Chapter One
Early American and Colonial Period to 1776
Tribes maintained their own religions -- worshipping gods, animals, plants, or sacred persons. Systems of government ranged from democracies to councils of elders to theocracies. These tribal variations enter into the oral literature as well.
Still, it is possible to make a few generalizations. Indian stories, for example, glow with reverence for nature as a spiritual as well as physical mother. Nature is alive and endowed with spiritual forces; main characters may be animals or plants, often totems associated with a tribe, group, or individual. The closest to the Indian sense of holiness in later American literature is Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendental "Over-Soul," which pervades all of life.
The Mexican tribes revered the divine Quetzalcoatl, a god of the Toltecs and Aztecs, and some tales of a high god or culture were told elsewhere. However, there are no long, standardized religious cycles about one supreme divinity. The closest equivalents to Old World spiritual narratives are often accounts of shamans initiations and voyages. Apart from these, there are stories about culture heroes such as the Ojibwa tribe's Manabozho or the Navajo tribe's Coyote. These tricksters are treated with varying degrees of respect. In one tale they may act like heroes, while in another they may seem selfish or foolish. Although past authorities, such as the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, have deprecated trickster tales as expressing the inferior, amoral side of the psyche, contemporary scholars -- some of them Native Americans -- point out that Odysseus and Prometheus, the revered Greek heroes, are essentially tricksters as well.
Examples of almost every oral genre can be found in American Indian literature: lyrics, chants, myths, fairy tales, humorous anecdotes, incantations, riddles, proverbs, epics, and legendary histories. Accounts of migrations and ancestors abound, as do vision or healing songs and tricksters' tales. Certain creation stories are particularly popular. In one well-known creation story, told with variations among many tribes, a turtle holds up the world. In a Cheyenne version, the creator, Maheo, has four chances to fashion the world from a watery universe. He sends four water birds diving to try to bring up earth from the bottom. The snow goose, loon, and mallard soar high into the sky and sweep down in a dive, but cannot reach bottom; but the little coot, who cannot fly, succeeds in bringing up some mud in his bill. Only one creature, humble Grandmother Turtle, is the right shape to support the mud world Maheo shapes on her shell -- hence the Indian name for America, "Turtle Island."
The songs or poetry, like the narratives, range from the sacred to the light and humorous: There are lullabies, war chants, love songs, and special songs for children's games, gambling, various chores, magic, or dance ceremonials. Generally the songs are repetitive. Short poem-songs given in dreams sometimes have the clear imagery and subtle mood associated with Japanese haiku or Eastern-influenced imagistic poetry. A Chippewa song runs:
Vision songs, often very short, are another distinctive form. Appearing in dreams or visions, sometimes with no warning, they may be healing, hunting, or love songs. Often they are personal, as in this Modoc song:
Indian oral tradition and its relation to American literature as a whole is one of the richest and least explored topics in American studies. The Indian contribution to America is greater than is often believed. The hundreds of Indian words in everyday American English include "canoe," "tobacco," "potato," "moccasin," "moose," "persimmon," "raccoon," "tomahawk," and "totem." Contemporary Native American writing, discussed in chapter 8, also contains works of great beauty.
THE LITERATURE OF EXPLORATION
Had history taken a different
turn, the United States easily
could have been a part of the great Spanish or French overseas
empires. Its present inhabitants might speak Spanish and form one
nation with Mexico, or speak French and be joined with Canadian
Francophone Quebec and Montreal.
Yet the earliest explorers of America were not English,
Spanish, or French. The first European record of exploration in
America is in a Scandinavian language. The Old Norse Vinland
Saga recounts how the adventurous Leif Eriksson and a band of
wandering Norsemen settled briefly somewhere on the northeast
coast of America -- probably Nova Scotia, in Canada -- in the
first decade of the 11th century, almost 400 years before the
next recorded European discovery of the New World.
