Main Currents in
American Thought
AN INTERPRETATION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO 1920
_Vernon Louis Parrington_
VOLUME ONE • 1620-1800
The Colonial Mind
VOLUME TWO • 1800-1860
The Romantic Revolution in America
VOLUME THREE • 1860-1920
The Beginnings of Critical Realism
in America
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1927, 1930, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
_All rights reserved, including
the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form._
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO THE MEMORY
OF
J. ALLEN SMITH
SCHOLAR TEACHER DEMOCRAT GENTLEMAN
_Omnium Amicus erat
qui
Justiciam ament._
Foreword
It is with a certain feeling of temerity that I offer the present
study of a field of American letters which has been pretty largely
neglected. That feeling springs from no sense of the slightness of the
materials treated of, or their remoteness from present-day interests.
To one who has dwelt for any length of time amidst the polemics of
colonial debate, a conviction of the greatness of the issues and the
intellectual honesty and masculine vigor of the disputants, comes
home with compelling force. The subjects with which they dealt are
old-fashioned only in manner and dress; at heart they were much the
same themes with which we are engaged, and with which our children
will be engaged after us. The feeling springs rather from a sense
of the complexity and many-sidedness of the materials, with their
ramifications into theology and politics and economics, and with
backgrounds that conduct to remote origins in European systems of
thought; and it is quickened by the realization that the interpretation
here offered, runs in many points counter to that frequently given.
The point of view from which I have endeavored to evaluate the
materials, is liberal rather than conservative, Jeffersonian rather
than Federalistic; and very likely in my search I have found what I
went forth to find, as others have discovered what they were seeking.
Unfortunately the _mens aequa et clara_ is the rarest of attributes,
and dead partisanships have a disconcerting way of coming to life
again in the pages of their historians. That the vigorous passions and
prejudices of the times I have dealt with may have found an echo in my
judgments is, perhaps, to be expected; whether they have distorted my
interpretation and vitiated my analysis is not for me to determine.
Of the present volume portions of Book One have already appeared
in a much abbreviated form in the _Cambridge History of American
Literature_, and certain passages of Book Three have appeared in
_Selections from the Connecticut Wits_, of the _American Authors
Series_; and I am indebted to the courtesy of G. P. Putnam’s Sons and
of Harcourt, Brace and Company for the privilege of reprinting them
here. My obligations to many students are too great to be adequately
acknowledged in a few words; they appear at large in the footnotes. I
find myself especially indebted to the critical historians who for the
past score of years have been working with such fruitful results in the
Revolutionary and Constitutional periods of our development. Without
the assistance of their searching investigations the difficulties
in the way of understanding those complex times would have proved
insuperable. To the sane and acute scholarship of my friend and
colleague, Prof. Edward McMahon, and to the generous counsel and
encouragement of the late Prof. J. Allen Smith, I am under particular
obligations; but in those instances in which I may unwittingly have
gone astray, the fault is mine. In a study dealing with so long a
period of time and with such diverse and difficult fields, I can
scarcely hope to have escaped the many traps laid for the unwary.
Perhaps I should add that the seeming neglect, in the present volume,
of southern backgrounds, has resulted from the desire to postpone the
detailed consideration of the mind of the South to a later volume.
V. L. P.
_Seattle, January 1, 1926_
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
[1] See “The Babylonian Captivity,” in _Works_, Vol. II, p. 233
(Philadelphia, 1915).