugar islands of the British West Indies which could send back
little but rum in return, prohibiting the importation of rum was in effect
cutting off trade with the West Indies. This deprived the empire of needed
lumber and deprived the Georgians of profitable commerce. There was
also the "medical" argument: "the experience of all the inhabitants of
America, will prove the necessity of qualifying water with some spirit,
(and it is very certain, that no province in America yields water that such
a qualification is more necessary to than Carolina and Georgia) and the
usefulness of this experiment has been sufficiently evident to all the
inhabitants of Georgia who could procure it, and use it with moderation."
Finally, there was the universal argument against unenforceable laws:
92 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
bootleggers claimed profits which might have gone into the pockets of
respectable citizens and "as it is the nature of mankind in general, and
of the common sort in particular, more eagerly to desire, and more im-
moderately to use those things which are most restrained from them; such
was the case with respect to rum in Georgia." The enterprising Carolina
rum-runners proved more decisive than any argument.
The Trustees, over Oglethorpe's loud objections, finally beat an un-
graceful retreat. In 1742, while still keeping the Act against rum on their
books, they ordered their agent to cease enforcing it. Later that year
they repealed prohibition, but they still allowed only mm imported from
another British colony in exchange for native Georgia products.
Of all items in the plan for Georgia, the last to die was the project for
raising silk. "Till the silk becomes a commodity," a colonial official re-
ported in 1740, "the only trade of the colony will be lumber and fresh
meat to carry to the islands." The Trustees did, from time to time, look
into the production of wine, but silk perhaps simply because they knew
less about it possessed their imagination. However intractable were
the London poor to the schemes of the Trustees, the silkworms proved
even more so. The fiat of London philanthropists made not the slightest
impression on them. The chronicle of the Georgia silk industry was one
of futile bickerings and unfulfilled hopes.
It was not surprising that raising a new and fragile product like silk
proved difficult in the American wilderness. Tending the worms and
winding the threads was a skilled and delicate business, but this was
hardly less delicate than dealing with the temperamental Piedmontese
on whom the Trustees depended for training the settlers in the art of silk
culture. The first debacle involved a Nicholas Amatis who with several
other Piedmontese was sent over soon after the founding of the colony.
The simplest facts were hard to come by in London. Some informants
reported that Amatis' assistants had broken the silk machinery, spoiled
the seed, destroyed the mulberry-trees and escaped into Carolina; others,
that Amatis himself just before he died had burnt all the worms and
machines because the magistrates had denied him a Catholic priest in
his last illness. On Amatis' death, instruction in silk-culture fell into the
hands of Jacques Camuse and his wife, who was supposed to teach
Georgians the art of silk-winding. But Mrs. Camuse was afraid to teach
the ladies of the colony too well, lest her own services become superflu-
ous.
Meanwhile the Trustees in London were exaggerating the significance
of their small success. From the beginning the promoters had spent a
disproportionate amount of their effort in securing favorable publicity,
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY 93
and they actually became victims of their own propaganda. They made a
great to-do over the gown "of Georgia silk" they presented to Queen
Caroline, and which she declared the finest silk she ever saw. Yet Georgia
silk came only irregularly and in small quantities. As late as 1740 the
Trustees heard that Mrs. Camuse had taught the people so little that, if
she died, the whole art of silk culture would be lost to Georgia. The only
substantial progress was made, under the greatest difficulties, among the
Salzburghers who were extraordinarily industrious, persistent, and in-
dependent and who had developed some local enthusiasm for silk-culture.
Of the 6301 pounds of silk cocoons produced in the whole of Georgia in
1751, all but three hundred pounds came either from Whitefield's or-
phanage or from the Salzburghers at Ebenezer. And in 1741 malcontents
spread the rumor in England that the silken gown presented to Queen
Caroline had contained few if any Georgia threads.
In May 1742 nearly half the silkworms in Savannah died, proving that
Georgia's climate was not suited to raising silkworms. If any part of
Georgia was proper for silk-culture, it would have been inland where
the climate was less variable, but this was some distance from the areas
first settled. Moreover, strong economic forces worked against the silk-
culture of Georgia.
Economical production of silk, as the experience of other parts of the
world had demonstrated, required laborers who were both highly skilled
and extremely cheap neither of which could be said of the inhabitants
of the new colony. Silk-laborers were hard to find because an ordinary
Georgia laborer, who could earn two shillings a day at other work,
could expect no more than one shilling from working at silk. In the
major silk-growing areas of the world, peasants were receiving no
more than threepence a day.
Despite all this, the Trustees remained blind and incorrigible in their
optimism; they still hoped to create a mulberry aristocracy. In their law
of March 19, 1750 they declared that, after June 4, 1751, no one could
be a representative in the Georgia Assembly who did not have at least
one hundred mulberry trees planted and properly fenced upon every
fifty acres of his land; and, after June 4, 1753, no one could be a deputy
who did not have at least one female in his family instructing in the art
of reeling silk and who did not produce at least fifteen pounds of silk
upon every fifty acres he owned. When finally in 1751 the Trustees de-
clared their intention to give up the government of Georgia and return
the colony to the Crown, they listed among the reasons not the unfitness
of Georgia for the culture of silk, but their lack of enough money "to
give any Encouragements for the Produce of Raw Silk." One Parlia-
94 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
mentary opponent of the Georgia project recommended that the best cure
for Georgia illusions was to require its inhabitants to drink only their
own wine and to be clothed only in their own silk. But illusions die hard,
and the brighter they are the longer they take adying. The production of
silk in Georgia dwindled on through the days of the Revolution, when
the Georgia Assembly transformed the old silk factory into a ball-room
and house of worship for which it was used until it was consumed by
fire a half-century later.
The government of Georgia failed too because the Trustees had bur-
dened themselves with powers which no one could wisely exercise
from London. They produced a bizarre combination of anarchy and
tyranny. The worst confusion and the most irritating abuses appeared in
the courts. Legislation could be made in London, but only in the Georgia
courts was it applied to particular individuals. While purporting to en-
force the laws of England, the Trustees had confused and combined the
jurisdiction of different English courts and had entrusted their administra-
tion to amateur judges who ruled by prejudice and favoritism. Oglethorpe
himself, whatever his other virtues, hardly possessed a judicial tempera-
ment; and his deputies took their cue from him. Where, the colonists
wailed, were their vaunted liberties as British subjects?
Complaint increased: pamphlets, petitions, and protests followed with
annoying frequency. Even the Trustees' own agent had to admit that
these protests, against every one of the major rules as well as against
the spirit of the government, spoke the mind of a substantial part of the
population.
As problems multiplied and public enthusiasm in England declined,
the interest of the Trustees, who after all were only volunteers, also
dwindled. Oglethorpe's own devotion to the venture was hardly increased
when in 1744 he was court-martialed (though fully acquitted) for al-
leged irregularities in his administration of the Army in Georgia. His
relations with the other Trustees became uncomfortable, and he attended
no meeting after early 1749. In 1742 Egmont resigned from the govern-
ing body, partly because of ill-health and partly because of the declining
public support. "It is a melancholy thing," he had shrewdly observed
some years before, "to see how zeal for a good thing abates when the
novelty is over, and when there is no pecuniary reward attending the
service. Had the Government given us salaries but of <2QO a year,
few of our members would have been absent."
The Trustees handed their charter back to the Crown and surrendered
their interest in Georgia on June 25, 1752, even before its twenty-one
year term had expked. A project which had been lavishly supported by
individual charity and public philanthropy, had come to a dismal end.
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY 95
It is uncertain just how much of the population had deserted Georgia
for the freer opportunities of Carolina and the other colonies by the mid-
dle of the century. The claim of the malcontents ten years before, that
only one-sixth of the original inhabitants were left, was probably an ex-
aggeration. But many had left, and there was more than romance 01
malice in the notion that Georgia was on the way to becoming a deserted
colony.
"The poor inhabitants of Georgia," unhappy settlers lamented, "are
scattered over the face of the earth; her plantations a wild; her towns a
desert; her villages in rubbish; her improvements a by-word, and her
liberties a jest; an object of pity to friends, and of insult, contempt and
ridicule to enemies." By the time of the Revolution, Georgia the darling
of philanthropists, the spoiled child of charitable London was the least
prosperous and least populous of the colonies.
16
The Perils of Altruism
IF THE FOUNDERS of the colony of Georgia lacked the grand vision
which inspired the Massachusetts Puritans or the mystic enthusiasm
of the Pennsylvania Quakers, they did possess a precise prosaic frame
within which they hoped to build a colony. Their difficulties came,
not from lack of a plan, but from too much of one. Their problems and
their opportunities arose neither from the dogmatic clarity of their prin-
ciples nor from the consuming intensity of their conviction nor even
from any vagueness in their notion of what they were about. Their essen-
tial weakness was a frame of mind which stifled the spontaneity and
experimental spirit which were the real spiritual wealth of America. How-
ever noble the impulses of Percival, Oglethorpe, and some of their asso-
ciates, these impulses found expression in niggling prudential gestures.
Had their aspiration been larger and more abstract or had it been more
self-seeking there might have been elbow-room for the possibilities
opened by life in the New World.
But philanthropists, like martyrs, missionaries, and apostles of the
96 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Good, have never been noted for their experimental spirit; they are phil-
anthropists precisely because they know what is good and how to ac-
complish it. By nature they are inclined to be too clear and too dogmatic
about any situation. So, indeed, were the Trustees of Georgia. The dis-
contented settlers properly complained that what an American colony
needed was a willingness to experiment: "At first it was a trial, now it
is an experiment; and certainly no man or society need be ashamed to
own, that from unforeseen emergencies their hypothesis did misgive; and
no person of judgment would censure for want of success where the pro-
posal was probable; but all the world would exclaim against that person
or society who, through mistaken notions of honor or positiveness of
temper, would persist in pushing an experiment contrary to all probabil-
ity, to the ruin of the adventurers."
This part of the Georgia story holds more than the lessons of irony
and defeat. For the clue to the failure of the Trusteeship is a clue to the
success of other forms of community in America. The Georgia project
was not abandoned because its settlers had found America unpromising
but, on the contrary, because what its settlers wanted was opportunity
with all its risks and what they were given was a plan. The opportunities
of the New World could not be encompassed by any plan, however self-
less or noble, devised by the Old World imagination. The dream to be
fulfilled here was more exotic than 18th-century London could believe,
American possibilities were not the same as European impossibilities;
they had a character all their own. Even to dream fruitfully of the life
here, it was necessary to compound the English dream with the American
experience.
PART FOUR
TRANSPLANTERS
The Virginians
"Thus, in the beginning, all the world was
America, and more so than it is now. . . ."
JOHN LOCKE
"In the beginning, All America was Virginia."
WILLIAM BYRD
VIRGINIA is a different story. Here we see no grandiose scheme, no at-
tempt to rule by an idea, but an earthy effort to transplant institutions.
If other colonies sought escape from English vices, Virginians wished to
fulfill English virtues. Let other colonies dazzle the world with a City
upon a Hill, inspire by a commonwealth of brotherly love, or encourage
with a vast humanitarian experiment. The model in Virginians* heads was
compounded of the actual features of a going community: the England,
especially the rural England, of the 17th and 18th century. If Virginia was
to- be in any way better than England, it was not because Virginians pur-
sued ideals which Englishmen did not have; rather that here were novel
opportunities to realize the English ideals. A middle-class Englishman
97
was to find space in Virginia to become a new kind of English country
gentleman. An unpredictable alchemy transformed the ways of the Eng-
lish manor-house into the habits of a New World republic. Squire West-
erns and Horace Walpoles underwent an Atlantic sea-change which made
them into Edmund Pendletons, Thomas Jeffersons, and George Wash-
ingtons. What made them American was not what they sought but what
they accomplished.
17
English Gentlemen,
American Style
IN ENGLAND in the later 17th century the ambition of a prosperous
tradesman was to become a country gentleman. To retire from a place
behind the shop-counter or from a seat at the clerk's desk to a spacious
manor house in the midst of broad acres this was the daydream of the
rising middle class. It was the counterpart in that age, of the 20th-century
businessman's dream of a costly suburban estate, membership in the
country-club, and winters in Florida. But it was more than that; becoming
a country gentleman in those days meant joining the governing class. To
acquire a manor house meant also to become a justice of the peace, a
power over the local pulpit, a patron and father-confessor to the local
peasantry, an overseer of the poor, and perhaps sooner or later a member
of Parliament, a knight, a baronet even conceivably a member of the
House of Lords.
The country house was thus the rising Englishman's way station to
heaven. Although it offered good living, it was no wallow of luxury or
indolence. And in the wholesome English folklore the burden of govern-
ment and public responsibility rested on those who sat comfortably in
the seats of gentlemen. "In the greatest fortune," observed Richard
99
100 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Brathwait in his English Gentleman (1630), a handbook which sub-
stantial Virginians consulted, "there is the least liberty." "He sinnes
doubly, that sinnes exemplarily: whence is meant, that such, whose very
persons should bee examples or patternes of vigilancy, providence and
industry, must not sleepe out their time under the fruitlesse shadow of
Security. Men in great place (saith one) are thrice servants; servants of
the Soveraigne, or state; servants of Fame; and servants of Businesse. So
as they have no freedome, neither in their persons, nor in their actions,
nor in their times." The ideal of the English gentleman, then, while
surely not ascetic, was decidedly moral and public. Rising English trades-
men who aspired to become gentlemen were aiming, not only at a life
of ease, but at a realm of larger and more dignified responsibilities.
In the earliest years of colonial Virginia the opportunity to rise into
the ranks of the gentry was not uncommon. Until nearly 1700, white
immigrants were probably better off in Virginia than they had been in
England. Scarcity of labor made wages higher; in 1623, George Sandys
complained that the Virginian expected, in addition to his food, a pound
of tobacco every day. With tobacco valued at a shilling a pound, the
Virginian earned in a day what his English counterpart earned in a week.
And there was the promise of rising in the world. After only a few years
of service, youths who had come as mere apprentices, according to the
author of A Perfect Description of Virginia (1649), could expect "Land
given them, and Cattel to set them up." The records of land transfers
studied by Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker show that in Virginia in the
later 17th century there was a numerous "yeomanry" men who owned
between 20 and 500 acres. At the upper end of the social scale, the man
who had come with moderate capital also probably had a better chance
of enlarging it; moreover, his money could buy more social status in
Virginia than in England. The system of granting land by "headrights,"
under which anyone could receive 50 acres of land for every person he
transported to the colony, made it simple enough to buy an entourage of
dependents.
To sit in a seat of power in a new country like 17th-century Virginia,
it was not yet necessary to nudge someone else out. If one could not lead
an already-existing community, one could start a new one. Many Vir-
ginia families were founded by tradesmen or artisans, men of extraordi-
nary talents, prosperity, or good luck, who acquired broad acres and soon
could afford the style of life appropriate to a country gentleman. The
standards of gentility, if self-consciously modeled on those of England,
were necessarily vaguer and less rigid. This fluidity of social classes was
shown in many ways. For a while every free white man could vote for
TRANSPLANTERS 101
members of the House of Burgesses; there was no property qualification.
The carping author of Virginia's Cure (London, 1662) objected that
wise legislation seldom passed the Virginia House of Burgesses, because
a majority of them "are usually such as went over Servants thither, and
though by time and industry, they may have attained competent Estates;
yet by reason of their poor and mean education they are unskilful in
judging of a good Estate either of Church or Common-wealth, or of the
means of procuring it." So long as white indentured servants remained
the principal source of labor, that is, until around 1700, there was no
racial barrier against the rise of fortunate or industrious workmen. Those
were the halcyon days of "democracy" in Virginia.
But they did not last long. Near the end of the 17th century, a host of
circumstances dissipated that fantasy-world where any man might be-
come a gentleman. "There is little or no incouragement for men of any
tolerable parts to come hither," Governor Francis Nicholson noted in his
report to the Council of Trade and Plantations on Dec. 2, 1701. "Form-
erly there was good convenient land to be taken up, and there were
widows had pretty good fortunes, which were incouragements for men
of parts to come. But now all or most of these good lands are taken up,
and if there be any widows or maids of any fortune, the Natives for the
most parts get them; for they begin to have a sort of aversion to others,
calling them strangers."
Virginia society was beginning to be frozen. By 1670, the legislature,
following the English example, established a property qualification:
voters included only "such as by their estates real or personal, have inter-
est enougjh to tye them to the endeavor of the public good." As time
passed, the suffrage was further restricted to exclude leaseholders and
life-tenants; after 1699 one could not vote unless he was a "freeholder,"
that is, one who owned land outright. One hundred unsettled acres or
25 acres with a house and plantation came to be required for a voice
in choosing burgesses. Suffrage in Virginia had become substantially the
same as that in England.
It was not only that the most fertile lands and the richest widows had
been taken up or were no longer available to casual immigrants. The
character of the laboring class had begun to change. By 1680 Negro
slaves were being imported in increasing numbers; the six thousand
brought in during the first nine years of the 18th century probably ex-
ceeded the entire importation of the previous century. Negro slaves were
displacing white indentured servants as the dominant labor-supply, and
slavery in Virginia grew at an accelerating pace during the early 18th
century, for slavery made the large plantation more profitable. The in-
102 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
creasing difficulties of the small planter discouraged immigration of white
servants, and the decrease of white servants in turn made the colony more
dependent on Negro slaves.
Toward the end of the 17th century every decade saw the situation of
the small planter grow less promising. After 1660 the stricter enforce-
ment of the Navigation Acts, designed to tighten the Empire's mercantilist
fabric, narrowed the margin of colonial profit and created new problems
for planters of all classes. The small man found himself constantly in
debt. A short-lived rebellion led by Nathaniel Bacon in Virginia in 1676
was at least partly due to these sufferings. Bacon himself declared small
farmers to be indebted beyond "the power of labor or industry" to save
them. Until around 1660 it was customary for an indentured servant to
remain in the colony at the end of his term of service to acquire a piece
of land, and to look hopefully up the social ladder. When land for this
purpose became scarce, the General Court of the colony had even from
time to time (as in 1627) specially provided certain parcels. But in the
last decades of the century, liberated servants looked to the greener
fields which some of the other colonies were offering.
In the early 18th century Virginia had become for most of the poorer
white immigrants nothing but a port-of -entry southward to the wilder-
ness-frontier of North Carolina, westward over the mountains, or north-
ward to Delaware, Maryland, and western Pennsylvania. This exodus of
the poorer white colonists, who might have formed a solid yeomanry
after the English pattern, worried Virginians but they could not agree on
its causes. Before the end of the 17th century, the English Board of
Trade instructed Governor Nicholson to see how it could be stopped.
Over the next decades the Board and the Governor debated how to keep
a future yeomanry from leaving Virginia. Governor Nicholson com-
plained that the main cause of emigration was the special encouragement
offered by colonies like Pennsylvania to craftsmen to set themselves up
in the woolen manufacture and in other skilled trades. "The members of
the Council and others ... in the Government," explained Edward Ran-
dolph in 1696, "have from time to time procured grants of very large
Tracts of land, so that there has not for many years been any waste land
to be taken up by those who bring with them servants, or by such Ser-
vants, who have served their time faithfully with their Masters, but it
is taken up and ingrossed beforehand." In 1728, Governor Gooch denied
this explanation by showing that Spotsylvania County, where large
grants were the rule, was more heavily populated than Brunswick, where
there had been many small grants.
While observers disagreed over the causes, the effect was unmistak-
TRANSPLANTERS 103
able: Virginia had become an aristocracy. By the beginning of the 18th
century, according to Wertenbaker, not more than five per cent of the
newcomers were becoming landowners. Most of the families which were
to rule Virginia later in the century the Fitzhughs, Byrds, Carters,
Wormeleys, Lees, Randolphs, Harrisons, Digges, Nelsons, and others
had already laid the foundations of their fortunes in vast land grants ac-
quired before 1700. The "best" families tended to intermarry and by
mid-century probably not more than a hundred families controlled the
wealth and government of the colony.
Virginia had arrived at a society strangely resembling that of the Eng-
lish countryside, but the resemblance was less in content than in form. It
was as if the landed families of Virginia had brought with them the text
of a drama long played on the English stage which now would be played
on the American. A bizarre, and in some respects inept, set of players
was taking the old English parts: The English Country Gentleman
Lord Effingham Blank or Squire Brown of Ancient Acres was now
played by The American Planter; The English Peasant, by The Negro
Slave; The Steward, by The White Overseer. We recognize the parts by
certain conspicuous signs. The Virginia (like the English) Country Gen-
tleman rode in a coach, ate off silver inscribed with his family coat of
arms which had been approved by the College of Heralds in London, sat
on the bench as justice of the peace, served as vestryman of the local
Anglican church, read the books of a gentleman, and even flavored his
conversation or his letters with an occasional literary allusion in a
classic language. The uncouth Negro slave, only a generation or two from
the African jungle, was taught to play the role of peasant.
The contrast with the British West Indies, where so many other cir-
cumstances were similar, is dramatic and revealing. There, absenteeism
prevailed, and the plantation owner, following the Spanish pattern, ex-
pected to establish colonies of slaves, housed in barracks and daily driven
to the fields, like the Indians in the Spanish encomiendas. But the Virgin-
ian, with the model of the English country gentleman before him, had to
cast his slaves in another role to make his own role probable. "He ex-
pected to live on his estate himself," John S. Bassett reminds us, "and
he wanted to group his slaves around him where he would know them,
physic them, give them in marriage, and in his good-natured way train
and swear at each one individually." The successful Virginia planter
came to live a life far different from that of the indolent West Indian
planter; he worked long hours and was close in his supervision. The
planter's wife acquired new, and hardly ornamental, tasks.
The new Virginia pattern was surprisingly old English, especially in
104 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
the relationship of social classes. At first, the American situation had
opened up some of the privileges and pastimes of English gentlemen.
For example, the keeping of a deer-park was a centuries-old symbol of
gentility: to hunt deer and to prosecute poachers were prerogatives of an
upper class. But hi the wilderness of seventeenth-century Virginia, deer
were not confined to the lordly estates of gentlemen. Promotional
brochures, like A New Description of Virginia (1649) and A True Rela-
tion of Virginia and Maryland (1669), advertised that native deer and
elk were found in wild abundance. "One sees at times many hundreds
together," William Byrd boasted as late as 1737, "They are, however,
not quite as large as the European ones, but on the other hand, much
better flavor, and big and fat all the year long." Symbolically, few facts
were more important than that America had made the very idea of
poaching obsolete.
If the Virginia gentry had been deprived of ancient insignia like the
deer-park, they were not slow to devise others more American. Horse-
racing, for example, though not yet the Sport of Kings, was already con-
fined to gentlemen. In 1674, the York County Court ordered:
James Bullocke, a Taylor, having made a race for his mare to runn w'th
a horse belonging to Mr. Mathew Slader for twoe thousand pounds of
tobacco and caske, it being contrary to Law for a Labourer to make a
race, being a sport only for Gentlemen, is fined for the same one
hundred pounds of tobacco and caske.
When Governor Sir Francis Nicholson declared an annual field day in
1691 and offered prizes, he limited contestants to "the better sort of
Virginians only.'*
There appeared other evidences of more rigid social classes. Even the
Negroes, who in the later 17th century had been "servants" (not neces-
sarily for life) were gradually forced into the life-long status of slavery.
The universal manhood suffrage of the mid-17th century was restricted,
step by step, until by 1700 voting requirements in Virginia were virtually
the same as those in the mother country.
TRANSPLANTERS 105
18
From Country Squire to
Planter Capitalist
IN ENGLAND people had long believed in the mystique of the gentle-
man. "A gentleman I could never make him," King James I had replied
to his nurse who requested that he make her son a gentleman, "though I
could make him a lord." In Virginia, as we have seen, an aura also sur-
rounded the gentleman, but an aristocratic family could more easily be
manufactured with money. Colonial Virginia thus foreshadowed the
wholesome crudity of the American attitude toward aristocracy. When-
ever coats of arms can be bought for ready cash, people are bound to be
skeptical of all charters of nobility. The obvious salability of social
position in America has helped dissipate the mystique of the European
hereditary aristocracy. If the poor see their "betters" pay cash for their
titles, how can they believe the myth of a charter sealed by God?
The spirit of business enterprise was kept alive in Virginia even among
the congealing aristocracy. Leading Virginia families like the Ludwells,
Spencers, Steggs, Byrds, Carys, and Chews, to mention only a few, were
but recently descended from merchants. For several reasons a successful
planter was likely to remain something of a merchant, constantly seeking
new investments for his capital. First, there were the characteristics of
Virginia's tobacco-agriculture. Since Virginians did not replenish the
nitrogen and potash which growing tobacco sucked from the soil, it was
only on virgin land that tobacco could flourish; the second crop was usu-
ally the best. After the fourth season land was customarily abandoned to
corn and wheat, before finally being turned back to wild pine, sorrel,
and sedge. Under this system a prudent planter dared not put more than
a small portion say, ten per cent of his acreage in tobacco at any
one time. Foresight required that he continually add to his land-holdings
since every year he was, in the Virginia phrase, "using it up." Soon the
term "tobacco land" became synonymous with "new land." The "sour
land" or "old fields" which had presumably yielded all their profit pro-
106 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
vided the sites for schools and churches in tidewater Virginia. A prudent
planter thus had to be a land speculator, alert to opportunity, ready to
make new purchases. The landholdings of the principal families were
constantly increasing and often shifting location. The most ancient planta-
tion houses like those of the Carters, Randolphs, and Byrds remained
fixed and became wellsprings of family tradition, but the lands from
which these families drew their wealth were capital equipment to be dis-
carded or exchanged when they no longer yielded a fair return. Under
these circumstances, large planters discovered special advantages in an
enslaved labor-force which could be moved about the countryside as one
or another piece of land promised greater profit. This wasteful system was
not an unmixed evil, at least from the point of view of the civic institu-
tions of Virginia, for it subjected the wealthy planter class who were
also the political leaders to an unrelenting test of alertness and enter-
prise.
The second factor which stimulated a mercantile and enterprising spirit
among the planters and which had shaped the character of the plantation
system itself was the lack of large towns. "The inhabitants do not live
close together," noted the French traveler Francis L. Michel in 1702,
"and the country is not settled in villages, because every twenty or thirty
years new ground must be broken." This was not the only reason. The
simple facts of geography were equally important. Tidewater Virginia,
extending southeastward toward the Chesapeake Bay, was a rich lowland
which was cut into fingers by several deep and navigable rivers: the
Potomac, the Rappahannock, the York, and the James. Each finger was
in turn reticulated by a veinwork of smaller rivers, many of which were
large enough to carry traffic toward the ocean. These were the circulatory
channels of economic life. Up came ships carrying Negro slaves from
Africa and the West Indies, clothing and household furnishings from
London; down went ships laden with hogsheads of tobacco from the vast
plantations of the Lees, the Carters, and the Byrds.
From a commercial point of view, then, cities were superfluous. Each
of the larger planters had his private dock. The tobacco grower could
load his hogsheads directly from his own dockside onto the ship which
went to his agent in London; his imports could be landed at his private
port-of-entry. For this reason Virginia had no commercial capital, no
Boston or Philadelphia, during the colonial period; her commerce dwelt
in these scores of private depots scattered along the riversides. "No Coun-
try in the World can be more curiously watered," observed John Clayton
in his Letter to the Royal Society in 1688. "But this Conveniency, that
in future Times may make her like the Netherlands, the richest Place in
TRANSPLANTERS 107
all America, at the present I look on the greatest Impediment to the
Advance of the Country, as it is the greatest Obstacle to Trade and Com-
merce. For the great Number of Rivers, and the Thinness of the Inhabi-
tants, distract and disperse a Trade. So that all Ships in general gather
each their Loading up and down an hundred Miles distant; and the best
of Trade that can be driven is only a sort of Scotch Peddling; for they
must carry all Sorts of Truck that trade thither, having one Commodity
to pass off. another. This (i.e.) the Number of Rivers, is one of the chief
Reasons why they have no Towns." Why, asked the authors of The Pres-
ent State of Virginia a few years later, should the planter-merchant, com-
fortably seated in the country with his customers all about him, wish to
change his life or invite the competition of town merchants?
In an age when land transportation was rudimentary, in a new country
where roads barely existed, the Virginia planters and those who bought
at their docks seemed favored by nature. "Most Houses are built near
some Landing-Place," the Rev. Hugh Jones noted in 1724, "any Thing
may be delivered to a Gentleman there from London, Bristol, &c. with
less Trouble and Cost, than to one living five Miles in the Country in
England; for you pay no Freight for Goods from London, and but Ktfle
from Bristol; only the Party to whom the Goods belong, is in Gratitude
engaged to freight Tobacco upon the Ship consigned to her Owners in
England."
The critics of Virginia frequently complained that the low state of
culture, religion, and commerce was due to this lack of towns. Because
the work of English furniture-makers was so cheaply carried to Virginia
plantations in the holds of ships coming for bulky hogsheads of tobacco,
native craftsmen were discouraged. The very ease of river transportation
actually provincialized the thinking of many planters. "At the first settle-
ment of the Country," Governor Spotswood reported in 1710, "people
seated themselves along the banks of the great Rivers and knew very
little of the inland parts beyond the bounds of their own private planta-
tions, being kept in awe by the Indians from vent* ring farther; neither had
they any correspondence than only by Water." To promote "cohabita-
tion" in towns would, critics said, produce the higher forms of civilization.
Some proposed legislation, tax-benefits for town-dwellers, and other en-
ticements, but all these failed and geography had its way. Until late in the
18th century, the commercial life of Virginia and, with it, the commer-
cial virtues remained diifused among the larger planters. Because there
were no towns, the Virginia country gentleman, more than his English
counterpart, had to acquire the town talents: a spirit of enterprise, a
capacity for sharp-dealing, and a townsman's eye for profit and loss.
108 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Tobacco, unlike the crops of many English country gentlemen, was not
part of a traditional subsistence economy; it was a commercial crop,
raised for profit. The planters' investments in slaves, land, and equipment
were supported by large cash loans. The account-books of George Wash-
ington and many others tell this story with discouraging vividness. Vir-
ginia was, as some complained, "a colony founded on smoke," and
Jefferson, like others before him, pleaded for a more diversified economy.
But the plantation system, exemplified in the West Indies and Virginia,
was, according to some historians, the first great experiment in large-scale
commercial agriculture since the Roman Empire.
The English country gentleman was traditionally interested in the
details of his farm. Even so great a lord as the eighth Duke of Devonshire
(several decades later) experienced "the proudest moment of his life"
when his pig won first prize at Skipton Fair. The large Virginia planter
could not be satisfied by prizes at a local fair. His tobacco had entered
the exacting competition of the world market, and he had to keep a sharp
eye on the cost of a hundred different tasks. When M. Durand de Dau-
phine visited Rosegill, the magnificent Wormeley estate in 1686, he
thought he was entering "a rather large village." Life on a large planta-
tion was far from that in a simple agrarian economy. There were hun-
dreds of slaves, white craftsmen, overseers, stewards, and traders who
were producing tobacco as a money-crop, raising food, and manufactur-
ing tools, farm instruments, and clothing for their own use and for sale
in local and foreign markets to which they were sometimes carried in the
planter's own ships. A Virginia plantation was an 18th-century version
of a modern "company town" rather than a romantic rural village. The
plantation-owner needed both business acumen and a large store of prac-
tical knowledge to run his little world of agriculture, trade, and manufac-
turing. Breadth and versatility, so impressive in men like William Byrd
and Thomas Jefferson, were common to the larger and more successful
Virginia planters of the 18th century: they were interested in natural
history, had a respectable knowledge of medical remedies and mechanics,
were at home in meteorology, and felt obliged to know the law. How
devious it is to explain these plantation necessities as if they were inspired
by the distant example and abstract teachings of the European Enlighten-
ment! They were nothing more than an index to the problems of a Vir-
ginia planter.
If oil these influences produced a breed of men with some characteris-
tic New World virtues, the product was none the less aristocratic. While
the Virginia gentleman felt more incentive to enterprise, was less fearful
of soiling his hands in trade, was more capitalistic in his frame of mind,
had a sharper eye for the cash-balance sheet, and was more versatile in
TRANSPLANTERS 109
his intellectual interests, he was still a member of a small privileged class.
Foundations of this class had been solidly laid before the opening of the
18th century. Col. Robert Quarry reported back to the Lords of Trade
in 1704 that on each of Virginia's four great rivers there lived between
ten and thirty men "who by trade and industry had gotten very competent
estates." By mid-century the number of such men had increased, and
there were some upstarts, like the Jeffersons and Washingtons among
them. But the very process which had multiplied the larger planters had
decimated the smaller ones. The social gulf between a substantial gentle-
man planter and everybody else was probably never wider in Virginia
than around the year 1750.
That heyday of the tobacco aristocracy in Virginia the middle dec-
ades of the 18th century was the youth of nearly all the leaders of
Revolutionary Virginia and of those who were to become the "Virginia
Dynasty" in the young Federal government. Washington was born in
1732; Monroe, the last of the group, in 1758. The biographies and letters
of these men reveal a closely intermarried social "four-hundred." When
Governor Alexander Spotswood reported to the Secretary of State on
March 9, 1713 that he had finally filled three vacancies in the Governor's
Council with three suitable men "of good parts, loyal and honest princi-
ples, and of plentiful Estates," he complained that but for these three he
could find none qualified. All others already held places of profit under
the government "or elce. . . . are related to one particular Family [the
Burwells] to which the greatest part of the present Council are already
nearly allyed." In the list of ninety-one men appointed to the Governor's
Council from 1680 till the American Revolution, there appear only fifty-
seven different family names, nine names providing nearly a third, and
fourteen others about another third. Five Councilors were called Page;
three each went by the name of Burwell, Byrd, Carter, Custis, Harrison,
Lee, Ludwell, or Wormeley. A member of the Council would be likely to
hold more than one office. "The Multitude of Places held by the Council,"
some complained, "occasions great Confusion, especially in such things
wherein the Places are incompatible: As when their Collectors Office
obliges them to inform their Judges Office against an unfree Bottom: Or
when their Honours, as Counsellors, sit upon and pass their own Ac-
counts, as Collectors." This monopoly of offices was not confined to the
Governor's Council; in local communities, the same substantial planter
was likely to be vestryman, justice of the peace, commander of the militia,
and delegate to the House of Burgesses.
The few surviving letters of Thomas Jefferson's youth (written between
1760 and 1764), which tell us nearly all we know about him firsthand
before the age of twenty-one, read much like the Society Page: the names
110 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
in his social pageant are almost without exception those of the "best"
Virginia families. The Rebecca Burwell who was his first romantic love
came of that very family which ruled the Governor's Council fifty years
before. "Dear Will," he wrote to young Fleming, "I have thought of the
cleverest plan of life that can be imagined. You exchange your land for
Edgehill, or I mine for Fairfeilds, you marry S[ucke]y P[otte]r, I marry
R[ebecc]a B[urwel]l, [join] and get a pole chair and a pair of keen horses,
practise the law in the same courts, and drive about to all the dances in
the country together. How do you like it?" Through the letters of this
young socialite run the names of Page, Mann, Carter, Nelson, Lee, Bland,
and Yates, none of which could have been excluded from a Virginia
Social Register.
No wall separates this world of the 1760's and 50's and 40's from
1776. No mutation of ideas distinguishes the thinking of the late years
from those of the middle years of the century. On the contrary, the more
we learn of Virginia life the more continuity we see between the ways
of the Revolutionary generations and those of their fathers and grand-
fathers. The more we begin to see the local lineage of their ideas, the less
we need seek a cosmopolitan philosophic ancestry or try to explain them
as ideas which lack a local habitation but are supposed to have been "in
the air" all over the world. The motives of the Revolution will dissolve
into the commonplace. The philosophers of the European Enlightenment
who have been hauled into the court of historians as putative fathers of
the Revolution may then seem as irrelevant as the guilty cousin who
suddenly appears in the last scene of a bad mystery play. The motives
and patterns of action which were to reach a climax in the Revolution
were already taking form a century before in the daily life of Virginia.
19
Government by Gentry
IT WOULD BE A great mistake to assume that the cozy, aristocratic
character of Virginia society had nothing to do with its civic virtues.
Only a perverse hindsight has made the political institutions of colonial
TRANSPLANTERS 111
Virginia a leveling democracy in embryo. When George Washington
feared for the preservation of self-government and the rights of English-
men, it was the political customs of mid-1 8th century Virginia that he
must have had in mind, for he knew no others. Those customs were the
representative institutions of a Virginia-bred aristocracy, whose pecu-
liarly aristocratic virtues nourished American representative government
at its roots. And those roots reached back to Virginia's Golden Day.
Never did a governing class take its political duties more seriously:
power carried with it the duty to govern. Thus, while Virginia had a
restrictive suffrage throughout the colonial period, it also had a law of
compulsory voting. In a few other colonies occasional statutes punished '
the qualified voter who did not appear at the polls, and it is uncertain
how strenuously the Virginia law was enforced, but the continuous course
of such legislation in Virginia from the early days till after the Revolution
testifies to the persistent belief that government was a duty. If the ordi-
nary voter was required to cast his ballot, men of greater substance were
expected to carry heavier burdens. When Jefferson, under particularly
unhappy circumstances in 1781, yearned for "the independance of
private life," he was describing the relief for which many men of promi-
nent Virginia families must have longed.
Just as the owner of a large plantation had thrust on him tasks of man-
agement which he could not escape he had to lay out orchards, decide
on the time to plant and to cut the tobacco, find raw materials for shoes
and clothing, and look after the health of the slaves so he had political
duties which he could not shirk. The successful planter developed per-
force the habit of command. He came to manage the affairs of the colony
with the same self-assurance he showed in managing his private estate.
If the plantation was a little colony in itself, which had to be governed
with tact, authority, and prudence, the colony of Virginia was in turn
ruled like a large plantation. The major dignities and decisions rested on
those who held the largest stake.
The roster of the House of Burgesses is a list of leading planters. The
upward political path from the seat of the vestryman or justice of the
peace to the Governor's Council was guarded all along the way by the
local gentry. Seeking a political career without their approval was hope-
less. And the House of Burgesses, which increased in power during the
colonial period until it dominated the Governor and Council, was hardly
more than the political workshop of a ruling aristocracy. Here were made
the major decisions about the price and quality of tobacco, taxation,
education, Indian relations, and religion. It was here that men were
trained and scrutinized before advancement to higher office. Freeholders
112 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
elected the Burgesses, but only the Burgesses themselves had the power
to advance Virginians to higher honors, and the Burgesses conscien-
tiously sifted upper-class Virginians for the tasks of government. Although
there were less than a hundred seats in the House of Burgesses in the
mid-1 8th century, nearly all prominent Virginians of the century had
served an apprenticeship in the House.
Members disagreed much less than we might suppose, and their dis-
cussions little resembled the debate of a modern legislature. Although
outspoken conflict marked the years of the Stamp Act, the politics of the
House did not harden into party lines. Virginians were not prepared for
the idea of political parties in the early years of the new government. As
the 18th century wore on, the ruling Burgesses seemed to become more
harmonious and singleminded, willing to recognize leadership among
men of quite different political complexions. Thus when the House,
sitting as the Virginia Convention of 1774, chose its delegates to the first
Continental Congress, it elected Peyton Randolph, Richard Bland, and
Edmund Pendleton, who had been conservatives in the recent Stamp Act
controversy, as well as their opponents, Richard Henry Lee and Patrick
Henry.
Perhaps never in recent times has a ruling group taken a more proprie-
tary attitude towards public office. During the years of the Revolution
and the first decades of independence, the Burgesses selected (almost
exclusively from their own membership) the Virginia governors, council-
members, judges, military officers, and delegates to Federal conventions.
Their personal knowledge of each member of the Virginia ruling class
qualified them to distribute public dignities and burdens with an impres-
sive, if not quite infallible, wisdom.
This snugness of the ruling Virginians did, of course, have its less
attractive side, which was displayed in the notorious Robinson Affair.
No modern journalist could have concocted anything more sensational
than these sober facts. When John Robinson, Speaker of the House of
Burgesses and Treasurer of the colony, died, Purdie's Virginia Gazette
(May 16, 1766) with unintended irony declared it "a calamity to be
lamented by the unfortunate and indigent who were wont to be relieved
and cherished by his humanity and liberality/' The embarrassing dimen-
sions of Robinson's generosity, though long suspected, were not con-
firmed until the administrators of his estate began to cast up their
accounts. They then discovered that Robinson, while Treasurer of the
colony, had drawn on the public funds to the extent of 100,761:7:5,
which he had lent out to scores of his friends. These amounts varied from
14,921 lent to William Byrd III (who had failed to inherit his an-
TRANSPLANTERS 113
cestors' business acumen and was unlucky at cards to boot), Lewis Bur-
weirs 6274, Carter Braxton's 3848, and Archibald Gary's 3975,
down to Richard Henry Lee's 12 and Patrick Henry's 11. Members
of the Governor's Council owed Robinson nearly 16,000; those of the
House of Burgesses over 37,000. Edmund Pendleton, administrator of
the estate, who spent twelve of the best years of his life trying to settle it,
had himself been favored with 1020. As the accounts of the estate un-
folded, it appeared that there was hardly a Virginia family of prominence
that had not been helped in distress by Robinson's generosity with the
public funds. This vast network of indebtedness explains the reluctance of
the Burgesses over so many years to separate the offices of Speaker and
Treasurer or to make a thorough audit of the colony's accounts. The
affable Robinson had made the public treasury a relief chest for the ruling
clique.
Two peculiar facts about this affair give us valuable clues to the morals
and customs of the rulers of Virginia. First, Robinson had never used any
of the funds for his personal benefit except insofar as he was benefited
by the gratitude of his friends. Second, when the facts were revealed the
leading Burgesses hardly reproached Robinson for misappropriating pub-
lic money; they came near praising him for his excess of virtue. When
Robert Carter Nicholas (Robinson's successor as Treasurer) hinted at
some impropriety, he was denounced for the suggestion; he found it
politic to deny the innuendo and declared the loans "more owing to a
mistaken kind of Humanity and Compassion for Persons in Distress."
Governor Fauquier expressed the general sentiment when, after hearing
Pendleton's report on the Robinson estate, he said, "Such was the Sensi-
bility of his too benevolent Heart." Whatever we may think of Robinson
himself, his career revealed a community where public power belonged
to a privileged few.
This power did carry with it corresponding and sometimes burdensome
duties. Almost from the beginning the House of Burgesses strictly re-
quired all members to be present at the opening of each session. A
Burgess who failed to attend the convening of the House was, according
to an Act of 1659-60 and repealed reenactments, fined three hundred
pounds of tobacco for every twenty-four hours of unexcused absence. At
the opening sitting, the Speaker would read letters from members ex-
plaining their absence, and their reasons would be approved or rejected.
It was not unknown as in the case of James Bray in 1691 for the
House to be so offended by an explanation that the Speaker issued a
warrant for the member's arrest, holding him in custody until he offered
suitable apology. Special tasks, such as the election of the Speaker, made
114 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
attendance at the opening session important, but the House was only
slightly indulgent toward Burgesses who missed any regular session. Be-
fore the end of the 17th century the fine of two shillings and sixpence was
increased to one hogshead of tobacco for each absence from a sitting.
When, during the session of 1684, five members failed to answer a roll-
call and were found to have gone home without consent of the House, a
resolution ordered the sheriffs of their counties to collect from each
negligent Burgess a fine of one thousand pounds of tobacco. They were
not readmitted to the House until they had apologized.
The House of Burgesses very early (in 1666) disclaimed the right to
relieve any duly elected member of his duty of attending, even when
his constituents formally requested it. This doctrine survived the 18th
century to plague the unhappy Jefferson in May 1782 when, just after
his retirement under a cloud of censure as Governor of Virginia, the
people of Albemarle County elected him delegate to the House. Weary of
office and smarting from the public ingratitude, Jefferson wished to
decline the office. When he sent his refusal to John Tyler, Speaker of the
House, the ominous reply informed him that "the Constitution in the
Opinion of the Members will not warrant the acceptance of your res-
ignation." Tyler warned Jefferson "that good and able Men had better
govern than be govern'd, since 'tis possible, indeed highly probable,
that if the able and good withdraw themselves from Society, the venal
and ignorant will succeed." Finally Jefferson was urged "to give at-
tendance without incuring the Censure of being siezed."
The Virginia Burgesses were, of course, "elected." Their election,
if less corrupt and more open to talent, much resembled the English
"election" of members of Parliament in the same period. It was nothing
like a free-for-all in which any ambitious young man could seek his
political fortune; the election was a process in which freeholders made
their choice from among the gentlemen. Technically the qualifications
for a Burgess were no greater than those for a voter, but in practice
the candidates for the House were members of the gentry.
Elections took place in an intimate atmosphere which emphasized
both the munificence of the candidates and the power of the freeholders,
a strange combination of protocol and conviviality. Campaign oratory
seems to have counted for very little; only an unusually pompous and
obtuse gentleman would orate to neighbors who had known him since
childhood. Seldom was there a public debate on the "issues," but even
the best known candidate could not hope for success unless he had taken
the trouble to mingle with his constituents. Convention forbade a
candidate's soliciting votes, or even voting for himself, and there was
TRANSPLANTERS 115
no party organization. A candidate was, however, expected to use in-
direct (usually gastronomic) means of persuasion; no one could hope
for election without "treating" the voters. Large quantities of rum punch,
ginger cakes, and barbecued beef or pork persuaded prudent voters that
their candidate possessed the liberality and the substance to represent
them properly in the Assembly. Such entertainment was expensive.
Samuel Overton of Hanover County estimated his cost for two elections
at 75; George Washington's expenditures when he stood for Burgess
were never less than 25 and on one occasion about 50. Such a sum
was several times what it would have cost a man to buy the house and
land required to qualify him as a voter. A Virginia statute did, of course,
prohibit anyone "directly or indirectly" giving "money, meat, drink . . .
present, gift, reward, or entertainment. ... in order to be elected, or
for being elected to serve in the General Assembly," but this law seems
to have been seldom enforced. A general reputation for hospitality was
actually the best defense against suspicions of bribery at election time.
Voting took place in the county courthouse or, in good weather, on
the courthouse green. It differed from a modern American election
mainly in the publicity given to every voter's choice and in the resulting
opportunity for gratitude or resentment between the candidate and his
constituents. By an almost unbroken custom, candidates were expected
to be present at the voting-place. At a table sat the sheriff, the candidates,
and the clerks (including one for each candidate). The voters came
up one at a time to announce their choices, which were recorded publicly
like a box-score. Since anyone present could always see the latest count,
a candidate could at the last minute send supporters to bring in additional
needed votes. As each voter declared his preference, shouts of approval
would come from one side and hoots from another, while the betting-
odds changed and new wagers were laid. The favored candidate would
rise, bow, and express thanks to the voter: "Mr. Buchanan, I shall
treasure that vote in my memory. It will be regarded as a feather in my
cap forever." This personal acknowledgment of the voter's confidence
was so customary that in the rare case when the candidate could not be
present he delegated a friend to make his obeisances for him. When
George Washington's command of the Frederick militia kept him at
Fort Cumberland during the 1758 election, his friend James Wood, the
most influential man in the county, sat at the poll and thanked each
voter individually for his compliment to the absent colonel. A less com-
mon method of voting was by a show of hands, acclamation, or some
other informal expression.
The control of the gentry over elections was by no means confined to
116 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
their ability to earn the favorable opinion of the voters. For the gentry
chose the sheriff from among themselves, and the sheriff managed the
elections. He decided whether any individual was qualified to vote; he set
the date of the election; he fixed the hour for opening and closing the
polls; there was no appeal from his decisions except to the House of
Burgesses, which was always reluctant to override local officials.
"Gentlemen freeholders," the sheriff would finally proclaim from
the courthouse door, "come into court and give your votes or the poll
win be closed." Sometimes the election would be ended by two o'clock in
the afternoon, but if the sheriff found that many voters had been kept
away "by rain or rise of watercourses," he might prolong the election
into another day. What modern candidate would not envy the Virginia
gentleman his power to keep the polls open until the winning votes had
been rounded up!
Virginia law permitted a gentleman freeholder to vote in every county
where he possessed the property qualification. If he was qualified in
three counties he could vote for three sets of Burgesses. Since a man
could represent in the House of Burgesses any district where he could
vote, this further widened the political opportunities of the larger planters.
They could choose to run where their chances seemed best. Many great
Virginians, including George Washington, Patrick Henry, John Marshall,
and Benjamin Harrison, used their extensive and dispersed landholdings
to advance their political fortunes.
20
A Republic of Neighbors
THE ARISTOCRATIC CHARACTER of Virginia republicanism helps ex-
plain why Virginians like Jefferson and Washington had more confidence
in representative government than had many of their thoughtful con-
temporaries from other parts of the country. John Adams, Alexander
Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris came from colonies where "the
people" were a volatile city crowd: "a great beast." For Virginians a
TRANSPLANTERS 117
"republican" government was an intricately balanced traditional arrange-
ment.
If a modern historian had invented an allegory to tell this story he
could hardly have done better than The Candidates; or, the Humours of
a Virginia Election, a comedy in three acts written by Robert Munford
of Mecklenburg in 1770. This little play is perhaps the first to express
the American talent for making sport of politics. In it a small group of
voters plays an affable and passive, but by no means foolish, role.
Everyone, including the candidates, is confident that these voters can
judge human quality and that they will see through a designing, ambi-
tious, or dishonest candidate.
Wou'dbe. Well, I've felt the pulse of all (he leading men, and find they
beat still for Worthy, and myself. Strutabout and Small-
hopes fawn and cringe in so abject a manner, for the few
votes they get, that I'm in hopes they'll be soon heartily
despised.
The prudent candidate who hopes to rise,
Ne'er deigns to hide it, in a mean disguise-
Will, to his place, with moderation slide,
And win his way, or not resist the tide.
The fool, aspiring to bright honour's post,
In noise, hi shouts, and tumults oft, is lost.
The gentlemen freeholders naturally come to despise Strutabout and
Smallhopes and the wealthy toper Sir John Tody, while they learn to
respect Wou'dbe and Worthy.
Worthy. I have little inclination to the service; you know my
aversion to public life, Wou'dbe, and how little I have ever
courted the people for the troublesome office they have
hitherto imposed upon me.
Wou'dbe. I believe you enjoy as much domestic happiness as any
person, and that your aversion to a public life proceeds
from the pleasure you find at home. But, sir, it surely is the
duty of every man who has abilities to serve his country, to
take up the burden, and bear it with patience.
The well-oiled machinery of aristocracy, far from thwarting the will of
the people, simply saves the people from mistakes: the sheriff is always
there to close the polls at the appropriate moment. The sensible neighbors
finally elect the two able candidates by acclamation. This is happy
evidence, Wou'dbe rejoices, of "a spirit of independence becoming
Virginians."
1 1 8 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
These customs of the Virginia countryside bred a similar independence
among the Burgesses themselves. Everything that made Virginia's elec-
tions aristocratic the tendency to inherit posts in the House of
Burgesses, the self-assurance and security of the large planters en-
couraged Burgesses to be reasonable and independent in their judgment.
Once in the legislature they seldom glanced over their shoulders for the
smile or frown of their constituency, a habit which often makes a modern
representative the fragile mirror of those who elect him.
It was generally accepted in Virginia in those days that the ruling
planters of good family had a prescriptive right to become ruling
Burgesses, always, of course, provided they had earned the good opinion
of their less substantial neighbors. "There is a greater distinction sup-
ported between the different classes of life here," observed John F. D.
Smyth as late as the Revolution, "than perhaps in any of the rest of the
colonies; nor does the spirit of equality, and levelling principle, which
pervades the greatest part of America, prevail to such an extent in
Virginia." The large planter, busy with his own affairs, was deterred
from standing for Burgess less by the risk of defeat than by the certainty
of victory.
This security of social position bred a wholesome vigor of judgment
which made the Virginia House of Burgesses a place for deliberation
and discussion rarely found among modern legislatures. Burgesses came
dose to Edmund Burke's ideal of the representative who owed allegiance
not to the whim of his constituency but only to his private judgment.
The voters in colonial Virginia had just enough power to prevent the
irresponsibility of their representatives, but not enough to secure their
servility. This was a delicate balance, but it had a great deal to do with
the effectiveness of the legislature. In Munford's Candidates the virtuous
Wou'dbe scrupulously avoided promising to do whatever the people
wished, since the people would not have chosen him unless they had
preferred his judgment to theirs. The most famous example of ibis
Burkean independence comes from a later day: in 1788, in the Virginia
Convention called to ratify the new Federal Constitution, at least eight
delegates voted for the new government against the wishes of their
electors.
The contrast between the atmosphere in the Virginia Burgesses and
in a modern state legislature is only partly explained by the talents of
the representatives. The seriousness, wisdom, honesty, and eloquence
in the deliberations of the Burgesses during the crucial years of the
Stamp Act the "most bloody" debates which Jefferson, then a student
at the College, heard from the door of the chamber was not due only
TRANSPLANTERS 119
to the greatness of the men and the issues. These men were not satisfied
to be spokesmen of thek voters' whims. Their speeches were serious and
sometimes subtle arguments directed to fellow-legislators. Thek debate
lacked that meandering and miscellaneous, if amusing, irrelevance of the
modern Congressional Record and its local counterparts. In those days
it was still customary for a legislator (at least in Vkginia) to give more
time to the deliberations of his House than to answering mail from his
constituents, to making "news" in legislative committees, or to seek-
ing jobs for faithful supporters. American folklore has only a little ex-
aggerated: the Vkginia House of Burgesses was a meeting of gods on
Olympus compared to a modern state legislature.
These men were talking to each other; none of them was much im-
pressed by the flowery phrase. With the conspicuous exception of a
few like Patrick Henry, Virginia's representatives talked in sober and
conversational style; there has seldom been an age of representative
government when the power to orate was less important. Within the
intimacy of the House of Burgesses, which any visitor to Colonial
Williamsburg can sense today, persuasive argument was of first im-
portance; demagoguery was useless. Jefferson was not an eloquent
speaker, a fact which led him later to send his annual messages to
Congress rather than deliver them in person; Washington and Madison
were hardly better. And the leading figures in the Burgesses in the 18th
century men like Richard Bland, Peyton Randolph, and John Robinson
were all ungraceful speakers. The House of Burgesses (like its English
counterpart, the House of Commons) was an exclusive dub where
gentlemen seriously discussed public problems.
Vkginia was governed by its men of property. There was no family
of substance without members in the Governor's Council, the House of
Burgesses, the county court or other governing bodies; and there was
no governing body of the colony that was not dominated by the men of
substance. These men presumably, and usually in fact, possessed the
best knowledge of the large economic and political problems of the com-
munity: the price of tobacco and the cost of producing it, the quality
of essential imports, the location of indispensable markets, the character
of necessary shipping, the routes of primary roads, the places of the
most useful ferries.
Land land to use, to waste, to divide among one's children was
the foundation of all the governing families and the fortunes of Vkginia.
The power to give or to deny land, those vast vkgin tracts expected to
appreciate most in the next decades, rested in the hands of the govern-
ment, especially in the House of Burgesses and the Governor's Council.
120 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
The Burgesses also possessed important routine powers over already-
settled land, powers which in England were held by the courts. In
England if a landholder inherited entailed land which he wanted to deal
with as full owner, he followed certain complicated but routine court
procedures which ingenious lawyers had developed. Not so in Virginia.
There any heir who wanted to get rid of such restrictions had to secure
in his own name, and for that particular piece of land, a private Act
of the House of Burgesses. Between 1711 and 1774 a total of one
hundred and twenty-five such Acts were passed; nearly three-fourths of
them for members of such leading families as the Armisteads, Beverleys,
Braxtons, Burwells, Carters, Dandridges, Eppes, Pages, Tazewells,
Wormeleys, Washingtons, and Yeates. All these, either in their own per-
son or through relatives, would have been represented in the House
which acted on their petition. Such private Acts of the House were a
necessity for the substantial planter: without them he was not free to
deal with his land, to move his labor force, or to dispose of worn-out
parcels in order to acquire lands farther west.
Still more important was the power of the Burgesses and the Governor's
Council over that treasure-house of the West to which they held the legal
keys. There was nothing secret or underhanded about any of this. Under
the prevailing system of soil-exhaustion, with fluctuating tobacco prices
and the exorbitant demands of London merchants, simple prudence had
made tobacco planters into land speculators. George Washington, though
shrewd and ambitious, was no gambler, but he seized opportunities to en-
large his holdings. He saw that a westward-pushing population would
raise the value of the fertile piedmont; it was important to be alert and
acquire good land early. In June 1767 Washington advised his friend,
the unfortunate Captain John Posey who had been sinking deeper and
deeper into debt, to "look to Frederick, and see what fortunes were made
by the Kites and the first takers up of those lands: Nay, how the greatest
estates we have in this Colony were made. Was it not by taking up and
purchasing at very low rates the rich back lands which were thought
nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable lands that we
possess?" In the middle years of the century, after his stint with Brad-
dock and before his Revolutionary command, Washington like many of
his fellow Virginia aristocrats, was in Douglas Freeman's accurate phrase,
a 'land hunter.'*
To satisfy land-hunger in Virginia one needed not only a strong body
but a shrewd political sense. The pathway to landed wealth lay, not only
through uncharted tracts in the wilderness, but also through the corridors
of government buildings in Williamsburg. This was the "inside track,"
TRANSPLANTERS 121
well-worn by leading Virginians, to the fertile expanses of the unsettled
south and west. There was hardly a fortune in Virginia which had not
been sought out in this fashion. When William Byrd was appointed by
the government to survey the dividing line between Virginia and North
Carolina in 1728, he saw the wealth of the fertile bottom-land and
christened it the "Land of Eden." He seized the morally dubious op-
portunity to buy 20,000 acres from the North Carolina commissioners to
whom it had been given for their services. In 1742, he secured the again
"lucky" chance to patent another 105,000 acres, which he had hoped to
get free but for which he actually paid the bargain price of 525. At
his death this man owned 179,440 acres of the richest land in the colony
the fruit of his "public services" as much as of his business enterprise.
In none of the "public business" which engaged Washington's interest
during his early years in the House of Burgesses was he more active
than in trying to secure parcels of land for himself and his fellow-
veterans of 1754. Governor Dinwiddie's emergency Proclamation of
February 1754 had supposedly rewarded these veterans with "200,000
acres of his majesty's lands on the Ohio," but it was Washington's
activity which included the promotion of bills in the House of Burgesses,
letters to the Governor, and addresses to the Governor's Council that
eighteen years later secured the actual allotment of thousands of acres.
Washington took the initiative in securing the grant, in locating the land,
and in allotting the acreage among different claimants in proportion to
rank. His own reward was 24,100 acres. Of this 18,500 was his personal
allotment, which he himself apportioned, and 5600 came from allotments
of others which his special position had enabled him to buy cheap. He
also had the advantage of knowing first-hand precisely the land which
would be divided; and hence he could be sure that the tracts rewarding
his patriotism were not unworthy of him. Under the circumstances
Washington had no reason to feel that he had unduly favored himself. "I
might add without much arrogance," he wrote, "that if it had not been
for my unremitted attention to every favorable circumstance, not a
single acre of land would ever have been obtained." With no more
immodesty Washington might have claimed credit for the thousands of
acres which he and other leading Virginians were to secure through the
Great Dismal Swamp Company and the Mississippi Company; in every
case the help of government agencies was essential.
The weaknesses of representative government in Virginia's Golden
Age were on the side of realism, practicality, and a too nice equivalence
of economic and political power. These were the mistakes of men of
affairs rather than of visionaries, reformers, or revolutionaries. While
122 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Virginians of great landed wealth could grow wealthier, white men at the
bottom of the ladder sometimes found it impossible to reach the next-
to-the-bottom rung, and the Negro had no chance to rise above servitude.
It was, however, also true that their aristocracy showed as high a talent
for government as that of any other community before or since. And
once a man was on his way up the ladder, there was little to stop him.
How irrelevant to look to the bookish prospectuses of English or
French political theorists of Locke, Montesquieu, or Rousseau to ex-
plain Virginia's political enthusiasms! Americans who knew the reality
did not need the dream. Virginians who would fight to preserve represent-
ative government and would offer "their Lives, their Fortunes, and their
sacred Honor" on the altar of the British Constitution had not produced
a single important treatise on political theory. Knowing what representa-
tive government was, why should they speculate about what it ought to
be? The great Virginians were in the closest touch with the world of con-
flicting interests. They possessed a sense of full-bodied economic and
political reality, but no particular genius for the abstractions of closet-
philosophy. This was to prove one of their greatest strengths.
Why should Burgesses disparage the common people or declaim in
favor of government by "the rich and the well-born"? They actually lived
where the people acquiesced in government by the rich and well-born;
and where the rich and well-born did not overbear the people. Those
Virginians who came to show an uncritical faith in the will of the people
had founded it on a solid but narrow experience: their experience of
rural neighbors who trusted the political talents of their extraordinarily
able aristocracy. Business, the opportunity to get rich and to get poor,
had vitalized and added mobility to that aristocracy. One could move into
it and, if incompetent, one would almost surely drop out of it, or at
least be denied the avenue to political power.
During the 18th century there was little evidence of dissatisfaction
with the way of government described here. Since the people acquiesced,
the ruling Burgesses had no reason to think ill of their way of life.
Although there were some minor political and economic reforms in
Virginia during the latter half of the century, these were all very much
within the established framework of Virginia's Golden Age. In the eyes
of the more influential (and even the more Revolutionary) Virginians, the
American Revolution was itself an attempt to preserve the moderate
ways of that age.
As the ruling Virginians admired the ideal of the English gentleman,
the genteel canon they most scrupulously followed was Moderation. Un-
like some of their English genflemen-contemporaries, they did not
TRANSPLANTERS 123
despise trade or labor, nor did they admire an idle aristocracy. Nor,
unlike some later Jacksonian Americans or European leveling democrats,
did they particularly idealize the horny-handed laborer. In Brathwait's
English Gentleman, Virginians could read that Moderation had a
threefold aspect, and must be exercised equally in matters of Mind,
Body, and Fortune. "Moderation," they learned, was "a vertue so
necessary, and well deserving the acquaintance of a Gentleman, (who
is to be imagined as one new come to his lands, and therefore stands in
great need of so discreet an Attendant) as there is no one vertue better
sorting ranke." This ancient virtue, needed for governing a community,
was no less desirable in those matters of religion, over which Europeans
had tortured one another for centuries.
21
"Practical Godliness":
An Episcopal Church Without Bishops
VIRGINIA was not founded by religious refugees, and the religion
of earliest Virginia was not Utopian or "purified." The going religion of
England was to become part of the life of English gentlemen in America,
No fact was more decisive in the history of Virginia and, through
Virginians, in shaping the American character. In 1724, the Rev. Hugh
Jones, who personally knew the colony, remarked:
If New England be called a Receptacle of Dissenters, and an Amsterdam
of Religion, Pennsylvania the Nursery of Quakers, Maryland the Retire-
ment of Roman Catholicks, North Carolina the Refuge of Run-aways,
and South Carolina the Delight of Buccaneers and Pyrates, Virginia
may be justly esteemed the happy Retreat of true Britons and true
Churchmen for the most Part; neither soaring too high nor drooping too
low, consequently should merit the greater Esteem and Encouragement.
The sectarians of New England, Pennsylvania, and Maryland believed
that the "purity" of their religion required them to protest against the
124 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
institutions of the mother country. But even before the others had set up
their protesting communities, the Virginians had begun to transplant
English religious life to American shores. Although small secessionist
movements had troubled English religious life from the Middle Ages,
the Roman Catholics were the only major religious group outside the
Established Church in England at the time Virginia was founded in 1607.
The Church of England, instead of being only one among numerous
religious sects, in Virginia was a catholic church, practically coextensive
with the community. Many things changed in Virginia between its found-
ing and the later 18th century, but Virginia's religion somehow retained
this catholic quality. Theirs was not a violent passion inspiring men to
rebuild Zion or to make a City of Brotherly Love, but a quietly pervasive
sentiment which suffused the institutions of the colony with a mild aura
of divine sanction. The fabric of Virginia society was held together by
ancient and durable threads of religion.
"Let others take what courses they please in the bringing up of their
posterity," Robert Carter wrote (July 14, 1720) from Rappahannock to
the London agent supervising the education of his sons, "I resolve the
principles of our holy religion shall be instilled into mine betimes; as I
am of the Church of England way, so I desire they should be. But the
high-flown up top notions and the great stress that is laid upon cere-
monies, any farther than decency and conformity, are what I cannot come
into the reason of. Practical godliness is the substance these are but
the shell." In mid-1 Sth-century Virginia this moderate spirit was ex-
pressed as much in warm but quiet devotion to the ways of the Estab-
lished Church as in immunity to the more dramatic appeal of extremists.
There were few dissenters of any denomination.
How had this moderation come into being in Virginia? The first
explanation was historical. The English Establishment had arisen from
a compromise and, in Lord Macaulay's phrase, continued to hold "a
middle position between the Churches of Rome and Geneva." This
mediating spirit qualified Anglicanism to be the State religion of a
liberal society and helps explain its extraordinary vitality. In those days,
even in England the emphasis of Anglicanism was traditionally on institu-
tions rather than on doctrines. The catholic character of the church in
Virginia simply increased that emphasis.
In Massachusetts Bay, Puritanism became more practical and less
interested in dogma than it had been in England. The Puritans in England
had been, doctrinally speaking, in a state of siege, but in New England
they were free to practice their way of life. Challenged by few theoretical
opponents, they showed less interest in sharpening their theological
TRANSPLANTERS 125
rapiers. The responsibilities of governing New England also dulled the
edge of dogma so that by the late 17th century they had begun those
prudent compromises which would produce 18th-century Congrega-
tionalism and 19th-century Unitarianism.
Anglicanism in Virginia, for similar reasons, was destined to be even
more practical and compromising than it had been in England. Virginia
was more barren of theological treatises than New England had been, and
Virginians devoted their energies to the institutions of Anglicanism, to the
problems of the parish, the vestry, the church-wardens, the assisting
of government, the enforcement of morality, and provision for the poor.
The practical character which Puritan New England paradoxically
achieved by its doctrinal orthodoxy, Anglican Virginia arrived at by its
catholicity and its traditionalism.
This practical religious spirit appears, for example, in the planters'
libraries, which contained many books about religion. In the library of
Edmund Berkeley, a fairly typical planter-aristocrat who died in 1718, of
one hundred and thirteen titles, the largest group (thirty-two) dealt with
religion. So too in the libraries of William Fitzhugh, Ralph Wormeley II,
Richard Lee n, Robert Carter, and William Byrd n, to mention only a
few. In these collections, works of theological controversy were extremely
rare; religious books consisted mainly of such Anglican guides as Richard
Alestree's The Whole Duty of Man, or Clement Ellis' The Gentile Sinner;
or, England's Brave Gentleman. Even the occasional book of religious
controversy was likely not to be theological but institutional, concerned
with the organization and government of churches.
Although the Church of England, in becoming the Church of Virginia,
had not altered its theology one iota, it had undergone a sea-change in
institutions. While the ocean insulated Virginia Anglicans from the con-
troversies of the metropolis, wilderness-spaces made a new thing of the
English church. The Anglican has commonly been called the "Episcopal"
church because it is a church of bishops; but in colonial Virginia there
would be no bishops. Anglicanism, in contrast to the dissenting churches,
was proverbially a church of hierarchy; but in Virginia congregations be-
came notoriously independent and self-governing. There is surely no
better example of the talent of Virginians for adapting English institu-
tions, for bending the outward form without breaking the inner spirit.
This transformation was accomplished in two ways: first, by nullifying
the power of English bishops in the colony, and second, by diffusing the
episcopal power into the local vestries, lite Virginia Church did not in
fact become truly "episcopal" that is, it did not acquire a bishop until
1783, after the separation from England.
126 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
During the colonial period the question of whether Virginia should
have a bishop had agitated people on both sides of the water. It was
generally assumed, although the legal origins were obscure, that the
control of the colonial church lay in the hands of the Bishop of London,
but the more prudent Bishops refused to assert a control they felt
they could not enforce. "For a Bishop to live at one end of the world,
and his Church at the other," Bishop Thomas Sherlock (Bishop of
London, 1748-1761) wrote, "must make the office very uncomfortable
to the Bishop, and in a great measure useless to the people." As a result
of legal ambiguities, political ambitions, and hysterical fears, colonial
Virginia never had its own bishop; in 1771, the House of Burgesses of
Episcopalian Virginia took the same stand against bishops that had
been taken by Puritan Massachusetts. The sole tie between the colony
and the Mother Church throughout the colonial period was a vaguely
empowered official called a Commissary.
Without a bishop in Virginia, every candidate for the Anglican
clergy had to go to England to be ordained. "The people of the Country,"
Bishop Sherlock complained in 1751, "are discouraged from bringing
up their Children for the Ministry, because of the hazard and expence
of sending them to England to take orders where, they often get the
small pox, a distemper fatal to the Natives of those Countrys." English
clergymen, arguing for colonial bishops, painted the unhappy plight of
young Virginians aspiring to the ministry. "And if they have the fortune
to arrive safe, being here without friends, and without acquaintances,
they have the sad business to undergo, of presenting themselves unknown
to persons unknown, without any recommendation or introduction, except
certain papers in their pocket. Are there not circumstances in this case,
sufficient to deter every ordinary courage, and to damp the most ad-
venturous spirit?" In 1767, an American writer noted, the trip could
not cost less than 100, and, of the fifty-two candidates who had
recently gone to England for ordaining, only forty-two had returned in
safely.
These hazards and expenses of travel enabled Virginia Anglicans to
build an American church, very different from the English church which
they purported to imitate. Without manifestoes, without treatises to de-
fend their position or new dogmas to buttress it, without sounding
theological trumpets and all under the respectable Anglican cloak
Virginians developed their novel institutions. Long before the Revolu-
tion, Virginia possessed a Congregationalism all its own. It differed from
the Congregationalism of New England partly because it lacked any
explicit theological defense. The ancient hierarchical pile of the Church
TRANSPLANTERS 127
of England was a defensive f agade behind which Virginians built their
own modest, self-governing structure. They were so unobtrusive and so
successful that the full significance of what they were doing remained
long hidden. If they could maintain an "episcopal" church without
bishops, what other improvising miracles could they not perform?
Before the middle of the 18th century, the Church of Virginia had
acquired a fixed character: it was a group of independent parishes,
governed in temporal matters by the House of Burgesses and in doctrinal
matters by no central authority at all. So far as we know, there was no
regular gathering of clergymen and hence no authentic voice of dogma.
Under these circumstances the supervision of the clergy and the definition
of religious practices fell into the hands of the leading lay members of
the parish, who of course believed it was in the best possible hands.
In England an Anglican minister held his post from the bishop; once
"inducted" he had a kind of property in his parish. He held it regardless
of, sometimes in spite of, the will of the parishioners, and could be
removed only by a trial before his bishop. The result was the notorious
twin evils of English parish life in the 18th century: "pluralism" or the
holding of numerous parishes by a single clergyman; and "absenteeism"
or the holding of a parish where the clergyman did not reside, and in some
cases had never visited. The unfortunate English parishioner was power-
less.
The Virginia remedy was nothing more complicated than the power
of each parish through its vestry to choose its own minister and to retain
him only so long as he satisfied them. The Anglican laymen of Virginia
had not acquired this power by legislation; they simply took advantage of
a legal technicality which they quietly transformed into a major institu-
tion. Technically, a minister in Virginia came into full possesson of his
parish and into legal control of the "glebe" (farmland owned by the
parish to help support the minister) only after he had been "presented"
by the vestry to the Governor and Council and then "inducted" into the
living. After induction he had a kind of property in the position; but
until that time he held his post at the will of the parish. Practical
Virginians, bent on getting their money's worth from their tithes, de-
veloped the simple practice of not "presenting" or "inducting" their
ministers. Thus the ministers were kept on year-to-year contracts, "which
they call by a Name coarse enough," Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton re-
ported with disgust in their Present State of Virginia in 1697, "viz. Hir-
ing of the Ministers; so that they seldom present any Ministers, that they
may by that Means keep them in more Subjection and Dependence.'*
Thirty years later, the Rev. Hugh Jones still worried over "such Vestry-
128 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Men, who erroneously think themselves the Masters of their Parson, and
aver, that since they compacted but from Year to Year with him as some
have done, they may turn off this their Servant when they will."
But most fears for the Virginia clergy were ill-founded. In 1724
Virginia clergymen had, on the average, served the same parish for
twenty years. Yet, of the twenty-eight replying to the Bishop of London's
questionnaire in that year, twenty-three had never been "inducted" into
their parishes and so, technically, were still on year-to-year tenure.
In England the pauper curate, filling a pulpit for a wealthy absentee
who lived comfortably on a distant estate, received treatment befitting
his squalor and servility: he ate with the butler and the lady's maid. But
in Virginia even the lower clergy had the status of gentlemen. "Any young
ministers that intend to marry," Commissary Blair cheerfully reported,
"after some proof that they are sober good men, need not fear but that
they may match to very good advantage with the Genflemens daughters
of the Countrey." It would be pleasant to report that the Anglican clergy
of Virginia were all men of learning and high morals; the fact is that we
know too little about the character of individual ministers. But we have
no reason to doubt that the Anglican ministers in Virginia parishes were
on the whole a conscientious and hard-working lot. In 1759, the Rev.
Andrew Burnaby noted that Virginia's sixty-odd clergymen were "men
in general of sober and exemplary lives." They were not much inferior to
the ministers of other days and were decidedly superior to their English
contemporaries.
But the clergyman's life was suffused with the special aroma of the
colony, the aroma of tobacco. If there was some exaggeration in saying
that the colony had been "founded on smoke," there was much less
exaggeration in the remark that in Virginia "the Establishment is indeed
Tobacco." In one sense at least, this was literally true, since almost from
the beginning the compensation of clergymen had been defined and paid
in tobacco. After 1695, the annual salary of a clergyman was fixed by law
at 16,000 pounds of tobacco. Since the tobacco in which a minister was
paid was that of his particular parish, the money value of his wage de-
pended very much on the quality of that crop. "Some Parishes," the Rev.
Hugh Jones lamented, "are long vacant upon Account of the badness
of the Tobacco." The minister who found himself in a parish which
raised the cruder "Oronoko" type considered himself unfortunate com-
pared with his colleague who preached to parishioners who grew the
milder, broader-leaved (and higher-priced) tobacco called "Sweet
Scented." When Commissary Blair wrote back to the Bishop of London
in 1724 requesting more clergymen for Virginia, he compared the
TRANSPLANTERS 129
vacancies in "five sweet scented Parishes" with "about double that num-
ber of Oranoco ones vacant" The old Virginia parable is still useful for
an ambitious clergyman: "The best way to get sweet-scented Tobacco is
to use sweet-scented Words."
Virtually the only occasion when ecclesiastical matters became a pres-
sing political issue in colonial Virginia was the so-called "Parson's
Cause" (1763). Then Patrick Henry, at the age of 27, first gained
popular notice and began his public career. No question of theology or
even of church-government was involved, but simply whether, in a
period of high tobacco prices, vestries should be permitted to pay their
clergymen in the money-values of an earlier age of cheap two-penny
tobacco.
"The public or political character of the Virginians," the Rev. Andrew
Burnaby sharply reported in 1759, "corresponds with their private one:
they are haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and
can scarcely bear the thought of being controuled by any superior
power." By the end of the 17th century the practice had become estab-
lished for the people of the parish, through their vestrymen, to select
their own minister. It was actually supported by an opinion of English
Attorney General Sir Edward Northey in 1703, but never reached
clear judicial decision. After Commissary Blair's bold defense of the
principle against Governor Spotswood in 1719, it was never again
seriously challenged in colonial Virginia: the parishes went on selecting
their own ministers, and employing them on a yearly basis. Thus the
battles of the American Revolution, as Bishop Meade has observed, had
already been fought in Virginia vestries for a hundred and fifty years.
"Taxation and representation were only other words for support and
election of ministers. The principle was the same."
"Self-government" in 18th-century Virginia in religious no less
than in civil matters was, of course, self-government by the ruling
planters on behalf of their servants and neighbors. The parish was their
elementary school in the political arts. By law the members of the vestry,
not over twelve in number, were supposed to be elected by the parish-
ioners. Since no regular intervals were legally fixed for these elections,
however, the ruling planters developed the convenient custom of allowing
vestrymen to continue in office indefinitely, until death or resignation.
When vacancies occurred, the vestry itself named new members. This
self-perpetuating power was important, and the ruling planters were re-
luctant to give it up. The "rebellious" session of the Virginia Assembly
which met under the domination of Nathaniel Bacon in 1676 enacted
numerous "reforms," many of which survived; but later Assemblies
refused to reenact the requirement that vestrymen be elected every three
130 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
years. Throughout the 18th century vestries remained self-perpetuating.
It was not until 1784, when Anglicanism was no longer established in
Virginia, that regular elections of the vestry were required. During this
long period, the only appeal from the decisions of the vestrymen was to
the General Court or the Assembly of the colony.
On the whole, these self-elected representatives of the parish did their
job well. They met at least twice a year, normally at the home of one
of their members. The power to choose the minister and to continue or
terminate his employment rested with them. Qualified by education,
morals, and property, they appear to have exercised their powers with
wisdom and restraint. If Virginia was remarkably free of the absenteeism,
pluralism, docility, and corruption which cursed English parishes, if
Virginia parishes refused as ministers those from England "who could
roare in a tavern and babble in the pulpit," the credit was the vestry's.
The parish, through the vestrymen or their deputies, the church-
wardens, wielded some of the powers of a modern sheriff, of a district
attorney, and of a grand jury. Among other things, vestrymen had the
duty of presenting to the court persons guilty of such moral offenses as
drunkenness, blasphemy, profanity, defamation, sabbath-breaking, stay-
ing away from divine services, fornication, and adultery. The vestry
levied parish taxes, assessed property for their payment, and defined the
boundaries of landed property. Once in every four years, under the super-
vision of the county court, the vestrymen appointed two persons to
"procession" the land, that is, to examine and renew old landmarks and
to record the bounds in the parish books.
The parish, acting through its churchwardens, was the main social
welfare agency. It was the vestry's general duty to call attention to
cases of extreme poverty and in the absence of an almshouse to provide
for the "poor and impotent" by boarding them at public expense in the
homes of willing citizens. The vestry tried to save the parish the sup-
port of bastards by binding out the mother, compelling the father to give
bond, and indenturing the children till the age of thirty. In the western
counties it was the vestry that looked after children orphaned by maraud-
ing Indians. Between 1748 and 1752 Augusta Parish, in the Valley where
the Indian menace was greatest, found new homes for forty-seven
orphans. The people of Norfolk, who saw their town burned on New
Year's Day of 1776, had their vestries to thank for relieving their suffer-
ing. In the late 17th century it was not unusual for the parish tax-levy
to equal three or four times the amount of all other taxes. Just before
the Revolution, Truro and Fairfax, the two parishes into which Fairfax
County was divided, each had larger budgets than the county govern-
ment.
TRANSPLANTERS 131
No prominent citizen could decently withdraw from churchly institu-
tions, for church duties and civic duties were one. Justices of the county
courts were commonly also vestrymen: George Washington, George
Mason, and George William Fairfax, all justices of Fairfax County, were
all vestrymen of Truro Parish; four of the nine vestrymen of Wicomico
Parish who met on Nov. 10, 1757, were justices and so it went. The
officers of the militia, who had to be recommended to the Governor by
the county justices, were apt to be these very same men. In 1785 after
the Church had been disestablished hi Virginia, many powers of the
vestry were transferred to the county court, but the leading planters still
did the parish jobs in their capacity as county justices.
It would have been strange had not the political and social leaders of
Virginia been leading Anglicans. Of the more than a hundred members of
the Virginia constitutional convention of 1776, only three were not
vestrymen. Two-thirds of all the signers of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence were members of the Established Church; six were sons or
grandsons of its clergymen. During the Revolution the movement toward
resistance and independence flourished in the Virginia vestries. When, af-
ter the colonial legislature had been dissolved and the county courts
abolished, each county was required to elect a small committee of safety
to act as a de facto government, an Anglican clergyman was elected a
member, in many cases president, of that committee in a third of the
counties. It is hard to name a leader of the Revolution, including such
men as George Washington, James Madison, Edmund Pendleton, and
Patrick Henry, who were not securely within the fold of the Church. The
fact that there were also outspoken Loyalists like the Rev. Jonathan
Boucher who were loyal Anglicans does not alter the case. For in Vir-
ginia a quiet devotion to the English Church both as a bulwark of things
ancient and English and as a local expression of the passion for inde-
pendence nourished that very reverence for the British constitution and
for the traditional rights of Englishmen which inspired the Revolution.
There is no paradox then in the facts that the leaders of Virginia
were almost to a man good Anglicans and that these same Virginians
led the Revolution. It has been all too easy to imagine that the "English"
church in Virginia, like the British government over the colonies, was
shaken by a rationalist, anti-clerical, and anti-traditionalist earthquake
with its epicenter somewhere in Europe. Such a view does not square with
the facts.