The first known and sustained contact between the Americas
and the rest of the world, however, began with the famous voyage
of an Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, funded by the
Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus's journal in his
"Epistola," printed in 1493, recounts the trip's drama -- the
terror of the men, who feared monsters and thought they might
fall off the edge of the world; the near-mutiny; how Columbus
faked the ships' logs so the men would not know how much farther
they had travelled than anyone had gone before; and the first
sighting of land as they neared America.
Bartolomé de las Casas is the richest source of information
about the early contact between American Indians and Europeans.
As a young priest he helped conquer Cuba. He transcribed
Columbus's journal, and late in life wrote a long, vivid
History of the Indians criticizing their enslavement by
the Spanish.
Initial English attempts at colonization were disasters. The
first colony was set up in 1585 at Roanoke, off the coast of
North Carolina; all its colonists disappeared, and to this day
legends are told about blue-eyed Croatan Indians of the area. The
second colony was more permanent: Jamestown, established in 1607.
It endured starvation, brutality, and misrule. However, the
literature of the period paints America in glowing colors as the
land of riches and opportunity. Accounts of the colonizations
became world-renowned. The exploration of Roanoke was carefully
recorded by Thomas Hariot in A Briefe and True Report of the
New-Found Land of Virginia (1588). Hariot's book was quickly
translated into Latin, French, and German; the text and pictures
were made into engravings and widely republished for over 200
years.
The Jamestown colony's main record, the writings of Captain
John Smith, one of its leaders, is the exact opposite of Hariot's
accurate, scientific account. Smith was an incurable romantic,
and he seems to have embroidered his adventures. To him we owe
the famous story of the Indian maiden, Pocahontas. Whether fact
or fiction, the tale is ingrained in the American historical
imagination. The story recounts how Pocahontas, favorite daughter
of Chief Powhatan, saved Captain Smith's life when he was a
prisoner of the chief. Later, when the English persuaded Powhatan
to give Pocahontas to them as a hostage, her gentleness,
intelligence, and beauty impressed the English, and, in 1614, she
married John Rolfe, an English gentleman. The marriage initiated
an eight-year peace between the colonists and the Indians,
ensuring the survival of the struggling new colony.
In the 17th century, pirates, adventurers, and explorers
opened the way to a second wave of permanent colonists, bringing
their wives, children, farm implements, and craftsmen's tools.
The early literature of exploration, made up of diaries, letters,
travel journals, ships' logs, and reports to the explorers'
financial backers -- European rulers or, in mercantile England
and Holland, joint stock companies -- gradually was supplanted by
records of the settled colonies. Because England eventually took
possession of the North American colonies, the best-known and
most-anthologized colonial literature is English. As American
minority literature continues to flower in the 20th century and
American life becomes increasingly multicultural, scholars are
rediscovering the importance of the continent's mixed ethnic
heritage. Although the story of literature now turns to the
English accounts, it is important to recognize its richly
cosmopolitan beginnings.
It is likely that no other
colonists in the history of the world
were as intellectual as the Puritans. Between 1630 and 1690,
there were as many university graduates in the northeastern
section of the United States, known as New England, as in the
mother country -- an astounding fact when one considers that most
educated people of the time were aristocrats who were unwilling
to risk their lives in wilderness conditions. The self-made and
often self-educated Puritans were notable exceptions. They wanted
education to understand and execute God's will as they
established their colonies throughout New England.
The Puritan definition of good writing was that which
brought home a full awareness of the importance of worshipping
God and of the spiritual dangers that the soul faced on Earth.
Puritan style varied enormously -- from complex metaphysical
poetry to homely journals and crushingly pedantic religious
history. Whatever the style or genre, certain themes remained
constant. Life was seen as a test; failure led to eternal
damnation and hellfire, and success to heavenly bliss. This world
was an arena of constant battle between the forces of God and the
forces of Satan, a formidable enemy with many disguises. Many
Puritans excitedly awaited the "millennium," when Jesus would
return to Earth, end human misery, and inaugurate 1,000 years of
peace and prosperity.
Scholars have long pointed out the link between Puritanism
and capitalism: Both rest on ambition, hard work, and an intense
striving for success. Although individual Puritans could not
know, in strict theological terms, whether they were "saved" and
among the elect who would go to heaven, Puritans tended to feel
that earthly success was a sign of election. Wealth and status
were sought not only for themselves, but as welcome reassurances
of spiritual health and promises of eternal life.
