Introduction [to Volume One: The Colonial Mind]

I have undertaken to give some account of the genesis and development in American letters of certain germinal ideas that have come to be reckoned traditionally American—how they came into being here, how they were opposed, and what influence they have exerted in determining the form and scope of our characteristic ideals and institutions. In pursuing such a task, I have chosen to follow the broad path of our political, economic, and social development, rather than the narrower belletristic; and the main divisions of the study have been fixed by forces that are anterior to literary schools and movements, creating the body of ideas from which literary culture eventually springs. The present volume carries the account from early beginnings in Puritan New England to the triumph of Jefferson and back-country agrarianism. Volume II concerns itself with the creative influence in America of French romantic theories, the rise of capitalism, and the transition from an agricultural to an industrial order; and Volume III will concern itself with the beginnings of dissatisfaction with the regnant middle class, and the several movements of criticism inspired by its reputed shortcomings.

Such a study will necessarily deal much with intellectual backgrounds, and especially with those diverse systems of European thought that from generation to generation have domesticated themselves in America, and through cross-fertilization with native aspirations and indigenous growths, have resulted in a body of ideals that we reckon definitively American. In broad outline those germinal contributions were the bequests successively of English Independency, of French romantic theory, of the industrial revolution and laissez faire, of nineteenth-century science, and of Continental theories of collectivism. Transplanted to American soil, these vigorous seedlings from old-world nurseries took root and flourished in such spots as proved congenial, stimulating American thought, suggesting programs for fresh Utopian ventures, providing an intellectual sanction for new experiments in government. Profoundly liberalizing in their influence, they gave impulse and form to our native idealisms, and contributed largely to the outcome of our social experience. The child of two continents, America can be explained in its significant traits by neither alone.

In the present volume, I have examined with some care the bequests of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe to the colonial settlements, and in particular the transplanting to America of old-world liberalisms. In the main those liberalisms derived from two primary sources, English Independency and French romantic theory, supplemented by certain contributions from English Whiggery. From the first came the revolutionary doctrine of natural rights, clarified by a notable succession of thinkers from Roger Williams to John Locke, a doctrine that destroyed the philosophical sanction of divine right, substituted for the traditional absolutism the conception of a democratic church in a democratic state, and found exemplification in the commonwealths of Rhode Island and Connecticut. But unfortunately the liberal doctrine of natural rights was entangled in New England with an absolutist theology that conceived of human nature as inherently evil, that postulated a divine sovereignty absolute and arbitrary, and projected caste divisions into eternity—a body of dogmas that it needed two hundred years’ experience in America to disintegrate. From this clash between a liberal political philosophy and a reactionary theology, between English Independency and English Presbyterianism, sprang the broad features of the struggle that largely determined the course of development in early New England, with which Book One is concerned.

Book Two deals with new beginnings from the raw materials of European immigrants, in other colonies than New England, who came hither singly and unorganized, and took immediate imprint from the new environment, creating during the eighteenth century the great body of yeomanry that was to determine in large measure the fate of America for a hundred years or more. It was to these scattered and undistinguished colonials that French romantic theory was brought by a group of intellectuals in the later years of the century, a philosophy so congenial to a decentralized society that it seemed to provide an authoritative sanction for the clarifying ideals of a republican order, based on the principle of local home rule, toward which colonial experience was driving. Exploring the equalitarian premises of the doctrine of natural rights, it amplified the emerging democratic theory by substituting for the Puritan conception of human nature as vicious, the conception of human nature as potentially excellent and capable of indefinite development. It asserted that the present evils of society are the consequence of vicious institutions rather than of depraved human nature; and that as free men and equals it is the right and duty of citizens to re-create social and political institutions to the end that they shall further social justice, encouraging the good in men rather than perverting them to evil. Romantic theory went further and provided a new economics and a new sociology. Since the great desideratum is man in a state of nature, it follows, according to the Physiocratic school, that the farmer is the ideal citizen, and agriculture the common and single source of wealth; and that in consequence the state should hold the tillers of the soil in special regard, shaping the public policy with a primary view to their interests. And since social custom is anterior to statutory laws, since the individual precedes the state, government must be circumscribed in its powers and scope by common agreement, and held strictly to its sole concern, the care of the social well-being. The political state, rightly conceived, must be reckoned no other than a great public-service corporation, with government as its responsible agent.

But while French romantic theory was spreading widely through the backwoods of America, providing an intellectual justification for the native agrarianism, another philosophy, derived from English liberalism of the later eighteenth century, was taking possession of the commercial towns. Realistic and material rather than romantic and Utopian, it was implicitly hostile to all the major premises and ideals of the French school. It conceived of human nature neither as good nor bad, but as acquisitive; and it proposed to erect a new social and political philosophy in accordance with the needs of a capitalistic order. It was concerned with exploitation and the rights of trade, rather than with justice and the rights of man. Its aspirations were expressed in the principle of laissez faire, and in elaborating this cardinal doctrine it reduced the citizen to the narrow dimensions of the economic man, concerned only with buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest. It would reduce the political state to the rôle of policeman, to keep the peace. With humanitarian and social interests, the state must not intermeddle—such functions lie outside its legitimate sphere. An expression of the aspirations of trading and speculating classes, it professed to believe that economic law—by which term it glorified the spontaneous play of the acquisitive instinct—was competent to regulate men in society, and that if freedom of trade were achieved, all lesser and secondary freedoms would follow.

