Beginnings of the American People Part 7

The distinction between gentle and simple was doubtless less absolute than the disillusioned Jarrett represents it to have been. Even in the South there were many gradations of wealth, and it was no uncommon thing for a man to rise, as Jarrett did himself, from mean birth to a considerable eminence. Yet in none of the colonies was the distinction altogether unreal. The ma.s.s of the voters,--small freehold farmers in the country and "freemen" in some of the towns,--holding themselves superior to the unfranchised, yet not claiming equality with the favored few; the tenant farmer or small shopkeeper, deferring to the freeholder and the freeman, but aware that fortune had placed him above the artisan and day laborer; the artisan and the day laborer, proud that none could call them "servant":--these were the simple folk who in all the colonies made the great majority of free citizens. Chiefly occupied with earning daily bread by the labor of their hands, many were content to escape the debtor's prison, the best well satisfied with a modest competence. They heard of countries beyond sea, but their outlook was bounded by the parish. The provincialism of their minds was not dispelled by communion with the cla.s.sics of all ages, and no cheap magazine or popular novel came to dull the edge of native shrewdness or curiosity. They read not at all, or they read the Bible, the _Paradise Lost_ or the _Pilgrim's Progress_, or some chance book of sermons or of theology, or book of English ballads. Periwigs and gold braid were not for them, nor was it any part of their ambition to enter the charmed circle of polite society, to a.s.sociate on terms of equality with the "best people" in the colony.

Yet with whatever semblance the older settlements might take on the character of European civilization, America was bound to be the land of opportunity so long as there was abundance of free land to entice the ambitious and the dispossessed. Early in the century, as good land became scarce in the older towns of New England, and proprietors began to deny the commons to the landless, venturesome and discontented men, accepting the challenge of a savage-infested wilderness, moved northward along the rivers into Maine and New Hamps.h.i.+re, or beyond the original Connecticut settlements into the valley of the Housatonic. Here land was less often than formerly disposed of to groups of proprietors intent to maintain the traditions of town and church; acquired by the older towns or by land agents, it was more often sold to companies or to individuals for the profit it would bring. The famous New Hamps.h.i.+re grants, one hundred and thirty towns.h.i.+ps in the present State of Vermont, fell mainly to speculators who sold to the highest bidder, covenanted and uncovenanted alike, among the throng of home-seekers who pushed into this western country in the seventh decade of the century. Long before the Revolution opened, there thus existed in New England a fringe of pioneer settlements--such as Va.s.salboro and Durham on the Androscoggin and the Kennebec, Concord and Hinsdale on the Merrimac and the Connecticut, Pittsfield and Great Barrington on the Housatonic--which formed a newer New England, less lettered and scriptural than the old, where cla.s.s distinctions were little known, where contact with the Indian and the wilderness had added a secular ruthlessness and ingenuity to the harsh Puritan temper, and where the individual, freed from an effective "village moral police," learned in the rough school of nature a new kind of conformity unknown to the ancient Hebrew code.

In the Middle and Southern colonies, even more than in New England, expansion of population into the interior was a notable feature of the eighteenth century. In 1700 the estate of William Byrd at the James River Falls was on the Indian frontier; North Carolina was unoccupied south of Albemarle Sound or west of the Nottaway River; there were few settlers in South Carolina north of the Santee, or south or west of it except the Charleston planters who had appropriated all the land within sixty miles of the coast and within twenty of every navigable river.

Sixty years later the unoccupied coast regions were settled, and the surplus population of Virginia and Maryland, excluded from the tide-water by the engrossers of great estates, or oppressed by its restricted social conditions, had occupied the cheap lands of eastern North Carolina, or, following the James and the Rappahannock, had settled in the up-country between the "Fall Line" and the Blue Ridge.

Cattle-raisers, learning from Indian traders of the fertile interior, followed the trails with their "cowpens," which in turn gave place to permanent farms. In this back country, the great plantation was not often found, and slavery played little part. There were few superiors where farms were comparatively small, and where most men worked with their hands and consumed provisions raised by their own labor. Of those who came from the older settlements to occupy the up-country, many were "such as have been transported hither as servants, and being out of their time ... settle themselves where land is to be taken up that will produce the necessities of life with little labor." William Byrd described with engaging wit the ne'er-do-wells who maintained a precarious existence below the Dividing Line; and Governor Spotswood deplored the s.h.i.+ftless servants who lived on the Virginia frontier. Yet we may suppose that freedom often transformed the idle bondsman into an industrious freeholder. Nor were all the settlers of the Virginia back country emanc.i.p.ated servants. In 1732 Peter Jefferson patented a thousand acres at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was in this frontier community above the Fall Line that Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were born; here they grew to manhood; here they were inspired with those ideals of society so inimical alike to the imperial designs of the British Government and to the complacent pretensions of the slave-owning aristocracies of the tide-water.

