revealed by an episode in the career of Joseph Dudley, son of the
emigrant, who was made royal governor in 1702. Dudley had lived much in
England, had sat in Parliament, and had imbibed prerogative notions of
government. He little relished the homely ways of New England and he
bore himself somewhat haughtily. One December day in 1705, as he was
driving along a country road with high snowdrifts on each side, he met
with two loads of wood. The chariot coming to a stop, Dudley thrust
his head out of the window and bade the carters turn aside and make
way for him; but they were inclined to argue the matter in view of the
drifts. Words were multiplied, and one of the carters cried--to quote
Sewall--“I am as good flesh and blood as you ... you may goe out of the
way.” In a rage the governor drew his sword and struck at the fellow,
who snatched the sword away and broke it. “You lie, you dog; you lie,
you devill!” cried Dudley, beside himself. “Such words don’t become a
Christian,” retorted the carter. “A Christian, you dog!” cried Dudley;
“a Christian, you devill! I was a Christian before you were born!”
and he snatched the carter’s whip and lashed him roundly. “Being in a
great passion: threatn’d to send those that affronted him to England.”
He arrested both carters and threw them into jail, whence they were
released by the help of Sewall, who took their side though connected
with Dudley through marriage. They were of good yeoman families, yet
the matter hung on for nearly a year before they were discharged from
their bonds.[130]
Village New England was becoming surprisingly independent in
spirit when plain countrymen stood upon their rights against the
Governor--“nor did they once in the Govrs ... sight pull of their
hatts,” as Dudley took pains to inform the Queen’s justices. Three
generations in America were having their effect in the creation of a
homespun democracy. “Mr. Dudley’s principles, in government, were too
high for the Massachusetts people,” commented a later Tory, whose own
principles were high:
He found it difficult to maintain what appeared to him to be the
just prerogative of the crown, and at the same time to recover
and preserve the esteem of the country. The government had been
so popular [_i.e._ democratic] under the old charter, that the
exercise of the powers reserved to the crown by the new charter was
submitted to with reluctance.[131]
If “the prejudices against him were great,” some explanation is found
in a letter written by his son, Attorney-General Paul Dudley, to an
English friend, which came to the hands of Cotton Mather and was
published by him:
I refer you to Mr. -- for an Account of everything, especially
about the Government, and the Colledge; both which, are Discoursed
of here, in Chimney Corners, and Private Meetings, as confidently
as can be.... This Country will never be worth Living in, for
Lawyers and Gentlemen, till the _Charter_ is _Taken Away_. My
Father and I sometimes Talk of the Queen’s Establishing a _Court of
Chancery_ in this Country; I have Writ about it, to Mr. Blathwayt:
If the Matter should Succeed, you might get some Place worth your
Return; of which I should be very Glad.[132]
If New England had grown restive under the theocratic oligarchy, it had
no intention of being toryized by English placemen.
It was during these troubled years that a new force made its appearance
in Massachusetts which Sewall noted: “Sept. 25 [1690]. A printed
sheet entituled publick Occurrences comes out, which gives much
distaste because not Licensed....” A week later he added: “Print of
the Governour and Council comes out shewing their disallowance of
the Public Occurrences”; and the next day, “Mr. Mather writes a very
sharp letter about it.” This was Increase Mather, who would tolerate
no such lawlessness of the press, which must be kept as a private
preserve for the orthodox party. Against the Mather conservatism it
was impossible to make headway, and the little sheet did not come to
a second issue. Not till fourteen years later did Sewall set down a
similar note: “April 24 [1704]. I went to Cambridge.... I gave Mr.
Willard the first News-Letter that ever was carried over the River. He
shew’d it to the Fellows.” So began in America, at first unlawfully,
and then with due propriety, the work of making and publishing
newspapers. For seventy-two years thereafter, the _News-Letter_
was published continuously, justifying in all its utterances the
confidence of Boston conservatism, espousing naturally the Tory side
in the pre-Revolutionary quarrels, and coming to a sudden end on the
evacuation of Boston by General Gage.
On December 14, 1719, the _Boston Gazette_ entered the field as a
competitor for conservative readers, and two years later, August 17,
1721, the _New England Courant_ appeared, the first organ of the
opposition. It was edited by James Franklin, who possessed much of the
Franklin independence, untempered by the prudence of Benjamin; and he
set himself incautiously to the business of assailing the strait-laced
authorities of Boston. He got together a group of brisk young men,
known as the Hell-fire Club, who flung their vivacious satires at the
Mathers with such effect as to lead Cotton Mather to undertake the
following “Good Device”:
Warnings are to be given unto the wicked Printer, and his
Accomplices, who every week publish a vile Paper to lessen and
blacken the Ministers of the Town, and render their Ministry
ineffectual. A Wickedness never parall’d any where upon the Face of
the Earth.[133]
Although his prayers could not convert the wicked journalists, his
warnings availed with the magistrates, who took means to put a stop
to such disrespect. Twice Franklin was arraigned for contempt, and
once he spent four weeks in the common jail. By way of counterblast
to so disreputable a sheet, the _New England Weekly Journal_ appeared
on March 20, 1727, an eminently respectable sheet, edited by Mather
Byles and with such notable contributors as the Reverend Thomas Prince.
But with the coming of the _Journal_ with its staff of writers who
modeled their style upon the Augustan wits, we are in the mid-current
of the eighteenth century, that was to enlarge the influence of the
public press far beyond what could have been foreseen from its small
beginnings. It was to penetrate the inland villages and slowly wear
away their insularity of temper and outlook, bringing fresh ideas to
minds that had long stagnated. On the whole it was not a liberal press,
but its final effect was profoundly liberalizing.
Footnotes
[119] A similar plea had failed Dr. Church when he offended the
oligarchy twenty years before, who quite as arbitrarily had fined him
six hundred pounds.
[120] See the account in Palfrey, _History of Massachusetts_, Vol. II,
Book XII, p. 327; and in Wise, _Vindication of the Government of the
New England Churches, Introduction_. The current Tory interpretation of
the common law of sedition was severe. “In 1679, at the trial of Henry
Carr [Care], indicted for some passages in a weekly paper, the Lord
Chief Justice Scroggs declared it criminal at Common Law to ‘write on
the subject of government, whether in terms of praise or censure, it is
not material; for no man has a right to say anything of government’”
(_State Trials_, VII, 929; quoted in Schuyler, _The Liberty of the
Press in the American Colonies, etc._)
[121] See _Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings_, Second
Series, Vol. XV, pp. 283-296.
[122] _Vindication_, edition of 1860, pp. 50-53.
[123] _Ibid._, pp. 54-55.
[124] _Ibid._, p. 60.
[125] _The Churches Quarrel Espoused_, p. 116.
[126] _Ibid._, p. 209.
[127] A gratuitous insult, as Wise was well known.
[128] “Letter to Robert Wodrow, September 17, 1715:” _Diary_, in
_Massachusetts Historical Collections_, Seventh Series, Vol. VIII, p.
327.
[129] _Ibid._, p. 450.
[130] The account with affidavits is given in Sewall, _Diary_, Vol. II,
pp. 144-147.
[131] Hutchinson, _History of Massachusetts Bay Colony_, Vol. II, p.
148.
[132] Sewall, _Diary_, Vol. II, Introduction, p. 109.
[133] _Diary_, Vol. II, p. 663.
Book Two • The Colonial Mind
The undistinguished years of the early and middle eighteenth century,
rude and drab in their insularity, were the creative springtime of
democratic America--plebeian years that sowed what after times were
to reap. The forgotten men and women of those silent decades wrote
little, debated little, very likely thought little; they were plain
workmen with whom ideas counted for less than the day’s work. The stir
of achievement filled the land, daily penetrating farther into the
backwoods and bringing new farmlands under the plow. The stern demands
of necessity held men in their grip, narrowing the horizon of their
minds, and obscuring the vision of their larger accomplishment. Along
the Appalachian watershed a vast drama, magnificent in the breadth and
sweep of its movement, was being enacted by players unconscious of
their parts. Not until long after they had gone to their graves were
the broad lines of that drama revealed. Today it is plain that those
unremembered years were engaged in clearing away encumbrances more
significant than the great oaks and maples of the virgin wilderness:
they were uprooting ancient habits of thought, destroying social
customs that had grown old and dignified in class-ridden Europe. A
new psychology was being created by the wide spaces that was to be
enormously significant when it came to self-consciousness. If this
middle eighteenth century wrote little literature, it created and
spread among a vigorous people something of far greater importance to
America, the psychology of democratic individualism.
From this determining influence--too little recognized by later
generations--the creative outlines of our history have taken shape.
American ideals and institutions emerged in large part from the silent
revolution which during the middle eighteenth century differentiated
the American from the transplanted colonial; a change that resulted
from an amalgam of the older English stock with other races, and the
subjection of this new product on a great scale to the influence of
diffused landholding. From these two major facts of a new race and
a free environment came the social and political philosophy of older
America, to which we have traditionally applied the term democratic,
and which unconsciously wove itself into our daily intercourse and ways
of thinking.
Part One: The Mind in the Making • 1720-1763
Chapter I • Colonial Backgrounds
I • New Stock
Immigration in the eighteenth century was almost wholly economic in
motive. The reports of free land and free opportunity in America
penetrated to remote hamlets of Great Britain, and more slowly to
the continent, and drew hither a rude influx of the dispossessed and
disinherited of Europe. From the hopeless poverty of great masses
of old-world laborers, increasing numbers sought escape through
emigration, accepting the hardships and uncertainties of the migration
in the hope of bettering themselves ultimately. A host of English
nondescripts--broken men, bond servants, “gaol birds,” the lees and
settlings of the old world--came overseas, voluntarily or under
duress, in numbers running into the hundred thousands, and shared with
German peasants from the Palatine, or Scotch-Irish from Ulster, the
back-breaking labor of subduing the wilderness. About these unfortunate
men and women no romance has gathered; tradition and history have not
remembered their names or glorified their deeds; yet their blood runs
in the veins of most Americans today of the older stock, and their
contribution to our common heritage was great and lasting.
Of the different racial strains that mingled their blood with the
earlier English--Irish, Huguenot-French, German, Scotch-Irish--the last
was by far the most important. Not since 1630, when the _Lady Arbella_
and her companion vessels brought the Puritans to Massachusetts Bay,
had there been an event so momentous to America as the arrival in 1718
of some four thousand Scotch-Irish from Ulster, the vanguard of an
army which by the time of the Revolution had risen to approximately
two hundred thousand, or more than twelve times the number of English
who settled Massachusetts. They were desperately poor; the available
lands near the coast were already preëmpted; so armed with axes, their
seed potatoes, and the newly invented rifle, they plunged into the
backwoods to become our great pioneering race. Scattered thinly through
a long frontier, they constituted the outposts and buffer settlements
of civilization. A vigorous breed, hardy, assertive, individualistic,
thrifty, trained in the democracy of the Scottish kirk, they were the
material out of which later Jacksonian democracy was to be fashioned,
the creators of that “western type which in politics and industry
became ultimately the American type.”[134]
Next to the Scotch-Irish, who for the most part were free peasants,
the most important addition to eighteenth-century America were the
indented servants. Mostly from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany,
they represented all trades and some of the professions. The white
slavers of the times were well organized and plied a brisk trade with
satisfactory profits; and in consequence, a steady stream of indented
servants poured into America to turn the wheels of colonial industry.
In his history of the German redemptioners, Diffenderfer has printed a
number of newspaper advertisements which throw a curious light upon the
traffic: here are two:
From the _American Weekly Mercury_, February 18, 1729:
Lately arrived from London, a parcel of very likely English
servants, men and women, several of the men Tradesmen; to be
sold reasonable and Time allowed for payment. By Charles Read of
Philadelphia, or Capt. John Ball, on board his ship, at _Anthony
Millkinson’s Wharf_.
From the same for May 22, 1729, announcements of two ships:
There is just arrived from Scotland, a parcel of choice _Scotch
Servants_; Taylors, Weavers, Shoemakers and ploughmen, some for
five and others for seven years; Imported by James Coults, etc.
Just arrived from London in the ship _Providence_, Capt. Jonathan
Clarke, a parcel of very likely _servants_, most Tradesmen, to be
sold on reasonable Terms.