In the light of such over-seas bequests to the American venture, the choice of materials for the present volume is predetermined. The line of liberalism in colonial America runs through Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. The first transported to the new world the plentiful liberalisms of a great movement and a great century; the second gathered up the sum of native liberalisms that had emerged spontaneously from a decentralized society; and the third enriched these native liberalisms with borrowings from the late seventeenth-century natural-rights school and from French romantic theory, engrafting them upon the vigorous American stock. Over against these protagonists of liberalism must be set the complementary figures of John Cotton, Jonathan Edwards, and Alexander Hamilton, men whose grandiose dreams envisaged different ends for America and who followed different paths. The Carolinian Seeker and the Jacobean theocrat, the colonial democrat and the colonial Calvinist, the Physiocratic republican and the capitalistic financier, embody in concrete form the diverse tendencies of primitive America; and around these major figures lesser ones will group themselves, parties to the great struggle of those early years, the eventual outcome of which was the rejection of the principles of monarchy and aristocracy, and the venturing upon an experiment in republicanism continental in scope.

That our colonial literature seems to many readers meager and uninteresting, that it is commonly squeezed into the skimpiest of chapters in our handbooks of American literature, is due, I think, to an exaggerated regard for esthetic values. Our literary historians have labored under too heavy a handicap of the genteel tradition—to borrow Professor Santayana’s happy phrase—to enter sympathetically into a world of masculine intellects and material struggles. They have sought daintier fare than polemics, and in consequence mediocre verse has obscured political speculation, and poetasters have shouldered aside vigorous creative thinkers. The colonial period is meager and lean only to those whose “disedged appetites” find no savor in old-fashioned beef and puddings. The seventeenth century in America as well as in England was a saeculum theologicum, and the eighteenth century was a saeculum politicum. No other path leads so directly and intimately into the heart of those old days as the thorny path of their theological and political controversies; and if one will resolutely pick his way amongst the thorns, he will have his reward in coming close to the men who debated earnestly over the plans and specifications of the Utopia that was to be erected in the free spaces of America, and who however wanting they may have been in the lesser arts, were no mean architects and craftsmen for the business at hand. The foundations of a later America were laid in vigorous polemics, and the rough stone was plentifully mortared with idealism. To enter once more into the spirit of those fine old idealisms, and to learn that the promise of the future has lain always in the keeping of liberal minds that were never discouraged from their dreams, is scarcely a profitless undertaking, nor without meaning to those who like Merlin pursue the light of their hopes where it flickers above the treacherous marshlands.

Contents [Volume One]

Introduction: The theme stated; part played by European intellectual movements; influence in colonial America of old-world liberalisms—English Independency, French romantic theory; incoming of a diverse philosophy—English laissez faire; significance of theology and politics in colonial America iii

Book I: Liberalism and Puritanism

New England a product of old-world custom and institutions, modified by new-world environment. Emergence of two classes: yeomanry, gentry; and two ideals: Puritan and Yankee 3

Part I

The Puritan Heritage—1620–1660

I. English Backgrounds I. Carolinian liberalism an attempt to create a new social system to replace the feudal, resulting in the doctrine of natural rights, democracy, and equalitarianism. The result of changing economics. Puritanism primarily middle-class. Types of church polity—monarchical, aristocratic, democratic. Separatism the left wing of Puritanism 5

II. Diverse theologies of Luther and Calvin. Reactionary nature of Calvinism: established in absolutism—universality of moral law, determinism, reprobation—denial of natural rights 11

II. The Transplanting of Ideas I. The settlement of New England came in the middle period of the Puritan movement. Pilgrim and Puritan 16

II. The Puritan Presbyterian: Social station—aristocratic, yet with middle-class ambitions. Hostility to ideal of Separatism. Sanctions of the oligarchy, of the theocracy. A Utopian venture 17

III. Certain Mistakes: The Plymouth covenant-principle—stages in the nullification of the Separatist principle: the fellowship of the churches; statutes erecting a state church; the climax reached in the Cambridge Platform. The adoption of a freehold tenure of land. Webster’s interpretation 22

III. The Chief Stewards of Theocracy I. Master John Cotton—Priest: Representative of priestly stewardship. Scholar and intellectual. Doctrine of an ethical aristocracy and carnal liberty. A scripturist, seeking to check the drift towards democracy. His Model of Moses his Judicials. Rejection of natural rights, of hereditary aristocracy. The Way of the Congregational Churches Cleared. Debate with Roger Williams—freedom to follow the law of God 27

II. John Winthrop—Magistrate: Lay representative of theocracy. A cultivated gentleman. Reasons for removal. Influence of the Bible. His leadership; conception of magistracy ennobled by Puritanism. Implied absolutism—political philosophy. Struggle with the deputies; distrust of democracy. Absolute authority of law—the Little Speech. Liberty to the good, just, and honest. Consequences 38

IV. The Contributions of Independency I. The clash between Presbyterianism and Independency—the right of individual freedom. Liberal leaders—Hooker, Williams. Two commonwealths—Connecticut, Rhode Island 51

II. Thomas Hooker—Puritan Liberal: A moderate. Sprung from low social origins. As a preacher in England; removal to Hartford. Democratic order of the commonwealth due to Hooker. His Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline 53

III. Roger Williams—Seeker: Embodiment of radical Independency, and forerunner of later generations. A provocative figure. Stages in his intellectual development. A mystic and Christian democrat, concerned with a new social order. His political theory: the compact theory and theocratic absolutism; conception of the state—of government; the compact a constitution, government an agent, and the end the common well-being. Theory of toleration. A great political thinker. The constitution of Rhode Island 62

V. Other Dreamers in Israel I. Nathaniel Ward—Elizabethan Puritan: A Puritan wit and belated Euphuist. The Simple Cobler of Aggawam—a mingling of satire and politics. A constitutionalist, pleading for a written compact to delimit prerogative and popular rights. His body of law 76

