until the year 1768,--after he had himself passed the middle line
of human life,--yet so quickly did he then enter into the spirit of
American society, so perfectly did he identify himself with its nobler
moods of discontent and aspiration, so powerfully did he contribute
by speech and act to the right development of this new nation out of
the old cluster of dispersed and dependent communities, that it would
be altogether futile to attempt to frame a just account of the great
intellectual movements of our Revolution without some note of the part
played in it by this eloquent, wise, and efficient Scotsman--at once
teacher, preacher, politician, law-maker, and philosopher, upon the
whole not undeserving of the praise which has been bestowed upon him as
“one of the great men of the age and of the world.” Born in 1722, at
the age of forty-six he accepted an invitation to the presidency of the
College of New Jersey. At the time of his removal to America, he had
achieved distinction as a preacher and an ecclesiastical leader. Even
as an author, also, he had become well known. His advent to the college
over which he was to preside was like that of a prince coming to his
throne. The powerful influence which, through his published writings,
Witherspoon exerted upon the course of Revolutionary thought, may be
traced in the very few sermons of his which touch upon the political
problems of that time, in various Congressional papers, and especially
in the numerous essays, long or short, serious or mirthful, which he
gave to the press between the years 1775 and 1783, and commonly without
his name. As a writer of political and miscellaneous essays, it is
probable that Witherspoon’s activity was far greater than can now be
ascertained; but his hand can be traced with certainty in a large group
of keen and sprightly productions of that sort. Of all these writings,
the chief note is that of a virile mind, well-balanced, well-trained,
and holding itself steadily to its own independent conclusions,--in
short, of enlightened and imperturbable common sense, speaking out in a
form always temperate and lucid, often terse and epigrammatic.
_John Woolman._--It is no slight distinction attaching to American
literature for the period of the Revolution, that in a time so often
characterised as barren of important literary achievement, were
produced two of the most perfect examples of autobiography to be
met with in any literature. One of these, of course, is Franklin’s
_Autobiography_, the first, the largest, and the best part of which
was written in 1771,--a work that has long since taken its place among
the most celebrated and most widely read of modern books. Almost at
the very time at which that fascinating story was begun, the other
great example of autobiography in our Revolutionary literature
was finished--_The Journal of John Woolman_, a book which William
Ellery Channing long afterward described as “beyond comparison the
sweetest and purest autobiography in the language.” It is a notable
fact, however, that while these two masterpieces in the same form
of literature are products of the same period, they are, in respect
of personal quality, very nearly antipodal to each other; for, as
Franklin’s account of himself delineates a career of shrewd and
somewhat selfish geniality, of unperturbed carnal content, of kindly
systematic and most successful worldliness, so the autobiography
of Woolman sets forth a career which turns out to be one of utter
unworldliness, of entire self-effacement, all in obedience to an Unseen
Leadership, and in meek and most tender devotion to the happiness of
others--especially slaves, poor toiling white people, and speechless
creatures unable to defend themselves against the inhumanity of man.
John Woolman, who was of a spirit so unpresuming that he would have
wondered and have been troubled to be told that any writing of his was
ever to be dealt with as literature, was born in 1720 in Northampton,
New Jersey, his father being a farmer, and of the Society of Friends.
Until his twenty-first year, he lived at home with his parents, and,
as he expressed it, “wrought on the plantation.” Having reached his
majority, he took employment in the neighbouring village of Mount
Holly, in a shop for general merchandise. In this occupation he passed
several years; after which he began to give himself almost wholly to
the true work of his life--that of an apostle, with a need to go from
land to land in fulfilment of his apostleship, and able, like one of
the greatest of all apostles, to minister to his own necessities by
the labours of a lowly trade. For, long before he set out upon these
travels, even from his early childhood, he had entered, as he thought,
into the possession of certain treasures of the spirit which he could
not hoard up for himself alone,--which, if he could but share them
with others, would make others rich and happy beyond desire or even
imagination.
The autobiography of John Woolman was the gradual and secret growth
of many years, beginning when he was of the age of thirty-six, and
added to from time to time until, at the age of fifty-two, being in
the city of York, in England, about the business of his Master, he was
stricken down of the smallpox, whereof he died. Besides this story
of his life, he left several ethical and religious essays. All these
writings are, as Whittier has said, in the style “of a man unlettered,
but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity
of whose heart enters into his language.” “The secret of Woolman’s
purity of style,” said Channing, “is that his eye was single, and that
conscience dictated the words.” There is about John Woolman’s writings
that unconventionality of thought, that charity without pretence,
that saintliness without sanctimony or sourness, that delicacy, that
untaught beauty of phrase, by which we are helped to understand the
ardour of Charles Lamb’s love for him, as uttered in his impulsive
exhortation to the readers of the _Essays of Elia_: “Get the writings
of John Woolman by heart.” “A perfect gem!” wrote Henry Crabb Robinson,
in 1824, of Woolman’s _Journal_, which Lamb had shortly before made
known to him. “His is a ‘schöne Seele.’ An illiterate tailor, he writes
in a style of the most exquisite purity and grace. His moral qualities
are transferred to his writings.” Perhaps, after all, the aroma that
lingers about Woolman’s words is best described by Woolman’s true
spiritual successor in American literature--Whittier--in the saying,
that he who reads these writings becomes sensible “of a sweetness as of
violets.”
