The Third and Fourth Generation
When the eighteenth century opened, many signs of change were in the
air. The third generation of native-born Americans was becoming
secularized. The theocracy of New England had failed. In the height of
the tragic folly over the supposed "witchcraft" in Salem, Increase
Mather and his son Cotton had held up the hands of the judges in their
implacable work. But before five years had passed, Judge Sewall does
public penance in church for his share of the awful blunder, desiring
"to take the shame and blame of it." Robert Calef's cool pamphlet
exposing the weakness of the prosecutors' case is indeed burned by
Increase Mather in the Harvard Yard, but the liberal party are soon to
force Mather from the Presidency and to refuse that office to his son.
In the town of Boston, once hermetically sealed against heresy, there
are Baptist and Episcopal churches--and a dancing-master. Young Benjamin
Franklin, born in 1706, professes a high respect for the Mathers, but he
does not go to church, "Sunday being my studying day," and neither the
clerical nor the secular arm of Boston is long enough and strong enough
to compel that industrious apprentice into piety.
If such was the state of New England, the laxity of New York and
Virginia needs little evidence. Contemporary travelers found the New
Yorkers singularly attached to the things of this present world.
Philadelphia was prosperous and therewith content. Virginia was a
paradise with no forbidden fruit. Hugh Jones, writing of it in 1724,
considers North Carolina "the refuge of runaways," and South Carolina
"the delight of buccaneers and pirates," but Virginia "the happy retreat
of true Britons and true Churchmen." Unluckily these Virginians, well
nourished "by the plenty of the country," have "contemptible notions of
England!" We shall hear from them again. In the meantime the witty
William Byrd of Westover describes for us his amusing survey of the
Dismal Swamp, and his excursions into North Carolina and to Governor
Spotswood's iron mines, where he reads aloud to the Widow Fleming, on a
rainy autumn day, three acts of the Beggars' Opera, just over from
London. So runs the world away, south of the Potomac. Thackeray paints
it once for all, no doubt, in the opening chapters of The Virginians.
To discover any ambitious literary effort in this period, we must turn
northward again. In the middle colonies, and especially in Philadelphia,
which had now outgrown Boston in population, there was a quickened
interest in education and science. But the New Englanders were still the
chief makers of books. Three great names will sufficiently represent the
age: Cotton Mather, a prodigy of learning whose eyes turn back fondly to
the provincial past; Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most consummate
intellect of the eighteenth century; and Benjamin Franklin, certainly
the most perfect exponent of its many-sided life.
When Cotton Mather was graduated from Harvard in 1678, in his sixteenth
year, he was publicly complimented by President Oakes, in fulsome Latin,
as the grandson of Richard Mather and John Cotton. This atmosphere of
flattery, this consciousness of continuing in his own person the famous
local dynasty, surrounded and sustained him to the end. He had a less
commanding personality than his father Increase. His nervous sensibility
was excessive. His natural vanity was never subdued, though it was often
chastened by trial and bitter disappointment. But, like his father, he
was an omnivorous reader and a facile producer of books, carrying daily
such burdens of mental and spiritual excitement as would have crushed a
normal man. Increase Mather published some one hundred and fifty books
and pamphlets: Cotton Mather not less than four hundred. The Rev. John
Norton, in his sketch of John Cotton, remarks that "the hen, which
brings not forth without uncessant sitting night and day, is an apt
emblem of students." Certainly the hen is an apt emblem of the
"uncessant" sitter, the credulous scratcher, the fussy cackler who
produced the Magnalia.
Yet he had certain elements of greatness. His tribal loyalty was
perfect. His ascetic devotion to his conception of religious truth was
absolute. His Diary, which has recently been published in full, records
his concern for the chief political events in Europe in his day, no less
than his brooding solicitude for the welfare of his townspeople, and his
agony of spirit over the lapses of his wayward eldest son. A "sincere"
man, then, as Carlyle would say, at bottom; but overlaid with such
"Jewish old clothes," such professional robings and personal plumage as
makes it difficult, save in the revealing Diary, to see the man himself.
The Magnalia Christi Americana, treating the history of New England from
1620 to 1698, was published in a tall London folio of nearly 800 pages
in 1702. It is divided into seven books, and proceeds, by methods
entirely unique, to tell of Pilgrim and Puritan divines and governors,
of Harvard College, of the churches of New England, of marvelous events,
of Indian wars; and in general to justify, as only a member of the
Mather dynasty could justify, the ways of God to Boston men. Hawthorne
and Whittier, Longfellow and Lowell knew this book well and found much
honey in the vast carcass. To have had four such readers and a
biographer like Barrett Wendell must be gratifying to Cotton Mather in
Paradise.
