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American literature
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The 17th century
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John Smith
William Penn
John Winthrop
Michael Wigglesworth
Anne Bradstreet
Edward Taylor
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Like other national literatures, American
literature was shaped by the history of the country
that produced it. For almost a century and a half,
America was merely a group of colonies scattered
along the eastern seaboard of the North American
continent—colonies from which a few hardy souls
tentatively ventured westward. After a successful
rebellion against the motherland, America became the
United States, a nation. By the end of the 19th
century this nation extended southward to the Gulf
of Mexico, northward to the 49th parallel, and
westward to the Pacific. By the end of the 19th
century, too, it had taken its place among the
powers of the world—its fortunes so interrelated
with those of other nations that inevitably it
became involved in two world wars and, following
these conflicts, with the problems of Europe and
East Asia. Meanwhile, the rise of science and
industry, as well as changes in ways of thinking and
feeling, wrought many modifications in people’s
lives. All these factors in the development of the
United States molded the literature of the country.
This article traces the history of American
poetry, drama, fiction, and social and literary
criticism from the early 17th century to the late
20th century. For information about closely related
literary traditions.
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The 17th century
American literature at first was naturally a
colonial literature, by authors who were Englishmen
and who thought and wrote as such. John Smith, a
soldier of fortune, is credited with initiating
American literature. His chief books included A True
Relation of … Virginia … (1608) and The generall
Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer
Isles (1624). Although these volumes often glorified
their author, they were avowedly written to explain
colonizing opportunities to Englishmen. In time,
each colony was similarly described: Daniel Denton’s
Brief Description of New York (1670), William Penn’s
Brief Account of the Province of Pennsylvania
(1682), and Thomas Ashe’s Carolina (1682) were only
a few of many works praising America as a land of
economic promise.
Such writers acknowledged British allegiance, but
others stressed the differences of opinion that
spurred the colonists to leave their homeland. More
important, they argued questions of government
involving the relationship between church and state.
The attitude that most authors attacked was jauntily
set forth by Nathaniel Ward of Massachusetts Bay in
The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America (1647). Ward
amusingly defended the status quo and railed at
colonists who sponsored newfangled notions. A
variety of counterarguments to such a conservative
view were published. John Winthrop’s Journal
(written 1630–49) told sympathetically of the
attempt of Massachusetts Bay Colony to form a
theocracy—a state with God at its head and with its
laws based upon the Bible. Later defenders of the
theocratic ideal were Increase Mather and his son
Cotton. William Bradford’s History of Plymouth
Plantation (through 1646) showed how his pilgrim
Separatists broke completely with Anglicanism. Even
more radical than Bradford was Roger Williams, who,
in a series of controversial pamphlets, advocated
not only the separation of church and state but also
the vesting of power in the people and the tolerance
of different religious beliefs.
The utilitarian writings of the 17th century
included biographies, treatises, accounts of
voyages, and sermons. There were few achievements in
drama or fiction, since there was a widespread
prejudice against these forms. Bad but popular
poetry appeared in the Bay Psalm Book of 1640 and in
Michael Wigglesworth’s summary in doggerel verse of
Calvinistic belief, The Day of Doom (1662). There
was some poetry, at least, of a higher order. Anne
Bradstreet of Massachusetts wrote some lyrics
published in The Tenth Muse (1650), which movingly
conveyed her feelings concerning religion and her
family. Ranked still higher by modern critics is a
poet whose works were not discovered and published
until 1939: Edward Taylor, an English-born minister
and physician who lived in Boston and Westfield,
Massachusetts. Less touched by gloom than the
typical Puritan, Taylor wrote lyrics that showed his
delight in Christian belief and experience.
All 17th-century American writings were in the
manner of British writings of the same period. John
Smith wrote in the tradition of geographic
literature, Bradford echoed the cadences of the King
James Bible, while the Mathers and Roger Williams
wrote bejeweled prose typical of the day. Anne
Bradstreet’s poetic style derived from a long line
of British poets, including Spenser and Sidney,
while Taylor was in the tradition of such
Metaphysical poets as
George Herbert and
John Donne.