Yet the first distinctive American frontier was not created alone by the movement of population westward from the older settlements; like every successive frontier in our history, it became the mecca of emigrants from British and continental lands. Before 1700, exiled Huguenots and refugees from the Palatinate began to seek the New World; and during the eighteenth century men of non-English stock poured by the thousands into the up-country of Pennsylvania and of the South. In 1700 the foreign population in the colonies was slight; in 1775 it is estimated that 225,000 Germans and 385,000 Scotch-Irish, together nearly one fifth of the entire population, lived within the provinces that won independence.

Persecution and the ravages of war, taxes that were heavy at any time and intolerable in time of famine, were among the causes that disposed many thousands of Protestant families from Ulster, and from the thickly populated districts of Switzerland and the Rhine country, to seek new homes in a land of better promise. To cross the ocean was no slight undertaking for unlettered and home-keeping people. But since the founding of Pennsylvania knowledge of America had spread among the peasants of Germany, and there was no lack of "Neulanders"--the emigrant agents of that day--who described the New World in glowing terms, and stood ready for a consideration to carry any who wished to be transported to its sh.o.r.es. And the way was facilitated by the English and colonial Governments: to forestall the French in settling the interior, secure the trade of the Indians in time of peace, and erect a barrier against them in time of war, foreigners were accorded naturalization, land was offered on easy terms, and toleration granted to all Protestant sects.

Foreigners were not attracted to New England, where the Puritans scrutinized all newcomers with a jealous eye; while New York was avoided on account of the unhappy experience of Governor Hunter's Palatines and the refusal of the great landowners along the Hudson to grant freehold t.i.tle. Most of the Germans, seeking homes in the best advertised and most German of all the colonies, landed at the port of Philadelphia.

Germantown had been founded by Francis Daniel Pastorius in 1683, but it was not until forty years later, after the devastating wars of the Spanish Succession, that his countrymen occupied in force the neighboring counties of Lancaster, Montgomery, and Bucks, pushed up into Lehigh and Northampton, and across the Susquehanna into c.u.mberland and Adams. Much to their surprise, doubtless, for it was scarcely the business of the emigrant agent to inform them, they learned that land in this German mecca sold for from 10 to 15 per hundred acres, and bore a quit-rent of one halfpenny. Many occupied the land as squatters, and it is estimated that 400,000 acres were settled without t.i.tle between 1732 and 1740. But the newcomers or their children soon learned of better opportunities to the south, where Maryland land sold for from 2 to 5 per hundred acres, and the up-country forestallers, such as Carter and Beverley, under-sold the Pennsylvania land office in order to attract settlers. As early as 1726 the stream of German migration began, therefore, to move along the mountain slopes to the south and west.

During the middle decades of the century, they occupied in increasing numbers the Piedmont of Virginia, crept southward along the west side of the Blue Ridge in the Shenandoah Valley, and out into the up-country of the Carolinas west of the great Pine Barrens.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Growth of English Settlements, 1700-1760.]

At the same time as the Germans, and in even greater numbers, came the Scotch and Scotch-Irish, mostly disappointed settlers in Ulster who found land t.i.tles insecure there and the promise of religious liberty unfulfilled. A few, not easily discouraged, came to the Berks.h.i.+res and the New Hamps.h.i.+re hills; more occupied the Mohawk and Cherry Valleys of New York; the great majority, like the Germans, settled in Pennsylvania and the up-country of the South. In Pennsylvania, they went for the most part beyond the German frontier, occupying the country from Lancaster to Bedford, the Juniata Valley and the Redstone country, and in the decades before the Revolution, attracted by free lands west of the Alleghanies, as far as Pittsburg on the upper Ohio. Like the Germans they pushed south into the Piedmont of Virginia, and along the Alleghany slope of the Shenandoah, and into the Southern up-country as far as the Savannah River. Sometimes mixing with the Germans, the main body of the Scotch-Irish was everywhere farther west. Too martial to fear the Indians, and too aggressive to live at peace with them, they were the true borderers of the century, the frontier of the frontier, forming, from Londonderry in New England to the Savannah, an outer bulwark, behind which the older settlements, and even the peace-loving Germans themselves, rested in some measure of security.