The several nationalities were appraised and rated by careful merchants
and the fittest import seasons considered.[135] The “best time for
Servants is about the month of May,” one merchant wrote to his agent in
Ireland; and another warned, “Irish servants will be very dull, such
numbers have already arrived from Different parts & many more expected,
that I believe it will be overdone, especially as several Dutch vessels
are expected here, which will always command the Market.”[136]
In the middle colonies, particularly Pennsylvania, the greater number
of servants came from the Rhine country. Deceived by swindling agents,
thousands of German peasants, eager to get away from their war-harried
and plundered homes, sold themselves into servitude to pay their
passage to America. For the better part of a century these German
redemptioners thronged the ports of Philadelphia and Baltimore, as the
following news items testify:
From _Der Hoch Deutsche Pennsylvanische Bericht_, August 16, 1750:
Six ships with Irish servants have arrived at Philadelphia, and two
ships with German Newcomers. Some say 18 more on their way here;
others say 24 and still others 10,000 persons.
From the same, December 16, 1750:
Capt. Hasselwood has arrived from Holland with the latest ship that
brought Germans. It is the fourteenth that has come laden with
Germans this year. 4,317 have registered in the Court House....
Besides these, 1,000 servants and passengers arrived from Ireland
and England.[137]
Of the human side of this widespread traffic some little idea may
be got from the diary of a certain John Harrower, a man of modest
education who became an articled schoolmaster to a Virginia family in
the year 1774. Following are some entries:
Wednesday, 26th. [January, 1774.] This day I being reduced to
the last shilling was obliged to engage to go to Virginia for
four years, as a schoolmaster for Bedd, Board, washing and five
pounds during the whole time. I have also wrote my wife this day a
particular Acct of everything that has happened to me since I left
her until this date....
Munday 31st ... It is surprising to see the No. of good tradesmen
of all kinds, th’t come on b’d every day ... while the Clerk was
filling up the Indentures the doctor search’d every serv’t to see
that they were sound ... seventy-five were Intend [indented] to
Capt Bowres for four Years....
Munday 7th ... at 4 pm put a servant ashore extreamly bade in a
fever, and then got under saile for Virginia with seventy Servants
on board all indented to serve four yeares there at their different
Occupations....
Munday, May 2nd.... At 2 pm the Capt carried five servts ashore to
Hampton in order to sell their Indentures, But returned again at
Midnight with[out] selling any more but one Boat Builder....
Freiday, 6th ... at Hobshole there was five Glasgow ships and an
English Brigantine lying, at 2 pm we passed by Leedstown on our
Star board hand where there was a ship from London lying with
convicts....
Wednesday, 11th.... At 10 A M Both Coopers and the Barber from our
Mace [mess] went ashore upon tryall. At night one Daniel Turner a
servt returned onb’d from Liberty so Drunk that he abused the Capt
and Chief Mate and Boatswan to a verry high degree, which made
him to be horse whipt, put in Irons and thumb screwed, on houre
afterward he was unthumbscrewed, taken out of the Irons, but then
he was hand cuffed, and gagged all night....
Munday, 16th. This day severalls came on b’d to purchase servts
Indentures and among them there was two soul drivers, they are
Men who made it their business to go on b’d all ships who have
in either Servants or Convicts and buy sometimes the whole and
sometimes a parcell of them as they can agree, and then they drive
them through the Country like a parcell of Sheep until they can
sell them to advantage, but all went away without buying any....
Munday, 23rd [May] ... at same time all the rest of the servants
were ordered ashore to a tent at Fredericksbg and several of their
indentures were then sold, about 4 pm I was brought to Colonel
Daingerfield, when we immediately agreed and my Indenture for four
years was then delivered him and he was to send for me the next
day.[138]
In some such fashion, year after year, thousands of immigrants were
transported to America, there to mingle their blood with that of the
earlier comers. They came as social derelicts, were greeted by the
awaiting “soul-drivers,” found masters, worked and got on, or lost
heart and slipped away into the tempting backcountry whither so many
broken men went in search of refuge. They were a plebeian lot, and they
endured the common fate of the underling. Very likely they transmitted
to their children a bitter hostility to the ways of an aristocratic
society, the residuum of old grievances, and this slowly accumulating
animus was eventually to count heavily with lower-class colonials in
favor of a more democratic order in the new world.
II • The Frontier • Lubberland
The frontier, which exercised so creative an influence in shaping
American character and institutions, was regarded in very different
lights by the gentleman and the commoner. To the former it was no other
than lubberland, the abode of rude leveling, the temptation to gross
social laxity. It drew away servants who were needed, and kept the
price of real estate low; and such very different persons as Cotton
Mather and John Dickinson agreed in desiring to stop the constant
drain into the backcountry, and keep settlers in the older portions.
Descriptions of the frontier indited by aristocratic pens convey an
idea very different from later democratic conceptions, and paint the
ancestors of later Jacksonians in unlovely colors.
Among the earliest of these records is _The Private Journal kept by
Madam Knight on a Journey from Boston to New York in the Year 1704_.
Madam Knight was a sprightly and intelligent woman, keeper of a dame’s
school in Boston, who set down in the journal some of the odd things
that came under her sharp eyes on her venturesome trip on horseback.
As she drew away from the older settlements, signs of relaxing social
convention multiplied with the worsening of the road. Connecticut,
which had always been too democratic to suit the Boston taste, she
found “a little too much Independant in their principalls.” It was not
careful to uphold proper social distinctions, but inclined to a free
and easy leveling altogether offensive:
... They Generally lived very well and comfortable in their
famelies. But too Indulgent (especially ye farmers) to their
slaves: suffering too great familiarity from them, permitting ym
to sit at Table and eat with them (as they say to save time), and
into the dish goes the black hoof as freely as the white hand. They
told me that there was a farmer lived nere the Town where I lodged
who had some difference with his slave, concerning something the
master had promised him and did not punctually perform; wch caused
some hard words between them; But at length they put the matter to
Arbitration and Bound themselves to stand to the award of such as
they named--wch done, the Arbitrators Having heard the Allegations
of both parties, Order the master to pay 40s to black face, and
acknowledge his fault. And so the matter ended; the poor master
very honestly standing to the award.[139]
In the unsettled country strange figures with rude decivilized ways
made their appearance. Here is a description of one such product of the
wilderness:
I had scarce done thinking, when an Indian-like Animal come to the
door, on a creature very much like himselfe, in mien and feature,
as well as Ragged cloathing; and having ’litt, makes an Awkerd
Scratch with his Indian shoo, and a Nodd, sitts on ye block,
fumbles out his black Junk [salt meat?], dipps it in ye ashes, and
presents it piping hott to his muscheeto’s (?), and fell to sucking
like a calf, without speaking, for near a quarter of an hower. At
length the old man said how do’s Sarah do? who I understood was the
wretches wife, and Daughter to ye old man.[140]
She thus describes a squatter’s hut in the backwoods:
This little Hutt was one of the wretchedest I ever saw a habitation
for human creatures. It was suported with shores enclosed with
Clapboards, laid on Lengthways, and so much asunder, that the
Light come throu’ everywhere; the doore tyed on with a cord in ye
place of hinges; The floor the bear earth; no windows but such
as the thin covering afforded, nor any furniture but a Bedd with
a glass Bottle hanging at ye head on’t; an earthan cupp, a small
pewter bason, A Bord with sticks to stand on, instead of a table,
and a block or two in ye corner instead of chairs. The family were
the old man, his wife and two children; all and every part being
the picture of poverty. Notwithstanding both the Hutt and its
Inhabitance were very clean and tydee.[141]
As Madam Knight meditated upon the causes of such poverty, she came to
a characteristic Boston conclusion:
We may Observe here the great necessity and benefitt both of
Education and Conversation: for these people have as Large a
portion of mother witt, and sometimes Larger, than those who have
bin brought up in Citties; but for want of emprovements, Render
themselves almost Ridiculos, as above.[142]
It is in the chatty narrative of Colonel William Byrd of Virginia,[143]
that we find the earliest detailed description of the fringe of
squatter settlements. Colonel Byrd was the first gentleman of Virginia,
a man of old-world education and some literary taste,[144] polished
manners, and a vast number of acres of choice land which he had
acquired and held largely tax-free, by means well understood among
Virginia gentlemen.[145] Among the several capacities in which he
served the commonwealth in return for his many acres, was to act as
a member of a joint commission which in the year 1728 ran a boundary
line between Virginia and North Carolina. As he sat his horse in the
capacity of overseer, he observed many amusing things which he jotted
down in his journal.
The backcountry, it would seem, had already developed the free and
easy ways of a squatter world, shiftless, lubberly, independent, but
animated by hostility towards the aristocratic Old Dominion, from which
many of the settlers had come. North Carolina had long been a place of
refuge for debtors, criminals, and runaway servants, who used their
legs to even the score with a caste system; and Colonel Byrd regarded
the lazy crew with amused contempt:
Surely there is no place in the World where the Inhabitants live
with less Labour than in N Carolina. It approaches nearer to the
Description of Lubberland than any other, by the great felicity
of the Climate, the easiness of raising Provisions, and the
Slothfulness of the People. Indian corn is of so great increase,
that a little Pains will Subsist a very large Family with Bread,
and then they may have meat without any Pains at all, by the Help
of the Low Grounds, and the great Variety of Mast that grows on
the High-land. The Men, for their parts, just like the Indians,
impose all the Work upon the poor Women. They make their Wives
rise out of their Beds early in the Morning, at the same time that
they lye and Snore, till the Sun has run one third of his course,
and disperst all the unwholesome Damps. Then, after Stretching and
Yawning for half an Hour, they light their Pipes, and, under the
Protection of a cloud of Smoak, venture out into the open Air;
tho’ if it happens to be never so little cold, they quickly return
Shivering into the Chimney corner. When the weather is mild, they
stand leaning with both their arms upon the corn-field fence, and
gravely consider whether they had best go and take a Small Heat at
the Hough; but generally find reasons to put off till another time.
Thus they loiter away their Lives, like Solomon’s Sluggard, with
their Arms across, and at the Winding up of the Year Scarcely have
Bread to Eat. To speak the Truth, tis a thorough Aversion to Labor
that makes People file off to N Carolina, where Plenty and a Warm
Sun confirm them in their Disposition to Laziness for their whole
Lives.[146]
One thing Colonel Byrd noted everywhere: the lazy lubbers wanted
chiefly to be let alone; they dreaded the possibility of falling within
the Virginia line; they were content in their Eden, and had no wish to
exchange their freedom for the stricter rule of the Old Dominion:
Wherever we passed we constantly found the Borderers laid it to
Heart if their Land was taken into Virginia; they chose rather
belong to Carolina, where they pay no Tribute, either to God or
to Caesar.... Another reason was, that the Government there is
so Loose, and the Laws so feebly executed, that, like those in
the Neighbourhood of Sydon formerly, every one does just what
seems good in his own Eyes.... Besides, there might have been
some Danger, perhaps, in venturing to be so rigorous, for fear of
undergoing the Fate of an honest Justice in Corotuck Precinct. This
bold Magistrate, it seems, taking upon to order a fellow to the
Stocks, for being disorderly in his Drink, was, for his intemperate
zeal, carry’d thither himself, and narrowly escap’d being whipp’t
by the Rabble into the Bargain.[147]
They are rarely guilty of Flattering or making any Court to their
governours, but treat them with all the Excesses of Freedom and
Familiarity. They are of Opinion their rulers woul’d be apt to grow
insolent, if they grew Rich, and for that reason they take care to
keep them poorer, and more dependent, if possible, than the Saints
of New England used to do their Governours.[148]
To the student of colonial politics such glimpses are suggestive.
They reveal how early was the popular distrust of magistrates and
government; and they serve to explain the most striking characteristic
of Revolutionary political practice--the movement to minimize the
power of the judiciary and the executive, and magnify the power of
the legislature; to keep authority within the control of the local
democracies. “Every one does just what seems good in his own Eyes”--in
this attitude of social _laissez faire_ that throve on a diet of corn
pone and salt pork was the origin of the coonskin democracy of Old
Hickory that was to bring eventual disaster to the plans of gentlemen.