Both the content and form of the literature of this
first century in America were thus markedly English.
John Smith
John
Smith, (baptized January 6, 1580,
Willoughby, Lincolnshire, England—d.
June 21, 1631, London), English explorer
and early leader of the Jamestown
Colony, the first permanent English
settlement in North America. Smith
played an equally important role as a
cartographer and a prolific writer who
vividly depicted the natural abundance
of the New World, whetting the
colonizing appetite of prospective
English settlers.
Smith
grew up on his family’s farm and was
apprenticed in his teens to a wealthy
merchant. At age 16 or 17, his
adventuresome spirit found an outlet on
the battlefields of continental Europe,
where he fought for the Netherlands in
its war of independence from Spain.
Having returned to England by 1599, he
spent about two years reading classical
military texts and studying
horsemanship. He then traveled to
Hungary in 1601 as a mercenary to join
Austrian forces fighting the Ottoman
Empire; he advanced to the rank of
captain. Captured by the enemy the
following year and taken to Turkey, he
escaped to Russia and returned to
England in 1604 or 1605. He then
attached himself to a group preparing to
establish an English colony in North
America. When a royal charter was
granted to the Virginia Company of
London, Smith and about 100 other
colonists led by Christopher Newport set
sail on December 20, 1606.
On
April 26, 1607, the voyagers arrived at
the Chesapeake Bay, and on May 14 they
disembarked at what was to become
Jamestown. The Virginia Company had
named Smith to the colony’s seven-member
governing council. His relationship with
the colony’s other leaders was generally
antagonistic, his focus being on the
practical means of survival in the
wilderness rather than on personal
privileges and status. He traded for
corn (maize) with the local Indians and
began a series of river voyages that
later enabled him to draw a remarkably
accurate map of Virginia. While
exploring the Chickahominy River in
December 1607, he and his party were
ambushed by members of the Powhatan
empire, which dominated the region. He
was ultimately taken to their emperor,
Chief Powhatan, also known as
Wahunsenacah. According to Smith’s
account, he was about to be put to death
when he was saved by the chief’s young
daughter of age 10 or 11, Pocahontas,
who placed herself between him and his
executioners.
Smith
became president of the Jamestown Colony
on September 10, 1608. He conducted
military training and continued to
secure corn from the Indians by trade.
He required greater discipline of the
colonists, announcing a policy that "he
that will not worke shall not eate
(except by sicknesse he be disabled)."
Colonists had previously been fed from a
common storehouse whether they worked or
not. Under Smith’s direction, small
quantities of tar, pitch, and soap ash
were made, a well was dug, houses were
built, fishing was done regularly, crops
were planted, and outlying forts were
built. The colony bore little loss of
life during his presidency, compared
with the enormous suffering and
mortality of the years before and after
his rule. In his dealings with Native
Americans, Smith’s approach differed
from those of the Spanish conquistadores
and later English settlers. Smith chose
to keep the Powhatan empire at bay
through psychology, diplomacy, and
intimidation—not massacre. He believed
the English could avoid bloodshed by
projecting an image of strength. When
Smith was injured from a fire in his
powder bag in September 1609, he was
forced to return to England.
Still
eager to explore and settle in America,
Smith made contact with the Plymouth
Company and sailed in 1614 to the area
he named New England, carefully mapping
the coast from Penobscot Bay to Cape
Cod. On another exploratory voyage the
following year, he was captured by
pirates and returned to England after
escaping three months later. In 1617 he
made one final colonizing attempt, but
his vessels were unable to leave port
for three months for lack of winds, and
he never set sail.
Smith
advocated English settlement of New
England for the rest of his life, but he
never saw North America again. His
writings include detailed descriptions
of Virginia and New England, books on
seamanship, and a history of English
colonization. Among his books are A
Description of New England (1616), a
counterpart to his Map of Virginia with
a Description of the Country (1612); The
Generall Historie of Virginia, New
England, and the Summer Isles (1624);
and The True Travels, Adventures, and
Observations of Captain John Smith in
Europe, Asia, Africa, and America
(1630). The Mayflower colonists of 1620
brought his books and maps with them to
Massachusetts. Smith died of an
unrecorded illness midway through 1631,
at age 51, in the London home of Sir
Samuel Saltonstall, a friend.
