more creditable to the American people than those which relate to
their early and steady esteem for higher education, and especially
to their efforts and their sacrifices in the founding of colleges.
Before the year 1765, seven colleges were established here: Harvard, in
1636; William and Mary, in 1693; Yale, in 1700; New Jersey, in 1746;
King’s--now Columbia--in 1754; Philadelphia--now the University of
Pennsylvania--in 1755; Rhode Island--now Brown University--in 1764.
Though all these little establishments bore the name of colleges, there
were considerable differences among them with respect to the grade
and extent of the instruction they furnished,--those founded latest
being, in that particular, the most rudimental. Nevertheless, at them
all one noble purpose prevailed,--the study of the ancient classics.
This extraordinary training in the ancient languages led to forms of
proficiency that have no parallel now in American colleges. So early
as 1649, President Dunster wrote to Ravius, the famous Orientalist,
that some of the students at Harvard could “with ease dexterously
translate Hebrew and Chaldee into Greek.” In 1678, there was in that
college even an Indian student who wrote Latin and Greek poetry; and
this accomplishment continued to be an ordinary one there as late as
the Revolutionary War; while the facile use of Latin, whether for
conversation or for oratory, was so common among the scholars of
Harvard and of Yale as to excite no remark. Nearly all the superior
men in public life, after the immigrant generation, were educated at
these little colleges; and in all the studies that then engaged the
attention of scholars in the Old World, these men, particularly if
clergymen, had a scholarship that was, in compass and variety, fully
abreast of the learning of the time. The existence here of these early
colleges was in many ways a means of colonial fellowship. Each college
was itself, in all portions of the country, a point of distinction for
its own colony; at each college were gathered some students from other
colonies; between all the colleges there grew a sense of fraternity
in learning and letters, and this re-enforced the general sense of
fraternity in civic destinies; finally, at these colleges was trained
no little of that masterly statesmanship of our later colonial time,
which, at a glance, interpreted the danger that hung upon the horizon
in 1765, proclaimed the imminent need of colonial union, and quickly
brought it about. The vast influence that our early colleges exerted
upon literary culture can hardly be overstated. Among all the people,
they nourished those spiritual conditions out of which, alone, every
wholesome and genuine literature must grow; and in their special
devotion to classical studies, they imparted to a considerable body
of men the finest training for literary work that the world is yet
possessed of. It was of incalculable service to American literature
that, even in these wild regions of the earth, the accents of Homer,
of Thucydides, of Cicero, were made familiar to us from the beginning;
that a consciousness of the æsthetic principle in verbal expression
was kept alive here, and developed, by constant and ardent study of
the supreme masters of literary form; and that the great, immemorial
traditions of literature were borne hither across the Atlantic from
their ancient seats, and were here housed in perpetual temples, for
the rearing of which the people gladly went to great cost. The tribute
of most eloquent homage, which, in 1775, in the House of Lords, the
Earl of Chatham paid to the intellectual force, the literary symmetry,
and the decorum of the state-papers then recently transmitted from
America, and then lying upon the table of that House, was virtually an
announcement to Europe of the astonishing news,--that, by means of an
intellectual cultivation formed in America, in its own little colleges,
on the best models of ancient and modern learning, America had already
become not only an integral part of the civilised world, but even a
member of the republic of letters.
_The Study of Physical Science in America._--The study of physical
science in this country began with the very settlement of the
country. The writings of the first Americans are strewn with sharp
observations on the geography of America, on its minerals, soils,
waters, plants, animals; on its climates, storms, earthquakes; on its
savage inhabitants, its diseases, its medicines; and on the phenomena
of the heavens as they appeared to this part of the earth. There were
here, even in our earliest age, several men of special scientific
inclination, such as William Wood, John Josselyn, John Sherman, John
Winthrop of Massachusetts, and John Winthrop of Connecticut. Indeed,
the latter was recognised as an eminent physicist even among the
contemporaneous physicists of England; and in Connecticut, where
he founded the city of New London, and where he was for many years
Governor, he pursued with great zeal his scientific researches,
carrying them even into the fatal chase for the philosopher’s stone.