II. John Eliot—A Theocratic Utopia: The Christian Commonwealth. Ordered to be suppressed. His plan of a Christian state. A rigid social order 81

Part II

The Twilight of the Oligarchy—1660–1720

The spread of provincialism and the consequences. Formalism in the church; superstition. The psychology of the Salem outbreak. The muddling of the oligarchy and the end 85

I. Samuel Sewall—Yankee First representative of the new order. The Sewall of tradition; the real Sewall: middle-class, governed by a prudential morality. Uncreative, conservative, conventional. The other side—generous, kindly, the first embodiment of village friendliness 88

II. The Mather Dynasty I. Difficulties involved in attempting an estimate. Certain Harvard contributions 98

II. Increase Mather: An arch conservative, bred by a conservative environment. His sympathy for the Genevan system; attempts to strengthen discipline; steps in his Presbyterianizing. Intolerant—his biographer quoted. Unread in political theory—dictatorial. As agent at the English court. His bitterness. Not a great Puritan—compared with Samuel Hopkins. His Illustrious Providences—not scientific. The last of the New England Presbyterians 99

III. Cotton Mather: Victim of a provincial environment. Subject for a psychologist. His egoism; his quarrels. The Diary. His venture into politics. A natural Tory. His writings: Wonders of the Invisible World; the Magnalia. The futility of his dream 106

III. Stirrings of Liberalism I. John Wise—Village Democrat: Before Dudley; at Quebec. Character—a liberal. His Vindication of the New England Churches—based on the doctrine of natural rights. Defense of democratic Congregationalism against the movement to Presbyterianize. Comment of Cotton Mather. His contribution to the paper-money controversy. His later influence 118

II. Social Drifts: Economic forces—a chasm opening between old England and New England. The village and Toryism: Joseph Dudley and the carters. First newspapers: News-Letter; New-England Courant; New-England Weekly Journal 125

Book II: The Colonial Mind

The middle eighteenth century undistinguished, yet it created the individualism that was the source of a new democratic psychology 131

Part I

The Mind in the Making—1720–1763

I. Colonial Backgrounds I. New Stock: Economic motive of immigration. The Scotch-Irish influx; indented servants—the Germans; diary of John Harrower 133

II. The frontier—Lubberland: Journal of Madam Knight—frontier leveling, poverty. History of the Dividing Line, Col. William Byrd—the backcountry, lubberland, impatient of law 137

III. The frontier—Land of Promise: Letters of Crèvecœur: A French Physiocrat; his travels in America; first interpretation of the influence of the frontier in economic terms—Ubi panis ibi patria; a new type; influence of the middle settlements, the frontier. More Letters: Crèvecœur the Loyalist—dislike of American Whiggery 140

II. The Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards I. Backgrounds: Decay of Calvinism; beginnings of rationalism. A free environment and the dogmas of total depravity and election. The major question of determinism 148

II. Edwards a Puritan mystic. Sought to establish theology in philosophy. Idealistic philosophy. Desire to magnify God—interpreted in terms of will. Defended threatened dogmas. On the Freedom of the Will—the triumph of the theologian. Narrative of the Surprizing Works of God and the psychology of conversion. The Great Awakening. Father of later Congregationalism. The tragedy of his position 152

III. Benjamin Franklin—Our First Ambassador A Democrat in an aristocratic world. A free soul; product of environment. Compared with Defoe. His rise. Enters politics. Agent in England. Corruption of English politics. A sociologist; our first economist. Economic theories: A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency. Labor the measure of value. Accepted Physiocratic views: laissez faire, agrarianism. Distrust of industrialism. Principles of Trade. Political views: imperial federation, Whiggery. In the Constitutional Convention—a unicameral system. A child of the eighteenth century 164

Part II

The Awakening of the American Mind—1763–1783

I. Imperial Sovereignty and Home Rule I. Background Facts: Causes of the Revolution obscure. Home rule and imperial centralization. Native liberalism. Three areas and three diverse interests. The imperial problem. Grievances of merchants, planters, yeomanry 179

II. Argument and Propaganda: American case based on the British Constitution; on natural rights. Theories of representation, English and colonial. Powers of Parliament. Natural rights and Locke—reasons for his appeal 186

III. Certain Social Consequences: Emergence of republicanism. Attitude of upper class. Expulsion of Loyalists. Influence on American culture. Rise of middle class; political centralization 190

II. The Mind of the American Tory I. Thomas Hutchinson—Royal Governor: The House of Hutchinson. Character and intellectual attainments. Insincerity of the Tory philosophy. Situation on his accession to the governorship. Prerogative and democracy. Proposals for remodeling Massachusetts government. The Town Meeting. Affair of the letters. The problem of sovereignty. Government by ministerial instructions. Comment on his enemies. His failure 194

II. Daniel Leonard—Tory Lawyer: Character. Massachusettensis. A follower of Hobbes—the leviathan state. The sin of rebellion and the law of treason. Groundlessness of American sedition—the virus of republicanism. On the right of revolution 207

III. Jonathan Boucher—Tory Priest: Character. A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution. Influence of Filmer’s Patriarcha. Doctrine of obedience. Evil effects of republicanism. Government a divine institution—the patriarchal nature of kingship. An extreme Tory 214

III. John Dickinson—The Mind of the American Whig A moderate—spokesman of the colonial Whigs. Essence of Whiggery—the rule of property. His social position; conception of political stewardship. A constitutional lawyer. Accepted parliamentary sovereignty, right to regulate trade. Taxation and Whiggery—a tax and an imposition. Not a republican. His Two Letters on the Tea Tax. In the Constitutional Convention. Letters of Fabius. His views old-fashioned 219

