Early American Literature

1620-1820

Long before Captain John Smith established Jamestown in 1607, the European

imagination had been entranced by rumors of the New World’s plenty. But it was

probably Captain Smith, rather than any other, who convinced English readers

that there was an earthy paradise not far from their shores. In his Description of

New England (1616) he wrote that “Here nature and liberty afford us that freely

which in England we want [lack], or it costs us dearly.” What greater satisfaction

is there, he asked, “pretty sport” to “pull up two pence, six pence, and twelve

pence” as fast as you can let out a line? One hundred twenty-five years later

another Virginia planter, William Byrd, would add to the fabled accounts of the

place in his History of the Dividing Line, and it is significant that Thomas

Jefferson’s one book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785, 1787), was written in

response to inquiries made by a French naturalist concerning the geography and

resources of his state. William Bartram, of Philadelphia, charmed both

Wordsworth and Coleridge with his travels though North and South Carolina in

the 1770s. His descriptions of sun-filled pastures and awesome waterfalls

convinced them that the landscape of our dreams is grounded on reality. European

readers for three centuries were anxious to sort American fable from fact, but as

Smith’s Description convinced them, the facts themselves were fabulous.

THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT: PLYMOUTH PLANTATION

Although those separatists from the Church of England whom we call “Pilgrims”

were familiar with Captain Smith’s Description and followed his map of the

Atlantic coast, they were not sympathetic to his proposal that he join their

emigration to the New World; for Smith was primarily an adventurer, explorer,

and trader, and while this group was not composed enterily of “reborn” Christians

(only about twenty-seven of the one hundred persons aboard the Mayflower were

Puritans), and even those were not indifferent to the material well-being of their

venture, their leaders had more in mind than mercantile success. These pilgrims

thought of themselves as soldiers in a war against Satan-the Arch-Enemy-who

planned to ruin the Kingdom of God on earth by sowing discord among those who

professed to be Christians. This small band of believers saw no hope of reforming

a national church and its Anglican hierarchy from within. In 1608, five years after

the death of Queen Elizabeth and with an enemy of Puritanism, James Stuart, on

the throne, they left Endland and settled in Holland, where, William Bradford tells

us, they saw “fair and beautiful cities” and the “grisly face of poverty”

confronting them. Isolated their language, and unable to farm, they turned to

mastering trades(Bradford himself became a weaver). Later, fearing that they

would eventually lose their identity as a religious community living as strangers in

a foreign land, they applied for a charter to settle in the Virginia Plantation- a vast

tract of land which included what is now New England. Sponsored who were

anxious to receive repayment in goods from the New World, they sailed from

Southampton, England, in September 1620. Sixty-six days later, taken by strong

winds much farther north than they had anticipated, they dropped anchor at Cape

Cod and established their colony at Plymouth.

In spite of the fact that their separatism does not make them representative of the

large number of emigrants who came to these shores in the seventeenth

century(Plymouth was eventually absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony in

1691 when a new charter was negotiated), their story has become an integral part

of our literature. Bradford’s account of a chosen people, exiles in a “howling

wilderness,” who struggled against all adversity to bring into being the City of

God on earth, is ingrained in our national consciousness. Both in the nineteenth

century and in the twentieth, Americans have seen themselves as a “redeemer

nation,” without, of course, possessing Bradford’s Christian ideals. What gives

Bradford’s book its great strength, in spite of his of obvious prejudices, is his

ability to keep the ideals of the Pilgrims before us as he describes the harsh reality

of their struggle against not only the external forces of nature but the even more

damaging corruption of worldliness within the community.

THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT: THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY

Far more representative in attitude toward the Church of England were the

Puritans who joined the Massachusetts Bay Colony under the leadership of John

Winthrop. They were dissenting but non-separating – although it might be argued

the geographical distance from London, and charter which located the seat of their

colony in Boston, left them non-separating in theory rather than practice.

Whatever their difference with respect to the Church of England, however, the

basic beliefs of both groups were identical: both held with Martin Luther that no

pope or bishop had a right to impose any law upon a Christian soul without

consent and, following John Calvin, that God chose freely those He would save

and those He would damn eternally.