Moreover, the concept of stewardship encouraged success. The
Puritans interpreted all things and events as symbols with deeper
spiritual meanings, and felt that in advancing their own profit
and their community's well-being, they were also furthering God's
plans. They did not draw lines of distinction between the
secular and religious spheres: All of life was an expression of
the divine will -- a belief that later resurfaces in
Transcendentalism.
In recording ordinary events to reveal their spiritual
meaning, Puritan authors commonly cited the Bible, chapter and
verse. History was a symbolic religious panorama leading to the
Puritan triumph over the New World and to God's kingdom on Earth.
The first Puritan colonists who settled New England
exemplified the seriousness of Reformation Christianity. Known as
the "Pilgrims," they were a small group of believers who had
migrated from England to Holland -- even then known for its
religious tolerance -- in 1608, during a time of persecutions.
Like most Puritans, they interpreted the Bible literally.
They read and acted on the text of the Second Book of Corinthians
-- "Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord."
Despairing of purifying the Church of England from within,
"Separatists" formed underground "covenanted" churches that swore
loyalty to the group instead of the king. Seen as traitors to the
king as well as heretics damned to hell, they were often
persecuted. Their separation took them ultimately to the New
World.
Bradford also recorded the first document of colonial
self-governance in the English New World, the "Mayflower
Compact," drawn up while the Pilgrims were still on board ship.
The compact was a harbinger of the Declaration of Independence to
come a century and a half later.
Puritans disapproved of such secular amusements as dancing
and card-playing, which were associated with ungodly aristocrats
and immoral living. Reading or writing "light" books also fell
into this category. Puritan minds poured their tremendous
energies into nonfiction and pious genres: poetry, sermons,
theological tracts, and histories. Their intimate diaries and
meditations record the rich inner lives of this introspective and
intense people.
Modest, pious, and hard-working, Taylor never published his
poetry, which was discovered only in the 1930s. He would, no
doubt, have seen his work's discovery as divine providence;
today's readers should be grateful to have his poems -- the
finest
examples of 17th-century poetry in North America.
Taylor wrote a variety of verse: funeral elegies, lyrics, a
medieval "debate," and a 500-page Metrical History of
Christianity (mainly a history of martyrs). His best works,
according to modern critics, are the series of short Preparatory
Meditations.
It is terrible poetry -- but everybody loved it. It fused the
fascination of a horror story with the authority of John Calvin.
For more than two centuries, people memorized this long, dreadful
monument to religious terror; children proudly recited it, and
elders quoted it in everyday speech. It is not such a leap from
the terrible punishments of this poem to the ghastly
self-inflicted wound of Nathaniel Hawthorne's guilty Puritan
minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, in The Scarlet Letter (1850)
or
Herman Melville s crippled Captain Ahab, a New England Faust
whose quest for forbidden knowledge sinks the ship of American
humanity in Moby-Dick (1851). (Moby-Dick was the
favorite novel
of 20th-century American novelist William Faulkner, whose
profound and disturbing works suggest that the dark, metaphysical
vision of Protestant America has not yet been exhausted.)
Like most colonial literature, the poems of early New
England imitate the form and technique of the mother country,
though the religious passion and frequent biblical references, as
well as the new setting, give New England writing a special
identity. Isolated New World writers also lived before the advent
of rapid transportation and electronic communications. As a
result, colonial writers were imitating writing that was already
out of date in England. Thus, Edward Taylor, the best American
poet of his day, wrote metaphysical poetry after it had become
unfashionable in England. At times, as in Taylor's poetry, rich
works of striking originality grew out of colonial isolation.
Colonial writers often seemed ignorant of such great English
authors as Ben Jonson. Some colonial writers rejected English
poets who belonged to a different sect as well, thereby cutting
themselves off from the finest lyric and dramatic models the
English language had produced. In addition, many colonials
remained ignorant due to the lack of books.
