Part 7 (2/2)

The fear of Anglicanism may remind us that the leveling of religious barriers was in part brought about by the movement toward political union. And in generating this new sense of solidarity, whether in respect to religion or politics, better facilities for intercourse and communication were not without importance. It is difficult for us, living in an age when a man may breakfast in Philadelphia and dine the same day in Boston, to remember that Franklin was ”about a fortnight”

making the same distance in 1724. Yet a quarter of a century later, when the means of travel were not much more expeditious even if they were more certain, men journeyed continuously up and down the road that led from Boston to New York and Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia out into the back country and along the Shenandoah Valley. So much so, that the inhabitants of the little town of New Brunswick, says Peter Kalm, ”get a considerable profit from the travellers who every hour pa.s.s through on the high road.” Communication by correspondence, immensely facilitated after the establishment of the ”General Post Office” by Parliament in 1710, served often to create cordial relations between men living in different colonies; men who perhaps had never seen each other, and who might have been, as the good John Adams sometimes was, disillusioned by personal contact. Newspapers, long since established in Philadelphia and Charleston, as well as in New York and Boston, regularly carrying the latest intelligence from every colony into every other, wore away provincial prejudice and strengthened intercolonial solidarity by revealing the common character of governmental organization and of political issues from Ma.s.sachusetts to South Carolina. The a.s.sembly at Williamsburg or at Philadelphia, guarding local privileges against the encroachments of prerogative, was made aware that in fundamentals the conflict was American rather than merely provincial, and proclaimed its rights more stubbornly and with far greater confidence for knowing that a.s.semblies in New York and Boston were enlisted in the common cause.

In strengthening this sense of political solidarity, the last French wars were of great importance. Aroused as never before to a realization of the common danger, colonial Governments cooperated, imperfectly, indeed, but on a scale and with a unanimity hitherto unknown, in an undertaking which none could doubt was of momentous import to America and to the world. Never before were so many men from different colonies brought into personal contact with one another; never before had so many Americans of all cla.s.ses heard the speech and observed the manners of Britons. It was an experience not to be forgotten. The Puritan recruit from Ma.s.sachusetts might write home lamenting the scandalous irreligion that prevailed among the levies from other colonies; but the irritating condescension of British regulars made him aware that he had after all more in common with the most unregenerate American than with any Englishman. The provincial, subtly conscious of his limitations when brought into contact with more traveled and cosmopolitan men, endures less readily than any other to be reminded of his inferiority. Who shall estimate the effect upon the proud and self-contained Was.h.i.+ngton of intercourse with supercilious British officers during the Braddock expedition? In how many unrecorded instances did a similar experience produce a similar effect? No bitterness endures like that of the provincial despised because of his provincialism. He has no recourse but to make a virtue of his defects, and prove himself superior by condemning qualities which he may once have envied. And Americans were the more confirmed in this att.i.tude by the multiplied proofs of the Englishman's real inferiority for the business in hand. Who were these men from oversea to instruct natives in the art of frontier warfare?--men who proclaimed their ignorance of the woods by standing grouped and red-coated in the open to be shot down by Indians whom they could not see! From the experience of the last French war there emerged something of that sublime self-confidence which stamps the true American. And in that war was generated a sense of spiritual separation from England never quite felt before--something of the contempt of the frontiersman for the tenderfoot who comes from the sheltered existence of cities to instruct him in the refinements of life.

After the Peace of Paris provincial politics takes on, indeed, a certain militant and perfervid character hitherto unknown, and not wholly due to the restrictive measures of the Grenville Ministry. It was as if the colonists, newly stirred by a nave, primitive egoism, still harboring the memory of unmerited slights, of services unappreciated oven if paid for, had carried over into secular activities some fanatical strain from the Great Awakening, something of the intensity of deep-seated moral convictions. And in no unreal sense this was so. The mantle of Samuel Davies fell upon Patrick Henry. The flood tide of religious emotionalism ebbed but to flow in other channels? and men who had been so profoundly stirred by the revivalist were the more readily moved by the appeal of the revolutionary orator.