The German or Scotch-Irish immigrant was doubtless grateful to the Government which offered him a refuge; but in the breast of neither was there any sentimental loyalty to King George, or much sympathy with the traditions of English society. Whether Mennonite or Moravian, German Lutheran or Scotch Presbyterian, they were men whose manner of life disposed them to an instinctive belief in equality of condition, whose religion confirmed them in a democratic habit of mind. That every man should labor as he was able; that no man should live by another's toil or waste in luxurious living the hard-earned fruits of industry; that all should live upright lives, eschewing the vanities of the world, and wors.h.i.+ping G.o.d, neither with images nor vestments nor Romish ritual, but in spirit and in truth:--these were the ideals which the foreign Protestants brought as a heritage from Wittenberg and Geneva to their new home in America. And if we may accept the impressions of an English observer, life in the Shenandoah Valley was in happy accord, in the middle of the century, with the arcadian simplicity of these ideals. "I could not but reflect with pleasure on the situation of these people,"

says Richard Burnaby. "Far from the bustle of the world, they live in the most delightful climate, and the richest soil imaginable; they are everywhere surrounded with the most beautiful prospects and sylvan scenes; ... they ... live in perfect liberty; they are ignorant of want, and acquainted with but few vices. Their inexperience of the elegancies of life precludes any regret that they possess not the means of enjoying them; but they possess what many persons would give half their dominions for, health, content, and tranquillity of mind."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Area of German Settlements and Frontier Line in 1775.]

The description does not lack truth, but perhaps it somewhat smacks of fas.h.i.+onable eighteenth-century philosophy. And a.s.suredly no region on the frontier was more favored than the famous Shenandoah Valley. Little question that conditions were less idyllic in other places. Missionaries who preached the Great Awakening in western Pennsylvania and in the Southern back country were often enough appalled by evidence of ignorance and low morals. And on the far outer frontier at White Woman's Creek, Mary Harris, still recalling after forty years' exile that "they used to be very religious in New England," told Christopher Gist in 1751 that "she wondered how white men could be so wicked as she had seen them in these woods." Neither the lyric phrase of Burnaby nor the harsh verdict of Mary Harris fitly describes those interior communities that stretched from Maine to Georgia. But there, as elsewhere, doubtless, the practice of men's lives, even among the frontier Puritans of New England, or the German Protestants and Scotch Presbyterians of the Middle and Southern colonies, often fell short of their best ideals.

Leaving the sheltered existence of long-settled communities, set down on a dangerous Indian frontier or at best in a virgin country, where customary restraints were relaxed, where churches were few and schools often unknown, where action more readily followed hard on desire and men's will made all the majesty of the law, the aggressive primary instincts had freer play, and society could not but take on a strain of the primitive. Even more than the original colonists, these dwellers on the second frontier caught something of the wild freedom of the wilderness, something of the ruthlessness of nature, something also of its self-sufficiency, something of its somber and emotional influence.

Between this primitive agricultural democracy of the interior and the commercial and landed aristocracy of the coast, separated geographically and differing widely in interests and ideals, conflict was inevitable.

When, in 1780, Thomas Jefferson said that "19,000 men below the Falls give law to more than 30,000 living in other parts of the state," he was proclaiming that opposition between the older and the newer America which found expression in provincial politics from the middle of the eighteenth century, which made a part of the Revolution, and which in every period since has been so decisive a feature of our history. In the eighteenth century the frontier was the home of a primitive radicalism.

Where offenses were elemental and easily detected, legal technicalities and the chicanery of courts seemed but devices for the support of idle lawyers; where debtors were most numerous and specie most scarce, few could understand why paper money would not prove a panacea for poverty; where every man earned his own bread and where submission to the inevitable was the only kind of conformity that was deemed essential, slavery and a state church were thought to be but the bulwark of cla.s.s privilege and the tyranny of kings. After the French wars the interior communities of the Middle and Southern colonies, finding themselves unfairly represented in the a.s.semblies, were first made aware that their interests were little likely to be seriously regarded either by the king's ministers or the merchants and landlords who shaped legislation at Williamsburg, Philadelphia, or New York. For defending the border in the desolating war that drove the French out of America, it now seemed that they were to be rewarded by land laws made for the rich, an administration of justice burdensome for spa.r.s.ely settled communities, a money system that penalized them for being debtors, or taxes levied for the support of a church which they never entered. And so, before the Revolution opened, the Western imagination had conjured up the specter of a corrupt and effete "East": land of money-changers and self-styled aristocrats and a pliant clergy, the haunt of lawyers and hangers-on, proper dwelling-place of "servants" and the beaten slave: a land of cities, scorning the provincial West, and bent on exploiting its laborious and upright people. And who could doubt that men who bought their clothes in London would readily crook the knee to kings? Who could question that special privilege in the colonies was fostered by the laws of trade, or that aristocracy in America was the reward of submission to England?