132 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
22
"Practical Godliness":
Toleration Without a Theory
THE VAST EXTENT of the Virginia parishes naturally affected the
quality of their religious experience. By 1740 a small parish measured
about twenty miles in length and possessed a scattered population of
about seven or eight hundred white persons gathered in about a hundred
and fifty families. A larger parish might be sixty miles long, or even
more if it extended southwestward toward the dim border between
Virginia and North Carolina. Churches were ten or more miles apart.
"Their large extent," the Rev. Alexander Forbes (whose own parish was
sixty miles long and eleven miles wide) complained in 1724, "is not
only the cause of the omission of Holy days; but very often I have
found that labor to be fruitless, which I have imployed in room of their
observation; for sometimes after I have travell'd Fifty Miles to Preach at
a Private House, the Weather happening to prove bad, on the day of
our meeting, so that very few or none have met; or else being hindred
by Rivers & Swamps rendered impassable with much rain, I have re-
turned with doing of nothing to their benefit or mine own satisfaction."
As a quantitative measure of religious zeal, he added that while parish-
ioners were faithful enough to go five or six miles to church, ten or fifteen
miles were simply too much for them. The large numbers of recently
arrived Africans or unassimilated white indentured servants made cau-
tious planters reluctant to leave their plantations unattended by an adult
male of the family.
The lack of any central church authority to enforce uniformity of
ritual, and the scarcity of church "ornaments," bred an informality alien
to the spirit of the English Church. "After the minister had made an end,"
a Sunday visitor to a tidewater church noted in 1715, "every one of the
men pulled out his pipe, and smoked a pipe of tobacco." We do not
know for sure how many, like those later parishioners of neighboring
Carolina who so annoyed the Rev. Charles Woodmason, actually brought
TRANSPLANTERS 133
thek dogs to church. But we do know that in some places there was no
font for baptizing; in others no surplice for the minister; elsewhere it
became common for people to take communion in their seats instead of
kneeling before the altar. "Every Minister," the Rev. Hugh Jones wrote,
"is a kind of Independent in his own Parish, in Respect of some little
particular Circumstances and Customs." Many rituals of the church
came to be performed at home.
The Parishes being of great Extent . . . many dead Corpses cannot be
conveyed to the Church to be buried: So that it is customary to bury in
Gardens or Orchards, where whole Families lye interred together,
in a Spot generally handsomly enclosed, planted with Evergreens, and
the Graves kept decently: Hence likewise arises the Occasion of preach-
ing Funeral Sermons in Houses, where at Funerals are assembled a
great Congregation of Neighbours and Friends; and if you insist upon
having the Sermon and Ceremony at Church, they'll say they will be
without it, unless performed after their usual Custom. Li Houses also
there is Occasion, from Humour, Custom sometimes, from Necessity
most frequently, to baptize Children and church Women, otherwise
some would go without it. In Houses also they most commonly marry,
without Regard to the Time of the Day or Season of the Year.
The vast American spaces were accomplishing in Virginia what in
England had required decades of theological controversy. In their own
peculiar way, and even without intending it, Virginians were "purifying"
the English church of its atmosphere of hierarchy and of excessive
reliance on ritual. And were not these the very defects which Massa-
chusetts Puritans had strenuously and stridently attacked?
While space "purified," it also diffused the religious spirit. The more
we learn of the spirit of the Church of Virginia, the more natural it
seems that Virginia should have become a haven of toleration in the
18th century, and even that Virginia should have been among the first of
the colonies with established churches to disestablish them. In Virginia
this process began in 1776; while in Connecticut, Church and State
remained united until 1818 and in Massachusetts until 1833. We need
not look abroad to violent winds of doctrine to explain the moderation
of Virginians.
The key to toleration in Virginia was the practical compromising
spirit which built the Church of England in its English home and gave
it new vitality when transplanted. It was Edmund Pendleton, devoted
supporter of the Established Church, and others like Mm who organized
the government and held Virginia together during the anarchic days of
the Revolution. Pendleton, as Philip Mazzei, the traveling Florentine,
134 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
recorded, was popularly known by the nickname of "Moderation."
Virginians were not passionate about religious dogma, for the simple
reason that they often knew nothing about it. George Washington, though
an active vestryman, probably could not have told the difference between
the Church of Virginia and any other, except that the Established
Church stood for moderation in all things and was the bulwark of
decency in his community.
Virginians had founded their community, not as religious refugees
held together by a common fanaticism, but as admirers of the English
way of life who hoped to preserve its virtues on this side of the water.
Their desire to increase their population and their lack of interest in
theology made them generally lax in enforcing laws against dissenters.
They were tolerant even of Papists and Quakers so long as they kept
the peace. William Fitzhugh, himself a devoted Anglican, lived happily
beside George Brent, a Catholic; he even developed a scheme for im-
porting Catholics to a settlement of their own. Yet he also sought to
attract French Huguenots. Many other leading Virginia Anglicans tried
to make their colony a haven for all decent Christians. A Quaker, John
Pleasants, despite tie letter of the law, was elected to the House of
Burgesses, and only because he refused to take the oath of office did he
vacate his seat. When King James II in 1687 issued his edict suspending
the laws against non-conformists (both Protestant and Roman Catholic) ,
the news was received with such enthusiasm in Virginia that it occasioned
the beating of drums and the firing of guns! The Council prepared an
address of thanks. The Burgesses approved, and a Roman Catholic was
duly elected a member from Stafford County. Against the Quakers, who
had shown their usual unwillingness to help defend the community, and
whose itinerant ways made them a source of information for the
colony's French and Indian enemies, Virginians remained ready to use
force. But they distinguished even among Quakers; when Thomas Story
early in the 18th century won their confidence, they permitted him to
wander at will preaching heterodoxy.
Men who wished to strengthen their colony with a solid citizenry
of English non-conformists, of Scots, Irish, Huguenots, Germans, and
Dutch could not split theological hairs. "With regard to the affair of
Mr. Davis the Presbyterian," the English Board of Trade wisely advised
the Council of Virginia in 1750, "A Toleration and a free exercise of
Religion is so valuable a branch of true Liberty, and so essential to the
improving and enriching of a Trading Nation, it should ever be held
Sacred to his Majesty's Colonies." From time to time, of course, they had
to restrain religious troublemakers who menaced the peace or security of
TRANSPLANTERS 135
the colony. Virginians forbade the coming of Puritans in 1640 and the
assembly of Quakers in 1662; a hundred years later (1770) they im-
prisoned wild Baptist preachers. But these were emergency measures
which expressed no general spirit of persecution.
Before the middle of the 18th century, dissenting sects Presbyterians,
Baptists, and even Quakers had acquired a recognized place in the life
of the colony. "If there are among you any dissenters from this Church
with consciences truly scrupulous," Gooch declared in his inaugural ad-
dress as Lieutenant-Governor in 1728, "I shall think an indulgence to
them to be so consistent with the genius of the Christian Religion that it
can never be inconsistent with the interest of the Church of England."
The laws against Quakers seem to have been enforced not to insure
religious orthodoxy but rather to prevent violence or to guard against
their helping the colony's military enemies under their guise of itinerant
preaching. In 1721, the court of King George County dismissed charges
against persons presented for not going to the Anglican parish church,
because the defendants called themselves Presbyterians. In 1724, Han-
over parish in that same county actually erected a chapel for a group of
dissenters and provided a salary for their minister, instead of requiring
them to attend the parish chapel. By 1744, the colony embodied its
attitude in law: the Act of that year, while still requiring all to attend
church regularly, permitted any Virginian to satisfy the law by attending
the church of his choice.
When the militant, sometimes called "New Light," Presbyterians in-
vaded Virginia in the 1740's, the Rev. Patrick Henry (uncle of the
famous Patrick, and Anglican minister of the parish of St Paul's, Han-
over) described their ways:
They thunder out in awful words, and new coin'd phrases, what they call
the terrors of the law, cursing & scolding, calling the old people, Grey-
headed Devils, and all promiscuously, Damn'd double damn'd, whose
[souls] are in hell though they are alive on earth, Lumps of hell-fire,
incarnate Devils, 1000 times worse than Devils &c and all the while
the Preacher exalts his voice puts himself into a violent agitation, stamp-
ing and beating his Desk unmercifully until the weaker sort of his
hearers being scar'd, cry out, fall down & work like people in con-
vulsion fits, to the amazement of spectators, and if a few only are thus
brought down, the Preacher gets into a violent passion again, Calling out
Will no more of you come to Christ? thundering out as before, till he
has brought a quantum sufficit of his congregation to this condition,
and these things are extoll'd by the Preachers as the mighty power of
God's grace in their hearts, and . . . they who don't are often condemn'd
by the lump as hardened wretches.
136 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Ministers like these, he warned, would stop at nothing. "Enthusiastick
Preachers," who said that they were "as sure of going to Heaven at last,
as if they were there already," could inspire criminals with the confidence
that .no crime prevented salvation. Despite this threat to public order,
the Rev. Henry did not give up hope of domesticating the New Lights.
He even allowed one of their leaders, George Whitefield, to preach
from his pulpit on condition that the Book of Common Prayer be read
before the sermon!
The Virginians can hardly be blamed if they trembled at revivalist
antics. Was it tyrannical simply to require erratic preachers to register
the places of their preaching? Many refused even to do this. The
cause celebre during this wild evangelical campaign was the "case" of the
Rev. Samuel Davies, whom the authorities had willingly licensed as the
minister of seven meeting-houses in five different counties in 1748. But
they refused to license Mm as minister of any more congregations. Did
he, they wondered, envisage a new kind of itinerant absenteeism, or a
network of religious agitators presided over by some super-pastor to
keep them stirred up?
The so-called Separate Baptists invaded Virginia around 1767. The
Regular Baptists had lived in peace in Virginia for a decade and were
undisturbed by the law; in fact there was no record in Virginia of a
Baptist suffering any punishment for his religion until the later Baptist
itinerants came into the colony. In this new group, many were lay
preachers who were ineligible for licensing: the others, who were or-
dained by their denomination, refused to obey the simple requirement
that they register for licenses as ministers, and that they list their "preach-
ing-points" and meeting-houses. The nearly fifty Separate Baptist preach-
ers who were sent to jail between 1768 and 1776 were imprisoned not
on ecclesiastical charges, but for "disturbing the peace" or refusing to
give bond to keep the peace in the future.
"I apprehend the Gospel of Christ will justify no other than mild and
gentle arguments," Col. William Green, Culpepper County justice of the
peace and a vestryman, wrote on Feb. 7, 1767, to the Baptist minister who
was preaching in his parish. "And whoever proceeds further, however
fond he may be of his own Opinions, and whether he be Churchman or
Anabaptist, or by whatever Name or title he may be called has not, I
humbly conceive a True Christian Spirit in him." His explanation might
well have been the manifesto of Virginia's "Practical godliness":
For my part, I think I Could Live in Love & Peace, with a good Man
of any of the various Sects Christians; Nor do I perceive any necessity
for differing or quarreling with a Man, because he may not Think ex-
actly as I do. I might as well quarrel with him for not being of the same
TRANSPLANTERS 137
Size or Complexion with myself. For the different Operations of the
Mind are not to be accounted for. . . . God is no Respecter of persons;
therefore it is a high Presumption and Folly, for us to pretend to confine
God's Mercies to any particular Nation, or Sect.
Only a few months later, Col. John Blair of Williamsburg, a member of
the Governor's Council, urged forbearance on his fellow Anglicans
because, he said, these very Baptists had done some good: they had
reformed some sinners, had brought some to repentance, and, by censur-
ing idlers, had made them provide for their families.
In Quaker Pennsylvania, Franklin also rejoiced in the happy diversity
of doctrine by which different gods led men hi diverse ways to decent and
productive lives. But Virginians had become accustomed to another way
of thinking. Their first thought was to include all within their church: to
transform the Church of Englishmen into the Church of Virginians.
Their church was not a fellowship of visible saints, nor a society of the
pure of conscience, nor even a communion of possessors of the True
Dogma. It was a loose practical affiliation of those whose Christianity,
in different and inarticulate ways, helped them to be good Englishmen
and decent Virginians. It was a convenient umbrella for all men of good
will.
The drama of the Rev. Patrick Henry lending his Anglican pulpit
to the heterodox George Whitefield was reenacted in a thousand different
ways. When confronted by the movers and ranters of the so-called Great
Awakening, the Virginians' first instinct was to draw them into the
Church of Virginia, to learn from them whatever was good, and to infect
them with a contagious respectability and decorum. From neighboring
Maryland, whose established Church was substantially indistinguishable
from that of Virginia, the Rev. Hugh Jones reported in 1741 that within
the Church he found "enthusiasm, deism, and libertism."
In a country without a bishop, or without even a church assembly, who
would enforce orthodoxy? The religious doctrine of many of the leading
Virginians, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick
Henry, and James Madison, was nondescript. This did not mean that
they were unorthodox Anglicans; no one knew for sure what one had
to believe to be a good member of the Church of Virginia. They were
members of a catholic church: "catholic" not in the sense that it pos-
sessed a dogma for all men (for its dogma was vague and inarticulate),
but in the sense that all, excepting only fanatics and agitators, could live
within it while holding their own private dogmas. This was, indeed, a
foreshadowing of the mterdenominationalism of 20th-century American
religious life.
In England the higher clergy of the 18th century wrote books of great
138 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
intellectual distinction. One of the most impoverished eras in the spiritual
life of the church was one of the richest in philosophic works by church-
men; Bishop Berkeley, Bishop Butler, and Bishop Hoadley modernized
theology for the battles of a new age. But as each defined his ideas and
clarified his distinctions he separated himself from his neighbors. Vir-
ginia was barren of such products, not only because it had no bishops,
but also because such distinctions did not interest its leaders. The very
"weaknesses" of intellectual life in Virginia thus helped save the com-
munity from theological division.
The College of William & Mary was established by charter in 1693
"for the breeding of good Ministers," and its first president was Com-
missary James Blair, technical head of the Church of Virginia. The ortho-
dox Anglican clergy came to think of the college as "an advantageous and
laudable Nursery and strong Bulwark against the contagious dissentions
in Virginia," but it never acquired that clerical or theological orientation
which some of its English founders looked for. Instead it became a bul-
wark of the moderate, catholic, and secular culture which was the life of
Virginia in the 18th century. Thirty years after the founding of the Col-
lege, the Rev. Hugh Jones prescribed the ingredients of successful clergy-
men in Virginia:
They likewise should be Persons that have read and seen something
more of the World, than what is requisite for an English Parish; they
must be such as can converse and know more than bare Philosophy and
speculative Ethicks, and have studied Men and Business in some meas-
ure as well as Books; they may act like Gentlemen, and be facetious
and good-humour'd, without too much Freedom and Licentiousness;
they may be good Scholars without becoming Cynicks, as they may be
good Christians without appearing Stoicks. They should be such as will
give up a small Matter rather than create Disturbance and Mischief. . . .
But from the fact that Virginia was barren of religious acrimony we
must not conclude that she was barren of religious sentiment. Among
the leaders of Virginia, religion itself nourished tolerance and an un-
willingness to contend over the dots on theological I's. The catholic and
compromising spirit of their Anglican church had made toleration a
religious institution in Virginia long before its Act for Religious Freedom.
Luckily, Virginia appropriately called "The Old Dominion" had be-
come a community before the hundred-and-one dissenting sects had
separated from the Church of England, before the 17th century had made
England a jungle of religious monstrosities. And even in the 17th century
she remained happily remote from the cut-throat enthusiasms and fanatic
fervor of the Age of the Puritans. In Virginia, moreover, there was ample
time to consolidate this catholic spirit of the Established Church.
TRANSPLANTERS 139
"Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction," Crevecoeur
observed in late 18th-century America, "are the food of what the world
commonly calls religion. These motives have ceased here; zeal in Europe
is confined; here it evaporates in the great distance it has to travel; there
it is a grain of powder inclosed, here it burns away in the open air, and
consumes without effect." Moderation has too often been confused with
lukewarroness. Since it is easier to measure the odium theologicum than
the love of God, the ages and nations in which men are readiest to kill
for religion acquire the reputation of being the most religious.
That liberal spirit in religion which we properly honor, and whose
American patron saints were the great Virginians, need not be explained
by any desire to displace tradition by something new and "enlightened."
Without clericalism there cannot be anti-clericalism. The identification of
the great Virginians with French "atheism" and "rationalism" was mostly
accomplished long after the fact, by theological enthusiasts like Timothy
Dwight who could not imagine a decent society surviving doctrinal di-
versity. But the life of Virginia had given the lie to library distinctions.
Just as the faith of many Virginians in republican government stemmed
from their happy experience with gentlemen freeholders in a planting
aristocracy, so men raised under the broad Virginia Church could not be
horrified by diversity of religious belief. They had seen diversity in their
own well-ordered community.
23
Citizens of Virginia
NOTHING could be more misleading than to think of Virginians as
"Citizens of the World." In common with American leaders since their
day, they preferred to start from their own problems. Their point of de-
parture was their location in time and space.
If George Washington seems colorless to us today it is partly because
our latter-day democratic prejudices have blinded us to the colors of his
Virginia. It is hard to bring ourselves to believe that the great Virginia
fathers of the Republic were nourished in the soil of aristocracy, slavery,
140 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
and an established church. Modern American democracy, we are told,
must have had its roots in some 18th-century "democracy"; so we have
looked for its seeds in the New England Town Meeting (supposed to be a
microcosm of democracy) rather than in the Virginia tobacco aristocracy.
But the ways of history are obscure and even self-contradictory. May
not the proudly independent spirit of the Virginia planting aristocrats
have been rooted in their vast plantations, in their sense of aristocratic
responsibility? May not the value they placed on their individual liberties
have been increased by the sharp contrast with the slavery they saw about
them? May not their aristocratic habit of mind their "habit of com-
mand'* and their belief that they could make judgments on behalf of their
community have helped make them leaders of an American Revolu-
tion? Perhaps revolutions are always led by people who build, in Justice
Holmes' phrase, "upon an aristocratic assumption that you know what is
good for them better than they which no doubt you do." Perhaps a
reliable toleration has its roots in the quiet catholicity of a not-too-
passionate established church, rather than in the explicit liberalism of
rationalists and anti-religionists.
The Virginians had indeed inoculated themselves against all strong
viruses; they, least of all people, sought to grasp the truths whether of
religion, of government, or of society suddenly and as a whole. Their
empirical, and even their reforming, spirit was grown in the tobacco-soil
of Virginia, and not in the corrosive absolutes which poured out of
Europe in their century. Traditionalism their loyalty to the working
ways of ancient England rooted them in time; localism their loyalty
to the habits of their parish and county and to their friends and neigh-
bors rooted them in space. The strength of both these sentiments (and,
to be precise, we should call them sentiments rather than philosophies)
accounts for much of what they made of Virginia, and of what Virginia
in the critical early years of the Republic gave to America. The strength
of their traditionalism was before long to be expressed in the American
Revolution in defense of the rights of Englishmen. The strength of their
localism was expressed in the- autonomy of the parish and in the federal
spirit, in the Constitution and in the devotion to States' rights. The fact
that their tradition was loosely stated their model was the life of the
English country gentleman made their tie to tradition no less real.
There was no part of life which an ideal so vague and so real did not
touch. Their narrower, more legal traditionalism was also to have its day:
in the Revolution, when they would be required to state in precise legal
language how their rights as Englishmen had been violated. But the
traditionalism of Virginia in the Golden Age was lived out with a quiet
TRANSPLANTERS 141
and pervasive intensity. Their very strength as transplanters came from
their willingness to transform as they transplanted, to flavor the distant
past with the local present.
Their localism has been given far too little attention and too little
credit. In these days, when States' rights are out of fashion, we are too
often told that a man's preoccupation with the habits of the place where
he lives can only drag the national progress. We are fortunate that 18th-
century Virginians thought differently. Their concern with the special
requirements of their own particular place on earth not only flavored
their political life and expectations; it gave all their thinking the aroma
of the specific and kept all their social ideals within finite bounds. It
was the seed of Federalism, without which the nation could not have
lived and liberal institutions could not have flourished. When Jefferson
listed for his tombstone the three achievements for which he wished to be
remembered, only one, the Declaration of Independence, reached beyond
the bounds of Virginia; the other two the Virginia statute for religious
freedom and the University of Virginia were strictly local.
If we run the gamut of Virginia life in the 18th century we see one fact
after another which tied the leader of the community to his particular
place, even more intimately than in contemporary England. The river-
avenues and the difficulties of land communication tended to keep com-
mercial life close to the plantation houses, on their private wharves. The
same was true of the cultural life: the centers of literary culture, includ-
ing the best libraries, remained scattered over the colony in widely-sepa-
rated mansion houses. Children of the substantial planters did not go to
school in a metropolitan center but in a local "old-field" school house, or
else studied with a private tutor under the family roof.
Although Williamsburg remained the political center, it never became
a metropolis; and the lack of cities left the parish meeting-houses, the
county court-houses and the rural residences as the natural foci of
social gatherings and community interest. From the days of the author
of Virginias Cure (1662), who complained that their "scattering Habita-
tions" were the root of a dangerous independence and a deviation from
rigid Anglicanism, we read pleas "that the only way of remedy for
Virginia's disease . . . must be by procuring Towns to be built, and in-
habited in their several Counties." Again and again well-meaning cosmop-
olites sought to lift Virginia to a respectably English level of literary
culture and religious orthodoxy by forcing the building of towns. This
pressure created the so-called "Cohabitation" Controversy between those
who hoped for an urban Virginia as enlightened and cultivated as
Mother England and those who were satisfied that Virginia should be-
142 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
come enlightened and cultivated in her own way. The Cohabitation Act
of 1680 sought to conjure up towns by act of the legislature, but that
Act and its successors (including even the Act of October 1705, which
exempted town-dwellers from three-fourths of their taxes) succeeded in
producing towns only on paper. The local spirit and the pressures of
geography and tobacco-culture, reenforced by such institutions as the
county court and the vestry, were simply too strong. Why, planters
sensibly asked, should they found towns to drain commerce from their
wharves and power from their local courts and churches?
Not the least significant consequence of this thriving localism was a
wholesome identification of self-interest with political activity. A man
who entered politics in Virginia was doing so not only because he had
large property and family interests to be protected, but because he was
personally involved in every aspect of life in a particular place and he
therefore wished to be a voice for that place. When Jefferson wrote to
his nephew, young Peter Carr, in August 1785, he advised that personal
ambition should be a prudent admixture of self-interest and public con-
cern. "Every day you lose, will retard a day your entrance on that public
stage whereon you may begin to be useful to yourself. . . . When your
mind shall be well improved with science, nothing will be necessary to
place you in the highest points of view, but to pursue the interests of your
country, the interests of your friends, and your own interests, also with
the purest integrity, the most chaste honour." In those years, and for long
after, when Jefferson said "my country" he meant Virginia. This identifi-
cation of the public man with the interests of his particular place led
Virginians to find the counsels of politics not in the peremptory com-
mands of absolutes but in a balancing of local interests. Localism, like
traditionalism, was an enemy of political dogma.
Their success in developing an institutional frame of mind the sup-
pleness of spirit for which they were to be preeminent would have been
impossible without certain providential coincidences. In the late seven-
teenth and eighteenth century, men of common sense could imagine
transplanting many features of English country life to Virginia. Yet
conditions were not so similar that a transfer of English ways was easy
and mechanical. If Virginia had been less like England, the 18th-century
attempt to reconstruct these English institutions in the New World might
have been absurd and romantic. If Virginia had been more like England,
emulation of things English might have become mere mimicry and living
English institutions might have become American fossils. No intelligent
Virginian could hope to reenact the drama of English life word-for-word,
yet none could fail to feel that the Virginia drama would be in the same
tradition, with similar actors, similar dialogue, and a similar moral.
TRANSPLANTERS 143
The caricature of the English colonial administrator, dining formally
in his dinner-jacket in his straw-hut in the jungle, is precisely the incon-
gruity which Virginia country gentlemen managed to avoid. Many of the
settlers of Jamaica and Barbados in the 18th century also hoped to build
their little Englands, but the exotic flora and fauna, the enervating tropi-
cal climate, and myriad other differences put anything resembling English
life outside the bounds of a sane imagination. Before long those who
could not tolerate an alien way of life returned to temperate England.
They left the Caribbean islands to resident-managers and to the few
expatriate English plantation owners who preferred a frankly exotic
way of life with its special privileges of luxuriance, indolence, despotism,
and irresponsibility. In contrast to all this, the climate and landscape
permitted Virginians to live in reasonable facsimiles of English country
houses and to transplant English institutions. Yet they avoided the
temptation of making imitation a dogma or building by a blueprint of
English life.
Tobacco was the leading institution of Virginia; willingness to be ruled
by it was both the strength and the weakness of the Virginians. While em-
bracing the landscape, they were sometimes seduced by it. The
promoters of Georgia were obstinately determined that the exotic silk-
worm must grow in their colony, but the leading men of Virginia, finding
that tobacco grew well on their land, allowed it to dominate their life.
The supreme irony in the story of Virginia was the last act in the
colonial drama. That act occurred in the Revolution itself, in the framing
of the Federal Constitution and in the rule of the Virginia Dynasty
(Washington-Jefferson-Madison-Monroe) within the Federal govern-
ment. The leaders of that age were the last flower of the aristocracy of
mid-1 8th century Virginia, not the first flower of a national spirit. The
Revolution which the Virginia aristocracy did so much to make and
"win" was in fact the suicide of the Virginia aristocracy. The turmoil of
the War, the destruction wrought in Virginia by British troops, the dis-
establishment of the Church, the disruption of commerce, and the decline
of tobacco-culture all spelled the decline of the aristocracy and its institu-
tions.
The Federal Constitution was a national road on which there was no
return. The leadership of Virginians in Federal life continued only so
long as the national government was an aristocratic camaraderie like
that of Virginia. When the United States ceased to be a greater Virginia,
Virginians ceased to govern the United States. The virtues of 18th-century
Virginia, when writ large, would seem to be vices. Localism would be-
come sectionalism; the special interests of where a man lived would
come to seem petty and disruptive.
BOOK TWO
VIEWPOINTS
AND INSTITUTIONS
'*We are, I think, in the right Road of Improve-
ment, for we are making Experiments."
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
"They are more inclinable to read Men by Busi-
ness and Conversation, than to dive into Books,
and are for the most Part only desirous of learn-
ing what is absolutely necessary, in the shortest
and best Method."
HUGH JONES
THEY saw new perspectives and found new viewpoints in their new
place. There was no American system of thought, but there were
signs of American ways of thinking. As the community-plans drawn
in Europe were changed in each colony, ways common to the
colonies began to appear. The following chapters will illustrate these
ways of thinking about knowledge and education, about the learned
occupations, about law, medicine, and science. New things were seen
from the New World, not because Americans had sharper vision but
because their vision was less obstructed by the piled-up wealth of
the past.
PART FIVE
AN AMERICAN FRAME
OF MIND
"We hold these truths to be self-evident . . ."
The Declaration of Independence
24
Wanted: A Philosophy
of the Unexpected
BY THE EARLY 17th century, Europe had accumulated a rich but
cumbersome cultural baggage. (Systems of thought, established institu-
tions, professional traditions, dogmatically-defined bodies of knowledge
regarded as all that was worth knowingthese cluttered the landscape
of England and of Europe. The bare earth was almost nowhere visible.
Systems always breed more systems; when new liberating movements
arose in England and on the continent during the 17th and 18th cen-
turies, they took the familiar European form of anti-systems. Thus, "the
Enlightenment," which claimed to free men from superstition and from
the dogma of old authority and petrified thought, itself acquired much
of the rigidity and authoritarianism of what it set out to combat. The
European Enlightenment was in fact little more than the confinement of
the mind in a prison of 17th- and 18th-century design. The new
"rationalism" which Europeans boasted was their new freedom was
the old human dogmatic servitude. What Carl Becker described as "The
Heaveply City of the 18th-Century Philosophers" was a mirage of free-
dom. tThe best European minds of that age labored to build the new-
model walls in which they were to be confined. Liberation could not be
conceived in any other way in Europe. ^
149
150 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
I Life in America was to give new meaning to the very idea of liberation.
For Americans, cultural novelty and intellectual freedom were not to
mean merely the exchange of one set of idols for another; they meant
removal into the open air.)
The most fertile novelty of the New World was not its climate, its
plants, its animals, or its minerals, but its new concept of knowledge. The
wealth of the new-found land could enable men to live well by Old World
standards, but the realization that knowledge itself might be different
from what men had before believed this opened up realms never before
dreamed of. Men in the New World found unsuspected possibilities in life
everywhere. No American invention has influenced the world so power-
fully as the concept of knowledge which sprang from the American ex-
perience. To understand that discovery we must look to the earliest
colonial days.
When has a culture owed so little to its few "great" minds or its few
hereditarily fortunate men and women? One of the contrasts between the
culture of Europe and that of the United States is that the older culture
traditionally depended on the monumental accomplishments of the few,
while the newer culture diffused, elusive, process-oriented depended
more on the novel, accreting ways of the many.
In most past societies certainly in the aristocratic societies of western
Europe rulers and priests had been the "explaining" classes. They were
the acknowledged possessors of the ways of knowing, the secret keys to
the ancestral treasurehouse of mystery and of knowledge. The Protestant
Reformation, with its dogma of the universal priesthood of all believers,
did, of course, discourage reverence toward a special class of "knowers,"
but there soon arose a "protestant" priesthood (in the Geneva of Calvin
or the London of Archbishop Laud) which, in its turn, denied freedom of
discovery to the laity or to heretics. The common people could show
their good sense only by acting according to ways approved by their
"betters."
American life quickly proved uncongenial to any special class of
"knowers." Men here were more interested in the elaboration of experi-
ence than in the elaboration of "truth"; the novelties of a New World
led them to suspect that elaborate verification might itself mislead. As
William James explained at the close of the 19th century, technically
completed verifications are seldom needed in experience. In America, he
said, "the possession of truth, so far from being ... an end in itself, is
only a preliminary means toward other vital satisfactions." Sometimes
consciously, sometimes through the force of circumstance, Americans
listened to the dictates of "self-evidence." Before long this appeal to self-
AN AMERICAN FRAME OF MIND 151
evidence became a distinctive popular epistemology a substitute for
philosophy or a philosophy for non-academic thinkers.
The more encumbered a society is with ancient culture and institu-
tions, the more likely is its most profound and well-organized thought
to diverge from its way of acting. One of the ways in which American
experience liberated the New World was by freeing men from the notion
that every grand institution needed a grand foundation of systematic
thought: that successful government had to be supported by profound
political theory, that moving religion had to be supported by subtle
theology in a word, that the best living had to have behind it the most
sophisticated flunking. 'This mood was to explain the superficially contra-
dictory strains of the practical and the traditional in the American mind
the openness to novel ways that worked and the readiness to accept
ancient and traditional laws for both common sense and common law
were time-proven and unreflective ways of settling problems.*
In America what seemed to be needed was not so much a new variant
of European "schools" of philosophy as a philosophy of the unexpected.
Too much of the best-elaborated thinking of the European mind added
up to proof that America and its novelties were impossible. A less
aristocratic and more mobile New World required a way of interpreting
experience that would be ready for the outlandish and would be equally
available to everyone everywhere.
"Common sense" was, of course, an old and thoroughly respectable
notion in western European civilization. Some Scottish thinkers in the
18th century they were not without their influence in America and one
actually had become the favorite philosopher of George III elaborated
a special "philosophy" of common sense. In America, however, the more
influential appeal to self-evidence did not take any such academic form;
it was a philosophy which had no philosophers. It had to be so, for it
was a way of thinking pervaded by doubt that the professional thinker
could think better than others.
The appeal to self-evidence did not displace more academic and more
^dogmatic modes of thinking among all Americans, but American life
nourished it until it became a prevailing mode. It was not the system of a
few great American Thinkers, but the mood of Americans thinking. It
rested on two sentiments. The first was a belief that the reasons men
give for their actions are much less important than the actions themselves,
that it is better to act well for wrong or unknown reasons than to treasure
a systematized "truth" with ambiguous conclusions, that deep reflection
does not necessarily produce the most effective action. The second was a
belief that the novelties of experience must be freely admitted into men's.
152 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
*
thought. Why strain the New World through the philosophical sieves of
the Old? If philosophy denied the innuendoes of experience, the philoso-
phy not the experience must be rejected. Therefore, a man's mind
was wholesome not when it possessed the most refined implements for
dissecting and ordering all knowledge, but when it was most sensitive
to the unpredicted whisperings of environment. It was less important that
the mind be elegantly furnished than that it be open and unencumbered.
25,
The Appeal to Self -Evidence
"WE HOLD these truths to be self-evident," the second sentence of
the Declaration of Independence proclaims. In deriving the essential
social truths from their "self-evidence" rather than from their being
"sacred & undeniable" as the original draft had read the Declaration
was building on distinctly American ground.
The roots of the appeal to self-evidence were described by the Rev.
Hugh Jones as early as 1724 in his character of the Virginians:
Thus they have good natural Notions, and will soon learn Arts and
Sciences; but are generally diverted by Business or Inclination from pro-
found Study, and prying into the Depth of Things; being ripe for Man-
agement of their Affairs, before they have laid so good a Foundation of
Learning, and had such Instructions, and acquired such Accomplish-
ments, as might be instilled into such good natural Capacities. Never-
theless thro' their quick Apprehension, they have a Sufficiency of
Knowledge, and Fluency of Tongue, tho' their Learning for the most
Part be but superficial.
They are more inclinable to read Men by Business and Conversation,
than to dive into Books, and are for the most Part only desirous of learn-
ing what is absolutely necessary, in the shortest and best Method.
The matured statement of this point of view is found in Franklin and
Jefferson, the most eloquent spokesmen of an American and anti-
aristocratic way of thinking about thinking. On more than one occasion
AN AMERICAN FRAME OF MIND 153
Franklin refused to engage in learned controversy. "Disputes," he
retorted to European critics of his ideas on electricity, "are apt to sour
one's temper, and disturb one's quiet." If his observations were correct,
he said, they would readily be confirmed by other men's experience; if
not, they ought to be rejected. He expressed the gist of his belief in
self-evidence to an English correspondent in his 1786 report on Ameri-
can progress in government. "We are, I think, in the right Road of
Improvement, for we are making Experiments. I do not oppose all that
seem wrong, for the Multitude are more effectually set right by Experi-
ence, than kept from going wrong by Reasoning with them." This is
much the same as Jefferson's notion (in his draft preamble to the Virginia
Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom) "that the opinions and belief
of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evi-
dence proposed to their minds.'*
The founders of European liberal thought declared that in any public
battle between truth and error, truth would eventually prevail. Theirs
was only another declaration of faith in philosophers, in the magical abil-
ity of enlightened and profound minds to grasp the truths of contending
systems, in the philosophers' capacity to devise systems corresponding
to the actual shapes and laws of nature. Theirs was simply another aristo-
cratic faith, but now the aristocracy were philosophers and scientists.
Progress was identified with what Sir Francis Bacon called "The Ad-
vancement of Learning": the talented and privileged few played the
leading role. The classic French statement, the Marquis de Condorcet's
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind
(1795), made the deepest philosophers Descartes, Newton, and Leib-
nitz the heroes in the battle to liberate the human mind. Their improved
metaphysics had enabled men to break out of the political and religious
prisons built by centuries of kings and priests. This was the work of "men
of genius, the eternal benefactors of the human race."
Such an explanation was alien to America. Even John Adams, who
thought human wequality was the wellspring of history, was outraged.
"What a pity," Adams exclaimed in irony, "that this man of genius
cannot be king and priest for the whole human race!" And Adams added
in 1811:
The philosophers of France were too rash and hasty. They were as artful
as selfish and as hypocritical as the priests and politicians of Babylon,
Persia, Egypt, India, Greece, Rome, Turkey, Germany, Wales, Scotland,
Ireland, France, Spain, Italy or England. They understood not what
they were about. They miscalculated their forces and resources: and
were consequently overwhelmed in destruction with all their theories.
154 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
The precipitation and temerity of philosophers has, I fear, retarded
the progress of improvement and amelioration in the condition of man-
kind for at least an hundred years.
The public mind was improving in knowledge and the public heart in
humanity, equity, and benevolence; the fragments of feudality, the in-
quisition, the rack, the cruelty of punishments, Negro slavery were
giving way, etc. But the philosophers must arrive at perfection per
saltum. Ten times more furious than Jack in the Tale of a Tub, they
rent and tore the whole garment to pieces and left not one whole thread
in it. They have been compelled to resort to Napoleon, and Gibbon him-
self became an advocate for the Inquisition. What an amiable and glori-
ous Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty they have now established in
Europe!
Adams' distrust of the ruthless demands of genius and his preference for
the slower, more sober advances of the public mind expressed a deep
current in American feeling: the difference between Washington and
Napoleon; between Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower on the one hand
and garret-spawned European illuminati like Lenin, Mussolini, and
Hitler.
In America what would liberate men was not the opportunity to com-
bat ancient and erroneous philosophic systems by modern ones, but the
opportunity to bring all philosophy into the skeptical and earthy arena
of daily life. No philosophy would be too sacred for such a test. Ameri-
cans saw less value in the full-dress intellectual tournaments of learned
academies, in the passionate arguments of artists and prophets on the
Left Banks of the world, than in the free competition of the marketplace.
Such competition was hardly yet known to Europe, and it might never
be known there in its crude American form. When Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes wrote in 1919 that "the best test of truth is the power of the
thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market," he was
not appealing from the individual philosopher to the guild of philosophers.
Rather he was appealing from professional thinkers to the bulk: of
Americans.
In the 18th century, if not earlier, American experience had already
begun to give this flavor to our thinking. "If what is thus published be
good," Franklin wrote in the Pennsylvania Gazette on July 24, 1740
defending the freedom of printers, "Mankind has the Benefit of it: If it
be bad ... the more 'tis made publick, the more its Weakness is expos'd
and the greater Disgrace falls upon the author, whoever he be." So
too, Jefferson in urging freedom of speech, press, and religion, argued less
from the desirability that every mind be enlightened by modern philoso-
phers than from the desirability of allowing each mind its free and direct
AN AMERICAN FRAME OF MIND 155
response to its unique experience. "Your own reason is the only oracle
given you by heaven," advised Jefferson "and you are answerable, not
for the Tightness, but uprightness of the decision." The basic American
questions were to be settled in the arena of experience rather than of
controversy or of learning. The straight short path by which Americans
arrived at their conclusions can be illustrated by their idea of progress.
By the 18th century many European thinkers had arrived at the idea
of progress by devious and painful intellectual paths. There was the
speculative philosophical path explored by Francis Bacon and Descartes;
there was the speculative historical path explored by Fontenelle, Con-
dorcet, and Gibbon. Some thinkers argued from the essential character
of man or the laws of nature; others extended their historical vision back
to the Romans, to Socrates, or even to primitive tribes. Some dissected
man, society, and the universe to find the elements of inevitable progress;
others took their bearings from distant points in time to trace their lines
to the present and into the future.
All these were the reflections of learned men. In England progress
seemed the slow and undramatic product of a long relatively peaceful
past. In France progress seemed a hope which could be fully justified
only by the future. But in America one needed to be neither historian
nor prophet: progress seemed confirmed by daily experience.
From the beginning, people in provincial America noted that in the
New World progress was self-evident. "Let them produce any colonie
or commonwealth in the world," we have heard the magistrates of Mas-
sachusetts Bay reply to the Child petitioners (1646), "where more hath
beene done in 16 yeares." When, about a century later, Burnaby visited
Philadelphia, he exclaimed that where only eighty years before had been
a "wild and uncultivated desert, inhabited by nothing but ravenous beasts,
and a savage people," there was now a flourishing city. "Can the mind
have a greater pleasure than in contemplating the rise and progress of
cities and kingdoms? Than in perceiving a rich and opulent state arising
out of a small settlement or colony? This pleasure everyone must feel who
considers Pennsylvania." American history could be summarized in the
phrase which appeared on more than one title page: "The Progressive
Improvements ... of the British Settlements in North America."
The American situation made it natural to identify progress with
growth and expansion. The very survival and vitality of the American
colonies was itself a proof of progress. Franklin drew his conclusions
about progress in America from what anybody could notice: a growing
population in the continental American emptiness. There could be no
greater mistake, Franklin explained in his Observations concerning the
156 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. (1755), than to gen-
eralize about the growth of population from the experience of the Old
World: "nor will Tables form'd on Observations made on full-settled
old Countries, as Europe, suit new Countries, as America." It would be
futile to try to restrict American manufactures or to seek to confine the
American population. "For People increase in Proportion to the Number
of Marriages, and that is greater in Proportion to the Ease and Conven-
ience of supporting a Family. When families can be easily supported,
more Persons marry, and earlier in Life." Plentiful land and the ease
of getting on in America would induce people to marry early and to have
more children: here the population would surely double every twenty
years. "But notwithstanding this Increase, so vast is the Territory of
North America, that it will require many Ages to settle it fully; and,
till it is fully settled, Labour will never be cheap here, where no Man
continues long a Labourer for others, but gets a Plantation of his own,
no Man continues long a Journeyman to a Trade, but goes among those
new Settlers, and 'sets up for himself, &c. Hence Labour is no cheaper
now in Pennsylvania, than it was 30 Years ago, tho' so many Thousand
labouring People have been imported." While the high cost of labor
here would prevent the colonies from competing with the mother country
in manufactures, their increasing population would yearly enlarge the
American market for British goods.
There is, in short, no Bound to the prolific Nature of Plants or Ani-
mals, but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each
other's means of Subsistence. . . . Thus there are suppos'd to be now
upwards of One Million English Souls in North-America, (tho' 'tis
thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over Sea,) and yet perhaps
there is not one the fewer in Britain, but rather many more, on Account
of the Employment the Colonies afford to Manufacturers at Home.
This Million doubling, suppose but once in 25 Years, will, in another
Century, be more than the People of England, and the greatest Number
of Englishmen will be on this Side of the Water. What an Accession of
Power to the British Empire by Sea as well as Land! What Increase of
Trade and Navigation! What Numbers of Ships and Seamen!
Franklin saw that already American facts were destroying European
theories. For example, the theory of "mercantilism" by which England
and her rivals justified their contest for empire had been shaped by
the facts of a crowded Europe. Behind mercantilism lay the assumption
that the wealth of the world was a pie and that a bigger slice for one
country meant a smaller slice for all the others. In the ever-expanding
New World, all this seemed doctrinaire. Why should America follow
AN AMERICAN FRAME OF MIND 157
the pattern of Europe? Why should an increase of people here menace
the wealth of England? On the contrary, as Franklin observed, to en-
large the American colonies would decrease the probable competition
from American manufactures while increasing the market for English
products.
Manufactures are founded in poverty. It is the multitude of poor
without land in a country, and who must work for others at low wages
or starve, that enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture, and
afford it cheap enough to prevent the importation of the same kind from
abroad, and to bear the expence of its own exportation.
But no man who can have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by his
labour to subsist his family in plenty, is poor enough to be a manufac-
turer, and work for a master. Hence while there is land enough in
America for our people, there can never be manufactures to any
amount or value. It is a striking observation of a very able pen, that the
natural livelyhood of the thin inhabitants of a forest country is hunting;
that of a greater number, pasturage; that of a middling population,
agriculture; and that of the greatest, manufactures; which last must
subsist the bulk of the people in a full country, or they must be sub-
sisted by charity, or perish. The extended population, therefore, that
is most advantageous to Great Britain, will be best effected, because
only effectually secured by the possession of Canada.
In his Interest of Great Britain considered with regard to her Colonies
and the acquisitions of Canada and Guadaloupe (with the collaboration
of Richard Jackson, 1760), Franklin applied this reasoning to British
policy in North America after her victory over the French. The question
then being debated in pamphlets and on the floor of Parliament was
whether the British should drive the French from North America by
annexing Canada or should instead take the sugar island of Guadeloupe.
Orthodox mercantilists argued that the frigid, unsettled wilderness of
Canada, adding a long boundary to be protected whUe yielding only a
scanty fur-trade, would become a heavy burden on Mother-England;
and that to remove the French from North America would dangerously
increase the independence of the Americans. But Franklin saw the ques-
tion differently; according to him, growth, expansion, and multiplication
were the law of American life. All ancient analogies between the human
body and the body politic were faulty because there were actually no
natural limits on the growth of a body politic. The American market, by
consuming English manufactures, would provide more employment for
English labor, and would eventually increase tenfold the population of
the mother-island. The influence of Franklin's pamphlet is hard to meas-
ure, especially since a number of powerful Englishmen (including the
158 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
great Pitt himself) already shared his views, but the British did acquire
Canada and not Guadeloupe by the Peace of Paris in 1763, and so they
removed the French menace from the continental American colonies.
This way of thinking had actually provided fresh American arguments
for expansion of the Empire. It also expressed a novel and naive ap-
proach to the idea of progress itself. The 18th-century expansion of the
American colonies might not have carried so forceful a lesson had not
Franklin and others prepared Americans in a way of naivet6, in a readi-
ness to argue from what seemed self-evident.
The same could be said for other American ideas of the provincial
age which at first sight looked like the conclusions of the European
"Enlightenment" philosophers. After a second look these American
doctrines often prove to be "self-evident" conclusions from the facts
of American life. For example, the versatile interests of a French philoso-
phe expressed his belief in the sovereign unity of reason and his en-
cyclopedic interests affirmed a theoretic "rationalism." But the versatility
of a Virginia planter owed more to the actual diversity of his responsi-
bilities for the government, crops, medicine, religion, and everything
else in his little plantation world. Again, while in France the essential
equality of mankind had to be laboriously demonstrated by research and
speculation (for example in Rousseau's "Essay on the Origin of In-
equality"), in America the idea of equality had a self-evident meaning
all its own. Of course, American facts would also limit American ideals;
where the "facts of life" in America seemed to deny equality (as in the
case of the Negro or the Indian), many good Americans felt strong
doubts.
/ From the beginning, Americans formed a habit of accepting for the
m^st part only those ideas which seemed already to have proved them-
selves in experience. Yhey used things as they were as a measure of
how things ought to be; in America the "is" became the yardstick of the
"ought." Was not the New World a living denial of the old sharp distinc-
tion between the world as it was and the world as it might be or ought
to be?
AN AMERICAN FRAME OF MIND 159
26
Knowledge Comes Naturally
IN OUR DAY it has become common for remote parts of the world
to be explored, mapped, botanized, and described before they are
densely settled by migrants. The explorer, the geographer, and the natur-
alist now go first; the settler follows. The stock of novelty is thus used
up or appropriated by specialized scientists even before a settled
culture begins to develop. For some time now, for example, we have had
more varied, more voluminous, and more precise knowledge about
Africa, Inner Mongolia, and the Arctic than provincial Americans pos-
sessed about any but a narrow strip along the Atlantic seaboard.
The haze which covered the New World in that age probably covers
no part of the world today; America was one of the last places where
European settlers would come in large numbers before the explorers,
geographers, and professional naturalists. With little more than hearsay
and advertising to guide them, early Americans had many of the joys
and tasks, the surprises and disappointments of explorers though they
lived the lives of permanent settlers* This was a crucial fact; it would
brighten their thinking about the world around them; it would affect
their ideal of man; it would liberate them from many of the metaphysical
and dogmatic problems which plagued the more introspective, library-
oriented man of Europe; it would entice their eyes and minds to varied,
shifting, unpredictable shapes of the world around them shapes on
which every man, sometimes the first viewer, was his own authority. The
time had come for the overcultivated man of Europe to rediscover the
earth on which he walked.
Perhaps never before in a civilized country had physical and intel-
lectual expansion been so clearly synonymous. To enlarge the country
and -to populate it automatically enlarged man's knowledge of the world.
The crowning symbol of this American identity was the Lewis and
Clark Expedition (1804-1806), conceived and fitted out by Jefferson
for the most mixed intellectual-political reasons. Even from the earliest
records of Captain John Smith, William Bradford, or John Winthrop,
160 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
the enlarging of knowledge of America was simultaneous with the en-
larging of the new American community. We sometimes forget how
gradual was the "discovery" of America: it was a by-product of the
occupation of the continent. To act, to move on, to explore meant also
to push back the frontiers of knowledge; this inevitably gave a practical
and dynamic character to the very idea of knowledge. To learn and to
act became one.
The continent itself was a great reservoir of the unknown, and it re-
mained so until well into the 19th century. It was not only that a new
species of plant or animal might be encountered near a rural doorway;
many of the simplest facts of geography were yet to be described. Anyone
who reads Jedidiah Morse's pioneer one-volume American Geography
(1789) sees vast unknown areas which challenged the leading Ameri-
can geographers of that day. The first extensive and systematic geography
of America was produced by an industrious German scholar, Christoph
Daniel Ebeling (1741-1817), whose seven-volume Erdbeschreibung und
Geschichte von Amerika: Die Vereinten Staaten von Nordamerika (1793-
1816) collected and sifted bits of knowledge from a hundred different
sources. Americans were too busy exploring their land to write elaborate
books about it. While the provincial age produced many regional surveys
like Belknap's History of New Hampshire, Williams' History of Vermont,
and Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, and useful handbooks like Morse's,
American interest was directed to the uses of the land rather than to a
full schematic description of it. Even before Ebeling's multivolume work,
the most important contributions to the writing of American geography
had not been made by Americans. "So imperfect are all the accounts of
America hitherto published, even by those who once exclusively pos-
sessed the best means of information," Morse explained in his Preface,
"that from them very little knowledge of this country can be acquired.
Europeans have been the sole writers of American Geography, and have
too often suffered fancy to supply the place of facts, and thus have led
their readers into errors, while they professed to aim at removing their
ignorance."
Although the eastern seaboard was known in some detail, knowledge
of the area across the Appalachians was full of conjecture. Some of these
vagaries had political consequences. Jefferson's plan for future Western
states makes no sense on a correct modern map; it must be understood
in the light of the conjectural geography of the West which was current
in his day. Morse's New Map of North America "from the latest and
best Authorities" (1794) placed the southern tip of the Rocky Moun-
tains northwest of Lake Superior! It designated "Head of the Misouri
unknown" and omitted the Columbia River and anything like the Sierra
AN AMERICAN FRAME OF MIND 161
Nevada Mountains. Morse frankly confessed ignorance of the geography
of all North America except the Atlantic seaboard: of the bays, sounds,
straits, and islands of the continent "(except those in the United
States . . .) we know little more than their names."
The heart of the continent was so uncharted that hypotheses about it
were commonly used to explain peculiarities of the climate of the settled
seaboard. The impenetrable forests, which were supposed to cover the
interior parts of the continent (presumably keeping the land from being
heated by the sun), explained the relatively cold climate of America.
On the seaboard where the land had been deforested and where the
sea-winds could reach inland, the winter climate was said to have become
progressively milder since the earliest settlements.
New "facts" of natural history, both real and imaginary, were the
very substance of the earliest promotional tracts designed to bring settlers
to America or to sell them land here. The authors of these brochures
were no more cautious or prone to understatement than the advertising
copy-writers in any other age. The writers of travel-books were always
tempted to turn up, or if necessary to invent, exotic novelties. Few went
so far as the Turkish writer Ibrahim Effendi who in 1729 described the
delightful "Wakwak" tree whose fruit was ripe and attractive women, but
many others exercised their imagination in describing bizarre plants and
the Eldoradan wonders of the water and climate.
Much of the authentic knowledge of the New World was the by-
product of travels undertaken for some specific practical purpose. When
William Byrd in 1728 served on the commission to survey the boundary
between Virginia and North Carolina, he kept a journal, the "History of
the Dividing Line," which deserves to be a more widely-read classic of
the truly New World literature. In his naive and colloquial fashion,
Byrd not only described the actual problems of surveying an American
wilderness. He collected all the miscellaneous remarkable details of life
around him: the superstitious Indian fear "to provoke the Guardian of
the Forrest, by cooking the Beasts of the Field and the Birds of the Air
together in one vessell"; how Indian men on horseback "rode more
awkwardly than any Dutch Sailor, and the Ladies bestrode their Palfreys
a la mode de France, but were so bashful about it, that there was no
persuading them to Mount till they were quite out of our Sight"; the
habits of the wild turkey; the qualities of rattlesnake root as an antidote
against snakebite; the virtues of the American wild grape; the habits and
edibility of the bear; and the surprisingly sweet flavor of polecat meat.
A hundred other practical missions produced thousands of oddments
about the New World: from official surveyors like Byrd, Peter Jefferson
(father of Thomas), and Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon who spent
162 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
five years (1763-68) surveying the ominous line which bears their name;
from private speculators like George Washington, bent on discovering
and claiming the best land; from itinerant ministers like the Anglican
Charles Woodmason, the Quaker Thomas Chalkley, or the Wesley
brothers, each determined to save souls in his own particular way; and
from merchants like the fanciful bookseller James Dunton. From remote
Fort Pitt, one of its British officers Henry Bouquet on Feb. 3, 1762 sent
John Bartram in Philadelphia a parcel of specimens. "I thought it might
be agreeable to you to know what nature produces, in those wildernesses.
... I should be much obliged to you, to send me, at your leisure, a cata-
logue of trees and plants, peculiar to this country, which are not natural
to the soil of Europe; as I propose to send a collection to a friend, when
we have more peaceable times."
All knowledge in America seemed to come in small, miscellaneous
parcels. The almost overwhelming temptation was simply to gather up
these parcels as one came upon them, not worrying too much whether
they were marketable in the familiar European categories. While Ameri-
cans collected the novelties, the more academic and bookish Europeans
systematized them. European, and especially English, gardeners and
naturalists helped make Americans aware of the wealth around them.
John Bartram, the self-educated Philadelphian who probably discovered
more plants than any other American and founded the first Botanic Gar-
den in America, owed his start in botanical collecting and the funds for
his extensive travels to Peter Collinson, London botanist and dealer in
nursery-goods who distributed American imports to English gardeners.
But Bartram was, as a contemporary described him, "more collector than
student" and, though "a Wonderful Natural Genius," possessed a scanty
knowledge of botanical principles. The significance of his seeds and
plants for systematic botany was discovered by English naturalists like
Sir Hans Sloane and Mark Catesby, by the Dutch botanist Johann Fried-
rich Gronovius, and by the great Swede Carl Linnaeus. Bartram's aptness
for collecting new items and his inability to systematize them symbolized
tendencies in American thought.
Perhaps the other most famous American botanist of this type was
John Clayton, the clerk of Gloucester County, Virginia, whose speci-
mens provided the raw materials for Gronovius' famous treatise Flora
Virginica (1739-43), which was extensively used by Linnaeus himself.
It was thoroughly in character that Flora Virginica, the leading method-
ical treatise on American botany in the colonial age, should have been
the work of European scholarship.
During the provincial age the most conspicuous American effort to
AN AMERICAN FRAME OF MIND 163
contribute to systematic science was made by the energetic and brashly
speculative Cadwallader Golden. Born in Scotland, Golden had secured
a master's degree at Edinburgh and a medical education in London. He
came to the colonies in 1710. From 1718 until his retirement from public
life in 1750 he held a number of public offices in New York surveyor-
general, member of the Governor's Council, and eventually Lieutenant-
Governor. For most of his life he carried on these jobs through deputies
and, while supported at public expense, devoted himself to the scientific
pursuits in which he was determined to attain immortality. Of a system-
atic turn of mind, he was very early attracted by Linnaeus' classifica-
tion. Although Golden thought and wrote a great deal about a mythical
"natural" botanic system and liked to speculate on the most general
scientific problems, these thoughts brought little notice or recognition;
it was his collection and description of American botanic novelties that
brought him international fame. His Plantae Coldenghamiae, a list of
plants found in the neighborhood of his New York farm, was probably
the closest approach to a systematic botany by an American hand during
the provincial age. It was never fully printed in America.
The atomizing influence of the American environment seemed con-
tagious. When in 1748 Peter Kalm, a learned Swedish professor, came
here at the expense of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Stockholm to
survey plants and trees of possible use in Sweden, he too was seduced
by the fascinating miscellany of America. Though he added some new
species, and even genera, of American plants, his principal product was
nothing systematic. His Travels in North America included such assorted
items as the brevity of Canadian women's skirts, the wastefulness of
American farmers' methods, and the habits of black ants.
Buffon and Linnaeus encouraged Americans to explore and discover
their New World: European interests coincided with American oppor-
tunities. But the Americans, well located to provide raw materials for
European systematizers, seldom served their knowledge up a I'Europe.
Sometimes the very existence of so many systematizers in contemporary
Europe seemed to make Americans feel that they themselves did not
need to seek large generalizations. Anyway, they lacked the leisure; they
were far from ancient libraries and centers of learning, and their new
world beckoned with many varieties of "unthought-of phaenomena." In
Europe, discovering something new in the natural world required the
concentration of a philosopher, the researches of a scholar, or the in-
dustry of an encyclopedist. In America it took effort to avoid novelty.
164 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
27
The Natural-History
Emphasis
To MAKE DISCOVERIES the American needed neither boldness nor
imagination. In ancient populous England, nearly every new fact or
experience was gained by effort, talent, or courage. Not so in America,
where novelty seemed to force itself on even the most indifferent and
insensitive eye.
Was the American to be blamed, then, if he believed too readily that
new knowledge came from just looking sharply at the world, and from
acting in it? How could he fail to be less willing than his Asiatic or
European contemporary to seek knowledge from contemplation and
from study? As the Marquis de Chastellux observed in 1782:
The more the sciences approach perfection, the more rare do discoveries
become; but America has the same advantage in the learned world, as
in that which constitutes our residence. The extent of her empire sub-
mits to her observation a large portion of heaven and earth. What
observations may not be made between Penobscot and Savannah? be-
tween the lakes and the ocean? Natural history and astronomy are her
peculiar appendages, and the first of these sciences at least, is susceptible
of great improvement.
One of the most valuable, and certainly one of the most distinctively
American, contributions to knowledge was to be the recording of the
experiences and scenes of daily life. This was natural history.
In England in the later 17th century, Robert Boyle, Sir Isaac Newton,
and others in the flourishing Royal Society charted new laws of physics.
But such additions to knowledge, far from being mere bits of new in-
formation, were sophisticated generalizations. It was precisely in this
realm that the stirring discoveries were made in England during the
American colonial period. The physical sciences were, of course, con-
firmed by experience and observation; but in their atmosphere, in their
emphasis, even in their purpose they differed from natural history, which
was the realm of the New World's promise.
AN AMERICAN FRAME OF MIND 165
The difference between natural history and the physical sciences sug-
gests the difference between New World and Old World concepts of
knowledge in the colonial period. To describe 18th-century Americans
and Europeans simply as "scientists" or as "children of the Enlighten-
ment" obscures what is most interesting. At least two large features
distinguish the world of physical science from the world in which Ameri-
can "scientists" were busiest and most successful in the colonial era.
First, the physical scientist must come to his experience ready to organize
it by a theory. In contrast, men have often contributed to natural history
merely by keeping a notebook of miscellaneous items which have caught
their attention; such are Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne,
Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, and the natural-history classics
of colonial America, Peter Kalm's Travels, Mark Catesby's Natural His-
tory of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, and Jefferson's Notes
on Virginia. No such notebook would be useful to a physicist. Second,
the physical scientist the physicist or chemist does not deal with the
subject-matters and classifications of everyday life. He speaks of entropy,
of gravity, of chemical substances, of hydrogen, oxygen, etc. This is in
contrast to the natural historian, who is almost always close to the
popular vocabulary; he speaks of water, earth, rain, and air.
It is a commonplace in the history of colonial American science that,
while great advances were made here in natural history, few epochal
contributions were made to the physical sciences. This character of
American thought has too often been described as nothing more than its
immaturity: the stultifying consequence of colonial life, of American
remoteness from ancient centers of learning, of lack of leisure and of
books, and of the urgencies of settling a new country. But such an ex-
planation hides from us some of the continuous features of American
culture, for the distinctively American bias in science is rooted in the
colonial age. "This Country opens to the philosophic view," Charles
Thomson wrote to Jefferson on March 9, 1782, "an extensive, rich and
unexplored field. It abounds in roots, plants, trees and minerals, to the
virtues and uses of which we are yet strangers."
Knowledge of the New World gathered in the New World was in-
evitably ill-assorted; men noted first whatever came first to their at-
tention. What they saw always depended on the luck of the traveler and
the fortunes of the seasons. John Josselyn enthusiastically retailed the
marvelous things he had seen and heard in New England on June 26,
1639 the tales "of a young Lyon (not long before) kill'd at Piscataway
166 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
by an Indian; of a Sea-Serpent or Snake, that lay quoiled up like a Cable
upon a Rock at Cape-Ann: a Boat passing by with English aboard, and
two Indians, they would have shot the Serpent but the Indians dis-
swaded them, saying, that if he were not kilTd out-right, they would be
all in danger of their lives ... of a Triton or Mereman which he saw
in Casco-bay . . . who laying his hands upon the side of the Canow,
had one of them chopt off with a Hatchet by Mr. Mittin, which was in
all respects like the hand of a man, the Triton presently sunk, dying the
water with his purple blood, and was no more seen." No wonder Josselyn
concluded "that there are many stranger things in the world, than are
to be seen between London and Stanes."
After reading Josselyn's and other accounts of observant travelers,
how can one believe that a "descriptive" approach to knowledge con-
fines the imagination? The Goddess of Miscellany reigned even in such
early promotional tracts as Francis Higginson's New-Englands Plantation
(1630), which described how God had arranged the Earth, Water, Air,
and Fire in America to be most favorable to human life. William Wood's
New Englands Prospect (1634) enumerated in poetic disarray:
The kingly Lyon, and the strong arm'd Beare,
The large lim'd Mooses, with the tripping Deare,
Quill-darting Porcupines and Rackcoones be,
CastelTd in the hollow of an aged tree;
The skipping Squerrell, Rabbet, purblinde Hare,
Immured in the self e same Castle are,
Lest red eyd Ferrets, wily Foxes should
Them undermine, if rampird but with mould.
The grim f ac't Ounce, and ravenous howling Woolfe,
Whose meagre paunch suckes like a swallowing gulfe.
Blacke glistering Otters, and rich coated Bever,
The Civet scented Musquash smelling ever.
A century later, variegated New World novelties filled William Byrd's
History of the Dividing Line (1728), and Jefferson's most important
literary product apart from the Declaration of Independence, his Notes
on Virginia (1784), was an omnium-gatherum of information about
minerals, plants, animals, institutions, and men. This flood of im-
pressions pouring out of America to interest stay-at-home Englishmen
was the main stream of new knowledge from the New World. America
was shaping the very concept of knowledge.
The modern reader can still pick up a copy of Mark Catesby's Natural
History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731-43), the
writings of John Bartram and William Bartram, Alexander Wilson's
AN AMERICAN FRAME OF MIND 167
American Ornithology (1808-14), or Audubon's casual writings, and
read them with enjoyment and profit. Writers of most works on natural
history even of ostensibly "systematic" accounts of flowers, trees, birds,
or mammals described objects within the scope of common men. De-
spite an occasional Latin name or learned reference, their works made
sense to any person with eyes, ears, and some curiosity. The drawings
had some of the universal intelligibility of the 20th-century picture-
magazine. Such books of travel and natural history required no theoreti-
cal training; they did not depend on abstruse definitions or on a structure
of philosophy or argument. They were a warehouse of "facts'* stored
more or less at random, as the discoverer had come upon them. There
was no single or necessary order of material; one did not need to progress
from definitions and premises through conclusions. They were thus as
different as possible from such classic works of "explanatory" science as
Newton's Principia. Moreover, while few men could understand Newton,
much less themselves contribute to physics, any alert American might
add to natural history by noticing a plant, some habit of the opossum or
deer, or a custom of the Indians.
We have too long been told that a "unified" scheme of knowledge is
required to give meaning and unity to society; that men have a greater
sense of sharing values and of working to a common end if they are
united by a grand overarching system of thought; that somehow an
articulate and systematic philosophy is likely to provide such a system
of shared meaning. The stock example is, of course, the Middle Ages
when such theologians as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus constructed
monuments of speculative philosophy. It has become an unexamined
commonplace that a more unified philosophy will produce a more unified
society, that ours would be a better and more meaningful world if we
in America possessed such systematic and "unifying" thought.
But is this really true? It may have seemed so in earlier societies where
the frame of meaning was supposed to be accessible only to a priestly
or ruling class. Could it remain so in a modern literate society where
most people would be expected to understand the purposes of the com-
munity? One cannot unify such a society by mere concepts, however re-
fined and subtle, however vivid to a few philosophers or theologians.
"The attempt to bridge the chasm between multiplicity and unity is the
oldest problem of philosophy, religion, and science," observed Henry
Adams in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1905), "but the flimsiest
bridge of all is the human concept, unless somewhere, within or beyond
168 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
it, an energy not individual is hidden; and in that case the old question
instantly reappears: What is that energy?" To say that a society can or
ought to be "unified" by some total philosophic system whether a
Summa Theologica, a Calvin's Institutes, or a Marx's Capital is to com-
mit oneself to an aristocratic concept of knowledge: let the elite know
the theories and values of the society; they will know and preserve for all
the rest.
When life thus draws its meaning from a system of philosophy,
when philosophy becomes the device for unifying knowledge, knowledge
itself becomes a monopoly. To understand a system, one must begin at
the beginning; one must acquire the prerequisites, which are often in a
learned or foreign language; and one must build from definitions, axioms,
and propositions, to corollaries and conclusions.
But the kind of new knowledge which life in America made possible,
precisely because it was factual and miscellaneous, required no prelim-
inary training. One could plunge in anywhere. Knowledge of the New
World its climate, geography, plants, animals, savages, and diseases
was accessible to everyone. The crude carving on the bark of a tree re-
cording that here Daniel Boone "CillED A. Bar" or the casual report of
the course of a river were pieces of natural history. The American did
not need to begin with explicit premises or with precise definitions and
propositions; he began with the first novelty that came to his attention.
If "knowledge" was miscellaneous, men could educate themselves with
the random materials of experience. They could become "self-made"
men, because they could start anytime anyplace. John Bartram and
Benjamin Franklin were paragons of this kind of learning, and there
were many others who "improved" their experience to become models of
learning in the American mold. The ideal of knowledge which came
from natural history was admirably suited to a mobile society. Its paths
did not run only through the academy, the monastery, or the university;
they opened everywhere and to every man.
PART SIX
EDUCATING THE
COMMUNITY
"A certain Person among the Greeks being a
Candidate for some Office in the State, it was
objected against him, That he was no Scholar.
True, saith he, according to your Notion of
Learning I am not; but I know how to make a
poor City rich, and a small City great."
JARED ELIOT
28
The Community Enters
the University
IN EUROPE a "liberal" education, which would supposedly liberate
a man from the narrow bounds of his time and place, was the property
of an exclusive few. The traditional hallmark of liberal education insofar
as there was any in 18th-century England the "Bachelor of Arts" degree
was under Parliamentary authority awarded only by Oxford and Cam-
bridge. This ancient clerical-aristocratic monopoly had, of course, pre-
served the learned tradition and produced many of the finest fruits of
European thought. But the universities had been hothouses where only
certain kinds of thinking could flourish. Their ancient walls had been
doubly confining: they insulated the inmates from the general com-
munity, while they separated people outside from the community's
bookish wisdom.
True, there were signs of change in England in the 17th and 18th
centuries. During the 17th century, especially after the Act of Uniformity
(1662) had required all clergymen, college fellows, and schoolmasters
to accept everything in the Book of Common Prayer, nonconformists
set up their so-called "dissenting academies" to train a ministry of their
171
172 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
own and to offer higher education to the children of dissenters. Much of
English intellectual life then centered in associations like the Royal So-
ciety of London or was carried on by gentlemen in their country houses.
All this tended to secularize and to broaden the currents of English
thought. Still, at least until the early 19th century, the citadel of English
learning remained in Oxford and Cambridge. Even if Gibbon's familiar
picture of an Oxford "steeped in port and prejudice" is a caricature,
lethargy did fall upon the universities during the 18th century. But be-
cause of their ancient tradition, their endowments, their monopoly of
degree-giving, their great and freely growing stock of books (under the
licensing acts each of the two Universities received a copy of every book
licensed in England), their power to publish (for much of the 17th and
18th centuries they were among the few printing agencies authorized out-
side London), and their control of avenues of political and ecclesiastical
preferment, they were hard to dislodge from their dominion over English
higher learning. The "democratizing" of English higher learning in the
earlier 19th century did not occur through growth of the "dissenting
academies" into universities; it came about mostly through liberalizing
the religious tests for admission to Oxford or Cambridge, and through
accepting more scholarship students. Even today Oxford and Cambridge
link aristocracy and learning in English life.
But many facts, from the very beginning, shaped American life and
diffused our collegiate education. Here we will observe only two.
First: The American legal vagueness and the blurring of distinctions
between college and university helped break educational monopolies.
Although the origins of Oxford and Cambridge were shrouded in
medieval mists, their control over higher learning in England came
largely from their clear legal monopoly. Legally speaking, they were
undeniably the only English Universities. Oxford in 1571 and Cambridge
in 1573 had received charters of incorporation and held for all England
the exclusive powers to grant degrees; their monopoly was complete until,
after a struggle, the unorthodox London University was founded in
1827.
In England the distinction between "college" and "university" was
always more or less sharp and significant: a college was primarily a place
of residence or of instruction, largely self-governing, but without the
power to give examinations or grant degrees; a university was a degree-
granting institution of learning, usually offering instruction in one of
the higher subjects of Law, Medicine, or Theology in addition to the
EDUCATING THE COMMUNITY 173
Seven Liberal Arts and Philosophy, and possessing special legal authority
(first in the form of a papal bull, later of a Royal or Parliamentary
charter). Until the early 19th century, then, there were many English
"colleges" but only two "universities," Oxford and Cambridge. Efforts
to found additional degree-granting institutions were repeatedly defeated.
For example, Gresham College, founded in 1548, possessed seven pro-
fessorships and eventually became a great center of learning in the form
of the Royal Society of London; but it never became a university. The
"dissenting academies," which produced such figures as Daniel Defoe,
Bishop Joseph Butler, Joseph Priestley, and Thomas Malthus, survived
in the form of secondary schools ("public" schools) or theological in-
stitutions, but did not acquire the power to grant degrees.
The significance of all this for English life and learning, while com-
plicated and not easy to define, was nevertheless persistent and pervasive.
At least since the Age of Queen Elizabeth I, the universities have pos-
sessed a social prestige which has remained undiminished, or has perhaps
even increased, with their academic decay. By the 18th century the
lethargy of Oxford and Cambridge like the collegiate rowdyism of
American colleges in the early 20th century had become a standing
joke. "From the toil of reading, or thinking, or writing, they had absolved
their conscience," wrote the great Edward Gibbon of the fellows of
Magdalen College, Oxford, about 1752. "Their conversation stagnated
in a round of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and
private scandal: their dull and deep potations excused the brisk intem-
perance of youth." Few professors performed their proper functions. Be-
tween 1725 and 1773, no Regius Professor of Modern History at
Cambridge delivered a lecture, although one did achieve notice when he
killed himself by falling from his horse in a drunk. But the social ameni-
ties were not neglected: Oxford and Cambridge remained fashionable
resorts for noblemen's sons, who sometimes came with their own tutors,
servants, and hunting dogs.
Despite all this, the great and ancient universities were far from
dead. Sir Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley (of Halley's Comet), Sir Wil-
liam Blackstone, and Edward Gibbon, among others, were nourished
there. Oxford and Cambridge continued to be the museum and the citadel
of the nation's high-culture.
How different was provincial America! Neither the virtues nor the
vices of these antique monopolies could be transplanted across the
Atlantic. The time-honored English distinction between "college" and
"university," like so many other Old World distinctions, became con-
fused and even ceased to have meaning in America. For one thing, the
174 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
legal powers of the different colonial governments, especially their
powers to create corporations and to establish monopolies, were varied,
fluid, and uncertain. Nothing was more fertile than this vagueness of the
American legal situation.
According to English law in the colonial period, a group of individuals
ordinarily could not act as a legal unit, own property, sue and be sued, nor
survive the death of individual members. They could not act as a "cor-
poration" unless they had been granted these privileges by their govern-
ment. Lord Coke declared the orthodox English doctrine: "None but
the King alone can create or make a corporation." This was the legal
theory. There were a few special exceptions (corporations "by prescrip-
tion" or "at the common law," and the Bishop of Durham's power to
create corporations in his "county palatine"), but the general power to
create a corporation remained one of the most closely hedged preroga-
tives of government, and many an enterprise hung on the willingness of
Crown or Parliament to grant the artificial immortality of a corporate
charter.
Who, if anyone, in the American colonies, possessed this important
power to create corporations? This proved to be a question with many
answers. There were several kinds of colonies "charter," "royal," and
"proprietary" each with a different legal character. The proprietary
charters (of Maine, for example) generally contained a "Bishop of
Durham clause" giving the English Bishop's peculiar regal powers to
the proprietor. But the explicit delegation to a colonial agency of the
right to incorporate was seldom found, and this area became a happy
hunting ground for legal metaphysicians. Add to this the many uncertain-
ties over the relative legal powers of colonial governors versus colonial
legislatures and of all the colonial governments as against the powers in
London. On this uncharted legal terrain many disorderly, inconsistent,
and unpredictable institutions sprouted.
The first American college was set up in a typically American legal
haze. The founding of Harvard is now generally dated from 1636, when
the General Court of Massachusetts appropriated four hundred pounds
"towards a schoale or college," but its legal structure and the extent of
its authority could hardly have been vaguer. Harvard actually granted
its first degrees in 1642, although by that time the college had received
from nobody the legal authority to grant a degree; it had not even been
legally incorporated. When the college finally received a charter from
the Massachusetts General Court in 1650, there was still no mention of
degrees, perhaps because of uncertainty over the General Court's own
authority to confer the degree-granting power. The boldest act of Henry
EDUCATING THE COMMUNITY 175
Dunster, the first vigorous President of Harvard College (1640-1654),
was to confer any degrees at all. As Samuel Eliot Morison explains, this
was "almost a declaration of independence from King Charles." Even
the legislative charter of 1650 seemed so insecure legally that when
Increase Mather was in England after the Revolution of 1688 he tried,
though unsuccessfully, to secure a special Crown charter. The legal
foundations of Harvard, the origins of its authority to grant degrees,
and the question of whether, and in what legal sense, if at all, it is
properly a "college" or a "university" all these have remained uncertain
and unresolved into the 20th century. From the beginning, the President
and Fellows exploited this uncertainty, and exercised any convenient
powers.
Yale came into being at a time when the legal foundations of Harvard,
which had already been prospering and granting degrees for nearly sixty
years, seemed most shaky. Harvard's special legal problems had been
compounded, of course, by the insecurity of the charter of Massachusetts
Bay Colony; obviously no secure legal rights could be derived from a
colonial government which itself might be unlegal. Who could hope to
satisfy the General Court, the Governor, and the changing English gov-
ernment, while respecting ancient forms of English law and duly regard-
ing colonial convenience? There was the further slippery question of
whether a colony which overstepped its legal authority, say by incor-
porating a college or university when it actually possessed no such
power, might not be violating its own charter. Such a violation might
invite unfriendly English politicians to challenge the legal existence of
the whole colony. During these years neither Massachusetts Bay nor
Connecticut lacked enemies back home who would have been delighted
to seize such an opportunity. "Not knowing what to doe for fear of
overdoing . . . ," explained Judge Samuel Sewall and Isaac Addington
in 1701 concerning the Act which they drafted to found Yale, "We on
purpose, gave the Academic as low a Name as we could that it might
better stand in wind and wether; nor daring to incorporat it, lest it
should be served with a Writt of Quo-Warranto." With prudent modesty
and ambiguity they decided to call their institution "a collegiate school."
Not until nearly half a century later (1745), after Yale had awarded
dozens of degrees, was it formally incorporated.
The history of colonial colleges is one of the most remarkable in-
stances of the triumph of legal practice over theory and of the needs of
the community over the abstruse distinctions of professional lawyers.
Before the outbreak of the Revolution, at least nine colonial institutions
which would survive into the 20th century were already granting degrees.
176 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
In all of England at this time there were still only two degree-grant-
ing institutions, Oxford and Cambridge, whose ancient monopoly was
still secured by the neatly-wrought distinctions of lawyers. The oldest
American colleges Harvard, William & Mary, and Yale all must
today find the origin of their legal degree-granting power in what
lawyers call "prescription," that is, in the simple fact that they have
been granting degrees for a very long time without being successfully
challenged. If the sharp English distinction between a properly-incor-
porated, degree-granting monopoly called a "university" and all other
types of institutions had been successfully transplanted here; if a single
royal university had been founded for all the American colonies; or if
the power to grant degrees had been clearly and explicitly forbidden in
all the colonies, the history of American higher education and possibly
of much else in American culture might have been very different.
Second: Outside control drew the college into the community.
In 17th-century Europe, and certainly in England, the universities and
their colleges were centers for a proud and eminent group of learned
men. The medieval clerical tradition had left them a form of academic
self-government which remains the pattern in much of Europe to this
day. The scholars who gathered round the university, controlling its
books, its buildings, its endowments, and its sinecures, were jealous of
their powers. To them the universities seemed very much their own.
Whatever may have been the effect of all this on "academic freedom,"
one plain result was to make universities independent of the community
and to isolate the university and the community from each other. This is
still expressed in the English antithesis between "town" and "gown."
The Protestant spirit which pervaded the American colonies was of
course congenial to the growth of "lay" (that is non-academic) control.
Medieval universities had been ecclesiastical agencies, and their "self-
government" had followed simply from the autonomy of the clergy. The
Protestant Reformation had given laymen a share in governing their
churches; another way of breaking the power of a priestly class was to
admit laymen into the government of universities. "Since the Reforma-
tion from Popery," an American author wrote in 1755, "the Notion of
the Sanctity of Colleges and other Popish Religious Houses has been
exploded. . . . The Intention herein was not to destroy the Colleges or
the Universities, and rob the Muses, but to rescue them from Popish
Abuses. ... in forming new Universities, and Colleges, the British
Nation has perhaps made them a little more pompous, in Compliance
with Customs introduced ... in Popish Times; which Customs being of
EDUCATING THE COMMUNITY 177
long Standing they chose to suffer to continue in them. But the Protestant
Princes, and Republicks, and States, in whose Territories there was no
University before, had no Regard to any Popish Usages or Customs in
erecting Colleges, and Universities, and only endowed them with such
Privileges and Powers, and Officers, as were properly School Privileges,
Powers and Officers." In old England, despite Protestantism, university
faculties remained entrenched behind their medieval walls. In America
there were no such walls.
As we look back on the story now, it seems clear that "lay" control
of American colleges owed less to anyone's wisdom or foresight than
to sheer necessity and to America's nakedness of institutions. While
European universities in the 17th and 18th centuries had inherited rich
lands, buildings, endowments, governmental appropriations, and in-
tangible resources, the first American colleges were, as Hofstadter and
Metzger point out, brand new "artifacts." They were founded by small
communities; lay boards of control helped marshal their limited resources
and kept the college in touch with the whole community, without whose
support there would have been no college at all.
In Europe the universities had historically been a kind of guild of
men of clerical learning. No such guild could exist here for the simple
reason that there was no considerable body of learned men. Control of
the new institutions inevitably fell to representatives of the community
at large. The learned, eminent, or at least aged men who led the faculties
of European universities could plausibly claim the power to govern
themselves. But at Harvard where in 1650, President Henry Dunster
had just turned forty, his treasurer was twenty-six, and the average age
of his "faculty" (then mostly a transient body of students preparing for
the ministry) was about twenty-four the staff of the college could
hardly expect to receive deference or power from the surrounding com-
munity.
Thus there emerged during the colonial period that pattern of outside
control which would permanently characterize American colleges- In
the early government of Harvard and of William & Mary there were
some signs of the growth of a system of dual control under which the
faculty would rule subject to veto by an outside body. But in neither
place did such a system last. As early as 1650, Harvard was plainly
under the control, not of professors, but of magistrates and ministers, and
so it remained. By the mid-1 8th century, when William & Mary College
was flourishing, the gentry had clearly prevailed over the academics.
The prototype of American college government was actually estab-
lished at Yale and at Princeton, where representatives of the community
178 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
were organized in a single board of trustees which legally owned and
effectively controlled the institution. These trustees were not members
of the faculty; they were ministers, magistrates, lawyers, physicians, or
merchants. American colleges would not be self-governing guilds of the
learned.
Outside control incidentally produced another institution: the Ameri-
can college president. Under the ancient European system where the
fellows of a college or the faculty of a university governed themselves and
were supported by ancient endowment or clerical livings, there had been
no place for such an officer. But the American system of college govern-
ment by outsiders created a new need. The trustees were often absentees,
with neither the time nor the inclination to govern; the college teachers
who were on the spot were often youthful and transient. Into this power
vacuum came the college president. He alone represented both the faculty
and the public, for he was a member of the governing board who resided
at the college. Technically an employee of the trustees, he was usually
the best informed of them and so became their leader. As the principal
member of the faculty he came to speak for them too. Upon his pro-
motional ability depended the reputation or even the very existence of
the institution. He combined the academic and the man of business; he
was supposed to apply learning to current affairs and to use business
judgment for the world of learning. With no counterpart in the Old
World, he was the living symbol of the breakdown of the cloistered walls.