Too much can be made of this doctrine of election; those who have not

read the actual Puritan sermons often come away from secondary sources with the

mistaken notion that Puritans talked about nothing but damnation. Puritans did

indeed hold that God had chosen, before their birth, those whom He wished to

save; but it does not follow that the Puritans considered most of us to be born

damned. While Puritans argued that Adam broke the “Covenant of Works” (the

promise God made obeyed God’s commandments) when he disobeyed and ate of

the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thereby bringing sin and death into the

world, their central doctrine was new “Covenant of Grace,” a binding agreement

Christ made with all men who believed in him, and which he sealed with his

Crucifixion, promising them eternal life. Puritans thus addressed themselves not

to the hopelessly unregenerate but to the indifferent, and they addressed the heart

more often than the mind, always distinguishing between “historical” or rational

understanding and heartfelt “saving faith.” There is more joy in Puritan life and

thought than we often credit, and this joy is the direct result of meditation on the

doctrine of Christ’s redeeming power. Edward Taylor is not alone in making his

rapturous litany of Christ’s attributes: “He is altogether lovely in everything,

lovely in His person, lovely in His natures, lovely in His properties, lovely in His

offices, lovely in His titles, lovely in His practice, lovely in His purchases and

lovely in His relations.” All of Taylor’s art is a meditation on the miraculous gift

of the Incarnation, and, in this respect, his sensibility is typically Puritan. Anne

Bradstreet, who is remarkably frank about confessing her religious doubts, told

her children that it was “upon this rock Christ Jesus” that she built her faith.

Their lives, however, were hard. Anne Bradstreet’s father told people in

England to come over and joint them if their lives were “endued with grace,” but

that others were “not fitted for this business”; that there was not a house where

one had not died, and that if they survived the terrible winter they had to face the

devastating infections that were the result of summer heat. Bradford’s account of

what he called “the starving time” are among the most moving in his history, and

nothing in Captain Smith’s Discovery had hinted at how oppressive daily life

might be. Sarah Kemble Knight of Boston and her Maryland counterpart Ebenezer

Cooker provide healthy antidotes to any sentimental notion we might have that

life on the frontier was invigorating. Puritan letters, diaries, histories, and poetry

all attest to their faith in a larger plan, a “noble design” as Cotton Mather put it,

which made daily the bearable.

In this Christocentric world it is not surprising that Puritans held to the

strictest requirements regarding communion, or, as they preferred to call it, the

Lord’s Supper. It was the most important of the two sacraments they recognized

(baptism being the other), and they guarded it with a zeal which set them apart

from all other dissenting churches. In the beginning, communion was taken only

by church (or “relation”) of their conversion – and was regarded as a sign of

election. This insistence on challenging their members made these New England

churches more rigorous than any others, and confirmed the feeling that they were

a special few. Thus, when John Winthrop addressed the immigrants to the Bay

Colony aboard the flagship Arbella in 1630, he told them that the eyes of the

world were upon them, and that they would be an example for all, a “city upon a

hill.”

PURITAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

Puritans held the writing of his history in high regard; for, as heirs of Renaissance

thought, they believed that lasting truths were to be gained by studying the lives

of noble men. Cotton Mather urged students of the ministry to read not only early

church historians but the classical historians Xenophon, Livy, Tacitus, and

Plutarch as well. Puritans saw all of human time as progression toward the

fulfillment of God’s design on earth. Therefore, pre-Christian history could be

read as a preparation for Christ’s entry into the world. They learned this lesson

from medieval biblical scholars, who interpreted figures in the Old Testament as

foreshadowings of Christ. This method of comparison, called “typology”, was an

ingrained habit of Puritan thinking, and it made them compare themselves, as a

chosen people, ton the Israelites of old, who had been given the promise of a new

land. Cotton Mather said that John Winthrop was the Puritan Moses whose

education had prepared him to fulfill the “noble design of carrying a colony of

chosen people into an American wilderness.”