IV. Samuel Adams—The Mind of the American Democrat An agitator and practical politician. Member of the opposition. Advocate of home rule. Understood the ways of Tory government. Master of political theory. Three lines of argument: natural rights, constitutional rights, the charter compact. Influence of Locke, of Coke. Reliance on public opinion. Use of publicity, organization, town meetings. Newspaper articles. Motive of attacks on royal officials. Faith in the people. A democrat. The cost in reputation 233

V. Literary Echoes I. The Whig Satirists 1. John Trumbull: A lover of belles lettres drawn into the strife. M’Fingal. The note of humor. A potential intellectual; a moderate liberal. An echo of Connecticut opinion 248

2. Francis Hopkinson, Esq.: The state of Philadelphia culture. A dilettante. A potential Tory turned Whig. The New Roof; Objections to the Proposed Plan of a Federal Government. A Federalist 252

II. The Tory Satirists 1. Jonathan Odell: A bitter nature. His satires—an embodiment of class prejudice. The American Times. Estimate of Whig leaders 255

2. Samuel Peters: His curious ambition. His History of Connecticut. Explanation of the cause of the Revolution—ministerial neglect. The cure—establishment of a colonial aristocracy 259

Book III: Liberalism and the Constitution

Part I

The Agrarian Defeat—1783–1787

I. Agrarianism and Capitalism I. Background of Ideas—English and French contributions. The struggle between political realists and humanitarian liberals. Influence of English middle class. Puritan ethics of work and capitalism. Attitude towards current liberalisms—the state. Influence of Harrington, Locke, Adam Smith. The new individualism. Rousseau and French humanitarianism—decentralization and the paternalistic state. Reasons why English influence prevailed 267

II. The Political Situation: Party alignments. Weakness of agrarians. The composite group of Federalists. Odium attaching to democracy—confused with Populism. Shays’s Rebellion. Reaction from natural rights to economic realism. The return to seventeenth-century republicanism 273

II. The Great Debate Inadequate theory of republicanism. Earlier English liberalism undemocratic. Democratic theory undeveloped. First debate: republicanism and the majority rule—Madison’s view; the Whig doctrine of property rule. Second debate: opposition to checks on majority will. The Federalist—its repute, the augmented state, theory of faction, economic basis of government. Letters of R. H. Lee—analysis of economic conditions, the Constitution undemocratic. Emergence of parties 279

III. Political Thinkers—The English Group I. Alexander Hamilton—The Leviathan State: Representative of conservative interests. A master of finance, administrator rather than thinker. Inadequate intellectual equipment. A political realist: men are swayed by self-interest; the rule of the strong. Undemocratic. The doctrine of vox justiciae. His plan of government—the fallacy of his argument. As a statesman: necessity of allying the wealthy with government: position on funding, taxation, the tariff, the industrial revolution. Statesman of the rising capitalism 292

II. John Adams—Realist: Compared with Dr. Johnson—apostle of common sense. Shift from earlier position. Intellectual qualities. His early constitutionalism—a federated British empire. A Defense of the Constitution of Government, and Discourses on Davila. Opposition aroused by latter. His political philosophy: theory of human nature, doctrine of rivalry, the class struggle, natural aristocracy. Foolishness of French doctrines of equality and fraternity. Faction the weakness of democracy—the end anarchy or absolutism. The fact of property rule. Hence need for system of checks and balances. Sources of his philosophy—Harrington. Hostility to Hamilton. A notable political thinker 307

Part II

Political Democracy Gets under Way—1787–1800

I. The Impact of the French Revolution Stirred party passions afresh. Popularized democracy in America and provided a body of philosophy: doctrines of the majority will, expediency, local self-government. Later party divisions. Democratic clubs. The odium theologicum. Paine’s Rights of Man and J. Q. Adams’s Publicola. The shift of positions 321

II. Political Thinkers—The French Group I. Tom Paine—Republican Pamphleteer: An internationalist. Odium attaching to his name. A social inefficient. Common Sense—appeal to expediency; attack on monarchy and the British Constitution. Political philosophy: doctrine of continuous compact, of the res publica. The Rights of Man—a reply to Burke’s theory of civil contract and the expediency of aristocratic rule. The business of the revolution. Agrarian Justice: civilization and poverty; relation to Babeuf; theory of unearned increment; a tax proposal. Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance—an attack on funding. A pacifist. Sources of his philosophy. His position in contemporary American opinion 327

II. Thomas Jefferson—Agrarian Democrat: Position. His inconsistencies due to a slowly clarifying philosophy. An intellectual, holding to American experience. Chief doctrines: the social compact, the res publica, the diminished state—a philosophy of decentralization. Belief in the excellence of an agrarian economy—a Physiocrat; fear of cities and industrialism. Suspicious of appeal to past experience: the evils of the past due to leviathan state; consolidation would repeat those evils in America. Excellence of home rule; the majority will. Fear of judicial encroachment, the Common Law. Class rule serves class interests. Faith in the common people. The industrial revolution and a new centralization 342

III. The War of Belles Lettres I. The Federalist Group 357

1. The Hartford Wits: Arch conservatives. Sources of Connecticut Federalism—Calvinism and business. The Connecticut fear of democracy. Members of the group. Theodore Dwight. Timothy Dwight—his contemporary reputation, likeness to Increase Mather, a clerical Federalist. His literary work 357

2. The Anarchiad: Political writings of the Wits. Character of Lemuel Hopkins. The theme of the work—an attack on populism and democracy 363