29
Higher Education in Place
of Higher Learning
IN AMERICA the college became a place concerned more with the
diffusion than with the advancement or perpetuation of learning. "Uni-
versity" education in America became, for all practical purposes, under-
graduate education. No one of the causes of the dispersion of higher
EDUCATING THE COMMUNITY 179
education was unique to America, but all of them together added up to
an overwhelming force against legal monopoly and geographic concentra-
tion.
Religious sectarianism and variety. Each of the three earliest colleges
Harvard, William & Mary, and Yale was founded to support the
established church of its particular colony; and these were the only col-
leges until 1745. Not until the mid-18th century after the Great
Awakening had aroused religious enthusiasms and sharpened sectarian
antagonism, and when prosperity gave people money enough to send their
sons to college and to build college buildings did the rash of colonial
colleges appear. This was what President Ezra Stiles of Yale called "the
College Enthusiasm." While in England the admirable dissenting acade-
mies did not even secure the power to grant degrees, in America the
school of every sect arrogated the dignity of an ancient European uni-
versity. By the time of the Revolution nearly every major Christian sect
had an institution of its own: New-Side Presbyterians founded Princeton;
revivalist Baptists founded Brown; Dutch Reformed revivalists founded
Rutgers; a Congregational minister transformed an Indian missionary
school into Dartmouth; and Anglicans and Presbyterians worked to-
gether in the founding of King's College (later Columbia) and the Col-
lege of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania).
Each college founded by a sect was another good reason for every other
sect to found its own college in order to save more Americans from the
untruths of its competitors. And all these sectarian colleges were so many
good reasons for secularists to found their own in order to rescue youth
from all benighting dogma. Here was an accelerating movement. Once
begun it was not easily stopped; it was only delayed by hard times
during the Revolution. Between 1746 and 1769, twice as many colleges
were founded in the colonies as in the previous hundred years; between
1769 and 1789 twice as many again as in the preceding twenty years.
And so it went. The movement gathered momentum, and seems hardly
yet to have stopped.
Such competition, incidentally, had a liberalizing effect. While the
founding sect in each case could hope to dominate, it dared not monopo-
lize its own institution. Under American conditions the sharpening re-
ligious antagonisms of the second half of the 18th century actually
produced interdenominational boards of control. While the college
president usually came from the dominant sect, it was commonly neces-
sary to conciliate hostile sects by including their representatives among
the trustees. King's College, which was an Anglican institution, possessed
on its first governing board ministers of four other denominations;
180 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Brown's board, although dominated by Baptists, included a substantial
number of Congregationalists, Anglicans, and Quakers. Of the twenty-
four trustees of the University of Pennsylvania (which had grown out
of a nonsectarian academy), six trustees represented all the principal de-
nominations, including the Roman Catholic.
Among these many new institutions there arose a lively competition
for students, because there were few places in sparsely populated America
where any single sect could furnish the whole student body of a college.
Perforce no American college during the colonial period imposed a
religious test on its entering students. Thus, a nonsectarianism, which
was not the product of an abstract theory of toleration, became an ideal
of American higher education. It was typically expressed by Ezra Stiles
who had become President of Yale in 1778 when the college was still
suffering from the narrow-minded orthodoxy of the obstinate Thomas
Clap (Rector and President, 1740-1766). Stiles's tolerance helped revive
the college. He, of course, admitted his own conscientious preference for
Congregationalism, but by that he dared not be governed.
There is so much pure Christianity among all sects of Protestants, that I
cheerfully embrace all in my charity. There is so much defect in all that
we all need forbearance and mutual condescension. I don't intend to
spend my days in the fires of party; at the most I shall resist all claims
and endeavors for supremacy or precedency of any sect; for the rest
I shall promote peace, harmony, and benevolence.
Provincial America had already begun to find safety in diversity.
Only a decade later the authors of The Federalist (No. 51) observed
with prophetic wisdom that "In a free government the security for civil
rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one
case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity
of sects." The proliferation of sects and the growth of religious en-
thusiasm in 18th-century America had produced an unpredicted and
unplanned (often an undesired) religious tolerance. Where every sect
lacked power to coerce, they all wisely "chose" to persuade.
Geographic distance and local pride. The great geographic distances
which dissipated religious passion also dissipated the intellectual passion
which might have been focused in one or two centers of higher learning.
There never has been an effective American movement for a national
university. The numerous and diverse American colleges, separated by
vast distances, never formed a self-conscious community of learned
men. Even efforts to adopt uniform standards of college admission or to
form a general association of colleges were feeble and unsuccessful until
the 19th century. Organizations like the Phi Beta Kappa Society
EDUCATING THE COMMUNITY 181
(founded in 1776), which aimed at an intercollegiate community of
educated men, exerted slight influence. American colleges were em-
phatically institutions of the local community. Harvard, William & Mary,
and Yale were designed by and for their particular provinces; their
support came from their own localities.
The primary aim of the American college was not to increase the
continental stock of cultivated men, but rather to supply its particular
region with knowledgeable ministers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, and
political leaders. While the university centers of traditional English
learning were detached from the great political and commercial center
of London, the early American colleges tended to be at the center of each
colony's affairs. The location of William & Mary at Williamsburg (and
the comparable locations of Brown, Yale, and the University of Pennsyl-
vania) where students like Jefferson could drop in during their spare
time to hear the debates of the House of Burgesses, linked learning and
public life. It symbolized both the easy intercourse between American
higher learning and the community as a whole and the identification of
leading men with the special problems of their particular regions.
In England, the leading families sent their sons away to the few best
"public" schools, and afterwards these young gentlemen were gathered
if only for hunting and wassailing at Oxford and Cambridge. Anyone
who could afford it thus went to a distant, "national" institution. "If he
returned to work in his native place he was no longer quite a native of it,"
G. Kitson Clark has explained, "he spoke a different language from most
of its inhabitants, had bonds of friendship which drew his mind away from
its borders, and above all had not had with his fellow townsmen that
close association in youth which is perhaps the closest neighbourly
bond there is. Perhaps this helped to impede the development of that
vigorous provincial life which England needed and still needs, and,
worse than that, it helped to create a caste, to emphasize a horizontal
social division, at a time of growing wealth and growing social tensions
when a horizontal division was particularly dangerous." In America
the basis of higher education was territorial; this distinction was im-
portant, for the diffusion of American higher education nourished the
local roots of a federal union. Mere proximity and the lower cost of
attending college near home seem to have been deciding factors in the
choice of a college by many pre-Revolutionaiy students in America.
Americans came to believe that no community was complete without
its own college. The famous provisions for an educational land-fund
in the Land Ordinance of 1785 and in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787,
which later became the bases for state universities, probably had some
182 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
such motive. Real estate developers in the early 19th century included
plans for colleges in their schemes to attract settlers to new towns.
Social and geographic mobility: the competition for students. These
insecure new institutions were competing for reputation, for financial
support, and most important of all for students. The Colleges of New
Jersey and of Rhode Island (later to be Princeton and Brown), which
charged the lowest fees, and Dartmouth, where some students could work
for their expenses, rapidly increased their enrollment. The College of
Philadelphia and King's College, sometimes called "the gentlemen's col-
leges," drew the fewest students from afar and had the smallest student
bodies.
Nearly all the modern techniques of student recruiting, except the
football scholarship, were used before the end of the colonial era. There
were many examples of the puffing brochure and of alumni acting as re-
cruiting agents. Along with these came lower standards of admission and
graduation and "popular" courses to attract the students whose tuition
fees were desperately needed. "Except in one neighbouring province,"
John Trumbull of Connecticut complained in 1773, "ignorance wanders
unmolested at our colleges, examinations are dwindled to meer form and
ceremony, and after four years dozing there, no one is ever refused the
honours of a degree, on account of dulness and insufficiency."
American colleges had already begun to put their money in impressive
buildings, which they could ill afford, rather than in books or faculty
endowments. During the twenty-five years before the Revolution five of
the colonial colleges spent about 15,000 for the erection or remodeling
of buildings. Such expenditures supposedly brought favorable publicity,
and hence students. But at the College of Philadelphia and the College
of Rhode Island, these heavy initial costs left the institutions bankrupt
almost before they had begun to operate.
Despite the competition between colleges, higher education was still
not cheap. In the mid- 18th century, the combined cost of room, board,
and tuition ranged from about 10 a year (at the College of New
Jersey or of Rhode Island), to twice that sum (at Bang's College); a
wealthy student might spend as much as 50. This was at a time when
a carpenter's annual earnings would have been no more than 50, a
college instructor's about 100, and a prosperous lawyer's only 500.
Although an ambitious parent might secure a loan to educate his son,
a college education obviously was not for the poor: there was not yet
a regular or extensive system of scholarships and, except at Dartmouth,
it was uncommon for students to work their way through college. Still,
everything considered, the situation was a great deal better than in Eng-
EDUCATING THE COMMUNITY 183
land, where a higher education could not be secured for much less than
100 a year.
One obvious effect of this dispersion and competition of colleges
was an increase in the number, though not in the quality, of college
degrees. About fourteen hundred men graduated from the three colonial
colleges in the thirty years before 1747; in the next thirty years the
colleges of British North America awarded more than twice that many
bachelor's degrees, about half the increase being due to the newly-founded
colleges. No American who could afford the fee of ten pounds a year
for four years could fail to secure, if he wanted it, the hallmark of a
"higher" education. American colleges were not simply distributing to
the many what in England was reserved for the privileged few; they were
issuing an inflated intellectual currency.
The early colonial dispersion established a pattern which was never
broken. From time to time after the Revolution, grandiose hopes were
expressed for a singje great institution supported by Congress. It was
to be situated in the national capital, where students of republican senti-
ment could be drawn from abroad, where the intellectual resources of
the nation could be concentrated, and where local prejudices might
be dissolved. There was such talk even in the Federal Constitutional
Convention. Charles Pinckney's draft expressly gave the Federal legis-
lature the power to establish a national university at the seat of govern-
ment, and Madison seems to have favored such a power. In the
showdown the proposal was defeated, either because members believed
the power already had been given by implication or because they con-
sidered it undesirable. George Washington was attracted by the idea
of an institution at the nation's capital to "afford the students an oppor-
tunity of attending the debates in Congress, and thereby becoming more
liberally and better acquainted with the principles of law and govern-
ment." But the Founding Fathers supported the local institutions which
had sprung up all over the country.
Until nearly the end of the 18th century, the typical American college
consisted of a president (usually a cleric, sometimes the pastor of a
neighboring church) and a few (seldom more than three) tutors who
were themselves usually young men studying for the clergy. There were
few "professors" mature men with a full command of their subject.
Under these circumstances the curriculum of American colleges, as
distinct from their institutional framework, inevitably remained tra-
ditional. Despite a few notable exceptions and some influence of the
184 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
English dissenting academies and the Scottish universities, American
colonial colleges stuck to the curriculum which the tutors had learned
from their tutors and which ultimately could be traced back to the
English universities and their medieval forebears. What distinguished
the American college was not its corpus of knowledge, but how, when,
where, and to whom it was communicated.
As colleges became more dispersed, developing their interdenomina-
tionalism and their linlcs with their local communities, they also became
less identified with any particular profession. During the 18th century
a decreasing proportion of American college graduates entered the
ministry. By the second half of the 17th century even Harvard, which
had been founded with an ecclesiastical purpose, was drawing many
sons of artisans, tradesmen, and fanners. By the end of the 18th century
only about a quarter of the graduates of all American colleges were
becoming clergymen. Meanwhile the lack of specialized legal and medical
training affected those learned professions themselves, making them
depend more on informal apprenticeship.
American colleges that aimed to make good citizens would only
accidentally produce profound or adventuring scholars. The Marquis
de Chastellux, traveling through the country in the 1780's, observed
that here the philosopher needed less to promote educational institutions
than to remove obstacles to their progress. "Leave owls and bats to flutter
in the doubtful perspicuity of a feeble twilight;" he warned with an eye to
the English vices, "the American eagle should fix her eyes upon the sun."
The peculiar promise of American academies lay in their numbers.
From the beginning, American colleges, in contrast with those of
England, were more anxious to spread than to deepen the higher learning.
A community of two million inhabitants or less, dispersed over the long
seacoast of a vast continent, would have had to concentrate its learned
minds in some American Athens if they were most effectively to stimulate
one another. But there was no American Athens, and Americans came
to value the intellectual virtues which grew in diffusion: the sense of
relevance, the free exchange between the community's experience and
that of its teachers. If by ancient criteria Americans were less learned,
they were shaping new tests of the value of learning. If they did not
know their sacred texts so well, they were opening a thousand windows.
EDUCATING THE COMMUNITY 185
30
The Ideal of the
Undifferentiated Man
WHILE EUROPEAN CULTURE had developed elaborate ways of frag-
menting, specializing, and monopolizing pieces of man's knowledge and
functions, American culture from its very beginning allowed many of
these to come together. American life promoted a new fluidity in man's
thinking about his knowledge and about himself. It produced a novel,
half-articulate educational ideal the ideal of the Undifferentiated man,
fostered by facts deeply rooted in the provincial age.
The vagueness of American social classes. The ideals of medieval
education, if they were nothing else, were at least precise. Long before
the founding of the American colonies, the traditional "liberal" education
had been defined as an induction into the seven (not six or eight) Liberal
Arts. Such were the studies suitable for a free man hence the "liberal"
education. With equal precision, the "higher" university faculties included
Theology, Law, and Medicine. Under American conditions, neither
liberal nor professional education could retain its ancient precision.
Where a man's status was as ambiguous and as shifting as it was in
the New World, he could not know in advance which types of learning
would be especially appropriate for him. In European culture the distinc-
tions of social status had been represented in distinctions of subject-
matter: the "liberal" arts, suitable for a "free" man, were labors of the
mind; the "servile" arts required the handling of physical objects. That
distinction long separated science from technology, and its breakdown
was essential to progress. Similarly, the distinction between "philoso-
phers" on the one hand and practical inventors known variously and
condescendingly as "mechanics," "projectors," or economic "adven-
turers" on the other was sharp and divisive. Distinctions which had
been hallowed by custom, law, and language in Europe came to seem
vague and artificial in America.
Although colonial society was doubtless a good deal more aristocratic
186 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
than we have been in the habit of imagining, many circumstances pre-
vented a clear definition of this aristocracy except perhaps in South
Carolina, Virginia, and upstate New York. In colleges with small and
transient faculties, the coverage of traditional subjects was necessarily
crude and haphazard. The multiplication of college degrees which came
to stand for the most diverse subject-matters at all different levels
further confused the ancient European standards, and made it less
clear what the authentic standard really ought to be.
The diffusion of roles. The traditional list of "liberal" arts, already
beginning to break down in Europe, would no longer liberate man in
America. Here men found it hard to prepare for any role, even that of a
"liberally" educated man, simply because their roles had not yet been
sharply defined. Similarly, in the professions, no traditional preparation
could actually prepare a man for the novel tasks of clergyman, doctor,
lawyer, or professor in America. Where the learned professions were
loosely organized, where nearly everybody was doing some of the work
of the doctor, the lawyer, or the teacher, the criteria of professional
eminence became vague. A successful New England clergyman was
also likely to be something of a physician, a politician, and a teacher, and
perhaps to have other jobs as well.
A remarkable instance of all this was the new and more diversified
role of women in American life. By the 18th century the rise of the
middle classes and the spread of literacy had already begun to improve
the education of European women. Although our knowledge is only
fragmentary, evidence suggests that women in colonial America were
more versatile, more active, more prominent, and on the whole more
successful in activities outside the kitchen than were their English
counterparts. The system of household manufactures, under which the
husband's craft was practiced in or near the home, gave the wife or
daughter an opportunity to learn. There was a surprisingly large num-
ber of women printers and newspaper publishers in the colonial period,
and not all were widows carrying on the work of their husbands. Women
were apothecaries and even general medical practitioners. Especially on
a Southern plantation a man needed his wife's cooperation to carry on
his business. William Byrd's secret diaries dramatically describe how
important was the help of a competent and energetic wife. In New
England, where seafaring husbands left their wives alone for months or
years, women prospered as merchants and tradeswomen.
Everywhere the scarcity of labor tended to remove social prejudices.
In early New England it was not unheard of, and apparently not frowned
upon, for the daughter of a good family to go out to domestic service.
EDUCATING THE COMMUNITY 187
Judge Samuel Sewall noted that his sister planned to become a maid to
a Boston family. At the death of William Sheaffe, deputy collector of
customs at Boston in 1771, his wife, who was the daughter of a promi-
nent citizen, was set up by her friends in the grocery business.
Great distances, social and geographic mobility, and the scarcity of
schools for the rising classes broadened women's interests by imposing
on them the responsibility for educating the family. Perhaps this made
it less odd than it might seem today that Cotton Mather taught his
daughter Katherine both Latin and Hebrew. George Wythe, one of the
leading figures of Revolutionary Virginia under whom Jefferson had
served his legal apprenticeship, was reputed to possess "a perfect knowl-
edge of the Greek language, which was taught him by his mother in the
back woods." Jefferson's own plan of reading for his daughter Patsy, he
explained in 1783, needed to be "considerably different from what I
think would be most proper for her sex in any other country than
America. I am obliged in it to extend my views beyond herself, and
consider her as possibly at the head of a little family of her own. The
chance that in marriage she will draw a blockhead I calculate at about
fourteen to one, and of course that the education of her family will
probably rest on her own ideas and direction without assistance. With
the best poets and prosewriters I shall therefore combine a certain
extent of reading in the graver sciences."
Even such fragmentary evidence suggests that women in the colonies
were successful in more different activities and were more prominent
in professional and public life than they would be again until the 20th
century. Colonial laws tended to assimilate the legal status of men and
of women. The rights of married women and their powers to carry on
business and to secure divorce were much enlarged; the law protected
women in ways unprecedented in the English common law.
American men who, like American women, were generally less special-
ized than their European counterparts, had become versatile through
the force of circumstances. They were not "universal men" but "jacks-
of-all-trades." Their tasks and opportunities made their interests broad
and fluid. The "businessman," not the virtuoso, was the prototype of
American versatility, for the businessman took his clues from his oppor-
tunities. "All the people of New-England without an exception," Timothy
Dwight observed in the early 19th century, "beside what is created by
disease, or misfortune, are men of business. . . . The business of a
Clergyman it is here believed, is to effectuate the salvation of his
flock, rather than to replenish his own mind with that superiour infor-
mation, which, however ornamental or useful in other respects, is cer-
188 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
tainly connected with this end in a very imperfect degree. . . . Clergymen,
here, are rarely possessed of libraries, sufficiently extensive to make such
attainments practicable." In the other learned professions, too, men were
judged by how well they performed rather than by how much they
knew of some subject matter. College faculties were viewed as instruments
for education rather than as repositories of wisdom; they were primarily
"teachers." Whenever women took their cues from their new tasks and
opportunities, their emphasis was also crudely instrumental; they had
several jobs to do. The traditional standards of feminine gentility would
not serve.
Out of all the limitations and opportunities of colonial America grew
an American ideal, which sprang from the conviction that knowledge,
like the New World itself, was still only half-discovered. English hand-
books, like Brathwait's English Gentleman, warned the would-be gentle-
man not to seem too proficient in any specialty (whether dancing,
swordplay, reading, or writing) lest it seem that he had been forced by
a lack of lordly acres to make his living as a mere craftsman- If in the
earliest years some Virginia would-be gentlemen were deterred by this
fear of appearing too proficient, it was not for long; gentlemanly ineptness
went against the American grain. Here all proficiencies, except perhaps
those of the pedant or the monopolist, were welcome.
America lacked enthusiasm for the man of profound, detached, and
"pure" intelligence. A wholesome fear of the exotic and the hieratic,
of the power of the mind to raise any man above men, inspired American
faith in the "divine average," a faith which would not have grown
without American opportunity. "He does not find, as in Europe," Creve-
coeur observed of the immigrant to America in 1782, "a crowded society,
where every place is over-stocked; he does not feel that perpetual collision
of parties, that difficulty of beginning, that contention which oversets so
many. There is room for everybody in America; has he any particular
talent, or industry? he exerts it in order to procure a livelihood, and
it succeeds."
PART SEVEN
THE LEARNED LOSE
THEIR MONOPOLIES
"It was a Place free from those 3 great Scourges
of Mankind, Priests, Lawyers, and Physicians
... the People were yet too poor to maintain
these Learned Gentlemen."
WILLIAM BYRD
31
The Fluidity of Professions
THE AMERICAN PROVINCIAL AGE, we have already seen, was not
an age of genius so much as an age of liberation. Its legacy was not great
individual thinkers but refreshed community thinking. Old categories
were shaken up, and new situations revealed unsuspected uses for old
knowledge.
Colonial America was not the first age or place where such breaking
of old molds had occurred. The Protestant Reformation in Europe had
opposed the distinction between priest and layman, between the holders
of the Keys to Heaven and the multitude who sought admission. But
what the Reformers could accomplish was limited by their institutional
inheritance. In England, for example, the ancient Universities of Oxford
and Cambridge, which were to exercise such a pervasive influence on
English high culture, were a legacy of the Universal Church of the
middle ages, when clergymen were a different species from laymen. The
mere persistence of those great Universities perpetuated many of the old
distinctions, especially those between the custodians of the sacred learn-
ing and the community at large. Provincial America was free from all
this; it was therefore freer to allow a new fluidity to life and thought
The universal priesthood of all believers attained a fuller expression in
American ways of daily living.
By the 18th century in Europe the departments of thought had been
191
192 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
frozen into professional categories, into the private domains of different
guilds, city companies, and associations of masters; and the professions
separated the areas of thought. Every professional field of learning bore
a "No Trespassing" sign duly erected by legal or customary authority.
In the newer culture of America few such signs had been erected; from
the sheer lack of organized monopolists, old monopolies could not be
perpetuated. America broke down distinctions: where life was full of
surprises, of unexplored wildernesses, and of unpredictable problems, its
tasks could not be neatly divided for legal distribution. Any man who
preferred the even tenor of his way, who wished to pursue his licensed
trade without the competition of amateurs, intruders, or vagrants, or who
was unwilling to do jobs for which he had not been legally certified was
better off in England.
At least four decisive facts about colonial America promoted this new
fluidity in man's thinking about himself and about the departments of his
knowledge. These were the product of no man's foresight but of the
circumstances of a New World.
Regression. When a man finds himself plunged back into the con-
ditions of an earlier age, he inevitably discovers many things. He re-
discovers forgotten uses of his tools, and learns to think about them in
the cruder categories of a primitive age. The sharp stone which early
man used for killing was hardly different from the one he used for
cutting, but in more developed cultures there arose a distinction between
"weapon" and "tool" as each of them became a more specialized imple-
ment. Thus, in 18th-century Europe, the firearm became primarily a
weapon; but for the colonial American backwoodsman, who had to
protect himself and his family from marauding savages and who often
shot meat for his table, the distinction between weapon and tool once
again had little meaning. What was true of implements was also true
of institutions and occupations. Under primitive conditions, there
seem to have been few distinctions among those who practiced the
different modes of healing and curing between the man who muttered
the incantation, the man who inserted the knife, and the man who mixed
the potion. But in 18th-century England all these tasks were dis-
tinguished: each had become the private preserve of a different group
the barber-surgeons, the doctors of physick, and the apothecaries. In
America such distinctions would have been difficult to preserve; the
healer (sometimes a lawyer or a governor or a clergyman) once again
performed all these different tasks.
Versatility required by the unexpected. Where the round of daily
life has been worn into a groove by many generations living in the same
THE LEARNED LOSE THEIR MONOPOLIES 193
place, men can prepare simply for the tasks which their ancestors have
faced before them. But not in a New World. Here the unexpected was
usual, and men had to be ready for it. The layman had to be prepared
to act the lawyer, the architect, and the physician, and to practice crafts
which others (only to be found across the ocean) knew much better.
Versatility was no longer merely a virtue; it was a necessity. The man
who could not be a little bit of everything was not qualified to be an
American.
The scarcity of institutions. Where institutions were scarce, they could
not be sharply distinguished from each other. Even the priests of different
religions gradually tended to become assimilated. Puritanism gradually
became less puritanical; Episcopalianism became less bishoply and more
congregational; and religions like Quakerism which would not compro-
mise with the New World could not long govern in it. "Thus all sects
are mixed as well as all nations;" remarked Crevecoeur in 1782, "thus
religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of
the continent to the other; which is at present one of the strongest
characteristics of the Americans. Where this will reach no one can
tell "
The last serious colonial effort to set up a guild in the medieval mold
took place in Philadelphia in 1718. Next to the occupational guilds, the
most important agencies for monopolizing knowledge in the Old World
had been the ancient educational institutions. But those too were lacking
in America, and the New World thawed the categories of thought.
Labor-scarcity and Land-plenty. Labor and skills were scarce in
colonial America; men had to do many things for themselves simply
because they could not hire others to do them. Inevitably they came to
set a lower standard, for otherwise a task could not have been done at
all. The carpenter had to be cooper, cabinetmaker, and cobbler. The
printer became writer, paper-manufacturer, binder, ink-maker, post-
master, and public figure. Land-plenty meant that even as a farmer the
American generally needed to be much less efficient in order to make a
living. Where men could "use up" their land, where they took for granted
large tracts in reserve for the future, they lacked an incentive which
prodded 18th-century English agriculture to reforms. Where everything,
including the old homestead, was for sale, men were less attached to any
particular piece of land. Once it ceased to support them, they would move
on. Land itself lost many of its ancient legal and social peculiarities. The
making of a living here required less specialization. At least for free white
colonials, there were many different ways of earning a living and it was
easy to change one's trade or the place where one practiced it.
194 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
"Strangers are welcome," Franklin explained in his Information to
those -who would remove to America (1782), "because there is room
enough for them all, and therefore the old Inhabitants are not jealous of
them." Since land was cheap, any diligent young man could rise. "Hence
there is a continual Demand for more Artisans of all the necessary and
useful kinds, to supply those Cultivators of the Earth with Houses, and
with Furniture and Utensils of the grosser sorts, which cannot so well
be brought from Europe. Tolerably good Workmen in any of those
mechanic Arts are sure to find Employ, and to be well paid for their
Work, there being no Restraints preventing Strangers from exercising any
Art they understand, nor any Permission necessary." In America, he ob-
served, everyone might hope and expect to become a Master, for any
industrious young man could secure an apprenticeship which might have
been too expensive for him in Europe. "In America, the rapid Increase
of Inhabitants takes away that Fear of Rivalship, and Artisans willingly
receive Apprentices from the hope of Profit by their Labour, during
the Remainder of the Time stipulated, after they shall be instructed.
Hence it is easy for poor Families to get their Children instructed; for
the Artisans are so desirous of Apprentices, that many of them will even
give Money to the Parent, to have Boys from Ten to Fifteen Years
of Age bound Apprentices to them till the Age of Twenty-one; and many
poor Parents have, by the means, on their Arrival in the Country, raised
Money enough to buy Land sufficient to establish themselves, and to
subsist the rest of their Family by Agriculture."
A new and fruitful social vagueness thus came into being in America.
The ancient, familiar, and respectable idea of a "calling" had been
displaced by the idea of opportunity. Historians in recent years have
written a great deal about the change which supposedly occurred in
Europe at the time of the Protestant Reformation. In contrast to the
medieval Catholic view, according to Max Weber, all Protestant de-
nominations took a novel view of men's occupations. This new view,
says R. H. Tawney, required a man to give thought to his "choice" of
a calling. But, in fact, European life offered very little choice to most
men; they had no freedom but to perform the tasks to which their own
family station assigned them. In Europe to hallow a man's "calling"
was simply to sanctify his efficiency in his traditional job.
Few American men dared look to their inherited stations to define
their callings. They had to look to their opportunities, to the unforeseen
openings of the American situation. Where a rapid-flowing life informed
THE LEARNED LOSE THEIR MONOPOLIES 195
a man of his tasks, he would be lost if he anchored himself to any fixed
role. No prudent man dared be too certain of exactly who he was
or what he was about; everyone had to be prepared to become someone
else. To be ready for such perilous transmigrations was to become an
American.
32
The Unspecialized Lawyer
IN 1758 when young John Adams consulted the leader of the Boston
bax about the proper education of an American lawyer, the reply was an
inquiry about Adams' general education and his knowledge of rhetoric.
"Then Mr. Gridley run a comparison between the business and studies
of a lawyer, a gentleman of the bar in England and those of one here:
a lawyer in this country must study common law, and civil law, and
natural law, and admiralty law; and must do the duty of a counsellor,
a lawyer, an attorney, a solicitor, and even of a scrivener; so that the
difficulties of the profession are much greater here than in England.'*
In 17th- and 18th-century England, as Adams* mentor knew, the legal
profession was elaborately organized and stratified and these divisions
reflected both English legal thinking and the prejudices of English
society.
At the top stood the "barristers," the aristocracy of the legal profession.
Organized in their ancient "Inns of Court" in London near the High
Courts, they possessed a monopoly over the practice in these courts.
The "benchers" of Lincoln's Inn, The Inner Temple, The Middle Temple,
and Gray's Inn from about the fifteenth century had held the power to
admit to the bar; that is, to confer the right to be heard in court as a
pleader. The English Civil War of the 17th century had scattered mem-
bers of the Inns and interrupted their formal educational activities.
Before the end of the 18th century even the requirement of a period
of apprentice-residence had become a mere fiction. Still the Tmis retained
their monopoly.
196 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
But these gentlemanly barristers of the Inns offered only a small
segment of the legal services of the community. Daily legal needs were
met by at least two other quite distinct occupations. "Attorneys" were
not authorized to plead in court but it was their function to set the
machinery of the court in motion on behalf of a client. They were
admitted to their monopoly by the judges of the courts in which they
practiced, each court acquiring its own limited number of attorneys,
who were not necessarily authorized to practice elsewhere. Another
branch of the profession (called "solicitors") were the private legal
agents, who were neither authorized to plead in the High Courts nor
to set lawsuits in motion, but who looked after routine legal matters
for their clients. These solicitors were a varied lot: some were also at-
torneys, some were not; some flourished in the Courts of Chancery. They
multiplied rapidly to serve the rising landed and commercial classes.
One resentful barrister in the early 17th century complained that the
solicitors "like the grasshoppers in Egypt, devour the whole land." There
were also the notaries, in their Scriveners' Company, who prepared
all legal documents which had to be authenticated by a seal, the patent
agents, and still other minor specialists.
Basic was the social distinction which separated barristers or "counsel-
lors" who alone were gentlemen and thus members of a true "profes-
sion" from all the others. "There ought always to be preserved," the
English judges ordered in 1614, "a difference between a counsellor at law,
which is the principal person next unto the Serjeants and judges in
administration of justice, and attorneys and solicitors which are but
ministerial persons and of an inferior nature." Solicitors had begun as
mere agents, servants, or stewards; and attorneys were akin to tradesmen,
since they supported themselves on the fees of individual customers. But
it was from the ranks of barristers that the judges were drawn. Unlike
tradesmen or craftsmen they did not receive "fees," but rather "honor-
aria," which neither then nor today are collectible by legal process.
To move all these fine distinctions across the ocean defied the efforts of
even the most devout admirer of English institutions. The American
uncertainty as to what really made a man a "gentleman" had blurred all
the lines between high-tone "professions" and other occupations. Since
there was no single center of appellate litigation in America, there was
no one place where ambitious young pleaders and cadet-judges could
learn their lessons. The higher colonial courts were dispersed into thirteen
different headquarters, each with its slightly different laws. There was no
American London where lawyers could consolidate their monopoly.
Most important perhaps was the fact that for a long time legal business
was too scarce to support so many specialties.
THE LEARNED LOSE THEIR MONOPOLIES 197
Whatever the reasons, there was no developed legal profession in any
of the colonies before the mid-1 8th century. The ancient English
prejudice against lawyers secured new strength in America. Despite the
occasional outbursts in England against lawyers (as early as Jack Cade's
Rebellion in 1450 and as recently as the Civil War of the 17th century),
they were not dislodged from power and privilege; the Trnyg of Court,
the Scriveners' Company, and other ancient guilds remained their strong-
holds. America had no such citadels of monopoly to begin with. Here
where courts were more loosely and more extemporaneously organized,
and where even judges commonly lacked legal training, distrust of lawyers
became an institution. By the later 18th century when American com-
merce required a more skilled legal profession, it had already been
determined that men of legal learning would not acquire the upper-class
monopolistic position they held in England.
The newly-shaped ruling group in each colony preferred to keep the
privileges which an established legal profession might have taken from
them. In Virginia, for example, the landed aristocracy did much of their
own law work rather than create a new class of colonial lawyers. In
Massachusetts Bay the clergy, supported by Puritan prejudice against
lawyers, delayed the growth of a trained, self-conscious bar: the colony's
earliest known provision affecting lawyers (Body of Liberties, Art. No.
26) prohibited any man from giving a reward to another to represent
him in court. In New York, too, the merchants and large landowners
were unwilling to hand over any of their powers to a legal aristocracy.
In Pennsylvania, the Quakers tried to avoid legal process altogether by
using laymen as "common peacemakers."
But while the colonies could live and even prosper without banisters,
solicitors, or scriveners, they could not live without law. As they became
more populous and wealthy and as their commercial life became more
intricate, some men made the law their special business. Before the end
of the colonial era each colony possessed something like a legal profes-
sion. Nobody had planned the result, but each colony had provided for
its needs in its own way. Each by a separate path had arrived at a
common New World destination, which was as remote intellectually
as it was geographically from the port-scented halls of London's Inns
of Court. The scarcity of professional apparatus together with the lack
of licensing guilds in law encouraged an informal apprentice system of
training. English solicitors and attorneys had long been trained in some-
thing like an apprentice system. An Act of Parliament in 1729 required
five years of apprenticeship under formally-drawn "articles" before a
solicitor or attorney could practice in any court. The gentlemanly bar-
risters, however, remained autonomous. For those socially and financially
198 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
qualified, admission to their particular monopoly was, one historian has
observed, like the return of stolen goods "without any questions being
asked." For them there was not even a general requirement of apprentice-
ship. In colonial America, however, an apprenticeship, usually less
formal than that required for English attorneys and solicitors, was the
door to all branches of the legal profession.
Diversity was the rule. In New England and in the middle colonies
by the time of the Revolution there had grown up a haphazard, weakly
organized legal profession, with little esprit. In larger colonies, admission
to legal practice tended to be dispersed into the different courts, each
of which admitted its practitioners on whatever criteria appealed to it. In
the smaller colonies (Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Delaware, for
example), where all the judges and practitioners were likely to know
one another, a lawyer who had been admitted by any one of the courts
was generally allowed to practice in all of them. In North Carolina, New
York, and New Jersey, Royal Governors held the technical power to
appoint all attorneys, but they generally appointed only on the recom-
mendation of a judge or a court. The earliest American association of
lawyers was probably that in New York, which was founded sometime
before 1748 and disappeared soon after 1765; in Massachusetts a bar
association did not come into being until 1761. In all these colonies in
the 18th century, practicing lawyers were distinguished by a higher level
of education than that of the general population, but their education
was quite unspecialized and had usually been secured in colonial colleges.
In the South, especially in Virginia and South Carolina, cities were
fewer and English institutions were more highly valued and more con-
sciously imitated. There the highest courts, though sometimes indirectly,
controlled the admission of all attorneys. The leading practitioners had
attended the Inns of Court in London. This vogue of the Inns seems to
have increased unaccountably after about 1750: of approximately 236
American-born members of the Inns of Court before 1815, over half
were admitted between 1750 and 1775. Of the whole figure nearly one-
third came from South Carolina, nearly one-quarter from Virginia,
and more came from Maryland than from Pennsylvania, New York, or
Massachusetts. All this fits with the legal conservatism of the Southern
leaders of the American Revolution. Who knew better than they the
ancient ways of English lawyers and the traditional rights of Englishmen?
In America, then, the variety of climate, economy, landscape, and
local tradition produced a variety of standards for the legal profession.
The lack of a single commercial or political capital expressed and re-
enforced this variety; there was no metropolitan focus for monopoly. The
THE LEARNED LOSE THEIR MONOPOLIES 199
Southern aristocracy's effort to make the Tnm of Court the headquarters
of their legal profession failed: London was too far away.
There did grow up a simpler, less snobbish kind of distinction: not a
dividing or specializing of the profession, but an informal grading of
practitioners by their education and experience. In some places only the
better educated and longer experienced lawyers were allowed to practice
in the highest courts. The few serious efforts (in early Virginia statutes,
for example) to transplant the English distinctions were short lived:
young Southern barristers, returned from the Inns of Court, for a while
seemed to dominate practice in colonial courts, but the Revolution
interrupted the flow of students to the Tnm and disintegrated this
distinction before it was well established. Even in Virginia in 1810 the
courts plainly declared that the functions of a barrister and of an attorney
were "inseparably blended in the same person."
The erasing of boundaries between the petty domains of the barrister,
the solicitor, and the attorney was less significant than the breakdown of
the walls which in Old England kept legal knowledge from the common
citizen. Where land was more a commodity than an heirloom, many
more people became landowners and, of necessity, learned some law.
As colonials acquired personal knowledge of the legal rights of English-
men, they distrusted still more the licensed professional monopolist.
One of the reasons we know so little about American law in the
colonial era is that so many of the judges were laymen. They seem to
have paid little attention to English precedents, only a few of which were
available in the colonies, or to American precedents, none of which were
yet reported in print. Their own opinions usually went unreported. We
know very little of the judges' notions of substantive law, for even when
a decision was permanently recorded, the reasons were seldom given.
In none of the American colonies before the end of the colonial era
were the courts manned predominantly by professionally trained lawyers.
Even in the highest court of Massachusetts Bay, which during the 18th
century possessed a larger and better organized bar than any other colony,
men learned in the law were rare. Of the nine Chief Justices of Massa-
chusetts between 1692 and the Revolution, only three had specialized
legal training, two at the Tnm of Court and one in the colony, the rest
were clergymen, physicians, merchants, or simply men of general educa-
tion. Of the twenty-three Associate Judges during this period only three
possessed any regular legal education, the rest being clergymen or lay-
men; two judges in the Court of Admiralty had been trained as English
barristers. The judges of Massachusetts included no other professionally
trained lawyers. The situation in the other colonies was not much differ-
200 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
ent: if anything, trained lawyers on the Bench were still more rare;
everywhere the lay judge was the rule.
Jefferson recalled that just after the mid-1 8th century, when he
practiced at the bar of the General Court, Virginia Attorney General
John Randolph owned three manuscript volumes of reports of cases
decided in that court between 1730 and 1740. Although this was
Virginia's highest court, its decisions on matters of English law (accord-
ing to Jefferson) were "of little value, because the Judges of that court,
consisting of the King's Privy Counsellors only, chosen from among
the gentlemen of the country, for their wealth and standing, without any
regard to legal knowledge, their decisions could never be quoted, either
as adding to, or detracting from, the weight of those of the English courts,
on the same point. Whereas, on our peculiar laws, thek judgments,
whether formed on correct principles of law, or not, were of conclusive
authority."
Lawbooks were scarce by English standards. John Adams recorded in
his autobiography that, seeking an American legal education, he had
"suffered very much for want of books." Of about one hundred and
fifty volumes of law reports which had been published in England before
the American Revolution, only about a fifth were commonly used here;
the proportion of treatises and textbooks was even smaller. The first
volume of American law reports was not published until 1790.
Where laymen were judges, there was little incentive for advocates to
be learned lawyers. In fact, technical legal learning might have been
a disadvantage, for an advocate could hardly show his learning without
revealing the ignorance of the judge and arousing the suspicion of the
jury. During a controversy between the Governor and the legislature
of Massachusetts, John Adams "quoted largely'* from Moore's Reports,
"a law authority which no man in Massachusetts had ever read.** Thomas
Hutchinson (who had been Chief Justice of Massachusetts for over a
decade) was not professionally trained in the law, but still was a great
deal better read in the law than most men who sat on his bench. Adams
reported that even Hutchinson was unacquainted with the authority and
so "wriggled to evade it. He found nothing better to say than that it was
'the artificial reasoning of Lord Coke.* "
A colonial spokesman of the extreme anti-professional spirit was
Chief Justice Samuel Livermore, who presided over the courts of New
Hampshire in the late 18th century. "Judge Livermore, having no law
learning himself,'* complained one of the few technically trained lawyers
of the day, "did not like to be pestered with it at his courts. When West
attempted to read law books in a law argument, the Chief Justice asked
him why he read them; 'if he thought that he and his brethren did not
THE LEARNED LOSE THEIR MONOPOLIES 201
know as much as those musty old worm-eaten books?' " In the very
age when English lawyers were enthroning the strict rule of precedent,
Judge Livermore dismissed a reference to an earlier contrary decision of
his own by observing that "every tub must stand on its own bottom," "It
is our business," Associate Justice John Dudley (a farmer and trader
by occupation, who sat on the same bench with Livermore) charged a
jury, "to do justice between the parties not by any quirks of the law out
of Coke or Blackstone books that I never read and never will but by
common sense as between man and man." When the learned Jeremiah
Mason filed a "demurrer," one of the best-known devices in English
legal pleading, Judge Dudley ridiculed the alien technicality as "no
doubt an invention of the Bar to prevent justice."
If the American lawyer sometimes possessed less legal learning than
his English counterpart, the literate American layman possessed more of
it. Some lay judges like two Chief Justices of Massachusetts, William
Stoughton (1692-1701) and Samuel Sewall (1718-28) had read widely
in law and compared not unfavorably with many contemporary English
judges. "Generally in our colonies," observed Dr. William Douglass,
"particularly in New-England, people are much addicted to quirks in the
law; a very ordinary country man in New-England is almost qualified
for a country-attorney in England."
In England, the 18th century was the era of professional systematizing
on a grand scale: Matthew Bacon's "Abridgment" appeared in 1736;
Charles Viner's famous legal encyclopaedia (in 23 volumes) in 1742-
53; Comyns' "Digest" in 1762. The great success of Viner's work
financed the first professorship of English Law at Oxford, held by Sir
William Blackstone, who delivered there as lectures his famous "Com-
mentaries." And Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England
(1765-69) was the most ambitious and most successful effort ever made
to reduce the disorderly overgrowth of English law to an intelligible
and learnable system. Needless to say, colonial America produced no
great legal systems or encyclopaedias. What it did produce were the
varied, dispersed, and miscellaneous efforts of hundreds of laymei^
semi-lawyers, pseudo-lawyers, and of a few men of solid legal learning.
Of all the known legal treatises (about sixty) published in the American
colonies before 1788, not a single one was properly a treatise for
professional lawyers. Instead, they were editions of The Constables
Pocket-Book and similar handbooks to help laymen do the work of
lawyers.
"In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study,"
observed Edmund Burke in a famous passage in his speech on concilia-
tion with America, "... all who read, and most do read, endeavor to
202 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
obtain some smattering in that science." He saw the broad significance in
this American dissolution of the lawyers' monopoly: such a citizenry
would not allow itself to be oppressed. The people of the colonies would
be united by their common understanding, or misunderstanding, of their
legal rights. Was it not a fact Burke said he learned it from an eminent
bookseller that by 1775 Blackstone's Commentaries had sold nearly
as many copies in America as in England?
While Blackstone had violated the spirit of the common law by con-
fining it in a system, he had provided for the first time the means by
which any literate person could grasp the large outlines of his legal tra-
dition. The vogue of Blackstone, who went through numerous American
editions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, therefore proclaimed
the popularity and the thinness of legal knowledge in America. Black-
stone was to American law what Noah Webster's blue-back speller
was to be to American literacy. With nothing more than the four
volumes of the Commentaries at hand, anyone however far from ancient
professional centers, from courts or legislatures could become an ama-
teur lawyer. Blackstone was a godsend to the rising American, to the
ambitious backwoodsman and the aspiring politician. One of the delight-
ful ironies of American history is that a snobbish Tory barrister,
who had polished his periods to suit the taste of young Oxford gentle-
men, became the mentor of Abe Lincoln and thousands like him. By
making legal ideas and legal jargon accessible in the backwoods, Black-
stone did much to prepare self-made men for leadership in the New
World.
33
The Fusion of Law
and Politics
DURING the whole colonial period, America probably did not
produce a single lawyer who was deeply learned by the strict English
standards. Americans tended to be smatterers and admirers of the law,
THE LEARNED LOSE THEIR MONOPOLIES 203
never its high priests; few if any of them were thoroughly at home in the
man-made jungle of conveyancing, bills in chancery, and real actions.
Still, even the scarcity of lawbooks and the meagerness of the technical
apparatus of legal learning did have some advantages. The few books
available, while sometimes overvalued and idolatrized, were often
thoroughly mastered. Jefferson found his legal learning in a few
classics like Bracton, Coke, and Blackstone (which, as his Common-
place Book shows, he reread and made his own). He was more likely
to see the broad outlines than if he had wandered in a library overflowing
with the disordered legal lore of all past ages. In Lord Coke, for example,
Jefferson saw not merely a crabbed legalist, but the champion of a broad
and still relevant position: "a sounder Whig never wrote, nor profounder
learning in the orthodox doctrines of British liberties. Our lawyers were
then all Whigs." Jefferson much preferred Coke to "the honeyed Mans-
fieldism of Blackstone" which he thought had bred a subtle Toryism,
even among the younger American lawyers who called themselves Whigs.
JefEerson's reverence for the pristine Anglo-Saxon form of English
common law however vaguely grounded in historical facts provided
him with a framework for a sensible legal simplicity and for refurbishing
the rights of Englishmen.
More than one wise modern lawyer has noted how the lawyer-framers
of the Federal Constitution were served by the fact that they had so few
books. Justice Miller, one of the ablest men to sit on the Supreme Court
in the late 19th century, described ignorance as a major shaping factor in
the law of our Western states; the first judges, he is supposed to have
observed, "did not know enough to do the wrong thing, so they did the
right thing."
The New World abounded with legal problems for which English
precedents either did not exist, or were not available on this side of the
Atlantic. So American judges boldly extrapolated half-understood princi-
ples or ingeniously adapted half-irrelevant English legislation. These
tendencies were reenforced in the last third of the 18th century by the
convenient appearance of Blackstone's Commentaries, which also de-
prived colonial lawyers of the dangerous temptation of making their
own code.
While American legal knowledge became simplified and popular, the
very idea of law acquired a new flavor which would long influence
American legal thinking and political institutions. Any system of common
law looks at how things have been done to determine how they ought
to be done: it respects the going machinery of society and looks pri-
marily to its functioning rather than to sudden legislation or to a legal
204 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
code. Strangely enough this tendency was reenforced in colonial America.
The boundary between technical "law" (once the monopoly of a learned
class) and every other kind of knowledge became less clear.
To Americans like Jefferson the laws seemed interfused with everything
else in the community. The numerous letters which Jefferson wrote to
aspiring law students advised them to acquire a good general education,
to read widely, and not to neglect languages, mathematics, or natural
philosophy. "This foundation being laid, you may enter regularly on the
study of the laws, taking with it such of its kindred sciences as will
contribute to eminence in its attainment. The principal of these are
physics, ethics, religion, natural law, belles lettres, criticism, rhetoric
and oratory. The carrying on several studies is attended with advantage.
Variety relieves the mind as well as the eye."
Colleges introduced "legal" matter, not for professional reasons, but
because it was closely connected with theological and "philosophical"
studies. The first curriculum of King's College listed for the
fourth year "the Chief Principles of Law and Government, together with
History, Sacred and Profane" and soon established a professorship of
natural law. Jefferson's own plans, both for the College of William &
Mary and later for the University of Virginia, included a broad study
of law in close relation to humanistic subjects. The wider context of
American legal studies, which shows how far the American concept of
the profession had drifted from its English guild backgrounds, was
nowhere better expressed than in President Ezra Stiles's plan (1777)
for a professorship of law at Yale:
The Professorship of Law is equally important with that of Medicine;
not indeed towards educating Lawyers or Banisters, but for forming
Civilians [citizens]. Fewer than a quarter perhaps of the young gentle-
men educated at College, enter into either of the learned professions of
Divinity, Law or Physic: The greater part of them after finishing the
academic Course return home, mix in with the body of the public, and
enter upon Commerce or the cultivation of their Estates. And yet per-
haps the most of them in the Course of their Lif es are called forth by
their Country into some or other of the various Branches of civil Im-
provement & the public offices in the State. Most certainly it is worthy
of great attention, the Discipline and Education of these in that knowl-
edge which shall qualify them to become useful Members of Society, as
Selectmen, Justices of Peace, Members of the Legislature, Judges of
Courts, & Delegates in Congress. How Happy for a community to
abound with men well instituted in the knowledge of their Rights &
Liberties? This Knowledge is catching, & insinuates [among those]
not of liberal Education to fit them for public service. It is greatly
owing to the Seats of Learning among us that the arduous Conflict of
THE LEARNED LOSE THEIR MONOPOLIES 205
the present day has found America abundantly furnished with Men
adequate to the great and momentous Work of constructing new Policies
or forms of Government and conducting the public arrangements in the
military, naval & political Departments & the whole public administra-
tion of the Republic of the United States, with that Wisdom & Mag-
nanimity which already astonishes Europe and will honor us to late
Posterity. ... It is scarce possible to enslave a Republic of Civilians,
well instructed in their Laws, Rights & Liberties.
In a later age, when the American legal profession was to become
more self-conscious, it would boast of the decisive role of "lawyers" in
founding the nation and its institutions. Of the fifty-six signers of the
Declaration of Independence, twenty-five were "lawyers"; of the fifty-five
members of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, thirty-one
were "lawyers"; in the first Congress, ten of the twenty-nine Senators and
seventeen of the sixty-five Representatives were "lawyers." But, contrary
to common belief, this does not show the importance of a specialized
learned profession in the making of our nation. The American experience
had not bred awe for the learned specialist in law or in anything else.
The boundaries of all American professional privilege were hazy. What
it does show is the pervasiveness of legal competence among American
men of affairs and the vagueness of the boundary between legal and all
other knowledge hi a fluid America. How little does it tell us about Jeffer-
son a self-trained lawyer with a brief apprenticeship in George Wythe's
office to say that he was a "lawyer" by profession!
What it meant to be a lawyer in America was classically expressed in
the career of Andrew Jackson, who at the age of twenty, after an
apprenticeship of rollicking travels with an itinerant court and the tute-
lage of the convivial Colonel John Stokes, in 1787 was declared by the
court to be "a person of unblemished moral character, and . . . competent
. . . knowledge of the law."
This early breakdown of the walls around technical legal knowledge
provides a clue to American political life for decades to come. Out
of a distrust of lawyers grew a widening respect for law. The American
Revolution could be framed in legal language because that language
spoke for the literate community. The great issues of American politics
through the Civil War in the 19th century and the New Deal in the 20th
would be cast in legal language the sacred test of "constitutionality"
precisely because Americans saw the revered legal framework as the
skeleton on which the community had grown. In this use of a legal test
for politics there was a kind of conserving narcissism not often found
among nonprimitive nations. In the world of dreams-come-true the
community had begun to make its actual image the mold of its desires.
PART EIGHT
NEW WORLD MEDICINE
"They have the Happiness to have very few
Doctors, and those such as make use only of
simple Remedies, of which their Woods afford
great Plenty. And indeed, their Distempers are
not many, and their Cures are so generally
known, that there is not Mystery enough, to
make a Trade of Physick there, as the Learned
do in other Countries, to the great oppression of
Mankind."
ROBERT BEVERLEY
34
Nature-Healing and
Simple Remedies
THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE hardly encouraged great work in the
physical sciences. Even in the biological sciences the colonial period was
barren of theoretical advance. But, in some fields of science which had
become overgrown with dogmatic learning in Europe, the simplicity of
American life as well as American naivete proved fruitful in their own
way. Medicine including materia medica, or what was later called
pharmacy or pharmacology was one such field.
Natural history (especially botany) and medicine were closely con-
nected in the 18th century. In those days the most commonly used
medicines were botanical, and the most important treatises on botany
were "herbals" catalogs of common medicinal plants, telling where
and how they grew and what they were good for. Nothing was more
natural than that European-trained physicians, finding themselves in a
new land with many unfamiliar plants, should seize the opportunity for
botanical discoveries. Even laymen studied American flora in the hope
of adding to medical knowledge.
In 1610, during the unhappy early years of the Jamestown colony,
209
210 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
the Governor and Council wrote to the London Company about wide-
spread sickness ("strange fluxes and agues") and dwindling medical
supplies. The company physician, Dr. Lawrence Bohun, looked for the
possible medical uses of local plants. Among other things, he found in
the gum of white poplar a balm which would "heale any green wound,"
and he experimented with sassafras, which was common around James-
town. Tobacco, from its first discovery, was of interest to Europeans
for its medicinal possibilities. Harriot's Briefe and True Report of the
New Found Land of Virginia (1588) touted tobacco as a medicine
which "purgeth superfluous fleame & other grosse humors, openeth all
the pores & passages of the body: by which meanes the use thereof, not
only preserveth the body from obstructions; but also if any be, so that
they have not beene of too long continuance, in short time breaketh
them: whereby their bodies are notably preserved in health, and know
not many greevous diseases wherewithall wee in England are oftentimes
afflicted." It was claimed that smoking tobacco would heal gout and
ague, cure hangovers, and reduce fatigue and hunger. The "Jamestown
Weed" (datura stramonium), which modern medicine has proved to be
sedative and antispasmodic when taken in small doses, and narcotic and
poisonous when taken in larger doses, was praised for its "cooling" effect.
Robert Beverley in 1705 observed "the Planters abhorring all Physick,
except in desperate cases":
The Planters . . . have several Roots natural to the Country, which in
this case they cry up as Infallible. They have the Happiness to have very
few Doctors, and those such as make use only of simple Remedies, of
which their Woods afford great Plenty. And indeed, their Distempers
are not many, and their Cures are so generally known, that there is not
Mystery enough, to make a Trade of Physick there, as the Learned do
in other Countries, to the great oppression of Mankind.
It was two eminent English physicians who persuaded Mark Catesby to
undertake the travels in 1710-19 which produced his Natural History of
Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. He found many therapeutic
plants, including the May-apple, snake-root, ginseng, and witch-hazel.
Among the most useful was the so-called "Tooth-Ache tree" whose
"leaves smell like those of Orange; which with the Seeds and Bark, is
aromatic, very hot and astringent, and is used by the People inhabiting
the Sea Coasts of Virginia and Carolina for the tooth-ach, which has
given it its name." Even Dr. John Morgan, who was devoted to the ways
of European medicine and hoped for the establishment in America of all
the respectable rigidities of European medical training, could not over-
look the peculiarly American opportunities:
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 211
We live on a wide extended continent of which but the smallest por-
tion, even of the inhabited part, has yet been explored. The woods,
the mountains, the rivers and bowels of the earth afford ample scope for
the researches of the ingenious. In this respect an American student has
some considerable advantages over those of Europe, viz. The most
ample field lies before us for the improvement of natural history. The
countries of Europe have been repeatedly traversed by numerous per-
sons of the highest genius and learning, intent upon making the strictest
search into everything which those countries afford; whence there is
less hopes or chance for the students who come after them to make new
discoveries. This part of the world may be looked upon as offering the
richest mines of natural knowledge yet unriffled, sufficient to gratify
the laudable thirst of glory in young inquirers into nature. The dis-
covery must greatly enrich medical science. . . . How many plants are
there, natives of this soil, possessed of peculiar virtues?
This natural-history emphasis among American doctors was en-
couraged not only by New World opportunities, but even by one of
the ancient dogmas of European medicine, the doctrine of "signatures."
This dogma, expressed in the motto similia similibus ("like by like" a
doctrine which was to be curiously confirmed by the use of inoculation)
implied that there was a necessary providential coincidence between
the place where a disease occurred and the place where its remedy would
be found. By the end of the 18th century some scientists were beginning
to doubt this generalization, but it was so widely held that Benjamin
Smith Barton's Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica
(1801-1804) described as "trite" the theory "that every country pos-
sesses remedies that are suited to the cure of its peculiar diseases . . .
that the principal portion of indigenous remedies is to be found among
the vegetables of the countries in which the diseases prevail." Thus it
was widely believed that the remedy for rattlesnake bite would probably
be found on the same American terrain where the rattlesnake was found.
And, sure enough, Polygala Senega (rattlesnake root) proved to be
just the thing! Well might the Rev. Nicholas Collin, rector of the Swedish
Churches in Pennsylvania and something of an inventor and natural
historian, exclaim: "The bountiful Creator discovers his marvels in
proportion to our wants . . . every country has native remedies against
its natural defects." Even when this ancient dogma was diluted into
only a hypothesis or a suspicion, it still encouraged students of American
diseases to take special interest in the plants the Creator had placed here.
In America trained physicians showed an impressive and fruitful in-
terest in the American landscape, its climate, its peculiar plants and
animals. In part this was, of course, only an effect of the close tradi-
212 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
tional association (not particularly fortunate on either side) of botany
and medicine as European academic subjects. But in those days most
scientists, other than mathematicians and astronomers, commonly began
with medical training. Carl Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist, had
been trained in medicine, and Herman Boerhaave, the director of a
botanic garden, dominated European medicine in the early 18th century
from his professorship of botany and medicine at the University of
Leyden. To his disciples a botanical garden was standard equipment
for medical institutions. Even in the early 19th century, the College
of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City still maintained a botanical
garden for teaching purposes.
Many of the leading American naturalists in the provincial age had
medical backgrounds. Some, like John Bartram and John Clayton, were
self-educated, but Cadwallader Golden, for example, possessed a London
medical education, and Benjamin Smith Barton, author of the first
notable American treatise on botany (Elements of Botany, 1803), and
professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, had come to
the subject through materia medica.
Especially in the South, where books and trained experts of any
kind were scarce, the physicians often the only persons of scientific
training for miles around became the leading botanical discoverers.
The career of Dr. Alexander Garden, after whom the "Gardenia" was
named, was a parable of the opportunities, temptations, and limitations
of American life. During his thirty years as a physician in Charleston,
South Carolina, he discovered many new species and genera and was
perhaps the most accomplished American botanist of the age; but
even he never produced a significant systematic work. His most im-
portant scientific writing was in his letters. Soon after arriving in
Charleston in 1752 with a medical degree from Edinburgh, where his
botanical interests had been stimulated in the University's botanical
gardens, he took up a correspondence with European naturalists in-
cluding Linnaeus, and became acquainted with Americans like Golden,
Clayton, and John Baxtram, with whom he exchanged observations.
Although energetic and imaginative, Garden's diffuse interests tended
to be focused mainly on the questions put to him by European scientists.
"In Charleston we are a set of the busiest, most bustling, hurrying
animals imaginable," he complained, "and yet we really do not do much,
but we must appear to be doing. And this kind of important hurry
appears among all ranks, unless among the gentlemen planters, who are
absolutely above every occupation but eating, drinking, lolling, smoking
and sleeping, which five modes of action constitute the essence of their
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 213
life and existence." Linnaeus urged him to collect the fish, reptiles, and
insects of Carolina, with the result that Garden's name appeared more
often than that of any other American in the famous twelfth edition of
Linnaeus' Systema Naturae. But Garden never became more than a
devoted gatherer of the raw materials from which European scientists
built their systems.
Dr. John Mitchell of Urbanna, Virginia, who had also been trained
in Edinburgh, claimed twenty-five new genera of plants, which made him
the rival of Garden as a botanical discoverer. He described to the Royal
Society the life-cycle and reproductive mechanism of that peculiar Amer-
ican animal, the opossum, and he inquired into the environmental causes
of differences of color in the human races. The first satisfactory map of
British and French North America (1755), which was used at the
Peace Conference of 1783 and was still standard at the end of the
century, was his work.
The members of this far-flung circle of American physician-naturalists
were held together by their collaboration and by their half-known and
tantalizingly amorphous American subject-matter. The systematizing
of their knowledge they left to their correspondents in England, France,
Germany, Holland, and Sweden, while they threw their energy into
collecting, describing, and interpreting the natural novelties of their
New World.
Any student of European medical education during the 17th and 18th
centuries cannot fail to see the significance of this concrete and practical
focus of the energies of American physicians. European medical learning,
especially in the great University centers, was still enveloped in dogma.
"Vitalists," "iatrochemists," and "iatrophysicists" argued with one an-
other over which of their single causes explained all human health. With
few exceptions, every eminent professor of medicine offered his own
simplistic explanation of all bodily functions; every illness was supposed
somehow to be another maladjustment of the general "system" of the
body. Some attributed all diseases to disorder in the "humors," others to
disturbance of the bodily "tension," and still others to even cruder
doctrinaire causes. American physicians, if academically trained at all,
had been trained in such dogmas, but the absence of American medical
schools until 1765 removed them from the arenas of such tempting
but fruitless debate. Later, as American medical education cc improved,"
more such medical dogmatists would be found on this side of the water.
Perhaps the most famous of them was Benjamin Rush, who expounded
214 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
a monistic theory of bodily tension and who had nearly unbounded
faith in bleeding. The ultimate proof of his theory was that any patient
who was bled long enough would eventually relax!
Even the most charitable historian cannot be impressed by the amount
of useful knowledge at the disposal of those learned European Doctors
of Physick in the 18th century. The rise of Newtonian physics, a grand
new system, seemed to encourage doctors in their temptation to make
a simple system of the body. It was not until the growth of pathological
anatomy, stimulated by the work of Morgagni of Padua in 1761, that
the classification, understanding, and successful remedying of specific
diseases made significant progress in the European medical schools.
Until well into the 19th century dogmas were so rigid, theories so
doctrinaire, hands and instruments so germ-ridden, and "remedies" so
enervating that the learned doctor often did less to cure than to kill
the patient. If the American patient had no other advantage, he was
lucky that so much learned error had not been brought to these shores.
The common medical treatments here did not cure any more effectively
than those administered in the Old World, but they probably interfered
less with the patient's recovery. While the European physician frequently
relied on extreme measures, which carried his simplistic dogma to its
logical if sometimes fatal conclusion, the American amateur was
more likely to let nature take its course. Instead of relying on ruthless
emetics, purges, and bleeding (what medical historians have called
"heroic" remedies), the self-trained practitioner was inclined to more
timid and less damaging treatments.
The ministers in early Massachusetts, who were probably most familiar
with the diseases of their community, were inclined to prescribe such
wholesome and harmless treatments as rest, fresh air, and massage.
The first medical publication of British North America was not written
by a trained physician. A Brief Rule to Guide the Common-People of
New-England How to Order Themselves and Theirs in the Small Pocks,
or Measels 9 by Thomas Thacher, minister of the Old South (Third)
Church in Boston, was published in January 1678 at the height of a
smallpox epidemic. This broadside contained nothing new. It was ap-
parently cribbed from the great English physician Thomas Sydenham
himself a pioneer in opposing "heroic" treatments who had urged
allowing "Nature to do her own work, requiring nothing of the Physician,
but to regulate her, when she is exorbitant, and to f ortifie her, when she
is too weak." The single sheet which Thacher composed was a simple
list of thirty numbered items in lay language. "As soon as this disease
therefore appears by its signs, let the sick abstein from Flesh and Wine,
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 215
and open Air, let him use small Bear wanned with a Tost for his
ordinary drink, and moderately when he desires it. For food use water-
gruel, water-potage, and other things having no manifest hot quality,
easy of digestion, boild Apples, and rmlV sometimes for change, but
the coldness taken off." Thacher freely confessed himself "though no
Physitian, yet a well wisher to the sick," but doctors even now agree
that Thacher's Brief Rule gave an adequate description of smallpox in
nearly modern terms and offered a sensible regimen for the patient.
It was a useful guide, perhaps even more useful than one by a learned
doctor would have been. It was reprinted during the epidemics of 1702,
and again in 1721.
In America it was not only the layman who inclined toward simpler,
more common-sense treatments. The therapeutics of Virginia physicians
in the 17th century was much simpler than that of their English con-
temporaries. Drugs, especially the exotic imported ones, were extremely
expensive, and apothecaries skilled in elaborate concoctions were rare
on this side of the ocean. Master pharmacists in Virginia sent their
apprentices into the woods to find native remedies; most of their medi-
cines were therefore simple, home-made, and less likely to disturb the
healing course of nature. We cannot appreciate this simplicity until
we have seen the indigestible concoctions of learned European doctors,
which included human excreta, urine, and nearly everything else, mixed
by complicated formulae. American physicians, especially the more
learned of them, were not always free from such well-established prac-
tices: Governor Winthrop, for example, used to prescribe a paste made
from wood lice. Cotton Mather reported to the Royal Society in London
in 1724 that Boston physicians advised the swallowing of "Leaden
Bullets" for "that miserable Distemper which they called the Twisting
of the Guts." On one occasion the prescription entered the lung of a
patient; "from which . . . unhappy experiments, I think, I should endure
abundant, before I tried such a remedy."
Even the eminent 19th-century physician Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
(the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table) though hostile to the Puritans,
had to admit that the remedies of their clergymen-physicians were less
harmful than those of their European contemporaries.
What has come down to us of the first century of medical practice,
in the hands of Winthrop and Oliver, is comparatively simple and reason-
able. I suspect that the conditions of rude, stern life, in which the colo-
nists found themselves in the wilderness, took the nonsense out of them,
as the exigencies of a campaign did out of our physicians and surgeons
in the late [Civil] war. Good food and enough of it, pure air and water,
216 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
cleanliness, good attendance, an anaesthetic, an opiate, a stimulant,
quinine, and two or three common drugs, proved to be the marrow of
medical treatment; and the fopperies of the pharmacopoeia went the
way of embroidered shirts and white kid gloves and malacca joints, in
their time of need. 'Good wine is the best cordiall for her,' said Gover-
nor John Winthrop, Junior, to Samuel Symonds, speaking of that gentle-
man's wife, just as Sydenham, instead of physic, once ordered a roast
chicken and a pint of canary for his patient in male hysterics.
One of the best examples of the dangers of the overzealous physician
was in the area of prenatal care. In the days before antisepsis, when
the causes of childbed fever were still unknown, it was during prenatal
examination that the physician was most likely to introduce infection.
The crude statistics of deaths from puerperal sepsis in Virginia before
1860 show a much higher mortality rate among whites attended by
doctors than among Negroes attended by midwives. Similarly, the
amateur, personal, small-scale nursing of colonial Virginia seems to
have been superior to that of the great English municipal hospitals, where
the poor, the insane, and the sick were brought together and where the
manners and morals of the nurses were proverbially corrupt.
The scarcity of professionals taught Virginians to do things for them-
selves. Crossing the back-country to a remote plantation or to survey
their lands, they had to provide their own medical services: William
Byrd, for example, had no physician on his expeditions. When travel-
ing into the North Carolina borderlands in 1733, lie was troubled by
"an impertinent Tooth." "Tooth-Drawers we had none amongst us, nor
any of the Instruments they make use of. However, Invention supply'd
this want very happily, and I contriv'd to get rid of this troublesome
Companion by cutting a Caper." Byrd simply tied a string from his
tooth to a log, and capered about till the tooth came out.
On any large plantation there was almost daily need for the layman
to act the doctor. The Virginia planter could no more afford to summon
a doctor for the minor ailments of his slaves than a modern farmer
can afford to call a carpenter every time his barn or his fences require
minor repairs. Even on large plantations the owner commonly relied
on himself, his wife, or the overseer for routine medical treatment and
for more serious cases in an emergency. When William Byrd arrived at
his plantation near Richmond in October, 1732 and learned of a fatal
epidemic of dysentery raging in the neighborhood, he instructed his
steward "to make use of the following Remedy, in case it shou'd come
amongst my People. To let them Blood immediately about 8 Ounces;
the next day to give them a Dose of Indian Physic, and to repeat the
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 217
Vomit again the Day following, unless the Symptoms abated. In the
meantime, they shou'd eat nothing but Chicken Broth, and Poacht Eggs,
and drink nothing but a Quarter of a Pint of Milk boil'd with a Quart
of Water, and Medicated with a little Mullein Root, or that of tha
prickly Pear, to restore the Mucus of the Bowels, and heal the Excoria-
tion. At the same time, I order'd him to communicate this Method to
all the poor Neighbors, and especially to my Overseers, with Strict
Orders to use it on the first appearance of that Distemper, because in
that, and all other Sharp Diseases, Delays are very dangerous." George
Washington commonly prescribed for the ills of his slaves, and in his
own last illness it was his overseer, and not a doctor, who first treated
htm by bleeding. When Thomas Jefferson returned to Monticello from
the White House one summer, he inoculated with his own hand seventy
or eighty people on his plantations and he supervised his neighbors in
the inoculation of another hundred-odd.
Much of the burden of doctoring fell upon the planter's wife, who
might be called out of bed at any hour of the night to deliver a baby
or to care for the violently ill in the slave-quarters. The nursery for the
infants of slave working-mothers was in her charge. "She takes great
care of her negroes," the Marquis de Chastellux wrote in 1781 of Mary
Willing Byrd, widow of William Byrd HI, "makes them as happy as their
situation will admit, and serves them herself as a doctor in time of sick-
ness. She has even made some interesting discoveries on the disorders
incident to them, and discovered a very salutary method of treating
a sort of putrid fever which carries them off commonly in a few days,
and against which the physicians of the country have exerted themselves
without success."
It is not surprising to find medical guides for laymen among the
commonest books in Virginia libraries. Every Man his own Doctor; or,
the Poor Planter's Physician (1734) attained vast popularity by pre-
scribing "plain and easy means for persons to cure themselves of all,
or most of the distempers, incident to the climate, and with very little
charge, the medicines being chiefly of the growth and production of this
country." Benjamin Franklin published three editions of this book in
Philadelphia (1734, 1736, 1737). The first pharmacopoeia ever printed
in British America was Dr. William Brown's thirty-two page pamphlet,
which he put together in 1778, in the stringent days of the Revolution,
to list the simplest, cheapest, and most available drugs.
The colonial situation, which sometimes bred a disrespect for learning,
also encouraged distrust of the omniscient professional, who already
was receiving his share of ridicule in Europe. The elder William Byrd
218 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
distrusted doctors so much that he would not call one even in his last
illness. His son, the famous William Byrd II, also preferred his own
practical methods. And in Franklin's Philadelphia people were handing
about a pointed epigram of "The Advantages of having two Phisicians":
One prompt Phisician like a sculler plies,
And all his Art, and skill applies;
But two Phisicians, like a pair of Oars,
Convey you soonest to the Stygian Shores.
Jefferson in 1807 was eloquent against the presumptuous dogmatism of
the physicians:
Having been so often a witness to the salutary efforts which nature
makes to re-establish the disordered functions, he [the wise physician]
should rather trust to their action, than hazard the interruption of that,
and a greater derangement of the system, by conjectural experiments
on a machine so complicated & so unknown as the human body, & a
subject so sacred as human life. Or, if the appearance of doing some-
thing be necessary to keep alive the hope & spirits of the patient, it
should be of the most innocent character. One of the most successful
physicians I have ever known, has assured me, that he used more bread
pills, drops of colored water, & powders of hickory ashes, than of all
other medicines put together. It was certainly a pious fraud. But the
adventurous physician goes on, & substitutes presumption for knol-
edge. From the scanty field of what is known, he launches into the
boundless region of what is unknown. He establishes for his guide some
fanciful theory of corpuscular attraction, of chemical agency, of
mechanical powers, of stimuli, of irritability accumulated or exhausted,
of depletion by the lancet & repletion by mercury, or some other in-
genious dream, which lets him into all nature's secrets at short hand.
On the principle which he thus assumes, he forms his table of nosology,
arrays his diseases into families, and extends his curative treatment, by
analogy, to all the cases he has thus arbitrarily marshalled together. I
have lived myself to see the disciples of Hoffman, Boerhaave, Stahl,
Cullen, Brown, succeed one another like the shifting figures of a magic
lantern, & their fancies, like the dresses of the annual doll-babies from
Paris, becoming, from their novelty, the vogue of the day, and yielding
to the next novelty their ephemeral favor. The patient, treated on the
fashionable theory, sometimes gets well in spite of the medicine.
From this side of the Atlantic, that Europe, which has taught us so many
other things, will at length be led into sound principles in this branch
of science.
While Americans seemed somewhat less vulnerable to complicated
forms of quackery, their circumstances tempted them in the direction of
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 219
nature-healing. The bookish cure-alls of the Doctors of Physick were
sometimes replaced by the environmental cure-alls sensationally adver-
tised in promotional literature: the New England air, the Virginia water,
the Georgia climate. Where Nature was so generous, men easily ex-
pected too much of her.
The record of the age did not yet justify Dr. David Ramsay's prophecy
on the second anniversary of Independence that the arts and sciences
"require a fresh soil, and always flourish most in new countries." He was
closer to the truth when he boasted of the success of amateur doctors
whose common sense was accomplishing what academic learning had
found difficult or impossible. "The pride of science is sometimes humbled
on seeing and hearing the many cures that are wrought by these pupils
of experience, who, without theory or system, by observation and practice
acquire a dexterity in curing common diseases."
35
Focus on the Community
IT WAS PRECISELY in the area of common diseases which now
obviously became problems in public health that American experience
had most to offer. Some diseases which in Europe seemed part of the
inevitable round of life could be avoided here by prudent public meas-
ures. Ailments which were endemic, or continually prevalent, in England
tended to become epidemic sudden and dramatic menaces to the com-
munity in America.
Public concern over a disease depends less on the actual mortality than
on the dramatic intensity with which it is impressed on the public. Al-
though smallpox probably caused fewer fatalities among white settlers in
America in proportion to the population than it had in England, it oc-
curred here almost exclusively in the spectacular form of epidemics.
During the 17th and 18th centuries in England and on the European
continent, smallpox was a common disease of childhood. By the time a
person had grown up he had almost certainly been exposed to it and
220 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
had either proven himself immune or had acquired immunity by surviv-
ing the disease. Smallpox was therefore not an epidemic disease among
adults in Europe. But in America, where the disease had not existed
until it was introduced by Europeans, it was much less widespread. Many
inhabitants lived through childhood without having been exposed.
During the 18th century, a common American objection to sending
sons to England for a higher education was the mortal danger from small-
pox. When a French visitor, Francis Louis Michel, visited William &
Mary College in 1702, he was surprised to find as many as forty students
there; he learned that wealthy parents who formerly had sent their sons
to England now preferred the intellectual crudities of a colonial education
to the perils of the English smallpox. The Rev. Hugh Jones, in 1724,
observed that more Virginians would have been given an English educa-
tion "were they not afraid of the Small-Pox, which most commonly proves
fatal to them." The church of Virginia might not have developed its dis-
tinctive features and might not have been quite so autonomous, if parents
had been readier to risk an English education for children wishing to
enter the church.
Because smallpox had been unknown among the Indians, they proved
especially vulnerable. In 1633, as Governor Thomas Hutchinson later
recorded in his History, "the small pox made terrible havock among the
Indians of Massachusets. . . . They were destitute of every thing proper
for comfort and relief and died in greater proportion titan is known
among the English. John Sagamore of Winesimet and James of Lynn
with almost all their people, died of the distemper." Even as late as the
19th century, certain Indian tribes which had until then escaped the
disease were being wiped out; fatalities in some tribes exceeded 90 per
cent. There can be little doubt that more Indians died from epidemics
than from white men's muskets.
Among the white settlers, too, smallpox was primarily an epidemic
disease. It swept through the colonies at intervals sometimes a genera-
tion apart and afflicted large numbers of adults. No longer one of the
normal trials of childhood, it became a sudden and terrifying scourge that
paralyzed the community and forced the regular activities of commerce
and government to be suspended. Where communities were small and
nearly all types of skill were scarce, losing the only carpenter or gun-
smith put everyone in trouble. Even the very high proportion of fatalities
due to disease is no adequate measure of the impact on the life of the
community.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of the public-health emphasis in
American medicine came from New England, where compact Boston and
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 221
the Puritan concern with community set the stage. One of the most
successful onslaughts against disease in all American history took place
there in the 18th century. How to treat the smallpox was publicly debated
by doctors, ministers, and journalists. The unlikely hero of the story was
none other than Cotton Mather ( 1663-1728) , on whom has been focused
the ill-informed hatred of generations of liberal historians. But sober
scholarship has lately begun to divest Mather of his Mephistophelian
character, so that we can now see him as a vivid symbol of the potentiali-
ties as well as the limitations of early New-England science.
Cotton Mather had a strangely miscellaneous, observant, and practical
mind. We can understand Mather better if we thinV of Mm as an early
version of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), who in fact heard Mather
preach on several occasions in Boston. He had read Mather's Essays to Do
Good (Franklin's first pen name was "Silence Do-Good"), and in his
Autobiography called it the book "which perhaps gave me a turn of think-
ing that had an influence on some of the principal future events of my life."
In it he probably discovered the literary genre which he was to make
famous in his Poor Richard. Even Franklin's "Junto" both the general
idea and the detailed procedure for its meetings seems to have been
borrowed from Mather's scheme of neighborhood benefit societies for
Boston, Some of the most characteristic of Franklin's enterprises were
thus directly suggested by Cotton Mather, but more important than any
direct influence were their intellectual aflinities.
It is misleading to separate Mather and Franklin by the academic
antitheses between "Calvinism" and "The Enlightenment." The similari-
ties in the interests and achievements of these two great men reveal
distinctive features of American culture in the provincial age: an undis-
criminating universality of interest surprisingly unconfined by a priori
theories; a lack of originality; an intense practicality; an unsystematic
and random approach to philosophy; and, above all, a willingness to be
challenged by New World opportunities. In his own day, Cotton Mather's
fame as an observer of American novelties reached British scientists, who
awarded him an honorary degree from the University of Aberdeen (1710)
and a coveted membership in the Royal Society (1713) .
By the standards of his day Mather was an alert and accurate observer
of nature. His scientific communications (which counted nearly 100 after
1712) to European friends and fellow-naturalists included notes on
American plants and Indian cures; on American birds, including the wild
turkey, the eagle and the vast flights of pigeons; on the rattlesnake; on the
violence of thunder and lightning in America; on a triton; on an egg
found within a hen's egg; on Indian divisions of time; and on dozens of
222 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
similarly miscellaneous items. In a letter (July 24, 1716) which accom-
panied a shipment of six or seven plants peculiar to America, he gave the
earliest known account of plant hybridization. His observation signif-
icantly concerned Indian corn, a plant which later geneticists also found
peculiarly well-suited to their experiments. Mather was even open-minded
enough to accept the hypothesis, then newly expounded by Nehemiah
Grew, that flowering plants reproduced sexually.
From his early years Cotton Mather had been interested in medicine.
He had once thought of making it his profession, but the lack of formal
courses on the subject at Harvard had left him to his own devices, and
largely to independent reading. In this respect, too, Mather's career has
a later parallel in that of Franklin; for, like Franklin's discoveries
in electricity, Mather's medical ideas could hardly have grown in the
mind of a learned professional.
So far as we now know, the first general treatise on medicine written
in the English colonies in America was the work which Cotton Mathel
completed in 1724. The title of his work, "The Angel of Bethesda," came
from the name of the famous healing-pool mentioned in the Gospel ac-
cording to John (5:2-4), but it seems to have been suggested to Mather
by the writings of the eminent physicist Robert Boyle. While Mather and
others published many fragmentary items on such topics as smallpox and
measles, this general work, although widely known to exist in manuscript,
was not published during the 18th century. Cotton's son, Samuel, for a
dozen years after Cotton's death had tried hard to have it published.
Mather's interest in diseases was probably sharpened by his Puritan
theology, with its emphasis on original sin and on the dark dualism of
man's nature. In a devious way the Puritan emphasis on sin thus seemed
to reenforce the empirical emphasis of American science; it may even
have helped liberate American medical practice from the dogmatism of
their learned European contemporaries. To Mather, at least, this connec-
tion of ideas seemed obvious enough; he explained at the beginning of
his first chapter:
Lett us look upon Sin as the Cause of Sickness. There are it may be
Two Thousand Sicknesses: and indeed, any one of them able to crush
us! But what is the Cause of all? Bear in Mind, That Sin was that which
first brought Sickness upon a Sinful World, and which yett continues
to sicken the World, with a World of Diseases.
Mather's work became a survey of diseases. One of the proposals for its
printing called it "An Essay upon the Common Maladies of Mankind:
offering, first, The Sentiments of Piety, whereto the Invalids are to be
awakened in and from their bodily Maladies. And then, a rich Collection
of plain but potent and approv'd Remedies for the Maladies."