_Benjamin Franklin._--For the period of the Revolution the writings
of Franklin fall naturally into two principal divisions--first, those
connected with the Revolutionary controversy, and, secondly, those
almost entirely apart from it. Among the latter, of course, are to be
reckoned his numerous papers on scientific discoveries and mechanical
inventions; a considerable number of his personal letters--these
being, perhaps, the wisest and wittiest of all his writings; many
short sketches, usually playful in tone, often in the form of
apologues or parables; finally, the first, and the best, part of his
_Autobiography_, which, during the hundred years succeeding its first
publication in 1791, has probably been the most widely read book of its
class in any language. Here, then, as a product of Franklin’s general
literary activity during the Revolutionary period, is a considerable
body of literature not concerned in the strifes of that bitter time,
almost faultless in form, and so pervaded by sense, gaiety, and
kindness, as to be among the most precious and most delightful of the
intellectual treasures of mankind.
In Franklin’s literary contributions to the Revolutionary controversy
between 1763 and 1783, we find that his relation to that controversy
had two strongly contrasted phases: first, his sincere and most
strenuous desire that the dispute should not pass from the stage
of words to that of blows, and thence to a struggle for American
secession from the empire; and, secondly, after the stage of blows
had been reached, his championship of American secession through war
as the only safe or honourable course then left to his countrymen.
The line of division between these two phases of opinion and action
falls across the spring and early summer of 1775. Prior to that time,
all his writings, serious or jocose, are pervaded by the one purpose
of convincing the English people that the American policy of their
government was an injustice and a blunder, and of convincing the
American people that their demand for political rights would certainly
be satisfied, if persisted in steadily and without fear, but also
without disloyalty and without unseemly violence. Subsequent to that
time, having accepted with real sorrow the alternative of war and of
war for American secession, all his writings, serious and jocose, are
pervaded by the one purpose of making that war a successful one,--a
result to which, as a writer, he could best contribute by such appeals
to public opinion in America as should nourish and quicken American
confidence in their own cause, and by such appeals to public opinion
in Europe as should win for that cause its moral and even its physical
support. For reasons that must be obvious, his general literary
activity was far greater during the first phase of this controversy
than during the second.
Probably no writer ever understood better than he how to make dull
subjects lively, and how, by consequence, to attract readers to the
consideration of matters in themselves unattractive. As he well knew,
the European public, whether upon the Continent or in Great Britain,
were not likely to give their days and nights to the perusal of long
and solemn dissertations on the rights and wrongs of his countrymen
in the other hemisphere. Accordingly, such dissertations he never
gave them, but, upon occasion, brief and pithy and apparently casual
statements of the American case; exposing, also, the weak points of the
case against his own, by means of anecdotes, epigrams, _jeux-d’esprit_;
especially contriving to throw the whole argument into some sort of
dramatic form.
Franklin’s favourite weapon in political controversy--a weapon which,
perhaps, no other writer in English since Dean Swift has handled with
so much cleverness and effect--was that of satire in the form of
ludicrous analogue, thereby burlesquing the acts and pretensions of his
adversary, and simply overwhelming him with ridicule. Moreover, with
Franklin, as had been the case with Dean Swift before him, this species
of satire took a form at once so realistic and so comically apt, as
to result in several examples of brilliant literary hoaxing--a result
which, in the controversy then going on, was likely to be beneficial to
the solemn and self-satisfied British Philistine of the period, since
it compelled him for once to do a little thinking, and also to stand
off and view his own portrait as it then appeared to other people, and
even in spite of himself to laugh at his own portentous and costly
stupidity in the management of an empire that seemed already grown too
big for him to take proper care of. As Franklin was by far the greatest
man of letters on the American side of the Revolutionary controversy,
so a most luminous and delightful history of the development of thought
and emotion during the Revolution might be composed, by merely bringing
together detached sayings of Franklin, humorous and serious, just as
these fell from his tongue or pen in the successive stages of that long
conflict: it would be a trail of light across a sea of storm and gloom.