Puritans believed that God’s hand was present in every human event and

that he rewarded good and punished bad. History, therefore, revealed what God

approved of or condemned, and if God looked favorably upon a nation, His

approval could be evidenced in its success. Puritans had enough confidence in

God’s design to believe that no facts were too small or insignificant to be included

in that design; everything could emblemize something. In writing about Anne

Bradstreet, Adrienne Rich observes that seventeenth-century Puritan life was

perhaps “the most selfconscious ever lived”; that “faith underwent its hourly

testing, the domestic mundanities were episodes in the drama; the piecemeal

thoughts of a woman stirring a pot, clues to her ‘justification’ in Christ.” John

Winthrop in his diary records a struggle between a snake and a mouse and is

surprised to see the seemingly weaker emerge the victor. His Boston friend, Mr.

Wilson, however, saw the event as a battle between Satan and a “poor

contemptible people, which God hath brought hither, which should overcome

Satan here and disposes him of his kingdom.”

When a young sailor on board the Mayflower mocked those Puritans who were

sick, Bradford found it fitting that the sailor should himself succumb to a

“grievous disease.” This sense of the universal significance of all things meant

that drama was present in every believer’s life and that individual lives could be

as symbolic as the life of a nation. Mary Rowlandson, who had been captured by

the Indians, saw her captivity as a lesson in the life of a representative soul who

once wished to experience affliction and later experienced it only too well. Her

Indian captors were, to her, more than uncivilized savages; they were devils

incarnate.

The greatest of all the Puritan historians was Cotton Mather, and in his

Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) the myth of a chosen people took an its

fullest resonance of meaning. By the time Mather undertook his history, the

original Puritan co9mmunity had vanished, leaving behind heirs to its lands and

fortunes but not to its spiritually. Mather saw himself as one of the last defenders

of the “old New England way,” and all the churches as under attack from nem

forces of secularism. As a historian, Mather solved his problem by not focusing

on the dissolution of the Puritan community but writing “saints’ lives” instead,

each of which (like those of Eliot, Bradford, and Winthrop) would serve as an

example of the progress of the individual Christian soul and an allegory of the

potential American hero. Under Mather’s artistry, Winthrop’s vision of a

community of saints living in mutual concern and sympathy became an ideal

rather than a historical reality. The words “New England” would symbolize the

effort to realize the City of God on earth, and “whether New England may live

anywhere else or no.” he said, “it must live in our history.”

AN EXPANDING UNIVERSE

It should come as no surprise to learn that Cotton Mather was defensively

retrospective in his ecclesiastical history of New England; for the enormous

changes economic, social, philosophical, and scientific-which occurred between

Mather’s birth in 1663 and the publication of the Magnalia in 1702 incvitably

affected the influence and authority of Congregational churches. In 1686 Mather

himself joined with Boston merchants in jailing their colonial governor, Sir

Edmund Andros, and was successful in getting him sent banck to England. It was

a rare occasion when church and trade saw eye to eye; the Puritan clergy disliked

Andros’s Anglicanism as much as the merchants hated his taxes. It was an act

celebrated annually in Boston until it was replaced by celebrations honoring

American independence.

The increase in population alone would account for greater diversity of

opinion in the matter of churches. In 1670, for example, the population of the

colonies numbered approximately 111,000. Thirty years later the colonies

contained more than a quarter of a million persons; by 1760, if one included

Georgia, they numbered 1,600,000, and the settled area had tripled. The demand

for and price of colonial goods increased in England, and vast fortunes were to be

made in New England with any business connected with shipbuilding: especially

timber, tar, and pitch. Virginia planters became rich in tobacco, and ricc and

indigo from the Carolinas were in constant demand.

New England towns were full of acrimonious debate between first settlers

and newcomers. Town histories are full of accounts of splinter groups and the

establishment of the “Second” church. In the beginning land was apportioned to

settlers and allotted free, but by 1713 speculators in land were hard at work,

buying as much as possible for as little as possible and selling high. The idea of a

“community” of mutually helpful souls was fast disappearing. Life in the colonies

was not easy, but the hardships and dangers the first settlers faced were mostly

overcome, and compared to crowded cities like London, it was healthier, cheaper,

and more hopeful. Those who could arrange their passage came in great numbers.

Boston almost doubled in size from 1700 to 1720. It is also important to note that

the great emigration to America which occurred in the first half of the eighteenth

century was not primarily English. Dutch and Germans came in large numbers

and so did French Protestants. Jewish merchants and craftsmen were well known

in New York and Philadelphia.