The great model of writing, belief, and conduct was the
Bible, in an authorized English translation that was already
outdated when it came out. The age of the Bible, so much older
than the Roman church, made it authoritative to Puritan eyes.
New England Puritans clung to the tales of the Jews in the
Old Testament, believing that they, like the Jews, were
persecuted for their faith, that they knew the one true God, and
that they were the chosen elect who would establish the New
Jerusalem -- a heaven on Earth. The Puritans were aware of the
parallels between the ancient Jews of the Old Testament and
themselves. Moses led the Israelites out of captivity from Egypt,
parted the Red Sea through God's miraculous assistance so that
his people could escape, and received the divine law in the form
of the Ten Commandments. Like Moses, Puritan leaders felt they
were rescuing their people from spiritual corruption in England,
passing miraculously over a wild sea with God's aid, and
fashioning new laws and new forms of government after God's
wishes.
Colonial worlds tend to be archaic, and New England
certainly was no exception. New England Puritans were archaic by
choice, conviction, and circumstance.
Samuel Sewall's Diary, which records the years 1674 to
1729,
is lively and engaging. Sewall fits the pattern of early New
England writers we have seen in Bradford and Taylor. Born in
England, Sewall was brought to the colonies at an early age. He
made his home in the Boston area, where he graduated from
Harvard, and made a career of legal, administrative, and
religious work.
Sewall was born late enough to see the change from the
early, strict religious life of the Puritans to the later, more
worldly Yankee period of mercantile wealth in the New England
colonies; his Diary, which is often compared to Samuel
Pepys's
English diary of the same period, inadvertently records the
transition.
Like Pepys's diary, Sewall's is a minute record of his daily
life, reflecting his interest in living piously and well. He
notes little purchases of sweets for a woman he was courting, and
their disagreements over whether he should affect aristocratic
and expensive ways such as wearing a wig and using a coach.
A graduate of Cambridge University (England), he retained
sympathy for working people and diverse views. His ideas were
ahead of his time. He was an early critic of imperialism,
insisting that European kings had no right to grant land charters
because American land belonged to the Indians. Williams also
believed in the separation between church and state -- still a
fundamental principle in America today. He held that the law
courts should not have the power to punish people for religious
reasons -- a stand that undermined the strict New England
theocracies. A believer in equality and democracy, he was a
lifelong friend of the Indians. Williams's numerous books include
one of the first phrase books of Indian languages, A Key Into
the
Languages of America (1643). The book also is an embryonic
ethnography, giving bold descriptions of Indian life based on the
time he had lived among the tribes. Each chapter is devoted to
one topic -- for example, eating and mealtime. Indian words and
phrases pertaining to this topic are mixed with comments,
anecdotes, and a concluding poem. The end of the first chapter
reads:
In the chapter on words about entertainment, he comments
that "it is a strange truth that a man shall generally find more
free entertainment and refreshing among these barbarians, than
amongst thousands that call themselves Christians."
Williams's life is uniquely inspiring. On a visit to England
during the bloody Civil War there, he drew upon his survival in
frigid New England to organize firewood deliveries to the poor of
London during the winter, after their supply of coal had been cut
off. He wrote lively defenses of religious toleration not only
for different Christian sects, but also for non-Christians. "It
is the will and command of God, that...a permission of the most
Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and
worships, be granted to all men, in all nations...," he wrote in
The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience
(1644).
The intercultural experience of living among gracious and humane
Indians undoubtedly accounts for much of his wisdom.
Influence was two-way in the colonies. For example, John
Eliot translated the Bible into Narragansett. Some Indians
converted to Christianity. Even today, the Native American church
is a mixture of Christianity and Indian traditional belief.
The spirit of toleration and religious freedom that
gradually grew in the American colonies was first established in
Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, home of the Quakers. The humane
and tolerant Quakers, or "Friends," as they were known, believed
in the sacredness of the individual conscience as the
fountainhead of social order and morality. The fundamental Quaker
belief in universal love and brotherhood made them deeply
democratic and opposed to dogmatic religious authority. Driven
out of strict Massachusetts, which feared their influence, they
established a very successful colony, Pennsylvania, under William
Penn in 1681.
