The Very Americans

This is the first post in a series devoted to reading and discussing both volumes of The American Intellectual Tradition (7^thedition).  This primary source collection, familiar to many a professor and student of American intellectual history, has been shaped by the careful editorial hands of David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper.

As part of the 2012 state-of-the-field forum published in Modern Intellectual History, David Hollinger contributed an essay explaining the reasoning that he and Charles Capper used in selecting the readings for the sixth edition of this work, and discussed the problems and challenges of choosing among many suitable alternatives.  Thankfully, Professor Hollinger has made that essay freely available as a .pdf  – you can access/download it via this link.  I encourage everyone to read that essay, not only for its applicability to our discussions here, but also as a valuable case study in the intellectual labor that goes into shaping anthologies more generally.

Anthologies – much like syllabi — are made, not found, and to construct an anthology is to carve a particular path through a field of inquiry.  Sometimes that might mean following already deeply-scored trails, and sometimes that might mean striking out in a different direction.  In this anthology, the editors do a little of both.  As a result, Hollinger and Capper have very ably marked out atrail through American thought, anAmerican intellectual tradition involving the contestation between faith and reason, piety and secularism, selfhood and the social order.  If we choose to go in different directions – new directions, perhaps? – we are still profoundly grateful for the work already done.  One has to start somewhere.

In fact, in this post I invite our readers to consider the starting point selected by Hollinger and Capper, and to speculate on what might happen to the path if we were to start the journey with a different thinker, or at least with a different text.

The first text in the anthology is John Winthrop’s now-famous 1630 sermon aboard the Arbella, known as “A Modell for Christian Charity.”  This is the city-on-a-hill sermon, yes – but also the “Sweet sympathie of affeccions” sermon, the “some must be rich some poore” sermon. It is, in short, a densely tangled knot of several ideas that governed the choices of the first governor and other authorities of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s settlement.

But does “the American intellectual tradition” start with the Massachusetts Bay Company? Should it?  Beginning the anthology here is very much in keeping with the intellectual tradition of American intellectual history as an established field – Perry Miller’s framing of “the errand into the wilderness” casts a long shadow.  But the foray of the Puritans in 1630 was not the first foray of English settlers to North America, or to that part of North America that eventually became the United States America, and certainly not the first foray of European settlers who managed to carve out a permanent city on what passed for a hill.  I speak, of course, of St. Augustine, the oldest settlement founded by Europeans that has been continuously occupied ever since, established by the Spanish in 1565 as a base from which to pry off other European attempts at settlement, including the ill-fated Fort Caroline, a French outpost the Spanish sacked and destroyed when the palisades of St. Augustine must have been still oozing sap from being cut down in the swampy, mercilessly hot and humid paradise of La Florida.

However, while St. Augustine is perhaps a good place to begin in discussing European settlement of (what became) the United States, it is probably not the best place to start tracing out “the American intellectual tradition,” because the documents written in connection with that founding or the administration of that colony probably did not make their way into wide circulation, or even wide discussion, among the waves of settlers coming from England in the decades to follow. Those documents are housed in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain. (The PBS “Secrets of the Dead” episode on La Florida is outstanding, and I would recommend it for anyone teaching the first half of the survey.)

Well, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, and perhaps no one expects that the American intellectual tradition would begin not in English but in Spanish – though perhaps we should! Nevertheless, even setting aside the beginnings of a continuous European presence in North America and how writing from that or aboutthat settlement would have shaped the ideas of Anglo-American colonizers, it seems to me that 1630 is awfully late to begin the journey through American thought.

So where – or, rather, when – should one start instead?

I suggest starting in the 1580s, when Richard Hakluyt the elder and Richard Hakluyt the younger were both actively promoting the idea of planting an English settlement in North America.  Hakluyt the elder’s 1585 pamphlet, Inducements to the Liking of the Voyage Intended towards Virginia in 40. and 42. Degrees, lays out an argument for settlement that is by turns missiological, mercantilist, virulently anti-Catholic, and imperialistically militant in scope.*  Hakluyt provides a handy summary of his argument for a colony near the end of the document:

The ends of this voyage are these:

1. To plant Christian religion
2. To trafficke.
3. To conquer.

Or, to doe all three.

There is the regnant conception of “America” that shaped attempts at English settlement and guided the English presence there for decades before the Pilgrims landed in 1620 or the Puritans landed in 1630.  America (including Native peoples) was to be an outpost of Protestant Christianity, America was to be a source of enriching trade and strategically useful natural resources, and America was to be a foothold for an English empire.

Those three ideas strike me as equally important in shaping American thought and American culture.  Those were for the most part the founding principles of what eventually became America, and they certainly run through “American thought” from 1607, when Jamestown became the first English settlement that would endure (barely) in the land.

Some of those ideas run through the sermons of John Winthrop as well.  Before Winthrop preached aboard the ship to the group of settlers destined to found the “city on a hill,” he first had to persuade people to sign on to the Massachusetts Bay Company’s proposed venture.   In 1629, Winthrop preached a sermon entitled “Reasons to Be Considered for Justifying the Undertakers of the Intended Plantation in New England and for Encouraging Such Whose Hearts God Shall Move to Join with Them in It.”**  In this sermon, he lays out the logic undergirding the founding of the colony.