By 1750 Philadelphia had became the unofficial capital of the colonies and

was second only to London as a city of commerce. In 1681 the Quaker William

Penn exchanged a large claim against the Crown for land in the New World. He

was name proprietor (rather than governor, since he actually owned the territory)

of Pennsylvania and in his “Frame of Government” told them that “Liberty

without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.” These

thousands of emigrants did not think of themselves as displaced Englishmen; they

thought of themselves as Americans. In 1702 no one would have dreamed of an

independent union of colonies, but by 1752, fifty years later, it was a distinct

possibility.

THE ENLIGHTEMENT

Great challenges to seventeenth-century beliefs were posed by scientists and

philosophers, and it has sometimes been suggested that the “modern” period dates

from 1662 and the founding of the British scientific academy known, because of

the patronage of King Charles II, as the Royal Society. The greatest scientists of

the age like Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and philosophers like John Locke

(1632-1704) saw no conflict between their discoveries and traditionally held

Christian truths. They saw nothing heretical in arguing that the universe was an

orderly system and that by the application of reason mankind would comprehend

its laws. But the inevitable result of their inquiries was to make the universe seem

more rational and benevolent than it had been represented by Puritan doctrine.

Because the world seemed more comprehensible, people paid less attention to

revealed religion, and a number of seventeenth-century modes o thought –

Bradford and Winthrop’s penchant for the allegorical and emblematic, seeing

every natural and human event as a message from God, for instance – seemed

almost medieval and decidedly quaint. These new scientists and philosophers

were called “Deists”; they deduced the existence of a Supreme Being from the

construction of the universe itself rather than from the Bible. “A creation,” as one

distinguished historian has put it, “presupposes a creator.” People were less

interested in the metaphysical wit of introspective divines than in the progress of

ordinary men as they made their way in the world. They assumed that men were

naturally good, and dwelt on neither the Fall nor the Incarnation. A harmonious

universe proclaimed the beneficence of God, and Deists argued that man himself

should be as generous. They were not interested in theology but in man’s own

nature. Americans as well as Englishmen knew Alexander Pope’s famous couplet.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of mankind is man.

Locke said that “our business” here on earth “is not to know all things, but those

which concern our conduct.” In suggesting that we are not born with a self of

innate ideas of good or evil and that the mind is rather like a blank wax tablet

upon which experiences are inscribed (a tabula rasa), Locke qualified traditional

belief.

THE GREAT AWAKENING

A conservative reaction against the world view of the new science was bound to

follow, and the first half of the eighteenth century witnessed a number of religious

revivals in both England and America. They were sometimes desperate efforts to

reassert the old values in the face of the new and, oddly enough, were themselves

the direct product of the new cult of feeling, a philosophy which argued that

man’s greatest pleasure was derived from the good he did for others and that his

sympathetic emotions (his joy as well as his tears) should not be contained.

Phillips Wheatley, whose poem on the death of the Methodist George Whitefield

(1714-70) made her famous, said that Whitefield prayed that “grace in the every

heart might dwell,” and longed to see “America excel.” Whitefield’s revival

meetings along the Atlantic seaboard were a great personal triumph; but they were

no more famous than the “extraordinary circumstances” which occurred in

Northampton, Massachusetts, under the leadership of Jonathan Edwards in the

1730s and which have come to be synonymous with the “Great Awakening.”

Edwards also read his Locke, but he wished to liberate human beings from

their senses, not define them by those senses. Edwards was fond of pointing out

that the five senses are what we share with beasts, and that if our ultimate goal

were merely a heightened sensibility, feverish sickness is the condition where the

senses are most acute. Edwards was interested in supernatural concerns, but he

was himself influenced by Locke in arguing that true belief is something which

we feel and do not merely comprehend intellectually. Edwards took the one

doctrine most difficult for eighteenth-century minds to accept –election-and

persuaded his congregation the God’s sovereignty was not only the most

reasonable doctrine, but that it was the most “delightful,” and appeared to him

(using adjectives which suggest that the best analogy is to what can be

apprehended sensually) “exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet.” In carefully

reasoned calmly argued prose, as harmonious and as ordered as anything the age

produced, Edwards brought his great intellect to bear on doctrines that had been

current the century before. Most people, when they think about the Puritans,

remember Edward’s sermon Sinners In The Hand o f an Angry God, forgetting the

one hundred years had lapsed between that sermon and Winthrop’s Model of

Christian Charity. When tried to reassert “the old New England way” and

demanded accounts of conversion before admission to church membership, he

was accused of being a reactionary who thrived on hysteria, was removed from

his pulpit, and was effectively silenced. He spent his last year as a missionary to

the Indians in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a town forty miles to the west of