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 223
The book made no claim to originality. "Nor, can it be Expected,"
Mather explained, "that while Colonies are yett so much in their Infancy
as ours are, and have had so many Serpents also to crush while in their
cradles as ours have had, they can be so circumstanced as to produce
many acute mathematicians, or allow them the Leisure for extraordinary
Inventions and Performances/' But Mather did himself an injustice: by
the very organization and emphasis of his volume he had put himself
among the most progressive medical students of his day. The idea of the
separateness of diseases had only begun to make headway abroad. Until
the middle of the 16th century the dominating concern of European medi-
cal men had been "the general state of the system" of which all diseases
were thought to be mere variants. Only with the work of Paracelsus in
the Renaissance was there a serious revival of the idea that there were
many different diseases, each with its own causes and cures. In the 17th
century the English physician Sydenham insisted that particular diseases
might be as different as particular plants and animals, and that therefore
they must be examined and classified in detail. How little progress had
been made by 1700 appears from the fact that there were then known
only two specific drugs (cinchona bark yielding quinine against malaria;
and mercury against syphilis); even these had probably come directly
from folk-medicine.
Mather's "Angel of Bethesda" expressed an empirical view alien to
many learned European doctors. He showed himself less interested
in the "causes" than in the remedies of diseases; his pages abound in
what he called "remarkable, and often experimented" cures. In a chapter
on the "Uncertainties and Contradictions" of Physicians, he illustrated
the vagaries of learned doctors by their contradictory prescriptions for
the consumption. "And here," Mather explains, "we will not concern our-
selves with the Differences among the Physicians, about the Cause of this
Distemper; (whereupon, who can read the Collection made by Dolaeus,
and not cry out, The Diviners are mad!) but only see, how they differ
about the Cure of it."
His hope that there might be a way to save the New England com-
munity from the scourge of smallpox was aroused by an item he read in
the Transactions of the Royal Society of London for 1714. This was a
letter from a Turkish doctor describing how "inoculation," or the delib-
erate infection of a healthy person with matter from a person suffering
from the smallpox, usually produced a light case of the disease from which
the patient recovered, and to which he was thereafter immune. Mather
then wrote to a doctor in London:
224 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
How does it come to pass, that no more is done to bring this operation,
into experiment & into Fashion in England? When there are so many
Thousands of People, that would give many Thousands of Pounds, to
have the Danger and Horror of this frightful Disease well over with
them. I beseech you, syr, to move it, and save more Lives than Dr.
Sydenham. For my own part, if I should live to see the Small-Pox again
enter into our Gty, I would immediately procure a Consult of our
Physicians, to Introduce a Practice, which may be of so very happy a
Tendency. But could we hear, that you have done it before us, how
much would That embolden us!
Mather found his opportunity in April 1721, when a ship from the
West Indies brought a smallpox epidemic to Boston. The events of the
next decades sharpened the contrast between the medical opportunities
on the two sides of the Atlantic. During the unusual outbreak of small-
pox in London in that year, the fashionable Lady Mary Wortiey Montagu,
who had brought the practice from Turkey, finally persuaded George I
to permit the inoculation of his two granddaughters. Despite the royal
example, only about twenty scattered inoculations were performed in
London; and, when two deaths occurred, the popular opposition in-
creased and was reenforced by the medical profession. Inoculations tem-
porarily ceased in England. They were soon resumed in considerable
numbers in different parts of the country, but not enough in any one com-
munity to justify conclusions about the technique as a measure of public
health. London, a sprawling city where smallpox was always present, was
not a favorable proving-ground. No substantial progress was made until
a serious London epidemic in 1752 focused public attention on the prob-
lem; and by that time the American successes, widely advertised in Eng-
land, were an old story.
American progress against smallpox began when Mather publicly
appealed to the physicians of Boston in early June 1721 to try inocula-
tion to protect tiie community. He set off a violent controversy. As a
whole the learned doctors led by the splenetic Dr. William Douglass,
the only physician in the city with a medical degree opposed the experi-
ment. They were understandably annoyed that laymen should try to tell
them how to practice their art, and should urge techniques borrowed from
''the Mussel-men, & faithful people of the prophet Mahomet." They did
have the solid objection that the practice, as then crudely conducted, ac-
tually tended to spread the disease. But they leaned heavily on theological
objections: to inoculate, they said, would violate "the all-wise Providence
of God Almighty" by "trusting more the extra groundless Machinations
of Men than to our Preserver in the ordinary course of Nature." The
New England Coitrant, just begun by James Franklin with the help of
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 225
his younger brother Benjamin, true to the conservatism of the colonial
press, opposed Mather's new-fangled practice. But many of the clergy
joined Mather in demanding a fair trial for inoculation. Passions ran
high. Heated pamphlets were exchanged, with Mather producing over half
a dozen. Public opinion became literally explosive: in November a bomb
was thrown into Mather's house.
Everybody agreed that the cure of smallpox was a public problem.
Despite the opposition, despite prohibition by the town government, and
despite threats of divine vengeance, Zabdiel Boylston, supported by
Mather and his clerical cohorts, managed to perform a number of inocula-
tions in Boston during the epidemic. These were sufficiently numerous to
provide statistical evidence that the calculated risk of death from inocula-
tion was smaller than the risk in cases naturally contracted. In March
1722, after the worst of the epidemic was over, Mather pointed out to
the Secretary of the Royal Society in London that of nearly 300 inocu-
lated in Boston only five or six had died (and perhaps these had already
been naturally infected before their inoculation), while of the more than
5000 who caught the disease naturally, nearly 900 had died. This meant
that there was about nine times as much chance of death if one caught
the smallpox in the ordinary course of infection as compared with the
danger from inoculation. The fact that about half the population of
Boston had contracted smallpox during the epidemic showed that from
the point of view of the community as a whole the risk of inoculation was
very much worth taking.
The collection of these Boston statistics was a pioneer work in public
health, one of the first cases of quantitative analysis of such a medical
problem. They later proved significant, not only in establishing inocula-
tion as a measure of preventive medicine, but as valuable raw material
for the development of the "calculus of probabilities" by mathematicians
Europeans, of course!
More than any other single fact, Mather's practical success with inocu-
lation established the idea that the smallpox might eventually be con-
quered, and this incidentally opened men's minds to the curability of
other diseases. Dr. Douglass himself bore witness to the power of the
American empirical atmosphere; by the time the next Boston smallpox
epidemic was imported from Ireland in 1729-30, he and most of his
fellow physicians had been persuaded of the advantages of inoculation
when properly controlled and they actually inoculated their own patients.
In 1755 Douglass declared that the risk from inoculation was only two
to three per cent and could still further be reduced. "I am at a loss for
the reasons, why inoculation hitherto is not much used in our mother
226 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
country, Great-Britain; considering that it has with good success been
practised in our colonies or plantations, particularly in Boston, New-
York, Philadelphia, and Charles-town of South-Carolina."
The influence of the Boston experiments spread up and down the
colonies. When, early in 1738, a ship from Africa brought a smallpox
epidemic to South Carolina a province having "more Lands than
Inhabitants to spare" which had not suffered such a seizure for nearly
thirty years, Dr. James Kilpatrick and his fellow physicians at once used
inoculation on a large scale. In Charleston, which then possessed a popu-
lation of around five thousand, one physician estimated that he inoculated
450 with his own hands. Before the epidemic abated about a thousand
had received inoculation. The mortality rate for inoculated per-
sons, according to Dr. Kilpatrick's account, was somewhere around
one per cent, a minute figure compared with the heavy mortality of those
naturally infected. In establishing inoculation as an American institution,
a strong, if crude, empirical strain, a carelessness of theory, and an in-
sistence on results were decisive. The dubious logic of Kilpatrick's
propaganda pamphlet was often repeated: "That Nothing but the real
Success of this Method could ever have continued it to this Time." But
there was good sense in his warning that learned physicians beware of
the "natural Shallowness and acquired Obscurity" which tempted them
to ignore obviously successful results. There was a conscious continuity
in the American practice; Kilpatrick, for example, was careful to offer
a statistical chart of the earlier successes in the Boston epidemic of 1721.
At the same time, common sense itself seemed to oppose the practice.
"The Novelty of seeking Security from a Distemper, by rushing into the
Embraces of it," Dr. Kilpatrick observed, "could naturally have very
little Tendency to procure it a good Reception on its first Appearance."
And when popular and professional fears were reenforced by the "better
opinion" back home in England they were not easily overcome. Nearly
every colony prohibited inoculation at some time or other, but such laws
did not stick. By 1760 the colonies were coming to regulate rather than
to prohibit the practice; and by 1775, in the Middle and Southern Colo-
nies at least, the laws aimed only to provide reasonable safeguards against
the spread of infection by inoculated persons. Even in New England,
where some laws prohibited the practice generally, the laws were sus-
pended to allow inoculation during epidemics. In September 1774, when
the Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia, the physicians of
the city agreed to inoculate no more during the sitting of the
Congress, "as several of the Northern and Southern delegates are under-
stood not to have had that disorder. 9 '
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 227
Early in the Revolution the army carried smallpox all over the colonies.
General George Washington, on the advice of Dr. John Morgan, phy-
sician-in-chief of the American armies, ordered the inoculation of the
whole army. This mass inoculation, in special hospitals set up for the
purpose, was probably the most extensive experiment of its kind until
that day. When smallpox came to Boston again in 1792, nearly half of
its twenty thousand inhabitants were inoculated.
Before the end of the colonial era, the smallpox menace which in-
creased in England until nearly 1800 was well under control in Amer-
ica: epidemics were less frequent and stirred less terror. A larger
consequence of the American practical success was that it helped prepare
men's minds, on both sides of the ocean, for the next step in the battle
against the disease. At the end of the 18th century when Edward Tenner
made the epochal discovery of vaccination, fewer people were frightened
by the theoretic paradox. Within a dozen years of Tenner's discoveries
and Benjamin Waterhouse's communication of them to the American
newspaper-reading public (March 12, 1799 in the Columbian Sentinel),
vaccination was widespread in America. State governments began sub-
sidizing it, and the Congress authorized a Federal Vaccine Agent to send
the virus post-free anywhere in the United States.
36
The General Practitioner
IN ENGLAND during America's provincial age, a "profession" could
be precisely defined as an occupation "fit for gentlemen.'* Common usage
referred (in Toseph Addison's phrase) to "the three professions of
divinity, law, and physic." If none of these was sure to make a man rich,
any one would give him a comfortably high social position. People in-
cluded physicians among the professions; but they did not include
surgeons or apothecaries, however skilled or learned, for theirs were
not considered suitable occupations for members of the upper classes.
These English boundaries between occupations, and hence between
228 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
departments of knowledge, embodied the social snobbery of a well-estab-
lished aristocracy. Exclusiveness, selfishness, and slothiulness had pro-
duced rigid corporations and petrified bodies of learning; they resisted
new knowledge and new ways of doing things.
Next to the clergy, and perhaps the law, medicine was the ear-
liest and most elaborately subdivided of English learned vocations.
Nowhere were guild distinctions more subtle, more intricate, or more
firmly entrenched. By the 18th century, however, the powerful forces of
the Industrial Revolution were breaking down the ancient monopolies of
the craft and commercial guilds; government regulation was becoming
ineffective. But in areas of advanced and specialized learning, particu-
larly in medicine, the old monopolies remained, and in some cases had
even become more sharply defined. These occupational compartments
perpetuated the compartments of thought.
In the early middle ages the "Doctor of Physick" was commonly trained
in a monastic school; by the 15th century he was a man who had been
graduated in medicine and had received from the University a license
to practice. Yet his field was much more limited than that of the modern
medical doctor. Necessarily a master of the classical languages in
which medical knowledge from the past had been preserved, he was also
a man of general learning. Thus, when Henry VIII chartered the Royal
College of Physicians in 1518, he intended to set up both a learned
academy and an exclusive guild for these practitioners of "physick."
Surgery was quite another matter. It held a much lower status. It had
not been studied in the medieval universities, partly because of the ban
on shedding of blood by the clergy and partly because its manual char-
acter made it less dignified. The healing and curing of wounds and all
surgery and tooth-drawing came within the province of the barbers, who
had had a guild of their own from the early fourteenth century. After
1540, practitioners of these skills were organized as the Barber-Surgeons,
but a distinction within the guild forbade the barber to act as surgeon
(except for drawing teeth) and forbade the surgeon to shave anyone.
A widening social gulf then separated medicine and surgery, the two
great branches of medical practice which now seem to us so closely
related.
Pharmacy was still another specialty. Apothecaries originally were a
species of grocer and were members of the grocers* guild, but in 1617
apothecaries received their own chartered monopoly and grocers were
forbidden to sell drugs. Midwifery was yet another vocation. At least
until the end of the 17th century it was practiced almost exclusively by
women licensed by their bishops and later sometimes licensed by the
Barber-Surgeons.
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 229
During the 17th and 18th centuries in England some changes mostly
for the worse were taking place in the organization of the numerous
medical professions. Rigidity and complexity increased, and there was no
substantial improvement in the quality of instruction or in professional
standards. By the 18th century, the Royal College of Physicians selected
its entrants largely on the basis of their social accomplishments and
ceased to offer any instruction worthy of the name; neither Oxford nor
Cambridge had any longer an active school of medicine. Somehow or
other due perhaps to a line of brilliant practitioners the surgeons'
branch of the Barber-Surgeons 5 Company seems to have avoided fossiliza-
tion. But they had troubles of their own; the physicians continued to lord
it over them. A great nuisance which continued into the early 18th
century was the ancient requirement that, before a surgeon could per-
form an operation, he had to secure a license from a bishop. Not until
1745 did the surgeons manage to secede from the barbers and form their
own company. Apothecaries, following a lengthy conflict with the
physicians, obtained legal authority in the early 18th century to carry
on a limited and inferior type of medical practice. To add to this prolific
confusion, there were numerous regional distinctions. By the end of
the 18th century Great Britain had eighteen medical licensing authorities,
each limited both in function and territory. Historians of the subject now
throw up their hands at any effort to make sense of these myriad over-
lapping monopolies and regulations.
This attic-full of institutions was not transported to the New World,
partly because of the lack of specialists. "Besides the hopes of being Safe
from Persecution in this Retreat," William Byrd wrote in 1728, "the
New Proprietors [of New Jersey] inveigled many over by this tempting
Account of the Country: that it was a Place free from those 3 great
Scourges of Mankind, Priests, Lawyers, and Physicians. Nor did they
tell a word of a Lye, for the People were yet too poor to maintain these
Learned Gentlemen/' Although Byrd had oversimplified the reasons, he
was accurate in observing that Americans were freer of learned monopo-
lists than were their contemporaries in England.
The professional organization of doctors which developed here, in con-
trast with that of England, was loose; the boundaries of specialties were
vague or non-existent. In the American colonies, governmental control
over medical practice virtually disappeared. The tradition of licensing
was not dead, but colonial regulations were unclear and unenforceable.
The first medical law of Massachusetts Bay (1649) simply required that
no person should administer any medical remedy "without the advice
and consent of such as are skillfull in the same Art, (if such may be had)
or at least of some of the wisest and gravest then present." Most colonial
230 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
legislation on the subject was concerned with fees rather than with
professional standards. The Assembly of Virginia as early as 1639 re-
sponded to protests against "the imoderate and excessive rates and prices
exacted by practitioners of physick & chyrurgery." The Virginia Act of
1662 explained:
Whereas the excessive and immoderate prices exacted by diverse avariti-
ous and gripeing practitioners in phisick and chirurgery hath caused
several hardhearted masters swayed by profitable rather than charitable
respects, rather to expose a sick servant to a hazard of recovery, than
put themselves to the certaine charge of a rigorous though unskilfull
phisician, whose demands for the most part exceed the purchase of the
patient, many other poore people also being forced to give themselves
over to a lingring disease. , . .
The better-trained American physicians knew well enough that the
European professional tradition required them to define their specialty
and stick to it. Colonial students at the medical school of Edinburgh Uni-
versity, the main training-center for Americans abroad, formed a "Vir-
ginia Club*' with articles signed by its members. The third article in 1761
was a solemn undertaking "That every member of this club shall make
it his endeavor, if possible, for the honor of his profession, not to degrade
it by hereafter mingling the trade of an apothecary or surgeon with it."
In America, however, where the very distinction of a gentleman (and
hence what was "fit" for him) was blurred, it was not so easy to confine
oneself to proper gentlemanly pursuits. In English and other European
rural communities, the fine professional distinctions did, of course, some-
times break down or become unenforceable. But in colonial America
disregard of them was widespread.
The professional subdivisions were in fact of little practical significance
among American doctors. Advertisements and indentures tell us of many,
like Dr. Gustavus Brown in Charles County, Maryland (1734-40), who
were practicing "Physick, Surgery, and Pharmacy." To these three
distinct English occupations some colonials even added that of midwife.
The occasional colonial non-conformist, like Dr. James McQurg, who
had been educated at Edinburgh and stuck to his notions of a distinctive
profession of physick, found himself unable to support his family.
"This however is partly owing to my not uniting the apothecary's and
surgeon's business with the physicians' as is common in this country. . . .
It is easier perhaps to succeed to a certain degree as a surgeon and
apothecary in this country than in any other." "I make use of the
English word doctor," wrote the Marquis de Chastellux on his travels
through America in 1781, < because the distinction of surgeon and
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 231
physician is as little known in the army of Washington as in that of
Agamemnon. We read in Homer, that the physician Macaon himself
dressed the wounds. , . . The Americans conform to the ancient custom
and it answers very well."
How, indeed, could nice distinctions be perpetuated in an America
which lacked learned doctors, professional associations, academies, and
legal or customary regulation? And so in America a fluid situation rather
than ancient institutions shaped medical practice.
To earliest colonial New England, medical learning was transferred
not so much by trained physicians as by ministers. In late 16th- and
early 17th-century England some dissenting clergymen had studied
medicine as a precautionary profession in case of their expulsion from the
country. The Pilgrim Elder William Brewster, Edward Winslow, and
Samuel Fuller all seem to have had such knowledge. For nearly a century
after Fuller's death in 1633, there was no prominent specializing physi-
cian in Massachusetts. The medical needs of the community were served
by ministers (like Thomas Thacher, who wrote the layman's brochure on
how to treat smallpox), by schoolmasters, and by a remarkable line of
governor-physicians. Governor John Winthrop, the first leader of Mass-
achusetts Bay, was probably its leading medical adviser, treating patients
about as well as did the average physician in England. His son, who
became Governor of Connecticut, carried on an extensive practice, offer-
ing remote New Englanders by correspondence the best medical advice
he could garner from his English books and acquaintances. There was
hardly a political or religious leader of the region who did not dispense
medical knowledge: Winslow treated the Indian chief Massasoit; the
Apostle John Eliot tried to instruct the Indians in modern medicine; in
times of epidemic the governors or assistants themselves commonly
decided on proper health measures. The two great experimenters with
the smallpox inoculation, Cotton Mather and Zabdiel Boylston, both
lacked medical degrees. While in Old England the clergy had sometimes
confined and stultified the practice of physick, in New England a versatile
clergy helped both to free medicine from its old monopolistic bonds and
to refresh it by a more empirical spirit.
Medical practice was thus dispersed into many different vocations. Of
the fifteen pamphlets on medical subjects published in Boston between
1721 and 1752 of which we know the authors, only four (those by Dr.
William Douglass) were written by a person who would have been ac-
cepted as a properly qualified physician in England. Not until 1781 was
there a Medical Department at Harvard College or a Massachusetts
Medical Society. The Society began spasmodic publication in 1790, but
232 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
the printing of that year was not followed by another until eighteen years
later. Protecting public health was a duty of the wise governor and the
competent clergyman. Not only had numerous English specialties be-
come amalgamated into the work of a general practitioner; the general
practitioner himself had become more closely assimilated into the still
larger class of persons concerned with the political and religious welfare
of the community.
In the Southern colonies a similar result was produced by somewhat
different causes. The European professional distinctions had not been
imported there either, and a native professional organization had not yet
come into being. If there was any distinction, it was simply between the
men of more and of less education rather than between practitioners of
different traditional specialties. On remote and widely dispersed planta-
tions, the planters found responsibilities as new and varied as those of the
New England clergy. The few Southerners who made their living from
medicine in the 17th century were commonly active also as politicians,
farmers, and lawyers. Not until 1691 were Virginia's medical men along
with ferrymen and Negroes specifically exempt from militia service.
Even hi Philadelphia, where neither a dominant and versatile clergy
nor the emergencies of plantation life were present to break down the
European categories, there developed a wholesome vagueness of pro-
fessional distinctions. During the 18th century that city boasted more
respectable medical learning than could be found anywhere else in the
colonies: of the seventeen "physicians" known to have practiced in
Philadelphia between 1740 and 1775, all but three had received some
training in Europe. In 1765 Philadelphia became the site of the first
American medical school, which was the earliest concerted effort to
import the academic institutions of European medicine. Here, if any-
where in America, one might have expected professional pride and pro-
fessional distinctions, but the familiar European distinctions were not
to be found. When Dr. Adam Thompson of Edinburgh went to Philadel-
phia in 1748 to "practice Physick, Chirurgery and Midwifery" but
publicly advertised that he would not keep his own apothecary shop, he
seems to have stirred the resentment of his colleagues. They considered
this an implied criticism of their willingness to be jacks of all the medical
trades, even including pharmacy.
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 233
37
Learning from Experience
"HE is of the clinical class of physicians," the visiting Scottish
physician Dr. Alexander Hamilton observed of Dr. William Douglass in
1744, "and laughs att all theory and practise founded upon it, looking
upon empyricism or bare experience as the only firm basis upon which
practise ought to be founded. He has got here about him a set of dis-
ciples who greedily draw in his doctrines and, being but half learned
themselves, have not wit enough to discover the foibles and mistakes of
their preceptor." This was the same Dr. Douglass who, on professional
grounds, had opposed Mather's inoculation experiment Perhaps he had
been chastened by the epidemic of 1721, for his doctrinaire attitude on
that occasion was not typical of his career. From the point of view of a
European physician at the time, the work of Dr. Douglass and his
fellow Americans already revealed a striking emphasis an interest in
practical ways of treating particular diseases.
American doctors had been encouraged to such an emphasis by a
number of circumstances, and especially by their informal system of
medical education. Until 1765 there was no medical school in British
North America; since few Americans could afford to study in Edinburgh,
London, or Leyden, the apprentice system became standard. In 18th-
century Virginia, only about one doctor in nine had a medical degree,
and this seems to have been about the general proportion throughout
the colonies at the outbreak of the Revolution. Zabdiel Boylston, perhaps
the most effective and independent physician of colonial New England,
had been taught by his father. The Clark family in Boston, the most
eminent medical family of the colonial period, felt little need for a medical
school: six generations of Clarks received their medical training at home.
Between the first John Clark (who may have held an English medical
diploma and who came to New England about 1638) and the seventh
(who secured an MJD. degree in 1802), not a single one of these suc-
cessful doctors had been given formal medical instruction.
All up and down the colonies, apprenticeship was the usual, almost
234 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
the exclusive, path to the profession. Indentures surviving from early
17th-centuiy Virginia reveal that the established doctor would keep a
young man in his household for seven years doing chores as nurse, janitor,
coachman, messenger, prescription-maker, and assistant surgeon, while
reading a few books and learning mostly by observing his master. Though
even this method of training was seldom cheap the best Virginia
practitioners asked about one hundred pounds a year there was always
considerable competition to enter the household of the most reputable
masters.
Many colonial physicians recognized the special value of learning
medicine where one was going to practice. In 1766, Dr. Thomas Bond
observed in his clinical lectures at the Pennsylvania Hospital:
Every Climate produces Diseases peculiar to itself, which require ex-
perience to understand and cure. . . . No Country then can be so proper
for the instruction of Youth in the knowledge of Physic, as that in which
'tis to be practised; where the precepts of never failing Experience are
handed down from Father to Son, from Tutor to Pupil. That this is not
a Speculative opinion, but real Matter of Fact, may be proven from the
Savages of America, who without the assistance of Literature have been
found possessed of Skill in the cure of Diseases incident to their climate,
Superior to the Regular bred, and most learned Physicians, and that
from their discoveries the present practice of Physic has been enrich'd
with some of the most valuable Medicines now in use.
Others, however, including some leaders of the profession, complained
that American training was crude and inadequate; they urged the require-
ment of a more formal medical education. John Morgan (1735-1789)
of Philadelphia was prominent among these. After a typical American
medical training (apprenticeship under Dr. John Redman and experi-
ence as military surgeon for an expedition to Fort Duquesne), Morgan
went abroad for a medical Grand Tour which included Edinburgh,
London, Paris, Parma, and Padua. On his return to Philadelphia, Mor-
gan announced his determination to engage in medicine "without turning
apothecary or practising surgery." He made no headway in persuading
other American doctors to leave cutting to surgeons and the mixing
of medicines to apothecaries, but he did help persuade the trustees of
the College of Philadelphia to establish the first American medical
school, and he was himself appointed Professor of the Theory and Prac-
tice of Medicine. His now famous Discourse upon the Institution of
Medical Schools in America^ delivered in May 1765, is one of the best
contemporary descriptions of the American medical profession. Morgan
bitterly attacked the informality and lack of sharp subdivisions, what
he called *the levelling of all kind of practitioners." Although he had
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 235
studied long and hard and traveled widely, he complained, "yet I have
been told, that to expect to gain a support here by my medical advice
and attendance only, without becoming a surgeon and apothecary too
in order to help out, is to forget that I was born an American." He
pleaded for the "separate and regular practice of physic, surgery and
pharmacy" such as was found abroad. Plainly Morgan had not yet
discovered the truth which Henry Adams preached to Americans in the
late 19th century: that just as important as drawing on European experi-
ence was learning the ways in which "the experience of mankind was
useless to them." Nowhere was this more important than in the American
learned professions, for there, more than anywhere else, in Adams*
phrase, "the weight of society stifled their thought."
No one can deny that the American situation had impoverished
medicine in many ways: the colonies were barren of theoretic advances
and of imaginative and fruitful laboratory investigations. Although there
was some progress in medical practice f or example, in immunology and
public health there were no epoch-making advances in medical science.
What 18th-century American medicine saw was simply the advance of a
novel medical profession. The frontiers of speculative medicine re-
mained in the European centers. Still, in what Dr. John Morgan dis-
paragingly called "the infant state of the colonies," lay an American op-
portunity. By allowing crude, fluid experience to overflow the ancient
walls between departments of medical knowledge, men might see
relations in nature which had been obscured by guild monopolies and
by the conceit of learned specialists.
American experience thus broke down the social as well as intellectual
distinctions between different branches of medical science. In the
1 8th century a prosperous New England physician dressed well and drove
in a coach to see his patients. His English counterpart would have worn
a powdered wig, a coat of red satin or brocade, short breeches, stockings
and buckled shoes, a three-cornered hat, and would have carried a gold-
headed cane. The snobbery of the European physician was no mere
personal peccadillo; it divided the body of medical science, separating
theory from practice, medicine from surgery and midwifery, and all of
them from pharmacy. Simply to reduce or to remove this snobbery,
whether by design or by the force of American circumstances, was to
rejoin sundered fragments of experience. Not until well into the 19th
century had medicine and surgery in Europe become more or less
equal in the social scale; only then could their practitioners collaborate
freely. In America their equality, hastened by the apprentice training
they shared, had existed from the beginning.
His apprentice training inducted the young American physician into
236 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
what, in more sophisticated modern terms, we would call a "clinical"
emphasis that is, a tendency to be more interested in the observation
and treatment of actual patients than in artificial laboratory experiments.
"At a time when in Paris and most European universities, medicine was
taught purely theoretically, without any concrete bedside illustration,"
Dr. Henry E. Sigerist remarks in his history of American medicine, "in
America it was learned in daily practical contact with patients." This
emphasis, though, was one which no one had designed or intended and
which men of respectable learning were actually trying to prevent.
Its most eloquent defense was to be made in the next century by Dr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (whose own work was a brilliant if unconscious
product of the same emphasis) , in his famous introductory lecture ( 1 867 )
on "Scholastic and Bedside Teaching" delivered to medical students
at Harvard:
When I compare this direct transfer of the practical experience of a
wise man into the mind of a student, every fact one that he can use
in the battle of life and death, with the far off, unserviceable "scien-
tific" truths that I and some others are in the habit of teaching, I cannot
help asking myself whether, if we concede that our forefathers taught
too little, there is not a possibility that we may sometimes attempt to
teach too much. I almost blush when I think of myself as describing the
eight several facets on two slender processes of the palate bone, or the
seven little twigs that branch off from the minute tympanic nerve. . . .
I can hear die voice of some rough iconoclast addressing the Anato-
mist and the Chemist in tones of contemptuous indignation: "What is
this stuff with which you are cramming the brains of young men who
are to hold the lives of the community in their hands? Here is a man
fallen in a fit; you can tell me all about the eight surfaces of the two
processes of the palate-bone; but you have not had the sense to loosen
that man's neck-cloth, and the old women are all calling you a fool?
Here is a fellow that has just swallowed poison. I want something to
turn his stomach inside out at the shortest notice. Oh, you have for-
gotten the dose of the sulphate of zinc, but you remember the formula
for the production of alloxan!"
"Look you, Master Doctor, if I go to a carpenter to come and stop
a leak in my roof that is flooding the house, do you suppose I care
whether he is a botanist or not? ... If my horse casts a shoe, do you
think I will not trust a blacksmith to shoe hin? until I have made sure
that he is sound on the distinction between the sesquioxide and the
protosesquioxide of iron?"
But my scientific labor is to lead to useful results by and by, in the
next generation, or in some possible remote future.
"Diavolo!" as your Dr. Rabelais has it, answers the iconoclast,
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 237
"what is that to me and my colic, to me and my strangury? I pay the
Captain of the Cunard steamship to carry me quickly and safely to
Liverpool, not to make a chart of the Atlantic for after voyagers!"
The American apprentice system, with its early combination of theory
and practice and its immediate transfer of the wisdom of the practitioner,
seems to have made the American doctor a more successful healer in
his daily rounds. In 1820, Dr. Nathaniel Chapman commented that,
although European physicians were more learned and original, in no
country was medicine better practiced than in America.
This was not all. The dissolving of ancient boundaries between theory
and practice, between the "higher" and the "lower" medical services,
provided a freer atmosphere in which American medicine made its dis-
tinctive advances. Although 18th-century America produced no great
medical scientists, it produced competent practitioners whose clinical
interests would eventually bear their own fruit. A few Americans, not
always doctors by profession, were aware of this promise. Dr. Thomas
Bond noted (in 1766) that "more is required of us in this late settled
world, where new Diseases often occurr." He urged an open-eyed, em-
pirical, piecemeal approach. Where else could the exchange of experi-
ences be so important? Jefferson, four decades later, still hoped to see
here "the first degree of value set on clinical observation, and the lowest
on visionary theories."
One of the first fruits of the American emphasis was an improvement
of hospitals and of nursing. In 17th- and 18th-century Europe, hospitals
were too often social cesspools in which the poor, the insane, and the
miscellaneous unfortunate festered in the accumulated vermin of gen-
erations. American hospitals were not built in any numbers until the
18th century, when the curable sick, the insane, and the contagious had
begun to be separated. Even hi 17th-century Virginia the patient was
more frequently housed hi the residence of his physician, where the mere
absence of institutionalized filth was itself a great advantage.
The Pennsylvania Hospital, founded by Dr. Thomas Bond in 1751
with the energetic assistance of Benjamin Franklin, was extraordinarily
successful by the standards of its day. Erected as "a means of increasing
the Number of People, and preserving many useful Members to the Public
from Ruin and Distress," the hospital admitted 8831 patients between
its founding and 1773; among these the managers reported 4440 com-
plete cures and only 852 deaths. Its mortality rate was half that of general
hospitals abroad. Dr. Benjamin Rush boasted in 1774 that by com-
parison with the hospitals of Europe "the Pennsylvania Hospital is as
perfect as the wisdom and benevolence of man can make it."
238 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
The few important American medical publications of the colonial
age, some of which we have already noticed, had an unmistakably
clinical flavor. In Boston, Dr. William Douglass' report on the scarlet
fever epidemic of 1735-36 was the first adequate clinical description of
the disease to appear in English. Dr. Thomas Cadwalader's Essay on
the West-India Dry-Gripes, printed by Benjamin Franklin in 1745,
demonstrated that many gentlemen were suffering from lead-poisoning
because they had been drinking Jamaica rum that had been distilled
through lead pipes. In Charleston, Dr. John Lining prepared an accurate
account of the yellow fever epidemic of 1748. From Philadelphia in 1750
came Dr. John Kearsley's detailed observations on yellow fever. Numer-
ous observers described the course of smallpox and the relative efficacy
of different treatments.
American colonial medicine produced nothing notable in a theoretical
way. Dr. Benjamin Rush, following the dogmas of Cullen's disciple
John Brown, made the most strenuous effort at an all-embracing medical
theory: his doctrine of "sthenia" and "asthenia" attributed all disorders
to an improper state of "tension." Rush's theoretic effort showed the
medical doctrinaire at his worst, but even he was not doctrinaire in all
things. He promoted the more humane treatment of the insane; and he
tried to improve public health in Philadelphia by such common-sense
expedients as sewage disposal, pure water, and clean streets.
Even into the 19th century the conspicuous successes of American
medicine confirmed its clinical approach; the American accomplishments
were the work of an undifferentiated medical profession under the
pressure of emergencies. Two heroic figures, proper patron saints of
American medicine, were melodramatic symbols of the peculiar op-
portunities of the New World. The first was Ephraim McDowell (1771-
1830), a backwoods doctor who had studied in Edinburgh for one
year but had not taken a medical degree. He encountered a woman
patient who appeared to have a large abdominal tumor, so large in fact
that he had originally mistaken it for a pregnancy. Before McDowell's
day the range of surgery had included amputations, removal of stones,
mending of ruptures, and some other items, but never a serious abdom-
inal operation. On December 13, 1809, McDowell, assisted only by an
apprentice nephew, laid the patient on a table in his house in Danville,
Kentucky and, within twenty-five minutes, while she recited psalms to
keep up her courage, he opened the abdominal cavity and removed the
cystic tumor of the ovary. When McDowell returned to visit his patient
five days later she was making her own bed; she lived thirty-one years
more. This was the first ovariotomy in medical history; it might not have
NEW WORLD MEDICINE 239
been performed except for the stringency of backwoods life and the
scarcity of learned specialists.
The second heroic figure, William Beaumont (1785-1853), was an
army doctor whose whole training had been by the apprentice method.
On June 6, 1822, while Beaumont was stationed at remote Fort Mack-
inac in northern Michigan, a French-Canadian employee of the Amer-
ican Fur Company received a load of buckshot in his left side. Despite
all that Beaumont could do to make it heal, the hole in the victim's
stomach (technically called a "gastric fistula") remained open. Beau-
mont had the inspiration to take advantage of this rare opportunity to
observe through the unhealed opening what actually was going on in the
stomach. He took the man under his own roof, where he carried on his
observations with exemplary skill and imagination but without benefit
of books or laboratories. He noted the operation of the gastric juices
and the effects of different stimulants such as tea, coffee, and alcohol.
The result was his Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice
and the Physiology of Digestion (1833), which became a classic of
clinical medicine; this unpretentious little book laid foundations for the
physiology of digestion and the science of nutrition. Were the works of
McDowell and of Beaumont primarily the fruits of genius or of provincial
opportunity? It is impossible to say. But if either of them had been
more learned or could have called in an appropriate specialist, would
he have dared as he did?
The immediate future of American medicine seemed to be at the bed-
side or in the clinic rather than in the laboratory. Perhaps the most impor-
tant medical innovation which America exported to Europe during the
19th century was surgical anesthesia, a definitely practical and clinical
discovery. Preventive medicine, dentistry, public health, clinical research,
and general medical practice were the areas of special American com-
petence. They were also the areas where the American standard of living,
the loosening of social and professional distinctions, and the varied ex-
periences of a new continent counted most.
PART NINE
THE LIMITS OF
AMERICAN SCIENCE
**We want hands, my lord, more than heads.
The most intimate acquaintance with the clas-
sics will not remove our oaks; nor a taste for
the Georgics cultivate our lands."
WILLIAM LIVINGSTON
to the Bishop of Llandaff
"Go on making experiments entirely on your
own initiative and thereby pursue a path entirely
different from that of the Europeans, for then
you shall certainly find many things which have
been hidden to natural philosophers throughout
the space of centuries."
PffiTER VAN MUSSCHENBROEK
to Benjamin Franklin
38
Popular Science:
Astronomy for Everybody
THE NATURAL-HISTORY EMPHASIS with its preference for the
simple lessons of everyday experience, and the clinical emphasis with
its prejudice against learning and theory, were by no means unmixed
blessings. True, they were decidedly democratic. They encouraged the
appeal to self-evidence and the American bias against a thinking class.
They were friendly to "popular science," the belief that the greatest
works of science ought to be understood by everyone. They fitted well
with the ideal of the self-made scientist.
But, in many fields, progress had to build on technical foundations and
on the professional learning of the past. The physical sciences, especially
astronomy and physics, had acquired this character by the 18th century.
In these fundamental sciences, therefore, colonial Americans did not
shine: their ideals and hopes led them to exaggeration and confusion.
They sometimes lost any sense of what was fundamental, and they
ignored distinctions between the basic accomplishments of the theoretical
and the peripheral advances of applied science. They often denied or
obscured their limitations and claimed the laurels of a Newton or Ein-
stein for colonial Americans whose work at best showed the applied
ingenuity of an Edison or Ford. Their limitations are nowhere more
243
244 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
obvious than in the men and achievements of which they boasted most
loudly.
"America has not yet produced one good poet, one able mathema-
tician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science." This common
charge, repeated by the French savant Abbe Raynal in 1774, annoyed
the colonials, and when Jefferson replied in his Notes on Virginia, he
spoke the mind of many Americans. Jefferson admitted the charge
against American literature, simply noting that America had not yet had
time to produce a Homer or a Shakespeare, but he proudly offered
George Washington as a great political and military leader. It was the
accusation against American science that especially irritated him. Sig-
nificantly, he refuted it not by any reference to American achievements
in natural history (where Jefferson himself and many others had attained
some distinction), but by two examples from the physical sciences,
where he was a novice but where presumably Europeans would be most
impressed. "In physics," Jefferson reminded European detractors, "we
have produced a Franklin, than whom no one of the present age has
made more important discoveries, nor has enriched philosophy with
more, or more ingenious solutions of the phaenomena of nature. We have
supposed Mr. Rittenhouse second to no astronomer living: that in genius
he must be the first, because he is self-taught."
By examining the accomplishments of these two paragons and of their
nearest rivals we can discover the limits of American culture in
the colonial age, and we can begin to see the price Americans were
paying for their democratic way of thinking.
In 18th-century Europe, the "New Science" of astronomy and physics
meant, of course, Newtonian science. When Voltaire visited England
in the 1720's he noted that although few people read Newton, everybody
talked about him and attributed to him, like Hercules in the fable, the
exploits of all the other heroes. Most Englishmen even those in the
educated classes who talked of Newton had acquired their knowledge
from popular books or public lectures, like Benjamin Martin's Plain
and Familiar introduction to the Newtonian Philosophy . . . Designed
for the use of such Gentlemen and Ladies as would acquire Knowledge
of this Science without Mathematical Learning (1751). This was gen-
erally even more true among Americans. Newton's Principia was first
published in England in 1687 (although some of his discoveries were
made considerably earlier), but the first copy to arrive in the colonies
appears to have been that which James Logan acquired in 1708. Even
later, copies were rare: Yale College received the second edition (1713)
from Sir Isaac himself, and John Winthrop IV owned a copy of the
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 245
third edition (1726). Most of the Americans who acquired a reputation
for astronomical and physical learning including Franklin and Ritten-
house seem to have secured their acquaintance with Newton's works
mainly at second-hand.
Perhaps the most important American colonial contribution to New-
tonian science was no theoretic insight but rather the observations made
through the three-and-one-half-foot telescope which John Winthrop, Jr.
had given to Harvard College in 1672. Through that telescope, Thomas
Brattle made observations of the Great Comet of 1680 which Newton
himself used and acknowledged in his Principia.
After Brattle's death and during the first half of the 18th century, the
most accomplished American astronomer was without doubt John
Winthrop TV (1714-1779), descendant of the first Governor of Massa-
chusetts Bay and of a long line of New England scholar-leaders. Win-
throp never became a folk-hero and so was not enumerated by Jefferson,
but he was a man of broad learning and vast energy and was generally
conceded to be the best that America had yet offered in the Newtonian
line. His lectures on Comets (1759) and on the Transit of Venus (1769)
showed an extraordinary talent for explaining complicated and difficult
matters. His notes on sunspots (1739) suggested a connection between
them and the aurora borealis not developed by other astronomers for at
least another century. His sensible remarks on the causes of earthquakes
(1755) revealed him to be a careful, clear-eyed observer. But as a whole
Winthrop's work was not strikingly original; although a brilliant teacher,
he added little of his own. When Winthrop was appointed Hollis Pro-
fessor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard in 1738 he had
already offered observations on natural history together with specimens
of plants, animate^ and minerals to members of the Royal Society in
London. Only after his appointment at Harvard did his attention focus
sharply on mathematics and astronomy. Still his work continued to
reveal the natural-history emphasis. His scientific writings remained
descriptive, fragmentary, and topical. Almost without exception they
arose from some particular and dramatic natural phenomenon or catastro-
phe a lightning stroke, the tremor of an earthquake, the appearance of
a comet, a lunar eclipse which could be observed in America.
Winthrop did not write an epochal book, but he did organize an epoch-
making expedition. A transit of Venus across the sun occurred twice
during his lifetime; one had not occurred within the preceding century
and a quarter, and would not again for over a century. The Newtonian
system had described the distances between planets and their distances
from the sun only in relative terms, that is, by comparison with the
246 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
earth's hypothetical distance from the sun. But observations of the transit
of Venus taken from remote points would for the first time make it
possible to calculate in miles the actual distance of the earth and hence of
the other planets from the sun. Not only would such results be useful
for astronomy, but for navigation, surveying, and map-making. Winthrop
therefore organized a Harvard expedition to Newfoundland the first
American astronomical expedition and the first scientific expedition
sponsored by a college in America. "This Phenomenon, (which has been
observed but once before since the Creation of the World)," Governor
Francis Bernard explained to the Massachusetts assembly, "will, in all
Probability, settle some Questions in Astronomy which may ultimately
be very serviceable to Navigation: For which Purpose, those Powers
that are interested in Navigation, have thought it their Business to send
Mathematicians to different Parts of the World to make Observations."
The Governor prevailed upon Massachusetts to send Winthrop and his
two assistants in its Province Sloop to St. John's, where their observations
attracted the attention of scientists throughout the world.
Although Winthrop was a more learned astronomer, the popular
symbol of American astronomy in the provincial age was David Kitten-
house (1732-1796). Many Americans shared Jefferson's judgment that
Rittenhouse was "second to no astronomer living," and in genius the
first, because he was self-taught. Rittenhouse had almost no formal edu-
cation. He began as a clock- and instrument-maker, and for much of his
life he owed his living to his clocks. Like Franklin, to whom his con-
temporaries often compared him, he seemed the embodiment of the
American ideal of the undifferentiated man. Troubleshooter of the Revo-
lution, he was engineer to the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety, helped
to fortify the shores of the Delaware, and devised ways of manufacturing
cannon and ammunition. A member of the convention which drew
Pennsylvania's first constitution, Rittenhouse was also first Treasurer of
his State and the first Director of the United States Mint. His knowledge
of metals and of mathematics aided Jefferson in simplifying the crude
and complicated coinage of the new nation. Jefferson held so high an
opinion of his scientific talent "the world has but one Ryttenhouse"
that he regretted Rittenhouse's political activities, fearing the versatile
astronomer might "throw away a Newton upon the occupations of a
crown." His fellow-colonials had made Rittenhouse, as they did Franklin,
one of their champions against the giants of Europe* Upon Franklin's
death, Rittenhouse, to whom Franklin had appropriately willed his tele-
scope, succeeded him as President of the American Philosophical Society;
when Rittenhouse died only a few years later he was mourned as a
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 247
national hero. Americans did not realize that by eulogizing Rittenhouse
as the Great American Astronomer they were in fact emphasizing the
narrowness of colonial science.
The peculiar justification for calling Rittenhouse the Great American
Astronomer came from the fact that he was the leading surveyor of his
day. To survey small town-lots and farm boundaries in long-settled
Europe, arithmetic with a smattering of trigonometry sufficed, but
America offered a whole continent to be measured. The property lines
of extensive tracts in the wilderness could not be drawn from a large
rock or the stump of a familiar tree; they had to be defined by the astro-
nomical dimensions of latitude and longitude. Rittenhouse's most endur-
ing work was of this especially American kind; for him astronomy was
a surveyor's tool. Between 1764, when he received 6 for helping
Mason and Dixon draw the boundary of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and
Delaware, and 1787, when he helped mark the long-disputed line be-
tween New York and Massachusetts, he drew boundaries of more than
half the original thirteen colonies.
But even such large-scale surveying was no match for the Newtonian
flights of mathematical imagination. Rittenhouse did make a few modest,
if not entirely successful, efforts to deal with solar space: the 1769 transit
of Venus gave him a great opportunity to establish among Europeans the
respectability of American science. It was an even more attractive op-
portunity than the 1761 transit for which Winthrop had organized his
Newfoundland expedition. In 1761 the most useful observations could
not be made within the settled areas; but the 1769 transit was expected
to be visible, weather permitting, all over the American colonies. Ar-
ranging the points of observation, providing the apparatus, and coordinat-
ing the results were precisely the kind of challenge which American
scientists seemed able to meet.
There was widespread, if not always well-informed, interest throughout
the colonies. Winthrop himself wrote a lucid little pamphlet explaining
to laymen the importance of the spectacle, how to make a smoked glass
for watching it, and how to record the crucial time and duration of the
transit. In Massachusetts, the principal observations were to be made
by Winthrop at the Cambridge observatory. In Philadelphia, where the
Rev. William Smith of the College of Philadelphia was the principal
organizer, David Rittenhouse held the center of the scientific stage. The
Pennsylvania legislature provided 100 for a telescope and another
100 for an observatory on State House Square; arrangements were
made for several other observations in the vicinity. Up and down the
coast every city prepared for its observations, and amateur astronomers
248 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
on distant farms readied their home-made instruments. Perhaps never
before or since have so many "scientific" calculations depended on such
crude apparatus.
At the long-awaited hour on June 3, 1769, observers in the middle
colonies had a serene sky, but the drama of the occasion itself produced
unforeseen difficulties. To observe the climactic moment through the
telescope at his newly-constructed Norriton observatory, Rittenhouse lay
on his back with his head supported by assistants. The strain proved too
much for him: at the zero hour when Venus touched the sun the object
of months of planning and the moment for which Rittenhouse had been
readjusting his specially designed clock Rittenhouse fainted away. On
recovering his senses he could do no more than estimate how much
time had elapsed.
Rittenhouse had the major responsibility for collecting and correlat-
ing the data from different observation-points. In collaboration with the
Rev. William Smith, he made the principal American effort to use
the observations for calculating the solar parallax; this was vitally im-
portant work because the hour of the transit had made it impossible to
see the phenomenon over most of Europe. Figures gathered from the
many American observers varied widely, and the crudeness of their
observations made any average scientifically worthless. Nevertheless, the
final figure produced by Smith and Rittenhouse happily turned out to
be close to the presently accepted distance of the earth from the sun.
The validity of their result was more the product of good luck than of
good science, but America's and Rittenhouse's reputation profited none
the less. Smith claimed that American observations of the transit "hath
done a Credit to our Country which would have been cheaply purchased
for twenty times the Sum!"
Whatever exaggeration there may have been in ranking Rittenhouse
among the world's great astronomers, Jefferson told the sober truth when
he declared that "as an artist he has exhibited as great a proof of
mechanical genius as the world has ever produced. He has not indeed
made a world; but he has by imitation approached nearer its Maker
than any man who has lived from the creation to this day." Among
the colonists Rittenhouse's principal claim to fame was his ingenious
contraption to help teach the public about astronomy, a working model
of the solar system, then called an "Orrery." His machine was not
the first of its kind nor even the first one made in America, but it was
probably the most intricate and accurate astronomical model that had
yet been produced. This was doubly remarkable because of his lack of
formal education and his remoteness from the centers of European
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 249
learning. Though a man of impressive humility, Rittenhouse dared (in
his own words) "boldly affirm, that he has not copied the general
construction, nor the particular disposition of any of its essential parts,
from any Orrery or description whatsoever. Neither has he made use of
any number he found in books, for one single wheel, but was at the
pains of getting them by calculation himself, having never met with any
that were exact enough for his purposes." If Americans could not add
to the theory of solar mechanics, they could at least construct the best
working model of the solar system known in their time.
"I would have my Orrery really useful," Rittenhouse wrote on January
28, 1767, when he first conceived his plan, "by making it capable of
informing us, truly, of the astronomical phaenomena for any particular
point of time; which, I do not find that any Orrery yet made, can do."
Within a few months he communicated to the American Philosophical
Society at Philadelphia details which substantially corresponded to the
finished product. An elegant upright cabinet would frame a large center
panel flanked by two smaller ones. In the middle of the center panel on
a four-foot-square vertical sheet of brass was to be displayed a gilded
brass ball representing the sun; round this ball would move others of
brass or ivory, representing the planets, which rotated in elliptical orbits
"their motions to be sometimes swifter, and sometimes slower, as nearly
according to the true law of an equable description of areas as is pos-
sible." One of the smaller panels, each of them four feet by about two
feet, would exhibit "all the appearances of Jupiter and his Satellites -
their eclipses, transits, and inclinations; likewise, all the appearances
of Saturn, with his ring and satellites." The other small panel would
show "all the phaenomena of the moon, particularly, the exact time,
quantity, and duration of her eclipses and those of the sun, occasioned
by her interposition; with a most curious contrivance for exhibiting the
appearance of a solar eclipse, at any particular place on the earth."
When the machine was set in motion by turning a crank, the planets
would proceed in their proper revolutions, three dials indicating precisely
the hour of the day, the day of the month, and the year at which the
planets would appear in these positions for a period of 5,000 years
either forward or backward. Spectacular heavenly phenomena, such
as a transit of Venus or an eclipse of the sun or moon, could thus be
foretold.
A still more remarkable device was a tiny telescope which could
be directed from the earth to any other planet "then will both the
longitude and latitude of that planet be pointed out (by an index and
graduated circle) as seen from the earth." The machine was also to be
250 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
equipped, according to an original plan, to play "music of the spheres"
as God's handiwork was displayed. The Rev. William Smith, the ag-
gressive provost of the College of Philadelphia who had worked with
Rittenhouse during the Transit of Venus, became enthusiastic over the
project. Both Smith and Rittenhouse seem to have taken for granted
that the completed Orrery would be offered to the College of Philadelphia,
where Smith expected it to be a featured attraction. But Dr. John
Witherspoon, who had just recently arrived from Scotland to become
president of The College of New Jersey (later called Princeton), hurried
over to Rittenhouse's workshop in Norriton and persuaded him to sell his
Orrery for 300 to the New Jersey institution. The ambitious Rev.
Smith declared that he "never met with greater mortification" than when
he read in The Pennsylvania Gazette of April 26, 1770, three days after
Witherspoon's successful visit to Rittenhouse, that the mechanical master-
piece of the age was lost to his college at Philadelphia. And especially
that Rittenhouse "should think so little of his noble invention, as to
consent to let it go to a village"!
Rittenhouse sought to mollify Smith (who had already agreed to
purchase the second Orrery) by arranging for the first demonstration of
the Princeton machine to take place at Smith's College of Philadelphia.
With a ready eye for public relations, Smith announced a series of four-
teen lectures during March and April 1771, climaxing in a lecture-
demonstration by Rittenhouse himself. The Provincial Assembly of
Pennsylvania so warmly admired the machine that they appropriated
300 "as a Testimony of the high Sense which this House entertains
of his Mathematical Genius and Mechanical Abilities in constructing the
said Orrery," and appointed a committee to arrange for Rittenhouse to
construct a third (and, of course, larger) one.
Many Americans welcomed the Orrery as reassuring evidence that
the New World could now compete with the scientific progress of the
Old. When the American Philosophical Society for Useful Knowledge
published its first volume of Transactions in 1771, the first section
was entitled "Mathematical and Astronomical Papers" and the first paper
was Rittenhouse's plan for his Orrery. "As this is an American Produc-
tion, and much more complete than any Thing of the Kind ever made in
Europe," The Pennsylvania Gazette (April 26, 1770) said in the first
public announcement of the Orrery, "it must give great Pleasure to every
Lover of his Country, to see her rising to Fame in the sublimest Sciences,
as well as every Improvement in the Arts." When Witherspoon prepared
a brochure to attract students to Princeton from the West Indies, he
took care to explain that students would be given their Astronomy
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 251
lessons u upon the Orrery, lately invented and constructed by David Rit-
tenhouse, Esq., which is reckoned by the best judges the most excellent
in its kind of any ever yet produced." The newly designed seal of the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, adopted in 1782, was inscribed only with
the date and the name of the institution and otherwise consisted entirely
of a view of the Rittenhouse Orrery. Jefferson's bill for reforming the
College of William & Mary in 1779 specifically provided that the college
should purchase such a machine "the mechanical representation, or
model of the solar system, conceived and executed by that greatest of
astronomers, David Ryttenhouse" and that it "be called by the name
of the Ryttenhouse." At his second meeting of the American Philosophical
Society, Jefferson offered a motion which was unanimously agreed to, that
the Society commission an Orrery to be presented to the King of France,
not only to show American gratitude to an ally during the Revolution but
also to refute the European detractors of American culture. The Rev.
James Madison wrote to Jefferson enthusiastically endorsing "an ex-
cellent, as well as a very short Method of confuting those Flimsy Theor-
ists, as you justly caU them, by sending both Rittenhouse and his
Orrery to Europe."
Neither Rittenhouse nor 'the Rittenhouse" ever reached Europe, but
many Americans and some friendly Europeans were now more hopeful
for an American culture which could produce them.
39
Naive Insights and Ingenious
Devices: Electricity
ON A RARE OCCASION, an American could discover something, even
in physics, simply because he was less learned than his European col-
leagues. Ignorance of the respectable paths of scientific thought might
leave him freer to wander off wherever facts beckoned. Such was no
foundation for a solid tradition of speculative science, but it was not
252 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
absolutely impossible to advance physics under American conditions. To
exploit naivete in a subject as cumulative as physics required great genius,
but at least one colonial American Benjamin Franklin was able to
do so.
Franklin's concepts did of course grow in the context of Newtonian
experimental science, but Franklin was not, and never pretended to be,
well read in the Newtonian classics. The evidence even for his reading
of Newton's Optics is only circumstantial; everything confirms our sus-
picion that Franklin lacked the mathematical knowledge to understand
Newton's Principia or other works of similar difficulty. His theoretical
equipment for advanced study in any of the physical sciences was meager.
Franklin's actual accomplishment was obscured by extravagant com-
parison here and abroad to the greatest mathematical and physical
theorists. John Adams declared his reputation "more universal than that
of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire." Lord Chatham praised
him in the House of Lords as "one whom all Europe held in high
Estimation for his Knowledge and Wisdom, and rank'd with our Boyles
and Newtons." The great chemist Joseph Priestley declared Franklin's
discovery in his kite experiment "the greatest, perhaps since the time of
Sir Isaac Newton." Franklin's special genius has been buried under the
even less discriminating praise heaped on him since his death.
In fact his achievement illustrated the triumph of naivete over learning.
A clue to Franklin's peculiar success as a "physicist" is found in the
explanation for Cadwallader Colden's failure. Golden, the New York
official whose work as a naturalist we have already noted, aimed at
greatness in the European mold. In his Principles of Action in Matter
(1751), he professed to carry on the work of Newton, even to outdo
Newton by providing a general theory of the "cause" of gravitation.
Golden did not possess the specialized learning, the architectonic mind,
nor the community with other learned physicists without which great
works in mathematical physics have seldom been produced. Yet he pre-
tended "to have discovered the true cause of the motion of the planets
and comets, and from thence to deduce the reason of all the phaenomena,
with that exactness as to agree with the most accurate observations."
Happily, he explained, all this would be accomplished, "without any aid
of the conic sections, or of any other knowledge, besides the common
rules of arithmetic and trigonometry." Franklin, in contrast to Golden,
had no illusion that he was at home in Newton's mathematical world;
he merely set out to explain certain specific phenomena. Colden's work
would probably have been of higher quality had he lived in Europe
near the ancient seats of learning, but under such circumstances Frank-
lin's work might not have been done at all.
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 253
Electricity was where Franklin earned his reputation as a physicist;
only there did he make physical discoveries of lasting significance.
Franklin's electrical discoveries were not embodied in treatises nor
were they the minor premises of a large theory about the nature, origin,
or causes of electricity, much less of all matter. His writings on electricity
were diffuse and miscellaneous. His book, which became famous under
the title Experiments and Observations on Electricity, made at Philadel-
phia in America, was actually a collection of letters, so loosely organized
that some readers have doubted whether the items were intended for
publication. They were not published as a book in America until 1941.
"He has endeavoured," said Sir Humphry Davy, "to remove all mystery
and obscurity from the subject. He has written equally for the un-
initiated and for the philosopher; and he has rendered his details amus-
ing as well as perspicuous, elegant as well as simple." Even today the
reader is amazed to find that so fundamental a work is so commonplace
and non-mathematical in its language. This work, the basis of Frank-
lin's scientific reputation, reads more like a book of kitchen-recipes or
instructions for parlor-magic than like a treatise on physics. In explain-
ing "the wonderful effect of pointed bodies, both in drawing off and
throwing off the electrical fire," in one of his most important letters,
he writes:
Place an iron shot of three or four inches diameter on the mouth of a
clean diy glass bottle. By a fine silken thread from the cieling, right
over the mouth of the bottle, suspend a small cork-ball, about the big-
ness of a marble; the thread of such a length, as that the cork-ball may
rest against the side of the shot. Electrify the shot and the ball will be
repelled to the distance of four or five inches, more or less, according to
the quantity of Electricity. When in this state, if you present to
the shot the point of a long, slender, sharp bodkin, at six or eight inches
distance, the repellency is instantly destroyed, and the cork flies to the
shot. A blunt body must be brought within an inch, and draw a spark
to produce the same effect.
In Franklin's day it was possible to carry on important electrical
experiments with kitchen equipment because the subject was still in its
infancy, and had not yet begun to become mathematical. Of all the
sciences which saw great advances in the 17th and 18th centuries elec-
tricity had had the least history. There was a great deal less to know,
or to be ignorant of, in electricity than in astronomy or mathematical
physics in general. Since it seemed to have no practical application at the
time, there was full scope for the play of idle curiosity. Franklin's interest
in electricity was, if anything, less "practical" than that of some of his
contemporaries, for he doubted that electricity would ever be the medical
254 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
cure-all that some were then predicting it would be. His amateur and
non-academic frame of mind was his greatest advantage; like many an-
other discovering American, he saw more because he knew much less
of what he was supposed to see.
When Franklin first became interested in electricity, just after 1746,
he knew very little of what had been done in Europe. Returning to Phila-
delphia after a trip to Boston, where he had happened to witness "elec-
trical entertainments," Franklin was delighted to find that the Library
Company had received some glass tubes from Peter Collinson. Three
fellow-amateurs joined him in repeating the experiments he had seen.
Most active was Ebenezer Kinnersley, an ordained Baptist minister who
never had a pulpit "an ingenious neighbor," according to Franklin,
"who, being out of business, I encouraged to undertake showing the
experiments for money." The other two were Philip Syng (1703-1789),
a silversmith by trade, and Thomas Hopkinson (1709-1751), a lawyer
and the father of the ingenious Francis Hopkinson. Both were to be
among the founders of the American Philosophical Society. The precise
role of each in the important early experiments is not easy to assign,
partly because Franklin showed no excessive modesty in his accounts.
But no one of the miscellaneous group was primarily a "natural philoso-
pher"; none held a regular university degree nor could have been called
learned by English standards.
The Philadelphia amateurs were quite out of touch with the work of
European natural philosophers. They thought that Syng had accomplished
something novel and important when he "invented" a simple electrical
machine: a sphere of glass that turned on an iron axle producing friction
which collected the electricity. This seemed a great improvement over
the "fatiguing exercise" of rubbing a glass tube. But machines like
Syng's had long before been used in England and were already popular
among electrical experimenters on the continent.
It seems that Franklin's only knowledge of earlier European work on
electricity was what he had gained from his London correspondent
Peter Collinson. That was not a great deal. Franklin reported to Collin-
son that he and his three Philadelphia collaborators were observing
"some particular phaenomena, that we look upon to be new." But he had
no way of knowing whether these were really discoveries or had already
been noticed by European scientists. Franklin's later letters to Collinson
(which became the book on electricity) continued to have the tantalizing
quality of a journal by an explorer who does not know whether anyone
has seen his land before.
If Franklin had been better informed of what European scientists
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 255
had accomplished, he might not have dared to make his boldly simple
suggestion: that electricity was a single fluid, not varying with the material
from which it was produced. This was Franklin's fundamental electrical
discovery. The two forms of electricity he then described simply as "plus"
and "minus," depending on what he conceived to be the direction of the
flow.
Sophisticated European thinking on the subject had already "ad-
vanced" to Du Fay's more elaborate doctrine:
There are two distinct Electricities, very different from one another; one
of which I call vitreous Electricity and the other resinous Electricity.
The first is that of Glass, Rock-Cry stal, Precious Stones, Hair of Ani-
mals, Wool, and many other Boies. The second is that of Amber,
Copal, Gum-Lack, Silk, Thread, Paper, and a vast Number of other
Substances.
Franklin seems to have known nothing of Du Fay's distinction. He
proceeded directly from his own observations to his epochal assumption
that all electricity was a single fluid. Even if Franklin had known the
misleading distinction which European scientists had made, he might
have offered his own simple explanation. But it would have required
boldness of imagination from a man whose forte was not boldness but
common sense. It is more likely that he would not have dared even to
voice his revolutionary observation.
Fortunately for our understanding of Franklin's work, we know what
happened to his thinking after he became better acquainted with the
writings of his European contemporaries. From the standard European
writings on electricity, many of which Peter Collinson sent to the Library
Company of Philadelphia, Franklin learned the respectable ideas and
the conventional vocabulary. His own insights lost their freshness. As
early as 1748, he showed a tendency to learn from books rather than
from observation; he began to see things as his European contemporaries
saw them. A pamphlet published in London in 1751 with four of
Franklin's letters on electricity offered nearly all his basic contribution
to the subject. The more perceptive European scientists themselves
feared that if Franklin acquired their learning he would soon see no
more than they did. Pieter van Musschenbroek, discoverer of the principle
of the condenser and an inventor of the Leyden jar, warned the American
scientist. On receiving Franklin's request for books on electricity in 1759,
he urged him to "go on making experiments entirely on your own initia-
tive and thereby pursue a path entirely different from that of the Euro-
peans, for then you shall certainly find many other things which have
been hidden to natural philosophers throughout the space of centuries.'"
256 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Unfortunately, by this time Franklin had already become "learned" in
electricity and the damage was done.
Franklin's writings on electricity, then, were not exceptions to the
descriptive, limited character of colonial science. With his usual good
luck, Franklin had happened on a subject where his lack of mathematics
was no disadvantage, where his lack of learning was in fact an advantage,
and where the play of his idle curiosity could bear fruit. Here was hardly
enough to justify Jefferson's boast that America was already producing
great physicists to vie with those of the Old World. Least of all did it
show that America was a fruitful soil for basic scientific discoveries of a
theoretical character. If it suggested anything, it was the contrary.
American barrenness of other discoveries in the physical sciences during
the colonial period only emphasized the atypical and coincidental
character of Franklin's discovery in this field.
The achievement by Franklin which most fired the popular imagination
and which has been hallowed in American folklore, was even further
from the rarefied world of Newtonian physics: his proof of the identity
of lightning and electricity, and his invention of the lightning-rod thus
made possible. Franklin's famous experiment of the electrical kite was
not a basic theoretical discovery. It was a clever way of putting to
practical use the "power of points" and the "single fluid" theory of elec-
tricity, both of which had already been developed in Franklin's letters.
It was a combination of applied science and mechanical ingenuity. The
identity of lightning and electricity had already been suspected by
Europeans, but they had found no way to prove it. Franklin's contribu-
tion was a simple device that, as he said, "might have occurred to any
electrician," but which somehow had not occurred to European physicists
preoccupied with their "electrical machines," their laboratory experi-
ments, and their theoretical arguments among themselves.
When Dr. John Lining of Charleston asked Franklin how he had
come to think of the kite experiment to test the identity of lightning
and electricity, Franklin replied by quoting from his scientific journal:
Nov. 9, 1749. Electrical fluid agrees with lightning in these particulars:
1. Giving light. 2. Colour of the light. 3. Crooked direction. 4. Swift
motion. 5. Being conducted by metals. 6. Crack or noise in exploding.
7. Subsisting in water or ice. 8. Rending bodies it passes through. 9. De-
stroying animals. 10. Melting metals. 11. Firing inflammable sub-
stances. 12. Sulphureous smelL The electric fluid is attracted by points.
We do not know whether this property is in lightning. But since
they agree in all the particulars wherein we can already compare them,
is it not probable they agree likewise in this? Let the experiment be
made.
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 257
Once Franklin had proposed the obvious and only conclusive test of the
hypothesis, several Europeans made the trial. They may even have
pursued Franklin's suggestion before Franklin himself got around to it.
The Abbe Nollet, one of the most "advanced" and learned of the
French physicists and a leading exponent of the two-fluid theory, rejected
such a direct appeal to "mere" observation. Franklin recounted in his
Autobiography that Nollet, already offended by Franklin's omission of
his name from the Experiments and Observations on Electricity, "could
not at first believe that such a work came from America and said it must
have been fabricated by his enemies at Paris, to decry his system. After-
wards, having been assur'd that there really existed such a person as
Franklin at Philadelphia, which he had doubted, he wrote and published
a volume of letters, chiefly address'd to me, defending his theory, and
denying the verity of my experiments, and of the positions deduc'd from
them." Still Franklin would not be drawn into quibbling over questions
that could be settled only by observation. "My writings contain'd a
description of experiments which any one might repeat and verify, and
if not to be verifi'd, could not be defended. ... I concluded to let my
papers shift for themselves, believing it was better to spend what time
I could spare from public business in making new experiments, than in
disputing about those already made."
So eager was Franklin for the application of his ideas, that in the very
letter in which he proposed his experiment to test the identity of lightning
and electricity (and even before the experiment had been made or his
hypothesis had been confirmed), Franklin described the ligjhtning-rod.
"If these things are so," he wrote from Philadelphia in 1749, "may not
the knowledge of this power of points be of use to mankind, in preserving
houses, churches, ships, &c. from the stroke of lightning, by directing us
to fix on the highest part of those edifices, upright rods of iron made
sharp as a needle, and gilt to prevent rusting, and from the foot of those
rods a wire down the outside of the building into the ground, or down
round one of the shrouds of a ship, and down her side till it reaches the
water?" In Poor Richard's Almanack for 1753, he published a simple de-
scription of a lightning-rod under the heading "How to secure Houses,
&c. from Lightning."
The lightning-rod quickly took hold in America. Even thoug;h academic
learning on electricity was scarce, what men did know about electricity
was soon put to more widespread practical use than in the great centers
of European learning. We do not have reliable statistics, but observers
from both sides of the Atlantic noticed that lightning-rods were more
widely used in America than in England. "No country has more certainly
258 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
proved the efficacy of electrical rods, than this," the Rev. Andrew
Buraaby noted as early as 1759 when he traveled through Virginia.
Although buildings were sometimes struck by lightning, rods were so
generally in use that it had become rare to hear of their being damaged.
Burnaby hoped that this American example would inspire others to give
up their religious prejudices against using scientific devices for human
safety.
Even in America, however, the introduction of the lightning-rod
had been delayed by religious prejudice and scientific conservatism. In
1755, soon after rods had first come into use, Boston was shaken by a
severe earthquake, which the Rev. Thomas Prince explained in a new ap-
pendix to his sermon Earthquakes, The Works of God and Tokens of His
Just Displeasure. "The more points of Iron are erected around the Earth,
to draw the Electrical Substance out of the Air; the more the Earth
must needs be charged with it. ... In Boston are more erected than
anywhere else in New England; and Boston seems to be more dread-
fully shaken. O! there is no getting out of the mighty Hand of God!
If we think to avoid it in the Air, we cannot in the Earth: Yes, it
may grow more fatal." But the sensible Professor John Winthrop,
who understood Franklin's points, read a lecture in the Harvard
College Chapel to refute such wild imaginings; and the cases in
which the rods had actually worked seemed in the popular mind to
outweigh fancy theoretical objections. In London in 1772, Franklin
found it curious that the English were only then beginning to use
lightning-rods although in America rods had already been in common use
for nearly 20 years and were found not only on public buildings,
churches, and country mansions but even on small private houses.
The circumstances of life here had probably prodded the Americans.
"Thunder Storms are much more frequent there [in America] than in
Europe, . . ." Franklin wrote from London in 1772. "Here in England,
the Practice [of using rods] has made a slower Progress, Damage by
Lightning being less frequent, & People of course less apprehensive
of Danger from it." Meteorologists tell us that, although the frequency
of thunderstorms in southern Canada is about the same as in Europe
(occurring on the average on about eleven days in the year), the fre-
quency increases as one goes south until thunderstorms are nearly seven
times as frequent in states bordering the Gulf of Mexico (occurring on
the average on about 72 days in the year) . All such figures are crude,
and it is possible that the weather was different in the 18th century. But
we do have enough information to make us suspect that lightning and
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 259
thunder were more frequent here than in Europe. At any rate they must
have seemed more threatening to colonial Americans dispersed over a
half-known continent.
40
Backwoods Farming
THE ANONYMOUS AUTHOR of American Husbandry, the best surviv-
ing 18th-century survey of colonial agriculture, concluded in 1775 that
"the American planters and farmers are in general the greatest slovens
in Christendom." He made this observation when Europe was in the
full tide of an agricultural revolution, when England had been, for several
decades, a center of new developments. There the accelerating "en-
closure" movement the fencing in of old common-lands and old pastures
which had long been going on, encouraged more efficient and more
capitalistic methods. Jethro Tull invented a drill for planting seeds in
rows, and in his Horse-Hoeing Husbandry (1733) he urged regular
plowing to destroy weeds and to increase the nourishment of plant-
roots. Lord "Turnip" Townshend, whose grandson was author of the
Townshend Acts, following TulFs suggestions improved the rotation
of crops. Before mid-century, Robert Bakewell made a science of stock-
breeding; and by the end of the century Arthur Young was using
his sharp powers of observation and his fluent pen to popularize these
and other new techniques. Although the peasants and small farmers were
slow to change their methods, agricultural experiment became a hobby
for some wealthy landlords, and before the American Revolution it was
a national fashion. Queen Caroline subscribed to TulTs book, and
George II heard TulTs system explained at court. George III, "Farmer
George,*' who could be seen carrying about the latest volume of Young's
agricultural journal, said he owed more to Young than to any of his
other subjects.
But in America, the colonial period was an age of stagnation in agri-
cultural science. George Washington, who himself had been a pretty
260 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
conservative farmer, surveyed the American situation in a letter to
Arthur Young on December 5, 1791:
An English fanner must entertain a contemptible opinion of our hus-
bandry, or a horrid idea of our lands, when he shall be informed that
not more than eight or ten bushels of wheat is the yield of an acre; but
this low produce may be ascribed, and principally too, to a cause . . .
that the aim of the farmers in this country, if they can be called farmers,
is, not to make the most they can from the land, which is, or has been
cheap, but the most of the labour, which is dear; the consequence of
which has been, much ground has been scratched over and none culti-
vated or improved as it ought to have been: whereas a farmer in Eng-
land, where land is dear, and labour cheap, finds it his interest to
improve and cultivate highly, that he may reap large crops from a small
quantity of ground.
This was a fair summary. The proverbial ingenuity of the American
backwoodsman produced a few improvements in the axe and the rifle,
for example. But most of what we know about colonial fanners suggests
a prevailing backwoods conservatism. The natural abundance, which
in later American history encouraged an experimental spirit, discouraged
it during the colonial years.
"Waste" is, of course, a relative term. To the American colonists
for whom labor was scarcer than land, it seemed more economical to
use up the land and move on than to spend precious hours in cultivating
and fertilizing. In their own way the colonists were very much interested
in economy. But they wanted "labor-saving" devices. And in these early
years the most obvious labor-saving device happened to be the wasteful
use of land. Most of the new agricultural techniques being developed
in England were aimed at making old land more productive usually at
considerable expense of labor.
Since few farmers kept detailed records, we have a lot to learn about
the common farming methods of colonial America. But the European
travelers, who looked for something new over here, were unanimous
on the backwardness of American farming methods. "The Europeans
coming to America," the Swedish botanist Peter Kalm remarked of the
middle colonies in 1748-51, "found a rich, fine soil before them, lying
as loose between the trees as the best bed in a garden. They had nothing
to do but to cut down the wood, put it up in heaps, and to clear the dead
leaves away. They could then immediately proceed to plowing, which in
such loose ground is very easy; and having sown their grain, they got
a most plentiful harvest. This easy method of getting a rich crop has
spoiled the Engjish and other European settlers, and induced them to
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 261
adopt the same method of agriculture as the Indians. . . . This is like-
wise the reason why agriculture and its science is so imperfect here
that one can travel several days and learn almost nothing about land . . .
except that from their gross mistakes and carelessness of the future, one
finds opportunities every day of making all sorts of observations, and of
growing wise by their mistakes. In a word, the grain fields, the meadows,
the forests, the cattle, etc. are treated with equal carelessness. . . . their
eyes are fixed upon the present gain, and they are blind to the future."
While Kalm probably exaggerated the natural fertility of the soil and the
ease of its first cultivation, he did not exaggerate the widespread care*
lessness of American farmers.
Many other observers noticed the broken fences and the stunted cattle
running at large, unfed and unprotected. Their manure was put to no use.
Artificial pasture long remained a rarity, and few farmers stored feed
for the winter. In Virginia a French traveler of the late 17th century saw
"poor beasts of a morning all covered with snow and trembling with
the cold, but no forage was provided for them. They eat the bark of the
trees because the grass was covered." Wild animals wolves, bears, and
savage dogs attacked the helpless cattle, and made the raising of sheep
difficult. The abundance of fish and game, while improving the colonial
diet, was no incentive to better husbandry; yet the colonists of the English
middle and lower classes were not skillful hunters. They had come from
a country where the chase was an upper-class monopoly. English breeds
deteriorated under American neglect. "Hogs swarm like Vennine upon
the Earth, and are often accounted such," Robert Beverley reported; they
were not even inventoried in estates. The early settler was always tempted
to seize whatever nature offered, especially if it was food, and so free
himself to enlarge his capital by clearing more land.
The plentifulness of land and game were not the only facts which
had discouraged the improvement of American fanning. The man who
farmed in America was likely to be an amateur: "all sorts of people turn
farmers ... no mechanic or artizan sailor soldier servant, &c. but
what, if they get money, take land, and turn farmers." Although the
English farmer may have looked advanced by colonial standards, his
methods left a good deal to be desired when compared to those of his
European contemporaries, German farmers, for example. The techniques
exported to the colonies from Great Britain were seldom the best.
The arriving colonists used any method which would produce quick
results, regardless of how it exhausted the land. Their first need was
an assured supply of food, and they learned their first lessons in hus-
bandry from the natives. Indian corn Europeans called it "maize"
262 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
remained the main bread-crop all over the colonies. Although the Indians
had perfected a high-yielding strain, their techniques of cultivation were
primitive; the colonists long followed their example. Moreover, uninter-
rupted crops of corn soon exhausted the soil. "The land, in their system,
after it is done with corn," the author of American Husbandry observed,
"is of no more value than the sky to them."
The recurrent colonial wars made planning difficult, increased the
scarcity of manpower, and kept American farmers conservative. "We
are all military Men, as well as Farmers," Jared Eliot complained in
1759, "our Circumstances being like that of the old Romans, from the
Plow to the War, and from the War to the Plow again." In the preceding
year alone, he figured, at least 5000 men had left their farms to fight the
French or the Indians "which, together with heavy Charges consequent
upon it, renders it neither safe nor prudent, to leave the old beaten
Paths, for new Inventions. . . . having neither Hands nor Money to spare,
for the Prosecution for any New Schemes, or untry'd Methods."
The range of fanning problems, from those of the unfamiliar heavy
winters of the northern colonies to those of the equally unfamiliar heat
of the Carolinas, was far wider than in little England. And there were as
many different kinds of bad husbandry as there were soils and crops
and climates. The snowy New England winters, covering the frozen
land for several months, made it impossible to follow the advice of
English theorists who told the frugal farmer to spend his winter dressing
and plowing his fields; the New England farmer had to crowd his
manuring, fencing, and harrowing into a short spring. This system was
self-perpetuating, because low yields made the New Englander spend
whatever time he could spare on clearing another acre which in its turn
would soon be used up.
In the middle colonies, and especially in Pennsylvania, where farming
methods may have been somewhat better, the temptations to overextend
"taking too much land for their money" were especially corrupting.
Draft animals were needed, but they were scarce, and the colonists did
not know how to care for them. "They clear a field and have not
strength of ploughs and cattle and men to crop more than that; they
therefore stick to it as long as they can get any corn, and when the land
will no longer bear it, they clear another piece and serve that in the same
manner. . . . this must necessarily be the system while the settlers spend
half their fortune in buying the land, that is, in paying the province
fees for it: if a man has a hundred pounds in his pocket, and was able
with ft to cultivate properly forty or fifty acres, and he takes three
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 263
or four hundred, which in patent fees costs him half his fortune, he then
plainly lessens his ability to cultivate."
We have already seen how tobacco-culture in Virginia exhausted the
soil, making plantation-owners into land-speculators, and how this was
reflected in the government of the colony. Farther south, farming methods
were even worse. The sparseness of population in North Carolina, which
lacked a good seaport, increased incentives to use up land and move on.
A wealth of pitch, tar, and turpentine could be taken from the wild
growth. In South Carolina, the rice grown in swamps was a crop un-
familiar to Englishmen; its cultivation involved expensive irrigation
and drainage problems which the colonial planters showed no special
ingenuity in solving. Indigo, also strange to English fanners, quickly
exhausted the soil.
This wide variety of climates, soils, and products was itself an obstacle
to concerted efforts for improving American agriculture. Each region had
to learn its own lessons. The difficulties of inland communication and the
scarcity of useful books kept methods stagnant. Costly experiments
in such things as silk and wine were repeated partly because later ex-
perimenters lacked reliable accounts of earlier failures. But nothing was
more obstructive than the sheer novelty of American conditions which
made useless much of the advice found in English books. It was re-
markable that any progress had been made, Jared Eliot observed in
1748, "When we consider the small Number of the first Settlers, and
coming from an old Cultivated Country, to thick Woods, rough unim-
proved Lands; where all their former Experience and Knowledge was
now of very little service to them: They were destitute of Beasts of
Burthen or Carriage; Unskill'd in every Part of Service to be done: It
may be said, That in a Sort, they began the World a New/*
What English agriculturalists meant by improvement in the colonies
did not necessarily mean a better life for the colonial farmers. From the
British imperial point of view, it was most desirable to encourage the
production of staples like hemp, sugar, indigo, silk, and wine, which
would not grow in the British Isles and for which British gold had to be
sent abroad. We have already seen the effect in Georgia of this doctrinaire
approach to colonial agriculture. In nearly every colony, costly and
futile efforts were made to increase the production of exotic staple crops.
"There is all the reason in the world to think that the nation's expecta-
tions of having hemp from the colonies will at last, after so many dis-
appointments, be answered by the lands on the Ohio," the author of
American Husbandry optimistically remarked. "This is precisely what
has been so long wanted. . . . Neglect of this sort sometimes gives rise
264 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
to ideas of incapacity in a country, when the fault is only in the
cultivator . . . they ought to have been bound to supply the navy with a
given quantity of hemp, the growth of the colony, annually: this would
have forced them to give a degree of attention to this important article."
More realistic, organized efforts to improve American agriculture
came slowly. From New England in the mid- 18th century, when land had
ceased to seem so rich or plentiful and when wood shortage had become
a problem, came the first important American treatise on agriculture.
The Rev. Jared Eliot's six essays, first published between 1748 and
1759, were collected into a volume, Essays upon Field Husbandry in
New England, as it is or may be Ordered (Boston, 1760). Eliot, a Con-
necticut clergyman and the grandson of the apostle John Eliot who had
tried to convert the Natick Indians, was also the leading physician of his
colony. Many Connecticut doctors served their apprenticeship under
him. His long career as a clergyman-physician "more than Thirty Years
in a Business that required a great deal of Travel" provided him,
he said, with the information for his essays and his own experiments.
"An Ounce of Experience is better than a Pound of Science," Eliot
observed. His essays contributed little that was new to agricultural
science but he did collect useful hints on drainage, crop-rotation, manur-
ing, stock-breeding, and dozens of other subjects. He improved Jethro
TulTs planting-drill and adapted Tull's method to American conditions.
But even Eliot still hoped for a large silk-making industry in Connecti-
cut, and he argued for small landholdings as the best means of defending
the borders of empire.