First, Winthrop says, “it will be a service to the Church” to plant “true religion” in North America as a bulwark against the satanic teachings of “the Jesuits.”  As important as anti-Catholicism has been in American thought and life practically to the present, it is useful to acknowledge its presence earlier in the American tradition rather than later.  From a brief for Protestant Christianity (of a Puritan sort, of course), Winthrop moves immediately to the economic reasons for the settlement:  “This land growes weary of her Inhabitants…” There is no economic opportunity in England.  There is rising poverty, rising vagrancy, the increasing enclosure of land, and no room for the growing population.  But, Winthrop argues, there’s plenty of room in America.  “[W]hy then should we stand hear striveing for places of habitation…and in ye mean tyme suffer a whole Continent, as fruitfull & convenient for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement.”  Why indeed.

In that argument we see one of the most crucial ideas shaping American life from the beginnings of colonization:  the conception of what is “waste” land, ripe for the taking, and what is someone else’s property.  Ownership of the land is tied to the labor of improving it, and in that sense, the colonizers argued, they had a right to any land the Native people had not brought under cultivation or development.  Winthrop makes this argument explicit later in the sermon when he sets up and then knocks down possible counterarguments to the venture of settlement.  In fact, that is “objection 1”:  “We have noe warrant to enter upon that land which hath been so long possessed by others.”  Here we see at least the recognition of an argument that might give the would-be settlers pause:  we would be interlopers laying claim to land that belongs to others.  Not to worry, though, says Winthrop; it’s not reallytheirs:  “That which lies common & hath never been replenished or subdued is free to any that will possesse and improve it…”  This idea undergirds not only the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but the conquest and settlement of every inch of the North American continent.  “The land was ours before we were the land’s…” Thus spake the New Englanders…and the Virginians, and the Carolinians, and the Tennesseeans, and the Nebraskans, and the Californians.

Not all the New Englanders, though.  Hollinger and Capper include a dissenting voice – well, actually two dissenting voices – in this first section of the anthology.  We have Anne Hutchinson, on trial primarily for not only slandering a good number of the ministers of the colony but also for proclaiming heretical ideas.  And we have Roger Williams, banished from the colony primarily for his dissenting ideas about religious freedom.  It’s worth remembering, though, that in addition to asserting their own religious liberty, either by its exercise or by its theoretical defense, both of these dissenters were also in opposition to the Pequot War.  American thought has grappled from the outset with the questions of who is a person, who is an American, and to whom “America” belongs.

Roger Williams asserted a radical answer to all three of those questions in The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644), excerpted in Hollinger and Capper.  In his discussion of civil peace, he remarks that “so many glorious and flourishing cities of the world maintain their civil peace; yea, the very Americans and wildest pagans keep the peace of their towns or cities…the peace spiritual, whether true or false, being of a higher and far different nature from the peace of the place or people, being merely and essentially civil and human” (46).  Whatever “American” has come to mean in the history of thought, for Roger Williams, it was the name for the Native people usurped from their place by the Puritans who embraced the idea that land belonged to anyone who “improved” it in a way recognizable and familiar to Europeans.

There is perhaps no more consequential idea in the history of America.  I say “perhaps,” because the idea of a chosen people with a divine mission is also quite consequential in the history of America.  It is difficult to say which has been the more significant in shaping subsequent conceptions of the social order.  Indeed, that might be a fruitful avenue of discussion. But both ideas were crucial to the founding and growth of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and both ideas are emphasized in Winthrop’s 1629 sermon, whereas only one of these ideas comes through clearly in the 1630 sermon.

I am not suggesting that Hollinger and Capper should replace one sermon with the other, nor am I suggesting that they should add one sermon alongside the other.  If they did that, who would get the boot?  (My vote goes for Charles Chauncy, bless his heart.) And in this series of posts, my own approach will be not so much to posit that there are other texts that shouldbe included in Hollinger and Capper’s anthology – it is, after all, theiranthology, and they have their own criteria of selection – as to consider what texts might be included in an anthology representing American intellectual life from colonization to the present.  There is not one American intellectual tradition; there are American intellectual traditions, radiating out in all directions at every point along the pathway. In this series of posts, let’s consider together what might be the consequences of following some of those paths.

If you would like to contribute an essay to this series, feel free to contact me or any of our bloggers. All of us can run guest posts, and we would be happy to consider your contribution.  (Here is the posting schedule for the series, with each date corresponding to a separate section of the two volume anthology.) All posts in the series, whether written by our regular bloggers or by guests, will be tagged “Hollinger and Capper,” so that clicking on that tag will pull up the whole discussion.

In the meantime, we can have a conversation via comments on this post.  I would love to hear your thoughts.

Editorial note (added April 8, 2018): The first section of Hollinger and Capper’s anthology is entitled “The Puritan Vision Altered” and includes the following readings:

• John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity” (1630)
• John Cotton, selection from A Treatise of the covenant of Grace (1636)
• Anne Hutchinson [sic], “The Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson at the Court at Newtown” (1637)
• Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644)
• Cotton Mather, selection from Bonifacius (1710)
• Charles Chauncy, Enthusiasm Described and Caution’d Against (1742)
• Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) and selection from A Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections (1746)

________

*In Envisioning America: English Plans for the Colonization of North America 1580-1640, A Brief History with Documents, 2^ndedition (Bedford/St. Martin, 2017), edited by Peter C. Mancall.

**Envisioning America, pp. 131-137.