Northampton. There he remained until invited to become president of the College

of New Jersey. His death in Princeton was the direct result of his willingness to be

vaccinated against smallpox and so to set an example for his frightened and

superstitious student; it serves as a vivid reminder of how complicated in any one

individual the response to the “new science” could become.

THE AMERICAN CRISIS

On June 7, 1776, at the second Continental Congress, Richard Henry Lee of

Virginia moved that “these united colonies are, and of a right ought to be, free and

independent states.” A committee was duly appointed to prepare a declaration of

independence, and it was approved on July 4. Although does mentions and then

swiftness took some delegates by surprise- the purpose of the congress had, after

all, not been to declare independence but protest the usurpation of rights by king

and parliament and to effect a compromise with the mother country-others saw

them as the inevitable consequence of the events of the decade preceding. The

Stamp Act of 1764, taxing all newspapers, legal documents, and licenses, had

infuriated Bostonians and resulted in the burning of the governor’s palace; in

Virginia, Patrick Henry had taken the occasion to speak impassionedly against

taxation without representation. In 1770 a Boston mob had been fired upon by

British soldiers, and these years later the famous “Tea Party” occurred, an act h

which drew hard lines in the matter of acceptable limits of British in

Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts, was still on everyone’s tongue in

Philadelphia when the second Continental Congress convened in May of 1775.

Although drama of these events cannot be underestimates, most historians

agree that it was Thomas Paine’s common senses , published in January 1776, that

gave the needed push for revolution. In the course of two months it was read by

almost every American. In arguing that separation from England was the only

reasonable course that “the Almighty” had planted these feelings in us ”for good

and wise purposes,” Paine was appealing to basic tenets of the enlightenment. His

clarion call to those that “love mankind,” those that are dare oppose not only the

tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth!” did not got unheeded. Americans needed an

apologist for the Revolution, and in December 1776, when Washington’s troops

were at their most demoralized, it was, again, Paine’s first Crisis paper –

popularly called the American Crisis - which was read to all the regiments and

was said to have inspired their future success.

Paine first came to America in 1774 with a note from Benjamin Franklin

recommending him to publishers and editors. He was only one of a number of

young writers who were able to take advantage of the times. This was, in fact, the

great age of the newspaper and the moral essay; Franklin tells us that he modeled

his own style on the clarity, good sense, and simplicity of the English essayists

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. The first newspaper in the colonies appeared

in 1704, but by the time of the Revolution there were almost fifty papers and forty

magazines. The great cry was for a “national literature” (meaning anti-British),

and the political events of the 1770s were advantageous for a career. Philip

Freneau made his first success as a writer as a satirist of the British, and after the

publication of his Poems Written Chiefly during the Late War (1786) he turned to

newspaper work, editing the New York Daily Advertiser and writing anti-

Federalist party essays, making himself an enemy of Alexander Hamilton in the

process. The most distinguished political writings of the period are, in fact, the

essays Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison wrote for New York newspapers

in 1787 and 1788 and collectively known as The Federalist Papers. In attempting

to get New Yorkers to support the new Constitution they provided an eloquent

defense of the framework of the Republic. Joel Barlow also published anti-British

satires in the New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine, and envisioned an

American literature which would extol our government, our educational

institutions, and the arts. He spent most of his life revising a long hymn to the

Republic called The Columbiad. But Barlow never settled down to the life of the

artist; he was too much the entrepreneur and world traveler for that. His best

poems are not his philosophical epics but poems, like The Hasty Pudding, in

praise of the simple life. Freneau’s career was also marked by restlessness and

indecision, although in his case financial necessity came between his life and his

art. The first American writer able to live exclusively by his craft was Washington

Irving.