III • The Frontier • Land of Promise
Quite another picture of the frontier was likely to be painted by
the eighteenth-century democrat. In the well-known _Letters_ of
Crèvecœur, and in the recently published _More Letters from an American
Farmer_,[149] is an analysis of frontier life and its creative
influence upon the emerging American character, far more sympathetic
and thoughtful than the casual narratives of Madam Knight and Colonel
Byrd. The author was a cultivated Norman-French gentleman, who about
the year 1759 or 1760 entered the English colonies from Canada, was
a surveyor for a time near Albany, a resident of Pennsylvania and of
Ulster County in the province of New York, eventually acquired a farm
of 120 acres in Orange County which he named “Pine Hill,” married
Mehetabel Tippet of Yonkers, and became a competent tiller of the soil
as well as a lover of country life. In disposition he was active and
energetic, curious concerning the ways of nature and society. In Canada
he had joined the army as lieutenant under Montcalm and was sent on a
map-making expedition to the wilderness beyond the Great Lakes, and
traveled from Detroit as far south as the Ohio River. After quitting
Canada following the fall of Quebec, he traveled from Nova Scotia
through the English colonies to the extreme south, and perhaps visited
Bermuda and Jamaica, noting keenly the country and the manners of the
people. Perhaps no other man before the Revolution was so intimately
acquainted with the French and English colonies as a whole, with their
near background of frontier and the great wilderness beyond, as this
French American; and it was from long and intimate contact with the
realities of colonial life that he wrote those comments that have
preserved his name to the present.
The Revolution broke in upon his peaceful life with disastrous
consequences. He took no part in the preliminary disputes, and was
under grave suspicion by his neighbors in Orange County and by the
British. He was thrown into prison in New York by his Majesty’s
officers, where his health was undermined and he was reduced to extreme
straits. Finally permitted to sail for Europe without his family, he
was shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland, but reached London where
he disposed of his manuscripts, and eventually got over to France
in August, 1781. After the peace he returned to America to find his
wife dead, his children scattered, and his farmhouse burnt. For a
time he was French consul at New York, where he interested himself
in establishing a packet service between France and America, and
in the improvement of agricultural methods, amongst other ways by
the establishment of botanical gardens. He was a scientific farmer,
introducing the system of cover crops into America and endeavoring to
introduce potato culture into France. He was a corresponding member of
the Académie des Sciences and the Royal Agricultural Society of Paris,
and a member of the Société d’Agriculture, Sciences, et Arts de Meaux,
and of the Société d’Agriculture de Caen. In 1790 he returned to France
where he died in 1813.
Underneath the discursive chat of his letters is the firm fabric of
economic fact. In the background of his thinking Crèvecœur was quite
definitely Physiocratic, in his warm humanitarianism as well as in his
agrarian bias. As the kindly Frenchman studied the ways of colonial
society and contemplated the future, he asked himself the question,
what was the American as he was perceptibly differentiating from his
European ancestors? That a new race was emerging in this new country,
he was convinced; and that it was not in consequence chiefly of a new
mixture of blood--although that was not without its influence--he
likewise believed. A more potent influence was at work and that
influence was environment. Crèvecœur was something of an economic
determinist who sought to explain laws, customs, institutions--the
pattern of the social web--by an inquiry into economic factors. _Mann
ist was er isst._ “Men are like plants; the goodness and flavor of the
fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they
grow. We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the
climate we inhabit, the government we obey, the system of religion we
profess, and the mode of our employment.”[150] Transplanted from the
meager opportunities of the old world to the rich soil and ample spaces
of America, the European undergoes a subtle transformation.
The rich stay in Europe, it is only the middling and the poor that
emigrate. In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have
by some means met together, and in consequence of various causes;
to what purpose should they ask one another, what countrymen they
are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch who
wanders about, who works and starves ... can that man call England
or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for
him, whose fields procured him no harvest, who met nothing but
the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and
punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface
of this planet? No! urged by a variety of motives, here they came.
Every thing tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of
living, a new social system; here they are become men: in Europe
they were as so many useless plants, wanting vegetable mould, and
refreshing showers; they withered and were mowed down by want,
hunger, and war: but now by the power of transplantation, like all
other plants, they have taken root and flourished! Formerly they
were not numbered in any civil list of their country, except in
those of the poor; here they rank as citizens. By what invisible
power has this surprizing metamorphosis been performed? By that
of the laws of their industry ... his country is now that which
gives him land, bread, protection, and consequence: _Ubi panis ibi
patria_, is a motto of all emigrants.... Here the rewards of his
industry follow with equal steps in the progress of his labor; his
labor is founded on the basis of nature, _self-interest_; can it
want a stronger allurement?[151]
From economic individualism in presence of unexploited natural
resources, he deduces the natural emergence of a new American
psychology that differentiates the colonial from the European peasant.
If “from involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless
labor,” the emigrant “has passed to toils of a very different nature,
rewarded by ample subsistence”; if he has left off being a peasant and
become a free-holder and citizen; will not this man “entertain new
ideas, and form new opinions”? He possesses a stake in society; his
horizons broaden, his ambitions quicken; this is his country.
An European, when he first arrives, seems limited in his
intentions, as well as in his views; but he very suddenly alters
his scale ... he no sooner breathes our air than he forms new
schemes, and embarks in designs he never would have thought of
in his own country. There the plenitude of society confines many
useful ideas, and often extinguishes the most laudable schemes
which here ripen into maturity.[152]
He begins to feel the effects of a sort of resurrection; hitherto
he had not lived, but simply vegetated; he now feels himself a
man, because he is treated as such; the laws of his own country
had overlooked him in his insignificancy; the laws of this cover
him with their mantle. Judge what an alteration there must arise
in the mind and thoughts of this man; he begins to forget his
former servitude and dependence, his heart involuntarily swells and
glows; this first swell inspires him with those new thoughts which
constitute an American.... From nothing to start into being, to
become a free man, invested with lands, to which every municipal
blessing is annexed! What a change indeed! It is in consequence of
that change that he becomes an American.[153]
_He_ is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient
prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the mode of life
he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he
holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of
our great _Alma Mater_. Here individuals of all nations are melted
into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day
cause great changes in the world.[154]
Having convinced himself that economic relaxation was the creative
force in determining American institutions and psychology, he was
led to examine the working of that force in diverse portions of
America. It is neither in the older seacoast world, nor along the
extreme frontier that he discovers his representative America; but
in the broad stretches of clearings, the vigorous backcountry or
“middle-settlements,” where agriculture was followed soberly and
effectively. “Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers of the soil,”
he pointed out; and it is the farmer of the middle region of New York
and Pennsylvania, with his broad acres in prosperous cultivation, his
economic independence, and his manly vigor, that he most delights to
dwell upon:
Europe has no such class of men; the early knowledge they acquire,
the early bargains they make, give them a great degree of sagacity.
As freemen, they will be litigious; pride and obstinacy are often
the cause of lawsuits; the nature of our laws and governments
may be another. As citizens it is easy to imagine, that they
will carefully read the newspapers, enter into every political
disquisition, freely blame or censure governors and others. As
farmers, they will be careful and anxious to get as much as they
can, because what they get is theirs.... As Christians, religion
curbs them not in their opinions; the laws inspect our actions;
our thoughts are left to God. Industry, good living, selfishness,
litigiousness, country politics, the pride of freemen, religious
indifference, are their characteristics.[155]
The thinly settled backwoods with their restless squatter population,
Crèvecœur regards as the rough vanguard of the westward-moving
settlements. It is here, he points out, that the forces of leveling
are strongest, that the last remnants of old-world distinctions and
privileges are stript away, that the idea of individual freedom carries
furthest, sometimes to social disaster. “He who would wish to see
America in its proper light,” he says, “and have a true idea of its
feeble beginnings and barbarous rudiments, must visit our extended line
of frontiers where the last settlers dwell.”
Now we arrive near the great woods, near the last inhabited
districts; there men seem to be placed ... beyond the reach of
government, which in some measure leaves them to themselves ...
as they were driven there by misfortune, necessity of beginnings,
desire of acquiring large tracts of land, idleness, frequent want
of economy, ancient debts; the reunion of such people does not
afford a very pleasing spectacle.... The few magistrates they have,
are in general little better than the rest; they are often in a
perfect state of war; that of man against man, sometimes decided by
blows, sometimes by means of law ... men are wholly left dependent
upon their native tempers, and on the spur of uncertain industry,
which often fails when not sanctified by the efficacy of a few
moral rules. There, remote from the power of example, and check of
shame, many families exhibit the most hideous parts of our society.
They are a kind of forlorn hope, preceding by ten or twelve years
the more respectable army of veterans which come after them. In
that space, prosperity will polish some, vice and law will drive
off the rest, who uniting with others like themselves will recede
still farther; making room for more industrious people, who will
finish their improvements, convert the loghouse into a convenient
habitation, and rejoicing that the first heavy labors are finished,
will change in a few years that hitherto barbarous country into a
fine, fertile, well regulated district. Such is our progress, such
is the march of the Europeans toward the interior parts of this
continent. In all society there are off-casts; this impure part
serves as our precursors or pioneers.[156]
Crèvecœur’s chattiness and bucolic love of nature may easily obscure
for the casual reader, the solid economic core of the _Letters_. The
story of Andrew, the Hebridean, with its note of idyllic simplicity,
reads like a tale out of the French romantics; yet in its broad outline
it is the story of many an immigrant who penetrated to the hospitable
backcountry, took land, and prospered. The strong coloring of the
description is only partly French; in part it is a reflection of the
spontaneous optimism that was working like leaven in colonial society.
It is the old-fashioned phrasing rather than the matter that makes the
_Letters_ seem obsolete to modern readers. Change the wording, soften
the bucolic enthusiasm, and the sober American of earlier generations,
as he observed the arrival of the strong-armed peasant from the north
of Europe, would have discovered nothing strange in such a sentiment as
this:
After a foreigner from any part of Europe is arrived, and become
a citizen; let him devoutly listen to the voice of our great
parent, which says to him, “Welcome to my shores, distressed
European; bless the hour in which thou didst see my verdant fields,
my fair navigable rivers, and my green mountains!--If thou wilt
work, I have bread for thee; if thou wilt be honest, sober, and
industrious, I have greater rewards to bestow on thee--ease and
independence. I will give thee fields to feed and clothe thee; a
comfortable fire-side to sit by.... I shall endow thee besides
with the immunities of a freeman.... Go thou, and work and
till; thou shalt prosper, provided thou be just, grateful, and
industrious.”[157]
Andrew the Hebridean is a portrait painted by a Physiocratic
humanitarian, but the idealism that would build peace and content
on honest foundations, and would deny them to none, not even the
poorest if they proved worthy, found frequent justification in the
prosaic experience of colonial America. If many an immigrant found
“soul-drivers” awaiting them, many others like Andrew found a more
hospitable reception.
Across the peaceful scenes depicted in the _Letters_ soon fell the dark
shadow of civil war, and Crèvecœur’s content was rudely broken in upon.
As a French humanitarian he loathed war and all its works, and every
instinct and argument counseled him to stand apart from the strife
that seemed to him so meaningless. He liked peace and orderly ways and
he could not work himself into a passion over the supposed wrongs of
a people who seemed to him blessed above all others on this troubled
earth. As a philosophical farmer he held the politician in contempt and
refused to take seriously abstract theories of statecraft. The citizen
who stuck to his plow was happier, he believed, than the citizen who
talked noisily of his wrongs, and was eager to overset things. The
rough leveling of the frontier he had found distasteful, and as he
watched the development of the Revolutionary disputes, he seems to have
discovered in the Whig program an irruption of the tumultuous frontier
leveling that threatened to sweep away the common peace and well-being.
The source of the unrest he traced to New England, the feculent
wellspring of all the hypocrisies; it was inspired, he was convinced,
by a selfish demagoguery and led by unprincipled mobsters. In so far
as he held partisan sympathies, they inclined to the Loyalist side.
His education in England and his breeding as a gentleman, drew him
towards the Loyalist gentry with whom he associated in Orange County,
and repelled him from the noisy ardor of the plebeian patriots. Yet in
spirit he stood resolutely aloof, although his sympathies were cruelly
hurt by the sufferings that fell under his observation. In certain
letters only recently published (_Sketches of Eighteenth Century
America_), he narrates the misfortunes that befell innocent men and
women from the bitterness of civil strife,[158] and draws a picture of
the lawlessness and greed of patriot committeemen, and the intolerance
of the mob spirit, that is not pleasant to contemplate.[159]
Bitterness rarely exudes from his pen, but when he considers the ways
of Whig politicians he now and then indulges in a passage that reveals
his loathing of the mercenary spirit that he discovers in the new
patriotism. In the conclusion of “The American Belisarius” he gives
vent to his anger against those who outrage common morality; if it were
not for the fact that this is a moral universe, he says ironically:
I’d worship the demon of the times, trample on every law, break
every duty, neglect every bond, overlook every obligation to which
no punishment was annexed. I’d set myself calumniating my rich
neighbors. I’d call all passive, inoffensive men by the name of
inimical. I’d plunder or detain the entrusted deposits. I’d trade
on public moneys, though contrary to my oath. Oath! Chaff for good
Whigs, and only fit to bind a few conscientious Royalists! I’d
build my new fortune on the depreciation of the money. I’d inform
against every man who would make any difference betwixt it and
silver, whilst I, secure from any discovery or suspicion by my good
name, would privately exchange ten for one. I’d pocket the fines
of poor militiamen extracted from their heart’s blood. I’d become
obdurate, merciless, and unjust. I’d grow rich, “fas vel nefas.”