The Diary of Mather's fellow-townsman Judge Samuel Sewall has been read
more generally in recent years than anything written by Mather himself.
It was begun in 1673, nine years earlier than the first entry in
Mather's Diary, and it ends in 1729, while Mather's closes in 1724. As a
picture of everyday happenings in New England, Sewall's Diary is as far
superior to Mather's as Pepys's Diary is to George Fox's Journal in
painting the England of the Restoration. Samuel Sewall was an admirably
solid figure, keen, forceful, honest. Most readers of his Diary believe
that he really was in luck when he was rejected by the Widow Winthrop on
that fateful November day when his eye noted--in spite of his
infatuation--that "her dress was not so clean as sometime it had been.
Jehovah Jireh!"
One pictures Cotton Mather as looking instinctively backward to the
Heroic Age of New England with pious nervous exaltation, and Samuel
Sewall as doing the day's work uprightly without taking anxious thought
of either past or future. But Jonathan Edwards is set apart from these
and other men. He is a lonely seeker after spiritual perfection, in
quest of that city "far on the world's rim," as Masefield says of it,
the city whose builder and maker is God.
The story of Edwards's career has the simplicity and dignity of tragedy.
Born in a parsonage in the quiet Connecticut valley in 1703--the year of
John Wesley's birth--he is writing at the age of ten to disprove the
doctrine of the materiality of the soul. At twelve he is studying "the
wondrous way of the working of the spider," with a precision and
enthusiasm which would have made him a great naturalist. At fourteen he
begins his notes on The Mind and on Natural Science. He is graduated
from Yale in 1720, studies theology, and at twenty-four becomes the
colleague of his famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the church at
Northampton. He marries the beautiful Sarah Pierrepont, whom he
describes in his journal in a prose rhapsody which, like his mystical
rhapsodies on religion in the same youthful period, glows with a clear
unearthly beauty unmatched in any English prose of that century. For
twenty-three years he serves the Northampton church, and his sermons win
him the rank of the foremost preacher in New England. John Wesley reads
at Oxford his account of the great revival of 1735. Whitefield comes to
visit him at Northampton. Then, in 1750, the ascetic preacher alienates
his church over issues pertaining to discipline and to the
administration of the sacrament. He is dismissed. He preaches his
"farewell sermon," like Wesley, like Emerson, like Newman, and many
another still unborn. He removes to Stockbridge, then a hamlet in the
wilderness, preaches to the Indians, and writes treatises on theology
and metaphysics, among them the world-famous Freedom of the Will. In
1757, upon the death of his son-in-law, President Aaron Burr of
Princeton, Edwards is called to the vacant Presidency. He is reluctant
to go, for though he is only fifty-four, his health has never been
robust, and he has his great book on the History of Redemption still to
write. But he accepts, finds the smallpox raging in Princeton upon his
arrival in January, 1758, is inoculated, and dies of the disease in
March--his dreams unfulfilled, his life-work once more thwarted. Close
by the tomb of this saint is the tomb of his grandson, Aaron Burr, who
killed Hamilton.
The literary reputation of Jonathan Edwards has turned, like the
vicissitudes of his life, upon factors that could not be foreseen. His
contemporary fame was chiefly as a preacher, and was due to sermons like
those upon God Glorified in Man's Dependence and The Reality of
Spiritual Life, rather than to such discourses as the Enfield sermon,
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which in our own day is the best
known of his deliverances. Legends have grown up around this terrific
Enfield sermon. Its fearful power over its immediate hearers cannot be
gainsaid, and it will long continue to be quoted as an example of the
length to which a Calvinistic logician of genius was compelled by his
own scheme to go. We still see the tall, sweet-faced man, worn by his
daily twelve hours of intense mental toil, leaning on one elbow in the
pulpit and reading from manuscript, without even raising his gentle
voice, those words which smote his congregation into spasms of terror
and which seem to us sheer blasphemy.
Yet the Farewell Sermon of 1750 gives a more characteristic view of
Edwards's mind and heart, and conveys an ineffaceable impression of his
nobility of soul. His diction, like Wordsworth's, is usually plain
almost to bareness; the formal framework of his discourses is obtruded;
and he hunts objections to their last hiding-place with wearisome
pertinacity. Yet his logic is incandescent. Steel sometimes burns to the
touch like this, in the bitter winters of New England, and one wonders
whether Edwards's brain was not of ice, so pitiless does it seem. His
treatise denying the freedom of the will has given him a European
reputation comparable with that enjoyed by Franklin in science and
Jefferson in political propaganda. It was really a polemic demonstrating
the sovereignty of God, rather than pure theology or metaphysics.