II. The French Group 367

1. Philip Freneau—Poet of Two Revolutions: A revolutionary volunteer—effect on his reputation. A radical advocate of all liberal movements. Effect on his poetic career. Spirit of his satire—attack on England. His desire to strip colonial loyalties from the American. Influence on Freneau of the French Revolution. The National Gazette—a leader of anti-Federalism. The consequences. His growing reputation 368

2. Joel Barlow—Jacobin: Early career: his experience abroad and his adoption of Jacobin views. Cost to his reputation. Advice to the Privileged Orders: the doctrine of res publica; social responsibility for the individual. Letter to the National Convention of France, and the machinery of a democratic state. The Columbiad—a republican poem 382

3. Hugh Henry Brackenridge—Free-Lance Democrat: An independent critic of the shortcomings of democracy. Modern Chivalry—a frontier book, a satire of current manners. Democracy must not be sacrificed to selfish individualism—the folly of the political climber and of the electorate. A notable book 390

Conclusion 397

Bibliography 399

Index 405

Book One • Liberalism and Puritanism

Common report has long made out Puritan New England to have been the native seat and germinal source of such ideals and institutions as have come to be regarded as traditionally American. Any critical study of the American mind, therefore, may conveniently seek its beginnings in the colonies clustered about Massachusetts Bay, and will inquire into the causes of the pronounced singularity of temper and purpose that marked off the New England settlements from those to the south, creating a distinctive New England character, and disciplining it for later conquests that were to set a stamp on American life. The course of its somewhat singular development would seem from the first to have been determined by an interweaving of idealism and economics—by the substantial body of thought and customs and institutions brought from the old home, slowly modified by new ways of life developing under the silent pressure of a freer environment. Of these new ways, the first in creative influence was probably the freehold tenure of landholdings, put in effect at the beginning and retained unmodified for generations; and the second was the development of a mercantile spirit that resulted from the sterility of the Massachusetts soil, which encouraged the ambitious to seek wealth in more profitable ways than tilling barren acres. From these sources emerged the two chief classes of New England: the yeomanry, a body of democratic freeholders who constituted the rank and file of the people, and the gentry, a group of capable merchants who dominated the commonwealth from early days to the rise of industrialism. And it was the interweaving of the aims and purposes of these acquisitive yeomen and gentry—harmonious for the most part on the surface, yet driving in different directions—with the ideal of a theocracy and the inhibitions of Puritan dogma, that constitutes the pattern of life to be dealt with here. The Puritan and the Yankee were the two halves of the New England whole, and to overlook or underestimate the contributions of either to the common life is grossly to misinterpret the spirit and character of primitive New England. The Puritan was a contribution of the old world, created by the rugged idealism of the English Reformation; the Yankee was a product of native conditions, created by a practical economics.

Part One: The Puritan Heritage • 1620–1660

Chapter I • English Backgrounds

I

The body of thought brought to America by the immigrant Puritans, and which gave a special cast to the New England mind, may be summed in a phrase as Carolinian liberalism. It was the confused bequest of a hundred years of English idealism, struggling with the knotty problems of a complex society in transition from the old static feudal order to the modern capitalistic; and it took a particular form and received a narrow ideology from the current ecclesiastical disputes concerning the nature and governance of the true church. It was exclusively a product of the Reformation, unleavened by the spirit of the Renaissance. But though English Puritanism was wholly theological in its immediate origins, it gathered about it in the century and a half of its militant career all the forces of unrest fermenting in England. Economics and politics joined hands with theology; the center of gravity of the total movement tended to sink lower in the social scale; and in the end all England was involved in the great struggle.

In its deeper purpose Puritanism was a frank challenge of the traditional social solidarity of English institutional life by an emergent individualism, and far-reaching social readjustments followed inevitably in its train. If the evolution of modern society is conceived of as falling into two broad phases, the disintegration of a corporate feudal order into unregimented individual members of society, and the struggles of those free individuals to regroup themselves in new social commonwealths, the historical significance of English Puritanism may perhaps become clear: it was one of the disruptive forces that disintegrated the traditional solidarity of church and state by creating a revolutionary philosophy of individual rights that purposed to free the individual, both as Christian and subject, from subjection to a fixed corporate status. The sixteenth century had announced the great doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, and the seventeenth century was engaged in adapting the forms of social and political institutions to that revolutionary principle. It was concerned to discover a new system of social organization that should adjust equitably the rights of the individual to the needs of the political state and to society. To that end the whole theory of the origin and functions of the political state must come in for review, and a new conception of the rights of the individual subject-citizen must be evolved.

This is the sufficient explanation of the close interweaving of theology and politics that marked the broadening movement of English Puritanism. Unless one keeps in mind the social forces that found it convenient to array themselves in Puritan garb, the clear meaning of it all will be lost in the fogs of Biblical disputation, and some of the ablest men the English race has ever bred will be reduced to crabbed theologians involved in tenuous subtleties and disputing endlessly over absurd dogmas. But tenacious disputants though they certainly were, pursuing their subtleties into the last refuge and cranny of logic, those Puritan dogmatists were very far from being vain practitioners of eccentricity. It is the manner and dress and not the matter of their argument that is strange; and if we will resolutely translate the old phrases into modern equivalents, if we will put aside the theology and fasten attention on the politics and the economics of the struggle, we shall have less difficulty in discovering that the new principle for which those old Puritans were groping was the later familiar doctrine of natural rights; and the final end and outcome of their concern for a more equitable relation of the individual to society, was the principle of a democratic commonwealth, established in the conception of political equalitarianism. Here are liberalisms in plenty to reward the search for the inner core of Puritanism. There was gunpowder packed away in Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, and the explosion that resulted made tremendous breaches in the walls of a seemingly impregnable feudalism. An intellectual like Roger Williams, who had thought his way resolutely to the logical outcome of the reforming principles, could not fail to be reckoned a firebrand by his generation. The doctrine of “thorough” was dangerously revolutionary.