Woolman was also one of the first antislavery writers,
publishing two essays, "Some Considerations on the Keeping of
Negroes," in 1754 and 1762. An ardent humanitarian, he followed a
path of "passive obedience" to authorities and laws he found
unjust, prefiguring Henry David Thoreau's celebrated essay,
"Civil Disobedience" (1849), by generations.
Edwards was molded by his extreme sense of duty and by the
rigid Puritan environment, which conspired to make him defend
strict and gloomy Calvinism from the forces of liberalism
springing up around him. He is best known for his frightening,
powerful sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741):
Edwards's sermons had enormous impact, sending whole
congregations into hysterical fits of weeping. In the long run,
though, their grotesque harshness alienated people from the
Calvinism that Edwards valiantly defended. Edwards's dogmatic,
medieval sermons no longer fit the experiences of relatively
peaceful, prosperous 18th-century colonists. After Edwards,
fresh, liberal currents of tolerance gathered force.
Pre-revolutionary southern
literature was aristocratic and
secular, reflecting the dominant social and economic systems of
the southern plantations. Early English immigrants were drawn to
the southern colonies because of economic opportunity rather than
religious freedom.
Although many southerners were poor farmers or tradespeople
living not much better than slaves, the southern literate upper
class was shaped by the classical, Old World ideal of a noble
landed gentry made possible by slavery. The institution released
wealthy southern whites from manual labor, afforded them leisure,
and made the dream of an aristocratic life in the American
wilderness possible. The Puritan emphasis on hard work, education
and earnestness was rare -- instead we hear of such pleasures as
horseback riding and hunting. The church was the focus of a
genteel social life, not a forum for minute examinations of
conscience.
William Byrd describes the gracious way of life at his
plantation, Westover, in his famous letter of 1726 to his English
friend Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery:
Like one of the patriarchs, I have my flock and herds, my bondmen
and bondwomen, and every sort of trade amongst my own servants,
so that I live in a kind of independence on everyone but
Providence...
William Byrd epitomizes the spirit of the southern colonial
gentry. The heir to 1,040 hectares, which he enlarged to 7,160
hectares, he was a merchant, trader, and planter. His library of
3,600 books was the largest in the South. He was born with a
lively intelligence that his father augmented by sending him to
excellent schools in England and Holland. He visited the French
Court, became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was friendly
with some of the leading English writers of his day, particularly
William Wycherley and William Congreve. His London diaries are
the opposite of those of the New England Puritans, full of fancy
dinners, glittering parties, and womanizing, with little
introspective soul-searching.
Byrd is best known today for his lively History of the
Dividing Line, a diary of a 1729 trip of some weeks and 960
kilometers into the interior to survey the line dividing the
neighboring colonies of Virginia and North Carolina. The quick
impressions that vast wilderness, Indians, half-savage whites,
wild beasts, and every sort of difficulty made on this civilized
gentleman form a uniquely American and very southern book. He
ridicules the first Virginia colonists, "about a hundred men,
most of them reprobates of good families," and jokes that at
Jamestown, "like true Englishmen, they built a church that cost
no more than fifty pounds, and a tavern that cost five hundred."
Byrd's writings are fine examples of the keen interest
Southerners took in the material world: the land, Indians,
plants, animals, and settlers.
Humorous satire -- a literary work in which human vice or
folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit -- appears
frequently in the colonial South. A group of irritated settlers
lampooned Georgia's philanthropic founder, General James
Oglethorpe, in a tract entitled A True and Historical
Narrative
of the Colony of Georgia (1741). They pretended to praise him
for
keeping them so poor and overworked that they had to develop "the
valuable virtue of humility" and shun "the anxieties of any
further ambition."
The rowdy, satirical poem "The Sotweed Factor" satirizes the
colony of Maryland, where the author, an Englishman named
Ebenezer Cook, had unsuccessfully tried his hand as a tobacco
merchant. Cook exposed the crude ways of the colony with
high-spirited humor, and accused the colonists of cheating him.
