American Literature: 1700-1820
Overview
As we move into the 18 th century, it is important to realize that Puritanism did not
evaporate; as a powerful religious, moral, and literary presence right after the Salem
witch trials; nor with the Great Awakening; nor with the unpacking of, on American
shores, of a few popular texts from the English and the continental Enlightenment. The
18th century and the first years of the 19 th are characterized by an ongoing interaction
between an Age of Reason and an Age of Faith—a time when new ideas and older ones
commingled in sharp minds and strong American literary texts. In the colonies south of
New England, other values are growing and local cultures were taking different
directions. The colonists visited each other, compared, and experimented with the
pluralism and empiricism that played a major role in the thinking of the Revolutionary
period, and the intellectual and imaginative courage that supported a new literature for
a new republic.
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During the eighteenth century, the religious, intellectual, and economic horizons
of the thirteen English colonies expanded, challenging the dominance of Puritan
culture with Enlightenment thought and uniting the different regions behind
common national interests.
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The Enlightenment involved the uneasy mixture of new scientific and
philosophical investigations into the nature of the universe with traditional
responses to scripture.
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In response to the Enlightenment’s intellectual rigor and call to ethical sentiment,
the “Great Awakening” of 1735–50 encouraged a return to Calvinist zeal by
stressing an intense emotional commitment and a complete surrender to faith.
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Imperial politics and the American Revolution of 1775–83 dominated the writings
of the late eighteenth century.
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Lasting effects of the Enlightenment include a greater social mobility, cultural
acceptance of ideals such as reason and equality, and the assumption of an
innate moral sense in all Americans.
Religious Voices:
• Jonathan Edwards: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
• John Woolman: Journal
Jonathan Edwards represents the highest, fullest achievement in New England
Puritan prose as well as the epitome of the male Puritan mind: in New England
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literature before 1750, only Bradstreet ranks with Edwards in creating, on the printed
page, a passionate, intellectual, complex, yet integrated sensibility.
Even this long after his death, Edwards still ranks as a major American philosopher and
theologian—a rigorous, systemic thinker. His brimstone sermons are more widely read
by modern students than are his careful readings of scripture and the natural world or
his gentle personal narratives. The contrast in his tone can cause problems in your
reading—conditioned by current pop culture, you may assume that any preacher with a
fiery delivery is a hypocrite. It is important to remember that Edwards lived what he
believed, and that the blameless life (which has withstood generations of skeptical
review), the rhetoric, the devotion to family, and the relentless scholarship and
theological inquiry coalesce into an integrated self and into the first great intellect to
emerge in Puritan New England.
Edwards took on the challenge of organizing and strengthening Calvinist theology to
meet eighteenth-century scrutiny, a scrutiny based in logic, in science, and in a belief
that the individual mind, propelled along by healthy skepticism and common sense,
could find its way to truth. The contrast between Edwards and Benjamin Franklin offers
a dramatic opposition and a way to move from the New England Puritans to the secular
world of the Federalists.
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” should be read not as a work of anti-secular
fanaticism but as a triumph of relentless logic and powerful belief. It is a demonstration
of Edwards’ belief that to read Scripture accurately, to follow logic wherever it might
take you, and to believe wholeheartedly could guide a Puritan consciousness to a vision
of grace and peace and to a vision of damnation.
Reading John Woolman’s Journal extracts can help you to see that many core values
of Puritanism endured throughout New England as deism gained favor and flourished in
the thinking of writers who belonged to very different congregations. You may wonder
what was so alien about the Quakers that the Puritans felt a need to persecute them.
Woolman’s emphasis on the inward life or “inner light” of the Quakers may suggest to
you the development of individual voice in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. Woolman’s
Journal suggests a yearning for faith connected more to feeling than to the kind of
“delight” that Edwards celebrates, a delight borne of religious reasoning and close
reading of Scripture.
Think about the connections among the expression of self-reliance in Bradford’s Of
Plymouth Plantation, the description Woolman offers of “inward life,” and the
assumptions that promoted Franklin’s popularity in Quaker Pennsylvania.
Native American Voices:
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Pontiac: Speech at Detroit
Red Jacket: Speech to the US Senate
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Tecumseh: Speech to the Osages
By 1820, white Americans had the iron presses; the huge new Fourdrinier machines for
making abundant paper; the roads and boats and soon the railroads for moving the
printed word all over the settled regions. Moreover, the towns and villages of the
United States communicated in only a handful of languages, not scores or hundreds of
dialects with no easy transcription to the page. As a result, the voices of the Native
American spokesmen (they are all male at this point) come down to us with strange
and unsettling resonations; the others, the strangers, are the ones who transcribe and
promulgate, and they do so on their own terms. The 18 th and 19th centuries plunge us
into a contemplation of media power, crucial in the construction of history and the
survival of swaths of human experience.