If the economics of England had not been in a state of flux during the century following the accession of Elizabeth, the Puritan movement would not have moved forward by successive stages to the explosion of the Civil War. But because, as later in France, a rising economic order was restive under the restrictions of an outworn order, the Puritan protest found capable allies at hand, and supported by the money and arms of the commercial interests, it passed under the control of the latter and set about the great business of making England over in accordance with the new plans and specifications. On the whole it is no mistake to regard the Puritan revolution as primarily a rebellion of the capable middle class, whose growing trade interests demanded a larger measure of freedom than a paternal king and a landed aristocracy were willing to grant; and its significant contributions to the modern world were the two systems it did so much to further: the system of capitalism and the system of parliamentary government. From the Puritan conception of the stewardship of talents came a new ethic of work that provided a sanction for middle-class exploitation, by supplanting the medieval principle of production for consumption with the capitalistic principle of production for profit; and from the conception of the dignity of the individual came the sanction for the self-pride of the merchant that sustained him in his encounters with a domineering aristocracy. A prosperous merchant who accounted himself a son of God and who was persuaded that he was fighting for a freer England was no mean foe to be awed by the rustlings of a Cavalier. The London burgesses were the backbone of Puritanism in the days before the movement passed into the extremer form of Independency and was taken over by the sectarian radicals; and the Presbyterian middle-phase of Puritanism spread widely amongst the middle class throughout central and southern England. But in unloosing the traditional social bonds Puritanism awakened aspirations that in the end proved hostile to the middle-class program. It created bitter partisan divisions; it set the social underling and the aristocrat apart from the middle-class core, and created those major political parties that have since carried on the parliamentary struggle. Inevitably it sharpened class alignments, and the reactions of those alignments vitally affected the development of New England. The struggles in Massachusetts can scarcely be understood unless they are set against the greater struggles then going forward in England.

The three parties that emerged from the theological disputes, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Independent, followed, in the main, broad social cleavages and corresponded roughly to the later political divisions of Tory, Whig, and Democrat. The first stoutly upheld the absolutist principle in church and state. It stood for Bishop and King. Numbering probably a large majority of the English people, and led by the hereditary masters of England, it was dominated by the feudal spirit of corporate unity. It believed that social order, the loyal subjection of subject to ruler, was possible only through a coalescence of church and state. The subject-citizen was born into the one as he was born into the other, and owed allegiance both to his spiritual and temporal overlords. Authority, whether in church or state, was of divine origin, and Bishop and King were the Lord’s anointed, answerable for their stewardship only to God. The second party was a compromise between aristocracy and democracy. It substituted the principle of elective stewardship for divine right. Rejecting the absolutism of the hierarchy, it turned to the system newly brought over from Geneva, a system that retained the principle of a state church, but which yielded control of the parish to the eldership, a select body of the best and wisest chosen by the laity, with final authority in doctrine and discipline vested in the synod. It drew its support largely from the London burgesses, but with a considerable following of country gentlemen. As the party developed it tended to merge with the nascent capitalism, restricted the doctrine of natural rights to property rights, and prepared the way for the later Whiggery of Pitt, or capitalistic imperialism. The third party was more or less consciously democratic in spirit and purpose, the expression of the newly-awakened aspirations of the social underling. Numbers of rebellious individualists appeared who wanted to be ruled neither by bishop nor elder, but who preferred to club with the like-minded and set up an independent church on a local, self-governing basis. They took literally the command of Paul, “Come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing.” That only was the true church, they asserted, which withdrew from all communion with sinners and rejected the authority of a sinful state; and so they called themselves Separatists.

Separatism, quite evidently, was the extreme left wing of the total Puritan movement, concerned to explore all the logical deductions from the revolutionary premise of the Reformation. It was the final expression of the disintegrating gospel of individualism implicit in the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Its unworldly sincerity was as uncompromising as its unworldly scripturism. Not finding sanction for them in the Bible, it rejected the established ecclesiastical authorities, and laid rude hands on the garments of Mother Church. Counsels of social expediency were accounted as dust in the balance against the explicit commandment of the Lord to separate from the sins of the world; and clinging to the text of the Scripture the Separatist was led straight to the conception of a Christian democracy. If the true church was a Congregation of the Saints, and if the Saints were equal in the sight of God, why should not the principle of equality prevail in the rule of the congregation? And if it were a brotherhood in Christ, owning allegiance to the King of Kings, by what Scriptural right did profane authorities exercise control over the tender consciences of the brethren? The autonomy of the congregation was a fruitful conception, certain to appeal to vigorous natures; and out of the loins of Separatism came a numerous and often ungainly progeny that greatly scandalized the conservative Carolinian: Anabaptist, Digger, Fifth-Monarchy man, Quaker, Seeker, Congregationalist—to name only a few—each following his particular path to his divinely sanctioned Utopia, regardless of social ties, denying the worth of social conformity. Imperious individualists, the Separatists were certain to prove an offense to all respectable folk, who demanded in the name of common sense that they be put down.