I’d send others a-fighting, whilst I stayed at home to trade and
to rule. I’d become a clamorous American, a modern Whig, and offer
every night incense to the god Arimanes.[160]
A lover of peace and good will, a humanitarian concerned only with
justice and the common well-being, seeking new ways to enlarge the
returns of agriculture, devoid of petty ambition and local prejudice,
a friend of man, Hector St. John de Crèvecœur was an embodiment of the
generous spirit of French revolutionary thought, a man whom Jefferson
would have liked for a neighbor. His sketchy and discursive writings
may not be notable literature, but we could ill spare them from the
library of eighteenth-century America.
Footnotes
[134] See Commons, _Races and Immigrants in America_, p. 37.
[135] Sometimes the profits were unexpectedly great, as is illustrated
by the case of a certain George Martin, who contracted with a
shipmaster to transport himself, his wife, and five children to America
for fifty-four pounds. He paid down $16, but died on the passage.
On the arrival of the vessel in port, the captain foreclosed on the
contract, sold the widow for twenty-two pounds, the three eldest sons
at thirty pounds each, and the two youngest, who were under five years
of age, he sold for ten pounds, realizing one hundred and twenty-two
pounds on a debt under fifty-one pounds. (Diffenderfer, _The German
Immigrants into Pennsylvania_, p. 268).
[136] _Ibid._, p. 229.
[137] _Ibid._, Part II, “The Redemptioners,” p. 209.
[138] For the entire diary, see _American Historical Review_, Vol. VI,
pp. 65-107.
[139] _The Private Journal, etc._, p. 40.
[140] _Ibid._, pp. 29-30.
[141] _Ibid._, p. 28.
[142] _Ibid._, p. 45.
[143] “The History of the Dividing Line,” in _The Writings of Colonel
William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, Esquire_, New York, 1901.
[144] At his death his library contained some four thousand volumes,
“the largest private library in the English-speaking colonies,”
according to his biographer.
[145] His father died possessed of 26,231 acres. He himself owned at
his death “no less than 179,440 acres of the best land in Virginia.”
[146] _Op. cit._, pp. 75-76.
[147] _Ibid._, p. 87.
[148] _Ibid._, p. 81.
[149] Published under the title of _Sketches of Eighteenth Century
America_ by the Yale University Press, 1925.
[150] _Letters ..._, in edition of 1904, p. 56.
[151] _Ibid._, pp. 52-55.
[152] _Ibid._, p. 76.
[153] _Ibid._, pp. 77, 79.
[154] _Ibid._, pp. 54-55.
[155] _Ibid._, pp. 57-58.
[156] _Ibid._, pp. 58-60.
[157] _Ibid._, pp. 90-91.
[158] See, e. g., “The Man of Sorrows,” “The Wyoming Massacre,” “The
History of Mrs. B.,” “The Frontier Woman.”
[159] See, e. g., “The American Belisarius” and “Landscapes.”
[160] _Sketches of Eighteenth Century America_, p. 249.
Chapter II • The Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards
I
Before an adequate democratic philosophy could arise in this world of
pragmatic individualism, the traditional system of New England theology
must be put away, and a new conception of man and of his duty and
destiny in the world must take its place. For the moment Calvinism was
strengthened by the coming of the Scotch-Irish who spread the familiar
dogmas along the frontier, remote from attack by old-world rationalism;
nevertheless those dogmas carried within them the seeds of slow decay.
The world that had created them lay in a forgotten past. The five
points of Calvinism, postulated on a God of wrath, were no longer
living principles answering to common experience; they were become no
other than ghosts that walked on the Sabbath to terrify the timid. An
intellectual _Aufklärung_ was a necessary preliminary to the creation
of a fruitful social philosophy. Theology must be made to square with
actuality, or yield control of men’s minds to more stimulating things.
But unfortunately there was no vigorous attack but only a tedious
decay. The old was too deeply entrenched to be routed, and stricken
with palsy it lingered out a morose old age. For years New England
stewed in its petty provincialism, untouched by the brisk debates that
stirred the old world. No vigorous disputant challenged its orthodoxy.
In the year 1726 Cotton Mather wrote, “I cannot learn, That among
all the Pastors of Two Hundred Churches, there is one Arminian; much
less an Arian, or a Gentilist.”[161] Nevertheless rationalism was
in the air, and although it might be excluded from the minister’s
study, it spread its subtle infection through the mass of the people.
The backwash of English deism reached the shores of New England, and
by the decade of the forties a movement of liberalism seems to have
got under way. The word Arminian sprinkles more freely the pages of
controversial literature, indicating the nature of the attack being
directed against Calvinism. Dogma was face to face with rationalism.
A critical movement had long been developing in England, undermining
there the foundations of Calvinism; and in this work members of the
Anglican clergy had aided. Hooker had been a rationalist and the
influence of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ was thrown in favor of an
appeal to reason and to history. He rejected a literal Hebraism for
a more philosophical interpretation of the Scripture. “The Light of
naturall understanding, wit and reason, is from God,” he argued; “he
it is which thereby doth illuminate every man entring into the World.
He is the Author of all that we think or do by vertue of that light
which himselfe hath given.”[162] Because of this rationalizing tendency
the Anglican clergy, before the middle of the seventeenth century, had
passed from the Calvinistic to the Arminian position. The fundamental
dogma of Arminianism was the doctrine of the freedom of the will--that
the elect of God are not pre-chosen, but a righteous life and good
works will bring men into the way of salvation. Destructive of the
whole Calvinistic system as such doctrine was--striking at the taproot
of determinism--Arminianism carried a social significance greater than
its theological import: it was an expression of the ideal of individual
responsibility that emerged from the decay of the feudal system. The
first reformers had asserted the right to individual interpretation
of the Scriptures; the Arminians threw upon the individual the whole
responsibility, bidding him assert his will and achieve his own
salvation.
English rationalism was carried further by a notable group of thinkers,
including Milton and Locke, who rapidly passed from Arminianism to
Arianism, and thence to Deism. By the beginning of the eighteenth
century English Presbyterianism, which had clung to Calvinism long
after the defection of the Anglicans, was undermined by the growing
rationalism and finally passed over into Unitarianism. Calvinism had
lost the battle in the old world and ceased to play an important part
in the intellectual life of England. In the face of this steady drift
away from the conception of a divine Will that dwarfed the human will
and held it fixed in the mesh of the divine purpose, towards the
conception of the responsibility of the individual and the significance
of the moral code in the work of salvation, the New England Calvinists
found their work cut out for them. A critical spirit was stirring, an
incipient rationalism was beginning to ask questions; orthodoxy for
the first time was on the defensive, and ill equipped for the pending
battle.
But Calvinism had fallen into the clutch of forces greater and more
revolutionary than either minister or congregation realized. To preach
with convincing force one must appeal to the common experience; dogma
must seem to square with the evident facts of life; it must appear
to be the inevitable and sufficient explanation of the mysteries and
perplexities that beset men in the world of reality. When it ceases to
be a reasonable working hypothesis in the light of common experience,
it is no longer a controlling influence in men’s lives. And this was
the unhappy predicament in which Calvinism now found itself. Take, for
example, the doctrine of total depravity. In the corrupt worlds of
Augustine and John Calvin such a doctrine must have seemed a reasonable
explanation of the common brutality; an evil society must spring from
the evil heart of man. But in the village world of New England the
doctrine had lost its social sanction. When in moments of calm sense
these provincial Calvinists asked themselves if the human heart were
in truth utterly depraved, if they themselves and their neighbors were
such vipers and worms as they professed to be, the conviction must have
grown upon them that such professions were untrue. The everyday life of
the New England village was animated by rugged virtues--by kindliness
toward neighbors and faithfulness to a strict ethical code, rather than
by hatred to God and man, or brutal wallowing in sin. In short, these
villagers knew that they were very far from a bad lot; and when they
pondered on this fact they must have discovered increasing difficulty
in reconciling Sunday dogma and week-day experience. Although they
repeated the familiar creed, the sanction for that creed was gone; it
was the voice of dogma that spoke, and not the voice of reason and
experience.[163]
Such is the explanation, as well, of the decay of another of the
cardinal points of Calvinism--the dogma of special election. In an
aristocratic society it is natural to believe that God has set men
apart in classes; but as the leveling process tended to strip away
social distinctions, the new individualism undermined the older class
psychology. When the common man has freed himself from political
absolutism, he will become dissatisfied with theological absolutism.
The right to achieve salvation is a natural corollary to the right to
win social distinction; that one’s future status lay wholly beyond the
reach of one’s will, that it rested in the hands of an arbitrary God
who gave or withheld salvation at pleasure, was a conception that ill
accorded with the nascent ideal of democracy. When that ideal should
be sufficiently clarified, the dogma of the elect of God, like the
aristocratic conception of the king’s favorite, would be quietly put
away in the potter’s field.
As the century advanced, the growing dissatisfaction with Calvinism
received fresh impetus from the new social philosophy of France. The
teaching of Rousseau that in a state of nature men were good, that
they are still sound at heart, and that the evils of civilization
have resulted from a perversion of the social contract, would appeal
to men whose experience was daily teaching them the falseness of the
traditional dogmas; and the ideal of equality would come home with
special meaning to men bred up in villages and on the frontier. Such
doctrines were fundamentally hostile to the spirit of Calvinism: not
only did Rousseau set the doctrine of human perfectibility over against
the dogma of total depravity, but he quickened the passion of revolt
against every form of arbitrary authority, theological as well as
political and social. Although the provincial colonial might not come
in immediate contact with such speculative philosophy, in the long
run he could not escape being influenced by it, and that influence
would count against a decadent theology that held men’s minds in its
tenacious _rigor mortis_.
The crux of the question, it came finally to be seen by the apologists
of the old order, lay in the fundamental problem of determinism. Was
the will of man effectively free, or was it held in strict subjection
to the stable will of God? According as the decision went touching
this question, would stand or fall the entire metaphysical structure
of Calvinism. To this problem, therefore, the best minds among the
ministers directed their thought; and the historical position of
Jonathan Edwards, greatest of the defenders of Calvinism, is revealed
in its true perspective when his labors are studied in the light of
this vital question.
II
Never had the traditional theology been so sorely in need of a champion
as at the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century;
and such a champion God raised up--many devout Calvinists believed--in
the person of Jonathan Edwards. Armed at all points--a theologian
equipped with the keenest dialectics, a metaphysician endowed with a
brilliantly speculative mind, a psychologist competent to deal with
the subtlest phenomena of the sick soul--here was a man who might be
counted on to justify the ancient dogmas to the troubled churches of
New England.
The offspring of four generations of religious enthusiasts, by every
right of heredity and training the child of Puritanism, Jonathan
Edwards was the last and greatest of the royal line of Puritan mystics.
As a young man he felt himself to be living in the very presence of
God; he was conscious of the divine life flowing through and around
him, making him one with the Godhood; and he was filled with yearning
for personal union with the divine love in Christ. His intellectual and
spiritual life was molded by a God-consciousness as passionate as that
of Spinoza; and it is this fact of a lifelong devotion to the God-idea
that furnishes the clue to an understanding of his later development.
Not content that God had marked him for His own, he must build a
philosophical universe about the Godhood, justifying his mysticism by
a metaphysical idealism. He must examine critically the foundations of
his creed and establish his theology upon philosophy. No obscurity must
remain unprobed, no link in the chain of reasoning escape challenge:
he must base the five points of Calvinism upon a metaphysics that
should relate them to a universal system of thought, giving them a
cosmic as well as a Biblical sanction. It was a great ambition, likely
to prove too difficult even for the remarkable powers of Edwards; and
if in pursuit of new arguments for old doctrines, he found himself
inclosed in a mesh of subtleties, if his theology and metaphysics were
never quite reconciled, blame must be laid upon the difficulty of
the undertaking rather than on the incapacity of the thinker. To one
cardinal principle Edwards was faithful--the conception of the majesty
and sufficiency of God; and this polar idea provides the clue to both
his philosophical and theological systems.