It was several decades before many others joined Eliot in an effort to
improve American agriculture. Local agricultural societies in Great
Britain, even before mid-century, were pooling the experience of gentle-
men-farmers and exchanging the results of experiments. But it was not
until 1785 that an effective organization for agricultural improvement was
founded in America. Earlier in the century the American Philosophical
Society at Philadelphia had announced agricultural improvements among
its objectives, but it accomplished very little. Jefferson's main contribu-
tions for example, his famous mould-board plow (1798) came only
late in the century. Progress in American agriculture came during the
years after the Revolution.
Of course, there were exceptions to this laggard character of colonial
fanning. The famous Narragansett pacers of Rhode Island "some of
them pace a Mile in little more than two Minutes, a good deal less than
threesshowed that it was possible here to breed first-class stock for
export. The German fanners who came in the early 18th century, arriving
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 265
mostly at Philadelphia on their way westward to the rich farmlands of
Pennsylvania and toward the Ohio Valley, showed a frugality which
contrasted sharply with the slovenliness of other American fanners. They
made their Conestoga Valley famous not only by the "Conestoga
Wagons," the heavy, broad-wheeled covered wagons which later sym-
bolized the westward movement but by the "Conestoga Horse" which
they developed from English stock into the finest draft animal of the
colonial age. Their methods, as Benjamin Rush surveyed them toward
the end of the 18th century, were a catalogue of the omissions of other
American farmers. "A German farm may be distinguished from the farm
of the other citizens of the state, by the superior size of their barns; the
plain, but compact form of their houses; the height of their inclosures;
the extent of their orchards; the fertility of their fields; the luxuriance
of their meadows, and a general appearance of plenty and neatness in
everything that belongs to them." In their efficient fanning methods the
Germans were using the specialized skills they brought with them. They
were simply being conservative after their fashion.
BOOK THREE
LANGUAGE AND
THE PRINTED WORD
**The people of one quarter of the world, will
be able to associate and converse together like
children of the same family.'*
NOAH WEBSTER
BRITISH COLONIALS were already beginning to talk like
Americans. In what they read and in what they printed, the New
World was having its way. We will see, in the following chapters, the
beginning of an American language and of an American style in
reading; and how American printing-presses came to serve Amer-
ican needs. Here the printed word ceased to be the property of a
literary class and began to belong to the public.
PART TEN
THE NEW
UNIFORMITY
"Those people spell best who do not know how
to spell."
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
41
An American Accent
WHILE Englishmen along the colonial seaboard tried to cling to the
familiar local ways of the different parts of England from which they
had come, they founded without meaning to a culture which was in
many ways more homogeneous in vast America than it had been in
little England. The settlers clung to their mother language, and in the
course of moving about the New World and in moving up and down the
social scale, they made it more uniform. A single spoken language soon
echoed across the continent, overcoming space as the printed word
overcomes time. The American language would fulfill the Elizabethan
prophecy of Samuel Daniel written in 1599:
And who, in time, knowes whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
This gaine of our best glory shall be sent,
T'inrich unknowing Nations with our stores?
What worlds in th' yet unformed Occident
May come refin'd with th' accents that are ours?
Only two centuries later when this dream had become a fact, Noah
Webster foresaw that "North America will be Peopled with a hundred
millions of men, all speaking the same language" Contrasted with Eu-
rope, America promised a "period when the people of one quarter of the
271
272 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
world, will be able to associate and converse together like children of
the same family."
The American language has indeed shown a spectacular uniformity.
Only after we have looked at polyglot nations like India, the Soviet Union,
and China, or when we remind ourselves that Europe, with an area of
less than four million square miles, possesses at least a dozen major
languages, can we appreciate our advantage. The people of the United
States, spread over three million square miles, speak only one language.
There is more difference between the speech of Naples and Milan, or of
Canterbury and Yorkshire, or of a Welsh coal-miner and an Oxford
undergraduate, or of a Provengal peasant and a Paris lawyer than there
is between the language of Maine and California, or between the
speech of a factory-worker and a college president in the United States.
The linguistic uniformity of America is geographic (without barriers
of regional dialect) and social (without barriers of caste and class).
Both types of uniformity have had vast consequences for the national
life; they have been both symptoms and causes of a striving for national
unity. When we note what a large French-speaking population has meant
in Canadian political life or how numerous languages have obstructed
federation in India, we begin to realize how different our political
life might have been without our language unity. Many other features of
modern American culture including the geographic mobility of the
population, the public educational system, the mail-order catalogs, the
networks of radio and television, the national mass-circulation magazines
and "national advertising" (with all these have meant for the standard
of living) would have been more difficult in a nation of several
languages. What would have happened to the Log-Cabin-to-the- White-
House style of American politics if, as in England, a man who lacked
the "proper" background betrayed himself in every word? Our common,
classless language has provided the vernacular for equality in America.
The other "American" qualities of our language seem trivial beside this
monumental uniformity, which can be traced back to the earliest age
of English settlement. If the roots of this linguistic uniformity had not
been strongly developed during the colonial period, before the numerous
and motley immigrations of the 19th century, the United States might not
today offer the world the paradoxical spectacle of a nation of many
peoples who speak a single language. Almost from the first settlement
there were pressures toward uniformity.
First, consider pronunciation. Men in areas as remote from each
other as Massachusetts Bay and Virginia had brought with them the
same language. They had come mostly from the same regions London,
THE NEW UNIFORMITY 273
the Midlands, and southern England and they represented roughly the
same social classes. Although the speech differences between New
England and the South even today are not great enough to make them
barriers to understanding, the most remote parts of the Atlantic colonies
in 17th-century America probably did not show even these small
differences. New Englanders and Southerners then spoke with some-
thing like what we now call a "Southern accent." Southern pronunciation
today is thus in many respects a survival of older ways and the "English"
characteristics of later New England speech are apparently innovations.
Once on American shores, English speech tended to become more
uniform, because of some general colonial and some peculiarly American
forces. "In consequence of the frequent removals of people from one
part of our country to another," John Pickering in his vocabulary of
Americanisms (1816) noted "greater uniformity of dialect throughout
the United States . . . than is to be found throughout England." Even
before the end of the 18th century, such students of language as the Rev.
John Witherspoon, who had come from Scotland to become president of
Princeton, noted this fact. "The vulgar in America speak much
better than the vulgar in Great-Britain," he remarked in The Druid
(1781), "for a very obvious reason, viz. that being much more unsettled,
and moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local
peculiarities either in accent or phraseology. There is a greater difference
in dialect between one county and another in Britain, than there is be-
tween one state and another in America." The once-isolated English
regional dialects met and had to speak to one another. Recent linguistic
scholars have noted this tendency toward uniformity to be a general
characteristic of the speech of any colony compared to that of its
mother country.
America, then, in the 18th century was a melting pot, although the
distinctions among the ingredients were subtler in its earliest period. In
the 19th and 20th centuries such diverse elements as Irish, German,
Polish, Jewish, Italian, Mexican, and Chinese were to be compounded;
in the 17th and 18th centuries the immigrants came from Yorkshire,
Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, London, Kent, Hampshire, and other English
counties. Anyone who looks at a map of England marked to show the
places of origin of traceable 17th-century immigrants to New England
and Virginia cannot fail to be impressed with their dispersion over the
face of the mother-country. Although, as we have already noted, there
was some tendency to concentrate (those from the Midlands in Virginia;
from London and East Anglia in New England) , and immigration did
not yet draw heavily from the peasantry, still the earliest American
274 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
colonies included men from different social classes and from many parts
of the homeland.
American life bred uniformity even within smaller areas, like New
England itself. About seventy per cent of the traceable settlers of
Plymouth, Watertown, Dedham, and Groton in Massachusetts during
the 17th century seem to have come from London and the Eastern
counties; the remainder were widely dispersed. Most important, the
ruling group did not all speak a single dialect, so could not fix any par-
ticular dialect as the language of the community. The pronunciation re-
vealed by the spelling of the semi-literate scribes of the New England
towns, who had come from many parts of England, suggests a speech
remarkably uniform and remarkably near the standard speech of England.
The same 18th-century travelers who noted the lack of dialects were
impressed also by the proper and grammatical English spoken by Amer-
icans of all classes. In Virginia, the Rev. Hugh Jones observed in 1724,
"the Planters, and even the Native Negroes generally talk good English
without Idiom or Tone, and can discourse handsomly upon most
common Subjects." Councillor Robert Carter preferred American-
trained, rather than Scotch or English tutors for his children "on account
of pronunciation in the English Language." The faculty of William &
Mary College in the 18th century was especially concerned that the
students learn proper pronunciation. In Philadelphia, the Scottish Lord
Adam Gordon, traveling the colonies in 1764-65, found that "the
propriety of Language here surprized me much, the English tongue being
spoken by all ranks, in a degree of purity and perfection, surpassing any,
but the polite part of London. 5 *
Some went so far as to say that the colonists "in general speak better
English than the English do." Even critical observers agreed. The Rev.
Jonathan Boucher (1737-1804) who had lived in the South for about
fifteen years, had taught Washington's stepson, John Parke Custis, and
was a leading Loyalist in the Revolution spent many years preparing
a "Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words." He felt that the absence
of dialect in America had actually impoverished the tongue, but he still
found it "extraordinary that, in North America, there prevails not only,
I believe, the purest Pronunciation of the English Tongue that is any-
where to be met with, but a perfect Uniformity."
The state of American speech in the years just before the Revolution
was summarized by William Eddis in his letter from America dated
June 8, 1770:
In England, almost every county is distinguished by a peculiar dialect;
even different habits, and different modes of thinking, evidently dis-
THE NEW UNIFORMITY 275
criminate inhabitants, whose local situation is not far remote: but in
Maryland, and throughout adjacent provinces, it is worthy of observa-
tion, that a striking similarity of speech universally prevails; and it is
strictly true, that the pronunciation of the generality of the people has
an accuracy and elegance, that cannot fail of gratifying the most judici-
ous ear.
The colonists are composed of adventurers, not only from every dis-
trict of Great Britain and Ireland, but from almost every other Euro-
pean government, where the principles of liberty and commerce have
operated with spirit and efficacy. Is it not, therefore, reasonable to
suppose, that the English language must be greatly corrupted by such
a strange intermixture of various nations? The reverse is, however, true.
The language of the immediate descendants of such a promiscuous
ancestry is perfectly uniform, and unadulterated; nor has it borrowed
any provincial, or national accent, from its British or foreign parentage.
For my part, I confess myself totally at a loss to account for the
apparent difference, between the colonists and persons under equal
circumstances of education and fortune, resident in the mother country.
This uniformity of language prevails not only on the coast, where Euro-
peans form a considerable mass of the people, but likewise in the in-
terior parts, where population has made but slow advances; and
where opportunities seldom occur to derive any great advantages from
an intercourse with intelligent strangers.
The resistance of the American language during the colonial period
to borrowing and the invention of words shows the strength of the forces
toward a uniform English speech. Wholesale assimilation of foreign words
might have produced a semi-English patois, a pidgin English or a
papiamento, like those in the Caribbean or in parts of South East Asia.
But this never happened. The opportunities for the mixing of French and
German into English in the colonial period were so numerous that the
failure of English colonials to seize them is doubly remarkable. Few
words were borrowed from German before the Revolution, despite the
several German-speaking communities in Pennsylvania, in the Valley
of Virginia, in Georgia, and elsewhere. It was not until after the Louisiana
Purchase (1803), after the settlements across the Mississippi, and
especially during and after the Mexican War (1846-48), that many
words were taken from the Spanish. There were not many borrowings
from the French until after the Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, and
the increasing contacts with the French along the Northwestern border;
although a few important words like portage, chowder and cachi were
adopted very early, and bureau and prairie were adopted before the
Revolution. Some of the earliest borrowings were from the Dutch, for
276 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
example, boss and Yankee, but the whole intake of Dutch words was not
large.
During the colonial period probably the largest number of additions
to the English language in America were of two limited classes: borrow-
ings of Indian words and new combinations of English words. The
borrowed Indian words were mostly from place-names, especially for
natural features, like Massachusetts Bay; or they were words having to
do with Indian relations, Indian life, Indian crops, or objects in Indian
use, such as hominy, toboggan, pemmican, mackinaw, moccasin, pa-
poose, sachem, powwow, tomahawk, wigwam, succotash, and squaw,
all of which were circulating by mid-1 8th century. America's novel plants
and animals incited new combinations of familiar English words, such as
bullfrog, mudhen, catbird, catfish, muskrat, razorback, gartersnake, and
groundhog, and American life suggested backwoods, backstreet, back-
lane, backlog, backcountry, while a number of older English words
bluff, cliff, neck, bottoms, pond, and creek acquired novel meanings to
fit the American landscape. Some of these new combinations already
faintly smacked of that copious and spicy enrichment of the language
which was to come in the early 19th century. But before the Revolution
the only strikingly new character which the English language had ac-
quired in America was its uniformity.
The very word "Americanism," meaning an expression formed or
predominantly used in America, was not known until Witherspoon em-
ployed it in 1781. Before then there was surprisingly little need for it.
That brashness and extravagance, the rip-snortin' (we owe the word to
Davy Crockett) lingo of the frontier and the Wild West, the flowery
spread-eagle bombast of 4th-of-July orators, which all seem so Amer-
ican, come not from the 18th but from the 19th century. The borrowings
from French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Yiddish, and the free
commercial invention of words (from Kodak to Sanforized), were also
products of American life in the 19th and 20th centuries of the
vast immigrations, industrialization, mass production, the mixing of
peoples in great cities, and the rise of advertising, national magazines,
radio and television. The vocabulary did not become distinctively
American until at least a half-century after the Declaration of Independ-
ence. The expansive, vibrant, motley, adventuring spirit of Elizabethan
England was to find a latter-day counterpart in the spirit of 19th-century
America; the enterprising spirit of both ages was expressed in a vitality,
ingenuity, and experimentalism of language. "The Elizabethan quality
in American English," Krapp has observed, "is not an inheritance but
a development on American soil."
THE NEW UNIFORMITY 277
American speech remained conservative, clinging to an increasingly
uniform standard, during the entire colonial period. Non-English-speak-
ing peoples tended to become quickly assimilated. The French Huguenots
who sought refuge in America after the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes in 1685 were, for example, soon absorbed. The numerous Ger-
mans who came here in the 17th century, occasionally as whole com-
munities, and settled in Pennsylvania and the valley of Virginia, in some
instances retained a modified German dialect for use among themselves,
but their language exerted negligible influence upon American English.
New immigrants expecting to rise into the higher social classes which
were already speaking the American language felt every incentive to
learn the common language of the community. By speaking "broken
English" the parents expressed their own aspirations for the common
language and the hope that their children might rise in the world.
42
Quest for a Standard
As SOON as literary people in 18th-century America became con-
scious of their own language, they expressed an excessive enthusiasm for
the standard language of England. Perhaps this was a characteristically
colonial phenomenon people still insecure in their new culture trying
to reassure themselves by showing that they could be even more proper
than the people back home. They were like the country cousin who
overdresses when he comes to the big city. The colonial frame of mind
bred an attitude toward language which still affects the life of every
American schoolboy, and shapes the American accent to this day.
In this respect, as in many others, Benjamin Franklin was a spokesman
for provincial America. It is symbolic of the tension within the colonial
culture that although Franklin did not hesitate to do some superficial
gadgeteering with the language, he clung to its ancient spirit. His un-
finished Scheme for a New Alphabet and Reformed Mode of Spelling
(1768), which would have abolished as unnecessary the letters c, w, y,
278 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
and / and would have required the addition of six new characters,
was as complicated as most systems of simplified spelling. He urged his
scheme only in an affectionate letter to his "Diir frind" Mary Stevenson,
but before long his good sense must have made him agree with Mary
who could "si meni inkanviiniensis, az uel az difikyltis." However much
Franklin might have been amused by tinkering with spelling, he never
showed any desire to meddle with the approved English style of Addison
in his own writing. He showed the same respect for the traditional English
language that he showed for the traditional rights of Englishmen.
Franklin was to be the Father of Purism in American English. The
18th century has been called the Age of Pedants in the history of the
English language, and it is at first surprising to find that Franklin, who
was in so many other ways a champion of good sense and experiment,
was in matters of language among the stodgiest. When Franklin sent
David Hume, the English philosopher, a copy of his pamphlet on Canada
and Guadeloupe, Hume replied with some criticisms of Franklin's lan-
guage, to which Franklin readily acquiesced. Franklin (Sept. 27, 1760)
accepted Hume's objection to his use of such new words as pejorate,
colonize, and unshakable: "The introducing new words, where we are
already possessed of old ones sufficiently expressive, I confess must be
generally wrong, as it tends to change the language." Franklin did
speculate that it would have been more convenient if English, like
German, had allowed the novel combination of familiar words. "But
I hope, with you," Franklin pledged, "that we shall always in America
make the best English of this Island our standard, and I believe it will
be so. I assure you it often gives me pleasure to reflect, how greatly the
audience (if I may so term it) of a good English writer will, in another
century or two, be increased by the increase of English people in our
colonies."
From this quest for truly English English, Franklin never wavered*
Nearly thirty years later (Dec. 26, 1789), in his famous letter to Noah
Webster acknowledging the dedication of Webster's Dissertations on the
English Language, Franklin, perhaps with a touch of irony, applauded
Webster's "Zeal for preserving the Purity of our Language, both in its
Expressions and Pronunciation, and in correcting the popular Errors
several of our States are continually falling into with respect to both."
He then called Webster's attention to certain "errors" in the hope that
"in some future Publication of yours, you would set a discountenancing
Mark upon them." The usages Franklin found particularly objectionable
were improved (in the sense of "employed"), the making of verbs out of
the nouns notice and advocate, and "the most awkward and abominable
THE NEW UNIFORMITY 279
of the three," the use of progress as a verb! There was very little in this
letter that could not have been written by Dr. Johnson himself; it breathed
the spirit of the Age of Pedants.
We sometimes forget the power of Franklin's example in the direction
of conformism and "purity" in language. One of the reasons for his
high reputation among American writers, as John Pickering explained
in 1816, was that "Franklin is one of the very few American writers
whose style has satisfied the English critics." From Franklin's success the
moral was generally drawn that to write the language well one had to
stick to safe English models. Until well into the 19th century, as Henry
Cabot Lodge shrewdly observed, "the first step of an American entering
upon a literary career was to pretend to be an Englishman, in order
that he might win the approval, not of Englishmen, but of his own coun-
trymen."
In the later 18th century when Americans described the peculiarities
of the American language, they did so, almost without exception, for the
wholesome purpose (in Franklin's phrase) of putting "a discountenanc-
ing Mark" on them. The Rev. John Witherspoon in his Druid essays
(1781), for example, showed a zeal for the "purity and perfection" of
the language. According to him, the American pressures toward uni-
formity toward a common speech for all classes actually threatened
the purity of the language, for the vulgarisms of one social class or one
part of the country quickly contaminated the speech of everybody, even
"scholars and public persons."
The fourth class of improprieties consists of local phrases or terms.
By these I mean such vulgarisms as prevail in one part of a country and
not in another. There is a much greater variety of these in Britain than
in America. From the complete population of the country, multitudes
of common people never remove to any distance from where they were
born and bred. Hence there are many characteristic distinctions, not
only in phraseology, but in accent, dress, manners, &c. not only between
one county and another, but between different cities of the same
county. . . .
But if there is a much greater number of local vulgarisms in Britain
than America, there is also, for this very reason, much less danger of
their being used by gentlemen or scholars. It is indeed implied in the
very nature of the thing, that a local phrase will not be used by any
but the inhabitants or natives of that part of the country where it pre-
vails. However, I am of opinion, that even local vulgarisms find admis-
sion into the discourse of people of better rank more easily here than
in Europe.
280 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
This search for a "purer" English, which in most instances meant simply
a more English English, preoccupied writers on the subject even into
the 19th century. Mencken estimated that from the beginning of the
Revolution until 1800 more Americanisms came into the language than
at any other time between the earliest colonial days and the rush to the
West. Partly because of this wave of innovation, American purists in-
tensified their efforts. "It has in so many instances departed from the
English standard," John Pickering warned in 1816, "that our scholars
should lose no time in endeavouring to restore it to its purity, and to
prevent future corruption."
Among the leaders of the return to a purer English we find none
other than the patron saint of American linguistic nationalism, Noah
Webster. If any single purpose ran through Webster's writings it was to
purify the American language; this he aimed to do by restoring it to the
condition of the "best" language of the "best" period in England. When
Webster was only thirty-one years of age, he published his Dissertations
on the English Language (1789), which stated fully his ideas. He there
expressed the theory (which he did not revise substantially until 1806)
that every language at some epoch reached an apex.
But when a language has arrived at a certain stage of improvement,
it must be stationary or become retrograde; for improvements in
science either cease, or become slow and too inconsiderable to affect
materially the tone of a language. This stage of improvement is the
period when a nation abounds with writers of the first class, both for
abilities and taste. This period in England commenced with the age of
Queen Elizabeth and ended with the reign of George H. It would have
been fortunate for the language, had the stile of writing and the pro-
nunciation of words been fixed, as they stood in the reign of Queen
Ann and her successor. Few improvements have been made since that
time; but innumerable corruptions in pronunciation have been in-
troduced by Garrick, and in stile, by Johnson, Gibbon and their
imitators.
Webster was not urging the superior advantage of a new American
language, but the superior opportunity here to restore **the English
language in its purity/' The truly dangerous innovators, he argued, were
the English writers of the later 18th century; Americans must not be
corrupted by their example. The English critics who pointed out "cor-
ruptions" in the American language had simply revealed their own
ignorance.
On examining the language, and comparing the practice of speaking
among the yeomanry of this country, with the stile of Shakespear and
THE NEW UNIFORMITY 281
Addison, I am constrained to declare that the people of America, in
particular the English descendants, speak the most pure English now
known in the world. There is hardly a foreign idiom in their language;
hy which I mean, a phrase that has not been used by the best English
writers from the time of Chaucer. They retain a few obsolete words,
which have been dropt by writers, probably from mere affectation, as
those which are substituted are neither more melodious nor expressive.
In many instances they retain correct phrases, instead of which the
pretended refiners of the language have introduced those which are
highly improper and absurd.
Webster was ready to justify even his spelling reforms in this con-
servative way. When he was charged with introducing novelties merely
to secure simplicity, he stuck to his guns. "In the few instances in which
I write words a IMe differently from the present usage," Webster wrote in
1809, "I do not innovate, but reject innovation. When I write f ether,
lether, and mold I do nothing more than reduce the words to their
original orthography, no other being used in our earliest English books."
He searched for the "primitive etymological orthography" which, along
with a cleansing of style, would "call back the language to the purity of
former times." The same went for pronunciation. "Your way of pro-
nouncing deaf is dej ours, as if it were written deef," Webster told the
visiting English naval officer, Captain Basil Hall, nearly twenty years
later, "and as this is the correct mode from which you have departed, I
shall adhere to the American way."
In his enthusiasm for the purity and uniformity of the American
language Webster grossly underestimated the number of distinctively
American words and American usages. He doubted, in his Dissertations,
whether there were as many as a hundred English words in use in
America "except such as are used in employments wholly local" which
were not universally intelligible. Nearly forty years later, in 1828, the
year of publication of his American Dictionary of the English Language,
he boasted to Captain Hall that "there were not fifty words in all which
were used in America and not in England." Webster's so-called American
Dictionary drew copiously on the writings of Americans for examples,
but, as Thomas Pyles has remarked, there was no other justification for
calling it "American."
Yet Noah Webster was thoroughly American and never more so
than when he sought an external (and even an English) standard for
the American language. His passion for linguistic legislation was, of
course, to have its counterpart in an American passion for written con-
stitutions and for almost every other kind of legislation. It expressed
282 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
the cultural insecurity of a colonial people. After 1776 it began to express
the quest for a national identity.
But how was a standard to be established? As early as 1724, the Rev.
Hugh Jones, then professor of mathematics at William & Mary College,
desired that a "Publick Standard were fix'd" to "direct Posterity, and
prevent Irregularity, and confused Abuses and Corruptions in our
writings and Expressions." In 1774, another writer, possibly John
Adams, urged in the Royal American Magazine that where so many
people over so wide an area spoke the same language, the opportunities
for "perfecting" the English language should be seized by forming the
Fellows of the American Society of Language. The Loyalist Governor of
New Hampshire forwarded this proposal to the Secretary of State for
the Colonies back in London. Only a few years later, after Independence,
John Adams wrote to the president of Congress proposing that Congress
set up an academy for "correcting, improving and ascertaining the
English language.** The fact that the English had never set up such
an academy in England made it all the more important that there be one
in America. "It will have a happy effect upon the union of States to have
a public standard for all persons in every part of the continent to appeal
to, both for the signification and pronunciation of the language." In 1806,
a bill to establish such an academy was introduced in the Senate and
reported favorably by a committee of which John Quincy Adams was
a member; but when the title of the academy was amended to omit the
word "National," the project died. On occasion Noah Webster also ad-
vocated legislation to fix the language and keep it pure, but for him the
aid of Congress was almost superfluous. In his own realm Webster had
become something of a dictator, and, like all dictators, he preferred to
speak the law himself. These were only the first in a long series of
zealous efforts reaching into our own century to use the legislature or the
schoolmaster to keep our language pure and purely American.
By the end of the 18th century, observant Americans had begun to
notice that, despite or perhaps because of the widespread uniformity of
the language in the colonies, there had not yet arisen any class or locality
on this side of the water which was the arbiter of linguistic propriety.
"We are at a great distance from the island of Great-Britain, in which the
standard of the language is as yet supposed to be found," Dr. Wither-
spoon remarked in 1781. "Every state is equal to and independent of
every other; and, I believe, none of them will agree, at least immediately,
to receive laws from another in discourse, any more than in action.
Time and accident must determine what turn affairs will take in this
respect in future, whether we shall continue to consider the language of
Great-Britain as the pattern upon which we are to form ours: or whether,
THE NEW UNIFORMITY 283
in this new empire, some centre of learning and politeness will not be
found, which shall obtain influence and prescribe the rules of speech and
writing to every other part." According to Dr. Johnson, this lack of a
cultural capital, the wide dispersion of population, and the vast extent
of America helped account for the barbarism of the American language.
"A nation scattered in the boundless regions of America resembles rays
diverging from a focus. All the rays remain but the heat is gone." What
the pontifical Doctor disparaged as "the American dialect" simply showed
the "corruption to which every language widely diffused must Always be
exposed."
In the early 17th century, when the American colonies were first
settled, every man had spelled as he pleased. Orthography, like style or
content, expressed the whim and personality of the writer or the
printer. It was not until the early 18th century that the principal English
authors all spelled pretty much alike; and not until Dr. Johnson's Diction-
ary (1755) that writers possessed a standard which nearly everybody
accepted. It was handy for the rising middle classes to have a guide into
the paths of linguistic elegance frequented by the upper classes. This was
especially important in England, where language had long been (and till
this day remains) an index of social class; the ability to speak and write
the "standard" language of the ruling aristocracy was essential to an
enjoyment of its other privileges. It is, then, not surprising that the
late 18th and early 19th century saw an unprecedented number of dic-
tionaries, grammars, and guides to correct speech. These "linguistic
Emily Posts" enabled men to speak and write with unobtrusive propriety
among their "betters."
It would have horrified Dr. Johnson and his Tory friends to discover
that the dogma of "correctness" in language the doctrine that to speak
well one must speak by the book, and that to speak by the book is
to speak well would help men of low birth push their way up (grammar
and dictionary in hand) into the best dining halls and salons. Before
guides to correct usage existed, a man learned his speech as he learned
his manners and his place in society, from his father and mother. There
was probably no language more casual and relaxed than the aristocratic
talk of the 17th- and 18th-century English drawing-rooms, from which
such words as ain't and even hain't are relics. Before mid-1 8th century
a man did not consciously learn, and did not need to be taught, the
"proper" language for his social class, for he drank it in with his
mother's milk. The very idea that there was a single "proper" speech
which any literate person could leam from a recipe book was subversive
of old ways and the old caste. It is easy to see why this way of looking
at language would suit the New World.
284 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
43
Culture by the Book:
The Spelling Fetish
THE MOST INFLUENTIAL American writer on language was Noah
Webster, Spelling-Master to America. The colossal popularity of his
spellers they had sold over sixty millions before the end of the 19th
century was both a symptom and a symbol of the mobility of American
society. Webster's American Spelling Book, "containing an easy Standard
of Pronunciation," appeared in 1789, but the demand it met, as Webster
himself noted, had long been there.
In America there flourished a ritual or game which popularized the
effort to make "proper" speech accessible to all. This was the spelling-
bee; and the word "bee" in this sense was appropriately an Americanism.
In this public ceremony contestants and audience bore witness that
there was no secret about how to speak or write the most "correct" lan-
guage of the community and hence that the linguistic upper class was
open to all. The spelling-bee was already familiar, especially in New
England, in the time of the Revolution. As early as 1750, Franklin had
proposed a public competitive game of spelling; by the latter half of the
1 8th century spelling matches had become well-established in the schools.
In rural communities and on the western frontier, where spelling was
especially valued as a symbol of culture, the institution took on a new
life in the 19th century, described, for example, in Bret Harte's "Spell-
ing Bee at Angels." There we learn from Truthful James:
Thar's a new game down in Frisco, that ez far ez I can see
Beats euchre, poker, and van-toon, they calls the "Spellin' Bee."
At the particular bee which Bret Harte describes, all went peacefully
even through the spelling of separate, parallel, and rhythm but the
miners finally found it necessary to settle the spelling of gneiss by a fight
with bowie knives.
Emphasis on "rules" of proper speaking and writing profoundly in-
fluenced the whole American attitude toward pronunciation. It explains
THE NEW UNIFORMITY 285
what is still perhaps the most important distinction between English and
American pronunciation, the American tendency toward "spelling-pro-
nunciation." Very early, Americans began trying to discover how a word
"ought" to be pronounced by seeing how it was spelled. This seemed to
provide a ready standard of pronunciation in a land without a cultural
capital or a ruling intellectual aristocracy.
We have become so accustomed to our own equation of spelling and
pronunciation that we find it hard to imagine that a tendency to pro-
nounce by custom rather than by spelling may have been an older and
more "literary" tradition. Yet that seems to have been the case. The
casual way of pronouncing which followed caste and custom and not
the spelling-book had long prevailed in the English of England.
Our insistent spelling-pronunciation shows itself in our habit of pre-
serving the full value of syllables. In long words like secretary, explana-
tory, laboratory, and cemetery, we preserve the full value of all, including
the next-to-last syllable, while the English almost drop that syllable and
say "secretary," "explanatory, "laboratory," and "cemet'ry." These are
only a few examples of the American insistence on giving every spelled
syllable its fully pronounced due. Some of these cases turn out to be
historically complicated by the fact that the secondary accent we have
preserved in the next-to-last syllable of a word like secretary seems
also to have been characteristic of 17th- and 18th-centmy spoken Eng-
lish. But while in England these syllables have tended to become lost,
in America they have been studiously preserved. This would not alter
the argument but would simply show that American spelling-pronuncia-
tion, like much else in our speech, is conservative. Our deference to
spelling as a guide to pronunciation has been so strong that we have
kept alive here ways of speech which soon died in England. The ritual
of the spelling-bee also tended to preserve the full pronounced values
of syllables, and to promote literalness in pronunciation. In the early days,
spelling was taught by reading a word aloud from the Speller letter by
letter and syllable by syllable: "o, r or; d, i di; n, a na; r, y ry;
ordinary." Students who had been taught the language in this fashion
(often under the incentive of team competition) would be apt to remain
careful, deliberate, and literal in pronunciation for the rest of their lives.
Our weakness for spelling-pronunciation affected the pronunciation of
proper names, and especially the names of places. In England these
had a purely traditional and casual pronunciation, but Americans who
hear Worcester pronounced Wooster are apt to spell it that way; and
Birmingham is fully and carefully pronounced, never in the elided English
manner.
The "Dictatorship of the Schoolmarm," often attacked by sophisticated
286 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
students, has dampened our ebullience and ingenuity. But the School-
marm, like her predecessor the Schoolmaster, by declaring teachable rules
of language has helped dissolve class distinctions and has kept one
more avenue open in a mobile society. Who could have predicted that a
free and equalitarian society would be promoted by a pedantically
precise standard of language?
H. L. Mencken has summed up the wider meaning of the special
precision of American speech:
It may be described briefly as the influence of a class but lately risen
in the social scale and hence a bit unsure of itself a class intensely
eager to avoid giving away its vulgar origin by its speech habits. . . .
Precision in speech thus became the hall-mark of those who had but
recently arrived. Obviously, the number of those who have but re-
cently arrived has always been greater in the United States than in
England, not only among the aristocracy of wealth and fashion but
also among the intelligentsia. The average American schoolmarm, the
chief guardian of linguistic niceness in the Republic, does not come
from the class that has a tradition of culture behind it, but from the
class of small farmers and city clerks and workmen. This is true, I
believe, even of the average American college teacher. Such persons
do not advocate and practise precision hi speech on logical grounds
alone; they are also moved, plainly enough, by the fact that it tends
to conceal their own cultural insecurity. From them come most of the
gratuitous rules and regulations that afflict schoolboys and harass the
writers of the country. They are the chief discoverers and denouncers
of 'bad English* in the books of such men as Whitman, Mark Twain
and Howells. But it would be a mistake to think of then* influence as
wholly, or even as predominantly evil. They have thrown themselves
valiantly against the rise of dialects among us, and with such success
that nothing so grossly unpleasant to the ear as the cockney whine
or so lunatic as the cockney manhandling of the h is now prevalent
anywhere in the United States. And they have policed the general
speech to such effect that even on its most pretentious levels it is
virtually free from the silly affectations which still mark Standard
English.
In this particular way, the American language has expressed both the
literate and the non-literary character of American culture. A printed
standard presupposes widespread literacy; the Dictatorship of the
Schoolmarm would never have been possible unless everybody in the
country had come under her jurisdiction through universal public educa-
tion. Moreover, if America had had a powerful centralized literary aris-
tocracy able to set up its casual practice as the criterion for the speech
THE NEW UNIFORMITY 287
of all cultivated men, textbook standards of precision would have been
superfluous and impossible. Literacy displaces aristocracy. Students of
language note that the tendency to make the spoken conform with the
written form of a word "in general grows as the printed and written
aspects of language become more prominent in the language conscious-
ness of a people." While there has been some such tendency in England,
it has been much stronger in America. "Each new group of American
citizens," Krapp observes, "has entered into possession of the language
not as a natural inheritance, not as a privilege, but as an acquisition, as
something to be gained through intelligent application and study."
Through learning to read, write, and speak the common language many
peoples were amalgamated into a single nation.
The early New England settlers, middle-class and literate, champions
of the common school, had a good deal to do with establishing uni-
formity in the first place. The Yankee schoolmaster, like the Yankee
peddler, traveled widely, and both carried the spelling-book, the yard-
stick of linguistic respectability. In the early 19th century, a New Eng-
land storekeeper could list for sale "Everything: whiskey, molasses,
calicoes, spelling-books, and patent gridirons." Noah Webster profited
handsomely from the fact that the uniformity of the American language
depended on schooling and universal literacy. "Nothing but the establish-
ment of schools and some uniformity in the use of books [preferably
Webster's Speller!]," he argued in his Dissertations on the English Lan-
guage (1789), "can annihilate differences in speaking and preserve the
purity of the American tongue." But this would not have been possible
without a high standard of living and of literacy:
Let Englishmen take notice that when I speak of the American yeo-
manry, the latter are not to be compared to the illiterate peasantry of
their own country. The yeomanry of this country consist of substantial
independent freeholders, masters of their own persons and lords of
their own soil. These men have considerable education. They not
only learn to read, write and keep accounts; but a vast proportion of
them read newspapers every week, and besides the Bible, which is
found in all families, they read the best English sermons and treatises
upon religion, ethics, geography and history; such as the works of
Watts, Addison, Atterbury, Salmon, &c. In the eastern states, there are
public schools sufficient to instruct every man's children, and most
of the children are actually benefited by these institutions.
Webster obviously had great faith in a printed, external standard for
language. Having made his fortune out of a spelling-book, he could
hardly have been expected to believe otherwise. "To reform the abuses
288 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
and corruption which, to an unhappy degree, tincture the conversation
of the polite part of the Americans . . . and especially to render the
pronunciation . . . accurate and uniform by demolishing those obvious
distinctions of provincial dialects which are the subject of reciprocal
ridicule in different states" so read Webster's petition for copyright for
his textbooks, and the introduction to his spellers.
At the same time that Webster legislated on language, he disclaimed
the purpose of a legislator. All such legislation was superfluous, he
said, because the real authority in matters of language was the American
people. This was doubtless one of the things Webster meant when in the
preface to his Dictionary he quoted Franklin: "Those people spell best
who do not know how to spell." The trouble with most earlier (and
especially English) writers on language, according to Webster, was
that they tried to dictate, and "instead of examining to find what the
English language &, they endeavor to show what it ought to be accord-
ing to their rules." In contrast to this, Webster declared for himself, "The
general practice of a nation is the rule of propriety, and this practice
should at least be consulted in so important a matter, as that of making
laws for speaking." His standards he found in "the rules of the language
itself*: or, in a phrase which he could not repeat often enough, in 'the
general practice of the nation."
A democratic respect for folkways was possible, Webster observed in
his Dissertations, only in a country of social equality. In England, he
explained, the appeal to general usage (the only true purifier and en-
livener of language) was impossible for the simple reason that there
a small isolated aristocracy, arrogant of its privileges, had elevated its
own peculiarities.
While all men are upon a footing and no singularities are accounted
vulgar or ridiculous, every man enjoys perfect liberty. But when a
particular set of men, in exalted stations, undertake to say, "we are
the standards of propriety and elegance, and if all men do not con-
form to our practice, they shall be accounted vulgar and ignorant,"
they take a very great liberty with the rules of the language and the
rights of civility.
But an attempt to fix a standard on the practice of any particular class
of people is highly absurd: As a friend of mine once observed, it is like
fixing a light house on a floating island It is an attempt to fix that
which is in itself variable; at least it must be variable so long as it is
supposed that a local practice has no standard but a local practice;
that is, no standard but itself* . . .
But this is not all. If the practice of a few men in the capital is to be
the standard, a knowledge of this must be communicated to the whole
THE NEW UNIFORMITY 289
nation. Who shall do this? An able compiler perhaps attempts to give
this practice in a dictionary; but it is probable that the pronunciation,
even at court, or on the stage, is not uniform. The compiler therefore
must follow his particular friends and patrons; hi which case he is
sure to be opposed and the authority of his standard called in question;
or he must give two pronunciations as the standard, which leaves the
student in the same uncertainty as it found him. Both these events
have actually taken place hi England, with respect to the most ap-
proved standards; and of course no one is universally followed.
The appeal to an aristocratic standard in language was thus only one
example of the general error of elevating local practice into a general rule.
Variations in pronunciation over the American continent seemed to
him no objection at all to making the "universal practice" of Americans
the standard for the country. In his Speller he purported simply to give
voice to this universal practice. "I have no system of my own to offer,"
he insisted. "General custom must be the rule of speaking, and every
deviation from this must be wrong. The dialect of one State is as ridicu-
lous as that of another; each is authorized by local custom; and
neither is supported by any superior excellence." The standard for an
American language would be distilled somehow from the very air of
America.
Even before the Revolution, as the English editor of David Ramsay's
History of the American Revolution (1791) noted, the American
language had acquired a standard of its own. This dialecfless language
of the New World was to become more uniform and more universal than
any yet known to Western man. Time would prove that Webster had
spoken with the cryptic voice of prophecy when he urged that "we
should adhere to our own practice and general customs." From these we
would develop a standard American language, a language which, as
Krapp says, "has grown, and is growing, in a thousand different places,
by mixture, by compromise, by imitation, by adaptation, by all the devices
by which a changing people in changing circumstances adapt themselves
to each other and to their new conditions." Americans would show en-
thusiasm both for linguistic legislation and for linguistic folkways. Just
as in their attitude to all other laws, Americans would combine a naive
faith in legislation with a profound reverence for ancient customs and
the common law. This alchemy of opposites which gave vitality to our
written Federal Constitution also gave vitality to our language.
Precisely because no part of our culture is more plainly borrowed, no
other part could so well reveal the peculiarities of American life. James
Fenimore Cooper summed up the development in his Notions of the
Americans in 1828:
290 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
That the better company of London must set the fashion for the
pronunciation of words in England, and indeed for the whole English
empire, is quite plain; for, as this very company, comprises all those
whose manners, birth, fortune, and political distinction, make them
the objects of admiration, it becomes necessary to imitate their affecta-
tions, whether of speech or air, hi order to create the impression that
one belongs to their society. . , .
There exists a very different state of things in America. If we had a
great capital, like London, where men of leisure, and fortune, and
education periodically assembled to amuse themselves, I think we
should establish a fashionable aristocracy, too, which should give
the mode to the forms of speech as well as to that of dress and de-
portment. ... we have no such capital, nor are we likely, for a long
time to come, to have one of sufficient magnitude to produce any
great effect on the language. . . . The habits of polite life, and even
the pronunciation of Boston, of New York, of Baltimore, and of
Philadelphia, vary in many things, and a practised ear may tell a native
of either of these places, from a native of any one of the others, by
some little peculiarity of speech. There is yet no predominating in-
fluence to induce the fashionables of these towns to wish to imitate the
fashionables of any other. . . .
If the people of this country were like the people of any other country
on earth, we should be speaking at this moment a great variety of
nearly unintelligible patois; but, in point of fact, the people of the
United States, with the exception of a few of German and French
descent, speak, as a body, an incomparably better English than the
people of the mother country. ... In fine, we speak our language, as a
nation, better than any other people speak their language. When one
reflects on the immense surface of country that we occupy, the gen-
eral accuracy, in pronunciation and in the use of words, is quite
astonishing. This resemblance in speech can only be ascribed to the
great diffusion of intelligence, and to the inexhaustible activity of the
population, which, in a manner, destroys space.
Here, in place of the "King's English," there had developed a "People's
English," peculiarly suited to a country without a capital, where every-
body was privileged to speak like an aristocrat.
PART ELEVEN
CULTURE WITHOUT
A CAPITAL
"A nation scattered in the boundless regions
of America resembles rays diverging from a
focus. All the rays remain but the heat is gone."
SAMUEL JOHNSON
"Men who are philosophers or poets, without
other pursuits, had better end their days in an
old country."
BENJAMIN RUSH
44
"Rays Diverging
from a Focus"
THE POOR QUALITY of American literary works during the colonial
period helped keep the market open to the imported product, and gave
added significance to the ways of importing. Never before, surely, haid so
far-flung and so populous a civilization been so literate, nor had so
literate a people produced less in the way of belles-lettres. Was there
perhaps some connection between these two characteristics of American
culture? between the literacy of the whole community and the un-
literary character of the ruling groups? In modern Western European
culture the most honorific use of the printed word, except for sacred
religious texts, has been in the ornamental literature of its privileged
classes. Such cultures are judged by their dramas, poems, novels, and
essays, which, like palaces and manor-houses, are the monuments of
aristocratic cultures. But must we measure our culture by its ability to
produce such monuments? Must we hope to induct an ever larger part of
the American people into the mysteries of an aristocratic belles-lettres?
The printed word has had another destiny in America, a role less
understandable by the traditional techniques of literary archeologists.
The peculiarly American emphasis on relevance, utility, "reader-interest,"
293
294 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
and catholicity of appeal has made of printed matter a different institu-
tion. Not the litterateur but the journalist, not the essayist but the writer
of how-to-do-it manuals, not the "artist" but the publicist is the char-
acteristic American man of letters* His readers are found not in the salon
but in the market place, not in the cloister or quadrangle but in the
barbershop or by the fireplace of the average citizen. His kind of printed
matter is "transparent": it calls attention to its object, not to itself.
Placing less emphasis on form than on purpose, it has no tendency to
create a class of professional "appreciators," a circle of the initiate who
value the form for its own sake. Here, too, American life focuses on
process rather than product: printed matter is treated less as "literature"
than as communication. These tendencies reach deep into our past, and
have flourished partly because in the colonial age our soil was not already
overgrown with literary culture.
In Western Europe the literature of the dominant classes was first
written in a dead and alien "classical" language; its inaccessibility added
to its prestige and to the power and self-esteem of those who held the keys
to the antique temples of learning. Among aristocratic cultures it is
still generally assumed that the works of ancient Greece and Rome can
never be equaled by mere moderns. The standard training for the English
ruling class has long been the ancient classics at Oxford they are sig-
nificantly called simply "Greats"; it has been assumed that a prospective
member of the governing groups should know an esoteric literature in
Greek and Latin before coming to his own vernacular literature. In
America much of this was to be reversed. Some of the most cultivated
men would agitate against perpetuating "classical" standards in learning.
Despite such romantic exceptions as George Sandys translating Ovid in
Virginia in the 1620's, knowledge of an ancient language was never to
acquire the widespread prestige in our culture that it had long possessed
in England. We started with a vernacular literature which acquired its
prestige from its utility.
Since books, unlike the spoken language, had to be carried in men's
ba ggage, the kind of bookish culture to be found in colonial America (or
in different parts of it) was, from one point of view, a product of the
facilities for transportation. Because books are physical objects which
are made in some particular place, they tend to remain near the place
of manufacture, or at least near a few centers of distribution. To de-
scribe the books in colonial America, therefore, as if they were every-
where the same is especially misleading.
During the colonial period, the centers for the importing and selling
of books and probably even for reading, were along the Atlantic seaboard
CULTURE WITHOUT A CAPITAL 295
It was easier to travel a thousand miles by water than a hundred by land,
and it was infinitely less trouble to carry a dozen books in the hold of a
ship for six weeks than to carry them inland for ten days. Bookish culture
was substantially a foreign import. Many enduring features of American
life were rooted in this simple fact and in the peculiar ways in which the
importation was to be accomplished.
Books were an urban commodity, and there was no inland city of any
significance before the era of the Revolution. Even as late as 1790,
every one of the eight cities with a population of more than six thou-
sand was on the seacoast. One consequence of the westward movement
and the growth of inland towns was tie rise of urban centers that were
less accessible to the literary culture of Europe. But it was not until
many decades after the first books were produced in America that they
began to take the place of books brought in from England.
The mind of the American city looked across the water to London.
"Because its outlook was eastward rather than westward," observes Carl
Bridenbaugh, "it was more nearly a European society in an American
setting." Moreover, almost without exception, the major paths for
diffusing the American population started from some eastern seaboard
city. The principal cities on the coast were so many separate funnels
through which the bookish culture of Britain poured into the inland
areas, to be dispersed throughout the countryside. The literary culture
of colonial America thus remained for a long time city-filtered. The
sole important exception was Virginia, where the numerous rivers and
the tobacco economy had diffused distribution onto scores of private
plantation-docks; but the cultural stream flowing through all Virginia
had already been filtered in London,
No one of the five largest cities established an undisputed cultural
dominance over colonial life as a whole. Despite similarities in their
forms of government, in their taverns and sociable amusements, there
were influential local differences important for the future of American
culture. We are accustomed to thmlr of Boston as dominating the culture
of 17th-century America, yet as early as 1680 both New York (then still
called New Amsterdam) and Newport had an urban life to rival
Boston's. Though Boston was the most populous of the early colonial
cities, by 1760 she had already fallen behind both New York and Phila-
delphia. During the 18th century, then, there was a race for leadership
among the colonial cities: even in the early decades Philadelphia was
neck-and-neck with Boston, and New York City was not far behind;
Newport and Charleston were already large towns by English provincial
standards. Numerous smaller cities gradually appeared: Portsmouth,
296 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Salem, Hartford, New Haven, New London, and Albany, to mention a
few. Such priority as ever did exist was frequently shifting. When Phila-
delphia became the most populous city, people could not forget that the
position had not long before been held by Boston; and, by the end of the
18th century, New Yorkers were beginning to hope that they might in
turn displace Philadelphia. But there was never an American London
or Paris, a metropolis of undisputed historical, political, cultural, and
commercial leadership.
One of the consequences was that American literary culture, even
despite the arterial connection with London, began to acquire a varied
responsiveness to local problems and to the manifold life of the
continent. In the following centuries, too, this would characterize the
bookish culture of the nation. The colonial period built this legacy from
the variety of religious attitudes, from the numerous local ways of earn-
ing a living, and from a hundred other regional differences, all of which
would make the hegemony of any one region difficult. The flourishing of
an importing book-trade in the several colonial cities thus diffused the
power to decide which books were worth the price.
45
Boston's "Devout and
Useful Books"
THE MAJOR English libraries, those of the universities for example,
had been accumulating for generations; in country houses volumes of
recent publication were only a thin veneer on the ancestral treasure.
Among books purchased for importation to the colonies, however, recent
titles had a more prominent place. Of the approximately four hundred
books John Harvard left in 1638 to the College that was to bear his
name, more than a fourth were printed after 1630. There were, of course,
a few instances of men bringing old family collections with them, but the
proportion of recently published titles (accentuated by frequent colonial
fires, like that which destroyed the Harvard Library in 1764) tended to
CULTURE WITHOUT A CAPITAL 297
grow as the 18th century wore on. This increased the importance of
such patterns of selective importation as characterized, for example,
Boston.
In early Boston, books were a surprisingly numerous and profitable
commodity. In 1686, when the city was only a half -century old and with
fewer than seven thousand people, it possessed a flourishing book-trade
and over a half-dozen booksellers, at least one of whom made a sub-
stantial fortune in the business. Compare this with the book-trade in
our own day in towns of about the same size to see the importance
of books in the life of 17th-century Boston.
John Dunton, a London bookseller who visited Boston on business in
1686, left an account which, despite obvious exaggeration, reveals a
prosperous and highly competitive booktrade. "I'm as welcome to 'em
as Sowr Ale in Summer; they Look upon my Gain to be their Loss, and
do make good the Truth of that old Proverb, That Interest will not lie."
Dunton claimed that in less than five months he had collected five
hundred pounds of old accounts due him for books, had sold the large
stock he had brought with him, and had taken orders for many more
which he would send back from England. Commerce in books continued
to flourish; in 1719, Daniel Neal noted that the Exchange on the site
of the present State House was "surrounded with booksellers shops"
doing a thriving business.
The central commercial position of Boston gave it power over the
literary taste and reading matter of its neighboring colonies. "The other
governments of New-England," Governor Thomas Hutchinson remarked
of the late 17th century, ". . . imported no English goods, or next to
none, directly from England, they were supplied by the Massachusets
trader." But the book-market of New England, while a great deal
freer than the printing press, was also confined by its governing spirits.
"There is an old Hawker," Cotton Mather wrote in 1683, "who will
fill this Countrey with devout and useful Books, if I will direct him; I
will therefore direct Him, and assist him, as far as I can, in doing so."
The energetic Mather and his fellow rulers of Boston exerted themselves
to stimulate the flow of books and to be sure that those books were
wholesome. When in 1713 the Massachusetts Assembly passed an act
against "Hawkers, Pedlars, and Petty Chapman," whom the established
merchants outside of Boston suspected of retailing stolen goods (as well
as of interfering with their trade) , Mather joined with the Boston book-
sellers "in addressing the Assembly, that their late Act against Pedlers,
may not hinder their Hawkers from carrying Books of Piety about the
Countrey."
When Mather wrote of "devout and useful Books" he accurately
298 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
characterized the printed matter that the rulers of opinion and the book-
buyers of Boston were importing for the city and its hinterland. So far
as we can tell, the Boston market was dominated by books religious or
didactic. There is interesting evidence of this in the invoices of John
Usher, the Boston bookseller. In 1682 Usher received from London
about 800 books, apparently selected for him by an English supplier.
About half were religious, about one-fifth were romance and belles-
lettres, about one-fifth were schoolbooks; the only other notable cate-
gories were navigation (60 volumes), history and travel (45 volumes),
and medicine (12 volumes). This must have represented a London
bookseller's estimate of New England tastes, but, judging from invoices
three years later (when Usher made his own selection) , Boston's didactic
and unliterary flavor was even stronger than the London bookseller had
guessed. Of the 800 books Usher himself ordered in that year, the
volumes were almost equally divided between religious books and school-
books, with few of any other character fifty on navigation, three dozen
on law, and not over a half-dozen of romance or belles-lettres.
Other clues suggest that the religious emphasis of John Usher's stock
of books was fairly typical of late 17th-century Boston, and would re-
main so for several decades. When Michael Perry, a Boston bookseller,
died in 1700, the inventory of his estate showed that of approximately
two hundred titles on hand two-thirds were religious.
The most important private libraries were, of course, owned by
prominent divines. The largest and most impressive by far was that of
Cotton Mather. "I do think," the enthusiastic John Dunton exclaimed in
1686, "he has one of the best (for a Private Library) that I ever saw:
Nay, I may go farther, and affirm, That as the Famous Bodleian Library
at Oxford is the Glory of that University, if not of all Europe, (for it
exceeds the Vatican,) so I may say, That Mr. Mather's Library is the
Glory of New-England, if not of all America. I am sure it was the best
sight that I had in Boston." This library, of which we unfortunately
possess no catalogue, Cotton's son Samuel described as "by far the most
valuable Part of the family Property," running to "7000 or 8000
Volumes of the most curious and chosen Authors." There can be little
doubt that the collection was heavily weighted on the religious side.
In those early years, Harvard College was still serving the purpose
for which it had been founded, namely to provide a learned ministry
for New England. Nearly three-quarters of the volumes John Harvard
left to the college were theological; gifts made later in the century ac-
centuated this theological flavor. Despite occasional complaints (begin-
ning with President Henry Dunster in 1647) about the narrowness of the
CULTURE WITHOUT A CAPITAL 299
library, Boston did not have a respectable collection of non-theological
books until the late 18th century.
Even in 1723, Joshua Gee's catalogue showed that two-thirds of the
Harvard College collection consisted of theological and religious works.
The most conspicuous weakness was in modern literature and belles-
lettres. The library did have Shakespeare, Milton, and some lesser poets,
but it left readers on their own to find Pope, The Taller, or The Spectator.
In many ways the Harvard College library was not much different from
that of a small college library in the British Isles, but such biases and
limitations were more influential in New England, where the College long
dominated intellectual life. These limitations also expressed the sovereign
literary tastes of the community, for it was primarily the ministers of New
England who, in sermons and on a thousand other occasions, spread the
knowledge of books.
While literary opportunities were surely more limited in New England
than in London, they were hardly more limited than in remote places in
the north or west of England. The literature of New England must not
be compared with the whole of English literature in the 17th century,
but only with that little segment which was the literature of the Puritans
of the English provinces. Even so, it was narrow. In 17th-century Boston
there was none of the residue of the earlier, more relaxed and adventur-
ing ages of English culture. Books were brought to New England, with
few exceptions, for a purpose. The cheap bookshops of London Bridge
dared display items which would have brought a fine or the whipping
post to a Boston bookseller. The miscellaneous frivolous, irreverent, ob-
scene, and unorthodox books which seeped into the London market to
titillate and sometimes to stimulate and enlarge the mind seldom
found their way into Boston. Booksellers' invoices are depressingly bar-
ren even of the great imaginative works of the age.
Nothing was more "practical" in Puritan New England than religion.
Their preoccupation with applied religion gave a point to religious books,
but it also confined their vision. The circumstances which removed
religious literature if not all literature from the realm of the orna-
mental, the aristocratic, and the speculative gave a crabbed, practical
quality to their tastes. Paradoxically, that very interest in public educa-
tion which was to make Massachusetts Bay one of the most literate and
bookish communities of its age also helped confine the taste and concerns
of the community during its earliest years. For literacy was considered
primarily an aid to orthodoxy; only secondarily was it to be a means for
acquiring other kinds of useful knowledge. "Devout and useful Books"
were supposed to be the full stock of the literate mind. Works of "delight
300 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
and amusement" so much of the best of English literature had no
place in this scheme.
To be responsible for his own salvation, to see the Word of God
through his own and not through a priest's eyes, a man had to be able
to read. The General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony (November
II, 1647) had explained:
It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men
from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping
them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from
the use of tongues, that so at least the true sense and meaning of the
original might be clouded by false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers,
that learning may not be buried in the grave of our fathers in the
church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavours.
It is therefore ordered, that every township in this jurisdiction, after
the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders,
shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such
children as shall resort to him to write and read. . . .
The chief text of compulsory public education in Massachusetts was the
New England Primer, which before the end of the 17th century had be-
come the best-selling New England schoolbook. Within the next century
and a half it was to sell upwards of three million copies. For New Eng-
land, and even for other parts of the colonies, it was to be the instrument
of literacy which Noah Webster's blue-backed Speller was later to be for
the young nation. But while Webster's texts were designed to produce
a universally literate people, speaking and spelling the same language, the
New England Primer had a more dogmatic purpose. From the day he
learned his alphabet and read the first syllable in his primer, the New
England child was pressed to absorb the truths by which his community
lived.
Some of the flavor changed after the Revolution, with the increasingly
secular temper. In the 18th century the rhymed alphabet, instead of going
from "Adam" to "Zaccheus," sometimes went from "Apple" to "Zany."
In place of the earlier exhortation to learn to read in order to know the
Bible and enter the Kingdom of Heaven, by the end of the 18th century
some children were being warned:
He who ne'er learns his A.B.C.
Forever will a blockhead be.
But he who learns his letters fair
Shall have a coach to take the air.
Still these were minor changes; the hard core of religious matter the
Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and some form of the Catechism
CULTURE WITHOUT A CAPITAL 301
remained well into the 19th century, when the Primer was finally en-
gulfed by Noah Webster's spellers and readers.
As the decades of the 18th century passed, this strong practical and
didactic flavor became diluted, even in New England. There, as elsewhere
in the colonies, time produced an assimilation of tastes, for in most of
the colonies the bookish culture was dominated by the wealthy men of
the cities. These native aristocracies were commercial in origin, and,
since commerce thrives on interchange, the culture of all American sea-
board cities became more alike during the 18th century. By the second
half of the century, the institutions for disseminating books the book-
sellers, the private libraries, and the college library were being sup-
plemented: by "social libraries" (a kind of book club developed by
Franklin in Philadelphia, whose members paid dues for the right to
borrow books) and by commercial and public circulating libraries.
These libraries were much less theological; they offered readers a selec-
tion of history, literature, travel, law, science, and fiction broad enough to
satisfy city-dwellers anywhere in North America.
But the earlier characteristic of bookish Boston the narrow practical
spirit long remained. If its literary culture had been more bland, less
pungent of provincial puritanism, Boston might have begun a career as a
cultural capital, which could conceivably have given a different turn to all
American intellectual life.
46
Manuals for Plantation Living
ALTHOUGH VIRGINIA was governed by an aristocracy, its capital
was not a city a circumstance as decisive for Virginia's bookish
culture as for her political institutions. In 1776 she was the most popu-
lous of the colonies, containing nearly twice as many people as Mas-
sachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, or North Carolina, and one-fifth of
all the inhabitants of the colonies. Yet while other colonies possessed
metropolises (Philadelphia counted 40,000 and even Charleston had
302 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
12,000), the legal capital of Virginia, Williamsburg, had a year-round
population of only 1500. Even though it was the seat of government, the
home of the College of William & Mary, and a small center of literary life
in the colony, Williamsburg remained for most of the year a sleepy village.
Twice annually at the so-called "Publick Times," when the General
Court met or the Assembly convened Williamsburg came quickly but
briefly to life, and its population doubled. But like the fair towns of
European medieval times, it remained a seasonal meeting-place.
During the colonial period, therefore, books that found their way into
the libraries of Virginia plantations had not come through bookshops in
nearby cities. Except for those which the settlers had brought on first
coming, or on rare later trips to England, books were for the most part
acquired from London on special orders. Each planter had to decide for
himself or more commonly let his London agent decide for him what
books should be sent. In 1722, Franklin later recalled in his Autobiog-
raphy, there was "not a good bookseller's shop in any of the colonies
southward of Boston." For the middle colonies this was something of an
exaggeration, characteristically designed to magnify Franklin's own
pioneering in libraries and bookshops. Yet his statement was true of
Virginia, and would remain so for many years. There was probably not a
bookstore in Williamsburg before 1736. Nearly a century later, Jefferson
still complained to John Taylor (May 28, 1816) of "the difficulties of
getting new works in our situation [Monticello], inland and without a
single bookstore." But the lack of a prospering book trade showed the
style of Virginia life rather than the absence of a demand for books.
The contents of their private libraries show that in books, as in other
imports, Virginia gentlemen followed their English exemplars. By English
canons they were permitted to be literate but dared not be bookish:
pedantry and the squint of the specialist were to be avoided like the
plague. They had to know enough of all things to act well and to satisfy
their private questions, but, as Sir Thomas Peyton warned, "not to
confound learned men and their books and friends with words newborn."
In the training of a gentleman the emphasis was thoroughly practical. He
was judged less by the furnishings of his mind, than by the furniture
of his house, less by his intellect and learning, than by the charity and
graciousness of his conduct.
There was little in the English model to inspire the Virginia emulator
to become a man of letters or a collector of books. Near the bottom of the
social scale there was little if any reading in 17th-century Virginia; most
Virginians probably could not read. If we ask, not how many were
literate, but how many were so illiterate they could not sign their names,
CULTURE WITHOUT A CAPITAL 303
we can find a rough answer. Philip Alexander Bruce, the social historian
of colonial Virginia, examined 17th-century county records to see how
many of the names were signed by a mark rather than by a proper
signature. In 18,000 instances he examined, nearly half of the male
white Virginians (including a few judges) were so illiterate they could not
sign their names. Three-quarters of the white women were unable to sign
their names. Even these figures probably exaggerate the literacy of Vir-
ginians, for we know that people who can sign their names sometimes
can neither read nor write.
At the top of the social scale, a few planter-aristocrats, even in the
17th century, owned large libraries, but undue significance has been
attached to such rare phenomena as the library of William Byrd, which
by 1744 contained more than 3600 titles. Byrd was a prodigy: his col-
lection, the largest in Virginia, elsewhere was rivaled only by Cotton
Mather's and James Logan's. Other "first gentlemen of Virginia" Wil-
liam Fitzhugh, the Lees, the Carters, and the Wormeleys possessed con-
siderable collections, but at no time were the leading men of colonial
Virginia particularly bookish or widely-read. A study of about a hundred
private libraries shows that these were, on the average, smaller than is
commonly supposed; nearly half contained fewer than twenty-five titles.
Before 1700 a library in Virginia containing more than one hundred
volumes was a rarity; even in the 18th century it was not unusual in
inventories of the estates of leading Virginians to find but a dozen books.
More typical than the library of, say, Jefferson was Washington's handful
of treatises for useful purposes or the estate of John Chilton, which,
though valued at 1700, contained only "two small old Bibles and
eighteen other books, mostly old."
The striking common characteristic of these collections is their practi-
cality. The larger libraries contained a generous sprinkling of works in
religion and general literature, including the ever-present Bible and
Book of Common Prayer, but even such "religious" books were usually
practical and devotional like Bailey's Practice of Piety or The
Whole Duty of Man rather than theological or speculative. Their di-
versity, from orthodox Puritanism at one end to Deism at the other,
attests the catholicity and tolerance of their owners.
In the 17th century, lawbooks often made up the biggest single group:
not only in the large libraries of people like Robert Carter (whose library
contained three hundred titles, of which one hundred were on law), but
even in the small libraries. Col. Southey Littleton, a leading planter of
Accomac County, on his death in 1680 left seventeen books, of which
four were on law; Capt Christopher Cocke of Princess Anne County in
304 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
1716 left a library of twenty-four titles, nine on law. The proportion of
lawbooks seems to have increased during the 18th century; not alone
among lawyers, but also among physicians, clergymen, and especially
among the large planters. In this new country, where all fortunes rested
on land and where legal claims were often disputed, lawyers were in
short supply. As county justices, burgesses, and vestrymen, the leading
Virginians faced all the legal problems of judge, legislator, and executive.
They could not perform their simplest public duties without some knowl-
edge of the English legal tradition which was the very cement of their
community. It provided the institutions of Virginia and the framework for
a new nation.
Especially in the smaller libraries, or in the collections of two dozen
titles or less which ought not to be dignified as 'libraries," one often
found medical texts to help the planter or his wife treat the plantation
sick. Their numerous handbooks on agriculture, building, horses, hunting,
or fishing were not for the hobbyist; they were essential tools. Even the
guide to horsemanship or gardening enabled the Virginian to etch in
more minute detail his reproduction of English country life.
To Virginians, advice on how to lead the life of a Christian gentleman
must have seemed hardly less practical than instructions on how to treat
smallpox. Even the "classics" seem to have been valued less as ornaments
of educated gentlemen than as handbooks for knowledge of men, of
history, of nature, and of affairs. Plutarch, Aristotle, and Pliny were
primarily sources of scientific information or political wisdom. The
classical works increased into the 18th century but never appeared in
large numbers. Virginians relied on translations. "They have few
Scholars," the Rev. John Clayton wrote back to England from James-
town in 1684, "so that every one studys to be halfe Physitian, halfe
Lawyer, and with a naturale accutenesse would amuse thee for want of
books they read men the more."
English visitors found it hard to believe that a prosperous ruling class
would rather learn directly from experience than from books. Perhaps
here was a new type of culture, where even gentlemen who could afford
otherwise might choose to read men rather than books; and when they
read their books, they might prefer to read them with a purpose. ''Never-
theless," the Rev. Hugh Jones observed in 1724, "thro' their quick Ap-
prehension, they have a Sufficiency of Knowledge, and Fluency of
Tongue, tho' their Learning for the most Part be but superficial. They
are more inclinable to read Men by Business and Conversation, than to
dive into Books, and are for the most Part only desirous of learning
what is absolutely necessary, in the shortest and best Method." Their
CULTURE WITHOUT A CAPITAL 305
outdoor life, their lack of leisure, the full-time demands of plantation
management, and the loneliness of their remote mansions made con-
versation infinitely preferable to reading. George Washington was reputed
to have stationed one of his slaves at a nearby crossroad to invite any
casual passerby to enliven the dinner table with news of the outside
world. More than one traveler wondered whether the proverbial "South-
ern hospitality" did not express loneliness as much as generosity.
The leading planters of Virginia, like the New England clergy, con-
trolled the bookish culture of their part of the country. The roles of
clergy and laity, however, were reversed, for many Anglican clergymen
in Virginia (some were in fact chaplains to leading planters) relied on
the libraries of the planter-aristocrats they served. Where else could the
rector of Christ Church parish look for reading-matter if not to the
books Robert Carter had collected at Corotoman? The manifold "re-
ligious" activities of a planter thus made him the supplier (and inci-
dentally the censor) of books for the clergy of his parish. The lack of
circulating libraries made him the librarian also for his poorer neighbors
and parishioners. The Rev. Thomas Bray, Commissary of the Church of
England for Maryland after 1696, thought the lack of books a menace
to the competence and independence of the Southern clergy; and, partly
to remedy this, The Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge
was founded. Bray set up libraries in Maryland, New England, New
York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas but not in Virginia.
These conditions increased the influence of the planters* taste over that
of the community at large. Their remoteness seems not to have led them
to develop independence and variety in their literary tastes. Instead a
surprising uniformity prevailed. The more remote the planters were, the
more eager they were to cling to old English ways.
For Virginians books were in the main merely tools, the stock-in-trade
of a plantation headquarters. And so they appear in the occasional orders
planters sent their London agents. On August 27, 1768, William Nelson
instructed the firm of John Norton & Sons:
I have already by this Conveyance sent you a Bill of Loading for 6
hhds of my Crop of Tobo. & I am now to answer your Letter of the
23rd of May, I am obliged for your Endeavours to procure me some
good red Herrings; but either they do not cure them so well as they did
formerly; or, what is more probable, my Taste is alter'd; so you need
not send any more; for I really don't like them; I shall however expect
My Garden Seeds, Cheese, &ca. as soon as a new Crop comes in,
with the Books I wrote for; & you will be pleased to add the following;
vizt, Blackstone's Commentary upon the English laws; also one plain
306 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Hat 6/ 1 Laced Do. & 8 pr of strong Shoes & Pumps for a Boy of
eight years old & the same Quantity of Hats & Shoes for two other
Boys of 13 & 15 years old.
The practicality of Virginians had a different character from that of
New Englanders. Virginians were unwilling, even if they had been geo-
graphically able, to accept cultural leadership from a New England
capital. At the same time the taste of the planters was neither strong
nor pungent enough to dominate that of other colonies. A large variety
of patterns was already producing the anti-literary and diffused character
of American intellectual life. If the Virginia mind was less crabbed and
less perverse than that of Puritan New England, it was equally hard-
headed, legalistic, and unpoetic. Among Virginians there was no place
for a literary class, a Grub Street, or a polite salon. They were not a
cultivated elite; they were men of affairs trying to transplant and in-
vigorate institutions.
47
The Way of the Marketplace:
Philadelphia
THE BREADTH and liberality of the bookish culture of colonial
Philadelphia gave it an alien flavor from the viewpoint of a New Eng-
lander or a Virginian. Its peculiarly Quaker tone also set it apart and,
for most of the colonial period, further disqualified Philadelphia from
being the capital of American culture. The account of the importing,
buying, reading, and writing of books in the Friendly metropolis leads
us into neither the drawing-rooms of patrons, the attics of Bohemia, nor
the convivial meeting-places of literary circles. It takes us rather into
the dispersed daily activities of physicians, businessmen, shopkeepers,
and mechanics.
The difference between Samuel Johnson's circle in London and
Benjamin Franklin's circle in Philadelphia is a measure of the difference
CULTURE WITHOUT A CAPITAL 307
between the place of books in the older and the newer culture. Dr.
Johnson's famous letter to Lord Chesterfield, in which he expressed
contempt for the arrogance of his patron, could never have been written
in Philadelphia. Imagine Franklin seeking a patron, cooling his heels
in the waiting room of a noble lord, and wasting his time writing letters
to rebuke the discourtesies of a man who sought sycophants! Contrast
Dr. Johnson's circle, frequented by James Boswell, Sir Joshua Reynolds,
Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, and Edward Gibbon
all men of letters in the traditional sense of the word with Benjamin
Franklin's "Junto," its young, unknown membership including a glazier,
a surveyor, a joiner, a cobbler, and several printers.
Curiously enough, the very doctrines of Philadelphia Quakerism the
inwardness, the distrust of dogma, the emphasis on the individual
which made Quakers uncompromising and ill-suited for governing a
large community, also made them practical in their approach to knowl-
edge. The ways of mysticism are unpredictable: for the very same reasons
the Quakers refused to fight attacking Indians, they wished to fight
pedantry. William Penn advised his children:
Have but few Books, but let them be well chosen and well read,
whether of Religious or Civil Subjects . . . reading many Books is but
a taking off the Mind too much from Meditation. Reading your selves
and Nature, in the Dealings and Conduct of Men, is the truest human
wisdom. The Spirit of a Man knows the Things of Man, and more
true Knowledge comes by Meditation and just Reflection than by
Reading; for much Reading is an Oppression of the Mind, and ex-
tinguishes the natural Candle; which is the Reason of so many sense-
less Scholars in the World.
Within the ample frame of English puritanism, New England Puritans
required that men attend to their books, but Pennsylvania Quakers with
equal earnestness urged that men attend to experience. New England
dogma might confine reading tastes to the practical purpose of build-
ing Zion, but Pennsylvania Quakers looked less into sacred texts than
into their hearts and at the sins of their community. If their religion did
not prod them to learning, it did not at least keep them from any kind
of learning.
Unlike the Puritans, the Quakers were never adept at compromise.
As the 18th century wore on they developed the only slightly inferior
virtue of inconsistency, which never shone more clearly than in their
attitude toward books. Despite his warnings, William Penn owned a
considerable library and other leading Quakers possessed collections
which served "for delight and profit." One of the three largest colonial
308 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
libraries of the early 18th century (along with Cotton Mather's and
William Byrcf s) was owned by James Logan, the Quaker who was
Perm's secretary, who later became leader of the conservative party,
and who before he died had held almost every important office in the
colony. Logan expected that the Hamburg merchant from whom he
ordered works in Greek and Latin would be surprised "to find an Ameri-
can Bearskin Merchant troubling himself with such books." Yet he
doted on his books and expected them to be the entertainment of his
advancing years.
The intellectual life of Philadelphia offered a great deal of room in
which active minds could range. Its citizens were less policed by
orthodoxy than were those of New England, less confined by narrowly
practical and political concerns than were those of Virginia, and less
dominated by the tastes of a literary aristocracy than were those of
London. These features disqualified Philadelphia from becoming the
literary capital of all America, but they enriched an already heterogene-
ous colonial culture.
By the middle of the 18th century Philadelphia showed a wide variety
of religious creeds and patterns of worship. An informal inventory of
the buildings of the city made by the Rev. Andrew Burnaby in 1759-60
included "a good assembly-room belonging to the society of free-
masons; and eight or ten places of religious worship; viz. two churches,
three quaker meeting-houses, two presbyterian ditto, one Lutheran
church, one Dutch Calvinist ditto, one Sweedish ditto, one Romish
chapel, one anabaptist meeting-house, one Moravian ditto: there is also
an academy or college, originally built for a tabernacle for Mr. White-
field." This tolerant atmosphere in religion encouraged the interchange
of books and ideas on many other subjects as well.
Philadelphia became a center of the book-trade, and its importance
increased with each passing decade of the 18th century. In 1742 there
were only five bookshops in the city; by 1760 fifty booksellers had
opened shop; by 1776 the city had seventy-seven bookshops. While, at
the end of the 17th century, Boston's book-trade had been second only
to that of London in the English-speaking world, in the second half of
the 18th century, the leadership had moved to Philadelphia.
Although the Philadelphia book-trade did not dominate colonial
America, it grew and flourished. Its imports became more assorted. Some
shops even found it profitable to specialize: James Chattin mainly in
Quaker tracts; Sparhawk & Anderton in "a very great choice of books
adapted for the instruction and amusement of all the little masters and
misstresses in America"; William Woodhouse in rare books; Charles
CULTURE WITHOUT A CAPITAL 309
Startin in classics and fine editions; Henry Miller in German books. By
the 1770's a fifth of the city's booksellers carried books in the German
language. The free and competitive atmosphere also invited books from
France; in the latter part of the century there probably were more French
books in the Philadelphia shops than could be found anywhere else
in the thirteen colonies.
Competition among booksellers helped disseminate books and ideas.
These were among the first American businesses to advertise extensively
in newspapers and to use modern dramatic methods of merchandising.
During the latter half of the 18th century, the newspapers were com-
monly filled with booksellers' ads (sometimes full pages). These reached
into outlying towns, and, together with occasional broadsides and cata-
logues especially directed to the country trade, were the propaganda by
which booksellers sold literacy to their fellow colonists.
The most enterprising of the early American merchandisers was Robert
Bell, a Scot whose "doubtful" religion and morality he fathered an
illegitimate child and openly kept a mistress seemed only to make him
a more effective salesman. A pioneer in "national" advertising, he in-
serted ads in nearly all the colonial newspapers to announce the first
American editions of Blackstone's Commentaries and other such works.
He traveled over the continent to buy up choice collections to be brought
to Philadelphia, where they were then sold or dispersed to other parts
of the colonies. His most famous purchase was the library of William
Byrd of Virginia, which he transported to Philadelphia in "perhaps as
many as 40 waggon loads." To the rhythm of his auctioneer's hammer,
he entertained Philadelphia audiences with his lively wit; he developed
the book-auction into a major American institution. The book-auction
had long been used on the continent of Europe, but it did not reach
England until the end of the 17th century, nor Boston, despite its
flourishing book-trade, until 1713. It was in flourishing, free-wheeling
Philadelphia, with its motley audiences, that the vulgar commercial
merchandising of reading-matter was most successful.
In 1744 Benjamin Franklin was advertising his own auction of choice
books with the minimum price marked in each volume. His sessions
were held daily at specified hours over a period of three weeks. The
auction was by no means confined to second-hand books; publishers
used this way of unloading their remainders directly on the reading
public. Bell, advertising an auction in 1770, catalogued the retail price
of his new books and announced that each would be offered for half-
price. By such sales, a colonial printer explained, he could turn "dead
stock into live cash, and may again attempt the work of some celebrated
310 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
author whose writings will diffuse knowledge throughout America."
None could rival Bell, whose wit and antics were a staple Philadelphia
entertainment "Many, going to his auction for the merriment," a news-
paper reported, "would buy a book from good humour. It was as good
as a play to attend his sales. . . . There were few authors of whom he
could not tell some anecdote, which would get the audience in a roar. He
sometimes had a can of beer beside him, and would drink comical
healths. His buffoonery was diversified and without limit." In mid-1 8th
century, in this once-Quaker metropolis, books had become a mere com-
modity, a very profitable one. It would be hard to imagine a Boston
clergyman or a Virginia planter taking part in such antics; for them
books had both a narrower and a more vital purpose. But in pitching his
sales-talk to the town "mechanick" and the passing customer, Bell
showed himself a shrewd judge of the growing Philadelphia market,
which was anything but highfalutin'.
The audience for imported books was widened and developed by
another institution which had its first American success in Philadelphia,
the so-called "social library," an early example of the American identifi-
cation of learning with self-improvement. While not an American inven-
tion such libraries were not uncommon in England in the 1720's it
held a special place in the life of this American city.
The "social library" was simply a club in which members paid an
entrance fee plus annual dues for the privilege of using the group's col-
lection of books. The earliest such institution known in the American
colonies grew out of the "Junto" formed by Benjamin Franklin in 1727.
This club of young artisans and tradesmen, established for "mutual
improvement," was modeled after the earnest Cotton Mather's scheme
for neighborhood benefit societies, to twenty of which he himself be-
longed. Its declared purpose was similar to that of later American
"Service" clubs like Rotary and Kiwanis.
Franklin's group did not chat wittily about polite literature; it had
topics for "debate." "Is it justifiable to put private men to death, for the
sake of public safety or tranquillity, who have committed no crime? As,
in the case of the plague, to stop infection; or as in the case of the
Welshmen here executed?" "If the sovereign power attempts to deprive a
subject of his right (or, which is the same thing, of what he thinks his
right) is it justifiable to him to resist, if he is able?" "Whence comes the
dew that stands on the outside of a tankard that has cold water in it in
the summer time?"
When members of the Junto found themselves handicapped in debate
by their lack of books, they did not ask a gift from a wealthy patron;
CULTURE WITHOUT A CAPITAL 311
instead they pooled their small individual means. At first they simply
collected the books owned by members onto shelves at one end of the
clubroom, but this was not enough. In 1731 Franklin proposed his plan
for the Library Company of Philadelphia "and, by the help of my
friends in the Junto, procured fifty subscribers of forty shillings each to
begin with, and ten shillings a year for fifty years, the term our company
was to continue. We afterwards obtain'd a charter, the company being
increased to one hundred." The Library Company of Philadelphia, dur-
ing its long life far longer than even the half-century Franklin had
optimistically foreseen encouraged that "purposeful reading 9 * which
was a common characteristic of American colonists north and south.
Like the members of later "Book Clubs," the members of Franklin's
company did not rely on their own judgment, "and the Committee
esteeming Mr. Logan to be a Gentleman of universal Learning, and the
best Judge of Books in these Parts, ordered that Mr. Godfrey should
wait on him and request Him to favour them with a Catalogue of suitable
Books." Logan's selections, costing forty-five pounds sterling, were
ordered from London on March 31, 1732. There were forty-odd titles.
The list included no work of theology but dictionaries, grammars,
an atlas, several multi-volume works of history, travel and biography,
and a few books on politics and morals. About a third of the
titles were on emphatically practical subjects: anatomy, biology, chemis-
try, geometry, mathematics, astronomy, agriculture and Daniel Defoe's
Compleat English Tradesman. Only a handful of ancient classics (and
these the most obvious the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Dryden's translation
of Virgil) and the merest smattering of belles-lettres (The Spectator, The
Guardian, The Taller, and the works of Addison) showed any deference
to the reading tastes of London literati. Although the library's scope
widened, its character and appeal did not change much during the next
half-century. "The librarian assured me," Jacob Duch6 reported in 1772,
"that for one person of distinction and fortune, there were twenty trades-
men that frequented this library." Two years later, of its 8000 titles,
barely 80 came under the classification "Fiction, Wit, and Humour."
This subscription library, and many others like it, flourished in Phila-
delphia and in the towns of New England, where fifty were founded in
the next half-century. Within Philadelphia the Library Company tended
to absorb other libraries; by the Revolution it had become a major insti-
tution in the cultural life of the city. To it was added the rich library of
James Logan, given to the public at his death in 1751. Later Franklin
boasted that his Library Company had been "the mother of all the North
American subscription libraries now so numerous"; actually it had been
312 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
only one expression of the diffused literacy of colonial America. He was
not exaggerating, however, when he remarked that "these libraries have
improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common
tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other
countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so
generally made throughout the colonies in defence of their privileges."