III

The appearance before the Revolution of cla.s.s and sectional conflict within the colonies was no more incompatible then than it has been since with a growing sense of solidarity against the outside world. And in developing this sense of Americanism, this national consciousness, the frontier was itself an important influence. Physiographically separated from the coast region, untouched by its social traditions, often hostile to its political activities, the people of the back country had but little of that pride of colony which made the Bostonian critical of the New Yorker, or gave to the true Virginian a feeling of superiority to the "zealots" of New, England. To the Scotch-Irish or German dweller in the Shenandoah Valley it mattered little whether he lived north or south of an imaginary and disputed line that divided Maryland from Pennsylvania. Political subjection to Virginia could not remove the Blue Ridge Mountains which isolated him far more effectively from Williamsburg than from Baltimore, or the racial and religious prejudice that disposed him to give more credit to ministers trained at Princeton than to clergymen ordained by the Bishop of London. In the back country, lines of communication ran north and south, and men moved up and down the valleys from Pennsylvania to Georgia, whether in search of homes or in pursuit of trade or to spread the gospel, scarcely conscious of the political boundaries which they crossed, and in crossing helped to obliterate.

If the physiography of the back country cut across provincial boundaries, the mingling of diverse races, in an environment which constrained men to act along similar lines while leaving them free to think much as they liked, could not but wear away the sharp edges of warring creeds and divergent customs. The many Protestant sects, differing widely in externals, were not far apart in fundamentals; and as in leaving their European homes the chief causes of difference disappeared, so life in America brought all the similarities into strong relief. In this new country, where schools were few and great universities inaccessible, the Presbyterian ideal of an educated clergy could not be always maintained, while sects which in Europe had professed to despise learning came to regard it more highly in a land where the effects of ignorance were more apparent than the evils of pedantry. No man could afford to be fastidious in any minor point of religious practice when a good day's journey would no more than bring him to the nearest church. Mr. Samuel Davies, one of the early presidents of Princeton, and for some years a missionary on the Virginia frontier, said that people in the up-country came twenty, thirty, and even forty miles to hear him preach. In a letter to Mr. Bellamy, of Bethlehem, he describes his labors, and asks for ministers to help him, from "New England or elsewhere." So true is it, as Colonel Byrd had observed in North Carolina, that "people uninstructed in any religion are ready to embrace the first that offers."

Yet in many a community, on the frontier and in every part of the Middle colonies, the mingling of races compelled men, however well instructed, to ignore the minor points of their proper creeds. The Moravian missionary Schnell, preaching at South Branch, Virginia, to an audience of English, Germans, and Dutch, quite satisfied them all by discoursing from the text, "If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink."

Although his principles forbade him to baptize the children which were brought to him, they "liked Brother Schnell very much," and desired him to remain with them. And communities there were where men had forgotten the very names almost of Protestant sects. Some people in Hanover County, a.s.sembling on Sundays to read a book of Whitefield's sermons which by some chance had come their way, and being desired by the county court to declare what religion they were of, found themselves at a loss for a name, "as we knew but little of any denomination of Protestants, except Quakers." But at length, "recollecting that Luther was a noted reformer, and that his books had been of special service to us, we declared ourselves Lutherans; and thus we continued until Providence sent us the Rev. Mr. William Robinson." Aided by Luther and edified by Whitefield, they were quite content to be further instructed and "corrected" by Mr. Robinson, Presbyterian though he was, "being informed that his method of preaching was awakening."