Samson Occom is the rarity; he mastered English, taught in it, and wrote in it. Later in
life he came to have second thoughts about his accommodation to white ways and
Christian practice. The other native voices we hear in this section are brought to us in
our language and in our medium—print—by white men with uncertain credentials and
motives. Ascribing quaintness to the speech of a people you mean to displace is a
common and effective strategy: elegize the unwanted others out of the way, mourn for
them while they are still above the earth. It’s not surprising that Chief Logan’s Spartan
epitaph for himself and his people became so famous in its time and after—it’s an apt
inscription for a monument for the dead, not a call to engage with the living. Pontiac
and Tecumseh and Red Jacket were also defeated leaders, and the ritualized
utterance that they leave behind also has an inevitable aura of elegy to it.
Political Voices:
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Benjamin Franklin: The Way of Wealth
John and Abigail Adams: Letters
Thomas Paine: from Common Sense and The Crisis
Thomas Jefferson: The Autobiography
Since the second grade, you have known Benjamin Franklin as a benign and
grandfatherly American icon who has a modern-style sense of humor. Overall, Franklin
seems, in contrast to the Puritans, refreshingly contemporary. What could be shocking
about Franklin, from the point of view of Jonathan Edwards or any fervent New England
Puritan, is his breezy acceptance of unreconciled conflicts and discontinuities in his own
system of values. The Puritan quest for complete integrity among all of one’s words,
public actions, private life, and cherished principles is replaced by a quest for maximum
worldly effectiveness and exemplary citizenship---and the condition of the soul seems to
have little to do with his plan.
We can begin with a look at the famous rules Franklin lays out for himself in The
Autobiography as a method for achieving a kind of perfection. With delight, we notice
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the hedge about “venery”—to be used “rarely” for purposes other than “health or
procreation,” meaning that it’s okay to go on a tear once in a while, provided you do it
discreetly and don’t disturb others. And what about the paradox inherent in trying to
“imitate” both “Jesus and Socrates,” as if there were no differences between these
moral models and as if such “imitation” weren’t in itself a problem in trying to achieve
“humility.” When Franklin encounters such dilemmas, he escapes with a wink and a
joke. What do we think of this as an intellectual and moral strategy? Would a Puritan
thinker ever allow him/herself an evasion of that kind?
Franklin’s life and his “instructions” transform daily routine into something resembling a
religious practice. Practical life itself seems to become his secular or deistic “religion,”
governed by precepts, self-discipline, and a consistent desire for worldly selfimprovement. So that Franklin’s work can be seen as both deriving from Puritan
religious method and reacting against it.
Materialism and greed are NOT the motives that propel Franklin; an assumption that
civic, intellectual, scientific, and charitable action constitute the only self worth caring
about and the only self that the Almighty (who Franklin imagines as somebody much
like himself—busy, intellectual, reasonable, benign, undogmatic, and forgiving) cares
about either. Consider the use of Franklin’s use of the word “erratum” in describing
moral failings and his refusal to use the word “sin.”
In the letters of John and Abigail Adams, we see the rare intersection of public and
personal life in colonial America and evidence of an intimate relationship between two
people. Look at the various conflicts that each of these writers reveals in his or her
letters: Abigail is concerned with smallpox, a lack of pins, and other domestic troubles;
she fears war with England; she’s afraid that others might read her letters; and she
takes pride in her connection to John’s work. John is concerned about keeping his
private identity alive, even as he attends to the affairs of the new Continental Congress
and labors to ensure the survival of a new country. Both are capable of praising and
chiding in the same letter and of complaining about the other’s lack of attention or
expression of feeling. John’s letter of July 20, 1776 (less than three weeks after the
signing of The Declaration of Independence ) opens, “This has been a dull day to me,”
because a letter he had expected to receive from Abigail did not arrive.
John and Abigail Adams transcend the formal requirements of eighteenth-century letter
writing and allow feeling to interrupt form. Indeed, Abigail statedly prefers those letters
in which John transgresses conventional form, writing about one of his letters, in hers
of July 21, 1776, that she wants from John more personal discourse and more words
“respecting yourself, your Health or your present Situation.” These letters exist within
the dual contexts of personal relationship and political change, and the rapid shifts in
the discourse reflect the way attention to audience changes the use of language, even
in the late eighteenth century.