The poem concludes with an exaggerated curse: "May wrath divine
then lay those regions waste / Where no man's faithful nor a
woman chaste."
In general, the colonial South may fairly be linked with a
light, worldly, informative, and realistic literary tradition.
Imitative of English literary fashions, the southerners attained
imaginative heights in witty, precise observations of distinctive
New World conditions.
William Bradford was elected governor of Plymouth in the
Massachusetts Bay Colony shortly after the Separatists landed. He
was a deeply pious, self-educated man who had learned several
languages, including Hebrew, in order to "see with his own eyes
the ancient oracles of God in their native beauty." His
participation in the migration to Holland and the
Mayflower
voyage to Plymouth, and his duties as governor, made him ideally
suited to be the first historian of his colony. His history,
Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), is a clear and compelling
account of the colony's beginning. His description of the first
view of America is justly famous:
Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of
troubles...they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns
to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or
much less towns to repair to, to seek for
succor...savage barbarians...were readier to fill their sides
with arrows than otherwise. And for the reason it was winter,
and they that know the winters of that country know them to be
sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms...all
stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole
country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and
savage hue.
The first published book of poems by an American was also
the first American book to be published by a woman -- Anne
Bradstreet. It is not surprising that the book was published in
England, given the lack of printing presses in the early years of
the first American colonies. Born and educated in England, Anne
Bradstreet was the daughter of an earl's estate manager. She
emigrated with her family when she was 18. Her husband eventually
became governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which later grew
into the great city of Boston. She preferred her long, religious
poems on conventional subjects such as the seasons, but
contemporary readers most enjoy the witty poems on subjects from
daily life and her warm and loving poems to her husband and
children. She was inspired by English metaphysical poetry, and
her book The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650)
shows the influence of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and other
English poets as well. She often uses elaborate conceits or
extended metaphors. "To My Dear and Loving Husband" (1678) uses
the oriental imagery, love theme, and idea of comparison popular
in Europe at the time, but gives these a pious meaning at the
poem's conclusion:
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let s so persevere
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
Like Anne Bradstreet, and, in fact, all of New England's
first writers, the intense, brilliant poet and minister Edward
Taylor was born in England. The son of a yeoman farmer -- an
independent farmer who owned his own land -- Taylor was a teacher
who sailed to New England in 1668 rather than take an oath of
loyalty to the Church of England. He studied at Harvard College,
and, like most Harvard-trained ministers, he knew Greek, Latin,
and Hebrew. A selfless and pious man, Taylor acted as a
missionary to the settlers when he accepted his lifelong job as a
minister in the frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts, 160
kilometers into the thickly forested, wild interior. Taylor was
the best-educated man in the area, and he put his knowledge to
use, working as the town minister, doctor, and civic leader.
Michael Wigglesworth, like Taylor an English-born,
Harvard-educated Puritan minister who practiced medicine, is the
third New England colonial poet of note. He continues the Puritan
themes in his best-known work, The Day of Doom (1662). A
long
narrative that often falls into doggerel, this terrifying
popularization of Calvinistic doctrine was the most popular poem
of the colonial period. This first American best-seller is an
appalling portrait of damnation to hell in ballad meter.
Easier to read than the highly religious poetry full of
Biblical references are the historical and secular accounts that
recount real events using lively details. Governor John
Winthrop's Journal (1790) provides the best information on
the
early Massachusetts Bay Colony and Puritan political theory.
The earliest woman prose writer of note is Mary Rowlandson,
a minister's wife who gives a clear, moving account of her
11-week captivity by Indians during an Indian massacre in 1676.
The book undoubtedly fanned the flame of anti-Indian sentiment,
as did John Williams's The Redeemed Captive (1707),
describing
his two years in captivity by French and Indians after a
massacre. Such writings as women produced are usually domestic
accounts requiring no special education. It may be argued that
women's literature benefits from its homey realism and
common-sense wit; certainly works like Sarah Kemble Knight's
lively Journal (published posthumously in 1825) of a
daring solo
trip in 1704 from Boston to New York and back escapes the baroque
complexity of much Puritan writing.