Yet with this as a guide there is much that remains perplexing. There
are inconsistencies in his thought as there were in his pastoral
life; and we shall understand his position only when we recognize the
contrary tendencies which confused him, as the inevitable consequences
of a system of thought that was at once reactionary and progressive,
the outcome of certain latent inconsistencies too antagonistic for any
thinker to reconcile. As the defender of the traditional theology,
setting his face against the developing experience of his generation,
and as a rigid disciplinarian, reverting to the older Separatist
conception of a church of the elect, and rejecting the “whole way
covenant” of his grandfather Stoddard, he may perhaps appear in the
light of a reactionary. But as the expounder of philosophic idealism
he was looking forward to Emerson; and as the advocate of the new
revivalistic methods, exalting the experience of conversion as the
central fact of the Christian life, and assisting the forces that were
drawing church and state apart, he was a pronounced revolutionist,
the schismatic leader of the New Lights and the father of later
Congregationalism. That Edwards was aware of certain inconsistencies is
fairly evident; that he was puzzled, hesitated, and stopped halfway in
his labors, is evident too, unless we believe, with Mrs. Stowe, that
certain of his speculations were too daring to put into print. The
chains that bound him were too strong to be broken; the contradictions
that lay at the root of the Calvinistic system could be eradicated only
by grubbing up the whole, and for that the time had not yet come.
In his early years, before his conversion turned him aside from
his true path, setting the apologetics of the theologian above the
speculations of the philosopher, Edwards gave promise of becoming a
strikingly creative thinker. Following the native bent of his genius,
he plunged into the study of metaphysics with such fruitful results
that it seemed likely that New England Puritanism was at last to
come to flower; that the mystical perception of the divine love,
which had steeped the early Puritan thought in emotion and quickened
it to poetry, was now to create a system of philosophy which, like
transcendentalism in the next century, should adequately express the
aspirations of the New England mind. There is no more interesting phase
in the early history of Edwards than the transition from religious
mysticism to philosophical idealism. The yearning for the knitting of
the soul to Christ, as expressed in the imagery of the Song of Songs,
burgeoned into a larger idealism that translated the Rose of Sharon and
the Lily of the Valley into an all-pervasive spirit of divine life. In
certain moods it is the mystic who cries, “My soul breaketh for the
longing it hath; my soul waiteth for the Lord, more than they who watch
for the morning.”
He was reading one day the words of Scripture [says Allen,
paraphrasing Edwards’ diary], “Now unto the King eternal, immortal,
invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory forever, Amen,”
when there came to him for the first time a sort of inward, sweet
delight in God and divine things. A sense of the divine glory was,
as it were, diffused through him. He thought how happy he should
be if he might be rapt up to God in Heaven, swallowed up in him
forever. He began to have an inward, sweet sense of Christ and the
work of redemption. The Book of Canticles attracted him as a fit
expression for his mood. It seemed to him as if he were in a kind
of vision, alone in the mountains or some solitary wilderness,
conversing sweetly with Christ and wrapt and swallowed up in
God.... God’s Excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed
to appear in everything--in the sun, moon, and stars; in clouds
and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water and all
nature, which used greatly to fix my mind.[164]
In other moods the intellect gains ascendency over the emotions, and it
is the idealistic metaphysician who speaks. With a searching curiosity
that impelled him to ask what lies behind the outward semblance of
things, binding them into a coherent whole and imparting to the world
of experience a compelling unity, he came early to an interpretation
distinctly Berkeleyan. From what source he derived it has been much
debated and remains unanswered; nevertheless it is clear that it is
closely related to his religious mysticism. When he inquired what lies
back of the outward semblance, what is the thing in itself behind
attributes and qualities, the existence of which is implicit in our
perception of time and space, but which cannot be resolved into the
things perceived, it was natural that he should have interpreted this
_Ding an sich_ in terms of God. “Men are wont to content themselves
by saying merely that it is something; but that something is _He_ in
whom all things consist.”[165] The world of sensation thus translates
itself into a world of ideas; and this world of ideas, the expression
of the divine mind, is the only reality. The more important of his
early generalizations are given by Allen in some extracts from his
notes on the “Mind”: “Bodies have no existence of their own.” “All
existence is mental; the existence of all things is ideal.” “The brain
exists only mentally, or in idea.” “Instead of matter being the only
proper substance, and more substantial than anything else because it is
hard and solid, yet it is truly nothing at all, strictly and in itself
considered.” “The universe exists nowhere but in the divine mind.”
“Space is necessary, eternal, infinite, and omnipresent. But I had as
good speak plain. I have already said as much as that space is God.”
“And indeed the secret lies here,--that which truly is the substance
of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable
Idea in God’s mind, together with His stable will that the same shall
gradually be communicated to us, and to other minds, according to
certain fixed and exact established methods and laws; or, in somewhat
different language, the infinitely exact, precise, Divine Idea,
together with the answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable
will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and
effects on their minds.”[166]
Edwards had come to such conclusions before the normal unfolding
of his mind was interrupted by his conversion. From the first a
strong bias toward theology had tended to warp his interest in the
purely metaphysical, and with the quickening of an active religious
experience, he turned to examine the dogmas which expressed his faith.
The call of the churches in distress came to him, and he made ready
his logic to do battle with the enemy. Against the twin tendencies
that were undermining the foundations of Calvinism--Arminianism with
its humanistic emphasis and deism with its mechanistic--the deepest
instincts of Edwards protested. The profound God-consciousness that
filled him was stirred by what seemed an infidel attack upon the
divine glory and sufficiency; the mystic and idealist was aroused to
protest against a theology that conceived of religion as consisting
of benevolence toward men rather than in union with God; and
against a philosophy that in constructing a mechanical system was
de-personalizing God into a vague First Cause, and bowing him politely
out of the universe. In so great a crisis his duty seemed clear--to
vindicate, not the ways of God, but God himself to men; to assert the
glory and sufficiency of God even to the extent of minifying the
capacities and potentialities of man.
The basis of his defense was already provided in his metaphysics, the
conception of the divine idea existent in God’s mind and expressed
in His stable will. The needs of his polemics, however, thrust into
relief the secondary rather than the primary element in his philosophy,
exalting the doctrine of the divine will to the obscuring of the divine
idea. How this came about is sufficiently clear in the light of the
fact that in explaining the existence of evil, Calvinism fell back on
determinism: the dogma of election could be fitted to the conception of
a precise and stable will of God. The long feud between Arminianism and
Calvinism resulted from emphasis laid upon different attributes of the
Godhood. Shall God be interpreted in terms of will or love? If He is
the sovereign ruler of the universe, He is also the common father; and
that which broadly divides later theological systems from earlier is
the shift from the former interpretation to the latter. The strategic
weakness of Edwards’s position lay in his assumption of the divine
sovereignty as a cardinal postulate.
But in adhering to the doctrine of predetermined election by the
sovereign will of God, Edwards did unconscious violence to the
instincts of the mystic, that throughout his earlier speculations--and
in much of his later, as well--impelled him to glorify the love of God
the Father, and the sweetness of spiritual communion with Him. The
practical necessities of the preacher, called upon to uphold the dogma
of election in face of growing disbelief, seem to have forced him to
such a position; but once having entered upon the train of speculation
opened by the question of divine polity involved in “His having mercy
on whom He will have mercy, while whom He will. He hardeneth,” he came
somewhat reluctantly to accept the doctrine of God’s sovereignty as
the cardinal principle of his theology, the creative source of his
thinking. Thereafter he followed a path that led back to an absolutist
past, rather than forward to a more liberal future. He had broken
wholly with the social tendencies of his age and world.[167]
The philosophical conception of divine sovereignty was too abstract
to concern the New England laity; it was rather against the dependent
dogmas of election and total depravity that the revolt was rising.
And in defense of these threatened dogmas Edwards put forth his best
strength. The crux of the matter, obviously, lay in the difficult
question of the power of will. The entire structure of Calvinistic
theology had been erected upon the assumption of determinism; and
it must stand or fall according as the argument should justify or
fail to justify that hypothesis. If the human will is effectively
free to choose between good and evil, the dogma of the elect must
go down with the dogma of predestination; and the teachings of the
Arminians--tending, as they seemed to the Calvinist, to abase the
creator in exalting the creature, and minifying the sovereignty of God
in magnifying the excellence of man--would be in a way to prevail.
Around this crucial point the battle had long raged, and it was with
full realization of the critical nature of the problem that Edwards
resolved to penetrate to the root of the matter, and by subjecting
the question of determinism to exact analysis, rout the enemies of
Calvinism from the inmost keep of their stronghold. His celebrated work
_On the Freedom of the Will_, written in 1754, not only was his most
important contribution to theology, but it was the last great defense
of the conservatism that was stifling the intellectual life of New
England.
The argument of this knotty book rests on a psychological rather than
a metaphysical basis. Compressed into the briefest terms it runs thus:
will is subject to desire, and desire follows what seems to us good;
hence the determining impulse is to be sought in the impulse to seek
the apparent good. The ethical import of such an argument will turn,
of course, upon the character of the good which the natural man may
be expected to desire. To Rousseau with his benevolent interpretation
of human nature nothing is to be feared from the subjection of will
to desire. Nor to the younger Edwards, feeling his way along the path
of transcendentalism, rediscovering the doctrine of the inner light,
was such subjection to be feared. In a remarkable sermon published
in 1734, he had expounded the thesis, “That there is such a thing
as a Spiritual and Divine Light, immediately imparted to the Soul
by God, of a different nature from any that is obtained by natural
means.”[168] The divine splendor which the idealist had seen diffused
through the material world the theologian was now merging with the
regenerative life of the Holy Spirit which “acts in the mind of a
saint as an in-dwelling vital principle.” It is “a kind of emanation
of God’s beauty, and is related to God as the light is to the sun”;
it is a new vision by means of which one may “see the beauty and
loveliness of spiritual things.” In such a reinterpretation of the
Quaker doctrine--so harshly condemned by the earlier Puritans--Edwards
entered upon a train of thought that threatened to disrupt the entire
Calvinistic system. He was at the dividing of the ways; he must abandon
transcendentalism or the dogma of total depravity.
Instead he sought refuge in compromise, endeavoring to reconcile what
was incompatible. Herein lay the tragedy of Edwards’s intellectual
life; the theologian triumphed over the philosopher, circumscribing
his powers to ignoble ends. The field of efficiency allotted by the
later theologian to this “in-dwelling vital principle,” was no longer
coextensive with the universe, but was narrowed to the little world
of the elect. In the primal state of man, Edwards argued, before the
sin of Adam had destroyed the harmony between creature and creator,
the light which flowed from God as from a sun shone freely upon His
universe, filling its remotest parts with the divine plenitude; but
with the fall the harmony was destroyed, the sun was hidden, and only
stray beams broke through the rifts to shine upon those whom God willed
them to shine upon; all else in creation was given over to eternal
darkness. And if the natural man, thus cast into sudden darkness “as
light ceases in a room when the candle is withdrawn,” is a being whose
will is impotent to his salvation, it follows that he will now be
impelled as inevitably towards evil as before he was impelled towards
good. Every instinct of a nature corrupt and compact of sin, and with
no wish to exchange darkness for light--having no eyes for the divine
glory--drives him to a blind and consuming hatred of God. He is become
as a loathsome “viper, hissing and spitting poison at God,” the
outcast and pariah of the universe. There is no drawing back from the
conclusion involved in the argument; the Edwardean logic moves forward
by regular steps. The punishment meted out to sin is to be measured
by the excellence of which the sin is a denial. God is of infinite
excellence, and denial of His excellence is therefore infinitely sinful
and merits infinite punishment. As a perfectly just judge God could not
decree otherwise; because of the infinite heinousness of his sin, the
natural man must receive the doom of eternal damnation.[169]
Under the rod of such logic--grotesque, abortive, unseasoned by any
saving knowledge of human nature--Edwards preached that remarkable
series of imprecatory sermons that sank deep into the memory of New
England, and for which it has never forgiven him.[170] Unfortunate
as those sermons were in darkening the fame of an acute thinker,
disastrous as they were in providing a sanction for other men to
terrify the imaginations of ill-balanced persons, we cannot regret that
Edwards devoted his logic to an assiduous stoking of the fires of hell.