* * *
The variety of attitudes towards books described in these chapters
was in fact even greater than appears here. In New York for most of the
18th century there was no impressive interest in books; before the
Revolution it did not have as many bookstores as either Boston or
Philadelphia, although its book-trade was comparable to that of such
English provincial cities as Newcastle, Liverpool, or Bath. Practical com-
mercial interests prevailed, and the confusing remnants of Dutch culture,
together with competition among literary languages, stunted the book
business. Charleston, South Carolina, which was the only large town
south of Philadelphia before the rise of Baltimore in mid-1 8th century,
showed an aristocratic character unique on the continent. Its upper class,
newly-rich in rice, indigo, and slaves, enjoyed their exclusive private
clubs and mimicked the ways of the London rich more successfully than
did Americans anywhere else. With its busy round of concerts, dances,
hunts, horse-races, cock-fights, and card-games, the city became famous
also for its beautiful and well-dressed women. But the free-spending
aristocracy did not spend much of its money on books; the first major
bookshop in Charleston did not open until 1754, when Robert Wells
offered an assortment of books "chiefly entertaining." This busy, gay,
unbookish community had very much its own flavor, but certainly not one
to qualify it as a cultural capital of the colonies.
CULTURE WITHOUT A CAPITAL 313
48
Poetry Without Poets
THE SEABOARD CITIES, each for its own reasons, sifted the bookish
culture of the mother country for a widely literate but not strikingly
literary people. Uncannily, the tastes of distant parts converged toward
the practical and the purposeful in the world of books. Almost wholly
dependent on London for their books, the colonists could not avoid
borrowing English ways of thinking about many things, but they did not
borrow the institution of a literary class.
The rich variety and equal competition of town life in America de-
prived the colonies of the natural habitat of a literary class. That class
usually cannot thrive unless it can sit at the center of things, and in
America there was no center.
The cultural mountain top from which the English literary word was
proclaimed was, of course, London. The simple fact that books in
America were, for all the colonial era, primarily an imported English
product held a vast significance: it helped make tolerable, or even
desirable, to the minds of energetic Americans their own lack of a
literary class. Actually, colonial America possessed a large stock of
ready-made belles-lettres supplied from abroad and in its own language.
The colonial situation thus provided Americans with the finest fruit of
a great literature which they could in a sense call their own, yet without
the institutions which had produced it. In short, the colonists could enjoy
the best of poetry without having to put up with a class of poets; they
could chuckle over the elegant trifles of Addison and Steele without
having to support a class of essayists; they could amuse themselves with
the products of Grub Street without having to build any such neighbor-
hood. The colonists were able to reap the profit from several centuries
of an aristocratic and leisured culture without having to accumulate for
themselves the capital sum of social distinctions and intellectual and
economic inequalities from which that culture had been produced.
Some observant colonists noted the opportunities and disadvantages of
their situation. "Your Authors," Benjamin Franklin wrote to William
Strahan, his bookseller friend in London (Feb. 12, 1744), "know but
314 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
little of the Fame they have on this side of the Ocean. We are a kind of
Posterity in respect to them." A posterity is in the comfortable position
of being able to enjoy the most delightful fruits of a past society without
having to endure its peculiar institutions: it can read Greek philosophers
without experiencing the slavery on which the Greek community was
based; it can relive Benvenuto Cellini's exploits without risking the
murderous passageways of Renaissance Italy. A posterity can be eclectic;
its detachment from the scenes and issues enables it to be more catholic
in its taste. "I would not have you be too nice in the Choice of Pamphlets
you send me," Franklin wrote to Strahan, "Let me have everything, good
or bad, that makes a Noise and has a Run: For I have Friends here of
different tastes to oblige with the sight of them." He explained his order
for six sets of a new edition of Alexander Pope's works by saying that
Americans had a broad interest in all the best English authors. "We
read their Works with perfect impartiality, being at too great a distance
to be byassed by the Factions, Parties and Prejudices that prevail among
you. We know nothing of their Personal Failings; the Blemishes in their
Charactre never reaches us, and therefore the bright and amiable part
strikes us with its full Force. They have never offended us or any of our
Friends, and we have no competitions with them, therefore we praise and
admire them without Restraint Whatever Thomson writes send me a
dozen copies of. I had read no poetry for several years, and almost lost
the Relish of it, till I met with his Seasons.'*
But American men of letters were not literati; they were clergymen,
physicians, printers, lawyers, farmers. They were busy men; and the
busier they were, the scantier the record which they left us. We have more
ample literary accounts of American life during the earlier 18th century
than of the turbulent years toward the end of the century. Perhaps no
great event of modern times has left so poor an account of itself by
participants as has the American Revolution.
In America this absence of a specifically literary class lasted into the
19th century. But it had not been much noted until writers like Washing-
ton Irving and James Fenimore Cooper actually began to found such a
class. "We have no distinct class of literati in our country," Jefferson
wrote in 1813, "Every man is engaged in some industrious pursuit, and
science is but a secondary occupation, always subordinate to the main
business of life. Few therefore of those who are qualified, have leisure
to write." John Pickering agreed that here there was hardly such a
thing as "authors by profession." "So great is the call for talents of all
sorts in the active use of professional and other business in America,"
explained Justice Joseph Story (1819), "that few of our ablest men have
CULTURE WITHOUT A CAPITAL 315
leisure to devote exclusively to literature or the fine arts This obvious
reason will explain why we have so few professional authors, and those
not among our ablest men." President Timothy Dwight of Yale clearly
described the consequences of being a nation with a borrowed literature:
Books of almost every kind, on almost every subject, are already
written to our hands. Our situation in this respect is singular. As we
speak the same language with the people of Great Britain, and have
usually been at peace with that country; our commerce with it brings
to us, regularly not a small part of the books with which it is deluged.
In every art, science, and path of literature, we obtain those, which to
a great extent supply our wants. Hence book-making is a business, less
necessary to us than to any nation in the world; and this is a reason,
powerfully operative, why comparatively few books are written.
A few nostalgic, imitative spirits yearned for an American reincarna-
tion of English letters. As late as 1769, a writer in the Pennsylvania
Chronicle who called himself "Timothy Sobersides" warned that Phila-
delphians, while busily encouraging manufacture, should no longer ignore
the Nine Muses: "It does not appear that any of those Lovely Personages
migrated with our Ancestors in the early days of peopling this Continent
from Europe." The critic hoped that "we shall no longer be so entirely
beholden to the Mother Country, as we have hitherto been, for all the
articles of Poetical Haberdashery; but that we may, at length, become
able to furnish ourselves with a sufficiency of sing-song, the product of
our own labour and Industry." Yet even in Philadelphia, where if any-
where on the continent there was a cosmopolitan atmosphere, efforts
to produce a polite literature were stiff, self-conscious, and sterile. For
example, the Rev. William Smith, provost of the College of Philadelphia,
tried to gather a coterie of poets under the name of the Society of
Gentlemen, but he found only poetasters. The best American utterance
during the colonial age, as perhaps in later ages, was not confined in
measured verse nor in the rounded essay. Instead it trickled out of a
thousand miscellaneous places: statute-books, pamphlets of political
controversy, projects, promotional brochures, sermons, speeches on the
floors of legislatures, newspaper-columns, and the staccato proceedings
of scientific societies. Such literature could never satisfy the men of
letters of the Old World.
American printed matter thrived on the absence of a strong liter-
ary aristocracy. It was diffuse. Its center was everywhere because it
was nowhere. Every man was close to what it talked about. Everyone
could speak its language. It was the product and the producer of a busy,
mobile, public society, which preferred relevant truths to empyrean
316 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Truth and would always retain a wholesome suspicion of the private
highfalutin* multilingual witticisms of the salon. In 1772 the Anglican
Rev. Jacob Duche, one of the earliest of a long line of popular American
pulpit orators, observed:
The poorest labourer upon the shore of Delaware thinks himself
intitled to deliver his sentiments in matters of religion or politics with
as much freedom as the gentleman or the scholar. Indeed, there is less
distinction among the citizens of Philadelphia, than among those of
any civilized city in the world. Riches give none. For every man
expects one day or another to be upon a footing with his wealthiest
neighbour. . . . Such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind,
that almost every man is a reader; and by pronouncing sentence, right
or wrong, upon the various publications that come in his way, puts
himself upon a level, in point of knowledge, with their several authors.
PART TWELVE
A CONSERVATIVE PRESS
"No American has within my knowledge been
willing to inhabit a garret, for the sake of
becoming an author."
TIMOTHY DWIGHT
49
The Decline of the Book
CONSIDERING the intellectual energy of colonial Americans, their
output of books was strikingly small. Even the most literate of them
men like Franklin and Jefferson did not express their most important
ideas in books.
To say, as Franklin did in his circular letter of 1743 proposing an
American Philosophical Society, that Americans did not write more
books because they were too busy with other things and because Ameri-
can culture was still "immature" is misleading. The book did not flourish
here, but other types of printed matter grew in profusion.
Everything dissuaded the colonial printer from undertaking the long
volume. First, there was the scarcity of type. In England the supply had
been limited as part of the control of the press; a Star Chamber Decree
of 1637 allowed only four persons, each with a limited number of
apprentices, to operate type-foundries at any one time. Not until the
Revolution could American printers buy type of American manufacture.
What made the situation in the American colonies even worse was that
type brought here was likely to consist of fonts long used and already
discarded by English printers. In 1779, when Franklin received copies
of the Boston newspapers sent to him in France, he said the only thing
he could see clearly in them was that American printers desperately
319
320 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
needed new type. "If you should ever have any Secrets that you wish to
be well kept, get them printed in those Papers."
In those days, long before linotype, the number of pages a printer
could keep standing in type for any time depended directly on the amount
of type he owned. The colonial printer with only a single font of a given
size could not keep pages of type standing; he had to set a few sheets,
print them, and then distribute the type before he could proceed. A rush
order for job printing for advertising brochures or for the legal and
commercial forms which were the backbone of his business might at
any time require the use of his type. Under these circumstances, a
prudent printer preferred small jobs which quickly repaid his investment
rather than books, whose market was uncertain and on which the
financial return might be postponed for a year or more.
The scarcity and the poor quality of paper was another deterrent to
book printing. Although William Bradford, a Philadelphia printer, had
established a paper mill near Gennantown as early as 1690 and paper-
production had increased during the colonial period, American printers
still remained dependent on European supplies. One reason why the
Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts were so irritating and helped set
Revolutionary events in motion was that they included paper among the
imported articles to be taxed. Even apart from any large issue of princi-
ple, the high price of paper itself gave colonial printers a reason to stir
up American indignation. The crucial necessity of paper imports for
colonial printers is shown by the fact that the cheaper grades of paper
which were used for newspapers were excepted from some of the Revolu-
tionary non-importation resolutions in 1769.
During the Revolution, George Washington had to write to his generals
on odd scraps of paper because nothing better could be had; loose
dispatches were sent to officers because paper was too precious to be used
for envelopes. Correspondents wrote on fly-leaves torn from printed
books and on the blank pages of old account-ledgers. Sometimes, for
lack of paper, weekly issues of newspapers failed to appear, and often
they were printed on whatever miscellaneous colors, sizes, and qualities
of paper the printer could find.
The paper scarcity was acute during most of the colonial period be-
cause of both the scarcity of rags from which paper was made and the
lack of skilled papermakers. When William Parks set up the first paper-
mill in Virginia in 1744, he used the columns of his Gazette (July 26,
1744) to persuade citizens of Williamsburg to sell him their worn linen
garments:
A CONSERVATIVE PRESS 321
Tho' sage Philosophers have said,
Of nothing, can be nothing made;
Yet much thy Mill, O Parks brings forth
From what we reckon nothing worth. . . .
(And long that gen'rous Patriot live
Who for soft Rags, hard Cash will give!). . . .
Ye Fair, renown'd in Cupid's Field,
Who f ain would tell what Hearts you've killed;
Each Shift decay'd, lay by with care;
Or Apron rubb'd to bits at Pray'r,
One Shift ten Sonnets may contain,
To gild your Charms, and make you vain;
One Cap, a Billet-doux may shape,
As full of Whim, as when a Cap,
And modest 'Kerchiefs Sacred held
May sing the Breasts they once conceal'd.
Nice Delia's Smock, which, neat and whole,
No Man durst finger for his Soul;
Turn'd to Gazette, now all the Town,
May take it up, or smooth it down.
Whilst Delia may with it dispence,
And no Affront to Innocence.
New England printers used a more theological whimsy to promote their
business. In the valuable paper-cargo of a captured Spanish ship which
Thomas Fleet, Boston printer and stationer, bought in 1748, he found
some bales of papal bulls or indulgences. On the backs of some he printed
popular songs like "Black-Eyed Susan," "Handsome Harry," and
"Teague's Ramble to the Camp," while others he advertised for sale:
"the Bulls or Indulgences of the present Pope Urban VHE, either by
the single Bull, Quire or Ream, at a much cheaper Rate than they can
be purchased of the French or Spanish Priests, and yet will be warranted
to be of the same Advantage to the Possessors."
Such paper as was made in the American colonies, then, while
tolerable for newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, almanacs and primers,
was not fit for a book which had to last years. For books the colonial
printer had to order from his London agent a supply of European
(preferably Dutch) paper. It was difficult or impossible to secure enough
paper of the same quality for a whole book; yet the printer could not
afford to keep his small quantity of type standing until enough paper for
the whole work had arrived. He therefore found it necessary to set only
as much of the book as he had paper for; he then stored the printed
sheets and distributed the type, until the arrival of more paper allowed
him to go on.
322 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Ink was also a problem. The leading printers' handbook (Moxon's
Mechanick Exercises of 1683) advised that manufactured ink was in-
ferior to that which printers might mix for themselves, but colonial
printers lacked the lamp-black and varnish from which ink was made.
They therefore continued to rely heavily on inferior ready-made ink
imported from England. Printing presses, too, had to be imported; it was
1769 before Issac Doolitde of New Haven built the first American press
as a commercial venture.
It is not surprising, then, that few books were printed in the American
colonies and that the staple commodity of the American bookseller
throughout the colonial period was the imported book. Revolutionary
non-importation agreements in 1769 were careful to enumerate "printed
books and pamphlets" along with gunpowder and fishhooks among
the items that might still be brought from England. Not until the end of
the 18th century did the importation of English books begin to be
affected by the competition of American imprints.
It is remarkable, indeed, that the colonial printer succeeded in printing
even those books he did the solid volumes of statutes, the occasional
works of recent history, or the religious tracts. Everything he printed
bore the mark of his crude equipment and scarce materials. Economy of
materials induced the printer to save paper by using a smaller type than
was desirable. In some instances economy encouraged simplicity but the
paper shortage generally discouraged the spacious design which would
have pleased the eye.
Though Americans tried to import some of the English improvements,
American printing lagged technically far behind that of England through-
out the 18th century. During his stay in England after 1724, Benjamin
Franklin with his uncanny talent for being in the right place at the
right time happened to work for some of William Caslon's sponsors
and was therefore in a position to know about Caslon's improved type-
faces, which he imported to America in the 1740's. But not until 1790,
after type-founding and paper-making were well-established American
enterprises, did the first monumental work appear from an American
press: the serial publication beginning in 1790 of the American issue of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica which ran to 18 volumes and required
seven years to print.
Since the beginning of his trade, the European printer had tried to
protect his investment by securing in advance the support of a rich
patron, who in return usually expected a flattering dedication. Gradually,
as the book-market widened, printers sought many patrons instead of one
for each publication; people agreed in advance to buy a particular book
A CONSERVATIVE PRESS 323
when it finally came off the press. When the market became still wider,
as in 18th-century England, publishers began to risk their own funds.
But the longer American books continued to be published with the
patronage of public officials, governors, and legislative bodies. The syco-
phantic dedication to a Lordly patron, who had bought and paid for
his compliments, is rarely found in volumes printed on this side of the
ocean. During the 18th century the American printer, more than his
English counterpart, tried to cover his investment by advance subscrip-
tions.
When books had to be subscribed in advance, there was every reason
for the printer to play safe, to be wary of the novel idea, the unknown
author, the radical questioner. Whenever a printer ventured a book with-
out subscription, he tried not to venture into the unknown. The publish-
ing list of even the enterprising Benjamin Franklin was solidly
conventional. Franklin published, as Carl Van Doren has pointed out, to
make either money or friends; preferably both. His government printing,
his almanacs, and such books as Every Man His Own Doctor (1734),
The Gentleman's Farrier (1735), and his edition of The New England
Primer brought in a tidy profit.
The output of American books increased during the 18th century,
but few works of lasting significance appeared. The longer and more
numerous items, especially in New England, tended to be religious works
sermons, tracts, practical guidebooks, and Biblical commentaries
though not necessarily works of theology. Leading the large sellers among
American imprints were schoolbooks like The New England Primer,
practical handbooks like John Tennent's Every Man His Own Doctor,
business manuals like William Bradford's Young Secretary's Guide, ready
reckoners, and books of tunes. In the South, religious works were out-
numbered by legal books. Because the colonies possessed many legis-
latures, few trained lawyers, several systems of courts, and a largely lay
judiciary, legal handbooks were everywhere in demand among laymen.
There were, of course, a few oddments, like The Bay Psalm Book (1640) ,
Jonathan Edwards' Enquiry into the Freedom of the Will (1754), and
the Mennonite Book of Martyrs, Der Blutige Schau-Platz (1748), which
with its 756 leaves had the distinction of being the largest (reputedly
also the ugliest) book published in the colonies before the Revolution.
In the words of the observant author of Bibliotheca Americana, who
wrote from London in 1789:
North America may want some of the fopperies of literature. She
boasts not those dignified literati, who in Europe obtain adulation from
the learned parasite, and applause from the uninformed multitude, for
324 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
pursuits and discoveries that terminate in no addition to the real
elegancies or conveniences of living. . . .
Whatever is useful, sells; but publications on subjects merely specu-
lative, and rather curious than important, and generally such on the
arts and sciences, as are voluminous and expensive, lie upon the book-
seller's hands. They have no ready money to spare for any thing but
what they want; and, in literary purchases, look for present, or future
use.
50
The Rise of the Newspaper
THE AMERICAN PRINTER was the servant of literacy rather than
of literature. While he produced few literary books, his presses turned
out countless other items more urgently needed for business and govern-
ment. In these he was at least the equal of his English contemporaries.
His job was not the same as that which tradition and aristocracy had
cut out for his fellow-craftsmen on the other side of the ocean.
The colonists, as we have seen, possessed a ready-made body of
belles-lettres which they simply imported from the mother-country, and
the leading books of English literature were probably just as available in
the principal colonial cities as in the English provincial towns. If a printer
could import and sell a book from London, why should he strain to
produce an inferior and more expensive colonial edition? Colonial
printers did not produce a complete Bible in English until 1782, but by
1663 they had already issued over a thousand copies of John Eliot's
famous translation of the Bible "into the Indian tongue." Bibles in Eng-
lish could easily enough be procured from England, but the Indian trans-
lation essential to New England's mission could be had nowhere else.
The American printer was left free to serve the special needs of his
community. Jefferson, with some exaggeration, boasted that, while Amer-
icans were saved from the "swarm of nonsense" which issued from the
European presses, they were far ahead of Europe in the production of
useful scientific matter.
As we shall see, it was the needs of the colonial governments that
A CONSERVATIVE PRESS 325
supported printers in the beginning. Also, the dispersion of government
into several colonial capitals very early diffused agencies of literacy and
of public information. The printing press did not spread generally into
English provincial towns until after 1693, when the last restriction acts
finally expired; there were still no presses in such English towns as
Liverpool, Birmingham, and Leeds. But, by the end of that year in the
American colonies, presses had already appeared in Cambridge, Boston,
St. Mary's City (in Maryland), Philadelphia, and New York. If each
colony had had to wait for presses until the demand for books or for
commercial printing produced an adequate income, many decades would
have passed, but American presses were flourishing by the mid-1 8th
century. Everywhere they owed their first establishment to government
subsidy. In 1762 when Georgia, the last of the thirteen colonies to
acquire a press, attracted James Johnston to Savannah as government
printer, there were already about forty presses operating throughout the
colonies.
In the earliest years the bulk of what issued from the presses was
government work: statutes and the votes and proceedings of colonial
assemblies. The first item printed in English America was not a poem
or a sermon; it was a printed legal form, the Freeman's Oath of 1639.
Legal and commercial forms were a staple commodity, for their demand
did not fluctuate with the tides of literary taste. When Franklin opened
his stationer's shop in about 1730, his first stock included many such
blanks, which his Autobiography modestly describes as "the correctest
that ever appeared among us." The numerous colonial governments,
each with its own regulations and its own system of courts and records,
multiplied the number of forms required.
Poor Richard's fame has overshadowed the myriad other almanacs
which served daily needs; every ambitious colonial printer issued his
own. Almanacs offered an 18th-century American fanner the services
now performed by agricultural extension, urban newspapers, magazines,
radio, and television. The hours of the rising and setting of the sun,
the cycles of the moon and the tide, and the prospects of weather were
the time-table of bis life as necessary to him as the railroad schedule
to a modern commuter. For many a farmer, the almanac was the most
important printed matter he possessed other than the Bible. It told him
the dates of court-sessions and the schedules of post-riders, coaches, and
packet-boats. It combined features of Better Homes and Gardens, Popu-
lar Mechanics, and The Reader's Digest. It contained practical hints, like
the recipe offered in Jonas Green's Almanack for the Year 1760 "by
which Meat, ever so stinking, may be made as sweet and wholesome,
in a few Minutes, as any Meat at all." Few printers failed to offer sage,
326 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
if shopworn, advice, and special thoughts for "the solitary dwellings of
the poor and illiterate, where the studied ingenuity of the learned writer
never comes." Old issues were preserved, to pass the long winter days,
to amuse the overnight guest, or to use for notebooks and accounts.
A thumbed-over accumulation of a dozen or more back numbers, with
their ever-relevant snippets of advice, information, and literary gems,
became the staple of remote readers. Almanacs spread up-to-date po-
litical information, opinion, and arguments in the years just before the
Revolution.
While no printer could make his mark without publishing an almanac,
the larger income and future lay with the newspaper. The account-books
of Franklin's printing partnership (1748-1765) with David Hall show
that income from the Pennsylvania Gazette in this period was much the
largest single item (over sixty per cent) of their business; the remainder
was about equally divided between public and job printing and miscel-
laneous publishing, including Poor Richard's Almanack. While the size
of Franklin's business was unusual, its proportions were probably typical
a heavy emphasis on contemporary and topical works, a meager list
of "literature." Before the end of the 18th century, an English observer
who had made a survey of American printed matter could report:
The newspapers of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsyl-
vania, and Maryland, are unequalled, whether considered with respect
to wit and humour, entertainment or instruction. Every capital town
on the continent prints a weekly paper, and several of them have one
or more daily papers.
In the early decades of the 18th century, when the first English provincial
newspapers were being printed, newspapers had already become a fa-
miliar institution in the American colonial capitals. By 1730 seven news-
papers were being published regularly in four colonies; by 1800 there
were over 180. The New York Gazette or Weekly Post Boy boasted
(April 16, 1770):
Tis truth (with deference to the college)
News-papers are the spring of knowledge,
The general source throughout the nation,
Of every modern conversation.
What would this mighty people do,
If there, alas! were nothing new?
A news-paper is like a feast,
Some dish there is for every guest;
Some large, some small, some strong, some tender,
For every stomach, stout or slender.
A CONSERVATIVE PRESS 327
At the end of the 18th century, the Rev. Samuel Miller noted that al-
though the population of the United States was but half that of Britain,
the number of newspapers circulating here annually, estimated at over
twelve million, was more than two-thirds the number circulated in the
mother country. "The Reading Time of most People," Franklin wrote
from Philadelphia in 1786, "is of late so taken up with News Papers and
little periodical Pamphlets, that few now-a-days venture to attempt read-
ing a Quarto Volume."
This precocious development of the American newspaper was in some
ways merely a colonial expression of what was also taking place in
England, but it was further stimulated by many local circumstances:
the spread of literacy, the extent of the country, the existence of several
capitals each with its own political news, and the competition among a
number of seaboard cities. Much that Americans said about their read-
ing habits was patriotic exaggeration, but there were plenty of facts to
confirm the Rev. Samuel Miller's portrait of America about 1785:
A spectacle never before displayed among man, and even yet without
a parallel on earth. It is the spectacle, not of the learned and the
wealthy only, but of the great body of the people; even a large portion
of that class of the community which is destined to daily labor, having
free and constant access to public prints, receiving regular information
of every occurrence, attending to the course of political affairs, dis-
cussing public measures, and having thus presented to them constant
excitements to the acquisition of knowledge, and continual means of
obtaining it. Never, it may be safely asserted, was the number of
political journals so great in proportion to the population of a country
as at present in ours. Never were they, all things considered, so cheap,
so universally diffused, and so easy of access.
The most appropriate literary expression of an American life so shift-
ing, so full of novelty, motion, and variety was the kaleidoscopic, ephem-
eral, miscellaneous newspaper. A newspaper has to be useful and
relevant, but it cannot require long study or concentration; it must be
literate, but it cannot separate the artistic and expressive from the com-
mercial and productive areas of living. It must mix public and private;
it must take the community into account, but with a view to action and
the specific event rather than to the universal principle. The newspapers
were a symbol of how America broke down all distinctions. "They have
become the means of conveying, to every class in society/' a contem-
porary printer observed, "innumerable scraps of knowledge, which have
at once increased the public intelligence, and extended the taste for
perusing periodical publications."
328 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
In saving newspapers from becoming too "literary" nothing was more
important than the advertisement, which tied it to daily commercial con-
cerns. "The advertisements, moreover, which they daily contain, re-
specting new books, projects, inventions, discoveries and improvements,"
Isaiah Thomas, the colonial printer-historian explained, "are well cal-
culated to enlarge and enlighten the public mind, and are worthy of
being enumerated among the many methods of awakening and main-
taining the popular attention, with which more modern times, beyond all
preceding example, abound." Very early the American newspaper had
to justify itself as a commodity rather than as a purveyor of orthodoxy.
While in France Robespierre and Mirabeau each owned his own news-
paper to address his constituents, this was not the American style. Jef-
ferson indignantly denied any control over the press that defended his
point of view. Only for an interlude of about a half-century after 1790
was the American press dominated by a bitterly partisan spirit. For
most of the history of American journalism, the independence and high
quality of the American press have been tied instead to the commercial
spirit and the need to offer his money's worth to a purchaser in the open
market.
While the earliest American magazines bore some mark of their lo-
cality, they were far less essential than the newspaper to the round of
daily life. And so they were slower to flourish on the American scene.
The magazine, like the book, is a "mixed" literary form, containing
miscellaneous entertainment and instruction; it approaches the book in
format, in permanence of interest, and in demands made on the printer.
Its unprecedented success in America did not come for another century
and a half, when it became a sign of the pervasively literate though em-
phatically non-literary character of our culture. In 18th-century England
the magazine still bore the flavor of that small circle of literati for whom
it was designed.
Not until 1741 did the first American magazine with a continuous
history begin to appear. Until the era of the Revolution, American maga-
zines were few, short-lived (the longest had lasted three years), and
pallid. It was almost the end of the 18th century before a viable, widely-
distributed, distinctively American magazine made its appearance. Most
early American magazines frankly imitated the English Gentleman's
Magazine and London Magazine; they were, as Frank Luther Mott says,
little more than "British magazines published in the Colonies." Their lack
of literary invention was impressive; they seem to have been composed
primarily with the scissors rather than with the pen. American periodicals
were in the habit of copying at least three-fourths of their content from
A CONSERVATIVE PRESS 329
other (mostly English) books, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines
a means of composition easier in the days before copyright made plagiar-
ism disrespectable.
51
Why Colonial Printed Matter
Was Conservative
WHEN PRINTING PRESSES, type-fonts, paper, and ink had to be
imported, when land transportation was crude and cities were few, no
man could own or operate a printing press without the knowledge and
assent of the government. Never was the press more effectively con-
trolled than during the earliest years of the American colonies. One did
not find in this vast unsettled country those "secret presses'* which in
England tantalized and enraged the authorities during the 17th century.
In none of the colonies was there anything that would today be recog-
nized as "freedom of the press." By 1686 the English government was
including in its regular instructions to provincial governors the following
paragraph:
And forasmuch as great inconvenience may arise by the liberty of
printing within our said territory under your government you are to
provide by all necessary orders that no person keep any printing-press
for printing, nor that any book pamphlet or other matters whatsoever
be printed without your especial leave and license first obtained.
This control remained among the legal duties of royal governors as long
as there were royal governors in the thirteen colonies. Although difficult
or imprudent to enforce, the power was in the background and must have
deterred colonial printers.
Authorities were still impressed by the great power for irresponsible
attack which a press could put in any man's hands. The European gov-
erning classes would no more have thought of leaving the manufacture
of explosive printed matter unregulated than they would have permitted
330 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
the unlicensed manufacture of gunpowder or the raising of private
armies. In America control was exercised, sometimes in one way, some-
times in another, and the need to censor varied with the flow of events.
But one fact is clear: the traditional European idea of monopolizing the
press to cement the social order was successfully transplanted to Ameri-
can shores. American circumstances made that control even more ef-
fective than it had been in England.
Between 1639 and 1763, more than half the imprints of American
presses came from New England, and all but a small number of these
were printed in and around Boston. The Massachusetts press restrictions
were therefore one of the largest single influences of the early age. For
two decades after the establishment of the first printing-press in Massa-
chusetts in 1638, there was no official board of censorship, but the
meager output of the Cambridge press included not a single item that
could have displeased the magistrates. Disputes within the community
such as the Anne Hutchinson affair or the demand for legal reform led
by Dr. Robert Child produced no printed matter in Massachusetts to
support the discontented. The Cambridge press was supervised by the
president of Harvard College. In 1662 the Massachusetts legislature,
worried by "incendiaries of commonwealths," passed an Act "for pre-
vention of irregularities & abuse to the authority of this country by the
printing presse," and the law set up a board to censor all copy before
it went to press. The story of printing in colonial Massachusetts, then,
is simply a tale of different forms and degrees of control. Censorship
was strictly enforced until about 1685, somewhat more laxly for the
next forty years. After 1723, the colonial government did not exercise
its control by censoring manuscripts before they went to press but by
frequent threats of prosecution (and occasional actual prosecutions)
under the extensive law of libel.
In England during these years, the increase of population, the multipli-
cation of presses, and the rise of liberal ideas had made government
control of the press harder to enforce. But government control of the
press remained effective in Massachusetts. Because Massachusetts was a
colonial government acting under its own laws, the lapses in the English
law of censorship (as for a period after 1679) and even the expiration
of all English censorship laws in 1695 did not have the same permissive
effect on the American side. Censorship (that is, control before pub-
lication), though somewhat relaxed, continued in Massachusetts Bay
for another quarter-century. Thus, when the News-Letter, the first regular
newspaper in America, appeared in Boston on April 24, 1705, it carried
the insignia of censorship already obsolete in England: the tell-tale phrase
A CONSERVATIVE PRESS 331
"published by authority." The Governor's Council continued to maintain
an unquestioned right to suppress offensive printed matter.
Effective press control continued into the era of the Revolution. In
1770, during the early stages of the Revolutionary agitation in Massa-
chusetts, the English Lords of the Council for Plantation Affairs com-
plained that the colonial government had failed to punish "seditious and
libellous publications." The Massachusetts Governor's Council replied
that, within the constitutional limits, it had actually been more successful
than the House of Lords had been in England. "Why is there not a charge
against the House of Lords . . . that they do not suppress those seditious
and libellous publications at home? If we have any amongst us, there
are fifty in England to one here." Nevertheless, the Council tried to
vindicate itself by starting libel prosecutions against offensive printers.
By the time of the Revolution, suppression of opposition presses was an
established practice; freedom of printing had acquired no general sup-
port, nor had it become fixed in the habits of the community. Therefore,
as the Revolutionary spirit rose in Boston, the radical party used mob
terror against writers and printers who dared defend King and Parlia-
ment. When Massachusetts drew up its new constitution in 1778, it in-
cluded a declaration in favor of freedom of the press, but the declaration
was rhetorical and ambiguous, probably because of widespread
doubts of the wisdom of such a novel institution. During the War, when
all publications unfavorable to the Revolutionary movement were sup-
pressed, there was no effective freedom of the press. After peace came,
political leaders in Massachusetts demanded, not a "free press," but
return to a "well-regulated" press.
John Adams, for example, had long argued that "license of the press
is no proof of liberty." As early as 1774, when a defender of the British
cause argued that the Revolutionary accusations of tyranny were un-
founded because the most diverse opinions were allowed to be published
in Massachusetts, Adams complained of "the scandalous license of the
tory presses." "There is nothing in the world so excellent that it may not
be abused. . . . When a people are corrupted, the press may be made an
engine to complete their ruin; and it is now notorious, that the ministry
are daily employing it, to increase and establish corruption, and to pluck
up virtue by the roots. . . . and the freedom of the press, instead of pro-
moting the cause of liberty, will but hasten its destruction." It is not
surprising that John Adams and his fellow Federalist leaders in Massa-
chusetts favored the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798; they were worried
only that the laws might not be effective. "If there is ever to be an
amelioration of the condition of mankind," Adams was still warning
332 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
two decades later, "philosophers, theologians, legislators, politicians and
moralists will find that the regulation of the press is the most difficult,
dangerous, and important problem they have to resolve. Mankind can-
not now be governed without it, nor at present with it."
In colonial Massachusetts, ruling clergymen, like the Mathers in their
heyday, had found ways outside the law to enforce their standards. When
Increase Mather wrote a book in 1700 attacking the practices of a church
newly-established in the colony by the Rev. Benjamin Colman and his
friends, the accused minister prepared a reply, but to secure its pub-
lication he had to send his manuscript to New York. "The Reader is
desired to take Notice," Colman's pamphlet explained, "that the Press
in Boston is so much under the aw of the Reverend Author, whom we
answer, and his Friends, that we could not obtain of the Printer there
to print the following Sheets, which is the only true Reason why we have
sent the Copy so far for its Impression and where it [is] printed with
some Difficulty." Bartholomew Green, the Boston printer, explained the
good commercial reason behind his refusal: the last time he had done a
printing job without advance government approval, he had been re-
quired to revise and reprint it before publication to meet official criticism.
Printing began under government sponsorship in all the colonies. The
press was supposed to be a prop for existing institutions; where there
was danger that it might serve another purpose, authorities preferred no
press at all. "I thank God, we have not free schools nor printing," Sir
William Berkeley, governor of Virginia for thirty-eight years, boasted
in 1671, "and I hope we shall not have these hundred years. For learn-
ing has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world; and
printing has divulged them and libels against the government. God keep
us from both." Some Virginia leaders of the next century did not share
Berkeley's enthusiasm for illiteracy, but for many years his modest am-
bitions for Virginia were fulfilled at least with regard to the press. In
1682, the government received its first scare from a press and printer
imported by John Buckner, rich landowner and merchant of Gloucester
County, whose offense was to print some of the colony's laws without
authority. Buckner was called before the Governor and Council, was
ordered to cease his subversive activities, and "for prevention of all
troubles and inconveniences, that may be occasioned thorow the liberty
of a presse" was required to post bond for his good behavior. In 1683
the King of England ordered that to prevent any such "troubles and in-
convenience" in the future, the Governor of Virginia should "provide by
all necessary orders and Directions that no person be permitted to use
any press for printing upon any occasion whatsoever." Until 1730, when
William Parks set up shop in Williamsburg, there was no printing press
A CONSERVATIVE PRESS 333
in Virginia. From then until 1766 Virginia had only a single press and
that was the official organ of the government. "I do not know that the
publication of newspapers was ever prohibited in Virginia," Jefferson
recalled many years later. "Until the beginning of our revolutionary dis-
putes, we had but one press, and that having the whole business of the
government, and no competitor for public favor, nothing disagreeable to
the governor could be got into it."
Outside of Boston, the two leading colonial printing centers were
Philadelphia and New York City. In both places, the right of the au-
thorities to control printed matter if not by censorship, then by libel
prosecutions and by legislative censure continued to be recognized at
least until the Revolution. In Philadelphia, William Bradford, who was
Pennsylvania's first printer (first imprint: 1686), was in continual trouble
with the government and the Society of Friends, usually for the most
trivial indiscretions. Finally, in 1693, when he was prosecuted for pub-
lishing a tract on one side of an internal Quaker dispute, he left the
colony in disgust and became the royal printer in New York. For the
next half-dozen years, there was no press at all in Philadelphia. William
Bradford's son, Andrew, who returned to Philadelphia and became the
official "Printer to the Province" in 1719, was only slightly more suc-
cessful than his father in satisfying the authorities. Libel trials and sup-
pression of the opposition press were common there until the eve of
the Revolution.
Much the same story is told of New York, which did not begin to
rival Boston or Philadelphia as a source of printed matter until after
1760. The famous case of John Peter Zenger (1734-35), which affirmed
the power of juries in libel cases to decide the law as well as the fact, is
important in retrospect and as a landmark of legal doctrine. But it was
not a turning point in the practices of the community; even after the
Zenger case, the question in New York was not whether the press should
be "well-regulated" but who should have the power of regulation. Zen-
ger's reward for his vindication in the trial which made him a hero in
later histories of freedom of the press, was his appointment to the mon-
opoly of "Publick Printer" in 1737. Twenty years later another printer,
Hugh Gaine, was brought to the bar of the Assembly and reprimanded;
he "humbly asked their Pardon" but still was required to pay costs all
for the offense of printing part of the public proceedings of the repre-
sentative body! James Parker, Printer to the General Assembly of New
York, obeyed Governor Clinton's ban in 1747 on publishing the As-
sembly's remonstrance against the Governor; although the next year he
dared to print it among the Assembly's votes. But within a decade, in
1756, the Assembly itself declared Parker "guilty of a high Misdemeanor
334 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
and a Contempt of the Authority of this House" for printing an article
critical of them in his newspaper. And so it went.
It was not only by government control, by censorship, and by threat
of libel prosecution that the American colonial press was confined. The
earliest American presses owed their very existence to the colonial gov-
ernments, a fact which inevitably affected the character of printers and
the output of their shops: government support meant government con-
trol. In these scattered colonial communities where what little passion
there was for literature could be satisfied with books imported from the
mother country the introduction of printing presses might have been
delayed for decades if it had depended on the market for polite literature.
But soon after the first settlements, each government needed a printing
press to circulate proclamations and laws, to provide copies of debates,
proceedings, decisions, and votes to the members of the governors' coun-
cils and representative assemblies, and to supply the legal forms needed
every day. Even in the earliest years of each colony, when the market for
commercial printing was small, the demand for locally printed books
non-existent, and the market for newspapers and periodicals still un-
developed, the government could offer an annual contract with an assured
income to anyone who promised to meet its needs.
The story of the introduction of printing into the American colonies
is, in short, an account of how the thirteen different governments sub-
sidized a public service. In Massachusetts the earliest press was, as might
be expected, under the close surveillance of the leading clergymen and of
Harvard College; it served church and state at the same time. Its scope
and limits were symbolized in its first three products: the recently re-
vised Freeman's Oath (1639) ; an almanac calculated for New England
(1639); and the famous Bay Psalm Book (1640), a new and supposedly
more literal translation of the Psalms by three New England divines. The
staples of this earliest press in the English colonies were the enactments
of the General Court.
Benjamin Franklin, being an enterprising businessman, valued his
appointment as clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly mainly as a way
to secure the government printing business for his presses. Within less
than a dozen years (1739-1750) Franklin received as clerk's fees and
for printing statutes and paper currency the sum of 2,762 of Penn-
sylvania money. Franklin's Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Neces-
sity of a Paper Currency (1729) , which he had both written and printed,
urged the printing of more provincial paper money secured by Penn-
sylvania's plentiful supply of land. "My friends there (in the House,) who
conceiv'd I had been of some service, thought fit to reward me by
employing me in printing the money; a very profitable jobb and a great
A CONSERVATIVE PRESS 335
help to me. This was another advantage gain'd by my being able to
write." On another occasion, Franklin was even paid for destroying the
colony's currency when it had become worn through use. About this
time, too, the neighboring colony of Delaware gave Franklin its contract
to print money, laws, and government proceedings.
William Parks, who in 1730 brought Virginia its first press in a half-
century, had only a few years before set up shop in Annapolis as official
printer to the province of Maryland, which had attracted hi by a
guaranteed annual fee for printing the debates, votes, and laws of its
Assembly. Parks set up his press in Williamsburg only after the Virginia
legislature had offered him their official printing and an increasing yearly
sum which began at 120 and reached 280 before his death. Not
all the colonies were so fortunate; some had to send their work to neigh-
boring colonies or even abroad. Although the Assembly of South Caro-
lina began offering a bounty as early as 1722 in order to attract a
printer, it was nine years before one could be persuaded to settle there.
Under these circumstances, the colonial press could hardly be a
nursery of novel, startling, or radical ideas. The printer had to be a
"government man," acceptable to the ruling group in his colony. Only
the government business made it at all possible for a man to live by his
press in the colonies; therefore, government printing held the first claim
on a prudent printer's time, as was evidenced by the many apologetic
prefaces to privately-supported books that had been delayed or had to
appear in abridged form. As the commerce and population of each colony
grew, however, government printing gradually became a smaller pro-
portion of the total printing business. Only then did it become financially
possible for a dissident or unconventional printer to make his way.
52
"The Publick Printer"
FOR CENTURIES TO COME the influential American "gentlemen of
the press" would not be "gentlemen" at all by European standards. The
ancestors of the American newspaperman were not essayists, wits, and
336 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
professional writers, but primarily printers craftsmen dealing in useful
public information. They were not literati, whose habitat was the draw-
ing room, the coffee house, or the salon. On the contrary, they were
servants of the general public: in 18th-century language, "Publick
Printers." Their hands stained with printers' ink, they frequented the
legislative assemblies and the marketplace to gather a salable commodity.
Their print-shops became forums and post offices, centers for news and
opinions. To make their living, they had to win the confidence of the
government, to discover sources of news, and to find ways of distributing
their commodity quickly. They were already beginning to develop the
unprecedented network of public information which eventually would
hold a vast nation together, stimulating as it satisfied the appetite for
news.
Some special features of colonial life increased the influence of men
who made a living from this kind of work. The most important single
fact was the large number of separate governments each with its own
executive and legislature, each with its own acts, laws, debates, votes,
proceedings, and orders to be printed. The mere existence of so many
separate political units gave a focus and a practical public purpose to the
earliest American printed matter, and so helped put the printing press
in the service of the whole literate community.
By the time of the Revolution, each colonial government had a printer
in its own capital to serve its own needs, and printers could be found
in all the principal cities up and down the Atlantic seaboard. If one
colonial government was displeased with its Public Printer, another
would welcome him and set him up with its official business. Men quali-
fied to become "Publick Printers" always remained in demand.
At the same time that printing presses were spreading out into the
towns of America, they were also going out from London, Oxford, and
Cambridge into the English provinces, but the American colonial printer
had a dignity and influence (as well as several new functions) unknown
to his English provincial counterpart. The "Publick Printer" was an
American institution. William Parks, Benjamin Franklin, William and
Andrew Bradford lived at the centers of government, where news was
made. Their influence in public life foreshadowed the special American
relation between politics and the press which has most recently found
expression in the regular Presidential Press Conference. The English
provincial printer was just another craftsman; only the King's Printer in
London held an official position. But the Public Printer of each Ameri-
can colony held an important public post.
As printer of the colonial laws, the proceedings of the assembly, and
A CONSERVATIVE PRESS 337
the principal newspaper, the Public Printer was the chief local customer
of the post office. Therefore, he always found it convenient, and often
found it profitable, to become the local postmaster. Not only could he
then use the post-riders to deliver his papers at public expense (Franklin
did this for a while), but he profited from the postmastership in many
indirect ways. The great distances, which sharpened the appetite for
news, made the post office in each town a gathering place for men of
affairs. Since all letters passed first through the postmaster's hands, he
had the quickest and most confidential access to news. When towns-
people came to get their mail, he could gather news items of local interest
and at the same time sell books, magazines, cough medicine, sealing wax,
chocolate, lemons, writing paper, pens, and fiddle strings. The printer's
shop came to resemble the later General Store. In every community its
owner was a person of influence.
The first regularly-published American newspaper, the Boston News-
Letter (April 24, 1704), was "published by Authority" by John Camp-
bell, Postmaster, "Publick Printer" to the colony. Succeeding Post-
masters in Boston even came to thinlc that such a publication was at-
tached to their office. Ellis Huske's paper, founded in 1734, bore the
significant name of The Boston Weekly Post-Boy and the imprint:
Boston; Printed for Ellis Huske, Post-Master: Advertisements taken
in at the Post-Office in King's-Street, over against the North-Door of the
Town-House, where all Persons in Town or Country may be supplied
with this Paper.
In Connecticut also the first newspaper was established by a printer who
was postmaster of the colony. The advantages of being postmaster
helped keep the press in the hands of respectable men who possessed
the confidence of their government.
The earliest printers (and often the writers) of books and newspapers
in the American colonies were thus intimately acquainted with the
public taste and with the problems of selling and delivering printed mat-
ter to a wide public. One of the few occasions when Franklin violated his
rule that one should "never ask, never refuse, nor ever resign" a public
office, occurred in 1751 when he sought the job of Deputy Postmaster
General for the American colonies and authorized his friends in England
to pay up to 300 for it "The Place has commonly been reputed to be
worth about 150 a Year but would be otherways very suitable to me,
particularly as it would enable me to execute a Scheme long since f orm'd
of which I send you enclos'd a Copy, and which I hope would soon
produce something agreeable to you and to all Lovers of Useful Knowl-
338 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
edge for I have now a large Acquaintance among ingenious Men in
America." This "scheme" was to lead to the formation of the American
Philosophical Society, first conceived by Franklin as a kind of clearing
house for useful knowledge. Correspondence was its primary purpose,
for Franklin believed that progress would come from pooling casual
information from men living in "different climates, having different soils,
producing different plants, mines, and minerals, and capable of different
improvements, manufactures, &c."
During his long association with the colonial postal service first
(after 1737) as Deputy Postmaster at Philadelphia and later (1753-
1774) as Deputy Postmaster General for all the American colonies
Franklin did a great deal to speed up the postal service and to make it
profitable to himself. By 1769 the office, which had barely repaid ex-
penses before he took it over, netted Franklin a profit of 1,859.
When Franklin had become Postmaster at Philadelphia in 1737, there
was no legal provision for admitting newspapers to the mails nor any
established rates for carrying them. As Postmaster he could simply hand
his own papers to the postriders (and forbid them to carry competing
papers). The other publishing advantages of his job were numerous:
"it facilitated the correspondence that improv'd my newspaper, increas'd
the number demanded, as well as the advertisements to be inserted, so
that it came to afford me a considerable income. My old competitor's
newspaper declined proportionably."
When Franklin became Deputy Postmaster General for all the colonies
he widened the experiment he had tried in Philadelphia of allowing his
competitors to use the mail. In 1758, he established for the first time
fixed (and highly profitable) postal rates for newspapers. Even this
reform was designed less to provide a free press than to strengthen and
increase a conservative press. His aim, he explained, was "to remedy
these Inconveniences and yet not to discourage the Spreading of News-
papers, which are on many Occasions useful to Government and
advantageous to Commerce and to the Publick."
The control over newspaper distribution, and hence over printed
opinion, by the colonial governments became more burdensome as the
conflict of opinion sharpened. William Goddard (1740-1817) and his
sister, Mary Katherine Goddard (1736-1816), earned places as patron
saints of a free press in America by opposing the post-office monopoly.
In many ways a prototype of the American businessman, Goddard was
restless, humorless, and tactless, but he was remarkably endowed with
aggressiveness, organizing ability, and a knack for making himself heard.
The son of the physician-postmaster of New London, Connecticut, God-
A CONSERVATIVE PRESS 339
dard had learned the printer's trade as an apprentice to James Parker and
John Holt, postmasters and newspaper publishers of New Haven. In
1762 Goddard set up a printing press in Providence, Rhode Island,
founded a newspaper, and became the town's postmaster. Unable to
secure the eight hundred subscriptions necessary to make his newspaper
pay, he moved first to New York and then to Philadelphia to try his
fortune in different publishing ventures. He finally established himself in
Baltimore, where his Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser (1773-
1793) spoke out in the last years before independence.
As proprietor of "a very free press," he had been victimized by
the government-controlled post office, which charged him one pound
a week for delivering three hundred and fifty newspapers to places out-
side Philadelphia. Goddard reacted to such abuses by setting up his
own postal system to make his publications independent of the govern-
ment. Goddard's project grew and, on December 30, 1773, news of the
Boston Tea Party was brought from New York to his office in Baltimore
by his own postriders.
Desire for a freer, more "constitutional" postal service was in the
main stream of Revolutionary sentiment. As early as 1711 the Virginia
House of Burgesses had refused to appropriate money for the post office,
which had been recently reorganized under an act of Parliament, on the
ground that the rates established by the British Act amounted to taxation
without consent. Not until later in the 18th century, after nine years
of Franklin's absentee management of the post office, was there any
effective competition for the old system. By then the rise of newspapers
had enlarged the demand for postal service, and the courage, enterprise,
and organizing ability of William Goddard had made a new system
possible. "Having at all times acted consistently, and to the utmost of
Ms power in support of the English Constitution and the rights and
liberties of his countrymen . . . especially as a printer, regardless of his
own personal safety or private advantage," explained John Holt, printer
of New York, in May 1775, Goddard had "by this conduct, incurred the
displeasure of many men in power, and been a very great sufferer (the
greatest, he believes, in this Country) by the stoppage and obstruction
given to the circulation of his newspapers by the Post-Office, which has
long been an engine in the hand of the British Ministry to promote their
schemes of enslaving the Colonies and destroying the English Con-
stitution/*
The needs of the Continental Congress, of the new American army,
and of the rising colonial newspapers brought into being the first United
States post office. When the publicly-owned American postal system was
340 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
set up on My 26, 1775, it was not on the foundation of the British
system but on that of Goddard's private enterprise which had aimed to
free the post office from the domination of government. Yet, the new
government expressed its conservatism when it named as first Postmaster
of the United States, not Goddard who had conceived and organized it,
but Franklin who had for many years run the British system. In one way
or another the American post office and especially the Postmaster
General and the local postmasters would continue to be involved in
politics.
The colonial printer-journalist-postmaster was thus pursuing a new
and distinctively American profession. He started in America as a crafts-
man and small businessman rather than as a man of letters, but he had
an important function in government, which kept him in touch with public
affairs. The dispersion of government into thirteen different centers, the
urgent need for certain kinds of practical information, and the com-
bination of the printshop with the post office interfused the currents of
the printed word and the currents of the public mind.
BOOK FOUR
WARFARE AND DIPLOMACY
"Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a
situation? Why quit our own to stand upon
foreign ground?'*
GEORGE WASHINGTON
AMERICAN experience in the colonial age shaped a particular
view of peace and war which would long affect our attitude toward
the objectives of war, the uses of diplomacy, and the place of the
military in political life. War and peace are more than the presence
or absence of sound, smell, destruction, pain, and bloodshed; they
are institutions. What a nation means by war or peace is as char-
acteristic of its experience and as intimately involved with all its
other ways as are its laws or its religion. In the following chapters
we will see how American ways of warfare and diplomacy began.
PART THIRTEEN
A NATION OF
MINUTE MEN
"They were soldiers when they chose to be so,
and when they chose laid down their arms."
JOSEPH DODDRIDGE
53
Defensive Warfare and
Naive Diplomacy
THE PERIOD during which the American colonies were founded is
generally described as the Age of Limited Warfare in Europe. From
about the time in the early 17th century when the Puritans settled
Massachusetts Bay until the French Revolutionary Wars near the end
of the 18th century, Europe showed notable restraint. After the blood-
bath of the religious wars, the "Enlightened Age" offered Europe a relief,
less from the fighting itself than from its worst horrors. War was
moderated less through efforts to abolish it than through the growth of
formal rules of warfare and by the specialization of the military function.
Since the restraints which made wars less destructive also made them less
decisive, European history during the colonial period was a story
of continual indecisive warfare. "Now it is frequent," Daniel Defoe
remarked in 1697, as the War of the Dutch Alliance dribbled out, "to
have armies of fifty thousand men of a side stand at bay within view
of one another, and spend a whole campaign in dodging, or, as it is
genteelly called, observing one another, and then march off into winter
quarters. The difference is in the maxims of war, which now differ as
much from what they were formerly as long perukes do from piqued
345
346 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
beards, or as the habits of the people do now from what they then were.
The present maxims of war are
Never fight without a manifest advantage,
And always encamp so as not to be forced to it.
And if two opposite generals nicely observe both these rules, it is im-
possible they should ever come to fight."
Battles tended to take place on large open fields, where the customary
rules and formations could be obeyed. At the opening of a battle, the
opposing forces were set up like men on a chessboard; each side usually
knew what forces the other possessed, and each part of an army was
expected to perform only specific maneuvers. Sneak attacks, irregular
warfare, and unexpected and unheralded tactics were generally frowned
on as violations of the rules. "This way of making war," Defoe succinctly
put it, "spends generally more money and less blood than former wars
did." Though armies increased, casualties declined. In the year 1704,
which witnessed decisive battles of the War of the Spanish Succession,
only 2000 British soldiers and sailors died in action and no more than
3000 died of wounds, disease, or other causes connected with the war.
Such moderation would have been impossible if the waging of wars
had not become a specialized occupation from which the mass of the
people felt removed. War had become the task of warriors, whose func-
tions were as separated from those of the common man as were the
tasks of the learned barrister, the doctor of physick, or the cleric. Officers
of opposing sides enjoyed the fraternity of all professionals and of the
international European aristocracy: between engagements they wined
and entertained one another with balls, concerts, and dinner parties.
Usually aristocratic professionals, they were drawn from the nobility
and the upper classes, for whom the duty of military service to then-
prince remained a relic of feudal days. Private soldiers, who had not
yet acquired the kudos of "fighting for their country," were few by
modern standards and tended more and more to be the dregs of society.
Driven to recruit from the jails and taverns, the sovereign preferred, if he
could afford it, to fill his ranks with such mercenary professionals as the
Swiss or the Hessians.
War, then, was not an encounter fought by two fully mobilized com-
munities and hallowed by patriotism. Military engagements occurred
not in the rubble of factories and cities, but usually on a military playing
field, a plain at some distance from the populace. There the "rules of
warfare" were neatly and scrupulously followed, with the least possible
interference to the peaceful round of household, farm, and fair. Com-
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 347
manders would no more have undertaken a battle in thick underbrush or
woods, at night, or in bad weather, than a modern professional baseball
team would consent to play in dense woods on a wet day. There were
exceptions, but surprisingly few.
From the middle of the 17th until near the end of the 18th century,
European war was merely an instrument of policy. It was not waged
to exterminate another people or to change their ways of life or their
political or economic institutions. Usually it was the effort of one ruling
prince to extend his territory, to vindicate his honor, or to secure a com-
mercial advantage from an opposing sovereign, who was likely to be his
cousin. Objectives were much more limited than they had been during
the religious wars of the 16th and early 17th centuries.
The pan-European character of the aristocratic literary culture pro-
vided the common ideas out of which grew a specialized literature
defining the just occasions and proper limits of warfare. During most of
this period, the leading handbook was Grotius' De jure belli ac pads
(On the Law of War and Peace), 1625-31, which set up authoritative
"rules" for civilized nations; it was displaced in the later 18th century
by VatteFs Le droit des gens (The Law of Nations), 1758, which made
some changes but still assumed that civilized nations were bound in
peace or war by certain natural regulations.
The American Indian who lay in wait for the earliest colonists had,
unfortunately, not read Grotius or Vattel. He had no international
aristocracy, nor was he persuaded of the advantages of limited warfare
that was waged only during clear weather in open fields. He had his own
weapons and his own ways, the ways of the forest. He was not accus-
tomed to pitched battles nor to the trumpet-heralded attack. The Indian
bow, unlike the matchlock, was silent, accurate, and capable of rapid
fire even in wet weather; the tomahawk was a more versatile weapon
than the fifteen-foot pike. When the Indian captured an enemy he did
not obey Grotius' laws of war by taking prisoners and seeking to exchange
them. On the contrary, massacre and torture were his rule; he thought
nothing of flaying his enemy or bleeding him to death with jabs of pointed
sticks. The Rev. Joseph Doddridge observed the savage attacks in
Western Virginia in the later 18th century:
The Indian kills indiscriminately. His object is the total extermination
of his enemies. Children are victims of his vengeance, because, if
males, they may hereafter become warriors, or if females, they may
become mothers. Even the fetal state is criminal in his view. It is not
enough that the fetus should perish with the murdered mother, it is
torn from her pregnant womb, and elevated on a stick or pole, as a
348 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
trophy of victory and an object of horror to the survivors of the slain.
If the Indian takes prisoners, mercy has but little concern in the
transaction. He spares the lives of those who fall into his hands, for the
purpose of feasting the feelings of ferocious vengeance of himself
and his comrades, by the torture of his captive. .
This American scene created a new type of adventure literature
stories of Indian captivities which recounted the suffering and heroism
of ordinary settlers, their wives, and children.
The Indian was omnipresent; he struck without warning and was
a nightly terror in the remote silence of backwoods cabins. The New
England settlers, Cotton Mather recalled, felt themselves "assaulted by
unknown numbers of devils hi flesh on every side"; to them the Indians
were "so many 'unkennell'd wolves.' " Every section of the seacoast
colonies suffered massacres. The bloody toll of the Virginia settlements
in 1622, and again in 1644, was never forgotten hi the colony. In Vir-
ginia in 1676, Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion expressed the demand of
western settlers for more aid against the Indians. We have already seen
how the Indian massacres of the mid-1 8th century sharpened the crisis
of the Quaker government of Pennsylvania. Such nightmares shaped the
military policy of settlers until nearly the end of the 18th century. The
Indian menace, which haunted the fringes of settlement through the
whole colonial era, remained a terror to the receding West well into the
19th century. Not until ten years after the massacre of Ouster's force in
1876, when the few remaining Indians had been removed to Indian
Territory or to reservations, did the Indian threat disappear.
The Indian was not the only menace. Parts of the English colonies
suffered intermittent threats of invasion by European powers the
French, the Dutch, or the Spanish. While England remained relatively
safe from foreign invasion from the time of the Armada (1588) at least
until the time of Napoleon, the earliest settlers of Virginia were often
in terror that the Spanish massacre of the Huguenots at Fort Caroline in
Florida might be repeated in their own province. More than once the
pioneer settlers of Jamestown raised the alarm that Spanish ships were
coming up their rivers; they anxiously watched every approaching sail in
fear that it might bring invaders. Boston was alarmed by the approach
of La Tour in a French ship of 140 tons in 1643, and on numerous later
occasions had reason to fear attack from some European force. Even the
pacifism of Pennsylvania Quakers was strained by the appearance of
Spanish ships in the very harbor of the city.
Such threats forced whole communities to huddle together in time
of danger. The garrison house, built as a common dwelling and refuge
during Indian raids, became a symbol of the unlimited nature of warfare
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 349
in America. At the first alarm of Indian attack, neighboring inhabitants
would collect their most valuable belongings and gather in the garrison.
In New England, such garrisons increased during the alarms of King
Philip's War in 1676, and a number continued to be maintained during
the French and Indian Wars well into the 1 8th century. The same general
scheme was followed up and down the colonies. Sometimes a particular
private dwelling suitably constructed with thick walls perforated by
loopholes, with an overhanging second story, and possibly with flankers
at the corners for lookout was agreed upon as the customary refuge.
Or, some towns like Hadley, Northampton, and Hatfield in the Con-
necticut Valley imitated the Indians by surrounding the town with a
defensive stockade.
The crowded life of the garrison houses, as the Rev. Doddridge re-
minds us, was no picnic; it made settlers dread what they called the
"Indian summer."
A backwoodsman seldom hears this expression without feeling a chill
of horror. . . . during the long continued Indian wars sustained by the
first settlers of the west, they enjoyed no peace excepting in the winter
season, when, owing to the severity of the weather, the Indians were
unable to make their excursions into the settlements. The onset of
winter was therefore hailed as a jubilee by the early inhabitants of the
country, who, throughout the spring and the early part of the fall, had
been cooped up in ... uncomfortable forts, and subjected to all the
distresses of the Indian war. At the approach of winter, therefore, all
the farmers, excepting the owner of the fort, removed to their cabins
on their farms, with the joyful feelings of a tenant of a prison recover-
ing his release from confinement. All was bustle and hilarity in pre-
paring for winter, by gathering in the corn, digging potatoes, fattening
hogs, and repairing the cabins. To our forefathers the gloomy months
of winter were more pleasant than the zephyrs and the flowers of May.
It however sometimes happened, after the apparent onset of winter, the
weather became warm; the smoky time commenced, and lasted for a
considerable number of days. This was the Indian summer, because
it afforded the Indians another opportunity of visiting the settlements
with their destructive warfare. The melting of the snow saddened every
countenance, and the genial warmth of the sun chilled every heart with
horror. The apprehension of another visit from the Indians, and of
being driven back to the detested fort, was painful in the highest
degree, and the distressing apprehension was frequently realized.
In such colonial warfare all were soldiers because all lived on the
battlefield. The bravery of women became a byword. In 1766 in
Shenandoah county in the Valley of Virginia, two men were taking their
wives and children in a wagon toward the safety of a fort when they
350 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
were attacked by five Indians and both men were killed. "The women,"
Kercheval reported, "instead of swooning at the sight of their bleeding,
expiring husbands, seized their axes, and with Amazonian firmness, and
strength almost superhuman, defended themselves and children. One
of the Indians had succeeded in getting hold of one of Mrs. Sheetz's
children, and attempted to drag it out of the wagon; but with the quick-
ness of lightning she caught her child in one hand, and with the other
made a blow at the head of the fellow, which caused him to quit his hold
to save his life. Several of the Indians received pretty sore wounds in
this desperate conflict, and all at last ran off, leaving the two women with
their children to pursue their way to the fort." Only a few years later,
Mrs, Experience Bozarth, in whose house a number of neighbors had
taken refuge, defended them all after their two men were severely injured,
by skillfully handling an axe with which she brained two Indians and
disembowelled a third. The backwoods was no place for the squeamish;
anyone who waited for the arrival of "troops" did not last long.
The boys' pastimes early prepared them for defense. Shooting small
game with a bow or a gun and throwing a tomahawk became life-saving
skills when Indians attacked. By the time a boy reached the age for
service in the militia he was already at home in the forest and knew the
ways of the Indian. "A well grown boy," Doddridge noted of the Valley
of Virginia in the 1760's, "at the age of twelve or thirteen years, was
furnished with a small rifle and shot-pouch. He then became a fort
soldier, and had his port-hole assigned him. Hunting squirrels, turkeys
and raccoons, soon made him expert in the use of his gun."
Hunting, Indian-fighting, and skirmishes in the backwoods encouraged
numerous American improvements in the rifle. By the mid-1 8th century,
the "Pennsylvania" rifle, later to achieve fame as the "Kentucky" rifle,
was already noticeably different from its Alpine prototype. It was longer
and more slender; had a smaller bore (a calibre of about .50), used a
ball weighing only about half an ounce, and was more accurate. In con-
trast, even as late as the American Revolution, the German rifle was still
clumsy, heavy, and short-barrelled; it used a ball about twice the weight,
was slower to fire, was heavier in recoil, and offered much less range and
accuracy. Slow loading with short iron rod, mallet, and ramrod
had not disqualified the rifle for backwoods use, but the American
developed a quicker and less strenuous means of loading: the "patch,"
a small greased cloth encasing a lead ball (slightly smaller than the bore),
which could be pushed smoothly down the barrel. By insuring a tight
fit in the rifling, the patch also prevented waste of fire-power. The result-
ing weapon had unprecedented convenience, economy, and accuracy.
By the Revolution this weapon, still practically unknown in England
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 351
and found only among hunters in the mountain fastnesses of Europe, had
become common in the American backwoods. "Rifles, infinitely better
than those imported, are daily made in many places in Pennsylvania," an
Anglican minister wrote from Maryland in 1775, "and all the gunsmiths
everywhere constantly employed. In this country, my lord, the boys, as
soon as they can discharge a gun, frequently exercise themselves there-
with, some a fowling and others a hunting. The great quantities of game,
the many kinds, and the great privileges of killing making the Americans
the best marksmen in the world, and thousands support their families by
the same, particularly riflemen on the frontiers, whose objects are deer
and turkeys. In marching through woods one thousand of these riflemen
would cut to pieces ten thousand of your best troops." Such reports as
these made the English regulars expect every American to be a sharp-
shooter.
The myth of the omnipresent American marksman, clothed not in
a military uniform but in a hunting shirt, became potent in psychological
warfare. Dixon & Hunter's Virginia Gazette (Sept. 9, 1775) reported an
exhibition by riflemen bound for Boston: while one man held between
his knees a small board with a bull's-eye the size of a dollar, a rifleman
at sixty yards put eight successive bullets through the bull's-eye. Wash-
ington arranged a similar exhibition on Cambridge Common in August
1775, hoping that spies would carry the frightening word back to the
British troops. At this very time the British musket was so crude that
the oflicial army manual did not even contain the command "aim" for
its musketeers. Early in the Revolution, General George Washington
issued an order in which he "earnestly" encouraged "the use of Hunting
Shirts, with long Breeches made of the same Cloth. ... it is a dress justly
supposed to carry no small terror to the enemy, who think every such
person a complete Marksman." But the rifle, unlike the European musket,
was not equipped with a bayonet and was a slower, more fragile weapon
of special skill. Ill-suited to the European formal battle-array, it remained
a highly individualistic weapon, admirable for skirmishing or for picking
off an individual enemy. Such tactics unnerved a rigidly trained pro-
fessional army; they would help convince British officers that subduing
the American populace was a hopeless task.
In America war had become an institution for the citizenry as well as
the warriors. The colonials were in the habit of defending themselves
on neighboring ground instead of employing professionals on a distant
battlefield. Just as everybody in America was somewhat literate but
none was greatly literary, everybody here was a bit of a soldier, none
completely so. War was conducted without a professional army, without
generals, and even without "soldiers" in the strict European sense. The
352 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Second Amendment to the Federal Constitution would provide: "A well
regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The distinctive American experience would, of course, make difficulties
whenever Americans would be arrayed in war or diplomacy against
Europeans, for in Europe the professional army with its aristocratic
officer class had made war a sophisticated, attenuated activity. To that
sophistication there were two aspects. On the one hand, specialization
of the soldier's function had made possible the limitation of warfare. On
the other hand, it made possible a sophisticated diplomacy by which
sovereigns used professional armies to serve their trivial or devious
purposes and under which an uninterested populace lightly allowed their
"nation" (i.e., the professional soldiery) to be committed to battle. A
professional army was casually sent wherever the sovereign wished for
imperial, dynastic, or commercial strategy. European war by the 18th
century was far removed from the naive defense of the hearth: special-
ized fighters were trained to kill for reasons they did not understand and
in distant lands for which they had no love. As the 18th century wore on,
such wars of policy commanded more and more of the blood and
treasure of Europe. But these wars were barely intelligible, much less
defensible, among colonial Americans, to whom war was the urgent
defense of the hearth by everybody against an omnipresent and merciless
enemy. Americans would long find it hard to understand the military
games played by kings, ministers, and generals who used uniformed
pawns on distant battlefields, or the diplomatic games in which such
wars were only interludes.
54
Colonial Militia and the
Myth of Preparedness
"To TRUST ARMS in the hands of the people at large has, in Europe,
been believed ... to be an experiment fraught only with danger," wrote
President Timothy Dwight of Yale in the early 19th century. "Here by a
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 353
long trial it has been proved to be perfectly harmless. ... If the govern-
ment be equitable; if it be reasonable in its exactions; if proper attention
be paid to the education of children in knowledge, and religion, few men
will be disposed to use arms, unless for their amusement, and for the
defence of themselves and their country. The difficulty, here, has been
to persuade the citizens to keep arms; not to prevent them from being
employed for violent purposes." The story of the military institutions of
the American colonies is an account of efforts to keep as much of the
free population as possible armed and prepared to fight on short notice.
In Europe, where rulers were reluctant to put the means of revolt into
the hands of their subjects, the high cost of firearms had anyway kept such
weapons beyond the reach of most of the populace. But in America the
requirements for self-defense and food-gathering had put firearms in
the hands of nearly everyone. Separated by an ocean, their European
sovereign could not have enforced a prohibition even if he had tried,
but he did not fear that their arms would shake his throne. From a very
early date, however, English Governors complained (and Americans
boasted) of this armed citizenry. "How miserable that man is," wailed
Governor Sir William Berkeley of Virginia, who had to deal with Bacon's
Rebellion in 1676, "that Governes a People wher six parts of seaven
at least are Poore Endebted Discontented and Armed." Even a century
later Cr&vecoeur observed that among backwoodsmen "surrounding
hostility immediately puts the gun into their hands."
An armed citizenry was a response not only to the omnipresent threat
of war but to the skirmishing type of warfare common in the American
woods. Because of the poor communications, the vast terrain, and the
ways of Indian fighting, war could seldom be a centrally-directed opera-
tion; instead it was a mass of scattered encounters by small groups and
individuals acting largely on their own. When Indians attacked, the
wise defenders hid themselves behind rocks and tree-trunks. "In our
first war with the Indians," the Apostle John Eliot wrote to Robert
Boyle in 1677, "God pleased to show us the vanity of our military skill,
in managing our arms, after the European mode. Now we are glad to
learn the skulking way of war. And what God's end is, in teaching us
such a way of discipline, I know not."
The mass drill, precision, and discipline of the professional soldier
were of little use, and decentralization of command was inevitable.
Virginia Governors, fearing that a nervous populace might foment
Indian troubles by fighting without provocation, in the early years actually
forbade the raising of the militia in any part of the colony until the
Governor's approval had been secured. But such delay was fatal, and
by 1680 the right to summon the militia was conferred on officers in
354 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
different parts of the colony. The commander of a remote backwoods
fort had to show an independence, which sometimes amounted to con-
tempt for his superior officers. When Captain Cadwalader Jones, com-
mander of a Virginia fort on the Rappahannock, received a command
in September 1679 which did not please him, he assembled his garrison,
read the communication aloud, and burned it in full view of his men, ex-
claiming that this showed what he thought of Major Robert Beverley
and the Governor! Under such conditions, what use was elaborate
strategy by a commander far from the scene of action?
The early Pilgrims organized their landing parties in loose, impromptu
fashion. Although they fortunately had a veteran military leader in
Captain Miles Standish, their armed unit was not the permanently organ-
ized military company but, as one historian has aptly put it, a "pick-up
team," chosen for each particular occasion from the men most available
at the time. Their first encounters showed features which would continue
to mark colonial military life: fighting by a band of casually gathered,
haphazardly armed civilians, over whom there was no effective central
command. The earliest settlers at Plymouth found that defense could
hardly be separated from all the other tasks of daily living of cultivating
the land, getting food, and building shelters. "They are constantly on
their guard night and day," observed a visitor to the town in 1627; men
went to church, musket in hand, and during the service "each sets his
arms down near him." But as the settlements pushed back from the
coast and dispersed, as the Indian menace became only intermittent, a
more formal organization became necessary. New England developed a
militia system which became the common pattern of colonial defense.
An armed citizenry was by no means an American invention. A prime
example of American "regression," it was a revival of the medieval
Assize of Arms (1181), from which the English had developed a
militia consisting of every able-bodied freeman, each required to provide
himself with arms, to train periodically under a local officer, and to
be ready on sudden call. By the later 17th and early 18th century, as
Europe's "limited" warfare left fighting to a small number of profes-
sionals, the English militia system had become something of a joke
mainly a device for parade and ostentation by the gentlemen lords-
lieutenants. In America, however, the ancient militia system, with a
number of striking New World modifications, was the pattern by which
whole communities organized against their enemies.
The unit in this system was not the trained professional soldier armed
and supplied from above; it was the self-armed citizen. The Court of
Assistants of Massachusetts Bay, in March 1631, ordered that within
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 355
two weeks every town should see that all men (including servants but
excepting magistrates and ministers) were supplied with arms approved
by their militia officers. Anyone who did not already own arms was re-
quired to purchase them; if he could not afford the price, the money
would be advanced by the town to be repaid by the citizen as soon as
possible. The next year the colony ordered that any single man who had
not so armed himself should be hired out as a servant, and this law re-
mained. In Plymouth the requirements were still more detailed: after
January 1633 each man had to have a musket or other suitable gun, a
cartridge belt, a sword, two pounds of powder, and ten pounds of bullets.
A long series of Acts in Massachusetts and neighboring colonies estab-
lished a militia system in which every able-bodied man was armed and
each town had its own company of militia, holding periodic trainings and
inspections of arms.
The militia was a most unmilitary outfit by European standards. It
wore no uniform. Although colonial Governors had sometimes been
chosen because of their military experience, only seldom was a colonial
militia actually drilled or commanded by a professional soldier. A striking
and troublesome feature of the colonial militia was its unprofessional
practice of electing its own officers. The occasions for these elections,
as we have already seen, were celebrated by a peculiar New England
institution: the "artillery election sermon" delivered to the community
of armed congregants. With minor variations and occasional exceptions,
the officers of the local militia owed their positions to popular choice,
usually ratified by the colonial legislature; the arrangement became toler-
able only as the custom developed of electing officers for an indefinite
term or of automatically reflecting satisfactory officers. This system
mitigated the brutal discipline of the European professional armies
(service in which, especially in remote colonies, was a form of punish-
ment for crime); but it produced an informality between officers and
men which weakened the force in combat. It also reminded the soldiers
that they were fighting for themselves and encouraged them to desert
when service become inconvenient.
In the South after about 1700, the problem of defense for the white
European population was complicated by fear of a slave uprising. In
South Carolina, for example, the "patrol" the group of white men
temporarily recruited from the civilian population who went regular
rounds to apprehend and punish vagrant Negroes soon became part of
the militia. Elsewhere, too, the militia system was adapted to a slave-
holding society. How widespread was the actual fear of uprising and to
what extent that fear fostered a militant spirit is debatable, but no one
356 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
can deny that features of a slaveholding plantation society helped dis-
perse the military function into the whole white community. Military
leadership fell on the civilian leaders of the community, who would have
been as jealous of a military class as they were of lawyers or of any
other group of specialized professionals. In Virginia the institution of the
"county-lieutenant" acquired a new life, and the proverbial "Kentucky
Colonel" remains a vestige of the earliest American military institutions.
Allowing for some variations, there was an impressive -uniformity in
the way colonists organized (or failed to organize) their defense. Every-
where, Americans relied on an armed citizenry rather than on a pro-
fessional army. The failure to distinguish between the "military man"
and every other man was simply another example of the dissolving of
the monopolies and distinctions of European life.
The militia system itself, with its axiom that every man was a trained
and ready-armed soldier who would instantly spring to the defense of
his country, encouraged the belief which often proved a dangerous
illusion that the community was always prepared for its peril. In a
country inhabited by "Minute Men" why keep a standing army? At the
time of the first World War, William Jennings Bryan would boast that
when the President called, a million freemen would spring to arms be-
tween sunrise and sunset. His belief was based on the obsolete assumption
that the very conditions of American life produced men who were always
ready to fight. The fear of a standing army, which by European hypoth-
esis was the instrument of tyrants and the enslaver of peoples, re-
enforced opposition to a professional body of men-in-arms. Moreover,
so long as the men-in-arms were merely civilians temporarily distracted
from their regular peaceful occupations, so long as there was no pro-
fessional group concerned for its own prestige, few American politicians
dared urge the advantages of a professional army.
The long-standing American myth of a constantly prepared citizenry
helps explain why Americans have always been so ready to demobilize
their forces. Again and again, our popular army has laid down its arms
with dizzying speed, only to disperse into a precarious peace. This
rhythm, of our life began in the earliest colonial period. The people sprang
quickly to arms: for example, on the night of September 23, 1675, during
King Philip's War, an alarm at a town thirty miles out of Boston brought
twelve hundred militiamen under arms within an hour. As soon as an
alarm was past, an expedition over, or a campaign ended, militiamen
showed the same speed in disbanding.
In New England after each of the early Indian wars the militia quickly
disintegrated. King Philip's War of 1675-76 had brought heavy mas-
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 357
sacres to the miserably prepared colonies. They relied on the myth that,
because every individual man was required to be prepared, the com-
munity as a whole did not need to worry. Their militia system, organized
only for peacetime, lacked communications suitable for war. There was,
in fact, no central command nor was there a permanent commissariat
which might have kept an army continuously supplied. Village after
village suffered surprise attack and had no way of securing assistance.
Yet, the obvious lesson was lost on the colonists at least they did
nothing about it. As soon as a battle was over, they allowed their forces
to fall into decay. By 1683, there was so little interest in local defense
and such difficulty in filling the quotas of commissioned officers that in
Plymouth Colony, for example, the government itself threatened to ap-
point militia officers if the towns continued to neglect their duty. When
Indians fell upon the colonists in 1689, they were again disastrously un-
prepared.
55
Home Rule and
Colonial "Isolationism"
THE MILITIA had arisen to defend farms, homes, and towns, not
to serve as pawns in anyone's grand strategy. When threatened by un-
predictable bands of marauding Indians, colonists saw no sense in send-
ing men off to fight in some distant place, while leaving their own homes
unprotected. Anyway, there was seldom a battlefront in Indian warfare.
From the very beginning, therefore, Americans thought of military de-
fense in the most direct and simple terms. They did not think of men
marching off to battle, but of a man standing, gun in hand, beside his
neighbors to fend off the enemy attacking his village. Settlers were
ready enough to build a stockade, a garrison house, or a fort for their
own town, but they were reluctant to maintain a fort at some distance
however strategic it might be for their own defense.
358 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Some of the crucial defenses of the colonies were never built, simply
because the nearby towns could not afford the expense of an adequate
fortification and remote towns were not enough interested. For example,
Castle Island commanded the channel by which vessels had to approach
Boston, and a strong, continuously-maintained fort there would have
protected the whole colony. But repeated efforts to persuade outlying
towns to bear their share of the expense were unsuccessful; the Island
fortification lacked a permanent garrison, was never fully manned, and
periodically fell into decay. The burden of maintaining it, when it was
maintained at all, was assumed by Boston and a few adjacent towns.
The same story could be told of Virginia and the southern colonies,
where the danger of coastal invasion by foreign powers and by pirates
was constant. At Jamestown, for example, the fortification had so
decayed by 1691 that it could not even be used as a depot for supplies.
Because the coastal defenses of the colonies required the largest invest-
ment, the most cooperation and planning, and the greatest support
from remote places, they proved to be the weakest link in the colonial
military scheme. For such defense, colonists came to rely on guard-ships
arriving fully manned from England.
Perhaps the dominant fact about the relationship of the colonies to
each other was this reluctance of any one colony to send its militia to
join in the defense of its neighbor. The "burgher guard," or local militia,
of New Amsterdam, which had been first mustered during the Indian
War of 1644, was unwilling even to go outside the city limits. When New
York or South Carolina fought in their own defense, they automatically
defended the other colonies, but this was the consequence of their more
exposed geographic situation; it was not due to any cooperative or far-
sighted spirit. Nevertheless, no colony hesitated to use its neighbors. For
a long time Virginia regularly sent a messenger to New York and New
England to bring back word on the movements of the hostile French and
the northern Indians never to see whether help was needed in the
North, but simply to be forewarned against a possible attack on them-
selves. A large proportion of the intercolonial communications con-
sisted of explanations, more or less diplomatic, of why each dared not,
or could not afford, to send its militia outside its own borders.
For example, when Governor Henry Sloughter of New York, in mid-
summer 1691, wrote the Governor of Massachusetts proposing a joint
conquest of Canada in order to remove their common frontier menace at
its source, the reply was a parcel of inconsistent excuses. Massachusetts,
Governor Bradstreet explained, was already occupied with new Indian
outbreaks on her borders; she was trying to finance two ships to cruise
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 359
her own coast against a French privateer; and besides she had no money
to spare. But none of this prevented the Massachusetts Governor from
asking whether New York would possibly be interested in establishing a
garrison at Pemaquid, where the Indians menaced Massachusetts from
the northeast. When Virginia received a similar request from New York
(supported by a requisition from England) in 1693, her Burgesses asked:
How could the defense of far-off New York amount to a defense of
their Virginia? Virginia had her own exposed seacoast; to reduce her
military force by sending any of it to New York would simply increase
her own peril. Virginia had always been her own best defense, and (the
Burgesses were still arguing in 1695) she wished to keep it that way.
Needless to say, no Virginia forces were sent; the money sent to help
New York in the common cause was provided only after the Virginia
Governor and Council overruled the Burgesses. When Massachusetts
suffered a new wave of disastrous Indian raids in 1703, she appealed in
vain to neighboring Connecticut and Rhode Island. The Council of
Connecticut plausibly explained that the colony was barely strong enough
to defend her own valley-frontier. They ignored the fact, already proved
by the fall of Deerfield, that this frontier could not be effectively de-
fended except in Massachusetts. The people of Connecticut even appealed
to their charter: their defense could not extend beyond their own borders
without a special Act of their General Court, which, of course, could not
be obtained.