In diverting the current of quickened religious feeling into political channels, the influence of Princeton College was a memorable one.

Founded by Presbyterians less interested in creeds than in vital religion, and barring no person on ”account of any speculative principles,” the new inst.i.tution furnished an education that was ”liberal” in the political as well as in the intellectual sense of the term. From this center emanated a new leaven. Here young men came from all the Middle and Southern country to receive the stamp of a new Presbyterianism compounded of vital religion and the latter-day spirit of Geneva. In this era, by such men as John Madison, Oliver Ellsworth, and Luther Martin, were founded the two famous societies, _Cliosophic_ and _American Whig_, where the lively discussions were doubtless more often concerned with history and politics than with the abstract points of theology or religion. It was in 1768 that John Witherspoon, the very personification of the new influence, became president of the college. A Scotchman educated at Edinburgh, he became at once an ardent defender of the colonial cause, as ”high a Son of Liberty as any man in America,”

destined to be better known as a signer of the Declaration of Independence than as a Presbyterian minister of the gospel. During twenty years previous to the Revolution, many men went out from Princeton to become powerful moulders of public opinion. Few were counted as theologians of note; few were set down as British Loyalists.

But they were proud to be known as Americans and patriots: ministers who from obscure pulpits proclaimed the blessings of political liberty; laymen who professed politics with the fervor of religious conviction.

And the Puritan spirit, in like manner deserting the worn-out body of old theologies, was reincarnated in secular forms, to become once more the animating force of New England civic life. The fall of the Puritan theocracy was followed, half a century later, by the rise of the Puritan democracy. As the old intimacy between State and Church disappeared, the churches turned to the people for that support which was no longer accorded by government. Thus there came into general use the famous Half-Way Covenant, a wide-open back door through which all men of blameless lives and orthodox beliefs might press into the churches, a kind of ecclesiastical manhood suffrage undermining the aristocracy of the fully regenerate. As a partial remedy for the evils arising out of this democratization of religion and church government, a closer union of the churches under ministerial supervision was advocated, and finally adopted in Connecticut under the name of ”Consociation.” But the scheme was defeated in Ma.s.sachusetts; and it is significant that the men who defeated it, no friends, many of them, of the Half-Way Covenant, appealed to that very democratic principle of which the Half-Way Covenant was a practical application. It was a son of Cotton Mather who warned the people of the churches never blindly to ”resign themselves to the direction of their ministers; but consider themselves, as men, as Christians, as Protestants, obliged to act and judge for themselves in all the weighty concernments of Religion.” To resign themselves to their ministers was thought, indeed, to be but the first step backward toward Anglican oppression and Papal tyranny.

A far more profound opponent of ecclesiastical aristocracy was the Reverend John Wise, of Ipswich. He belongs to that ill.u.s.trious minority which stood out against the witchcraft delusion. Fined and imprisoned upon one occasion for leading his town to refuse the collection of taxes not imposed by a representative a.s.sembly, he was a proper man to declare that ”power is originally in the people.” As men are ”all naturally free and equal,” civil government ”is the effect of human free-compacts and not of divine instigation.” And ”if Christ has settled any form of power in his Church he has done it for the benefit of every member. Then he must needs be presumed to have made choice of that government as should least expose the people to hazard, either from fraud, or arbitrary measures of particular men. And it is as plain as daylight, there is no species of government like a democracy to attain this end.” So argued the Ipswich preacher in 1717. Fifty years later, his _Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches_, too radical for his own day, was seen to be the very thing needed; in 1772, when ”consociation” had broken down even in Connecticut, when Anglicanism was a.s.sociated in men's minds with royal oppression, and when political and religious liberty seemed destined to stand or fall together, then the work of John Wise was reprinted and two editions were exhausted within the year.

Accompanying the endeavor to find a common theoretical basis for Church and State was the disposition to apply a common test to public and private conduct. Rousseau voiced one of the strongest convictions of his age when he said that ”those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand anything about either one or the other.” With the decay of creeds, true religion was thought by many to be inseparable from civic virtue, while political philosophy, preaching the regeneration of an ”artificial” society by returning to the simple life of nature, was often conceived with an emotional fervor which raised civic duties to the level of religious rites. In America, long before Rousseau startled the world with his paradoxes, men who could not agree on creeds or forms of government found common ground in thinking that the test of true religion was that it made good citizens, the test of rightly ordered society that it made good men. In the early letters of John Adams we may note how one man's mind was won to this new ideal.