It was the doctrines of Separatism, quite as much as the principle of the independency of the congregation, that aroused the fierce antagonism of Presbyterians equally with Anglicans. In the main those doctrines did not derive from John Calvin; they go back rather to Wittenberg than to Geneva, to the principles of Luther and certain German sects. The Anabaptist and the Digger, clearly, were of German descent and of somewhat ancient lineage, offspring of late medieval communism and other primitive enthusiasms. The Quaker was a mystic, sprung from the New Testament, who denied the Scriptural validity of a Hebraized Calvinism and a hireling priesthood, and accepted the Holy Spirit as the sole guide to his feet. The Seeker, on the other hand, who may perhaps be regarded as the completest expression of Puritan radicalism, was an open-minded questioner who professed to have found no satisfactory answer to his inquiry concerning the nature of the true church, and was awaiting further light. The Seekers were individuals rather than a sect, few in numbers yet greatly influential, men like Roger Williams, Sir Harry Vane, Cromwell, and perhaps Milton, outstanding figures of a great age, who embodied the final results of Puritan idealism before it was submerged by the Restoration.

During the long years of rule by divine right under the first Stuarts, the Anglicans held the Puritan unrest in strict control. Nevertheless a hundred years of debate and changing economic conditions had rendered the attempt to erect in England a counterpart of the French centralized state, no better than an anachronism. The Presbyterian opposition grew rapidly in numbers and prestige, and the early years of the Long Parliament marked the culmination of Presbyterian power. The bishops were overthrown and the elders were in a fair way to seize control of England. But unfortunately for Presbyterian hopes, the radical sects thrown up out of the war clashed with the moderates and finally broke with them; whereupon followed the “root and branch” revolution that had been long preparing. The left-wing Independents secured control of the army and set about the work of erecting a government that should be a real commonwealth of free citizens. The voice of the underling, for the first time in English history, was listened to in the national councils, for the excellent reason that his sword was drawn to enforce his demands. But they were too small a minority to leaven the sodden mass of a people long subject to absolutist rule. The psychology of custom was against them. They could strike down their armed enemies in the field, but they could not liberate the minds of men unfit to be free. Militant Puritanism was overthrown and its idealisms became the jest of every drunken tapster in London. But fortunately, not before its political principles, long obscured by theology, were sufficiently clarified to be laid open to the common understanding of Englishmen. Out of the debates around the camp fires of the army had come a new philosophy that rested on the principle that the individual, both as Christian and citizen, derives from nature certain inalienable rights which every church and every state is bound to respect. This far-reaching doctrine of natural rights, to the formulation of which many thinkers had contributed and which received later its classic form from the pen of Locke, was the suggestive contribution of Puritanism to political theory, with the aid of which later liberals were to carry forward the struggle.

II

The far-reaching liberalisms implicit in the rejection of a hierarchical organization of the church were to discover no allies in the major premises of the system of theology accepted generally by the English Puritans, and by them transported to New England. Calvinism was no friend of equalitarianism. It was rooted too deeply in the Old Testament for that, was too rigidly aristocratic. It saw too little good in human nature to trust the multitude of the unregenerate; and this lack of faith was to entail grave consequences upon the development of New England. That the immigrant Puritans brought in their intellectual luggage the system of Calvin rather than of Luther must be reckoned a misfortune, out of which flowed many of the bickerings and much of the intolerance that left a stain on the pages of early New England history.

Two divergent systems of theology, it will be remembered, were spreading through northern Europe during the years of the Reformation, systems that inevitably differentiated in consequence of certain variations of emphasis in the teachings of Luther and Calvin. Both thinkers accepted the adequacy of the Scriptures to all temporal needs, but Luther was at once more mystical and more practical than Calvin, deriving his inspiration chiefly from the New Testament, discovering the creative source of the Christian life in the spiritual union of the soul with Christ, and inclining to tolerance of differences of opinion amongst believers; whereas Calvin was ardently Hebraic, exalting righteousness above love, seeking the law in the Old Testament and laying emphasis on an authoritarian system. The one was implicitly individualistic, the other hierarchical in creative influence. The teachings of Luther, erected on the major principle of justification by faith, conducted straight to political liberty, and he refused to compromise or turn away from pursuing the direct path. If one accepts the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, one can scarcely refrain from following Luther in his conception of Christian liberty. If the mystical union of the soul with Christ has superseded all lesser loyalties by a higher and more sacred, the enjoyment of spiritual freedom must be reckoned the inalienable right of every child of God. Neither the political state nor the official hierarchy can justly coerce the individual conscience. “One thing and one thing only,” said Luther in his Treatise on Christian Liberty, “is necessary for Christian life, righteousness and liberty.” And from this he deduced the conclusion that “neither pope nor bishop nor any other man has the right to impose a single syllable of law upon a Christian man without his consent; and if he does, it is done in the spirit of tyranny.”⁠[1] Clearly, this is the spirit of uncompromising individualism that would eventually espouse the principle of democracy in church and state; and it was their native sympathy with such liberalism that led the radical Separatists to turn more naturally to Luther than to Calvin. Many of the differences that set Roger Williams so greatly apart from the New England brethren must be traced to the Lutheran origins of his thinking.