He was on terms of endearing intimacy with Watkins, Robert Boyle, and
other great leaders of science in England; and it is said that under
the menace of public calamities there, and drawn, likewise, by their
friendship for Winthrop, these men had proposed to leave England,
and to establish in the American colony over which Winthrop presided
“a society for promoting natural knowledge.” They were, however,
induced by Charles II. to remain in England; and accordingly, with the
co-operation of Winthrop, who happened to be in London at the time,
they founded there, instead of in New London, the association that soon
became renowned throughout the world as the Royal Society. Perhaps
there was no one of these early American students of nature whom it
is now pleasanter to recall than the Quaker naturalist, John Bartram.
Born in Pennsylvania, in 1701, he founded near Philadelphia the first
botanic garden in America. He was appointed American botanist to George
III., and won from Linnæus the praise of being “the greatest natural
botanist in the world.” As John Bartram represents high attainments
in science reached under all outward disadvantages, so John Winthrop
of Harvard College represents still higher attainments in science
reached under all outward advantages. A descendant of the first
Governor of Massachusetts, from 1738 until his death in 1779 he served
his Alma Mater with great distinction as professor of mathematics and
natural philosophy. For extent and depth of learning in his special
departments, he was probably the foremost American of his day. All
things considered, he was probably the most symmetrical example both
of scientific and of literary culture produced in America during the
colonial time; representing what was highest and broadest in it, what
was most robust and most delicate; a thinker and a writer born and
bred in a province, but neither in thought nor in speech provincial;
an American student of nature and of human nature, who stayed at home,
and bringing Europe and the universe to his own door, made himself
cosmopolitan.
Thus, from the earliest moment of American civilisation, there
were, here and there in this country, eager and keen students of
nature,--their number greatly multiplying with the passing of the
years. But it belongs to the essence of such studies that they
who pursue them should seek the fellowship of their own brethren,
either for help in solving difficulties or for delight in announcing
discoveries; and it is, beyond question, true that the union of the
American colonies was first laid in the friendly correspondence and
intellectual sympathies of students of physical science, who from an
early day were dispersed through these colonies. By the year 1740,
the American students of nature had become a multitude; and from
that year to the year 1765, the glory of physical research among us
culminated in the brilliant achievements of Benjamin Franklin, whose
good fortune it then was to enable his country to step at once to the
van of scientific discovery, and for a few years to be the teacher of
the world on the one topic of physical inquiry then uppermost in men’s
thoughts. In proposing the formation of the American Philosophical
Society, this wonderful man had announced to his own countrymen that
the time had come for them to make new and greater exertions for the
enlargement of human knowledge. Inspired by the noble enthusiasm of
Franklin, whose position brought him into large personal acquaintance
in all the colonies, the activity and the range of scientific studies
in America were then greatly increased,--a bond of scientific communion
that helped to prepare the way for political communion, whenever the
hour for that should come. The direct impulse given by all this eager
study of physical science to the development of American literature
is to be seen not only in scientific writings like those of Winthrop
and of Franklin, which have high and peculiar literary merit, but in
the general invigoration of American thought, in the development of
a sturdy rational spirit, and in a broadening of the field of our
intellectual vision.
But, in spite of all these influences working toward colonial
fellowship, the prevailing fact in American life, down to the year
1765, was colonial isolation. With that year came the immense event
that suddenly swept nearly all minds in the several colonies into the
same great current of absorbing thought, and that held them there for
nearly twenty years. From the date of that event, we cease to concern
ourselves with an American literature in the East or the South, in
this colony or in that. Henceforward American literature flows in
one great, common stream, and not in petty rills of geographical
discrimination,--the literature of one multitudinous people, variegated
indeed, in personal traits, but single in its commanding ideas and in
its national destinies.