The crisis in American life caused by the Revolution made artists self-

conscious about American subjects. It would be another fifty years before writers

discovered way of being American without compromising their integrity, one of

the ironies of our history is that the Revolution itself has rarely proved to be a

usable subject for American literature and art.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

When John Winthrop described his “model” for a Christian community, he

envisioned a group of men and women working together for the common good,

each one of whom knew his or her place in the social structure and accepted

God’s disposition of goods. At all times, he said, “some must be rich, some poor,

some high and eminent in power and dignity,” others low and “in subjection.”

Ideally, it was to be a community of love, all made equal by their fallen nature and

their concern for the salvation of their souls; but it was to be a stable community,

and Winthrop would not have imagined very much social change. One hundred

forty years later John Adams, our second president, envisioned a model

community, decreed by higher laws, when he said that the American colonies

were a part of a “grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination of

the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the

earth.” Adams witnessed social mobility of a kind and an extent, however, that no

European before him would have dreamed possible. As historians have observed,

European critics of America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries never

understood that great social change was possible without social upheaval

primarily because there was no feudal hierarchy to overthrow. When Crevecoeur

wanted to distinguish America from Europe, it was the medievalism of the latter

that he wished to stress. The visitor to America, he said, “views not the hostile

castle, and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay-built hut and miserable

cabin, where cattle and men help to keep each other warm, and dwell in meanness,

smoke and indigence.”

Of course, not everyone was free. Some of our founding fathers, like

Thomas Jefferson, were large slaveowners, and it was still not possible to vote

without owning property. Women had hardly any rights at all: they could not vote,

and young women were educated at home, excluded by their studies from

anything other than domestic employment. Nevertheless, the same forces that

were undermining church authority in New England (in New York and

Philadelphia no such hierarchy existed) were effecting social change. The two

assumptions held to be true by most eighteenth-century Americans were, as

Russel Nye once put it, “the perfectability of man, and the prospect of his future

progress.” Much of the imaginative energy of the second half of the eighteenth

century was expanded in correcting institutional injustices: the tyranny of

monarchy, the tolerance of slavery, the misuse of prisons. Few doubted that with

the application of intelligence the human lot could be improved; and writers like

Freneau, Franklin, and Crevecoeur argued that, if it were not too late, the white

man might learn something about brotherhood and manners from nobles savages

rather than from rude white settlers, slave-owners, and backwoodsmen.

In many ways it is Franklin who best represents the spirit of the

Enlightenment in America: self-educated, social, assured, a man of the world,

ambitious and public-spirited, speculative about the nature of the universe, but in

matters of religion content to observe the actual conduct of men rather than to

debate supernatural matters which are improvable. When Ezra Stiles asked him

about his religion, he said he believed in the “creator of the universe” but he

doubted the “divinity of Jesus.” He would never dogmatize about it, however,

because he expected soon “an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.”

Franklin always presents himself as a man depending on firsthand experience, too

worldly-wise to be caught off guard. His posture, however, belies one side of the

eighteenth century which can be accounted for neither by the inheritance of

Calvin nor by the empiricism of Locke: those idealistic assumptions which

underlie the great public documents of the American Revolution, especially the

Declaration of Independence. These are truths which, Joel Barlow once said, were

“as perceptible when first presented to the mind as age or world of experience

could make them.” Given the representative nature of Franklin’s character, it

seems right that of the documents most closely associated with the formation of

the American Republic – the Declaration of Independence, the treaty of alliance

with France, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution – only he should have

signed all four.

The fact that Americans in the last quarter of the eighteenth century would

hold that “certain truths are self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they

are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these

are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is the result, as both Leon Howard

and Gary Wills have argued, of their reading the Scottish philosophers,

particularly Francis Hutcheson and Lord Kames (Henry Home), who argued that

all men in all places possess a sense common to all – a moral sense – which

contradicted the notion of the mind as an empty vessel awaiting experience. This

idealism paved the way for writers like Bryant, Thoreau, and Whitman, but in the

1770s its presence is found chiefly in politics and ethics. The assurance of a

universal sense of right and wrong made possible both the overthrow of tyrants

and the restoration of order; and it allowed men to make new earthly covenants,

not, as was the case with Bradford and Winthrop, for the glory of God, but, as

Thomas Jefferson argued, for man’s right to happiness on earth.