The great obstacle to British efforts to combine all the colonial troops
against the French and Indian menace in the mid-1 8th century was this
pervasive localism. Sir Charles Hardy, Governor of New York, wrote
from Fort George on May 7, 1756:
To consider the general Good ought to be the Attention of every honest
Man, & no time ever more strongly called for an Exertion of the united
Strength of this extensive Dominion to defend His Majesty's just rights,
& remove a perfidious & vigilant Enemy from their Encroachments, an
Enemy watching every Neglect, & improving every Advantage, & tho*
small in Number, when compared to our numerous Inhabitants, still
acting as one Body, under one Order of Controul, & united in that
Order, put Us poor disunited Millions in Defiance, committing by the
Means of their Indians, the most unheard of Barbarities, & laying
waste our Lands without opposition.
This, My Lord, is the State of unhappy divided America. Your Lord-
ship is desirous that a strong Army may appear in the Field; the
Provinces that were concerned last Year, are raising a great many
Men, intended to be 10,000 & I believe will fall little short of that
360 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Number; This may in appearance promise great Things, but I cannot
flatter myself in much Success; Our Measures are slow; one Colony
will not begin to raise their Men in an early time, doubting whether
their Neighbours will not deceive them, in compleating their Levies so
largely as they promised.
Everywhere colonists feared to put their young men into a regular army
that might be sent to a distant place as part of a large strategy. That
seemed the surest way of depriving their homes and closest borders of
necessary defense.
The issue of home-defense soon became involved with constitutional
issues. The English Civil War of the mid-17th century had been fought,
in part at least, over the question of parliamentary control of the army.
The liberties of Englishmen, freedom from oppressive taxation, and rep-
resentative government itself according to the Commonwealth men
depended on the power of a representative assembly to raise, discipline,
and command its own forces. If the British government could raise an
army of colonials at colonial expense, could keep it under remote com-
mand and strict discipline, and could send it wherever British interests
dictated, what meaning was there to the constitution and the self-govern-
ing rights of free Englishmen?
The older English fear of a standing army combined with the newer
American fear of a drained-off, remotely stationed army. The colonies
temporized, offering bad prudential excuses and good legalistic reasons;
these all added up to each colony's refusal to release its armed men
from its own separate control. "The truth is," Lord Loudoun shrewdly
wrote from New York on November 22, 1756, "Governors here are
Cyphers; their Predecessors sold the whole of the Kings Prerogative, to
get their Sallaries; and till you find a Fund, independent of the Province,
to Pay the Governors, and new model the Government, you can do
nothing with the Provinces, ... if you delay it till a Peace, You will not
have a force to Exert any Brittish Acts of Parliament here."
War was becoming a different institution for the Americans. The
"isolationism" of the separate colonies and the New World experience
of war from which that isolationism sprang helps explain many things
about the American Revolution. The War for Independence was a clash
between two concepts of how, when, and where men should fight. In
America, the British government had found it necessary to wage old-
style European wars, fought for some very large or very petty (but always
half-hidden) purposes by a regular army moved about the continent at
the will of its commander. Incidentally, the colonists were defended and
they profited in many indirect ways from participation in the Empire.
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 361
But it would be hard to prove simple "self-defense" for any of
Britain's colonial wars. Sometimes they required an offensive in remote
places to serve the large strategy. The justification was always elaborate:
What benefit would accrue to the Empire if its professional military force
was used to this or that end? British military policy was never obvious in
the sense in which self-defense against marauding Indians was obvious
to the American settler. Even at the conclusion of the long, expensive, and
"victorious" French and Indian War in 1763, it was by no means clearly
desirable that the British should acquire Canada and so force the French
from North America. As we have seen, some English plausibly feared that
removal of the French menace might make the colonists less dependent
on the mother country, and they doubted that much profit could come
from the frigid Canadian wilderness. Such questions of empire policy
seemed irrelevant to the remote American settler, for whom defense
meant protection against sudden death. Even the Americans who were
more safe on the seacoast hoped in the New World to escape European
dynastic and military policy.
The major financial and manpower burden of the French and Indian
War was, of course, borne by the British government itself. Whether the
colonists (despite their protests) bore their fair share of the cost and the
fighting can be argued, but it is plain that the Colonial Assemblies did
their best to keep their contributions as small as possible. If the colonists
had been more "far-sighted" and less "isolationist," they might have seen
that their concept of a Fortress America was narrow and they might have
foreseen the many long-range advantages in sharing the expenses of
imperial wars. Had they voluntarily undertaken such expenses, the
occasion might never have arisen for those changes in British policy
after 1763 which aimed to make the colonies pay their way, which
fomented the constitutional debate over taxation, and without which the
colonies might not have been stirred to rebellion.
From their American experience the colonies had come to believe that
defense began at home. The more they worried the problem, the more
they believed that the British Constitution hallowed their assertion that
treasury and army must be locally controlled. Parliament had tried to
commit the colonists to fight and to finance wars of policy. But the
strongly particularist feelings of each of the colonies, which prevented
them from helping one another in the earlier colonial wars and which
plagued Lord Loudoun during the French and Indian War, led them
toward a "War of Separation." In that war, and later in the War of
1812, a similar short-sightedness again reenforced by legal, constitu-
362 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
tional, financial, and prudential arguments would again produce
near-disaster.
There is, then, no paradox in the fact that the colonies were willing
to "revolt" and yet were unwilling to unite; on the contrary, the two
facts explain each other. The intense separatism and the determination
to keep local resources to defend homes and towns also caused the
nearly overwhelming difficulties which afflicted the colonial armies during
the Revolution. These, too, were the very reasons why, in the long run,
it was impossible for the British regular army to subdue the Americans.
And these were the reasons which would make American federalism
difficult, necessary, and in the long run spectacularly successful.
Here also were roots of a latter-day American "isolationism." In place
of the European concept of wars undertaken to serve the half-secret needs
of dynasty, commerce, or empire, there had grown here a notion of
war as the urgent and temporary defense of the homeland. In the words
of Washington's Farewell Address:
Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very
remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies,
the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence,
therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial
ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combina-
tions and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a
different course. If we remain one people, under an efficient govern-
ment, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from
external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause
the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously
respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making
acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation;
when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice,
shall counsel.
Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our
own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny
with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in
the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?
Under the new Federal Constitution, declarations of war were possible
only through a cumbersome and time-consuming legislative process, in
full public view. The after-image of the early American vision re-
mained. And the American people retained a strong and often dis-
organizing hand on their nation's foreign policy.
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 363
56
The Unprofessional Soldier
THE BELIEF that American wars would always be fought by "em-
battled farmers" was rooted in the earliest facts of American life. Mili-
tary men were to be simply citizens in arms. The military caste, the Man-
on-Horseback, the Palace Revolution, the Coup d'6tat, the tug of war
between army and civil government these recurring motifs in con-
tinental European political life did not appear on the American scene.
Civilian control over the army, clearly asserted in the Federal Constitu-
tion, merely declared what was already one of the firmest institutions of
colonial life.
The typical American view of the military appeared in Doddridge's
description of the backwoodsmen who "formed the cordon along the
Ohio river, on the frontiers of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Kentucky,
which defended the country against the attacks of the Indians during
the revolutionary war. They were the janizaries of the country, that is,
they were soldiers when they chose to be so, and when they chose laid
down their arms. Their military service was voluntary, and of course
received no pay."
Long before the end of the colonial period, British politicians and
professional soldiers had learned that they could not rely on Americans
to fill the ranks of the regular army stationed in America. While the
backwoodsman with his sharpshooting rifle was ready and able to defend
his home, he was intractable within a European-type professional army.
The armed civilians of the separate colonies, which in their intense
localism refused to cooperate in any large strategy, were inadequate to
the large tasks of colonial defense. If the British government hoped to
protect the colonies by preventing the accumulation of offensive French
military strength, they had to send in a professional army from the
outside. The capture of Louisbourg by New Englanders in 1745 was the
only instance in the colonial period of a successful large-scale military
operation by provincial fighters and even that was the product not
of wise planning but of lucky coincidence.
364 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
When General Braddock made his preparations for the disastrous
campaign of 1755, he put relatively small reliance on American troops.
Even at that he was expecting too much. The nucleus of his army was
soldiers of regular regiments of the British Army, supposed to be
brought up to full strength by American recruits, to be supported by
voluntary financial aid from the colonial assemblies, and to be partly
provisioned by the colonies. But Braddock was disappointed: few re-
cruits were raised, the assemblies refused substantial assistance, and
wagons and supplies were offered only at exorbitant rates. Character-
istically, the northern colonies voted instead to set up a wholly provincial
army under a general of their own choosing. This foreshadowed the
difficulties which Lord Loudoun would meet on a larger scale a few
years later and which would dramatize the divergence of American from
European ways of war.
Loudoun's activities comprised the greatest British effort before the
Revolution to control and centralize American military activities. Ac-
cording to plans made in advance, he arrived in America in 1756 carry-
ing a broad commission to organize a force against the French and
Indians; he was supposed to command a regular army of nearly fourteen
thousand men (two-thirds of the privates besides replacements to be
colonials). During two years of recruitment, the British, using dubious
methods, managed to enlist about 7500 Americans; during the same
period the British Isles supplied only about 4500. The year 1757
showed a decided reversal of proportions: in that year only about 1200
men were recruited in the colonies, while 11,000 came from England.
Loudoun, with the hoped-for acquiescence of the separate colonial gov-
ernments, was supposed to be supreme commander of all local forces,
including, of course, their militia. But the more Loudoun learned of
colonial troops and colonial ways, the less he came to rely on them
whether as recruits for the ranks of his regular regiments or as supporting
forces organized in their own militia. "The King must trust in this coun-
try to himself and those he sends," Lord Loudoun wrote back from
America as early as September 1756, ". . . for this Country will not
run when he calls."
Everything that Loudoun, with the experienced eye of a professional
soldier, saw of the American provincial militias appalled him. Upon his
arrival, there were about seven thousand militiamen occupying the
colonies' northern forts. These men had been raised, and their officers
commissioned, each by his separate province; for all practical purposes
each group was responsible only to its own distinct government. When
Loudoun and his subordinates inspected the camp commanded by Gen-
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 365
eral John Winslow (who had been commissioned by the Governors of
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York), they were horrified by the
absence of decent military order or even rudimentary sanitation. They
saw a hundred graves dug in a day for men dead of disease. "The fort
stinks enough to cause an infection," Loudoun heard from Fort William
Henry, "they have all their sick in it. The camp nastier than anything I
could conceive, their necessary houses, kitchens, graves and places for
slaughtering cattle, all mixed through their encampment." Deserters
were only mildly punished. Loudoun was shocked to see men firing their
guns at random after drill, sleeping on post, and taking pot shots at
game while they were on the march. But the elected officers would
seldom risk unpopularity by punishing offenders.
No commander in his right mind would admit men with such a con-
ception of an army into a regiment of well-disciplined regulars. And why,
indeed, should any American put himself under the strict discipline of
the British Army? Everything was better in the provincial militias: a
Massachusetts private soldier received all of 10^4d sterling a day while a
British regular private received no more than 4d; in addition, the
provincial soldier received an annual bounty for reenlistment Supplies
for the provincials looked like luxuries to the regulars. The militiaman
not only received a greater staple allowance, but after one summer's
service, he was allowed to keep his hatchet, blanket, and knapsack and
he soon established the profitable custom of taking his musket home
with him. He could count on his sugar, ginger, rum, and molasses; and his
marching allowance was three times that of a British regular.
This life of a provincial militiaman was free-and-easy compared to that
of the regular, who might be punished with flogging, or be forced to
enlist for life in the West Indies. It was so free-and-easy in fact that the
commander of provincial troops never really knew how many men he had
at his disposal. The militiaman preferred to stay close to home, so that
he could return to his family in case of need. When the General Court
of Massachusetts voted troops for the expedition to Crown Point in
Northeastern New York, they expressly provided that the men "shall not
be compelled to march southward of Albany, or westward of Sche-
nechtedy." "The Troops are constantly coming & going," an observer
wrote of General Johnson's New York army, "ill arm'd, ill cloath'd &
worse disciplined, some having served their time out, as they phrase it,
and some commencing fresh men. Never to be sure was such a motiy
Herd, almost every man his own master & a General."
The "leveling spirit" of the Americans was notorious among British
officers. "Our Militia is under no kind of discipline. . . ." complained
366 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Cadwallader Golden to Lord Halifax in 1754. 'The Inhabitants of the
Northern Colonies are all so nearly on a level, and a licentiousness, under
the notion of liberty, so generally prevails, that they are impatient under
all kind of superiority and authority." 'The Officers of the Army with
very few Exceptions," a colonial observer noted of such provincial troops,
u are utter Strangers to Military Life and most of them in no Respect
superior to the Men they are put over, They are like the heads and indeed
are the heads of a Mob." Such "officers" had long been snubbed by
British regulars. In 1741 in the expedition against Cartagena in the
Caribbean, officers from Virginia, including even the experienced and
highly competent Governor Gooch, had been passed over for promotion
and brazenly mistreated. George Washington himself had traveled alone
half-way across the colonies to settle just such a question concerning his
own military rank. The established policy repeated by the Duke of
Cumberland in 1754 ordered "that all Troops serving by Commissions
signed by Us, or by Our General Commanding in Chief in North Amer-
ica, shall take Raiik before all Troops which may serve by Commission
from any of the Governors or Councils of Our Provinces in North
America: And It is Our further Pleasure, that the Generals and Field
Officers of the Provincial Troops shall have no Rank with the Generals
& Field Officers who serve by Commissions from Us." Loudoun brought
with him to America a modified order allowing colonial officers more
rank, but by then it was too late.
There was not a single problem that plagued Loudoun in the French
and Indian War that did not also trouble Washington in the War of In-
dependence. Washington, trying to raise a unified Continental Army
from unmilitary Americans, now stood in the shoes of Lord Loudoun.
Although the "cause" was different, the difficulties were the same. The
Continental Army, like the British Regular Army twenty years earlier,
had to compete for men against the separate state militias, and Washing-
ton had only slightly more success. Had the American cause been forced
to depend on an American regular army, the outcome would have been
even more doubtful and drawn-out. Washington, however, took wise
advantage of his opportunity to fight the war seriatim first in New
England, then in the Middle Colonies, then in the South rather than all-
at-once, as the French and Indian Wars had been fought. This made the
dispersed militia more useful and his smaller army more effective.
The unseemly disputes over rank and precedence, in which regular
British officers had lorded it over mere militiamen, were reenacted with
the officers of the Continental line now assuming the old airs of the
regulars. The Congress and the States showed democratic prodigality;
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 367
they lavished military titles on mere able-bodied citizens, regardless of
competence. "My blacksmith is a captain," De Kalb reported in amaze-
ment. To avoid offense, it was always safer to assume that anybody was
entitled to be addressed as a high officer. "Not an hour passes," Wash-
ington wrote to the President of the Continental Congress (Aug. 3,
1778), "without new applications and new complaints about rank. . . .
We can scarcely form a Court Martial or parade a detachment in any
instance, without a warm discussion on the subject of precedence." When
Colonel Crafts of the militia and Colonel Jackson of the Continental
army arrived to act as pall-bearers at the funeral of a fellow-officer,
Crafts as the older man claimed the right to walk first, but Jackson argued
that as a Continental officer he was entitled to precedence. Neither gave
in, and Crafts and his friends walked out on the funeral.
Even Washington's patience wore thin; but since local prides were not
to be overcome, he learned to live with them and somehow to harness
them in the common cause. "I have labored, ever since I have been
in the service," Washington wrote at the end of 1776, "to discourage all
kinds of local attachments and distinctions of country [i.e. of State],
denominating the whole by the greater name of American, but I have
found it impossible to overcome prejudices; and, under the new estab-
lishment, I conceive it best to stir up an emulation; in order to do which
would it not be better for each State to furnish, though not to appoint,
their own brigadiers?" In 1780, to the inquiries of the Congress about
his problems of promotion and rank, he replied: "If in all cases ours was
one army, or thirteen armies allied for the common defence, there would
be no difficulty in solving your question; but we are occasionally both, and
I should not be much out if I were to say, that we are sometimes neither,
but a compound of both"
All the American armies were competing against each other for men,
for officers, for rank, and for glory. Privates from New England were
being offered higher pay than those from the Middle States. Massachu-
setts even offered to pay its men by lunar rather than calendar months
in order to secure a competitive advantage. This particular trick Wash-
ington stigmatized as the "most fatal stab to the peace of this Army, that
ever was given. . . . Lord North himself could not have devised a more
effectual blow to the recruiting Service." Problems were compounded by
the familiar "leveling" tendencies of the Americans; by their refusal to
allow a sufficiently higher pay to officers, they stirred discontent and
bred an unmilitary familiarity between officers and men.
The widespread fear of a permanent professional army increased the
difficulties. John Adams declared it safer in the long run to put public
368 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
faith in a temporary though less effective militia. "Although it may cost
us more, and we may put now and then a battle to hazard by the method
we are in, yet we shall be less in danger of corruption and violence from
a standing army, and our militia will acquire courage, experience, disci-
pline, and hardiness in actual service. I wish every man upon the con-
tinent was a soldier, and obliged, upon occasion, to fight and determined
to conquer or to die. Flight was unknown to the Romans. I wish it was
to Americans." Proposals to offer long-term pensions to officers, in
order to attract better men and to raise their morale, were widely opposed.
Elbridge Gerry listed the reasons (Jan. 13, 1778): "the infant state of
the country, its aversion to placemen and pensioners, whereby Great
Britain is likely to lose her liberty, the equality of the officers and soldiers
of some States, before the war."
Short-term enlistments (sometimes for as little as three months) ex-
pressed both the widespread fear of a professional standing army and the
assumption that an army would be superfluous the day after the war was
won. Washington repeatedly complained that this was the core of his
problem. For example, in a circular (Oct. 18, 1780) to the several
States from his headquarters near Passaic, he said:
I am religiously persuaded that the duration of the war, and the greatest
part of the Misfortunes, and perplexities we have hitherto experienced,
are chiefly to be attributed to temporary inlistments. ... A moderate,
compact force, on a permanent establishment capable of acquiring the
discipline essential to military operations, would have been able to
make head against the Enemy, without comparison better than the
throngs of Militia, which have been at certain periods not in the feild,
but on their way to, and from the feild: for from that want of persever-
ance which characterises all Militia, and of that coercion which
cannot be exercised upon them it has always been found impracticable
to detain the greatest part of them in service even for the term, for
which they have been called out; and this has been commonly so
short, that we have had a great proportion of the time, two sets of men
to feed and pay, one coming to the Army, and the other going from it.
Men went home just as they were beginning to understand their duties,
and it was often necessary to recruit a new army in the face of the enemy.
More than one American military defeat can be explained by the transient
character of the army. General Richard Montgomery rushed into his dis-
astrous assault on Quebec in late December 1775 because the enlistments
of all his New England troops would expire at midnight on December
31, and he was sure they would not stay with him a day longer.
The unreliability and lack of discipline of the American armed citi-
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 369
zenry, which had been so hastily gathered into military ranks, haunted
brave Revolutionary commanders from Washington down to lieutenants
in the field, and made large-scale planning mere wishful thinking. Time
after time militia fled the battlefield, spreading defeatism as they went.
"America," warned Washington, "has been almost amused out of her
Liberties" by the proponents of the militia. "I solemnly declare I never
was witness to a single instance, that can countenance an opinion of
Militia or raw Troops being fit for the real business of fighting. I have
found them useful as light Parties to skirmish in the woods, but incapable
of making or sustaining a serious attack. . . . The late battle of Camden
is a melancholly comment upon this doctrine. The Militia fled at the first
fire, and left the Continental Troops surrounded on every side, and over-
powered by numbers to combat for safety instead of victory." "Great
god," exclaimed Daniel Morgan on Feb. 1, 1781, only a few days after
his victory over Tarleton, "what is the reason we cant Have more men
in the field so many men in the country Nearby idle for want of em-
ployment." At this critical moment in the War, when Greene was retreat-
ing before Cornwallis, Edward Stevens vainly appealed to his troops.
After crossing the Yadkin we could not have Paraded a greater Force
than Eight Hundred for Action if even that Including Militia and all
and a great part of the number was the Militia under me whose times
were out. I saw the greatest necessity of these men remaining a few
days till the Troops from General Greens Camp could get up, and
this the General requested of me to endeavour to bring about. I had
them paraded and addressed them on the Subject. But to my great
mortification and astonishment scarce a man would agree to it, And
gave for answer he was a good Soldier that Served his time out. If the
Salvation of the Country had depended on their staying Ten or
Fifteen days, I dont believe they would have done it. Militia wont do.
Their greatest Study is to Rub through their Tower [Tour] of Duty
with whole Bones.
But many militiamen were not this scrupulous of their duty; they often
went home before their term was up. Desertions were commonplace. It
is hard to assess the military tactics of some battles because one can
never be sure how many of the "losses" of the Revolutionary army were
due to desertion rather than to death or capture. Within a few weeks
before the Battle of Bennington on August 16, 1777, more than four
hundred men deserted or, more accurately, disappeared. At the siege
of Newport, about the same time, five thousand militiamen deserted
within a few days, so weakening Sullivan's forces that he had to abandon
any idea of attack. On many occasions for example, near Savannah in
370 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
March 1779, at Johnstown in October 1781, and at other places too
numerous to mention large numbers of militia fled in panic. Although
the Americans had outnumbered the British by more than fifty per cent
at Guilford Court House on March 15, 1781, the wholesale flight of the
militia to the woods gave victory to the British. The experienced General
Daniel Morgan had shrewdly foreseen just this when he warned General
Nathanael Greene against the "great number of militia" and advised, "If
they fight, you beat Cornwallis, if not, he will beat you." "Put the ...
militia in the centre, with some picked troops in their rear with orders to
shoot down the first man that runs." Greene followed Morgan's advice,
but the anxiety of the North Carolina and Virginia militia prevailed.
How could such an ill-assorted, ill-disciplined, and ill-supplied army
succeed against the well-organized forces of one of the great military
powers? How, indeed, can we account for the final victory? Many acts
of heroism, courage, and sacrifice embellished the records of the fighting
Americans. The unorthodox imagination of amateur American generals,
in sharp contrast to the professional rigidity of the British command, gave
the colonials an unexpected advantage. But it is still hard to explain why
the British surrendered so quickly after Yorktown. Today the most per-
suasive answer is not that the Americans won but that the British lost
or perhaps that they simply gave up, having seen the long-run hopelessness
of their cause. The American terrain (together with the colonial disper-
sion, which meant that there was no jugular vein to be cut by British
force) led the British to realize that to subdue America was beyond their
means. Within the first four years of the Revolution, every one of the
most populous towns Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston
had fallen to the British and had been occupied by their regular troops,
but always without decisive effect. The American center was everywhere
and nowhere in each man himself. In addition, the French brought
crucial aid to the American militia and irregulars, and the spectre of a
permanent American alliance with France haunted the British Empire.
Perhaps the most typical and most ominous of the military events of
the war was the abrupt disbanding of the army. In January, 1781 ten
months before Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown mutiny shook the
army in Pennsylvania; again, on the brink of peace in June 1783, muti-
nous soldiers, in control of the powder magazines and public offices at the
seat of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, threatened to use force
to get their wages. It was in the shadow of such disorder that the Con-
tinental Army was hastily dispersed and that General Washington on
December fourth bade a tearful farewell to his officers. Nothing was more
American about the Revolution than this conclusion of it, when armed
A NATION OF MINUTE MEN 371
citizens impatiently dissolved themselves back into the populace. In this,
as in later wars in American history, "the end of the war" and the end
of the army were substantially, and disastrously, synonymous.
In American folklore it is fitting that the first call to arms, the rousing
of "embattled farmers," the sudden appearance of Minute Men, together
with Washington's Farewell and the last dispersion of the army, should
remain the most permanent and the most moving symbols. The story of
the actual administration of the Army is dismal and discreditable
almost unprecedented in the annals of war.
Yet the very weaknesses of the professional army had already fore-
shadowed strengths in American institutions. Unmilitary Americans
freely chose a general for their first President. Washington might become
"first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,"
but the political power given to a military leader meant something very
different here from what it might have meant elsewhere. The American
military ideal was not Caesar but Cincinnatus, not the skilled general
glorying in the tasks of warfare to which he gave his life, but the planter
who had unwillingly left his tobacco fields.
When, near the end of the war, American officers tried to set up an
organization to perpetuate their comradeship, their memories, and their
tradition (and perhaps their political influence), they significantly chose
to call themselves the Society of the Cincinnati. Washington assumed its
leadership though only with the greatest reluctance, for he was suspi-
cious of the organization and hoped to see it soon dissolved. Among the
people at large it aroused violent fears of a military caste; they saw in such
a hereditary military society a dangerous center of aristocracy, a focus
of monarchic conspiracy. The Society was so congenial to the monarchic
spirit that King Louis XVI of France authorized his officers to form a
branch chapter and to wear the Order of the Cincinnati as a military
decoration.
Long after the Society of the Cincinnati had faded from the public
memory, another American military institution reached into many
American homes. This was the Purple Heart Badge of Military Merit,
which Washington established by a general order of Aug. 7, 1782:
The General ever desirous to cherish a virtuous ambition in his
soldiers, as well as to foster and encourage every species of Military
merit, directs that whenever any singularly meritorious action is per-
formed, the author of it shall be permitted to wear on his facings over
the left breast, the figure of a heart in purple cloth or silk, edged with
narrow lace or binding. Not only instances of unusual gallantry, but
also of extraordinary fidelity and essential Service in any way shall
372 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
meet with a due reward. . . . Men who have merited this last dis-
tinction to be suffered to pass all guards and sentinels which officers
are permitted to do.
The road to glory in a patriot army and a free country is thus open
to all this order is also to have retrospect to the earliest stages of the
war, and to be considered as a permanent one.
Even though the Federal Constitution later gave the power to wage
war to the central government, the American army was never fully unified.
State militias, under their later guise of the "national guard," remained
important; they helped keep alive a spirit of local allegiance and a variety
of practice and military standards which eventually created all kinds of
problems. The peacetime regional nucleus of the militia or "national
guard" stayed together through a Civil War and two World Wars, so
that many men continued to fight beside their neighbors.
Starting with Washington himself, American history would offer again
and again especially after the decline of the Virginia Dynasty ex-
amples of men whose fame on the battlefield eventually led them to the
highest civil office. Even in Great Britain, where there was little fear of
military coups d'etat during the 18th and 19th centuries, military men
rarely became prime ministers; turning military success into a political
career was almost unheard of there. But in America this became com-
mon: the prominent examples Jackson, William Henry Harrison,
Taylor, Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eisenhower come quickly to
mind. Some of these men had begun, not in the ranks of the regular army,
but in the local militia. And their military exploits far from seeming
mere success in a specialized profession actually attested their success
as undifferentiated Americans. Precisely because there was no military
caste, the citizen-soldier easily found a place in American political life.
A CKNO WLED GMENTS
The University of Chicago for the last fourteen years has offered me the
freedom and the stimulating environment to pursue the research which
has gone into this book. Its Social Science Research Committee has sup-
ported the work over many years. To the friendly atmosphere of the De-
partment of History and especially to its chairman, Walter Johnson
I owe more than I can say.
To the Relm Foundation of Ann Arbor, Michigan, I am especially in-
debted for its generous grant. The Foundation, and its Secretary, Richard
A. Ware, have given me an unrestricted freedom to do my work. Unlike
many other foundations, they have shown a faith in the individual
scholar which has itself been an inspiration in this collaborative age.
The staff of the University of Chicago Library, and particularly Mr.
Robert Rosenthal, Head of the Department of Special Collections, and
Miss Katherine M. Hall of the Inter-Library Loan Department have been
continually helpful.
A number of my friends and colleagues at the University of Chicago
have shared their ideas with me, have given me their suggestions, and
have read all or part of the manuscript. For their acute comments, their
frankness, and their generosity, it is a pleasure to thank all of them.
They include: Edward C. Banfield, Laura Banfield, William T. Hutchin-
son, Robert L. McCaul, Raven I. McDavid, Jr., Mitford M. Mathews,
Sidney E. Mead, Charles L. Mowat, Richard J. Storr, and Hza Veith. The
profound historical insight and the sensitive literary judgment of Aveiy O.
Craven have been invaluable. Others who have offered specific suggestions
helpful to the research or who have read all or part of the manuscript are:
Professor Carl Bridenbaugh of the University of California, Professor
I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University, Professor John Duffy of Louisi-
ana State University, Professor Donald Fleming of Browji University,
Professor Edmund S. Morgan of Yale University, Dean Emeritus Frank
Luther Mott of the School of Journalism, University of Missouri, Dr.
373
374 The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Stanley Pargellis of the Newberry Library, Professor Thomas Pyles of
the University of Florida, Dr. Leo Rosten of Look Magazine, Professor
Richard H. Shryock of the Johns Hopkins University, Professor Frederick
B. Tolles of Swarthmore College, Professor Harry R. Warfel of the
University of Florida, and Dr. Lawrence C. Wroth of the John Carter
Brown Library. They have saved me from many errors; but I have some-
times differed from them on facts or on interpretations, so that I alone
am responsible for the errors which remain.
I have been fortunate in receiving stimulus, suggestions, and criticisms
from my students at the University of Chicago, and I have been particu-
larly lucky in research assistants who could not only help gather raw
materials but who have also taught me a great deal. These include Pro-
fessor Archie H. Jones, now of Humboldt State College, Arcata, Cali-
fornia, and Professor Brook Ballard of Principia College. I have been
especially indebted to Mr. Keith B. Berwick for his independent in-
telligence and constant encouragement during the last two years of the
research and writing. The book has benefited immeasurably from his
scholarly precision and resourcefulness.
For the checking of the final manuscript and for research on many
specific facts I wish to thank Miss Charline Clawson, Mrs. Alan M. Fern,
Mrs. Ramonda Jo Karmatz, and Mr. Albert Romasco. For permission
to quote from H. L. Mencken's American Language, I wish to thank
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. of New York.
Invaluable secretarial assistance has come from Miss N. Miyake of
Kyoto, Japan and Mrs. Kenneth Finlayson of Homewood, Illinois. The
preparation of the manuscript has been greatly facilitated by the intelli-
gence, efficiency, and scrupulous care of Mrs. Ed Stack of Homewood,
Illinois, who has seen it through from the first draft to the printer's copy.
For sympathetic and imaginative editing I owe Mr. Jess Stein of
Random House a debt which few authors can honestly acknowledge to
their publishers.
My wife, Ruth F, Boorstin, has shared this book from the first outlines
to the last proof corrections. Without her cheerful help it would never
have been written. Her feeling for the appropriate word and her constant
editorial advice have given me a unique advantage.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Following is a list of works useful for studying the period covered in
this volume. It is meant to help the reader who may wish to pursue
further some of the topics I discuss, to suggest the kinds of material on
which I have relied in my research, and to indicate my heavy debt to
other scholars. But it is not a complete bibliography of any aspect of the
subject, nor does it include all the works I have used. After a General
section, the bibliography is arranged into thirteen Parts, corresponding
with the grouping of topics in my chapters. In each Part, I have begun
by mentioning works of general interest and easiest accessibility, and I
have then proceeded toward the more "primary" and more esoteric
materials*
GENERAL
The last thirty years have probably
produced more useful books about
the colonial period than were written
in the preceding century-and-a-half.
But, with few exceptions, recent schol-
arship has aimed at clarifying and
amplifying details rather than at rein-
terpreting the sweep of colonial his-
tory, much less at discovering the
special character of American civil-
ization. The reader who wonders what
it all adds up to will still have to re-
turn to George Bancroft's History of
the United States from the Discovery
of the American Continent (10 vols.,
1834-75), to Francis Parkman's
France and England in North Amer-
ica (9 vols., 1865-92) and The Con*
spiracy of Pontiac (2 vols., 1851), or
to the works of one of the few great
interpretive historians who wrote
earlier in our century Frederick
Jackson Turner's Frontier in American
History (1920), Charles A. and Mary
R. Beard's Rise of American Civiliza-
tion (4 vols., 1927-42), or Vernon L.
Parrington's Main Currents in Amer-
ican Thought (3 vols., 1927-30).
For particular aspects of the colo-
nial period there are monumental
works. For example, Herbert L. Os-
good's American Colonies in the Sev-
enteenth Century (3 vols., 1904-7)
and his sequel on the 18th century
(4 vols., 1924) provide an admirably
clear and readable survey of con-
stitutional history; and Charles M.
Andrews' Colonial Period of Amer-
375
376
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
lean History (4 vols., 1934-38) is a
comprehensive, if dull, survey of
political history, with an occasional
look at the social history. For im-
portant surveys of the more traditional
topics see: Moses Coit Tyler's pioneer
History of American Literature, 1607-
1765 (2 vols., 1878; reprinted, 1949)
and The Literary History of the Amer-
ican Revolution (1897); William P.
Trent and others (eds.), The Cam-
bridge History of American Literature
(3 vols., 1917; several times reprinted),
Vol. I; Robert E. Spiller and others
(eds.), Literary History of the United
States (2 vols. and a 3rd vol. of bib-
liography, 1946); Clinton Rossiter's
comprehensive and readable survey of
colonial political thought, Seedtime of
the Republic (1953); Louis B. Wright,
The Cultural Life of the American
Colonies (1957); L. H. Gipson, The
British Empire before the American
Revolution (7 vols., 1936-49).
Despite the rise of the so-called
"New History" with its emphasis on
the life of the common man, we still
have few comprehensive works on
non-political and non-belles-lettres
aspects of the colonial period. The
first three volumes of A History of
American Life (Arthur M. Schlesinger
and Dixon Ryan Fox, eds.; 1927-48)
make a systematic but not very im-
aginative effort to cover social history.
There are a few important intensive
studies of particular topics, for exam-
ple: Carl Bridenbaugh's Cities in the
Wilderness: The First Century of
Urban Life in America, 1625-1742
(2d. ed., 1955), Cities in Revolt:
Urban Life in America, 1743-1776
(1955), and The Colonial Craftsman
(1950); Marcus L. Jernegan, Labor-
ing and Dependent Classes in Colonial
America (1931); Michael Kraus, In-
tercolonial Aspects of American Cul-
ture (1928); Richard B. Moms' path-
breaking Government and Labor in
Early America (1946); A. E. Smith,
Colonists in Bondage (1947); An-
thony N. B. Garvan, Architecture and
Town Planning in Colonial Connecti-
cut (1951); S. Fiske Kimball, Do-
mestic Architecture of the American
Colonies (1927); Percy W. Bidwell
and John I. Falconer, History of
Agriculture in the Northern United
States, 1620-1860 (1941); Lewis C.
Gray, History of Agriculture in the
Southern United States to 1860 (2
vols., 1941); and A. W. Calhoun, A
Social History of the American Family
(3 vols., 1917-19).
Among the more important recent
efforts at synthesis and interpretation
are: the volumes in A History of the
South (Wendell H. Stephenson and E.
Merton Coulter, eds.), Wesley Frank
Craven on the 17th Century (1949)
and John Alden on the South in the
Revolution (1957), to be supple-
mented by a volume by Clarence Ver
Steeg on the 18th century; Michael
Kraus, The Atlantic Civilization:
Eighteenth Century Origins (1949);
Leonard W. Labaree, Conservatism in
Early American History (1948); An-
son Phelps Stokes, Church and State
in the United States (3 vols., 1950);
William W. Sweet, Religion in Colo-
nial America (1942). The best recent
multivolume survey which aims to
include all aspects of the period is
Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Found-
ing of American Civilization (3 vols.,
1938-47); an excellent brief survey is
Curtis P. Nettels, The Roots of Ameri-
can Civilization (1938).
For a microcosm of the problems
faced by a society there is no substi-
tute for biography. And there are a
number of monumental but readable
ones which throw light on colonial
life in general: Albert J. Beveridge,
Life of John Marshall (4 vols., 1916-
19); Douglas SouthaU Freeman,
George Washington (6 vols., 1948-
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
54) ; David John Mays, Edmund Pen-
dleton (2 vols., 1952) ; Dumas Malone,
Jefferson and His Time (4 vols.,
1948 ); and Carl Van Doren,
Benjamin Franklin (3 vols. in one;
1938). Unfortunately, there are few
brief lives of these or other major
figures. This lack is beginning to be
repaired by the admirable Library of
American Biography (Oscar Handlin,
ed.), a collection of concise biograph-
ical essays, of which a few colonial
volumes for example, Frederick B.
Tolles on James Logan (1957), Ed-
mund S. Morgan on John Winthrop
(1958), and Verner Crane on Ben-
jamin Franklin (1956) have already
appeared, and are noted under partic-
ular topics below. A valuable refer-
ence tool, full of readable brief essays
and deserving of wider use is the Dic-
tionary of American Biography (Al-
len Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds.,
22 vols., 1928-44 and supplements).
For the geography, Charles O.
Paullin's Atlas of the Historical Geog-
raphy of the United States (1932),
though in need of amplification and
revision, is invaluable. Also useful are
chapters I-X of Ralph H. Brown's
Historical Geography of the United
States (1948) and his Mirror for
Americans (1943). The best guide to
population figures is Herman R. Friis,
A Series of Population Maps of the
Colonies and the United States, 1625-
1790 (American Geographical Society.
Mimeographed Publication no. 3, New
York, 1940), supplemented by Evarts
B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington,
American Population before the Fed-
eral Census of 1790 (1932) and Stella
H. Sutherland, Population Distribu-
tion in Colonial America (1936).
Among the more readable and stim-
ulating accounts of the European back-
ground in the age of settlement are
George Kitson Clark's brilliant The
English Inheritance (1950); Eli F.
377
Heckscher's classic Mercantilism (tr.
Mendel Shapiro, 2 vols., 1935); Paul
Hazard, The European Mind: The
Critical Years (1953); Wallace Note-
stein, The English People on the Eve
of Colonization (1954); Sir Leslie
Stephen, History of English Thought
in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols.,
1876); George M. Trevelyan, Illus-
trated English Social History (4 vols.,
1949-52); and Basil Willey, The
Seventeenth Century Background
(1934) and The Eighteenth Century
Background (1940). The delightful
illustrations in A. S. Turberville, Eng-
lish Men and Manners in the Eight-
eenth Century (2d. ed., 1929) and in
Roger Ingpen's edition (Boston, 1925)
of BoswelTs Life of Johnson add
much that does not show up in print.
There is no better way to discover
the questions which trouble colonial
historians nowadays and to glimpse
what scholars consider the frontier of
their subject, than by occasionally
reading The William and Mary Quar-
terly (published jointly by William &
Mary College and the Institute of
Early American History & Culture at
Williamsburg), which offers learned
and readable articles. Valuable articles
on the colonial age are found in The
New England Quarterly, The Missis-
sippi Valley Historical Review, and
The Southern Historical Review; in
the journals and other publications of
local historical associations for ex-
ample, The Pennsylvania Magazine of
History and Biography, The Virginia
Magazine of History and Biography,
the publications of the American
Antiquarian Society, the Colonial So-
ciety of Massachusetts, and the Massa-
chusetts Historical Society (with a
recent invaluable index), among
others. American Heritage, under the
brilliant editorship of Bruce Carton,
offers the general reader lively and
attractively illustrated essays.
378
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
More and more primary sources are
coming into print. But the colonial
records, statutes, and legislative pro-
ceedings (printed mostly in the colo-
nial period and early 19th century
and specifically referred to below) are
basic. The best brief selection of
sources is edited by Merrill Jensen,
American Colonial Documents to 1776
("English Historical Documents, IX,"
1955). A more extensive collection is
the series of 19 volumes (still in print)
edited with introductions under the
supervision of J. Franklin Jameson,
entitled Original Narratives of Early
American History (1906-1917; re-
printed, 1952) ; each of these volumes
collects documents for particular colo-
nies or topics, such as witchcraft or
the colonial rebellions. Justin Winsor's
Narrative and Critical History of
America (8 vols., 1889) collects rep-
resentative documents with still-valu-
able discussions of the sources by
many authors; it remains one of the
best introductions to the primary
materials. Peter Force earlier in the
19th century transcribed and reprinted
in Tracts and Other Papers Relating
Principally to the Colonies in North
America (4 vols., 1836-46; reprinted,
1947) and American Archives (9
vols., 1837-53) many valuable pam-
phlets and public documents which,
thanks to him, are now available in
numerous libraries. Many of the state
and local historical societies have re-
printed important documents rare in
the original. There are numerous col-
lections of colonial documents on
special subjects, for example the early
volumes of John R. Commons (ed.),
A Documentary History of American
Industrial Society (11 Vols., 1910-11)
and Edgar W. Knight (ed.), A Docu-
mentary History of Education in the
South Before 1860 (5 vols., 1949-53).
The writings of leading figures of
the colonial age are every year be-
coming more generally accessible in
more complete and better-edited form.
The model for these new editions is
the magnificent Papers of Thomas
Jefferson being published by the
Princeton University Press ( 1950 )
tinder the general editorship of Julian
P. Boyd. The collection will eventually
run to fifty-odd volumes; it includes
a generous selection of letters to Jef-
ferson, and is illuminated by copious
but sensible notes. These volumes give
the student who does not have access
to manuscript collections an unprece-
dented opportunity to witness daily life
in that age. Comparable editions are
now in preparation of the writings of
Benjamin Franklin, John Adams,
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison,
and other leaders. These editions, com-
plementing one another, will render
obsolete all earlier editions. The ex-
pansion of microfilm and microcard
facilities, and especially the prepara-
tion in Readex Microprint by the
American Antiquarian Society (Wor-
cester, Mass. 1955-) of every item in
Evans* bibliography and the American
Culture Series of microfilms (Univer-
sity Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Mich.,
1941 ) 9 p U ts many scarce items
within reach of every good research
library in the country.
The writings of travelers are of
special value for the colonial period;
but of course they must always be
read with due regard to the prejudices
and competence of the observer. Espe-
cially useful in this area is Thomas
D. Clark, Travels in the Old South, a
bibliography, (2 vols., 1956); and im-
portant reprints are R. G. Thwaites
(ed.) Jesuit Relations and Allied
Documents, 1610-1791 (73 vols.,
1896-1901) and Early Western Trav-
els, 1748-1846 (32 vols., 1904-07).
Newton D, Mereness (ed.) Travels
in the American Colonies (1916) and
Allan Nevins (ed.), America through
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
British Eyes (1948) are useful selec-
tions. The travel-books of the greatest
general interest for the period include:
Andrew Burnaby, Travels through the
Middle Settlements in North America
in the Years 1759 and 1760 (3d ed.,
1798); Francois Jean de Chastellux,
Travels in North America in the Years
1780, 1781, and 1782 (2 vols., 1787);
Jonathan Carver, Travels through the
Interior Parts of North America,
1766-68 (1778); Nicholas Cresswell,
The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell
1774-1777 (1924); M. G. St. Jean de
Crevecoeur, Letters from an American
Farmer (1782; reprinted, Everyman
Paperback, 1957); Durand, Un Fran-
fats en Virginie (1687) [trans, and ed.
by Fairfax Harrison, A Frenchman in
Virginia, Being the Memoirs of a
Huguenot Refugee in 1686 (1923)];
Timothy Dwight, Travels in New Eng-
land and New York (4 vols., 1821-
22); William Eddis, Letters from
America . . . from 1769, to 1777
(1792); Christopher Gist, Journal
(1750-53; ed. Wm. Darlington,
1893); the journals of Alexander
Hamilton, a Scottish-trained physician
who traveled in New England and
New York in 1744 (ed. Carl Briden-
baugh as Gentleman's Progress, 1948);
Hugh Jones, The Present State of
Virginia (1724) (Sabin's Reprints, V,
1865; also ed. Richard L. Mor-
ton, 1956); The America of 1750:
Peter Kalm's Travels in North Amer-
ica (1770) (ed. Adolph Benson, 2
vols., 1937); Sarah Knight, Journal
of a trip from Boston to New York in
1704 (1824); Johann D. Schoepf,
Travels in the Confederation (ed. and
translated from the German ed. of
1788 by Alfred J. Morrison, 2 vols.,
1911).
Important contemporary surveys
which sum up tendencies and com-
pare trends in different parts of the
country are William Douglass, A
379
Summary . . . of the British Settle-
ments in North America (2 vols.,
1747-52) ; Tench Coxe, A View of the
United States of America (1795); and
Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of
the Eighteenth Century (2 vols.,
1803).
The basic bibliographic tools are
the two monumental works: Joseph
Sabin and others (eds.), Dictionary of
Books Relating to America from its
Discovery to the Present Time (29
vols., 1868-92; reprinted, 1928-36)
and Charles Evans (ed.), American
Bibliography: a Chronological Dic-
tionary of All Books, Pamphlets and
Periodical Publications Printed in the
United States . . . 1639-1820 (12
vols., 1903-34).
BOOK ONE
THE VISION
AND THE REALITY
PART ONE
A CITY UPON A HILL:
The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay
When Parrington published the first
volume of his Main Currents in
American Thought in 1927, he painted
the Puritans as joyless people, unusu-
ally bigoted even by the standards of
their age. The only humane and lively
spirits, we were told, were the Anne
Hutchinsons and the Roger Williamses,
whom the Puritans harried into the
wilderness. A special butt of his attack
was Kenneth B. Murdock's life of In-
crease Mather, which Parrington
called "a somewhat meticulous de-
fense . . . unhappily conceived in the
dark of the moon, a season congenial
to strange quirks of fancy." In the
380
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
thirty years since, the scholarly por-
trait has been radically revised. This
revision has been most effectively ac-
complished by several scholars at the
old Puritan stronghold, Harvard Col-
lege. Their work has inspired a wider
reexamination of the Puritans their
mind, body, and soul. Samuel Eliot
Morison has done more perhaps than
anyone else to humanize the Puritans,
to remind us that they liked colorful
clothing, enjoyed good beer, and had
passions much like those of the people
of other ages. Any student can profit-
ably start his study of the Puritans
with Morison's Builders of the Bay
Colony (1930), go on to The Puritan
Pronaos (1936; reprinted as The In-
tellectual Life of Colonial New Eng-
land, 1956), and his three sprightly
volumes on Harvard College (the
founding, 1935; the 17th century, 2
vols., 1936), supplemented for the 18th
century by Three Centuries of Har-
vard, 1636-1936 (1936). The monu-
mental studies by Perry Miller espe-
cially his New England Mind: The
Seventeenth Century (1936; reprinted,
1954) ; his New England Mind: From
Colony to Province (1953); Ortho-
doxy in Massachusetts (1933); and a
valuable collection of his essays, Er-
rand into the Wilderness (1956)
have given the subtleties of Puritan
theology a serious examination by a
mind worthy of them for the first time
since Jonathan Edwards. No one who
works through Miller's volumes, fol-
lowing his reconstruction and dissec-
tion of the more sophisticated
American Puritans, can fail to respect
them and to see a human plausibility
in then: thinking. The main peril of
Miller's approach is that he may
sometimes lake their distinctions more
seriously and more precisely than
17th-century Puritans saw them to be.
He is more interested in the intricacy
of their philosophy than in the social
consequences of their ways of think-
ing and he is not much concerned with
the vagueness and fluidity which ideas
seem to acquire when they touch the
confusing world of action. Puritan
literature has been reexamined in
several further works by Kenneth B.
Murdock, especially in his Literature
and Theology in Colonial New Eng-
land (1949) and his admirably dis-
criminating little volume, Selections
from Cotton Mather (American Au-
thors Series, 1926), which helps
Mather tell us about himself with a
cogency which Mather himself lacked.
A less sympathetic view of the Puri-
tans is found in James Truslow
Adams, Founding of New England
(1921) and Revolutionary New Eng-
land (1923); and in Brooks Adams'
incisive and bitter Emancipation of
Massachusetts (1887).
Considering the extent of the litera-
ture, there are surprisingly few read-
able and authentic biographies of
leading Puritans; by reading Barrett
Wendell's Cotton Mather, The Puritan
Priest (1891; reprinted, 1926) we see
some of the prejudices which have ob-
structed our understanding of the
Puritans as living individuals. A bril-
liant recent exception is Edmund S.
Morgan's sprightly and perceptive
biographical essay, The Puritan Dilem-
ma: The Story of John Winthrop
(1958).
Many particular aspects of Puritan
lif e have been treated in useful mono-
graphs. The best survey in its field re-
mains William B. Weeden, Economic
and Social History of New England,
1620-1789 (2 vols., 1891), which
needs correction in many details. The
following are valuable on topics in
social history: E. A. J. Johnson,
American Economic Thought in the
Seventeenth Century (1932); Joseph
Dorfman, The Economic Mind in
American Civilization, 1606-1865 (2
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
vols., 1946), Volume I; Bernard
Bailyn, The New England Merchants
in the Seventeenth Century (1955);
Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan
Family (1944); Noah Porter, The
New England Meeting House (1933);
and Babette Levy, Preaching in the
First Half-Century of New England
History (1945). On witchcraft, a sub-
ject which in my opinion has exagger-
ated significance in the popular
image of New England, see Charles
W. Upham, Salem Witchcraft (2 vols.,
1867) and George Lyman Kittredge,
Witchcraft in Old and New England
(1929).
Despite the copious literature, many
topics still need comprehensive treat-
ment. One of these is the legal history
which the general student now has to
glean from miscellaneous monographs
such as William DeLoss Love's Fast
and Thanksgiving Days of New Eng-
land (1895); Charles J. Hilkey's in-
adequate Legal Development in
Colonial Massachusetts, 1630-1686
(1910) ; from several excellent articles
by Julius Goebel Jr., for example,
"King's Law and Local Custom in
Seventeenth Century New England,"
Columbia Law Review, XXXI (1931),
pp. 416-448; Mark DeWolfe Howe
and Louis F. Eaton Jr.'s valuable 'The
Supreme Judicial Power in ... Mas-
sachusetts Bay," NJB.Q., XX (1947),
291-316; and Richard B. Morns'
pioneer monographs, Studies in the
History of American Law (1930) and
Government and Labor in Early
America (1946). The best survey of
the spirit and practice of the laws of
Massachusetts Bay is found in Zecha-
riah Chafee Jr.'s brilliant introduction
to the Records of the Suffolk County
Court, 1671-1680, in the Colonial So-
ciety of Massachusetts Publications,
Vol. XXIX.
Regional and family pride have
combined to produce a great deal of
381
valuable local history (together with
many less valuable antiquarian and
genealogical studies) and to make it
accessible by reprinting many of the
more important early documents.
These are found, among other places,
in the publications of the American
Antiquarian Society (Worcester,
Mass.), The Colonial Society of Mas-
sachusetts (Boston) , The Essex Insti-
tute (Salem), The Massachusetts
Historical Society (Boston), The Nar-
ragansett Society (Providence), and
The Prince Society (Boston).
English Puritanism is a much more
extensive and complicated subject than
American Puritanism. The English
background can be glimpsed in Wil-
liam Haller, The Rise of Puritanism
. . . 1570-1643 (1938); M. M. Knap-
pen, Tudor Puritanism (1939); Wal-
lace Notestein, The English People
on the Eve of Colonization (1954);
and Alan Simpson, Puritanism in Old
& New England (1955). The amateur
in English history who wants to start
with a sampling of documents on the
English side would do well to read
in the earlier volumes of the Winthrop
Papers, reprinted by the Massachusetts
Historical Society. Especially interest-
ing for contrasts with New England
Puritanism is A. S. P. Woodhouse's
admirably edited Puritanism and
Liberty: Being the Army Debates
(1647-49) from the Clarke Manu-
scripts (1951).
Early New Englanders left remark-
ably full and eloquent records of them-
selves and of their age. For the casual
student, Perry Miller has provided a
discriminating brief selection in The
American Puritans (Anchor Books,
1956); and for the more serious stu-
dent (with Thomas H. Johnson), The
Puritans (1938) which, in addition to
brilliant introductions and notes, has
what is still the best bibliography.
Everyone interested in the Puritans
382
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
should read in their entirety (nor can
he resist if he once starts) : William
Bradford, History of Plymouth Plan-
tations (most recent edition, by
Samuel Eliot Morison, 1952; and
many earlier editions); and John
Winthrop, Journal (sometimes called
The History of New England from
1630 to 1649, best read in ed. James
Savage, 2 vols., 1853, also found in
J. F. Jameson's "Original Narratives"
series, and other editions). Too little
read is Cotton Mather's magnificent
Magnolia Christi Americana (2 vols.,
1853) which, despite its pedantry, re-
mains the greatest literary monument
to the classic age of New England
Puritanism. If the reader once be-
comes accustomed to Mather's con-
ceits and ceases to try to translate
the ornamental phrases of Greek,
Latin, and Hebrew, he will find him-
self stirred by a characteristically
American epic.
From the later 18th century, Gov-
ernor Thomas Hutchinson left us a
readable and surprisingly comprehen-
sive account, The History of the Col-
ony and Province of Massachusetts
Bay (Vols. ME covering 1628-1750,
first pub. 1764-1767; Vol. HI covering
1750-1774, first pub. 1828. New ed.,
by Lawrence S. Mayo, 3 vols., 1936),
which has a peculiar value because of
the destruction of many of the docu-
ments from which it was written in
the burning of Hutchinson's mansion
during the Stamp Act riots of 1765.
Also valuable are The Hutchinson
Papers (1769), Prince Society Pub.,
Vols. n-IH (1865).
The Puritans were inveterate dia-
rists. The most vivid and detailed of
these are Cotton Mather's (published
in Mass. Hist. Soc., Coll., 7th Series,
Vols. VII-VHE; reprinted, 2 vols.,
1957) and Samuel SewaU's (Mass.
Hist. Soc., Coll., 5th series, Vols. V-
VII).
Among the more accessible and
more interesting collections of docu-
ments on particular topics are: Charles
Francis Adams (ed.), Antinomianism
in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay,
1636-1638; George L. Burr (ed.) , Nar-
ratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648-
1706 ("Original Narratives" series,
1914); Daniel Gookin, "Historical
Collections of the Indians in New
England," Mass. Hist. Soc., Co//., I,
141-226, and "An Historical Account
of the Doings and Sufferings of the
Christian Indians hi New England in
. . . 1675, 1676, 1677," Am. Antiq.
Soc., Coll., II (Trans., 1836), 423-534;
William Hubbard, "A General History
of New-England from the Discovery
to 1680," Mass. Hist. Soc., Coll., 2d
Series, V-VI; Edward Johnson, Won-
der-Working Providence of Sions
Savior in New England, 1628-1651
("Original Narratives" Series, 1910);
John Josselyn, "An Account of Two
Voyages to New England" (1674),
Mass. Hist. Soc., Proc., 3d Series, III,
211-354, and "New-Englands Rarities
Discovered: in Birds, Beasts, Fishes,
Serpents, and Plants of that Country"
(1672), Am. Antiq. Soc., Co//., IV
(Trans., 1860), 105-238; Increase
Mather, Remarkable Providences . . .
(1856); Nathaniel Morton, New Eng-
lands Memoriall (1669) (fac. reprod.,
ed. Howard J. Hall, 1937); Michael
Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom
(1662) (ed. Kenneth B. Murdock,
1929); "Winthrop Papers," Mass.
Hist. Soc., Coll., 3d Series, IX; 4th
Series, VI, VII; 5th Series, I, II, IV,
VHI; 6th Series, III, V; William Wood,
New Englands Prospect (1634; Uni-
versity Microfilms, American Culture
Series, No. 31, Roll 4).
The most available collection of
basic documents in the history of Con-
gregationalism in New England in-
cluding such items as the "Cambridge
Platform" of 1648, is WiUiston Walker,
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
The Creeds and Platforms of Congre-
gationalism (1893). Some of the
works most useful for the Puritan
theology and attitudes toward religion
are: William Ames, The Marrow of
Sacred Divinity (1638) and Con-
science with the Power and Cases
thereof (1639); The Bay Psalm Book
(ed., Zoltan Haraszti, 2 vols., 1956);
John Cotton, A Brief e Exposition of
the Whole Book of Canticles (1648);
Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the
Invisible World (1693) and The Chris-
tian Philosopher (1721; University
Microfilms, American Culture Series,
No. 110, Roll 10); Increase Mather,
Cases of Conscience (1693), Remark-
able Providences (1684; reprinted,
1856), and An Historical Discourse
Concerning the Prevalency of Prayer
(1677); John Norton, The Orthodox
Evangelist (1654), one of the most
popular handbooks of theology; Wil-
liam Perkins, 'The Art of Prophecy-
ing" (1592) in Perkins' Works
(London, 1631), H, 643-673; Thomas
Shepard, Works (3 vols., 1853);
Nathaniel Ward, The Simpler Cobler
ofAggawam (5th ed., London, 1647);
Michael Wigglesworth, "God's Contro-
versy with New England . . . ," Mass.
Hist. Soc., Proc., Xn (1871-73), 83-
93; John Wise, A Vindication of the
Government of New-England
Churches (1717; reprinted, 1772).
Among the more accessible and
more useful legal records are: William
Brigham (ed.), The Compact; with the
Charter and Laws of the Colony of
New Plymouth (Boston, 1836); Zech-
ariah Chafee, Jr. (ed.), "Records of
the Suffolk County Court, 1671-
1680)," Col. Soc. Mass., Pub., XXK-
XXX; George Francis Dow (ed.),
Records and Files of the Quarterly
Courts of Essex County Massachu-
setts, 1636-1692 (8 vols., 1911-21);
Max Farrand (ed.), The Laws and
Liberties of Massachusetts; Reprinted
383
from the copy of the 1648 Edition in
the . . . Huntington Library (1929);
The General Laws and Liberties of
The Massachusetts Colony (revised
and reprinted, Cambridge, Mass., 1672;
University Microfilms, American Cul-
ture Series, No. 70, roll 7); John
Noble (ed.), Records of the Court of
Assistants of the Colony of the Mas-
sachusetts Bay, 1630-1692 (3 vols.,
1901-28); The Records of the Town
of Cambridge (Formerly Newtowne)
Massachusetts, 1630-1 703 ( 190 1 ) ;
"The Royal Charter of the Governor
and Company of the Massachusetts
Bay in New England, March 4, 1628/
29," Mass. Hist. Soc., Proc., LXH
(1928-29), 251-273; Nathaniel B.
Shurtleff (ed.), Records of the Gov-
ernor and Company of the Massachu-
setts Bay in New England (5 vols.,
1853-54); Nathaniel Ward, The
Body of Liberties, 1641 (Old South
Leaflets, General Series, Vol. 7; No.
164; Boston, 1905) ; William H. Whit-
more (ed), The Colonial Laws of
Massachusetts, Reprinted from the
Edition of 1672 f with the Supplements
through 1686, together with the Body
of Liberties of 1641 and the Records
of the Court of Assistants, 1641-44
(1890). Thomas Lechford's contem-
porary comments on the working of
the legal system are found in "Note-
Book Kept in Boston, Massachusetts
Bay, from June 27, 1638, to July 29,
1641,*' Am. Antiq. Soc. Coll., VH, and
"Plain Dealing: or Newes from New
England . . ." (1642), Mass. Hist. Soc.,
Coll, 3d Series, m, 55-128.
Basic bibliographical tools worth
looking at, if only for some notion of
the scope and productivity of Puritans
as authors are Thomas J. Holmes*
monumental Mather bibliographies:
Increase Mather, A Bibliography of
his Works (2 vols,, 1931), and Cotton
Mather, A Bibliography of his Works
(3 vols., 1940).
384
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
PART TWO
THE INWARD PLANTATION: The
Quakers of Pennsylvania
Quaker historians have shown a re-
markable ability to discover the short-
comings of their fellow-Quakers while
holding firm to their own Friendly
convictions. Rufus M. Jones, perhaps
the leading American Quaker of this
century, was effective in pleading for
the humane treatment of Quaker (and
other) conscientious objectors in the
two World Wars, yet he was incisive
in his description of the dangers of
Quaker obstinacy in earlier American
history. A good place to start is his
sensible and simply-written Quakers
in the American Colonies (1911); then
to The Later Periods of Quakerism
(2 vols., 1921). Today the leading
historian of American Quakers (also
a prominent Quaker) is Frederick B.
Tolles, whose writings, more than
those of Jones, relate the special cul-
ture of the Quakers to American civil-
ization as a whole. Tolles's profound
and suggestive essays are perhaps the
best path into further reading on the
problems of Part II: The Atlantic
Community of the Early Friends
(Friends' Historical Society, London,
1952); 'The Transatlantic Quaker
Community in the Seventeeth Cen-
tury,'* Huntingdon Library Quarterly,
XIV (May, 1951), 239-258; Quaker-
ism and Politics (The Ward Lecture,
1956, published by Guilford College,
N. C., 1956); and "The Culture of
Early Pennsylvania," Penn. Mag. Hist.
Biog., LXXXI (1957), 119-37; from
these one should go on to his Meet-
ing House and Counting House;
The Quaker Merchants of Colonial
Pennsylvania (Chapel Hill, N. C.,
1948); then to his attractive biogra-
phies of two of the most prominent
(and most American) of the early
American Quakers: James Logan and
the Culture of Provincial America
(1957) and George Logan of Phila-
delphia (1953). Besides these, the
most readable studies of the environ-
ment of early American Quakerism
are Carl Van Doren's Benjamin
Franklin (New York, 1938) and Carl
and Jessica Bridenbaugh's Rebels and
Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of
Franklin (New York, 1942).
For the trials of Quaker pacifism
see Robert L. D. Davidson's War
Comes to Quaker Pennsylvania, 1682-
1756 (1957), which did not come to
my attention until these chapters were
going to press. Davidson gives more
decisive significance than I would to
the conflict between mercantile inter-
ests and religious principles, and he
is less inclined than I to see the
Quaker withdrawal as the climax of
a conflict between mystic absolutism
and perfectionism on the one hand
and the world of political and eco-
nomic conflict on the other. Other
valuable general studies are: James
Bowden, The History of the Society
of Friends in America (2 vols., 1850-
54); Howard H. Brinton, Friends for
300 Years (1952); George S. Brookes,
Friend Anthony Benezet (1937); Wil-
liam Charles Braithwaite, The Second
Period of Quakerism (1919); Solon
J. and Elizabeth Buck, The Planting
of Civilization in Western Pennsyl-
vania (1939); Maxwell S. Burt, Phila-
delphia, Holy Experiment (1945);
Henry J. Cadbury, "Intercolonial
Solidarity of American Quakerism,"
Penn. Mag. Hist, & Biog., LX (1936),
362-74; Verner W. Crane, Benjamin
Franklin and a Rising People (1956);
Thomas F. Gordon, The History of
Pennsylvania from its Discovery by
Europeans to . . . 7775 (1829); Guy
F. Hershberger, "The Pennsylvania
Quaker Experiment in Politics, 1682-
1756," Mennonite Quarterly Review,
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
X (1936), 187-221, and "Pacifism and
the State in Colonial Pennsylvania,"
Church History, VIE (1939), 54-74;
Samuel M. Janney, Life of William
Penn (1852); Rayner W. Kelsey,
Friends and the Indians, 1655-1917
(1917); Mrs. Ethyn Kirby, George
Keith (1638-1716) (1942); Arnold
Lloyd, Quaker Social History, 1669-
1738 (1950); Albert C. J. Myers, Im-
migration of the Irish Quakers into
Pennsylvania, 1682-1750 ( 1902) ;
Samuel Parrish, Some Chapters in the
History of the Friendly Association
for Regaining and Preserving Peace
with the Indians by Pacific Measures
(1877); John P. Selsam, The Pennsyl-
vania Constitution of 1776 (1936);
Isaac Sharpless, Political Leaders of
Provincial Pennsylvania (1919), A
History of Quaker Government in
Pennsylvania (2 vols., 1899), Quaker-
ism and Politics (1905), A Quaker
Experiment in Government (1898);
William T. Shore, John Woolman
(1913); Charles J. Stille, The Life
and Times of John Dickinson, 1732-
1808 (1891), and (ed.) "The Attitude
of the Quakers in the Provincial
Wars," Penn. Mag. Hist. & Biog., X
(1886), 283-315; and Theodore
Thayer, Israel Pemberton, King of the
Quakers (1943).
The best introductions to the writ-
ings of the early Quakers are John
Woolman, Journal and Other Writings
(Everyman's Library, 1952), supple-
mented by The Works of John Wool-
man (1774), and George Fox, An
Autobiography (an edition of what is
more commonly called Fox's Journal;
ed. Rufus M. Jones, 1919). A handy
selection is Frederick B. Tolles and
E. Gordon Alderfer, The Witness of
William Penn (1957). Penn's more
important works are found at length
in A Collection of the Works of Wil-
liam Penn (ed. Joseph Besse, 2 vols.,
1726), or William Penn, The Rise and
385
Progress of the People Called Quakers
(1695; reprinted, 1886). A useful
contemporary history of 18th-century
Quakerism is Robert B. Proud, History
of Pennsylvania (2 vols., 1797-98);
and William Smith, A Brief View of
the Conduct of Pennsylvania for the
Year 1755 (1756). Some valuable
documents on particular topics are:
Thomas Balch (ed.), Letters and
Papers Relating Chiefly to the Pro-
vincial History of Pennsylvania
(1855) ; Anthony Benezet, The Mighty
Destroyer Displayed, in . . . the
Dreadful Havock Made by . . . Spiritu-
ous Liquors (1774), and Serious Con-
siderations on Several Important
Subjects (1778); William Bradford,
An Enquiry How Far the Punishment
of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania
(1793); Gerard Croese, The General
History of the Quakers (1696); Albert
C. Myers (ed.), Narratives of Early
Pennsylvania, West New Jersey and
Delaware, 1630-1707 ("Original Nar-
ratives" series, 1912); and William
Smith, A Brief View of the Conduct of
Pennsylvania for the Year 1755
(1756). A particularly valuable col-
lection of early Quaker writings is
Ezra Michener (ed.), A Retrospect of
Early Quakerism (1860).
Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography
with a selection of his other writings
is available in a Modern Library edi-
tion (ed. Nathan G. Goodman, 1932).
The best edition of his Writings (until
the definitive edition being prepared
at Yale under the editorship of Lyman
Butterfield) is that by Albert H.
Smyth (10 vols., 1907).
The acts of the early Quaker
martyrs are recounted in George
Bishop, New-England Judged t by the
Spirit of the Lord (London, 1703),
and Humphrey Norton, New Eng-
land's Ensigne (London, 1659; Uni-
versity Microfilms, American Culture
Series, No. 63, Roll 6). A useful in-
386
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
troduction to contemporary documents
on Quaker-Indian relations is Indian
Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin
1736-1762 (ed. Julian P. Boyd, intro.
by Carl Van Doren, 1938), and
Charles Thomas, An Enquiry into the
Cause of Alienation of the Indians
(1789; reprinted, 1867).
Among the more valuable reprinted
documents bearing on Quaker politics
are: 'The Correspondence of James
Logan and Thomas Story, 1724-41,"
Bull of Friends Historical Assn., XV
(Autumn, 1926), 1-92; "James Logan
on Defensive War, or Pennsylvania
Politics in 1741," Penn. Mag. Hist. &
Biog., VI (1882), 402-411; and "Cor-
respondence between William Penn
and James Logan, Secretary of the
Province of Pennsylvania, and Others,
1700-1750," Hist. Soc. Perm., Mem-
oirs, IX-X.
Some of the more interesting ac-
counts by itinerant Quaker mission-
aries are those by Samuel Bownas
(1756), John Churchman (1779),
Thomas Chalkley (2d ed., 1751),
Samuel Fothergill (ed. George Cros-
field, 1844), John Fothergill (1754),
William Reckitt (1776), and Daniel
Stanton (1799). See also the contro-
versial George Keith's Journal of
Travels . . . on the Continent of North
America ( 1706; University Microfilms,
American Culture Series, No. 101,
Roll 9).
Important sources for the legal and
legislative history are: "The Funda-
mental Constitutions of Pennsylvania,"
Penn. Mag. Hist. & Biog. f X (1896),
283-301; Laws of the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania (1700-1810) (4 vols.,
1810); Minutes of the Provincial
Council of Pennsylvania, especially,
"Petition of Hugh Pugh . . ." Vol. IH
(1717-1736), pp. 40-43, and petitions
of Quakers at Vol. VII (1756-1758),
pp. 84^86, 311-312, 638-647; "Papers
of the Governors," ed. G. E. Reed,
Pennsylvania Archives, 4th Series, I-
XII; William Penn, The Excellent
Priviledge of Liberty and Property
. . . a Reprint and Facsimile of the
First American Edition of Magna
Charta (1797); Records of the Colony
of Rhode Island and Providence Plan-
tations in New England, (1636-1792),
ed. John R. Bartlett (10 vols., 1856-
65) ; The Statutes at Large of Pennsyl-
vania from 1682 to 1801, ed. James
T. Mitchell and Henry Flanders (16
vols., 1896-1908); and "Votes and
Proceedings of the House of Repre-
sentatives of the Province of Pennsyl-
vania, Dec. 4, 1682-Sept. 26, 1776,"
Pennsylvania Archives, 8th Series,
Vols. I-VIH.
PART THREE
VICTIMS OF PHILANTHROPY: The
Settlers of Georgia
Much of the popular historical
writing about early Georgia has aimed
to defend the colony against the
slanderous traditional rumor that it
was settled mostly by bankrupts and
by refugees from the London jails.
Albert B. Saye's readable New View-
points in Georgia History (1943) uses
careful scholarship to scotch this
rumor, and is the most suggestive start-
ing point for reading in early Georgia
history. The best recent history of the
state is E. Merton Coulter, Georgia,
A Short History (1947); for an older
view see Charles C. Jones Jr., The
History of Georgia (2 vols., 1883).
Some of the most useful studies have
centered around the biography of
Oglethorpe, for example: Amos A.
Ettinger's full and lively James Ed-
ward Oglethorpe, Imperial Idealist
(1936) and Leslie F. Church's valu-
able Oglethorpe: A Study of Philan-
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
thropy in England and Georgia (Lon-
don, 1932). See also Thaddeus M.
Harris, Biographical Memorials of . . .
Oglethorpe (Boston, 1841), which re-
prints some documents, and Robert
Wright, A Memoir of General James
Oglethorpe. Sidelights on Oglethorpe
are found here and there in Boswell's
Life of Johnson (1791).
Readable accounts of the English
background are: Rosamond Payne-
Powell, Eighteenth Century London
Life (1938); Arthur S. Turberville,
English Men and Manners in the
Eighteenth Century (1929; reprinted,
Galaxy Books, 1957), and (ed.) John-
son's England (2 vols., 1933).
Important studies of special topics
include: James D. Butler, "British
Convicts Shipped to American Colo-
nies," Am. Hist. Rev., II (1896), 12-
33; John P. Corry, Indian Affairs in
Georgia, 1732-1756 (1936);E.Merton
Coulter and Albert B. Saye (eds.), A
List of the Early Settlers of Georgia
(1949); Verner W. Crane, 'The Pro-
motion Literature of Georgia," in
Bibliographical Essays: A Tribute to
Wilberforce Eames (1924) and The
Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (1929;
reprinted, Arm Arbor Paperbacks no.
4, 1956); H. B. Fant, "The Labor
Policy of the Trustees for Establishing
the Colony of Georgia in America,"
Georgia Historical Quarterly, XVI
(1932), 1-16; Wesley M. Gewehr, The
Great Awakening in Virginia, 1740-
1790 (1930), incidentally touching
Georgia; James R. McCain, The Ex-
ecutive in Proprietary Georgia, 1732-
1752 (1914) and Georgia as a Pro-
prietary Province (1917); David M.
Potter Jr., 'The Rise of the Plantation
System in Georgia," Ga. Hist. Q., XVI
(1932), 114-135; and Reba C. Strick-
land, Religion and the State in Georgia
in the Eighteenth Century (1939).
There is no better first-hand intro-
duction to the life of the upper classes
387
in mid- 18th-century London than
John Percival Egmont, Manuscripts of
the Earl of Egmont. Diary of Viscount
Percival afterwards first Earl of Eg-
mont (3 vols., 1920-23), which does
for this period much of what Pepys'
diary does for London a half-century
earlier. Egmont lacks some of Pepys 1
amiable vices, but he has peccadillos
of his own which are almost as inter-
esting and no less salacious. For few
enterprises in American history do we
possess so full, so frank, and so af-
fable an account as Egmont has left us
of the Georgia project. Additional
light comes from the correspondence
between Egmont and Bishop Berkeley
(the philosopher and promoter of a
missionary college in Bermuda),
edited by Benjamin Rand, Berkeley
and Percival . . . The Correspondence
of George Berkeley, afterwards Bishop
of Cloyne t and Sir John Percival,
afterwards Earl of Egmont (1914).
The full flavor of the Georgia con-
troversy can be sensed only from con-
temporary pamphlets, for example:
Francis Moore, "A Voyage to Georgia
Begun in the Year 1735" (1744), Ga.
Hist. Soc., Co//., I, 79-152; Robert
Montgomery, "A Discourse Concern-
ing the Design'd Establishment of a
New Colony to the South of Carolina"
(1717), in Force, Tracts, Vol. I, No.
1; "Reasons for Establishing the Col-
ony of Georgia, with Regard to the
Trade of Great Britain" (1733), Ga.
Hist. Soc., Coll., I, 203-38; Thomas
Stephens, A Brief Account of the
Causes that Have Retarded the Prog-
ress of the Colony of Georgia in
America (1743); Pat Tailfer and
others, "A True and Historical Narra-
tive of the Colony of Georgia in
America" (1741), Ga. Hist. Soc.,
Coll., H, 163-263. Many other valu-
able documents are reprinted in the
Georgia Historical Society Collections,
published since 1840 (except for 1917-
388
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
51). Another useful collection is
George White (ed.), Historical Col-
lections of Georgia (1854). The prob-
lems of one of the most famous Meth-
odist missionaries to Georgia in 1738
are recounted in George Whitefield,
Journal of a Voyage from London to
Savannah in Georgia (1826) and in
his Works (ed. J. Gillies, 6 vols., 1771-
72).
Materials for the legal and adminis-
trative history are found in The Colo-
nial Records of the State of Georgia
(ed. Allen D. Candler; 26 vols., 1904-
16).
PART FOUR
TRANSPLANTERS: The Virginians
For Virginia where, as in New Eng-
land, regional, local, and family pride
have been strong, we have a vol-
uminous historical literature which is,
on the whole, of high quality and of
considerable general interest. But
Virginia, unlike Massachusetts Bay,
has not been the center of "revision-
ist" controversies. The New England
Puritans have been blamed for nearly
every kind of social crime from
"witch-burning'* to Prohibition. They
have had rough handling from their
own disgruntled great-great-grand-
children, as well as from newcomers.
The Virginians have been more gently
treated, not only by local historians
but by the American people generally.
No offensive catch-phrase like "Puri-
tanism" misleads us into thinking that
we have grasped the complexity of
their life. Nearly all the writing about
the Virginians with the trivial ex-
ception of an occasional "debunking'*
biography like W. E. Woodward's life
of Washington has been friendly,
and almost none has been as antago-
nistic as Brooks Adams, James Tru-
slow Adams, or V. L. Parrington were
in their writing about "Puritanism."
Still the public mind has had diffi-
culty in catching the flavor of early
Virginia life. Here, too, a large "or-
ganizing" concept has been the enemy
of our understanding, but for the
Virginians the tag-idea has been a
favorable one. While "Puritanism,"
with which we have tagged early New
Englanders has dark overtones of
provincialism, bigotry, persecution,
and narrowness, the cliche for the
Virginians has been "The Enlighten-
ment" or "The Age of Reason"
expressions bright with eulogistic
overtones. In both areas the cliches
have concealed the real character of
colonial life.
To begin to understand the ways of
living and of thinking of these Vir-
ginians one must look to the minutiae
of daily living in particular places.
Fortunately, much of the writing
about the Virginians took a local (or
even antiquarian) point of view from
the very beginning; we now possess
a wealth of detail, skillfully inter-
preted. A masterpiece of such inter-
pretation is Colonial Williamsburg, at
Williamsburg, Virginia, which every-
one interested in our past should visit.
I have commented on its peculiarly
American character as a kind of his-
torical document in "Past and Present
in America," Commentary, XXV
(1958), pp. 1-7. But life in Wifflams-
burg was only one aspect of life in
colonial Virginia; a comparable model
of a going plantation community
would add still more to our under-
standing.
The foundations for our knowledge
of the social history of early Virginia
were laid by Philip A. Bruce (1856-
1933); his Economic History of
Virginia in the Seventeenth Century
(2 vols., 1895; reprinted, 1935), In-
stitutional History of Virginia in the
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Seventeenth Century (2 vols., 1910),
Social Life of Virginia in the Seven-
teenth Century (1907), and The Vir-
ginia Plutarch (1929) are still the
best treatments of many topics. Bruce
wrote with a fluent but not eloquent
style, he was prodigiously industrious,
and he had the imagination to let the
facts lead him into many corners
which might have seemed unimpor-
tant on a priori grounds. His work is,
however, marred by patriotic bias:
whenever the facts are ambiguous, he
chooses the interpretation most "fav-
orable" to the Virginians. But without
his warm affection for the early Vir-
ginians, his work might not have
been done at all.
The most important recent books on
early Virginia history are in the Bruce
tradition: they gather and organize
the details of daily life, usually in a
sympathetic spirit, but they excel
Bruce in their literary flair and in
interpretive penetration. A good start-
ing point for the general reader is
Louis B. Wright's urbane and sprightly
First Gentlemen of Virginia (1940),
to which I am deeply indebted. Also
suggestive is his Culture on the Mov-
ing frontier (1955), esp. Ch. 1. A
different emphasis is found in Carl
Bridenbaugh's stimulating Myths and
Realities: Societies of the Colonial
South (1952) and Seat of Empire:
The Political Role of Eighteenth Cen-
tury Williamsburg (1950), which un-
derline the special characteristics of
Virginia's rural life. Among the most
valuable studies of the social history
are Thomas J. Wertenbaker's Patrician
and Plebeian in Virginia (1910), The
Planters of Colonial Virginia (1922),
and Virginia under the Stuarts, 1607-
1688 (1914), brought together in a
single volume under the title, The
Shaping of Colonial Virginia (1958).
Wertenbaker's theses about the social
origins of the early Virginia settlers
389
and the size of their landholdings
have been challenged in detail but still
seem to me substantially correct
For particular topics in the social
and economic history there are a
number of valuable special studies:
John S. Bassett, "The Relation be-
tween the Virginia Planter and the
London Merchant," Am. Hist. Assn.
Annual Report (1901), I, 551-575;
Julian P. Boyd, The Murder of George
Wythe (1949); Avery O. Craven, Soil
Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agri-
cultural History of Virginia and Mary-
land, 1606-1860 (1926); Wesley F.
Craven, The Dissolution of the Vir-
ginia Company: The Failure of a
Colonial Experiment (1932); Ruther-
foord Goodwin, A Brief and True Re-
port Concerning Williamsburg in Vir-
ginia (3d. ed., 1940); Oscar and Mary
Handlin, "Origins of the Southern
Labor System," Wm. & Mary Q.,
3d Ser., Vn (1950), 199-222; Fairfax
Harrison, '"Western Explorations hi
Virginia Between Lederer and Spots-
wood," Va. Mag. Hist. & Biog., XXX
(1922) 323-341; Chester Kirby, The
English Country Gentleman, a Study
of Nineteenth Century Types (1937);
Arthur P. Middleton, Tobacco Coast:
A Maritime History of Chesapeake
Bay in the Colonial Era (1953); Ed-
mund S. Morgan, Virginians at Home:
Family Life in the Eighteenth Century
(1952) and (with Helen M. Morgan)
The Stamp Act Crisis (1953); Fer-
nando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint:
Tobacco and Sugar (1927) for an in-
teresting comparison with a Caribbean
economy; Joseph C. Robert, The Story
of Tobacco in America (1949); Mary
(Newton) Stanard, Colonial Virginia,
its People and Customs (1917); and
Lyon G. Tyler, Williamsburg, The
Old Colonial Capital (1907).
An amusing and scholarly brief in-
troduction to Virginia politics is
Charles S. Sydnor's Gentleman Free-
390
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
holders (1952). Political, legislative,
and legal history are explored also in:
Julian C. Chandler, The History of
Suffrage in Virginia (Johns Hopkins
University Studies in History & Politi-
cal Science, 19th Ser., VI-VH, 1901)
and Representation in Virginia (J.H.U.,
Studies, 14th Sen, VI-VH, 1896);
Oliver P. Chitwood, Justice in Co-
lonial Virginia (J.H.U. Studies, 23rd
Sen, Vn-Vm, 1905); Percy S. Flip-
pin, The Financial Administration of
the Colony of Virginia (J.H.U.
Studies, 33rd Ser., H, 1915) and The
Royal Government in Virginia, 1624-
1775 (1919); Evarts B. Greene, The
Provincial Governor in the English
Colonies of North America (1898);
Fairfax Harrison, Virginia Land
Grants: A Study of Conveyancing in
Relation to Colonial Politics (1925);
Albert E. McKinley, The Suffrage
Franchise in the Thirteen English Col-
onies in America (1905); Elmer I.