The theology of Calvin lay like a heavy weight upon the soul of New
England, and there could be no surer way to bring it into disrepute,
than to thrust into naked relief the brutal grotesqueries of those
dogmas that professed thus to explain the dark mysteries which lie upon
the horizons of life. For a long while yet they were to harass the
imagination of New England, but the end already could be foreseen. Once
the horrors that lay in the background of Calvinism were disclosed to
common view, the system was doomed. It might still wear the semblance
of life; it might still remain as an evil genius to darken the
conscience of men and women; but its authoritative appeal was gone. In
this necessary work of freeing the spirit of New England, no other
thinker played so large or so unconscious a part as Jonathan Edwards;
and it was the notorious minatory sermons--the translation into vivid
images of the generalized dogmas--that awakened the popular mind to an
understanding of the conclusions involved in the premises.
While Edwards was thus hastening the decay of Calvinism with his lurid
painting of “the landscape of hell,” in another phase of his work he
was engaged in awakening an interest in religion among the slothful
churches. He had long been interested in the phenomena of conversion,
and as the great revival of the forties, led by Whitefield, spread from
England to the colonies, he joined eagerly in the work. In consequence
of an earlier revival in his parish of Northampton, his attention had
been drawn to the little understood psychology of the awakening soul,
and with the detachment of the scientist he set himself to study the
problem. The terrors aroused by his minatory sermons provided his
clinical laboratory with numerous cases of abnormal emotionalism. Day
after day he probed and analyzed and compared, until as a result of
his close studies in vivisection, he became a specialist in the theory
of conversion, commanding the eager attention of a generation that had
come to look upon this as the central fact of Christian experience.
It is not easy today to be sympathetic with this phase of Edwards’s
work; it belongs equally with his dogmas to a world of thought that
is no longer ours. The repulsive records as they are set down in his
_Narrative of the Surprizing Works of God_, marked by evidence of
pathological states of mind not far removed from insanity, no longer
seem a testimony to God’s beneficent presence; the spiritual writhings
which this gentle-natured student watched with such fascination,
appear rather to be cases for the alienist to prescribe for. But to
Edwards the terrors of a five-year-old girl were not pathological;
they were the soul-labors of the spiritual rebirth, the visible signs
of the supreme miracle of the universe, filling him with wonder and
awe at God’s infinite mercy; and like a modern psychologist he was
at enormous pains to chart the successive steps in the miraculous
transformation.[171]
Other and greater consequences were to flow from the new revivalism.
The Great Awakening was the single movement that stirred the colonial
heart deeply during three generations. It reveals, among other things,
that America was still living in the world of the seventeenth century:
that the upper class was not yet rationalized, nor the middle class
commercialized. Theology was still of greater popular interest than
politics. In its chief phenomena the Great Awakening was a return to an
earlier age--to those unbalanced enthusiasms of the Puritan upheaval.
It was essentially a mass movement. Its use of hypnotic suggestion, its
lurid terrorism, its outcries and hysterical possessions, reveal like
the Ranters of a hundred years before the phenomena of mob psychology,
and it made appeal to the ill-educated, the isolated, the neurotic, to
the many natural victims of hypnotic excitation bred by the monotony
and austerity of village life. Its after effects were revolutionary,
for the quickening of religious emotionalism marked the beginning of
the end of Puritan formalism.
The bitter quarrel among the churches which followed as an aftermath
was more than a theological dispute; it was a sign of the breaking
up of the traditional parish system. The hierarchy had long before
lost its authority, but in their several parishes the ministers still
enjoyed patriarchal power. The tragic dismissal of Edwards from his
parish was an unprecedented revolt against that authority. But greater
changes were to follow. After the Great Awakening itinerant preachers
made their appearance, who presumed to enter any parish without the
consent of the minister, and preach such doctrines as they would. They
were non-conforming free lances, hostile to the established church,
whose stock-in-trade was the new emotionalism. Under their leadership,
Separatist congregations were gathered that were not only an offense to
the regular establishment but a challenge to its authority. Hundreds
left the old congregations and flocked to the Baptists and Methodists,
and naturally they would make trouble over paying taxes to support a
church they had repudiated. In short, a little revolution was under way
that was to end in the complete disintegration of the parish system.
By a curious irony of fate, Jonathan Edwards, reactionary Calvinist
and philosophical recluse, became the intellectual leader of the
revolutionaries. His insistence upon conversion as the sole ground
of admission to communion was the final blow that destroyed the old
theocratic system which the Mathers had labored to uphold. Church
and state were effectively cut asunder by such a test. There is no
evidence that Edwards was concerned about the political or social
consequences that must result from the abandonment of the traditional
“Half-way Covenant.” It was a question of doctrine with him, involving
only matters of church discipline. Although he was accused of being a
Separatist, and of seeking to disintegrate the parish system, he had no
thought of attacking a parochial order that he held in high esteem. He
was unconcerned that his teachings led straight to the old Separatist
conclusion that it is the church mystical which Christ established,
and not the church visible. Nevertheless he became the creator of the
new Congregationalism, which in accepting the democratic principles
elaborated by John Wise and establishing the local church as an
autonomous unit, effectively nullified the Presbyterian tendencies of
the old order.
As one follows the laborious career of this great thinker, a sense of
the tragic failure of his life deepens. The burdens that he assumed
were beyond the strength of any man. Beginning as a mystic, brooding
on the all-pervasive spirit of sweetness and light diffused through
the universe, with its promise of spiritual emancipation; then turning
to an archaic theology and giving over his middle years to the work
of minifying the excellence of man in order to exalt the sovereignty
of God; and finally settling back upon the mystical doctrine of
conversion--such a life leaves one with a feeling of futility, a sense
of great powers baffled and wasted, a spiritual tragedy enacted within
the narrow walls of a minister’s study. There was both pathos and irony
in the fate of Jonathan Edwards, removed from the familiar places
where for twenty years he had labored, the tie with his congregation
broken, and sent to the frontier mission at Stockbridge to preach to a
band of Indians and to speculate on the unfreedom of the human will.
The greatest mind of New England had become an anachronism in a world
that bred Benjamin Franklin. If he had been an Anglican like Bishop
Berkeley, if he had mingled with the leaders of thought in London
instead of remaining isolated in Massachusetts, he must have made a
name for himself not unworthy to be matched with that of the great
bishop whom he so much resembled. The intellectual powers were his,
but the inspiration was lacking; like Cotton Mather before him, he was
the unconscious victim of a decadent ideal and a petty environment.
Cut off from fruitful intercourse with other thinkers, drawn away from
the stimulating field of philosophy into the arid realm of theology,
it was his fate to devote his noble gifts to the thankless task of
re-imprisoning the mind of New England within a system from which his
nature and his powers summoned him to unshackle it. He was called to be
a transcendental emancipator, but he remained a Calvinist.
Footnotes
[161] Quoted in Walker, _History of the Congregational Churches in the
United States_, p. 216.
[162] _Ecclesiasticall Politie_, sixth edition, Book III, p. 10.
[163] See Wendell, _Literary History of America_, p. 89.
[164] _Jonathan Edwards_, p. 25.
[165] _Ibid._, p. 13.
[166] For an examination of the philosophy of Edwards, see Adam
Leroy Jones, “Early American Philosophers,” in _Columbia University
Contributions to Philosophy, Psychology and Education_, Vol. II, No. 4,
Chapter 4.
[167] For a statement of the doctrine, see Sermon XXXIV, “God’s
Sovereignty,” in _Works_, New York, 1847, Vol. IV, p. 548.
Edwards unconsciously admits that the doctrine of sovereignty was
reactionary. “From my childhood up, my mind had been full of objections
against the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, in choosing whom He would to
eternal life, and rejecting whom He pleased, leaving them eternally to
perish and be everlastingly tormented in hell.” Later he came to regard
such repugnance as the sinful expression of the natural man. As he saw
further, his mind “apprehended the justice and reasonableness of ...
God’s absolute sovereignty and justice with respect to salvation ...
as much as of anything that I see with my eyes; at least it is so at
times. But I have often, since that first conviction, had quite another
sense of God’s sovereignty than I had then. I have often hid not only
a conviction, but a delightful conviction. The doctrine has very often
appeared exceedingly pleasant, bright, and sweet.... But my first
conviction was not so.” Quoted in Allen, _Jonathan Edwards_, pp. 37-38.
[168] Sermon XXVII, in _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 438.
[169] See Sermon IX, in _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 226. The argument is
unfolded in the following propositions: “Every crime or fault deserves
a greater or less punishment, according as the crime is greater or
less.” “A crime is more or less heinous, according as we are under
greater or less obligations to the contrary.” “Our obligations to
love, honor, and obey any being, is in proportion to its loveliness,
honorableness, and authority.” “But God is a being infinitely lovely,
because he hath infinite excellence and beauty.” “So that sin against
God, being a violation of infinite obligations, must be a crime
infinitely heinous, and so deserving of infinite punishment.”
[170] See in particular Sermon XI. “The Eternity of Hell Torments”;
Sermon XII, “When the Wicked shall have filled up the measure of their
Sin, wrath will come upon them to the uttermost”; Sermon XIII, “The End
of the Wicked contemplated by the Righteous; or, The Torments of the
Wicked in Hell, no occasion of grief to the Saints in Heaven”; Sermon
XV, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in _Works_, Vol. IV.
[171] According to Edwards there were four regular stages: (1) the
first stirrings, when the sinner is brought under conviction that he is
lost; (2) the realization of God’s justice, that he merits damnation;
(3) the breaking in of the light, the first “gracious discoveries”
of God’s mercies; (4) peace after the storm, the joy of assurance of
salvation. For a fuller statement, see Allen, _Jonathan Edwards_, pp.
133-160.
Chapter III • Benjamin Franklin • Our First Ambassador
There was a singularly dramatic fitness in the life and career of
Benjamin Franklin. America has never been more worthily represented
at old-world capitals than by this unpretentious commoner, drawn from
the stock of the plain people. A plebeian in an aristocratic age, he
was nevertheless, by common consent, first among colonial Americans in
qualities of mind and heart. A wit and philosopher, rich in learning,
charming in manners, ripe in the wisdom of this world, resourceful
in dealing with men and events, he was one of the most delightful as
he was one of the greatest men produced by the English race in the
eighteenth century.
“Figure to yourself,” he wrote in his seventy-second year, “an old man,
with gray hair appearing under a marten fur cap, among the powdered
heads of Paris. It is this odd figure that salutes you, with handfuls
of blessings.” An odd figure indeed in such a setting, but a figure
that captured the imagination of Paris, as it has since captured the
imagination of America; so novel as to seem romantic--a charming rustic
philosopher who might have stepped out of the pages of Rousseau. And
so the French aristocracy patronized _le bon homme_, and laughed with
him at the affectations of this preposterous world, and made much of
him for the zest that it discovered in a novel sensation. It was the
same odd figure that had stood at the bar of the House of Commons and
matched his intelligence against that of celebrated English lawyers;
the same figure that had been called in council by the great Pitt--who
thought himself too great to learn anything even from Franklin; that
had been lashed by the scurrilous tongue of Wedderburn; that had seen a
thousand bribes dangled before him by Lord Howe and other gentlemen--a
figure that seems strangely out of place in that old-fashioned Tory
world, with its narrow sympathies and narrower intelligence. And yet
considered in the light of social revolutions, what other figure in
eighteenth-century Europe or America is so dramatically significant?
The figure of the self-made democrat, with some three millions of his
fellows at his back, and countless other millions to come, who was
entering on a world-wide struggle for political mastery, the end of
which no one can yet foresee? His presence in the councils of gentlemen
was a tacit denial of their hitherto unquestioned right of supremacy.
It was a rare personal triumph; but it was far more significant than
that, it was the triumph of a rising class and a new social ideal.
Although Franklin’s origins, whether Boston or Philadelphia, were
narrowly provincial, his mind from early youth to extreme old age was
curiously open and free, and to such a mind the intellectual wealth
of the world lies open and free. From that wealth he helped himself
generously, to such good effect that he early became an intellectual
cosmopolitan, at ease with the best intellects and at home among the
diverse speculative interests of the eighteenth century: the sane and
witty embodiment of its rationalism, its emancipation from authority,
its growing concern for social justice, its hopeful pursuit of new
political and economic philosophies, its tempered optimism that trusted
intelligence to set the world right. No other man in America and few in
Europe had so completely freed themselves from the prejudice of custom.
The Calvinism in which he was bred left not the slightest trace upon
him; and the middle-class world from which he emerged did not narrow
his mind to its petty horizons. He was a free man who went his own
way with imperturbable good will and unbiased intelligence; our first
social philosopher, the first ambassador of American democracy to the
courts of Europe.