Throughout the 1700-1820 period, we have been observing the way in which each shift
in thinking retains old forms. The need that the Mayflower Puritans felt for a document
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to clarify and stabilize their shared values is the earliest example of this. In the writings
of the Federalist period, the pattern continues.
Like Franklin’s Autobiography, The Declaration of Independence is a blueprint, and
experiment that the French would soon emulate, and another important moment in the
invention of an American polity and identity. The Declaration of Independence can
legitimately be viewed as a literary work, a work with special rhetorical qualities and
power, a work that was actually written by human beings, not dictated from the
heavens. Consider how this document “invents” history. Do you see a resemblance
between The Declaration and the sermon form, especially in “Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God”? Compare the language with Franklin’s in “The Way to Wealth.”
Black Voices:
• Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African
• Phyllis Wheatley: poetry
Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative gives us a new perspective on life in the
American Colonies. Although the original version of The Declaration of Independence
includes a reference to the slave trade (see the changes Jefferson notes in the text
included in his Autobiography) and although during the writing of the Constitution the
prohibition of the slave trade was discussed, stipulations concerning slavery were
omitted from the Constitution, and Congress was formally prohibited from abolishing
the slave trade for at least twenty years. That is the historical context in which Equiano
was writing, and the narrative provides a rare and stirring firsthand account of life in
Africa, the internal African slave trade (Equiano’s own father owned slaves), and
conditions of the slave ships themselves.
The American world that Equiano depicts enshrines the merchant.
King, the
Philadelphia merchant, eventually keeps his promise and allows Equiano to buy his
freedom. Equiano does so by becoming a merchant himself. Cargo thus becomes
central to Equiano’s freedom; he begins as “live cargo,” becomes a trader in various
goods, and literally reverses his fortunes. Unlike the authors of later slave narratives,
such as Frederick Douglass, Equiano does not achieve freedom by finding his voice.
Neither does he feel compelled to keep silent. By including his manumission papers in
his narrative, Equiano seems to suggest that, indeed, it is only a reversal of fortune, not
his own power, that has produced his freedom. The “absolute power and domination of
one man claims over his fellow” that allowed Robert King to emancipate Equiano
equally allowed other white men to enslave freeman Joseph Clipson.
Phyllis Wheatley is a fascinating poet, for she reflects Puritan influence, wrote poetry
that imitates Alexander Pope, and was the first African American to publish a book.
Wheatley writes about liberty as an abstract or spiritual condition rather than as
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freedom from slavery. The kind of slavery she seems most concerned with is that of
her former ignorance of Christianity and redemption. Her letters provide a valuable
addition about her life, documenting her correspondence with abolitionist groups in
England and America and with other Africans in servitude in America. She views
spiritual salvation as “the way to true felicity,” but she is also aware of the needs of
both Africans and American Indians.
Wheatley makes a connection between achieving exalted language in poetry (or in art)
and rising on “seraphic pinions.” Wheatley resembles earlier colonial writers in whose
writings personal concerns and personal voice are largely absent, but the powerful
images of “rising” and racial uplift will reappear in black prose and poetry from Booker
T. Washington to Countee Cullen.
Women’s Voices:
• Sarah Kemble Knight: A Journey from Boston to New York
• Sara Wentworth Morton: poetry
• Mercy Otis Warren: poetry
Sarah Kemble Knight writes as one of our first homegrown tourists, traveling down
the East Coast with a keen eye and a playful curiosity. You may enjoy the secular
truculence of her voice and want to compare it to Rowlandson’s, perhaps speculating on
what may be happening to the status and voice of colonial women. You may be
puzzled by the apparent strangeness of New York to Knight’s Boston sensibility,
especially now, when the territory between Beacon Street and Manhattan can seem like
one amalgamated supercity!
Sara Wentworth Morton and Mercy Otis Warren are among the poets who wrote
for family, or circles of friends. If they published in their own lifetime, these chapbooks
were hand-printed in small runs paid for by the author or someone close—they were
keepsakes rather than “editions” or “books” in the modern sense of these words.
The poems can be sorted into those that seem like performance or obligatory works
and poems that seem more intimate, less ceremonial. Odes to General Washington and
demonstrations of craft, like samplers of embroidery, mingle here with poems to
husbands and special friends. Try sorting these poems out and deciding which poems
should go into which stack!
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