Edwards goes beyond Augustine and Calvin in asserting the arbitrary will
of the Most High and in "denying to the human will any self-determining
power." He has been refuted by events and tendencies, such as the growth
of historical criticism and the widespread acceptance of the doctrine of
evolution, rather than by the might of any single antagonist. So, too,
the Dred Scott decision of Chief Justice Taney, holding that the slave
was not a citizen, was not so much answered by opponents as it was
superseded by the arbitrament of war. But the idealism of this lonely
thinker has entered deeply and permanently into the spiritual life of
his countrymen, and he will continue to be read by a few of those who
still read Plato and Dante.
"My mother grieves," wrote Benjamin Franklin to his father in 1738,
"that one of her sons is an Arian, another an Arminian. What an Arminian
or an Arian is, I cannot say that I very well know. The truth is I make
such distinctions very little my study." To understand Franklin's
indifference to such distinctions, we must realize how completely he
represents the secularizing tendencies of his age. What a drama of
worldly adventure it all was, this roving life of the tallow-chandler's
son, who runs away from home, walks the streets of Philadelphia with the
famous loaves of bread under his arm, is diligent in business, slips
over to London, where he gives lessons in swimming and in total
abstinence, slips back to Philadelphia and becomes its leading citizen,
fights the long battle of the American colonies in London, sits in the
Continental Congress, sails to Europe to arrange that French Alliance
which brought our Revolution to a successful issue, and comes home at
last, full of years and honors, to a bland and philosophical exit from
the stage!
He broke with every Puritan tradition. The Franklins were relatively
late comers to New England. They sprang from a long line of blacksmiths
at Ecton in Northamptonshire. The seat of the Washingtons was not far
away, and Franklin's latest biographer points out that the pink-coated
huntsmen of the Washington gentry may often have stopped at Ecton to
have their horses shod at the Franklin smithy. Benjamin's father came
out in 1685, more than fifty years after the most notable Puritan
emigration. Young Benjamin, born in 1706, was as untouched by the ardors
of that elder generation as he would have been by the visions of
Dante--an author, by the way, whom he never mentions, even as he never
mentions Shakespeare. He had no reverence for Puritan New England. To
its moral beauty, its fine severity, he was wholly blind. As a boy he
thriftily sold his Pilgrim's Progress. He became, in the new fashion of
that day, a Deist. Like a true child of the eighteenth century, his
attitude toward the seventeenth was that of amused or contemptuous
superiority. Thackeray has somewhere a charming phrase about his own
love for the back seat of the stage-coach, the seat which, in the old
coaching days, gave one a view of the receding landscape. Thackeray,
like Burke before him, loved historical associations, historical
sentiment, the backward look over the long road which humanity has
traveled. But Franklin faced the other way. He would have endorsed his
friend Jefferson's scornful sentence, "The dead have no rights." He
joined himself wholly to that eighteenth century in which his own lot
was cast, and, alike in his qualities and in his defects, he became one
of its most perfect representatives.
To catch the full spirit of that age, turn for an instant to the London
of 1724--the year of Franklin's arrival. Thirty-six years have elapsed
since the glorious Revolution of 1688; the Whig principles, then
triumphant, have been tacitly accepted by both political parties; the
Jacobite revolt of 1715 has proved a fiasco; the country has accepted
the House of Hanover and a government by party leadership of the House
of Commons, and it does not care whether Sir Robert Walpole buys a few
rotten boroughs, so long as he maintains peace with Europe and
prosperity at home. England is weary of seventeenth century
"enthusiasm," weary of conflict, sick of idealism. She has found in the
accepted Whig principles a satisfactory compromise, a working theory of
society, a modus vivendi which nobody supposes is perfect but which will
answer the prayer appointed to be read in all the churches, "Grant us
peace in our time, O Lord." The theories to which men gave their lives
in the seventeenth century seem ghostly in their unreality; but the
prize turnips on Sir Robert's Norfolk farm, and the wines in his cellar,
and the offices at his disposal--these are very real indeed. London
merchants are making money; the squire and the parson are tranquilly
ruling the country parishes; the philosophy of John Locke is everywhere
triumphant. Mr. Pope is the poet of the hour, and his Essay on Man,
counseling acceptance of our mortal situation, is considered to be the
last word of human wisdom and of poetical elegance. In prose, the style
of the Spectator rules--an admirable style, Franklin thought, and he
imitated it patiently until its ease and urbanity had become his own.