Fortune was kind to Franklin in many ways: kind in that it did not
visit upon him the fate that befell his elder brother Ebenezer, of whom
Sewall noted, “Ebenezer Franklin of the South Church, a male-infant
of 16 months old, was drowned in a Tub of Suds, Febr. 5, 1702/3”;
kind also in that it set him in a land where opportunity waited upon
enterprise, and where thousands of kindred spirits were erecting a
society that honored such qualities as he possessed. In England he must
have remained middle-class, shut in by a wall of prejudice; but in
colonial America he found a congenial environment. Like Samuel Sewall,
he swam easily in the main current of colonial life, won increasing
honors, until--as he naïvely remarked--he came more than once to stand
before kings. How fortunate he was is revealed by contrast with the
career of his great English counterpart and fellow spirit, Daniel
Defoe, whose _Essay on Projects_--a classic document of the rising
middle class--might well have been Franklin’s first textbook.
The earliest literary representative of the English middle class, Defoe
preached the same gospel of social betterment. With his head full of
projects for the advancement of trade and the material well-being of
his fellows, he preached the new gospel of practical efficiency to a
generation of wits, going so far as to assert that the ideal statesman
should be sought, not among gentlemen but among merchants, whose
training in business affairs had made them shrewd judges of men and
capable in dealing with practical matters. But the London of Queen
Anne was not a place in which to rise by preaching efficiency. Defoe’s
day had not yet come in England, and in spite of great abilities and
arduous labors he remained a Grub Street hack, the servant and not
the counselor of aristocratic politicians. Instead of coming to stand
before kings--like the more fortunate Franklin--he stood often before
constables; instead of cracking his joke and his bottle at Will’s
Coffee House, he was forced to study the ways of the unprosperous at
Bridewell. But if he failed in his ambition to get on, he found a
certain solace in the vicarious realization of his ideal. Robinson
Crusoe, the practically efficient man making himself master of his
environment, was the dream of Daniel Defoe; Franklin was the visible,
new-world embodiment of that dream.
It was Franklin’s supreme capacity for doing well the things which
his fellow Americans held in esteem, that enabled him to rise out of
obscurity to a position of leadership. Before he should be intrusted
with the confidence of his fellow citizens, he must prove himself
worthy of such confidence, and even in colonial America the task was
far from easy. In the wealthier communities society was exclusive and
select--nowhere more so than in Philadelphia--and it could not be
expected to view with approval the advancement of a printer-tradesman,
especially if he were a member of the plebeian anti-Proprietary
party. It was an evidence of Franklin’s discretion that he removed
from Boston, where neither his father’s chandlery shop, nor his
brother’s baiting of the ruling gentry, would serve his purpose. In
Philadelphia, free from family entanglements, he bent himself to the
task of securing a competence, understanding how easily the wheel
turns on a well-greased axle; and by the time he had come to his
early forties he had kept his shop so well that henceforth it would
keep him. He was ready to do his real work in the world; and in the
choice of that work he revealed the curious _flair_ for the timely that
was so characteristic. His extraordinary successes in the field of
civic betterments gained him the good will of the commonalty, and his
experiments in natural philosophy won the approbation of the gentry.
Interest in scientific inquiry, particularly in physics, had spread
widely in England since the founding of the Royal Society, and to be an
authority on magnetism was as evident a mark of breeding in Georgian
England as discriminating judgment in the matter of manuscripts and
mistresses had been a sign of culture among Florentine cinquecentists.
In establishing a reputation as a natural philosopher, therefore,
Franklin not only was acquiring dignity at home, but he was providing
himself with a sure passport to European favor. And it was the seal
of European approval that finally won for Franklin the grudging
recognition of the first families of Philadelphia. A few held out
against him and to the day of his death regarded him with disapproval;
but in the end his personal charm prevailed with all but a handful of
elderly Tory ladies. So delightful a wit and so useful a citizen could
not be dismissed as a pushing tradesman.
Franklin first entered politics as a member of the popular party, then
engaged in a bitter struggle with the Proprietors over tax matters,
defense of the frontier, and other questions of acute popular concern.
There was the usual colonial alignment between the backcountry yeomanry
and the town gentry; between the agrarian and mercantile interests;
and the dispute had reached a point where the yeomanry determined to
appeal to the King to convert the commonwealth into a Crown Colony. As
one of the leaders of the popular party, Franklin was singled out for
attack. A bitter election went against him, and he lost his seat in the
Assembly, only to be chosen Colonial Agent to England, there to begin
his long diplomatic career. Probably no other attack which Franklin
suffered was so coarse or vindictive as this assault by the Proprietary
party, led by the first gentlemen of Philadelphia, John Dickinson
among them. Unpleasant as the experience was, it proved of service to
Franklin, for it taught him how quickly the hornets would be about the
ears of anyone who disturbed the nest of official perquisites; and this
was worth knowing to a colonial diplomat on his first mission to a
court and parliament where yellow jackets were uncommonly abundant.[172]
He was nearly threescore when he set out on his diplomatic mission,
which beginning modestly as temporary agent of the anti-Proprietary
party of Pennsylvania, was to broaden immensely as the American
difficulties increased, until he became in the eyes of all the
world the spokesman of the colonial cause; first at London to King,
Parliament, and people, and later at Paris to all Europe. It was
a mission of discussion and argument, curiously illuminating to
a colonial bred in a simple, decentralized world. Before he went
abroad Franklin had been a democrat by temperament and environment;
when he returned he was a democrat by conviction, confirmed in his
preference for government immediately responsible to the majority
will. Centralized Tory governments had taught him the excellence
of town-meeting ways. At London he discovered widespread political
corruption. It was a world flyblown with the vices of irresponsible
power. The letters of Franklin are full of the scandal of bribe-taking
and pension-mongering, of gross parliamentary jobbery. The elections
of 1768 were a debauch, the brisk bidding of Indian nabobs sending the
market price of parliamentary seats up to four thousand pounds. “It
is thought,” he wrote on March 13, “that near two millions will be
spent on this election; but those, who understand figures and act by
computation, say the crown has _two millions in places and pensions_ to
dispose of, and it is well worth while to engage in such a seven years
lottery, though all that have tickets should not get prizes.”[173]
To expect such a government to be swayed by appeals to justice or
abstract rights was plain folly, Franklin very quickly learned. The
colonial goose was there to be plucked, and gentlemen who gained their
livelihood by skillful plucking would not easily be denied. “To get
a larger field on which to fatten a herd of worthless parasites, is
all that is regarded,” wrote the celebrated London physician, Dr.
Fothergill, to Franklin.[174] Even war with the colonies might not seem
undesirable to some, for “an auditor of the exchequer has sixpence in
the pound, or a fortieth part, of all the public money expended by the
nation, so that, when a war costs forty millions, one million is paid
to him.”[175]
It was a bitter experience for one who had grown up in respect for
England and veneration for English traditions. Franklin was not a
man of divided loyalties, and his love of the old home was deep and
sincere. He had many warm friends there, and the idea of American
separation from the empire was profoundly repugnant to him. It was not
till he was convinced beyond hope that America could expect from the
English government nothing but ignoble dependence that he accepted the
idea of independence. Again and again he complained bitterly of “the
extreme corruption prevalent among all orders of men in this rotten
old state.”[176] “I wish all the friends of liberty and of man would
quit that sink of corruption, and leave it to its fate.” “I do not
expect that your new Parliament will be either wiser or honester than
the last. All projects to procure an honest one, by place bills, etc.,
appear to me vain and impracticable. The true cure, I imagine, is to
be found in rendering all places unprofitable, and the King too poor
to give bribes and pensions. Till this is done, which can only be by
a revolution (and I think you have not virtue enough left to procure
one), your nation will always be plundered, and obliged to pay by
taxes the plunderers for plundering and ruining. Liberty and virtue
therefore join in the call, +COME OUT OF HER, MY PEOPLE+!”[177] “The
people of England ... are just and generous,” wrote his friend David
Hartley, member of Parliament, “and, if it were put to the sense of
the people of England, you would not be left in any doubt whether it
was _want of will_, or _want of power_, to do you justice. You know
the blot of our constitution, by which, to our disgrace, and to your
misfortune, a corrupt ministry, sheltered by Parliamentary influence,
are out of our immediate control. A day of account may come, when the
justice of the nation may prevail; and if it comes not too late, it
may prove a day of reconciliation and cordial reunion between us and
America.”[178] He is blind indeed who cannot see in such experience
the explanation of Franklin’s later efforts in Pennsylvania and in the
constitutional convention to keep government in America responsive to
the will of the people.
During the long years of his ambassadorship, so rich in intellectual
opportunity, Franklin was intimately concerned with economics and
politics, and he found in them subjects congenial to his talents. By
temperament he was what we should call today a sociologist. He cared
little for abstract reasoning, but much for social betterment; and this
led him to examine critically current economic theory in the light
of present fact. All his life economics was a major interest with
him, and his several contributions entitle him to be regarded as our
first important economist, the only one indeed before the nineteenth
century. His chief guides in this little explored field seem to have
been Sir William Petty, the statistician of the Restoration period, in
his younger days, and the French Physiocrats in later years. He was
the first American to abandon the traditional mercantile school--a
generation before other American thinkers had repudiated it; and he was
the first to ally himself with the rising school of _laissez faire_.
In the year 1729, when he was just turned twenty-three, Franklin
entered the field of economics with a pamphlet entitled _A Modest
Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency_. It is a
curiously suggestive work, not only for the light which it sheds on his
economic views, but on his social and political sympathies. It marks
his early alignment with the agrarian party, to which he adhered to
the end of his life. From the days when Samuel Sewall first confronted
the question of land-banks in the Massachusetts legislature till the
British government forbade all issues of bills of credit, the currency
question was bitterly debated in the several colonies. It was primarily
a class issue, in which the town merchants and money lenders found
themselves outvoted by the agrarian debtors and small men. Little light
had come from those debates on the nature of money and its social
functions; but much heat had been engendered over the supposed question
of honest versus dishonest money. With this cheap fallacy Franklin was
not concerned; but he was greatly concerned in this and in later papers
in expounding the quantitative theory of money, the nature of credit,
and the important fact, overlooked by the hard-money men, that gold and
silver are themselves commodities, fluctuating in value with supply and
demand. This first pamphlet, Franklin afterward remarked, “was well
received by the common people in general; but the rich men disliked it,
for it increased and strengthened the clamor for more money; and, they
happening to have no writers among them that were able to answer it,
their opposition slackened, and the point was carried by a majority in
the House.”[179]
By much the most interesting idea in the pamphlet, however, is the
elaboration of the labor theory of value. Commenting on this, McMaster
says in his _Life of Franklin_:
Bad as were his notions of political economy, his pamphlet
contained one great truth,--the truth that labor is the measure of
value. Whether he discovered, or, as is not unlikely, borrowed it,
he was the first openly to assert it; and his it remained till,
forty-seven years later, Adam Smith adopted it and reaffirmed it in
“The Wealth of Nations.”[180]
Unfortunately the biographer’s knowledge of the history of economic
thought was as faulty as, in his judgment, were Franklin’s economic
principles. In his _Treatise of Taxes_, written in 1662, Sir William
Petty--whom Franklin in many ways greatly resembled--clearly elaborated
the principle of labor-value;[181] it was restated by Vauban in 1707,
in his _Projet d’une disme Royale_, by Hume in 1752, and later by the
Physiocrats; and when Adam Smith wrote it was pretty widely known.
There can be little doubt where Franklin got it. The similarity between
his work and that of Sir William Petty is too evident to escape
comment. But that does not lessen the significance of the fact that a
self-trained provincial of three and twenty should have read Petty’s
work, seized upon the salient idea and turned it to effective use,
years before economic students generally were acquainted with it. All
his life Franklin took up ideas like a sponge, and what he took he
incorporated with the solid results of his own observations.
During his stay in England Franklin came in close contact with the
body of Physiocratic writings, which seem to have greatly stimulated
his interest in economic thought. The school was at the height of
its influence between the years 1763 and 1772, and had pretty well
undermined the position of the mercantilists. They were the founders
of modern social science and their teachings contained in germ the
liberal doctrine of economics in its entirety. In their emphasis upon
free trade and _laissez-faire_ competition, on the police theory of
the state, on property, security, liberty, on the natural laws of
association and self-interest, and especially in their emphasis on land
as the sole source of wealth, they presented a system of economics that
fitted American conditions as Franklin understood those conditions. In
one important point--their acceptance of an absolute prince--Franklin
broke with them wholly; but their preference for agriculture over
manufacturing and commerce accorded with his deepest convictions.