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
I. A GENERAL VIEW
_The Three Stages._--In the intellectual process of the American
Revolution, are to be observed three well defined stages of development
on the part of the men who began and carried through that notable
enterprise. The first stage--extending from the spring of 1763 to the
spring of 1775--represents the noble anxiety which brave men must feel
when their political safety is imperilled, this anxiety, however, being
deepened in their case by a sincere and even a passionate desire, while
roughly resisting an offensive ministerial policy, to keep within
the bounds of constitutional opposition, and neither to forsake nor
to forfeit that connection with the mother-country which they then
held to be among the most precious of their earthly possessions. The
second stage--extending from the spring of 1775 to the early summer
of 1776--represents a rapidly spreading doubt, and yet at first no
more than a doubt, as to the possibility of their continuing to be
free men without ceasing to be English colonists. This doubt, of
course, had been felt by not a few of them long before the day of
the Lexington and Concord fights; but under the appalling logic of
that day of brutality, it became suddenly weaponed with a power which
mere words never had,--the power to undo swiftly, in the hearts of
a multitude of liegemen, the tie of race, the charm of an antique
national tradition, the loyalty, the love, and the pride of centuries.
The third stage--extending from the early summer of 1776 to the very
close of the whole struggle--represents a final conviction, at least on
the part of a working majority of the American people, that it would be
impossible for them to preserve their political rights and at the same
time to remain inside the British Empire,--this conviction being also
accompanied by the resolve to preserve those rights whether or no, and
at whatsoever cost of time, or effort, or pain.
Of course, the intellectual attitude of the Loyalists of the
Revolution--always during that period an immense and a very
conscientious minority--correlated to that of the Revolutionists in
each one of these three stages of development: in the first stage, by a
position of qualified dissent as to the gravity of the danger and as to
the proper method of dealing with it; in the second and third stages,
by a position of unqualified dissent, and of implacable hostility, as
regards the object and motive and method of the opposition which was
then conducted by their more masterful fellow-countrymen.
_The Predominant Note._--The chief trait of American literature
during the period now under view is this: its concern with the
problems of American society, and of American society in a peculiar
condition--aroused, inflammable, in a state of alarm for its own
existence, but also in a state of resolute combat for it. The
literature which we are thus to inspect is not, then, a literature of
tranquillity, but chiefly a literature of strife, or, as the Greeks
would have said, of agony; and, of course, it must take those forms
in which intellectual and impassioned debate can be most effectually
carried on. The literature of our Revolution has almost everywhere
the combative note; its habitual method is argumentative, persuasive,
appealing, rasping, retaliatory; the very brain of man seems to be in
armour; his wit is in the gladiator’s attitude of offence and defence.
It is a literature indulging itself in grimaces, in mockery, in
scowls: a literature accented by earnest gestures meant to convince
people, or by fierce blows meant to smite them down. In this literature
we must not expect to find art used for art’s sake.
Our next discovery is the rather notable one that such a period
actually had a literary product very considerable in amount. Even in
those perturbed years between 1763 and 1783, there was a large mass of
literature produced in America. More than with most other epochs of
revolutionary strife, our epoch of revolutionary strife was a strife
of ideas: a long warfare of political logic; a succession of annual
campaigns in which the marshalling of arguments not only preceded the
marshalling of armies, but often exceeded them in impression upon the
final result. An epoch like this, therefore,--an epoch in which nearly
all that is great and dear in man’s life on earth has to be argued
for, as well as to be fought for, and in which ideas have a work to
do quite as pertinent and quite as effective as that of bullets,--can
hardly fail to be an epoch teeming with literature, with literature,
of course, in the particular forms suited to the purposes of political
co-operation and conflict.
We shall be much helped by keeping in mind the distinction between
two classes of writings then produced among us: first, those writings
which were the result of certain general intellectual interests and
activities apart from the Revolutionary movement, and, secondly, those
writings which were the result of intellectual interests and activities
directly awakened and sustained by that movement. The presence of the
first class we discover chiefly in the earlier years of this period,
before the Revolutionary idea had become fully developed and fully
predominant; and, again, in the later years of the period, when, with
the success of the Revolution assured, the Revolutionary idea had begun
to recede, and men’s minds were free to swing again toward the usual
subjects of human concern, particularly toward those which were to
occupy them after the attainment of independence and of peace.