There was scant room in the rigid system of John Calvin for such Christian liberty. The Genevan thinker was a logician rather than a philosopher, a rigorous system-maker and dogmatist who knotted every argument and tied every strand securely into its fellow, till there was no escape from the net unless one broke through the mesh. To the formalist who demanded an exact system, and to the timid who feared free speculation, the logical consistency of Calvinism made irresistible appeal; and this perhaps suffices to explain its extraordinary hold on the rank and file of middle-class English Presbyterians. More original minds might break with it—men like Richard Hooker and Roger Williams and Vane and Milton—but academic thinkers and schoolmen, men whom the free spaces of thought frightened and who felt safe only behind secure fences, theologians like John Cotton and his fellows, made a virtue of necessity and fell to declaiming on the excellence of those chains wherewith they were bound. How narrow and cold was their prison they seem never to have realized; but that fact only aggravated the misfortunes that New England was to suffer from the spiritual guidance of such teachers. In seeking for an explanation of the unhappy union of a reactionary theology and a revolutionary political theory, Harriet Beecher Stowe suggested in Poganuc People that the Puritan immigrants were the children of two different centuries; that from the sixteenth century they got their theology, and from the seventeenth their politics, with the result that an older absolutist dogma snuggled down side by side in their minds with a later democratic conception of the state and society. In England the potential hostility between Calvinist dogma and individual freedom was perceived by the more liberal Separatists, but in America it was not till the rise of the Revolutionary disputes of the next century that Calvinism was discovered to be the foe of democratic liberalism and was finally rejected. It is a fruitful suggestion, and in its major contention that the liberalisms implicit in the Puritan revolution were ill served by a reactionary theology, it is certainly in harmony with the facts.

That Calvinism in its primary assumptions was a composite of oriental despotism and sixteenth-century monarchism, modified by the medieval conception of a city-state, is clear enough today to anyone who will take the trouble to translate dogma into political terms. In recasting the framework of the old theology, Calvin accepted as a sovereign conception the idea of God as arbitrary and absolute will—an august Rex regum whose authority is universal and unconditioned; and this conception he invested with Hebraic borrowings from the Old Testament. The principle of absolutism, indeed, he could scarcely have escaped. It came down to him through the Roman Empire and the Roman Church, from the ancient oriental despotisms, and it was interwoven with all the institutions and social forms against which the Reformation was a protest. But unhappily, instead of questioning the principle, he provided a new sanction for it and broadened its sway, by investing it with divine authority and erecting upon it a whole cosmology. That the ancient Hebrew thinkers, in seeking to give concrete form to their speculations on the nature of Jehovah, should have made use of the political ideas of primitive Israel, that they should have used all the wealth of oriental imagery in describing the regal attributes of their God, was inevitable. They knew only oriental potentates, and so Jehovah became a greater Ptolemy, with Cherubim and Seraphim, Angels and Principalities and Powers, duly ranked about the heavenly throne. So saturated with monarchical and caste ideas is the Old Testament, that it is almost impossible today to put the old phrasing out of mind, and we talk as naturally of the Kingdom of God as did the men of that older world who knew no other political phraseology. Calvin rejected the individualism of Luther and followed in the footsteps of older thinkers like Duns Scotus. The monarchical principle was everywhere gaining ground in Europe. He had a lawyer’s love of law, and law reposed in the absolute will of the prince. Hebraize this fact, erect a cosmology upon it, and we have the vital principle of Calvinism.

From this cosmic absolutism, that conceived of God as the stable Will sustaining the universe, binding together what otherwise would fly asunder, two important corollaries were derived: the universality of the moral law, and the necessity of divine judgment. From the former flowed that curious association of God’s will with natural causes which induced Cotton Mather, when suffering from toothache, to inquire what sin he had committed with his teeth, and which left no free spaces or non-moral impulses in the lives of men. From the latter flowed the doctrine of theological determinism. If time is embedded in the eternity of God’s mind, if to Him past and future are here and now, foreknowledge is an inevitable divine attribute, and predestination is only a finite way of expressing God’s understanding of how human fate works itself out. Ally this doctrine of determinism with the Biblical account of the fall of man, and the doctrine of the elect becomes the theological complement of the class prejudices of the times. Bred up in the current aristocratic contempt for the sodden mass of the people, Calvinist theologians easily came to regard them as stupid, sensual, veritable children of Adam, born to sin and heirs of damnation. Only the elect shall be saved. That there was a remnant in Israel whom God had chosen, Isaiah had long before pointed out; and the doctrine of the remnant was confirmed for Calvinism by the sinful herd whose daily actions testified to their lost estate.

According to such a theology, the individual clearly is in no effective sense a free soul. There is no room for the conception of human perfectibility. The heritage of natural freedom was long since cast away by the common forefather; and because of the pre-natal sin which this act entailed on all mankind, the natural man is shut away eternally from communion with God. He is no better than an oriental serf at the mercy of a Sovereign Will that is implacable, inscrutable, the ruler of a universe predetermined in all its parts and members from the foundation of the earth. Except for the saving grace of divine election, which no human righteousness can purchase, all must go down to the everlasting damnation that awaits the sons of Adam. In the eyes of such a philosophy it is sheer impertinence to talk of the dignity and worth of the individual soul. Men are no other than the worms of the dust. The boon of eternal life is not included in God’s enumeration of natural rights; it is a special grant from the Lord of the universe who is pleased to smile on whom he is pleased to smile. In the hard words of Paul, “Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.” And those on whom he hath had mercy are his Saints, and they are gathered into his church, as the free city-states had risen out of the muck of medieval despotism. They are the stewards of his righteousness and are called to the great work of rulership on earth that God’s will may be done and righteousness may prevail over iniquity.

It was an ambitious program, and so long as the Presbyterian party maintained its ascendency in England it endeavored to thrust its Calvinism down every throat, no matter how unwelcome; but with the passing of power from its hands, and the growth of a common-sense spirit of toleration, Calvinistic dogma lost its authority and the minds of Englishmen turned to more humane philosophies. In New England, on the other hand, by virtue of a rigid suppression of free inquiry, Calvinism long lingered out a harsh existence, grotesque and illiberal to the last. In banishing the Antinomians and Separatists and Quakers, the Massachusetts magistrates cast out the spirit of liberalism from the household of the Saints.

Footnotes