Miller, The Legislature of the Prov-
ince of Virginia; Its Internal Develop-
ment (1907); William Z. Ripley, The
Financial History of Virginia, 1609-
1776 (1893); Arthur P. Scott, Crimi-
nal Law in Colonial Virginia (1930);
St. George L. Sioussat, "Virginia and
the English Commercial System," Am.
Hist. Assn., Annual Report (1906),
I, 71-97; and Wilcomb E. Washburn,
The Governor and the Rebel: A His-
tory of Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia
(1957). Thomas J. Wertenbaker's
Give Me Liberty: The Struggle for
Self -government in Virginia (1958)
came to my attention as this book was
going to press.
On religion in Virginia, the leading
work is George M. Brydon, Virginia's
Mother Church and the Political Con-
ditions under Which it Grew (2 vols.,
1947-52), which despite its strong bias
in favor of the Church, is the best
picture on a broad canvas, and one of
the most solid studies of any of Vir-
ginia's early institutions. Moreover,
it is a useful corrective to the popular
caricature of religion in Virginia
usually drawn from crude notions of
the American "Enlightenment." An
essential monograph is Arthur L.
Cross, The Anglican Episcopate in the
American Colonies (Harvard Histori-
cal Studies, IX, 1902). Other im-
portant studies dealing with the Vir-
ginia church are: James S. Anderson,
The History of the Church of Eng-
land in the Colonies (3 vols., 1845-
56); Simeon E. Baldwin, "The Amer-
ican Jurisdiction of the Bishop of
London in Colonial Times," Am.
Antiq. Soc. Proc., New Series, XIII
(1899-1900), 179-221; Elizabeth H.
Davidson, The Establishment of the
English Church in Continental Amer-
ican Colonies (1936); Hamilton J.
Eckenrode, Separation of Church and
State in Virginia; A Study in the
Development of the Revolution
(1910); Wesley M. Gewehr, The
Great Awakening in Virginia, 1740-
1790 (1930); Edward L. Goodwin,
The Colonial Church in Virginia
(1927); Evarts B. Greene, 'The An-
glican Outlook on the American
Colonies in the Eighteenth Century,"
Am. Hist. Rev., XX (1914-15), 64-85;
William Meade, Old Churches, Min-
isters and Families of Virginia (2
vols., 1857); Perry Miller, "The Reli-
gious Impulse in the Founding of Vir-
ginia: Religion and Society in the
Early Literature," Wm. & Mary Q.,
3rd Series, V (1948), 492-522, and
"Religion and Society in the Early
Literature: The Religious Impulse in
the Founding of Virginia," VI (1949),
24-41; Daniel E. Motley, Life of
Commissary James Blair . . . (J.H.U.
Studies, 19th Series, X, 1901); Wil-
liam S. Perry, The History of the
American Episcopal Church, 1587-
18S3 (2 vols., 1885); and William H.
Seiler, "The Church of England as the
Established Church in Seventeenth-
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Century Virginia," Journal of South-
ern History, XV (1949), 478-508.
For a rounded picture of the planter
and his problems we must look to
biographies such as: Richmond C.
Beatty, William Byrd of Westover
(1932); Irving Brant, James Madison
(3 vols., 1941-50); Leonidas Dodson,
Alexander Spotswood, Governor of
Colonial Virginia, 1710-1722 (1932);
Douglas Southall Freeman's monu-
mental George Washington (6 vols.,
1948-54; completed in Vol. 7 by John
A. Carroll and Mary W. Ashworth,
1958); Marie Kimball, Jefferson: The
Road to Glory , 1743-1776 (1943),
Jefferson: War and Peace, 1776-1784
(1947), and Jefferson: The Scene of
Europe, 1784-1789 (1950); Dumas
Malone's definitive Jefferson and His
Time (4 vols., 1948 ); David John
Mays' searching Edmund Pendleton,
1721-1803 (2 vols., 1952); Robert
D. Meade, Patrick Henry (2 vols.,
1957 ); Louis Morton, Robert
Carter of Nomini Hall: A Virginia
Tobacco Planter of the Eighteenth
Century (1941); and Kate Mason
Rowland, The Life of George Mason,
1725-1792 (2 vols., 1892). A useful
reference work is Lyon G. Tyler (ed.),
Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography
(5 vols., 1915).
Many of the writings of colonial
Virginia have been reprinted. Perhaps
the most attractive and the most
frank, witty, and informative of the
early Virginia writers is William Byrd
H (1674-1744), who is too little
known. There is no easily available
and fully representative selection of
his works, nor even a satisfactory
complete edition of his writings, al-
though one is now in preparation by
Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling.
The best collection remains The Writ-
ings of Colonel William Byrd of West-
over in Virginia (ed. John S. Bassett,
1901), which includes his main works
391
in unabridged form. For a more inti-
mate portrait of Byrd and his family
life, see The Secret Diary of William
Byrd . . . 1709-1712 (ed. Louis B.
Wright and Marion Tinling, 1941)
and Another Secret Diary of William
Byrd . . . 1739-1741; with Letters and
Literary Exercises, 1696-1726 (ed
Maude H. Woodfin and Marion Tin-
ling, 1942), and especially William
Byrd of Virginia: The London Diary
(1717-1721) and Other Writings (ed.
Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling,
1958) with Wright's admirable brief
biographical introduction. For 'Byrd
as a natural historian, see William
Byrd's Natural History of Virginia:
or The Newly Discovered Eden (ed.
R. C. Beatty and W. J. Mulloy, 1940).
No historian has yet discovered a
satisfactory record of the lives,
thoughts, and feelings of the lower
classes in colonial Virginia,
The lives and characters of other
great Virginians can be best explored
through their own writings, which
every reader should sample. Besides
the multivolume editions (see Gen-
eral section above) of the writings
of Jefferson and Washington, there
are handy briefer selections, such as
The Life and Selected Writings of
Thomas Jefferson (ed. Adrienne Koch
and William Peden, Modern Library,
1944) and Basic Writings of George
Washington (ed. Saxe Commins,
1948).
Contemporary surveys, histories,
and chronicles by Virginians, while
lacking the grandeur of the works of
Bradford, Winthrop, and Cotton
Mather, possess some more amiable
virtues, including greater attention
to the beauties of the landscape.
Among the more valuable of these are:
for the earliest settlements, Travels and
Works of Captain John Smith (ed.
Edward Arber, 2 vols., 1910); Robert
Beverley, The History and Present
392
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
State of Virginia (1705; ed. Louis B.
Wright, 1947); Joseph Doddridge,
Notes, on the Settlement and Indian
Wars of the Western Parts of Vir-
ginia and of Pennsylvania from 1763
to 1783 (1824; reprinted with Kerche-
val [below], 1883; and 1912); Henry
Hartwell, James Blair, and Edward
Chilton, The Present State of Vir-
ginia, and the College (1727; ed.
Hunter D. Parish, 1940); Devereux
Jarratt, A Brief Narrative of the Re-
vival of Religion in Virginia (1778);
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State
of Virginia (1788; ed. William Peden,
1955); Hugh Jones, The Present State
of Virginia (1724; Sabin's Reprints,
V, 1865; also ed. Richard L. Morton,
1956); William Keith, The History
of the British Plantations in America
(1738); Samuel Kercheval, A History
of the Valley of Virginia (1833); and
William Stith, The History of the
First Discovery and Settlement of
Virginia (1747; reprinted, N. Y.,
1865). A collection of some of the
contemporary accounts of Bacon's
Rebellion is Charles M. Andrews
(ed.), Narratives of the Insurrections,
1675-1690 ("Original Narratives"
series, 1915).
The best summary introduction to
the contemporary travel-literature is
Thomas D. Clark, Travels in the Old
South, a bibliography (2 vols., 1956).
Of the dozens of travel-books which
touch on Virginia, the more useful
include: Andrew Burnaby, Travels
through the Middle Settlements in
North America in the Years 1759
and 1760 (3rd ed., 1798); Gilbert
Chinard (ed.), A Huguenot Exile in
Virginia (1687; reprinted, 1934);
Francis Michel, "Report of the Jour-
ney of Francis Louis Michel from
Berne, Switzerland to Virginia, Oc-
tober 2, 1701 December 1, 1702,"
trans. William J. Hunke, Va. Mag.
Hist. & Btog., XXIV (1916), 1-43,
113-141, 275-303; and Charles Wood-
mason, The Carolina Backcountry on
the Eve of the Revolution; The
Journal and Other Writings of Charles
Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant (ed.
Richard Hooker, 1953).
An invaluable guide into one of the
most valuable sources, especially for
social history, is Lester J. Cappon and
Stella Duff, Virginia Gazette Index,
1736-1780 (2 vols., Williamsburg,
1950), a prodigious and meticulous
work helpful for finding items on any
conceivable topic in The Virginia Gaz-
ettes 1736-1780 (reproduced by photo-
stat in the Massachusetts Historical
Society, Boston, 1925). Some of the
more accessible contemporary letters,
diaries, and records of less well-known
figures, which throw light on social
history are: Letters of Robert Carter ,
1720-1727; the Commercial Interests
of a Virginia Gentleman (ed. Louis
B, Wright, 1940) ; Journal and Letters
of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773-1774:
A Plantation Tutor of the Old Domin-
ion (ed. Hunter D. Parish, 1943);
"Diary of John Harrower, 1773-1776,"
Am. Hist. Rev., VI (1900-1901), 65-
107; William Keith, A Collection of
Papers and other Tracts (1740); and
John Norton and Sons, Merchants of
London and Virginia, Being the
Papers from their Counting House for
the Years 1750 to 1795 (ed. Francis
N. Mason, 1937).
Materials for the religious history
are found in: Samuel Davies, Ser-
mons on Important Subjects (3 vols.,
1841); Francis L. Hawks, Contribu-
tions to the Ecclesiastical History of
the United States (2 vols., 1836-39);
Devereux Jarratt, Sermons on Various
and Important Subjects in Practical
Divinity adapted to the Plainest Ca-
pacities and Suited to the Family and
Closet (1805); William S. Perry (ed.),
Historical Collections Relating to the
American Colonial Church (5 vols.,
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
1870-78); and "Virginia's Cure: or an
Advisive Narrative Concerning Vir-
ginia, Discovering the True Ground
of that Churches Unhappiness and the
Only True Remedy" (1662), in Force,
Tracts, Vol. HI.
The basic collections of sources for
the legal, legislative, and administra-
tive history are: Executive Journal
of the Council of Colonial Virginia,
1680-1739 (ed. Henry R. Mcllwaine,
1925-30); Legislative Journals of the
Council of Colonial Virginia (ed.
Henry R. Mcllwaine, 3 vols., 1918-
19); Journals of the House of
Burgesses, 1619-1776 (ed. Henry R.
Mcllwaine, 13 vols., 1905-15); The
Statutes at Large; being a Collection
of All the Laws of Virginia from the
First Session of the Legislature in the
Year 1619 (ed. William W. Hening,
13 vols., 1810-23); and Calendar of
Virginia State Papers and Other Manu-
scripts Preserved in the Captiol at
Richmond, 1652-1869 (ed. W. P.
Palmer and others, 11 vols., 1875-93).
See also Joseph H. Smith's mono-
graph, Appeals to the Privy Council
from the American Plantations (1950).
Items of special interest for legal
and legislative topics include: Richard
Starke, The Office and Authority of a
Justice of the Peace (Williamsburg,
1774) and William W. Hening, The
New Virginia Justice (Richmond, Va.,
1799), examples of the -widely-used
guides for justices of the peace; The
Commonplace Book of Thomas Jeffer-
son: A Repertory of His Ideas on
Government (ed. Gilbert Chinard,
1926), an intimate view of Jefferson's
reading on legal subjects; The Official
Letters of Alexander Spotswood,
Lieutenant Governor of the Colony of
Virginia, 1710-1722 (1882-85); and
An Essay upon Government of the
English Plantations . . . An Anony-
mous Virginian's Proposals for Liberty
under the British Crown, with Two
393
Memoranda by William Byrd (1701,
ed. Louis B. Wright, 1945). For a
glimpse of problems of a colonial gov-
ernor, see "Instructions to Francis
Nicholson," Va. Mag. Hist. & Biog.,
IV (1896-97), 49-54; "Governor
Nicholson to the Council of Trade
and Plantations, December 2, 1701,"
Great Britain, Calendar of State
Papers. Colonial Series. America and
the West Indies, 1701, 640-655; and
"Council of Trade and Plantations to
Governor Nicholson, November 4,
1702," the same series, 1702, 700-702.
BOOK TWO
VIEWPOINTS AND
INSTITUTIONS
PART FIVE
AN AMERICAN FRAME OF MIND
It is peculiarly inappropriate, and
can even be misleading, to try to
sum up American thinking much less
American culture through great
philosophic systems or the literary and
philosophic works of great men. For
an American tendency to fuse the
"high" and the "low" cultures which
have been traditionally polarized in
Western Europe, and an ineptitude
at systematic philosophy and at mon-
umental works of belles-lettres, have
been striking features of our culture.
In my Genius of American Politics
(1953; Phoenix paperback, 1958) I
have explored the characteristic Amer-
ican lack of political theory. "The
Place of Thought in American Life,"
The American Scholar, XXV (1956),
137-50, is a more general article.
Some of my ablest and most learned
colleagues think my view of American
culture perverse, and even dangerous.
394
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
For the most part, writers have as-
sumed that the categories of Euro-
pean philosophy and literature, and
the approach by way of "systems"
("Puritanism," "Rationalism," "Ro-
manticism," "Transcendentalism,"
etc.) are adequate to the examination
of American culture. Pioneer and
highly readable work of this kind
was done by I. Woodbridge Riley in
his American Philosophy; the Early
Schools (1907) and American
Thought from Puritanism to Pragma-
tism and Beyond (1923). Among the
more important recent works in the
same tradition are Herbert W.
Schneider, A History of American
Philosophy (1946) and Stow Persons,
American Minds: A History of Ideas
(1958). Especially notable in this
tradition are the writings of Perry
Miller (see Part I, above).
Some influential historians, while
sharing the traditional emphasis on
dominant systems of thought (some-
times described as "Climates of
Opinion") and on the works of great
thinkers, are more inclined to trace
these ideas into the popular litera-
ture, and to write (as . Merle Curti
has) "a social history of American
thought." But these writers, too,
tend to give the seminal signifi-
cance to such abstract, systematized,
and cosmopolitan notions as "The
Enlightenment," "Natural Law," etc.
See, for example, Carl Becker's at-
tractive essays, The Declaration of
Independence (1922; reprinted 1933;
Vintage paperback, 1957) and The
Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-
Century Philosophers (1932); and
Merle Curti's compact and compre-
hensive survey, The Growth of Am-
erican Thought (1943).
For the context in European sophis-
ticated thinking of some of the ideas
discussed in Part V, see Alfred North
Whitehead, Science and the Modern
World (1925) and Adventures of
Ideas (1933), and J. B. Bury, The
Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its
Origin and Growth (1932; Beacon
paperback, 1956). And for a set of
revealing American reactions to some
of the European ideas of progress, see
Zoltan Haraszti, John Adams and the
Prophets of Progress (1952), which
collects and skillfully interprets
Adams' marginalia on his personal
copies of several writers of the Euro-
pean "Enlightenment." One can fol-
low the revisions of the text of the
Declaration of Independence in the
facsimiles reproduced in Julian P.
Boyd, The Declaration of Independ-
ence, The Evolution of the Text
(1945).
The shortest way to the geographic
ideas of the colonial period is to look
at contemporary maps, some of which
are conveniently reproduced in Charles
O. Paullin's Atlas of the Historical
Geography of the United States
(1932); then one should examine
Jedidiah Morse, American Geography
(London, 1794) or The American
Universal Geography (2 vols., Boston,
1793). Especially useful are the works
of Ralph H. Brown, Historical Geog-
raphy of the United States (1948);
and Mirror for Americans: Likeness
of the Eastern Seaboard, 1810 (1943),
which contains an excellent brief in-
troduction on the state of the geo-
graphic knowledge of America in the
later 18th century. Valuable special
studies include: Thomas D. Cope,
"Collecting Source Materials about
Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon,"
Am. Philos. Soc., Proc. t XCII (1948),
111-114; and Fulmer Mood, 'The
English Geographers and the Anglo-
American Frontier in the Seventeenth
Century," U. of Cal. Pub. in Geog-
raphy, VI, no. 9.
In distinguishing different ap-
proaches to science and in defining the
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
natural-history emphasis, I have found
Stephen E. Toulmin's Philosophy of
Science: An Introduction (1953) help-
ful. An adequate full-length history
of natural history in America remains
to be written, although William H. and
Mabel Smallwood, Natural History
and the American Mind (1941) is a
useful exploratory monograph. Sev-
eral years ago I tried to describe com-
mon American attitudes to science in
the colonial period in The Lost World
of Thomas Jefferson (1948), but that
volume has many crudities of defini-
tion and gives too systematic a char-
acter to the thinking of American
scientists. Yet I am still impressed by
a distinctively American a "natural-
history" flavor in the scientific writ-
ing of the era. For a valuable col-
lection of writings on the borderlands
of philosophy, including some early
items otherwise difficult to find, see
Joseph L. Blau, American Philosophic
Addresses: 1700-1900 (1946).
The best monograph on a period
of colonial science is Brooke Hindle,
The Pursuit of Science in Revolution-
ary America, 1735-1789 (1956),
which gives particular attention to the
social organization of scientific activ-
ity. Valuable special studies include:
Ernest Earnest, John and William
Bartram t Botanists and Explorers
1699-1777, 1739-1823 (1940); George
B. Goode, 'The Beginnings of Natural
History in America," Smithsonian In-
stitution, Annual Report (1897), in
U. S. National Museum, H (Wash-
ington, 1901), 357-407; Josephine
Herbst, New Green World (1954);
Brooke Hindle, "Cadwallader Colden's
Extension of the Newtonian Prin-
ciples," Wm. & Mary Q., 3rd Series,
XIII (1956), 459-475; and Conway
Zirkle, The Beginnings of Plant Hy-
bridization (1935).
Representative colonial writings on
natural history, found either in corre-
395
spondence, in works on special topics,
or in regional histories and surveys
(in addition to the writings by Jos-
selyn, Wood, Cotton Mather, and
others mentioned in Part I above;
and those by William Byrd, Jefferson,
and others in Part IV above) include:
Benjamin S. Barton, "Memorandums
of the Life and Writings of Mr. John
Clayton, the Celebrated Botanist of
Virginia," The Philadelphia Medical
and Physical Journal, H (1806), 139-
145; John Bartram, Observations on
the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, Rivers,
Productions, Animals and other Mat-
ters worthy of Notice. Made . . . in
his travels from Pensilvania to Onan-
dago, Oswego and Lake Ontario in
Canada . . . (1751); William Bartram,
Travels through North and South
Carolina, Georgia, East and West
Florida (1791; abridged, ed., Carl Van
Doren, 1940); Jeremy Belknap, "The
Belknap Papers," Mass. Hist. Soc.,
Coll, 5th Series, HOT, 6th Ser., IV,
and The History of New Hampshire
(3 vols., 1791-92); John Brickell, The
Natural History of North-Carolina
(1737; reprinted, 1911); Andrew
Burnaby, Travels . . . in the Years
1759 and 1760 (3rd ed., London,
1798); William Byrd, Natural History
of Virginia . . . (1737; ed. R. C.
Beatty and W. J. Mulloy, 1940) ; Mark
Catesby, The Natural History of Caro-
lina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands
(2 vols., 1731-43); Francois Jean de
Chastellux, Travels in North America
in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782
(2 vols., Dublin, 1787); John Clay-
ton's work, incorporated into Johan-
nes F. Gronovius, Flora Virginica
(Leyden, 1739-43; 1762); Cadwal-
lader Colden, The History of the Five
Indian Nations of Canada (1727; 2
vols., N.Y., 1902) and The Principles
of Action in Matter (London, 1751),
'The Colden Letter Books," N.Y.
Hist. Soc., Coll, IX-X (1876-77) and
396
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
"The Letters and Papers of Cad-
waUader Colden, 1711-1775," N. Y.
Hist Soc., Coll., L-LVI (1917-1923),
LXVH-LXVin (1934-35); William
Darlington, Memorials of John Bart-
ram and Humphrey Marshall with
Notices of their Botanical Contempo-
raries (1849); William Douglass, A
Summary, Historical and Political of
the . . . British Settlements in North
America (2 vols., Boston, 1747-52);
"Governor Thomas Dudley's Letter to
the Countess of Lincoln, March 1631,"
in Force, Tracts, II, No. 4; John D.
Godman, American Natural History,
Part 1, Mastology (3 vols., 1826-28);
Peter Kalm, The America of 1750:
Peter Kalm's Travels in North Amer-
ica (1770; ed. Adolph B. Benson, 2
vols., 1937) and "The Passenger
Pigeon . . . accounts by Pehr Kalm
(1759) and John James Auduhon
(1831)," Smithsonian Inst, Annual
Report (1911), 407-424; Turhand
Kirtland, Diary . . . from 1798-1800
While Surveying and Laying Out the
Western Reserve for the Connecticut
Land Company (1903); James E.
Smith (ed.), A Selection of the Cor-
respondence of Linnaeus and Other
Naturalists, from the Original Manu-
scripts (2 vols., 1821); Thomas Smith
and Samuel Deane, Journals . . .
(1849); Earl Gregg Swem (ed.),
Brothers of the Spade: Correspond-
ence of Peter Collinson of London,
and of John Custis, of Williamsburg,
Virginia, 1734-1746 (1957); Samuel
Williams, The Natural and Civil His-
tory of Vermont (2d ed., 2 vols.,
1809); and Alexander Wilson, Amer-
ican Ornithology (9 vols., 1808-14).
PART six
EDUCATING THE COMMUNITY
Although education has lately be-
come one of our most talked-about
subjects, the history of American ed-
ucation has until recently been much
neglected. More historical study has
gone into minor works of American
literature than into the development
of the major educational institutions.
We still lack an adequate general
history of higher education in the
colonial period much less a general
history of American education.
As might have been expected from
the fact that the roots of American
higher education are in regional loyal-
ties, some of the best works have been
stimulated by affection for a particu-
lar college or university. A readable,
brief introduction to colonial higher
education is contained in the first
seven chapters of Samuel Eliot Mori-
son's brilliant Three Centuries of Har-
vard, 1636-1936 (1936). Morison's
Founding of Harvard College (1935)
offers a detailed study of the con-
tinental and English background of
17th-century Harvard and a com-
parison with earlier European in-
stitutions; his Harvard College in
the Seventeenth Century (2 vols.,
1936) adds valuable details of the cur-
riculum and of student life. Thomas J.
Wertenbaker's Princeton, 1746-1896
(1946) is also very readable. A work
which throws much light on the pecu-
liar features of American higher edu-
cation is Richard Hofstadter and
Walter P. Metzger, The Development
of Academic Freedom in the United
States (1955); incidental to an acute
treatment of its special subject it gives
us a better general account of colonial
institutions of higher education than
any other book. See also George P,
Schmidt, The Liberal Arts College: A
Chapter in American Cultural History
(1957), esp. Ch. v on 'The Old-Time
College President."
Valuable specialized studies and
contemporary records of particular
aspects of college-founding, of student
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
life, and of the government of colonial
colleges are: Herbert B. Adams, The
College of William and Mary (1887);
Sadie Bell, The Church, The State,
and Education in Virginia (1930);
Walter C. Bronson, The History of
Brown University, 1764-1914 (1914);
Samuel W. Brown, The Seculariza-
tion of American Education (1912);
Bailey B. Burritt, Professional Dis-
tribution of College and University
Graduates (1912); Lyman H. Butter-
field (ed.), John Witherspoon Comes
to America (1953); Frederick Chase,
A History of Dartmouth College (2
vols., 1891-1913); E. P. Cheyney,
History of the University of Pennsyl-
vania (1940); Edwin Grant Dexter,
A History of Education in the United
States (1922); Franklin B. Dexter
(ed.), Documentary History of Yale
University Under the Original Char-
ter of the Collegiate School of Con-
necticut, 1701-1745 (1916) and Sketch
of the History of Yale University
(1887); Timothy Dwight, Travels
in New England and New York (4
vols., 1821-22); Edward C. Elliot and
M. M. Chambers (ed.), Charters and
Basic Laws of Selected American
Universities and Colleges (1932);
Allen O. Hansen, Liberalism and
American Education in the Eighteenth
Century (1926); "Harvard College
Records: Corporation Records, 1636-
1750," Col. Soc. Mass., Pub. (Colls.
1925), XV-XVI: A History of Colum-
bia University, 1754-1904 (1904);
John W. Hoyt, Memorial in Regard to
a National University ( 1892) ; William
L. Kingsley, Yale College: A Sketch
of its History (2 vols., 1879); John E.
Kirkpatrick, The Rise of Non-Resident
Government in Harvard University
(1925); Edgar W. Knight (ed.), A
Documentary History of Education in
the South Before 1S60 (5 vols., 1949-
53); Beverly McAnear, "College
Founding in the American Colonies,
397
1745-1775," Mississippi Valley Hist.
Rev., XLH (1955), 24-44, and "The
Selection of an Alma Mater by Pre-
Revolutionary Students," Penn. Mag.
Hist. & Biog., LXXm (1949),
429-40; Robert L. McCaul, "White-
field's Bethesda College Project and
other major attempts to found
Colonial Colleges," in two parts,
to be published in Ga. Hist. Q.
in 1959, and "Education in Georgia
During the Period of Royal Control,
1752-1776: Financial Support of
Schools and Schoolmasters," Ga.
Hist. Q., XL (1956), 103-12, 248-
59; John MacLean, History of the
College of New Jersey (2 vols., 1877) ;
Thomas H. Montgomery, A History
of the University of Pennsylvania
from its Foundation to A*D. 1770
(1900); Forrest Morgan (ed.), Con-
necticut as a Colony and as a State
(4 vols., 1904); Samuel Eliot Mori-
son, "Precedence at Harvard College
in the Seventeenth Century," Am.
Antiq. Soc., Proc., N.S., XLII (1932),
371-431; The Original Charter of
Columbia College . . . with the Acts
. . . Relating to the College (1836);
Edwin Oviatt, Beginnings of Yale
(1701-1726) (1916); Elsie W. Parsons,
Educational Legislation and Admin-
istration of the Colonial Government
(1899); Leon B. Richardson, History
of Dartmouth College (2 vols., 1932);
Herbert and Carol Schneider (eds.),
Samuel Johnson, President of King's
College (4 vols., 1929); Louis Shores,
Origins of the American College
Library, 1638-1800 (1934); Richard
H. Shryock, **The Academic Profes-
sion in the United States," Am. Assn.
of U. Profs., Bull, XXXVm (1952),
32-70; The Literary Diary of Ezra
Stiles (ed. Franklin B. Dexter, 3 vols.,
1901); Extracts from the Itineraries
and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles
(ed. Franklin B. Dexter, 1916);
Donald Tewksbury, The Founding of
398
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
American Colleges and Universities
Before the Civil War with Particular
Reference to the Religious Influences
Bearing Upon the College Movement
(1932), an especially valuable mono-
graph; Charles F. Thwing, A History
of Higher Education in America
(1906); Leonard J. Trinterud, The
Forming of An American Tradition:
A Re-examination of Colonial Pres-
byterianism (1954); Oscar M. Voor-
hees, The History of Phi Beta Kappa
(1945); The Works of John Wither-
spoon (2d ed., 4 vols,, 1802); George
B. Wood, Early History of the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania (3d ed., 1896);
and Thomas Woody, A History of
Women's Education in the United
States (2 vols., 1929). An important
reference work is J. L. Sibley's bio-
graphical dictionary, Harvard Grad-
uates (continued by C. K. Shipton, 8
vols., 1873-1951).
To understand the peculiarities of
American higher education one must
grasp some of the large features of
the great European institutions and
traditions. A brilliant essay is Charles
H. Haskins* little classic, The Rise of
Universities (1923; reprinted, Gold
Seal paperback, 1957) ; with ideas that
can be pursued in the relevant chapters
of H. O. Taylor, The Medieval Mind
(2 vols., 1925-27). Hastings Rashdall,
The Universities of Europe in the
Middle Ages (2 vols., 1895) is a
readable full-length study. A lively
brief study which includes the more
recent period is Sydney C. Roberts,
British Universities (1947). George
Kitson Clark, The English Inherit-
ance (1950), explores the foundations
of British culture, including those that
were laid in the Universities. On
special topics see: The Government
of Oxford (1931); Herbert McLach-
lan, English Education under the Test
Acts: Being the History of the Non-
conformist Academies, 1662-1820
(1931); Charles E. Mallet, A History
of the University of Oxford (3 vols.,
1924-28); Albert Mansbridge, The
Older Universities of England: Oxford
and Cambridge (1923); John A. R.
Marriott, Oxford: Its Place in Na-
tional History (1933); James B.
Mullinger, A History of the University
of Cambridge (1888); Irene Parker,
Dissenting Academies in England
(1914); Denys A. Winstanley, The
University of Cambridge in the Eight-
eenth Century (1922); and Chris-
topher Wordsworth, Scholae Acad-
emicae: Some Account of the Studies
at the English Universities in the
Eighteenth Century (1877). Edward
Gibbon's Autobiography gives an acid
and unforgettable, but probably un-
fair, portrait of 18th-century Oxford.
Some of the peculiarities of the legal
history of the corporation in the
American colonies which affected the
history of colleges and universities
are discussed in: Joseph S. Davis,
Essays in the Earlier History of
American Corporations (2 vols.,
1917); E. Merrick Dodd, American
Business Corporations until 1860
(1954); and Shaw Livennore, Early
American Land Companies: Their In-
fluence on Corporate Development
(1939).
For the position of American
women in colonial business, public,
and private life, see Mary S. Benson,
Women in Eighteenth-Century Amer-
ica; A Study of Opinion and Social
Usage (1935); Clarence S. Brigham,
Journals and Journeymen: A Contri-
bution to the History of Early Amer-
ican Newspapers (1950); Elizabeth
W. (Anthony) Dexter, Colonial
Women of Affairs; A Study of Women
in Business and the Professions in
America Before 1776 (1924); Alice
(Morse) Earle, Home Life in Colonial
Days (1898); Richard B. Morris,
Studies in the History of American
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Law: With Special Reference to the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
(1930); and Julia C. Spruill, Women's
Life and Work in the Southern Colo-
nies (1938).
PART SEVEN
THE LEARNED LOSE THEIR MONOPOLIES
One of the most striking facts about
the literature of American history is
the scarcity of works on the develop-
ment of American law. Although we
live by a common-law system based
on custom and history and although
we have the most prosperous law
schools and the most influential (and
probably the most liberally educated)
legal profession in the Western World,
our legal history remains a Dark Con-
tinent. It is hard to explain why this
is true: some say it is because the
materials of our legal history are too
scanty, others because they are too
voluminous, but none can deny that
we are ignoramuses about America's
legal past. Moreover, there is little
prospect that this will cease to be so
within the next half-century; even the
wealthiest and most "interdisciplinary"
of our law schools pay little or no at-
tention to American legal history.
Only the history of the Supreme Court
and of constitutional law have been
treated extensively. Lawyers insist
that mere historians are not qualified
to chronicle their subject, and histor-
ians find other less technical subjects
more rewarding.
Among the few important works on
the history of American lawyers and of
American private law which are com-
petent both from a technical legal and
a historical point of view are: Julius
Goebel, Jr. and T. Raymond Naugh-
ton, Law Enforcement in Colonial
New York; A Study in Criminal Pro-
399
cedure (1664-1776) (1944); Readings
in American Legal History (ed. Mark
deWolfe Howe, planograph, Harvard
U. Press, 1949); Mark deWolfe Howe,
and Louis F. Eaton, Jr., "The Supreme
Judicial Power in the Colony of
Massachusetts Bay," NJE.Q., XX
(1947), 291-316; James Willard
Hurst, The Growth of American Law:
The Law Makers (1950); Eldon R.
James, "A List of Legal Treatises
Printed in the British Colonies and
the American States before 1801," in
Harvard Legal Essays (1934); Frank
H. Miller, "Legal Qualifications for
Office in America, 1619-1899," Am.
Hist. Assn., Ann. Report (1899), I,
87-153; Richard B. Morris, Studies in
the History of American Law: With
Special Reference to the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries (1930) and
"Legalism Versus Revolutionary Doc-
trine in New England,'* N.E.Q., IV
(1931), 195-215; Hubert Phillips,
Development of a Residential Qualifi-
cation for Representatives in Colonial
Legislatures (1921); Roscoe Pound,
The Formative Era of American Law
(1938); Max Radin, Handbook of
Anglo-American Legal History (1936);
Paul S. Reinsch, English Common
Law in the Early American Colonies
(1899), also found in Select Essays
in Anglo-American Legal History (ed.
Assn- of Am. Law Schools; 3 vols.,
1907); Two Centuries' Growth of
American Law, 1701-1901 (1902).
We have a larger, though still sur-
prisingly small, number of useful
books on the history of the legal pro-
fession and legal education. The only
general guide is Charles Warren, A
History of the American Bar (1912).
For the colonial period the following
are especially helpful: George Dexter
(ed.), "Record Book of the Suffolk
Bar, 1770-1805," Mass. Hist Soc.,
Proc., XK (1881-82), 141-179; Sam-
uel H. Fisher, Litchfield Law School,
400
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
1774-1833: Bibliographical Catalogue
of Students (Yale Law Library, Pub.
No. 11; 1946) and the collection of
manuscript notebooks which early
students of the Litchfield Law School
made from the lectures of Judge
Tapping Reeve, which now are in the
Yale Law Library; Frank W. Grin-
nell, *The Bench and Bar in Colony
and Province (1630-1776)," in Albert
B. Hart (ed.), Commonwealth His-
tory of Massachusetts (1928), II, 156-
191; Paul M. Hamlin, Legal Education
in Colonial New York (1939); E.
Alfred Jones, American Members of
the Inns of Court (1924); "Lawyers
of the Seventeenth Century," Wm. &
Mary Q. t VHI (1899), 228-30; Wil-
liam Draper Lewis (ed.), Great Amer-
ican Lawyers (8 vols., 1907-09); Joel
Parker, The Law School of Harvard
College (1871); Josef Redlich, The
Common Law and the Case Method
in American University Law Schools
(1914); Alfred Z. Reed, Training for
the Public Profession of the Law
(1921), an especially useful study for
the origins of American professional
standards (in this connection see also,
Esther Lucile Brown, Lawyers and the
Promotion of Justice, 1938); Charles
Warren, History of the Harvard Law
School and of Early Legal Conditions
in America (3 vols., 1908); and
Emory Washburn, Sketches of the
Judicial History of Massachusetts
from 1630 to the Revolution in 1775
(1840).
Miscellaneous biographical mate-
rials, and the notebooks, correspond-
ence, and other writings of early
American lawyers help us piece to-
gether a picture of their daily work.
For example, the papers of John
Adams (ed. Charles F. Adams; 10
vols., 1850-56) and of Jefferson (ed.
Julian P. Boyd) shed some light on
the subject. To define Jefferson's view
of the law, I have tried to make use
of the materials in the Jefferson
Papers in my reviews in Wm. & Mary
Q., 3rd Series VII (1950), 596-609,
VIII (1951), 283-285, and X (1953),
126-130; see also H. Trevor Col-
bourn, '*Thomas Jefferson's Use of the
Past," Wm. & Mary Q., 3rd Series, XV
(1958), 35-56, and Marie Kimball,
Jefferson: The Road to Glory, 1743-
1776 (1943). Most important of all
is Jefferson's Commonplace Book,
with his notes on his legal reading (ed.
Gilbert Chinard, 1926); see also the
Literary Bible of Thomas Jefferson
(ed. Gilbert Chinard, 1928). Other
valuable biographical material is
found in Charles P. Smith, James
Wilson, Founding Father: 1742-1798
(1956); Robert D. Meade, Patrick
Henry: Patriot in the Making (1957),
esp. chs. v-x; David J. Mays, Edmund
Pendleton (1952); Samuel G. Heis-
kell, Andrew Jackson and Early Ten-
nessee History (1918); and Marquis
James, Andrew Jackson , The Border
Captain (1933). I have examined
several sets of manuscript notebooks
kept by lawyers and judges during
the colonial period (now in the pos-
session of the Harvard Law Library)
in order to provide themselves with
records of precedents for use in prac-
tice; some of these are included in
my Delaware Cases: 1792-1830 (3
Vols., 1943).
Some of the significance of Sir Wil-
liam Blackstone's Commentaries on
the Laws of England (4 vols., 1765-
1769), which was the Bible and the
Correspondence School for genera-
tions of American lawyers, can be
grasped by surveying the number and
variety of American editions of his
work; see Catherine S. Eller, The Wil-
liam Blackstone Collection in the Yale
Law Library (Yale Law Lib., Pub.
No. 6; 1938). For the drift of Black-
stone's work and some of the features
which made it especially appealing see
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
my Mysterious Science of the Law:
An Essay on Blackstone's Commentar-
ies (1941; Beacon paperback, 1958).
A valuable general history of the
learned occupations in England is
A. M. Caix-Saunders and P. A. Wil-
son, The Professions (1933). There is
yet no comparable work for the his-
tory of the professions in America. An
indispensable reference work for Eng-
lish legal history (which tells us more
than any other single work about the
laws of the colonies) is Sir William
Holdsworth's monumental History of
English Law (12 vols., 1922-38). A
lively history of English thinking
about the sources of the common law
is Sir Carleton K. Allen, Law in the
Making (1930 and later editions). The
Littleton-Griswold Fund of the Asso-
ciation of American Law Schools has
supported the publication of several
volumes of early American legal
records, with valuable introductions;
for example, The Burlington Court
Book: A Record of Quaker Juris-
prudence in West New Jersey, 1680-
1709 (ed. H. Clay Reed and George J.
Miller, 1944).
PART EIGHT
NEW WORLD MEDICINE
The best starting point for studying
the history of medicine in America is
a good local history which avoids
irrelevant abstractions. There is no
better way to begin than through Dr.
Wyndham S. Blanton's comprehensive,
careful, and readable Medicine in Vir-
ginia (3 vols.: 17th century, 1930; 18th
century, 1931; 19th century, 1933).
At present there is no other local his-
tory of medicine of comparable qual-
ity, but John Duffy will soon publish
his full-length history of medicine in
Louisiana. On a less ambitious scale,
401
Henry R. Viets, Brief History of
Medicine in Massachusetts (1930) is
valuable. Until we have more local
studies of the quality of the Blanton
and Viets works it will be hard for
anyone to write a comprehensive his-
tory of medicine in this country;
regional differences of climate, public
health, and disease have been great,
and local problems have tended to
dominate writing in the field. Dr.
Henry E. Sigerist's American Medi-
cine (1934) is a concise and highly
readable pioneer essay valuable for
its insights and its hints for future re-
search, but sketchy in its facts.
Dr. Richard H. Shryock has come
closer than anyone else to compre-
hending this large and varied subject.
His works are remarkable, not only
for their ability to organize a mass of
intractable detail, but even more for
their success in pointing the way from
this technical subject to other, and
more familiar, problems of social his-
tory. See his Development of Modern
Medicine: An Interpretation of the
Social and Scientific Factors Involved
(1947) and American Medical Re-
search Past and Present (1947). Dr.
Shryock's brief studies include: "Eight-
eenth Century Medicine in America,"
Am. Antiq. Soc., Proc. (Oct., 1949),
1-20; **Women in American Medi-
cine," Journal of Am. Women's Med.
Assn., V (1950), 371-379; 'The Inter-
play of Social and Internal Factors in
the History of Modern Medicine,"
Scientific Monthly, LXXVI (1953),
221-230. Francis R. Packard, History
of Medicine in the United States (2
vols., 1931), although disorganized
and sometimes inaccurate, is occasion-
ally helpful. An especially interesting
collection of essays are the papers in
the "Symposium on Colonial Medicine
in Commemoration of the 350th Anni-
versary of the Settlement of Virginia,"
Bull. Hist. Med. f XXXI (Sept.-Oct.
402
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
1957), which came to my attention
only after these chapters had gone to
press.
Some valuable special studies on
medicine, medical practice, and medi-
cal education are: Malcolm S. Bein-
field, "The Early New England Doc-
tor: An Adaptation to a Provincial
Environment," Yale Journal of Bi-
ology and Medicine, XV (1942-43),
99-132; Carl Bridenbaugh (ed.), Dr.
Thomas Bond's clinical lectures
(1776) in Journal of the History of
Medicine, H (1947), 12 ff., and (with
Jessica Bridenbaugh) Rebels and Gen-
tlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of
Franklin (1942), on the profession in
Philadelphia; A. M. Carr-Saunders
and P. A. Wilson, The Professions
(1933) for the English side; Joseph
Carson, History of the Medical De-
partment of the University of Penn-
sylvania (1869); R. Kingston Fox,
Dr. John Fothergill and His Friends
(1919); H. Fielding Garrison, An
Introduction to the History of Medi-
cine (1924); James E. Gibson, Dr.
Bodo Otto and the Medical Back-
ground of the American Revolution
(1937); Thomas F. Harrington, The
Harvard Medical School: A History
(3 vols., 1905); Claude E. Heaton,
"Medicine in New York during the
English Colonial Period," Bull Hist.
Med. t XVH (1945), No. 1; Freder-
ick P. Henry, Standard History of the
Medical Profession of Philadelphia
(1897); Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit
of Science in Revolutionary America t
1735-1789 (1956); Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Medical Essays, 1842-1882
(1883); John B. Langstaff, Doctor
Bard of Hyde Park: The Famous
Physician of Revolutionary Times
(1942); Henry F. Long, 'The Physi-
cians of Topsfield, with Some Account
of Early Medical Practice," Essex In-
stitute, Hist. Coll, XLVn (1911),
197-229; William Macmichael, The
Gold-Headed Cane (2d ed., 1828),
for social aspects of the English medi-
cal professions; Albert Matthews,
"Notes on Early Autopsies and Ana-
tomical Lectures," Col. Soc. Mass.,
Pub., XIX (Trans., 1916-17), 273-89;
Thomas G. Morton and Frank Wood-
bury, History of the Pennsylvania
Hospital, 1751-1895 (1895); William
F. Norwood, Medical Education in
the United States Before the Civil War
(1944); William Pepper, The Medical
Side of Benjamin Franklin (1911);
Eric Stone, Medicine among the
American Indians (1932); Joseph
Toner, Contributions to the Annals of
Medical Progress and Medical Edu-
cation in the United States Before and
During the War of Independence
(1874); James J. Walsh, History of
Medicine in New York (5 vols., 1919);
Edward Warren, Life of John Warren,
M. D., Surgeon-General During the
War of the Revolution (1874); Wil-
liam Welch, "English Influence on
American Medicine in the Formative
Period of American History," in Con-
tributions to Medical and Biological
Research dedicated to Sir William
Osier (2 vols., 1919); and Stephen
Wickes, History of Medicine in New
Jersey . . . from the Settlement . . .
to . .. 1800 (1879).
Reprints of major writings in early
American medical history with useful
introductions are available in the
Bibliotheca Medica Americana (Insti-
tute of the History of Medicine, Johns
Hopkins University), which includes,
for example, Dr. John Morgan's Dis-
course Upon the Institution of Medi-
cal Schools in America (1765; re-
printed, 1937) and Daniel Drake's
Practical Essays on Medical Educa-
tion and the Medical Profession in the
United States (1832; reprinted, 1952).
A basic document for understanding
early New England medicine is the
abridged edition of Cotton Mather's
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
manuscript, "The Angel of Bethesda,"
edited with an interesting introduction
by Richard H. Shryock and Otho T.
Beall in Cotton Mather, First Signifi-
cant Figure in American Medicine
(1954); but see the criticism of the
editors' interpretations by Donald
Fleming in his review, Isis, XLVI
(1955), 374-76. Other important con-
temporary medical writings include:
Benjamin Smith Barton, Collections
for an Essay Towards a Materia
Medica of the United States (1801-4);
Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and
Observations (4th ed., 4 vols., 1815);
Johann D. Schoepf, The Climate and
Diseases of America (tr. from German
by James R. Chadwick, 1875); James
E. Smith (comp.), A Selection of the
Correspondence of Linnaeus and other
Naturalists (2 vols., 1821); John Tea-
nent, Every Man His Own Doctor:
Or, The Poor Planter's Physician
(2d ed., Williamsburg, Va., 1734);
James Thacher, American Medical
Biography (1828); and Joseph B.
Walker (ed), "Diaries of the Rev.
Timothy Walker . . . 1730 to ...
1782," New Hampshire Hist. Soc.,
Coll., IX (1889), 123-191.
A number of the more important
travel-books and historical and geo-
graphical surveys of the 18th and early
19th century were written by physi-
cians and therefore include medical
information; for example: Dr. Wil-
liam Douglass' Summary (1749-51);
Dr. Alexander Hamilton's Itinerarium
(1744; ed. Carl Bridenbaugh, 1948);
Dr. David Ramsay's History of South
Carolina (2 vols., 1809) and History
of the Revolution in South Carolina
(2 vols., 1785). For lively comments
on many aspects of medicine and so-
ciety, see The Letters of Benjamin
Rush (ed. Lyman Butterfield; 2 vols.,
Princeton, 1951).
On colonial epidemics (and espe-
cially on smallpox) there is a more
403
extensive literature than on any other
topic. The literature is still very con-
troversial; some of the ablest recent
scholars have continued the debate
between Dr. Douglass and Cotton
Mather mentioned in Ch. 35. Val-
uable general discussions of the rela-
tion of epidemics to the rise of civil-
ization are: Percy M. Ashburn, The
Ranks of Death: A Medical History of
the Conquest of America (1947) and
Henry Sigerist, Civilization and Dis-
ease (1943). The best introduction to
colonial problems is John Duffy's
scholarly and readable Epidemics in
Colonial America (1953). The best
technical study of a particular epi-
demic is Dr. Ernest Caulfield's bril-
liant examination of a diphtheria out-
break, A True History of the Terrible
Epidemic Vulgarly Called the Throat
Distemper . . . in . . . New England
Colonies Between . . . 1735 and 1740
(1939). Perry Miller discusses the
New England smallpox controversy in
The New England Mind: from Colony
to Province (1953), ch. 21; his sym-
pathy lies on the side of traditional
learning championed by Dr. William
Douglass. The more useful special
studies include: John I Barrett, 'The
Inoculation Controversy in Puritan
New England,'* Bull Hist. Med., Xtt
(1942), 169-190; H. D. Behnke,
"Colonial theories concerning the
cause of disease," Medical Life, XLI
(1934), 59-74; John B. Blake, Benja-
min Waterhouse and the Introduction
of Vaccination (1957); Edgar M.
Crookshank, History and Pathology of
Vaccination (2 vols., 1889); Reginald
H. Fitz, "Zabdiel Boylston, Inocula-
tion, and the Epidemic of Smallpox in
Boston in 1721," Johns Hopkins Hos-
pital, Bull., XXII (1911), 315-327;
George Lyman Kittredge, "Cotton
Mather's Election to the Royal So-
ciety," Col. Soc. Mass., Pub., XIV
(Trans., 1911-1913), 81-114, and
404
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
"Further Notes on Cotton Mather and
the Royal Society," 281-292, also
"Cotton Mather's Scientific Communi-
cations to the Royal Society," Am.
Antiq. Soc., Proc., N.S., XXVI (1916),
18-57, and "Some Lost Works of Cot-
ton Mather," Mass. Hist. Soc., Proc.,
XLV (1911-12), 418-479; Arnold C.
Klebs, "The Historic Evolution of
Validation," J. H. Hospital, Bull,
XXIV (1913), 69-83; Morris C.
Leikind, "Variolation in Europe and
America," Ciba Symposia, III (1941-
1942), 1090-1101, 1124, "Vaccina-
tion in Europe," 1102-1113, "The In-
troduction of Vaccination into the
United States," 1114-1124; Genevieve
Miller, "Smallpox Inoculation in Eng-
land and America: A Reappraisal,"
Wm. <fe Mary Q., 3rd Sen, XIH
(1956), 476-92, and The Adoption of
Inoculation for Smallpox in England
and France (1957); Hugh Thursfield,
"Smallpox in the American War of In-
dependence," Annals of Med. Hist,,
3rd Ser., H (1940), 312-318; and
Joseph Waring, "James Killpatrick and
Smallpox Inoculation in Charles-
town," Annals of Med. Hist., N.S., X
(1938), 301-308.
A facsimile reproduction of Thomas
Thacher's broadside, A Brief Rule to
Guide the Common-People of New
England . . . in the Small Pocks or
Measles (1677-78) is found in Biblio-
theca Medica Americana (Inst. Hist.
Med., J.H.U., No. 1, 1937). The
communication about inoculation that
started the controversy between
Mather and Douglass was Emanuel
Timonius, "An Account, or History
of the Procuring the Small Pox by
Incision, or Inoculation; as it has for
some time been Practiced at Con-
stantinople," Royal Soc., Phil. Trans.,
XXIX (1714-16), 72-82. Sbme of the
more interesting contemporary writ-
ings on colonial diseases and epidemics
are: William Currie, An Historical
Account of the Climates and Diseases
of the United States (1792), Memoirs
of the Yellow Fever ( 1798 ) , A View of
the Diseases Most Prevalent in the
United States . . . at Different Seasons
of the Year (1811), and (with Isaac
Cathrall) Facts and Observations
Relative to the Origins, Progress, and
Nature of the Fever . . . in . . . Phila-
delphia (1802); William Douglass, A
Practical Essay Concerning the Small
Pox (Boston, 1730), The Practical
History of a New Epidemical Eruptive
Miliary Fever . . . in the Years 1735
and 1736 (Boston, 1736); Dr. Fan-
cher, "Progress of Vaccination in
America," Mass. Hist. Soc., Co//., 2d
Ser., IV (1816), 97; Benjamin Gale,
"Historical Memoirs, Relating to the
Practice of Inoculation for the Small
Pox in the American Provinces, Partic-
ularly in New England," Royal Soc.,
Phil. Trans., LV (1765), 193-204;
James Kirkpatrick, A Full and Clear
Reply to Doct. Thomas Dale Wherein
the Real Impropriety of Blistering with
Catharides in the . . . Small Pox is
Plainly Demonstrated (Charleston,
1739), The Analysis of Inoculation
(2d ed,, London, 1761), An Essay on
Inoculation, Occasioned by the Small-
pox being Brought into South Caro-
lina in the Year 1738 (London, 1743) ;
"Extracts of two Letters from Dr.
John Lining, Physician at Charles-
Town in South Carolina . . . Giving an
Account of Statical Experiments Made
Several Times in a Day Upon Him-
self, for One Whole Year," Royal
Soc., Phil. Trans. t XLE (1742-43),
491-509; "An Extract of Several Let-
ters from Cotton Mather D.D. to
John Woodward, M.D. . . ." Royal
Soc., Phil. Trans., XXIX (1714-16),
61-72; Increase Mather, Several Rea-
sons Proving the Inoculating or Trans-
planting the Small Pox is a Lawful
Practice and that it has been Blessed
by God for the Saving of Many a
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Life, with Cotton Mather, Sentiments
on the Small Pox Inoculated (1721;
reprinted with intro. by George Ly-
man Kittredge, 1921); Richard Mead,
A Discourse on the Small Pox and
Measles (1747); "Account of the Yel-
low Fever which Prevailed in Virginia
in the Years 1737, 1741 and 1742, in
a Letter to the Late Cadwallader
Colden, esq. of New York, from the
Late John Mitchell, M.D., F.R.S., of
Virginia," American Medical and
Philosophical Register, IV (1814; on
microfilm in Amer. Periodical Series,
Ser. 2.); Henry Newman, "The Way
of Proceeding in the Small Pox In-
oculated in New England," Royal
Soc., Phil. Trans., XXXII (1722-23),
33-35; Thomas Nettleton, "A letter
from Dr. Nettleton, Physician at Hali-
fax in Yorkshire, to Dr. Whitaker,
Concerning the Inoculation of the
Small Pox," Royal Soc., Phil. Trans.,
XXXII (1722-23), 35-48, and an-
other letter at 49-52; Noah Webster,
A Collection of Papers on the Subject
of Bilious Fevers, Prevalent in the
United States for a Few Years Past
(1796) and A Brief History of Epi-
demic and Pestilential Diseases (2
vols., 1799).
PART NINE
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE
We do not yet possess a compre-
hensive history of science or technol-
ogy in colonial America, or for any
other era of our history. The closest
approach to it is Brooke Hindle's Pur-
suit of Science in Revolutionary Amer-
ica, 1735-1789 (1956). Donald Flem-
ing will soon publish his three-volume
history of American science and tech-
nology which should provide a much
needed general guide. An admirable
survey of the present state of the sub-
405
ject, with references to the most im-
portant printed works and to promis-
ing areas of research, is Whitfield J.
Bell, Jr., Early American Science:
Needs and Opportunities for Study
(1955), the first of a valuable series
of prospectuses published by the In-
stitute of Early American History and
Culture, Williamsburg, Va.
One must rely heavily on periodical
literature: especially on the publica-
tions of the American Philosophical
Society and of the Royal Society of
London; on Isis: International Review
Devoted to the History of Science and
its Cultural Influences (Cambridge,
Mass., 1913 to date), the beneficiary
of the masterful editing of George
Sarton, and now of I. Bernard Cohen;
on Osiris: Studies on the History and
Philosophy of Science and on the His-
tory of Learning and Culture (Bruges,
1936 to date); and on the professional
and historical journals of different
scientific specialties.
Among the more valuable items
which touch on colonial science in
general are: Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., "The
Scientific Environment of Philadel-
phia, 1775-1790," A.P.S., Proc. 9 XCII
(1948), 6-14; Frederick E. Brasch,
"The Newtonian Epoch in the Amer-
ican Colonies (1680-1783)," Am.
Antiq. Soc., Proc., N.S., XLIX (1939),
314-32, and "The Royal Society of
London and its Influence upon Sci-
entific Thought in the American
Colonies," Scientific Monthly, XXXHI
(1931), 336-55, 448-69; C. A.
Browne, "Scientific Notes from the
Books and Letters of John Winthrop,
Jr.," Isis, XL (1928), 325-42; Roger
Burlingame, March of the Iron Men:
A Social History of Union Through
Invention (1949); I. Bernard Cohen,
Some Early Tools of American Science
(1950); Margaret Denny, "The Royal
Society and American Scholars,"
Scientific Monthly, LXV (1947), 415-
406
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
27; Courtney R. Hall, A Scientist in
the Early Republic; Samuel Latham
Mitchell 1764-1831 (1934); Henry
E. Huntington Library and Art Gal-
lery, San Marino, CaL, Science and
the New World: an Exhibition to
Illustrate the Scientific Contributions
of the New World and the Spread of
Scientific Ideas in America (1937);
Brooke Hindle, 'The Quaker Back-
ground and Science in Colonial Phila-
delphia," Isis, XLVI (1955), 243-50;
Theodore Hornberger, "The Scientific
Ideas of John Mitchell," Huntington
Lib. Q. t X (1946-47), 277-296, "Sam-
uel Lee (1625-1691), A Clerical
Channel for the Flow of New Ideas
to Seventeenth-Century New Eng-
land," Osiris, I (1936), 341-55, "The
Science of Thomas Prince," N.E.Q.,
IX (1936), 26-42, Scientific Thought
in the American Colleges, 1638-1800
(1948); Hornberger's edition of
Charles Morton's Compendium Physi-
cae (1687) (Col. Soc. Mass., Pub.,
XXXffl) which, with an introduction
by Samuel Eliot Morison, is invalu-
able for its glimpse of what Harvard
students were learning at the end of
the 17th century; Frederick G. Kil-
gour, "Rise of Scientific Thought in
Colonial New England," Yale Journal
of Biology and Medicine, XXH (1949),
123-130; Flora Masson, Robert Boyle
(1914); Robert H. Murray, Dublin
University and the New World (1921);
John W. Oliver, History of American
Technology (1956); Richard H.
Shryock, 'The Need for Studies in the
History of American Science," Isis,
XXXV (1944), 10-13; Raymond P.
Stearns, "Colonial Fellows of the
Royal Society of London, 1661-1778,"
Osiris, VIE (1948), 73-121; Dirk J.
Struik, Yankee Science in the Making
(1948), an elementary interpretation
of the history of technology from a
Marxist point of view; "Symposium
on the Early History of Science and
Learning in America," A.P.S., Proc.,
LXXXVI (1942), 1-204; Charles O.
Thompson, "Robert Boyle: A Study in
Biography," Am. Antiq. Soc., Proc.,
N.S., H (1882-83), 54-79; Lyon G.
Tyler, "Virginia's Contribution to
Science," Am. Antiq. Soc., Proc., N.S.,
XXV (1915), 358-374; Charles R.
Weld, A History of the Royal So-
ciety (2 vols., 1848); A. Wolf's two-
volume reference work on the history
of science, technology, and philosophy
(16th and 17th centuries, 1935; 18th
century, 1939).
Lacking a good general history of
colonial astronomy, our best approach
is through the work of one of the
leading colonial astronomers like John
Winthrop IV (1714-1779) or David
Rittenhouse (1732-1796). On Win-
throp see Frederick E. Brasch, "John
Winthrop ( 17 14-1779) , America's
First Astronomer, and the Science of
His Period," Astronomical Society of
the Pacific, Pub. f XXVIII (1916),
153-170, and "Newton's First Critical
Disciple in the American Colonies
John Winthrop," in Sir Isaac Newton,
1727-1927. A Bicentenary Evaluation
(1928), 301-338; Frederick G. Kil-
gour, "Professor John Winthrop's
Notes on Sun Spot Observations
(1739)," Isis, XXIX (1938), 355-361.
Winthrop's own writings are scarce,
but the more available are: Two Lec-
tures on Comets (reprinted, Boston,
1811; in John Crerar Library, Chi-
cago); A Lecture on Earthquakes
(Boston, 1750; U. of 111. microfilm);
Relation of a Voyage from Boston to
Newfoundland, for the Observation of
the Transit of Venus, June 6, 1761
(Boston, 1761; in Brown U. Library);
Two Lectures on the Parallax and
Distance of the Sun as Deductible
from the Transit of Venus (Boston,
1769; in John Crerar Library, Chi-
cago); "Extract of a Letter from John
Winthrop ... to B. Franklin . . ."
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Royal Soc., Phil Trans., LX (1770),
358-362, and the correspondence be-
tween Winthrop and John Adams,
Mass. Hist. Soc., Coll, 5th Series, IV
(1878), 289-313.
The best introduction to Ritten-
house is through Howard C. Rice Jr.,
The Rittenhouse Orrery: Princeton's
Eighteenth-Century Planetarium, 7767.
1954; A Commentary on an ExhibU
tion held in the Princeton University
Library (Princeton U. Library, 1954),
which offers a great deal more than its
limited title would suggest. William
Barton, Memoirs of the Life of David
Rittenhouse (1813), is still the best
biographical source, and reprints
items by Rittenhouse. See also: Maur-
ice J. Babb, "David Rittenhouse,"
Penn. Mag. Hist. & Biog., LVT (1932),
193-224; Thomas D. Cope, "David
Rittenhouse Physicist," Journal of
the Franklin Institute, CCXV (1933),
287-297; Edward Ford, David Ritten-
house: Astronomer Patriot, 1732-
1796 (1946). Brooke Hindle is writing
a full-length biography of Rittenhouse.
The history of American survey-
ing in which Rittenhouse played a
leading role also needs treatment. For
some interesting suggestions, see:
Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps
(1949); Thomas D. Cope, "Collect-
ing Source Material about Charles
Mason and Jeremiah Dixon," A.P.S.,
Proc., XCII (1948), 111-114; William
D. Pattison, Beginnings of the Amer-
ican Rectangular Land Survey Sys-
tem, 1784-1800 (Research Paper, No.
50, Dept. of Geography, University
of Chicago, 1958).
Colonial writings on astronomy and
mathematics which are of special in-
terest include: Cadwallader Colden,
The Principles of Action in Matter,
the Gravitation of Bodies, and the
Motion of the Planets, Explained from
those Principles (London, 1751);
Samuel Danforth, An Astronomical
407
Description of the Late Comet or
Blazing Star as it Appeared in New
England in . . . 1664 (Cambridge,
Mass., 1665); Increase Mather,
Kometographia, or A Discourse Con-
cerning Comets (Boston, 1683; Univ.
Microfilms, Am. Culture Series, No.
83, Roll 8); and the valuable col-
lection, "Mathematical and Astronom-
ical Papers," American Philosophi-
cal Society, Trans., I (1771), 1-180. A
good source for popular astronomy is
the colonial almanac (see Part XII,
below). For a suggestive essay on one
aspect of this history see Andrew D.
White, A History of the Doctrine of
Comets (1887).
For our knowledge of colonial
physics, electricity, and the place of
Franklin in the history of physical
science, we owe most to the scholarly
and readable works of I. Bernard
Cohen. The basic book for this subject
is Cohen's edition (with an introduc-
tion) of Benjamin Franklin's Experi-
ments and Observations on Electricity
(1941). Cohen offers books for any
taste: a brief anthology and commen-
tary for the general reader, Benjamin
Franklin: His Contribution to the
American Tradition (1953) or a mas-
sive monograph, Franklin and New-
ton: An Inquiry into Speculative New-
tonian Experimental Science and
Franklin's Work in Electricity as an
Example Thereof (in Memoirs of the
American Philosophical Society, VoL
XLm, 1956). I incline toward the em-
phasis found in Cohen's earlier rather
than in his later works. Although
Cohen seems to draw other morals
from the voluminous data collected in
his latest study (1956), in my opinion
he does not succeed in disproving his
earlier suggestions that Franklin's im-
portant contributions owed much to
his independent naivet6. In Cohen's
six-hundred-odd pages of fascinating
detail, the reader still finds strikingly
408
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
little evidence of any direct influence
of Newton's writings on Franklin
much less of Franklin's understanding
of the subtleties of Newton's theories.
From it all, I still have the picture of
Franklin as a brilliant amateur.
On Franklin's knowledge of science,
on electricity, lightning-rods, and the
history of their introduction, the fol-
lowing are valuable: I. Bernard
Cohen, "How Practical was Benjamin
Franklin's Science?" Penn. Mag. Hist.
& Biog., LXIX (1945), 284-93, and
"Prejudice against the Introduction of
Lightning Rods," Franklin Inst., Jour-
nal, CCLIH (1952), 393-440; Austin
K. Gray, Benjamin Franklin's Library
( 1936) ; Zoltan Haraszti, "Young John
Adams on Franklin's Iron Points,"
Isis, XL! (1950), 11-14; Basil F. J.
Schonland, The Flight of Thunder-
bolts (1950); Eleanor M. Tilton,
"Lightning Rods and the Earthquake
of 1755," N.E.Q., Xm (1940), 85-97;
Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin
(1938). For a sidelight on the light-
ning-rod controversy, see Thomas
Prince, Earthquakes, The Works of
God (Boston, 1755).
For colonial agriculture, useful sur-
veys are found in the works by Bid-
well and Falconer, and by Gray listed
in the General section above. Many
little-known facts and some stimu-
lating generalizations are in Lyman
Carrier, The Beginnings of Agricul-
ture in America (1923). A still very
suggestive pioneer monograph on the
relation between agricultural tech-
nology and social history is Avery O.
Craven, Soil Exhaustion as a Factor
in the Agricultural History of Virginia
and Maryland, 1606-1860 (1926). In
the Columbia University Studies in the
History of American Agriculture we
have excellent reprint editions with
valuable introductions of basic works
of the colonial era: Tared Eliot, Essays
Upon Field Husbandry in New Eng-
land, And Other Papers, 1748-1762
(ed. Harry J. Carman and Rexford
G. Tugwell, 1935); and American
Husbandry (1775), the most compre-
hensive and detailed 18th-century sur-
vey (ed. Harry J. Carman, 1939).
These are surprisingly readable works,
which even the non-specialist can
enjoy. An especially valuable descrip-
tion of the problems of one part of
the country is Robert R. Walcott,
"Husbandry in Colonial New Eng-
land," N.E.Q., DC (1936), 218-252.
Some items which give glimpses of
different sides of this varied and com-
plex subject are: E. Alexander Berg-
strom, "English Game Laws and
Colonial Food Shortages," N.E.Q.,
XII (1939), 681-690; Beverly W.
Bond, The Quit-Rent System in the
American Colonies (1919); Thomas
S. Brewer, "Agricultural Conditions
in Colonial Pennsylvania" (unpub-
lished Master's Thesis, Dept. of His-
tory, University of Chicago, 1915);
Kathleen Bruce, "Materials for Vir-
ginia Agricultural History," Agricul-
tural History, IV (1930), 10-14; S. J.
and E. H. Buck, The Planting of Civil-
ization in Western Pennsylvania
(1939); Jesse Buel: Agricultural Re-
former; Selections from his Writings
(ed. Harry J. Carman, 1947); David
Doar, Rice and Rice Planting in the
South Carolina Low Country (1936);
Everett E. Edwards (ed.) Jefferson
and Agriculture (U. S. Dept. of
Agric., 1943); Amelia Clewley Ford,
Colonial Precedents of our National
Land System (1910); W. Neil Frank-
lin, "Agriculture in Colonial North
Carolina," No. Car. Hist. Rev., Ill
(1926), 539-47; Norman S. B. Gras,
History of Agriculture in Europe and
America (1940); Ulysses P. Hedrick,
A History of Agriculture in the State
of New York (1933); Duncan C.
Heyward, Seed from Madagascar
(1937), a discussion of the origins of
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
rice-culture in South Carolina; Arthur
H. Hirsch, "French Influence on
American Agriculture in the Colonial
Period . . . ," Agric. Hist., IV (1930),
1-9; Edward H. Jenkins, Connecticut
Agriculture (1926); W. A. Low, "The
Farmer in Post Revolutionary Vir-
ginia, 1783-1789," Agric. Hist., XXV
(1951), 122-27; Thomas Mairs, Some
Pennsylvania Pioneers in Agricultural
Science (1928); Deane Phillips, Horse
Raising in Colonial New England
(1922); U. B. Phillips, American
Negro Slavery (1918); Aaron M.
Sakolski, Land Tenure and Land Tax-
ation in America (1957); Carl O.
Sauer, *The Settlement of the Humid
East," Climate and Man (U.S. Dept.
Agric., Yearbook, 1941) , 157-166;
Joseph Schafer, The Social History of
American Agriculture (1936); Rich-
ard H. Shiyock, "British Versus
German Traditions in Colonial Agri-
culture,*' Mississippi Valley Hist.
Rev., XXVI (1939-40), 39-54; Carl
R. Woodward, Ploughs and Politicks:
Charles Read of New Jersey and His
Notes on Agriculture, 1715-1774
(1941), The Development of Agricul-
ture in New Jersey, 1640-1880 (1927),
and "Agricultural Legislation in Colo-
nial New Jersey," Agric. Hist., Ill
(1929), 15-28; Harry A. Wright, "The
Technique of Seventeenth Century
Indian-Land Purchasers," Essex Inst.,
Hist. Coll, LXXVH (1941), 185-97.
Especially valuable early American
writings on agriculture include: John
Beale Bordley, Essays and Notes on
Husbandry and Rural Affairs (2d
ed., Phila., 1801), Sketches on Rota-
tions of Crops and Other Rural Mat-
ters (Phila., 1796); Samuel Deane,
The New England Farmer (2d ed.
Worcester, Mass., 1797); J. D. B.
De Bow, "Indian Corn," De Bow's
Review, I (1846), 465-497; William
Erving, "Premiums Offered by the
Committee of the American Academy
409
of Arts and Sciences, Appointed for
Promoting Agriculture," American
Museum, II (1787), 355-56; Joseph
Greenleaf, "Experiments for Raising
Indian Corn in Poor Land," Am. Mus.,
I (1787), 39-40; Thomas Nairn, Letter
from South Carolina (2d ed., London,
1732); Benjamin Rush, "An Account
of the Manners of the German In-
habitants of Pennsylvania" (ed.
Theodore E. Schmauk, in Penn.-Ger-
man Soc., Proc., XIX, 1908); James
Tilton, "Queries on the Present State
of Husbandry and Agriculture in the
State of Delaware," Am. Mus., V
(1789), 375-82; J. Warren, "Observa-
tions on Agriculture its Advantages
and the Causes that have in Amer-
ica Prevented Improvements in Hus-
bandry," Am. Mus., H (1787), 344-
348; and the revealing Letters on
Agriculture from . . . George Wash-
ington . . . to Arthur Young . . . and
Sir John Sinclair, ed. Franklin Knight
(1847).
BOOK THREE
LANGUAGE AND THE
PRINTED WORD
PART TEN
THE NEW UNIFORMITY
Although our language, like our
law, is one of the most characteristic
developments of American culture,
its history also has been neglected by
general students of American history.
But the history of the American
language has been the object of com-
prehensive and intensive recent study
by specialists, who have been among
the wittiest and most literate of our
social historians. The absence of any
adequate contemporary system of
410
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
phonetics for recording the actual
sounds as spoken in the early days
has left this field open for speculation.
The starting-point is a work of na-
tional piety, likely to be the most du-
rable and ironical literary remain
of H* L. Mencken: The American
Language (1937), The American Lan-
guage: Supplement One (1945; chs.
1-6), The American Language: Supple-
ment Two (1948; chs. 7-11). A new
combined edition of these volumes is
in preparation by Raven I. McDavid,
Jr. Another basic work is George
Philip Krapp, The English Language
in America (2 vols., 1925), less witty
than Mencken, but still highly read-
able. He is less inclined than Mencken
to note novelties in the American
language. But he, too, is at home hi
the history of our culture, and his
vision is sometimes broader than
Mencken's. An indispensable reference
work is Mitford M. Mathews' prodi-
gious Dictionary of Americanisms on
Historical Principles (2 vols,, 1951;
one-volume edition, 1956) which
should be on the desk of every serious
student of American history, and which
is now available in a moderately
priced one-volume edition. Mathews'
work, which aims to trace the history
of all words or expressions originat-
ing in the United States, builds on
Sir William A. Craigie and J. R. Hul-
bert, Dictionary of American English
on Historical Principles (4 vols., 1938-*
44).
Two delightful, suggestive, and brief
recent surveys, admirably suited for
the non-specialist are Thomas Pyles,
Words and Ways of American English
(1952) and Albert Marckwardt, Amer-
ican English (1958). A stimulating
application of a developmental ap-
proach to language is Donald J. Lloyd
and Harry R. Warfel, American Eng-
lish in its Cultural Setting (1956), a
college textbook.
Here too, anyone seriously interested
must get into the periodical literature,
especially into such journals as Amer-
ican Speech, Dialect Notes, and Pub-
lications of the Modern Language
Association. Some of the best articles
for the non-specialist have been writ-
ten by Allen Walker Read: "The
Spelling Bee: A Linguistic Institution
of the American Folk," P.M.L.A., LVI
(1941), 495-512, "British Recognition
of American Speech in the Eighteenth
Century," Dialect Notes, VI (1928-
39), 313-334, and "Dunglison's Glos-
sary, 1829-1830," Dialect Notes, V
(1918-1927), 422-32. Some other
valuable articles of interest to the
non-specialist are: Henry Alexander,
'The Language of the Salem Witch-
craft Trials," American Speech, III
(1927-1928), 390-400; Frank E. Bry-
ant, "On the Conservatism of Lan-
guage in a New Country," P.M.L.A.,
XXH (1907), 277-90; J. H. Combs,
"Old, Early and Elizabethan English
in the Southern Mountains," Dialect
Notes, IV (1913-1917), 283-97; "Co-
lonial and Early Pioneer Words,"
Dialect Notes, IV, 375-385; A. R.
Dunlap, " 'Vicious' Pronunciations in
Eighteenth-Century English," Am.
Speech, XV (1940), 364-67; C. H.
Grandgent, "From Franklin to Lowell:
A Century of New England Pronuncia-
tion," P.M.L.A., XIV (1899), 207-
39; Leon Howard, "A Historical Note
on American English," Am. Speech,
II (1926-1927), 497-99, and "Toward
a Historical Aspect of American
Speech Consciousness," Am. Speech,
V (1929-1930), 301-5; George H. Mc-
Knight, "Conservatism in American
Speech," Am. Speech, I (1925-1926),
1-17; Albert Mathews, "The Term
State-House," Dialect Notes, n (1900-
1904), 199-224; Louise Pound, "Re-
search in American English," Am.
Speech, V (1929-1930), 359-65; Evan
T. Sage, "Classical Place-Names in
America," Am. Speech, IV (1928-
1929), 261-71; Charles W. Townsend,
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
"Concerning Briticisms," Am. Speech,
VH (1931-1932), 219-222; Harold
Whitehall, "The Quality of the Front
Reduction Vowel in Early American
English," Am. Speech, XV (1940),
136-43, and "An Elusive Development
of 'Short O' in Early American Eng-
lish," Am. Speech, XVI (1941), 192-
203; William H. Whitmore, "Origin
of the Names of Towns in Massa-
chusetts," Mass. Hist. Soc., Proc., XU
(1871-1873), 393-419.
Monographs of particular interest
include: Richard M. Dorson, Jonathan
Draws the Long Bow (1946), on
early New England folklore; Gordon
V. Carey, American into English: A
Handbook for Translators (London,
1953); Henry Cabot Lodge, 'The
Decline of Colonialism," in Studies in
History (1884); Mitford M. Mathews,
Some Sources of Southernisms (1948)
and (ed.) The Beginnings of American
English: Essays and Comments ( 193 1 ) ;
Anders Orbeck, Early New England
Pronunciation, as Reflected in Some
Seventeenth Century Town Records
of Eastern Massachusetts (1927),
which ingeniously uses the naive spell-
ings of early scribes to help discover
their pronunciation; Robert E. Spiller,
Fenimore Cooper, Critic of His Time
(1931); G. R. Stewart, Names on the
Land (1945), a popular study of
place-names; Richard H. Thornton,
An American Glossary (3 vols., 1912-
1939); Jacob H. Wild, Glimpses of
the American Language and Civiliza-
tion (Bern, Switzerland, 1945). See
Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin
(1938), for Franklin's attitude toward
style and for his efforts at spelling-
reform.
In one sense, of course, every work
written in America illustrates the
history of the American language.
Some of the writings which explicitly
discuss the early condition of the
language include: James Fenimore
Cooper, "Home as Found," in Com-
411
plete Works (N.Y., 1893, Vol. XIV)
and Notions of the Americans (2 vols.,
1828); Nicholas Cresswell, Journal,
1774-1777 (reprinted, 1924); Jacob
Duche, Caspipina's Letters (1774),
sometimes known as Observations;
Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers
Fithian, 1773-1774 (ed. Hunter D.
Parish, 1943); Benjamin Franklin,
Autobiography (Modern Library ed.,
1932); Bret Harte, *The Spelling Bee
at Angels," in Writings (1910), XII,
183-188; Hugh Jones, An Accidence
to the English Tongue . . . Consider-
ing the True Manner of Reading,
Writing and Talking Proper English
(London, 1724) and The Present State
of Virginia (1724; ed. Richard L.
Morton, 1956); James Kirke Paulding,
"A Sketch of Old New England, by
a New England Man," in Richard
Phillips (ed.), New Voyages and
Travels (9 vols., 1820-1823, Vol.
VIII) and The Bulls and Jonathans
(1867, reprinting two earlier works
comparing Englishmen and Ameri-
cans); John Pickering, A Vocabulary
. . . of Words and Phrases . . . Peculiar
to the United States (Boston, 1816);
John Witherspoon, Works (2d ed.,
4 vols., 1802), which includes the im-
portant Druid papers.
The comments of English and other
travelers and essayists are of varying
reliability on the actual state of the
language, but they are expressed with
an almost uniform dogmatism. Some
of the more interesting of these which
touch on the American language are:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on
His Own Times, forming a Second
Series of The Friend (3 vols,, 1850);
William Eddis, Letters from America
. . . from 1769 to 1777 (London,
1792); Basil Hall, Travels in North
America in... 1827 and 1828 (3 vols.,
Edinburgh, 1829); Alexis de Tocque-
ville, Democracy in America (2 vols.,
ed. Phillips Bradley, 1945).
The best introduction to Noah
412
The Americans THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Webster is his own introduction to
his American Dictionary of the English
Language (2 vote., N.Y., 1828); then
one should read his Dissertations on
the English Language (1789; fac-
simile with intro. by Harry R. Warfel,
1951). Other important works by
Webster are: A Grammatical Institute,
of the English Language (3 vols., Hart-
ford, Conn., 1783-1785), the first part
of which became his famous blue-
back speller; Compendious Dictionary
of the English Language (1806), the
earlier form of his more famous
American Dictionary; An American
Selection of Lessons in Reading and
Speaking (Phila., 1807); and his Let-
ters (ed. Harry R. Warfel, 1953).
The best biographies are Harry R.
Warfel, Noah Webster, Schoolmaster
to America (1936) and Ervin C.
Shoemaker, Noah Webster, Pioneer of
Learning (1936).
An interesting analogy to Ameri-
can linguistic conservatism, and an
opportunity to compare the problems
in a field where difficulties of trans-
portation were more important, is the
story of the log-cabin in America, On
the Atlantic seaboard, despite the
greater cost and inferior durability of
the clapboard house, the early settlers
clung to the English-type dwellings.
The story is delightfully told and copi-
ously illustrated in Harold R. Shurt-
leff, The Log Cabin Myth (1939),
which every student of the emergence
of American (or other colonial) cul-
ture should read.
PART ELEVEN
CULTURE WITHOUT A CAPITAL
The student of the history of read-
ing habits will soon discover how
little we know about what people ac-
tually read in the past. Literary his-
torians have devoted themselves
mostly to chronicling what was writ-
ten, or rather what has been printed.
Intellectual historians tend to be pre-
occupied with the mere presence of a
book in a certain place. Social histo-
rians have given some attention to
the composition of libraries and to the
books sold or bought. But what people
actually read is a fact almost as private
and inaccessible as what they thought.
We do not have even an approximate
record of the actual reading as con-
trasted with the book-buying, or book-
ownership of any major figure in our
past. We might be astonished at the
meagreness of a full and accurate list
of the reading, say of Washington. In
a few instances such as the Com-
monplace Books (edited by Gilbert
Chinard, 1926, 1928) in which Jef-
ferson transcribed passages and made
notes of some of his reading for cer-
tain years; or John Adams' library
marginalia (edited and interpreted by
Zoltan Haraszti, under the title John
Adams and the Prophets of Progress,
1952) we have first-hand evidence of
actual reading habits. Occasionally ac-
cidents and odd facts help us. For
example, the fire which destroyed the
collection of the Library Company
of Providence, R. I., on Christmas
Eve, 1758, but which left unharmed
the Register Book and the books actu-
ally in the hands of borrowers, gives
us a tantalizing glimpse of the pattern
of library-circulation although not
necessarily of reading. See Jesse H.
Shera, Foundations of the Public
Library (1949), 117 ff.
Historians have tended to be satis-
fied with mere circumstantial evidence.
But everyone knows from his personal
experience that the purchase of a book
is sometimes a substitute for the read-
ing of it; we would all be flattered to
think that the contents of our libraries
had got into our heads. Many volumes
from the 17th and 18th centuries sur-
vive with uncut pages or in mint con-
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
dition. While seldom admitting it, we
have been inclined to study the literary
furnishings of past houses as if they
were the furnishings of past minds.
Partly because of the special difficul-
ties of the subject, and partly because
of the bias of our literary scholars, I,
too, have in Part XI come at reading
habits indirectly mainly through the
contents of libraries and the character
of the book-trade.
The most important evidence of
everyday reading habits sometimes is
self-destroying. Hornbooks, primers,
and newspapers tend to be used up,
and the items best preserved (and
hence often most prominent in schol-
ars' lists) are often preserved because
they were not much used.
For general social history, for urban
life, and for the differences between
different parts of the colonies, many
of the most valuable items will be
found in the bibliographical notes
above, especially the General section,
and Parts I-IV. For the paths from
social history to the history of read-
ing habits, the writings of Carl Briden-
baugh, Louis B. Wright, and Lawrence
C. Wroth are especially valuable. All
Bridenbaugh's works throw light on
the context of the literary culture: for
urban life in general his work is defi-
nitive; for the South, see his Myths
and Realities: Societies of the Colo-
nial South; for Philadelphia (with
Jessica Bridenbaugh) his Rebels and
Gentlemen (1942); and see his "The
Press and Book in Eighteenth Cen-
tury Philadelphia," Penn. Mag. Hist. &
3iog. t LXV (1941), 1-30. Wright's
First Gentlemen of Virginia; Intellec-
tual Qualities of the Early Colonial
Ruling Class (1940) is indispensable
for its wealth of detail and its judicious
generalizations; see also his impor-
tant article, "The Purposeful Reading
of Our Colonial Ancestors," ELH: A
Journal of English Literary History,
413
IV (1937), 85-111, 'The Classical
Tradition in Colonial Virginia," Bibli-
ographical Society of America, Papers 