Nevertheless, not by illustrative fragments of what he wrote or said,
any more than by modern descriptions, however vivid, can an adequate
idea be conveyed of the mass, the force, the variety, the ease, the
charm, of his total work as a writer during those twenty tremendous
years. Undoubtedly, his vast experience in affairs and the sobriety
produced by mere official responsibility had the effect of clarifying
and solidifying his thought, and of giving to the lightest products of
his genius a sanity and a sureness of movement which, had he been a
man of letters only, they could hardly have had in so high a degree.
It is only by a continuous reading of the entire body of Franklin’s
Revolutionary writings, from grave to gay, from lively to severe, that
any one can know how brilliant was his wisdom, or how wise was his
brilliancy, or how humane and gentle and helpful were both. No one
who, by such a reading, procures for himself such a pleasure and such
a benefit, will be likely to miss the point of Sydney Smith’s playful
menace to his daughter,--“I will disinherit you, if you do not admire
everything written by Franklin.”
_Thomas Hutchinson._--Within the two decades of the American Revolution
are to be found two distinct expressions of the historic spirit among
this people. In the first place, from a consciousness of the meaning
and worth of the unique social experiments then already made by each
of the thirteen little republics, came the impulse which led to the
writing of their local history. Afterward, from a similar consciousness
of the meaning and worth of the immense events which began to unfold
themselves in the collective political and military experience of these
thirteen little republics, then rapidly melting together into a larger
national life under the fires of a common danger, came the impulse
which led to the writing of their general history.
Reaching the line which divides colonial themes from those of the
Revolution, we confront a writer who, in his capacity as historian, not
only towers above all his contemporaries, but deals with themes which
are both colonial and Revolutionary. This writer is the man so famous
and so hated in his day as a Loyalist statesman and magistrate, Thomas
Hutchinson, the last civilian who served as governor of Massachusetts
under appointment by the king. That he deserves to be ranked as,
upon the whole, the ablest historical writer produced in America
prior to the nineteenth century, there is now substantial agreement
among scholars. In writing the early history of Massachusetts, Thomas
Hutchinson was in effect writing the history of his own ancestors,
some of whom had been eminent, some of whom had been notorious, in the
colony almost from the year of its foundation. He was born in Boston
in 1711. From the age of twenty-six when he was elected to his first
office, until the age of sixty-three when he resigned his last one, he
was kept constantly and conspicuously in the public service. Before
the outbreak of the great controversy between the colonies and the
British government, no other man in America had, to so high a degree
as Hutchinson, the confidence both of the British government on the
one hand, and of his own countrymen on the other. Had his advice been
taken in that controversy by either of the two parties who had so
greatly confided in him, the war of the Revolution would have been
averted. While the writing of history was for Hutchinson but the
recreation and by-play of a life immersed in outward business, the
study of history seems to have been a passion with him almost from his
childhood. It should be added that Hutchinson had the scientific idea
of the importance of primary documents. Through his great eminence in
the community, and through his ceaseless zeal in the collection of such
documents, he was enabled in the course of many years to bring together
a multitude of manuscript materials of priceless value touching the
history of New England. With such materials at his command, and using
with diligence those fragments of time which his unflagging energy
enabled him to pluck from business and from sleep, he was ready, in
July, 1764, amid the first mutterings of that political storm which
was to play havoc with these peaceful studies and to shatter the hopes
of his lifetime, to send to the printer, in Boston, the first volume
of _The History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay_. He published his
second volume in the early summer of the year 1767,--not far from
the very day on which Parliament, by the passage of the Townshend
Act, perpetrated the ineffable folly of plunging the empire into
such tumults as led to its disruption. Notwithstanding the lurid and
bitter incidents amid which it was written, the second volume of
Hutchinson’s history of Massachusetts, like the first one, has the tone
of moderation and of equanimity suggestive of a philosopher abstracted
from outward cares, and devoted to the disinterested discovery and
exposition of the truth.
From the time of the publication of the second instalment of his work,
sixty-one years were to elapse before the public should receive ocular
evidence that the author had had the fortitude, amid the calamities
which overwhelmed his later years, to go on with his historical
labours, and to complete a third and final volume, telling the story of
Massachusetts from the year 1750 until the year 1774--the year in which
he laid down his office as governor and departed for England. Borne
down with sorrow, amazed and horror-stricken at the fury of the storm
that was overturning his most prudent calculations, and was sweeping
him and his party from all their moorings out into an unknown sea, he
found some solace in resuming in England the historical task which he
had left unfinished. In his diary for October 22, 1778, its completion
is recorded in this modest note: “I finished the revisal of my History,
to the end of my Administration, and laid it by.” Laid by certainly it
was, and not until the year 1828 was it permitted to come forth to the
light of day, and then, largely, through the magnanimous intervention
of a group of noble-minded American scholars in the very city which, in
his later lifetime, would not have permitted his return to it.