And, indeed, toward the middle of the century, the "awakening" preacher was everywhere welcome. In America, as in England itself, a strange lethargy had fallen on the churches in that interlude between the Puritan regime and the Revolution. Dead literalism had crept into the pulpits, and conventional conformity too often did duty for conviction among the people. It was a condition which could not endure in communities where religion was still the chief intellectual and emotional refuge from the daily routine of commonplace duties. Thus it happened that both in the older settlements, where for the unlettered the dull round of life was rarely broken either by real or fict.i.tious adventure, and in those newer regions where primitive conditions brought the primal pa.s.sions readily to the surface, the burning words of the revivalist met with ready and unprecedented response. Let him but preach "vital" religion, and none questioned too closely into his formal beliefs, or inquired of what nationality or province he might be. For the preachers of "vital" religion--whether the Moravian Schnell or the Methodist Whitefield, whether the Puritan Jonathan Edwards, profoundest theologian of his generation, or the Presbyterian enthusiasts, such as Gilbert Tennant and Mr. Davies, who went out from the little Log College to carry the gospel to the mixed population of the Middle and Southern colonies--all alike appealed to those instinctive emotions which make men kin and from which every religion springs. In forming the new spirit of Americanism, few events were more important than the Great Awakening.

During that sudden up-surging of religious emotionalism, which for a decade rolled like a tidal wave over the colonies, provincial boundaries and the distinctions of race and creed were in some measure forgotten in a new sense of common nature and human brotherhood.

True it is that the Great Awakening was accompanied by no lack of acid jealousies and unchristian recrimination. In almost every sect "New Light" separated from "Old Light," "New Side" from "Old Side," in most unfraternal division. Gilbert Tennant, imitating Whitefield and out-heroding Herod, exhausted ecclesiastical billingsgate in quest of terms to characterize those clergymen--Congregational or Presbyterian or Anglican; those "letter-learned Pharisees," those "moral negroes," those "plastered hypocrites"--who stood out in stiff-necked opposition to revivalist methods of inculcating vital religion. Schism divided the Presbyterians for more than a decade; many congregations in eastern Connecticut, renouncing the Say brook Platform and the Half-Way Covenant, "separated" from the a.s.sociation; and in Ma.s.sachusetts the quarrel between revivalists and anti-revivalists only accentuated the breach between new and old Calvinists. And true it is that the flood tide was followed by the ebb: the tremendous emotional upheaval, which began with the Northampton sermons of Jonathan Edwards in 1734, seemed to cease after 1744 as suddenly as it came. For more than a year scarcely one person was converted in all Boston, said Thomas Prince in 1754. Jonathan Edwards waited in vain from 1744 to 1748 for a single applicant for admission to the Northampton Church. And the great Whitefield himself, returning to America in 1744, 1754, and 1764, although always gladly heard by thousands, found that the old magic had unaccountably lost its wonder-working power.

Yet division is sometimes the prelude to more effective union. It was precisely in sowing dissension within the sects that the Great Awakening broke down barriers between the sects; and by separating men in the same locality it united men in different localities. The graduates of Log College, a very seminary of revivalism, disowned by Philadelphia Presbyterians, found encouragement among New Englanders of East Jersey and New York Presbyterians who had been educated at New Haven. In 1746, men from three colonies, whom the Great Awakening had brought in to closer relations, founded the College of New Jersey, afterwards located at Princeton. Although destined to become the intellectual citadel of a new Presbyterianism, two of its first three presidents were born in New England, two were graduates of Yale College, and one was a Congregationalist, while Samuel Blair, an alumnus of the new inst.i.tution, was not thought unworthy to be minister of the Old South Church of Boston. These are but isolated instances of the leveling of religious barriers between Protestant sects in the Northern colonies. In the decades following the Great Awakening New England religious solidarity was already a thing of the past. While cultivated and tolerant liberals of Boston, dallying with Arminian and Arian delusions that were but the prelude to Unitarianism, departed from the old Calvinism in one direction, Jonathan Edwards and his disciples were formulating the "New England Theology" which enabled the clergy of Connecticut and western Ma.s.sachusetts to approach within hailing distance of Scotch Presbyterianism. Ministers of "Consociated" churches scrupled not, indeed, to call themselves Presbyterians. From 1766 to 1775, representatives from the Connecticut a.s.sociation, and from the Synods of New York and Philadelphia, snuffing on every tainted breeze the danger of a prospective Anglican Episcopate, met annually in joint convention; and a few years later it was without reproach that the Connecticut Congregationalists could refer to the plan for a still more intimate fellows.h.i.+p as "a Scheme for the Union of the Presbyterians of America."

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.