”There is a story about town,” he writes to Charles Cus.h.i.+ng, ”that I am an Arminian.” Time was when such a rumor would have been too serious to be reported, without comment, in the postscript of a long letter. In 1756, even this young candidate for the ministry felt that such issues were becoming remote and unreal. He but voiced the growing discontent when he asked, ”where do we find a precept in the gospel requiring ecclesiastical synods, councils, creeds, oaths, subscriptions, and whole cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion enc.u.mbered with in these days?” Independent thinking, fortified by the authority of Locke and Sidney, Bacon and Tillotson, and the author of Cato's Letters, enabled him to announce, in the very spirit and all but the very words of Diderot and Rousseau, of whom he had never heard, that ”the design of Christianity was not to make good riddle-solvers or good mystery-mongers, but good men, good magistrates, and good subjects.” And so he renounced the ministry in favor of ”that science by which mankind raise themselves from the forlorn, helpless state, in which nature leaves them, to the full enjoyment of all the inestimable blessings of social union.”

It is but an evidence of the force of this new ideal that Benjamin Franklin, in whose life and writings it finds best expression, became the most influential American of his time and won in two continents the veneration that men accord to saints and prophets. At the age of sixteen some books against Deism came his way; but ”the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me to be stronger than the refutations; [and] I soon became a thorough Deist.” Yet experience straightway led this original pragmatist to the conclusion that, although a materialistic philosophy of life ”might be true, it was not very useful.” Without faith in religions, yet unable to do without religion, he set down the list of virtues which he thought might be of benefit to himself and at the same time of service to his fellows; qualities which all the sects might unite in proclaiming good, and which any man might easily acquire by a little persistence in self-discipline.

Aiming to become himself ”completely virtuous,” he dreamed of some day formulating the universal principles of the ”Art of Virtue,” and of uniting all good men throughout the world in a society for promoting the practice of it. And what was this Art of Virtue but a socialized religion divested of doctrine and ritual? ”I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue; and the Scriptures a.s.sure me that at the last day we shall not be examined what we _thought_, but what we _did_; and our recommendation will be that we did good to our fellow creatures.” The evangelist Whitefield, when Franklin once promised to do him a personal service, a.s.sured the philosopher that if he made that kind offer for Christ's sake he should not miss a reward. It was in the spirit of the new age speaking to the old that the sage replied: ”Don't let me be mistaken; it was not for Christ's sake, but for yours.”

Franklin spoke indeed for the new age and the New World. He was the first American: the very personification of that native sense of destiny and high mission in the world, and of that good-natured tolerance for the half-spent peoples of Europe, which is the American spirit; a living and vocal product, as it were, of all the material and spiritual forces that were transforming the people of the British plantations into a new nation. All racial and religious antagonisms, all sectional and intercolonial jealousies, all cla.s.s prejudice, were in some manner comprehended and reconciled in Franklin. He was as old as the century and touched it at every point. What an inclusive experience was that of this self-made provincial who as a printer's boy heard Increase Mather preach in Boston and in his old age stood with Voltaire in Paris to be proclaimed the incomparable benefactor of mankind! Provincial! But was this man provincial? Or was that, indeed, a province which produced such men? Was that country rightly dependent and inferior where law and custom were most in accord with the philosopher's ideal society? In that transvaluation of old values effected by the intellectual revolution of the century, it was the fortune of America to emerge as a kind of concrete example of the imagined State of Nature. In contrast with Europe, so ”artificial,” so oppressed with defenseless tyrannies and useless inequalities, so enc.u.mbered with decayed superst.i.tions and the debris of worn-out inst.i.tutions, how superior was this new land of promise where the citizen was a free man, where the necessities of life were the sure reward of industry, where manners were simple, where vice was less prevalent than virtue and native incapacity the only effective barrier to ambition! In those years when British statesmen were endeavoring to reduce the ”plantations” to a stricter obedience, some quickening influence from this ideal of Old World philosophers came to reinforce the determination of Americans to be masters of their own destiny.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