A great historian Hutchinson certainly was not, and, under the most
favourable outward conditions, could not have been. He had the
fundamental virtues of a great historian--love of truth, love of
justice, diligence, the ability to master details and to narrate them
with accuracy. Even in the exercise of these fundamental virtues,
however, no historian in Hutchinson’s circumstances could fail to be
hampered by the enormous preoccupation of official business, or to
have his judgment warped and coloured by the prepossessions of his own
political career. While Hutchinson was, indeed, a miracle of industry,
it was only a small part of his industry that he was free to devote
to historical research. However sincere may have been his purpose to
tell the truth and to be fair to all, the literary product of such
research was inevitably weakened, as can now be abundantly shown,
by many serious oversights and by many glaring misrepresentations,
apparently through his failure to make a thorough use of important
sources of information then accessible to him, such as colonial
pamphlets, colonial newspapers, the manuscripts of his own ancestors
and of the Mathers, and especially the General Court records of
the province in which he played so great a part. As to the rarer
intellectual and spiritual endowments of a great historian,--breadth of
vision, breadth of sympathy, the historic imagination, and the power of
style,--these Hutchinson almost entirely lacked. That he had not the
gift of historical divination, the vision and the faculty divine to see
the inward meaning of men and events, and to express that meaning in
gracious, noble, and fascinating speech--Hutchinson was himself partly
conscious.
His first volume seems to have been written under a consciousness that
his subject was provincial, and even of a local interest altogether
circumscribed. In the second volume, one perceives a more cheery and
confident tone, due, probably, to the prompt recognition which his
labours had then received not only in Massachusetts but in England.
In the third volume are to be observed signs of increasing ease in
composition, a more flowing and copious style, not a few felicities
of expression. That, in all these volumes, he intended to tell the
truth, and to practise fairness, is also plain; to say that he did not
entirely succeed, is to say that he was human. Of course, the supreme
test of historical fairness was reached when he came to the writing
of his third volume,--which was, in fact, the history not only of
his contemporaries but of himself, and of himself in deep and angry
disagreement with many of them. It is much to his praise to say that,
throughout this third volume, the prevailing tone is calm, moderate,
just, with only occasional efforts at pleading his own cause, with
only occasional flickers of personal or political enmity. But no one
should approach the reading of Hutchinson’s _History of Massachusetts
Bay_ with the expectation of finding in it either brilliant writing or
an entertaining story. From beginning to end, there are few passages
that can be called even salient--but almost everywhere an even flow
of statesmanlike narrative; severe in form; rather dull, probably,
to all who have not the preparation of a previous interest in the
matters discussed; but always pertinent, vigorous, and full of pith.
Notwithstanding Hutchinson’s modest opinion of his own ability in the
drawing of historical portraits, it is probable that in such portraits
of distinguished characters, both among his contemporaries and among
his predecessors, the general reader will be likely to find himself the
most interested.
_Samuel Peters._--Somewhere in the debatable land between history,
fiction, and burlesque, there wanders a notorious book, first published
anonymously in London in 1781, and entitled _A General History of
Connecticut_. Though the authorship of this book was never acknowledged
by the man who wrote it, there is no doubt that it was the work
of Samuel Peters, an Anglican clergyman and a Loyalist, a man of
commanding personal presence, uncommon intellectual resources, powerful
will, and ill-balanced character. He opposed with frank and bitter
aggressiveness the Revolutionary politics then rampant. He sailed for
England in October, 1774. There he abode until his return to America in
1805. During the five or six years immediately following his arrival
in England, he seems to have had congenial employment in composing his
_General History of Connecticut_, as a means apparently of wreaking an
undying vengeance upon the sober little commonwealth in which he was
born and from which he had been ignominiously cast out. The result of
this long labour of hate was a production, calling itself historical,
which was characterised by a contemporary English journal--_The
Monthly Review_--as having “so many marks of party spleen and idle
credulity” as to be “altogether unworthy of the public attention.”
In spite, however, of such censure both then and since then, this
alleged _History_ has had, now for more than a hundred years, not only
a vast amount of public attention, but very considerable success in
a form that seems to have been dear to its author’s heart--that of
spreading through the English-speaking world a multitude of ludicrous
impressions to the dishonour of the people of whom it treats. It cannot
be denied that for such a service it was most admirably framed; since
its grotesque fabrications in disparagement of a community of Puritan
dissenters seem to have proved a convenient quarry for ready-made
calumnies upon that sort of people there and elsewhere.