JOHN SMITH

1580-1631

By the time John Smith was nineteen years old he had left his family’s

Lincolnshire farm and the life of a shopkeeper’s apprentice behind him for the

high seas and a life of adventure. From 1601 to 1605 he served as mercenary and

fought the Turks in the Balkans, and it was there that he was captured and sold

into slavery. He escaped by murdering his owner and fled to safety in Poland,

where Prince Sigismund Bathori signed documents testifying to Smith’s heroism

and helped him to return to England by way of Germany, France, Spain, and

Morocco. After his return to London he seems to have had no further interest in

Europe and turned all his attention instead to a new obsession: America.

In 1606 the London Trading Company received a patent from the Crown

encouraging the colonization of America. Although one of the company’s avowed

aims was the dissemination of Christianity in the New World, the primary impulse

behind their explorations was more materialist than religious. The first ship set

sail for Virginia on December 3, 1606, with one hundred and forty-four persons

aboard. Captain John Smith was among them. They entered Chesapeake Bay four

months later. Thirty-nine people had died on the voyage and their troubles were

just beginning. The London Company knew almost nothing about the region they

had encouraged these emigrants to settle and instructions on how they were to

govern themselves were not revealed to them until they opened letters sealed until

their arrival. For the first year they were to be ruled by a council of seven men.

Smith’s name was listed as one of the seven, but because he had been charged

with mutiny on the voyage over, he was excluded from the governing body until

June of 1607. Shortly after the ships which brought them to Virginia returned to

London, the settlers were ravaged by disease and saw their number dwindle daily.

From the beginning, Smith seems to have understood better than anyone

else that their first priority was immediate survival and not the possibility that

they might find gold. Although he was excluded from office, he was allowed to

explore the surrounding countryside and search for food. It was one of his first

explorations that the was captured by Indians and condemned to death. Whether

or not Smith was actually saved by the intervention of the beautiful daughter of

Chief Powhatan we will never know. Smith’s first account of his adventure

appeared in a letter he wrote to a friend in England and published under the title of

A True Relation (1608), and no mention is made there of Pocohontas. But sixteen

years later Smith retold the tale of his close call with death in The General History

(1624) and from that time to the present his name and hers have been inextricably

paired. True or not, this tale of redemption from captivity by the intercession of a

child of nature caught the imagination of Smith’s readers in a way that the actual

grim details of the life led at Jamestown did not. It is ironic that Smith was

imprisoned upon his return and charged with the loss of two men. He was only

saved from hanging by the arrival of ships from England bringing much-needed

supplies.

After the summer of 1608 and the second epidemic of malaria (forty-five

out of ninety-five men died), it was clear to all that, whatever his faults, John

Smith knew more about wilderness survival than any of them and that if they were

to endure it would have to be under his command. Smith was elected president of

the council in the autumn of 1608 and later, governor. The winter of 1608 would

have been their last had Smith not been able to bargain successfully with the

Indians for corn. In October 1609, however, he was forced to return to England

for medical care, having been seriously wounded in a gunpowder explosion.

Smith never returned to Jamestown, but five years later he embarked for

the shores of America, and in April 1614 arrived at what is now the Maine coast.

Had he spent a winter in Maine and Massachusetts he might have returned with a

more-qualified view toward settlement there, but, instead, he left for England in

August, determined to encourage further exploration of the territory he called

“New England.”

Smith made a number of attempts to reach these shores again, but pirates,

the weather, and money all prevented him one time or another. He was so

determined to return that in spite of the fact that he had no sympathy with the

Puritans he offered to lead the Leyden contingent on their crossing in 1620. These

“Pilgrims” rejected his offer, but were grateful for the use of his maps.

Necessity transformed John Smith from an adventurer into a writer, but in

his New England Trials (1620), The General History of Virginia (1624), and

Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England (1631) he always

had one eye focused on a last expedition to America led by himself. Sadly for

him, it was never to take place, but the great migrations to Massachusetts Bay in

the 1630s prove that his work did not fall on deaf cars. John Winthrop aboard the

Arbella would certainly have looked with favor on Smith’s observation in A

Description of New England (1616) that nothing is more honorable than the

discovery of “things unknown: erecting towns, peopling countries, informing the

ignorant, reforming things unjust, teaching virtue, and [making a gain] to our

native mother country.”