During
the founding years of the United States
in the late 18th and the early 19th
century, Smith was widely regarded as a
reliable observer as well as a national
hero. Thomas Jefferson described him as
"honest, sensible, and well informed."
Some historians have contended that
Smith was prone to self-promotion in his
writings. Yet his writings are notably
generous in giving credit to others who
helped the colony survive, and scholars
have confirmed factual details of his
autobiographical writing.
Smith’s
account of his rescue by Pocahontas in
1607 has been particularly
controversial. Some scholars believe he
might have misunderstood the event—that
it could have been an adoption ceremony
rather than an intended execution—and
others contend that he fabricated the
incident outright. With regard to the
truthfulness of Smith’s account, it has
been argued that he had little reason to
concoct such an episode. Because Smith
was the only English eyewitness to the
incident and the Powhatan witnesses left
no written record, the debate over it
may never be conclusively resolved.
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William Penn
William Penn, (b. Oct. 14, 1644, London,
Eng.—d. July 30, 1718, Buckinghamshire),
English Quaker leader and advocate of
religious freedom, who oversaw the
founding of the American Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers and
other religious minorities of Europe.
Early
life and education
William was the son of Admiral Sir
William Penn. He acquired the
foundations of a classical education at
the Chigwell grammar school in the Essex
countryside, where he came under Puritan
influences. After Admiral Penn’s naval
defeat in the West Indies in 1655, the
family moved back to London and then to
Ireland. In Ireland William heard Thomas
Loe, a Quaker itinerant, preach to his
family at the admiral’s invitation, an
experience that apparently intensified
his religious feelings. In 1660 William
entered the University of Oxford, where
he rejected Anglicanism and was expelled
in 1662 for his religious Nonconformity.
Determined to thwart his son’s
religiosity, Admiral Penn sent his son
on a grand tour of the European
continent and to the Protestant college
at Saumur, in France, to complete his
studies. Summoned back to England after
two years, William entered Lincoln’s Inn
and spent a year reading law. This was
the extent of his formal education.
In 1666
Admiral Penn sent William to Ireland to
manage the family estates. There he
crossed paths again with Thomas Loe and,
after hearing him preach, decided to
join the Quakers (the Society of
Friends), a sect of religious radicals
who were reviled by respectable society
and subject to official persecution.
Quaker leadership and political activism
After joining the sect, Penn would
eventually be imprisoned four times for
publicly stating his beliefs in word and
print. He published 42 books and
pamphlets in the seven years immediately
following his conversion. In his first
publication, the pamphlet Truth Exalted
(1668), he upheld Quaker doctrines while
attacking in turn those of the Roman
Catholics, the Anglicans, and the
Dissenting churches. It was followed by
The Sandy Foundation Shaken (1668), in
which he boldly questioned the Trinity
and other Protestant doctrines. Though
Penn subsequently qualified his anti-Trinitarianism
in Innocency with Her Open Face (1669),
he was imprisoned in the Tower of
London, where he wrote his most famous
book, No Cross, No Crown (1669). In this
work he expounded the Quaker-Puritan
morality with eloquence, learning, and
flashes of humour, condemning the
worldliness and luxury of Restoration
England and extolling both Puritan
conceptions of ascetic self-denial and
Quaker ideals of social reform. No
Cross, No Crown stands alongside the
letters of St. Paul, Boethius’s
Consolation of Philosophy, and John
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as one of
the world’s finest examples of prison
literature. Penn was released from the
Tower in 1669.
It was
as a protagonist of religious toleration
that Penn would earn his prominent place
in English history. In 1670 he wrote The
Great Case of Liberty of Conscience Once
More Debated & Defended, which was the
most systematic and thorough exposition
of the theory of toleration produced in
Restoration England. Though Penn based
his arguments on theological and
scriptural grounds, he did not overlook
rational and pragmatic considerations;
he pointed out, for example, that the
contemporary prosperity of Holland was
based on “her Indulgence in matters of
Faith and Worship.”