No account of New England colonial literature would be
complete without mentioning Cotton Mather, the master pedant. The
third in the four-generation Mather dynasty of Massachusetts Bay,
he wrote at length of New England in over 500 books and
pamphlets. Mather's 1702 Magnalia Christi Americana
(Ecclesiastical History of New England), his most ambitious
work,
exhaustively chronicles the settlement of New England through a
series of biographies. The huge book presents the holy Puritan
errand into the wilderness to establish God s kingdom; its
structure is a narrative progression of representative American
"Saints' Lives." His zeal somewhat redeems his pompousness: "I
write the wonders of the Christian religion, flying from the
deprivations of Europe to the American strand."
As the 1600s wore on into the 1700s, religious dogmatism
gradually dwindled, despite sporadic, harsh Puritan efforts to
stem the tide of tolerance. The minister Roger Williams suffered
for his own views on religion. An English-born son of a tailor,
he was banished from Massachusetts in the middle of New England's
ferocious winter in 1635. Secretly warned by Governor John
Winthrop of Massachusetts, he survived only by living with
Indians; in 1636, he established a new colony at Rhode Island
that would welcome persons of different religions.
Humane and courteous be,
How ill becomes it sons of God
To want humanity.
The best-known Quaker work is the long Journal (1774) of
John Woolman, documenting his inner life in a pure, heartfelt
style of great sweetness that has drawn praise from many American
and English writers. This remarkable man left his comfortable
home in town to sojourn with the Indians in the wild interior
because he thought he might learn from them and share their
ideas. He writes simply of his desire to "feel and understand
their life, and the Spirit they live in." Woolman's
justice-loving spirit naturally turns to social criticism: "I
perceived that many white People do often sell Rum to the
Indians, which, I believe, is a great Evil."
The antithesis of John Woolman is Jonathan Edwards, who was
born only 17 years before the Quaker notable. Woolman had little
formal schooling; Edwards was highly educated. Woolman followed
his inner light; Edwards was devoted to the law and authority.
Both men were fine writers, but they reveal opposite poles of the
colonial religious experience.
[I]f God should let you go, you would immediately sink, and
sinfully descend, and plunge into the bottomless gulf....The God
that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider
or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is
dreadfully provoked....he looks upon you as worthy of nothing
else but to be cast into the bottomless gulf.
Southern culture naturally revolved around the ideal of the
gentleman. A Renaissance man equally good at managing a farm and
reading classical Greek, he had the power of a feudal lord.
Besides the advantages of pure air, we abound in all
kinds of provisions without expense (I mean we who have
plantations). I have a large family of my own, and my doors
are open to everybody, yet I have no bills to pay, and half-
a-crown will rest undisturbed in my pockets for many moons
altogether.
Robert Beverley, another wealthy planter and author of The
History and Present State of Virginia (1705, 1722) records
the
history of the Virginia colony in a humane and vigorous style.
Like Byrd, he admired the Indians and remarked on the strange
European superstitions about Virginia -- for example, the belief
"that the country turns all people black who go there." He noted
the great hospitality of southerners, a trait maintained today.
Important black writers like Olaudah Equiano and Jupiter
Hammon emerged during the colonial period. Equiano, an Ibo from
Niger (West Africa), was the first black in America to write an
autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah
Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). In the book -
- an early example of the slave narrative genre -- Equiano gives
an account of his native land and the horrors and cruelties of
his
captivity and enslavement in the West Indies. Equiano, who
converted to Christianity, movingly laments his cruel
"un-Christian" treatment by Christians -- a sentiment many
African-Americans would voice in centuries to come.
The black American poet Jupiter Hammon, a slave on Long
Island, New York, is remembered for his religious poems as well
as for An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York
(1787),
in which he advocated freeing children of slaves instead of
condemning them to hereditary slavery. His poem "An Evening
Thought" was the first poem published by a black male in America.
Outline of American Literature:
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