_Literary Centres._--We shall find, within the first decade of this
period and before its culmination into the final violence of the
Revolutionary controversy, the beginnings of a new and a truer life in
America. Of this new literary life there were, in general, two chief
centres, one in the New England, one in the Middle Colonies. The New
England literary centre was at New Haven, and was dominated by the
influence of Yale College, within which, especially between 1767 and
1773, was a group of brilliant young men passionately devoted to the
Greek and Roman classics, and brought into contact with the spirit of
modern letters through their sympathetic study of the later masters
of English prose and verse. The foremost man in this group was John
Trumbull.
The new literary life of the Middle Colonies had its seat in the
neighbourhood of New York and Philadelphia, and was keenly stimulated
by the influence of their two colleges, and also by that of the College
of New Jersey under the strong man--Witherspoon--who came to its
presidency in 1768. The foremost representative of this new literary
tendency was Philip Freneau, a true man of genius, the one poet of
unquestionable originality granted to America prior to the nineteenth
century. Of him and of his brother poet in New England, it is to be
said that both began to do their work while still in youth; both seemed
to have a vocation for disinterested literature in prose as well as
in verse; both were reluctantly driven from that vocation by the
intolerable political storm that then burst over the land; both were
swept into the Revolutionary movement, and, thenceforward, the chief
literary work of both was as political satirists. From about the year
1774, little trace of an æsthetic purpose in American letters is to be
discovered until after the close of the Revolution.
_Classification of the Revolutionary Writings._--The characteristic
life of the period we now have in view was political, and not political
only, but polemic, and fiercely polemic, and at last revolutionary; and
its true literary expression is to be recognised in those writings,
whether in prose or in verse, which gave utterance to that life. Such
writings seem naturally to fall into nine principal classes.
First, may here be named the correspondence of the time; especially,
the letters touching on public affairs which passed between persons in
different portions of America, and in which men of kindred opinions
found one another out, informed one another, stimulated, guided, aided
one another, in the common struggle. Indeed, the correspondence of
our Revolution, both official and unofficial, constitutes a vast, a
fascinating, and a significant branch of its literature. Undoubtedly,
the best of all the letter-writers of the time was Franklin; and next
to him, perhaps, were John Adams, and Abigail Adams, his wife. Indeed
the letters of Mrs. Adams, mostly to her husband, and covering this
entire period, are among the most delightful specimens of such work as
done by any American. Not far behind these first three letter-writers,
if indeed they were behind them, must be mentioned Jefferson and
John Dickinson; and, for shrewdness of observation, for humour, for
lightness of touch, for the gracious _negligée_ of cultivated speech,
not far behind any of them was a letter-writer now almost unknown,
Richard Peters of Philadelphia. Of course, no one goes to the letters
of Washington, in the expectation of finding there sprightliness of
thought, flexibility, or ease of movement; yet, in point of diligence
and productiveness, he was one of the great letter-writers of that age.
The second form of literature embodying the characteristic life of our
Revolutionary era is made up of those writings which were put forth
at nearly every critical stage of the long contest, either by the
local legislatures, or by the General Congress, or by prominent men in
public office, and which may now be described comprehensively as State
Papers. It is probable that we have never yet sufficiently considered
the extraordinary intellectual merits of this great group of writings,
or the prodigious practical service which, by means of those merits,
they rendered to the struggling cause of American self-government,
particularly in procuring for the insurrectionary colonists, first, the
respectful recognition, and then the moral confidence, of the civilised
world.
The third class of writings directly expressive of the spirit and
life of the Revolution consists of oral addresses, either secular or
sacred,--that is, of speeches, formal orations, and political sermons.