And indeed, how much of that London of the third decade of the century
passed into the mind of the inquisitive, roving, loose-living printer's
apprentice from Philadelphia! It taught him that the tangible world is
the real world, and that nothing succeeds like success; but it never
even whispered to him that sometimes nothing damns like success.
In his limitations, no less than in his power of assimilation, Franklin
was the representative man of his era. He had no artistic interests, no
liking for metaphysics after his brief devotion, in early manhood, to
the dialogues of Plato. He taught himself some Latin, but he came to
believe that the classics had little significance and that they should
be superseded by the modern languages. For the mediæval world he had no
patience or understanding. To these defects of his century we must add
some failings of his own. He was not always truthful. He had an
indelible streak of coarseness. His conception of the "art of virtue"
was mechanical. When Carlyle called Franklin the "father of all the
Yankees," we must remember that the Scotch prophet hated Yankees and
believed that Franklin's smooth, plausible, trader type of morality was
only a broad way to the everlasting bonfire.
But it is folly to linger over the limitations of the tallow-chandler's
son. The catalogue of his beneficent activity is a vast one. Balzac once
characterized him as the man who invented the lightning-rod, the hoax,
and the republic. His contributions to science have to do with
electricity, earthquakes, geology, meteorology, physics, chemistry,
astronomy, mathematics, navigation of air and water, agriculture,
medicine, and hygiene. In some of these fields he did pioneer work of
lasting significance. His teachings of thrift and prudence, as
formulated in the maxims of Poor Richard, gave him a world-wide
reputation. He attacked war, like Voltaire, not so much for its
wickedness as for its folly, and cheerfully gave up many years of a long
life to the effort to promote a better understanding among the nations
of the world.
It is perhaps needless to add what all persons who love good writing
know, that Benjamin Franklin was a most delightful writer. His letters
cover an amusing and extraordinary variety of topics. He ranges from
balloons to summer hats, and from the advantages of deep ploughing to
bifocal glasses, which, by the way, he invented. He argues for sharp
razors and cold baths, and for fresh air in the sleeping-room. He
discusses the morals of the game of chess, the art of swimming, the
evils of smoky chimneys, the need of reformed spelling. Indeed, his
passion for improvement led him not only to try his hand upon an
abridgment of the Book of Common Prayer, but to go even so far as to
propose seriously a new rendering of the Lord's Prayer. His famous
proposal for a new version of the Bible, however, which Matthew Arnold
solemnly held up to reprobation, was only a joke which Matthew Arnold
did not see--the new version of Job being, in fact, a clever bit of
political satire against party leadership in England. Even more
brilliant examples of his skill in political satire are his imaginary
Edict of the King of Prussia against England, and his famous Rules for
Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One. But I must not try to call the
roll of all the good things in Franklin's ten volumes. I will simply say
that those who know Franklin only in his Autobiography, charming as that
classic production is, have made but an imperfect acquaintance with the
range, the vitality, the vigor of this admirable craftsman who chose a
style "smooth, clear, and short," and made it serve every purpose of his
versatile and beneficent mind.
When the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 startled the American colonies
out of their provincial sense of security and made them aware of their
real attitude toward the mother country, Franklin was in London. Eleven
years earlier, in 1754, he had offered a plan for the Union of the
Colonies, but this had not contemplated separation from England. It was
rather what we should call a scheme for imperial federation under the
British Crown. We may use his word union, however, in a different field
from that of politics. How much union of sentiment, of mental and moral
life, of literary, educational, and scientific endeavor, was there in
the colonies when the hour of self-examination came? Only the briefest
summary may be attempted here.
As to race, these men of the third and fourth generation since the
planting of the colonies were by no means so purely English as the first
settlers. The 1,600,000 colonists in 1760 were mingled of many stocks,
the largest non-English elements being German and Scotch-Irish--that is,
Scotch who had settled for a while in Ulster before emigrating to
America. "About one-third of the colonists in 1760," says Professor
Channing, "were born outside of America." Crèvecœur's Letters from an
American Farmer thus defined the Americans: "They are a mixture of
English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this
promiscuous breed that race now called Americans has arisen." The
Atlantic seaboard, with a narrow strip inland, was fairly well covered
by local communities, differing in blood, in religion, in political
organization--a congeries of separate experiments or young utopias,
waiting for that most utopian experiment of all, a federal union. But
the dominant language of the "promiscuous breed" was English, and in the
few real centers of intellectual life the English tradition was almost
absolute.