For the const.i.tutional and political tendencies in this period, see Charming, _History of the United States_, II, chaps, X-XII; Greene, _Provincial America_, chaps, V, XII; Andrews, _The Colonial Period_, chap. VII. Economic, social, and intellectual characteristics are well described in Channing, II, chaps, XV-XVII; Greene, chaps, XVI-XVIII; Andrews, _The Colonial Period_, chaps, III, IV. The best account of religious changes in the eighteenth century is in Walker, _History of Congregationalism in America._ See also, Fiske, _New France and New England_, chap. VI. Of special importance for the influence of Princeton College and for the religious conditions in the up-country are _The Life of Devereaux Jarrett_ (Baltimore, 1806); and Alexander, _Biographical Sketches of the Founder and the Alumni of Log College_ (Princeton, 1845).

The expansion of population into the interior and the coming of the Germans and Scotch-Irish are well described in Channing, II, chap, XIV; and Greene, chap. XIV. For a full treatment of the German migration see Faust, _The German Element in the United States_ (2 vols. 1909); for the Scotch-Irish see Hanna, _The Scotch-Irish_ (2 vols. 1902). The best account of the characteristics of frontier society in this period is in Turner, _The Old West_, in _Proceedings of the Wisconsin Historical Society_, 1908, p. 184. Of considerable importance for understanding colonial society in this period are the observations of foreign travelers, notably Kalm and Burnaby whose narratives are printed in Pinkerton, _Voyages_ (London, 1808-14), vol. XIII. For understanding the temper and ideals of America in the eighteenth century, no writings are of equal importance with those of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, especially the _Diary_ of the former (_Works of John Adams_, 10 vols. Boston, 1856) and the _Autobiography_ of the latter, in his collected works and separately printed in many editions. See Bigelow edition. _The Life of Benjamin Franklin written by Himself._

CHAPTER VI

THE WINNING OF INDEPENDENCE

_If they accept protection, do they not stipulate obedience?_

SAMUEL JOHNSON.

_The decree has gone forth, and cannot now be recalled, that a more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth, must be established in America._

JOHN ADAMS.

I

As Chateaubriand said of the Revolution in France, that it was complete before it began, so may it be said that America was free before it won independence. The strict letter of the law counts for less in times of emotional stress than the strong sense of prescriptive right, and formal allegiance is in no way incompatible with a deep-seated feeling that submission must be voluntary to be honorable. Before the outbreak of the French war such a feeling was common throughout the colonies. The state of mind which conditioned the formal argument for colonial rights and drove the colonists into revolution is revealed in a sentence which Franklin wrote in 1755: ”British subjects, by removing to America, cultivating a wilderness, extending the domain, and increasing the wealth, commerce, and power of the mother country, at the hazard of their lives and fortunes, ought not, and in fact do not thereby lose their native rights.” It was as much as to say that Americans were in fact free because they ought to be free, and that they ought to be free because they had made for themselves a new country.

The issue between England and America is therefore not be resolved by computing the burden of a penny tax, or by exposing the sordid motives of British merchants and Boston smugglers, still less by coming ”armed at all points with law cases and acts of Parliament, with the statute-book doubled down in dog's ears” to defend either the cause of liberty or authority. The issue, shot through and through, as all great issues are, by innumerable sordid motives and personal enmities and private ambitions, was yet one between differing ideals of justice and welfare; one of those issues which, touching the emotional springs of conduct, are never composed by an appeal to reason, which formal argument the most correct, or the most skilled dialectic, serve only to render more irreconcilable. ”In Britain,” said Bernard in 1765, ”the American governments are considered as corporations empowered to make by-laws, existing only during the pleasure of Parliament. In America they claim to be perfect states, no otherwise dependent upon Great Britain than by having the same king.” Few Englishmen could imagine an empire of free states; few Americans could understand a nation bound against its will.

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