“In America, as in the Grand Rebellion in England,” said a Loyalist
writer--Boucher--of our Revolutionary time, “much execution was done by
sermons.” Had it been otherwise, there would now be cause for wonder.
Indeed, the preachers were then in full possession of that immense
leadership, intellectual and moral, which had belonged to their order,
in America ever since its settlement, in England ever since the middle
of the sixteenth century; and though this tradition of leadership
was beginning to suffer under the rivalry of the printing-press and
under the ever-thickening blows of rationalism, yet, when aroused
and concentrated upon any object, they still wielded an enormous
influence over the opinions and actions of men,--even as to the
business of this world. Without the aid “of the black regiment,” as he
facetiously called them, James Otis declared his inability to carry
his points. Late in the year 1774, the Loyalist, Daniel Leonard, in an
essay accounting for the swift and alarming growth of the spirit of
resistance and even of revolution in America, gave a prominent place to
the part then played in the agitation by “our dissenting ministers.”
“What effect must it have had upon the audience,” said he, “to hear
the same sentiments and principles, which they had before read in a
newspaper, delivered on Sundays from the sacred desk, with a religious
awe, and the most solemn appeals to heaven, from lips which they had
been taught from their cradles to believe could utter nothing but
eternal truths!” The literary history of the pulpit of the American
Revolution is virtually a history of the pulpit-champions of that
movement; since those preachers who were not its champions could seldom
find a printer bold enough to put their sermons to press, or even an
opportunity to speak them from the pulpit. Nor was it necessary that
ministers should seem to go out of their way in order to discourse upon
those bitter secular themes: indeed, they would have been forced to go
out of their way in order to avoid doing so. Fast days, thanksgiving
days, election days, the anniversaries of battles and of important
acts of Congress and of other momentous events in the progress of the
struggle, brought such topics to the very doors of their studies, and
even laid them upon the open Bibles in their pulpits. Moreover, if any
clergyman held back from political preaching, he was not likely to
escape some reminder, more or less gentle, as to what was expected of
him in such a time of awful stress and peril. “Does Mr. Wibird preach
against oppression and the other cardinal vices of the time?” wrote
John Adams to his wife, from Philadelphia, shortly after the battle
of Bunker Hill. “Tell him, the clergy here of every denomination, not
excepting the Episcopalian, thunder and lighten every Sabbath. They
pray for Boston and the Massachusetts. They thank God most explicitly
and fervently for our remarkable successes. They pray for the American
army.”
More than in all other publications, it was in the fourth class of
writings, namely, the political essays of the period, that the American
people, on both sides of the great controversy, gave utterance to their
real thoughts, their real purposes, their fears, their hopes, their
hatreds, touching the bitter questions which then divided them. The
political essay, whether in the shape of the newspaper article or in
that of the pamphlet, gives us the most characteristic type of American
literature for that portion of the eighteenth century.
Closely associated with the political essay as the most powerful form
of prose in the literature of the American Revolution, should be
mentioned the political satire, as being likewise the most powerful
form of verse during the same period, and as constituting the fifth
class of writings directly expressive of its thought and passion.
The best examples of satire to be met with among us before the
Revolutionary dispute had reached its culmination may be seen in the
earlier and non-political verse of Freneau and John Trumbull. It is
true that no great place was given to satire until about the year
1775--that is, until the debate had nearly passed beyond the stage of
argument. From that time, however, and until very near the close of the
Revolution, this form of literature rivalled, and at times almost set
aside, the political essay as an instrument of impassioned political
strife. On the Revolutionist side, the chief masters of political
satire were Francis Hopkinson, John Trumbull, and Philip Freneau. On
the side of the Loyalists, the satirical poet who in art and in power
surpassed all his fellows, was Jonathan Odell.
For the sixth class of writings characteristic of the period, we may
take the popular lyric poetry of the Revolution,--the numberless
verses, commonly quite inelaborate and unadorned, that were written to
be sung at the hearth-stone, by the camp-fire, on the march, on the
battle-field, in all places of solemn worship.