The merest glance at colonial journalism will confirm this estimate. The
Boston News-Letter, begun in 1704, was the first of the journals, if we
omit the single issue of Publick Occurrences in the same town in 1690.
By 1765 there were nearly fifty colonial newspapers and several
magazines. Their influence made for union, in Franklin's sense of that
word, and their literary models, like their paper, type, and even ink,
were found in London. The New England Courant, established in Boston in
1721 by James Franklin, is full of imitations of the Tatler, Spectator,
and Guardian. What is more, the Courant boasted of its office collection
of books, including Shakespeare, Milton, the Spectator, and Swift's Tale
of a Tub. ¹ This was in 1722. If we remember that no allusion to
Shakespeare has been discovered in the colonial literature of the
seventeenth century, and scarcely an allusion to the Puritan poet
Milton, and that the Harvard College Library in 1723 had nothing of
Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and had only
recently obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare, we can appreciate
the value of James Franklin's apprenticeship in London. Perhaps we can
even forgive him for that attack upon the Mathers which threw the
conduct of the Courant, for a brief period, into the hands of his
brother Benjamin, whose turn at a London apprenticeship was soon to
come.
¹ Cook, E. C. Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704-1750.
N. Y., 1912.
If we follow this younger brother to Philadelphia and to Bradford's
American Mercury or to Franklin's own Pennsylvania Gazette, or if we
study the Gazettes of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, the
impression is still the same. The literary news is still chiefly from
London, from two months to a year late. London books are imported and
reprinted. Franklin reprints Pamela, and his Library Company of
Philadelphia has two copies of Paradise Lost for circulation in 1741,
whereas there had been no copy of that work in the great library of
Cotton Mather. American journalism then, as now, owed its vitality to a
secular spirit of curiosity about the actual world. It followed England
as its model, but it was beginning to develop a temper of its own.
Colonial education and colonial science were likewise chiefly indebted
to London, but by 1751 Franklin's papers on electricity began to repay
the loan. A university club in New York in 1745 could have had but
fifteen members at most, for these were all the "academics" in town. Yet
Harvard had then been sending forth her graduates for more than a
century. William and Mary was founded in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton
in 1746, King's (now Columbia) in 1754, the University of Pennsylvania
in 1755, and Brown in 1764. These colonial colleges were mainly in the
hands of clergymen. They tended to reproduce a type of scholarship based
upon the ancient languages. The curriculum varied but little in the
different colonies, and this fact helped to produce a feeling of
fellowship among all members of the republic of letters. The men who
debated the Stamp Act were, with a few striking exceptions, men trained
in Latin and Greek, familiar with the great outlines of human history,
accustomed to the discipline of academic disputation. They knew the
ideas and the vocabulary of cultivated Europe and were conscious of no
provincial inferiority. In the study of the physical sciences, likewise,
the colonials were but little behind the mother country. The Royal
Society had its distinguished members here. The Mathers, the Dudleys,
John Winthrop of Connecticut, John Bartram, James Logan, James Godfrey,
Cadwallader Colden, and above all, Franklin himself, were winning the
respect of European students, and were teaching Americans to use their
eyes and their minds not merely upon the records of the past but in
searching out the inexhaustible meanings of the present. There is no
more fascinating story than that of the beginnings of American science
in and outside of the colleges, and this movement, like the influence of
journalism and of the higher education, counted for colonial union.
Professor Tyler, our foremost literary student of the period, summarizes
the characteristics of colonial literature in these words: "Before the
year 1765, we find in this country, not one American people, but many
American peoples.... No cohesive principle prevailed, no centralizing
life; each little nation was working out its own destiny in its own
fashion." But he adds that with that year the colonial isolation came to
an end, and that the student must thereafter "deal with the literature
of one multitudinous people, variegated, indeed, in personal traits, but
single in its commanding ideas and in its national destinies." It is
easy to be wise after the event. Yet there was living in London in 1765,
as the agent for Pennsylvania, a shrewd and bland Colonial--an honorary
M.A. from both Harvard and Yale, a D.C.L. of Oxford and an LL.D. of St.
Andrews--who was by no means sure that the Stamp Act meant the end of
Colonialism. And Franklin's uncertainty was shared by Washington. When
the tall Virginian took command of the Continental Army as late as 1775,
he "abhorred the idea of independence." Nevertheless John Jay, writing
the second number of the Federalist in 1787, only twelve years later,
could say: "Providence has been pleased to give this one connected
country to one united people; a people descended from the same
ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion,
attached to the same principles of government."