America was notably happy and contented in comparison with Europe, and
America would remain happy and contented, he believed, so long as land
was abundant and her farmers remained freeholders. The new middle-class
gospel of industrialism he profoundly distrusted. He shared Goldsmith’s
concern over the destruction of the English peasantry and the creation
of a degraded proletariat. Manufacture and trade developed only
where free land was inadequate or the peasants were dispossessed;
industrialism sprang from the national poverty and was nourished by it.
Writing in 1760 he said:
Unprejudiced men well know, that all the penal and prohibitory
laws that were ever thought on will not be sufficient to prevent
manufactures in a country, whose inhabitants surpass the number
that can subsist by the husbandry of it.... Manufactures are
founded in poverty. It is the number of poor without land in a
country, and who must work for others at low wages or starve, that
enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture, and afford it cheap
enough to prevent the importation of the same kind from abroad, and
to bear the expense of its own exportation. But no man, who can
have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by his labor to subsist
his family in plenty, is poor enough to be a manufacturer, and work
for a master. Hence while there is land enough in America for our
people, there can never be manufactures to any amount or value.[182]
Nine years later, in his _Positions to be Examined, concerning National
Wealth_, he stated the Physiocratic theory thus:
There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The
first is by _war_, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered
neighbors. This is _robbery_. The second by _commerce_, which is
generally _cheating_. The third by _agriculture_, the only _honest
way_, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into
the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of
God in his favor.[183]
Franklin’s prejudice against trade somewhat lessened in after years,
as he considered the economic need of free exchange of commodities.
In 1774, two years before the publication of _The Wealth of Nations_,
he collaborated with George Whately in writing a pamphlet entitled
_Principles of Trade_, that suggests Adam Smith. Franklin was
acquainted with Smith, had visited him, and doubtless had discussed
with him the theory of _laissez faire_, division of labor, use of
machinery, and other principles of the new school, but no mention of
him is made.[184] The central doctrine is thus elaborated:
Perhaps, in general, it would be better if government meddled no
farther with trade, than to protect it, and let it take its course.
Most of the statutes, or acts, edicts, _arrêts_, and placarts
of parliaments, princes, and states, for regulating, directing,
or restraining of trade, have, we think, been either political
blunders, or jobs obtained by artful men for private advantage,
under pretense of public good. When Colbert assembled some wise
old merchants of France, and desired their advice and opinion,
how he could best serve and promote commerce, their answer, after
consultation, was, in three words only, _Laissez-nous faire_: “Let
us alone.” It is said by a very solid writer of the same nation,
that he is well advanced in the science of politics, who knows the
full force of that maxim, _Pas trop gouverner_: “Not to govern too
much.” Which, perhaps, would be of more use when applied to trade,
than in any other public concern. It were therefore to be wished,
that commerce was as free between all the nations of the world, as
it is between the several counties of England; so would all, by
mutual communication, obtain more enjoyments. Those counties do not
ruin one another by trade; neither would the nations. No nation was
ever ruined by trade, even seemingly the most disadvantageous.[185]
As a colonial, long familiar with the injustice of Navigation Laws,
Boards of Trade, and other restrictions in favor of British tradesmen,
Franklin agreed with Adam Smith on the principle of free trade; but
with later developments of the _laissez-faire_ school--its fetish of
the economic man and its iron law of wages--he would not have agreed.
Plugson of Undershot was no hero of his, and the social system which
Plugson was creating would have seemed to him as vicious as the old
system with its “bad, wasteful, plundering governments, and their mad
destructive wars.” In his later speculations he was rather the social
philosopher than the economist, puzzled at the irrationality of society
that chooses to make a pigsty of the world, instead of the garden
that it might be if men would but use the sense that God has given
them. “The happiness of individuals is evidently the ultimate end of
political society,”[186] he believed, and a starvation wage-system was
the surest way of destroying that happiness.[187] In one of the most
delightful letters that he ever wrote, Franklin commented on the ways
of men thus:
It is wonderful how preposterously the affairs of this world are
managed. Naturally one would imagine, that the interests of a few
individuals should give way to general interest; but individuals
manage their affairs with so much more application, industry, and
address, than the public do theirs, that general interest most
commonly gives way to particular. We assemble parliaments and
councils, to have the benefit of their collected wisdom; but we
necessarily have, at the same time, the inconvenience of their
collected passions, prejudices, and private interests. By the
help of these, artful men overpower their wisdom and dupe its
possessors; and if we may judge by the acts, _arrêts_, and edicts,
all the world over, for regulating commerce, an assembly of great
men is the greatest fool upon earth?...
What occasions then so much want and misery? It is the employment
of men and women in works, that produce neither the necessaries
nor conveniences of life, who, with those who do nothing, consume
necessaries raised by the laborious.... Look round the world, and
see the millions employed in doing nothing, or in something that
amounts to nothing, when the necessaries and conveniences of life
are in question. What is the bulk of commerce, for which we fight
and destroy each other, but the toil of millions for superfluities,
to the great hazard and loss of many lives?... It has been computed
by some political arithmetician, that, if every man and woman would
work for four hours each day on something useful, that labor would
produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of
life, want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the
rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and happiness.[188]
But the immediate problem of Franklin as representative of the colonies
at St. James’s, was political--how to reconcile the antagonistic
ambitions of the sundered bodies of Englishmen; and the solution which
he set forth with admirable clearness, bears the impress of a mind
intent upon the reality behind parchment pretense. While lawyers were
befogging the issue with legal quibble, and politicians were proving
the unconstitutionality of the forces stirring in eighteenth-century
America, Franklin was more concerned with adjusting imperial policy to
existing fact. On one side were the colonies, in which the practice of
local self-government had taken deep root; whether the practice was
sanctioned by their charters or the British constitution was beside the
question. On the other side was the British parliament, serving as a
legislative body for its proper constituency, the people of the British
Isles. Over both colonies and parliament, providing an effective but
ungalling tie to bind the parts together, was the King, to whom both
paid willing allegiance. So long as England was content to maintain the
_status quo_, the colonies, Franklin believed, would remain loyal to
the empire; but if the ministry persisted in its program of extending
parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies, the outcome must be one of
two things, federation or separation.
To the principle of federation Franklin was an early and faithful
friend. The conception of a federal union of the several colonies was
slowly spreading in America, and no other colonial had done so much
to further it; in his well-known Plan of Union he had sketched the
outlines of a federal constitution; what was more natural, therefore,
than for him to think in terms of a Federated British Empire, as a
statesmanlike solution of the present perplexities. The plan involved
two problems: first, an inquiry into the nature and constitution
of an imperial parliament, and second, provision for an equitable
representation of the several divisions of the empire. The present
difficulties had arisen out of the ambition of the British parliament
to assume sovereignty over the colonial legislatures, thereby reducing
them to a dependent status; those difficulties would be settled only
by constitutional recognition of local rights and local sovereignties.
“The British state,” he argued, “is only the Island of Great Britain,”
and if by reason of familiarity with local needs, “the British
legislature” is “the only proper judge of what concerns the welfare of
that state,” why does the principle not hold for the several colonial
legislatures?
Here appears the excellency of the invention of colony government,
by separate, independent legislatures. By this means, the remotest
parts of a great empire may be as well governed as the centre;
misrule, oppressions of proconsuls, and discontents and rebellions
thence arising, prevented. By this means, the power of a king
may be extended without inconvenience over territories of any
dimensions, how great soever. America was thus happily governed in
all its different and remote settlements, by the crown and their
own Assemblies, till the new politics took place, of governing it
by one Parliament, which have not succeeded and never will.[189]
In this dream of a British Empire Franklin was far in advance of
his time. On both sides of the ocean selfish and unimaginative men
stood ready to thwart all such proposals; little Englanders and
little colonials in vast numbers were concerned with more immediate
and personal interests than those of the English race. Nevertheless
Franklin was convinced that the gods, if not the Tories, were on the
side of the colonies. The enormous increase in material strength that
the years were swiftly bringing to America was an augury of good hope;
the legitimate demands of America would be granted when America had
grown too strong to be denied, which must be shortly. In the meantime
it was the duty of Englishmen, British and colonial alike, to endeavor
“with unfeigned and unwearying zeal to preserve from breaking that
fine and noble China vase, the British empire.” It was the traditional
policy of “protract and grow strong”--a wise and sane policy--and
Franklin clung to it until he was convinced of its utter futility.
One other choice remained--separation; and he made that choice sadly,
understanding better than most what it involved.
The years which followed were filled to the brim for Franklin as well
as for America. Ideals changed and principles clarified swiftly;
but his social philosophy was founded on too wide and sobering an
experience with men and governments, to sway with every gusty passion
of the times. He had been a democrat from his youth up and in those
critical first days of independence, when the forces of agrarianism
were taking possession of state governments, he threw in his lot
with them, and joined heartily in the stimulating work of providing
a democratic constitution for Pennsylvania. During the later years
of reaction following the peace, when so many Revolutionary leaders
endeavored to stay the agrarian movement and undo its work, he saw
no cause to lose faith in government immediately responsive to the
majority will. He was a forerunner of Jefferson, like him firm in the
conviction that government was good in the measure that it remained
close to the people. He sat in the Constitutional Convention as one of
the few democrats, and although he was unable to make headway against
the aristocratic majority, he was quite unconvinced by their rhetoric.
For years he had been an advocate of unrestricted manhood suffrage,
annual parliaments,[190] and a single-chamber legislature; and when he
heard eloquent young lawyers argue that a single-chamber legislature,
responsive to a democratic electorate, must lead to mob legislation,
and that good government required a carefully calculated system of
checks and balances, he remarked:
It appears to me ... like putting one horse before a cart and the
other behind it, and whipping them both. If the horses are of equal
strength, the wheels of the cart, like the wheels of government,
will stand still; and if the horses are strong enough the cart will
be torn to pieces.[191]
When in 1790 it was proposed to substitute a bicameral system for the
single-chamber in Pennsylvania, Franklin came to the defense of the
simpler, more democratic form, with a vivacity little staled by years:
Has not the famous political fable of the snake, with two heads and
one body, some useful instruction contained in it? She was going
to a brook to drink, and in her way was to pass through a hedge, a
twig of which opposed her direct course; one head chose to go on
the right side of the twig, the other on the left; so that time was
spent in the contest, and before the decision was completed, the
poor snake died with thirst.[192]
Both his economic principles and his views on government have been
condemned by Federalistic critics as tainted with populism. They both
sprang from the same root of agrarian democracy. Whether Franklin
or his critics more adequately represented the larger interests of
eighteenth-century America is beside the present question; it is enough
to note that all such criticism is leveled primarily at Franklin’s
democratic philosophy as a thing in itself undesirable, if not
dangerous.
Franklin may often have been wrong, but he was never arrogant, never
dogmatic. He was too wise and too generous for that. In the midst
of prosperity he never forgot the unprosperous. All his life his
sympathy went out to whoever suffered in person or fortune from the
injustice of society: to the debtor who found himself pinched by the
shrinking supply of currency; to the black slave who suffered the most
elementary of wrongs; to impressed seamen; to the weak and wretched
of earth. He was a part of that emerging humanitarian movement which,
during the last half of the eighteenth century, was creating a new
sense of social responsibility. True to his Physiocratic convictions,
Franklin was social-minded. He was concerned not with property or class
interests, but with the common welfare; and in his quick sympathy for
all sorts and conditions of men, in his conviction that he must use
his talents to make this world better and not exploit it, he reveals
the breadth and generosity of his nature. Reason and work, in his
pragmatic philosophy, are the faithful handmaids of progress, of which
war, whether public or private, is the utter negation. After long
years of thought he rendered a judgment which later experience has not
reversed,--“there is no good war and no bad peace.”
It is to little purpose that certain shortcomings of Franklin are dwelt
upon. “There is a flower of religion, a flower of honor, a flower of
chivalry, that you must not require of Franklin,” said Sainte-Beuve;
a judgment that is quite true and quite obvious. A man who is less
concerned with the golden pavements of the City of God than that the
cobblestones on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia should be well and
evenly laid, who troubles less to save his soul from burning hereafter
than to protect his neighbors’ houses by organizing an efficient
fire-company, who is less regardful of the light that never was on
sea or land than of a new-model street lamp to light the steps of the
belated wayfarer--such a man, obviously, does not reveal the full
measure of human aspiration. Franklin ended as he began, the child
of a century marked by sharp spiritual limitations. What was best
in that century he made his own. In his modesty, his willingness to
compromise, his openmindedness, his clear and luminous understanding,
his charity--above all, in his desire to subdue the ugly facts of
society to some more rational scheme of things--he proved himself a
great and useful man, one of the greatest and most useful whom America
has produced.