That
same year Penn also had an unexpected
opportunity to strike another blow for
freedom of conscience and for the
traditional rights of all Englishmen. On
Aug. 14, 1670, the Quaker meetinghouse
in Gracechurch Street, London, having
been padlocked by the authorities, he
preached in the street to several
hundred persons. After the meetings, he
and William Mead were arrested and
imprisoned on a trumped-up charge of
inciting a riot. At his trial in the Old
Bailey, Penn calmly and skillfully
exposed the illegality of the
proceedings against him. The jury, under
the leadership of Edward Bushell,
refused to bring in a verdict of guilty
despite threats and abusive treatment.
For their refusal the jurymen were fined
and imprisoned, but they were vindicated
when Sir John Vaughan, the lord chief
justice, enunciated the principle that a
judge “may try to open the eyes of the
jurors, but not to lead them by the
nose.” The trial, which is also known as
the “Bushell’s Case,” stands as a
landmark in English legal history,
having established beyond question the
independence of the jury. A firsthand
account of the trial, which was a vivid
courtroom drama, was published in The
People’s Ancient and Just Liberties
Asserted (1670).
Admiral
Penn died in 1670, having finally become
reconciled to his son’s Quakerism. Young
Penn inherited his father’s estates in
England and Ireland and became, like his
father, a frequenter of the court, where
he enjoyed the friendship of King
Charles II and his brother, the duke of
York (later James II). In 1672 Penn
married Gulielma Springett, a Quaker by
whom he had eight children, four of whom
died in infancy. In the 1670s Penn was
tirelessly active as a Quaker minister
and polemicist, producing no fewer than
40 controversial tracts on religious
doctrines and practice. In 1671 and 1677
he undertook preaching missions to
Holland and northern Germany, where the
contacts he established would later help
him in peopling Pennsylvania with
thousands of Dutch and German emigrants.
The later years of the decade were also
occupied with political activities. In
1679 Penn supported the Parliamentary
candidacy of the radical republican
Algernon Sidney, going on the hustings
twice—at Guildford and later at Bramber—for
his friend. During these years he wrote
a number of pamphlets on behalf of the
radical Whigs, including England’s Great
Interest in the Choice of this New
Parliament (1679), which is noteworthy
as one of the first clear statements of
party doctrine ever laid before the
English electorate.
Founding and governorship of
Pennsylvania
Penn had meanwhile become involved in
American colonization as a trustee for
Edward Byllynge, one of the two Quaker
proprietors of West New Jersey. In 1681
Penn and 11 other Quakers bought the
proprietary rights to East New Jersey
from the widow of Sir John Carteret. In
that same year, discouraged by the turn
of political events in England, where
Charles II was ruling without Parliament
and prospects for religious freedom
seemed dark, Penn sought and received a
vast province on the west bank of the
Delaware River, which was named
Pennsylvania after his father (to whom
Charles II had owed a large debt
canceled by this grant). A few months
later the duke of York granted him the
three “lower counties” (later Delaware).
In Pennsylvania Penn hoped to provide a
refuge for Quakers and other persecuted
people and to build an ideal Christian
commonwealth. “There may be room there,
though not here” he wrote to a friend in
America, “for such a holy experiment.”
As
proprietor, Penn seized the opportunity
to create a government that would embody
his Quaker-Whig ideas. In 1682 he drew
up a Frame of Government for the colony
that would, he said, leave himself and
his successors “no power of doing
mischief, that the will of one man may
not hinder the good of a whole country.”
Freedom of worship in the colony was to
be absolute, and all the traditional
rights of Englishmen were carefully
safeguarded. The actual machinery of
government outlined in the Frame proved
in some respects to be clumsy and
unworkable, but Penn wisely included in
the Frame an amending clause—the first
in any written constitution—so that it
could be altered as necessity required.
Penn
himself sailed in the Welcome for
Pennsylvania late in 1682, leaving his
family behind, and found his experiment
already well under way. The city of
Philadelphia was already laid out on a
grid pattern according to his
instructions, and settlers were pouring
in to take up the fertile lands lying
around it. Presiding over the first
Assembly, Penn saw the government of the
“lower counties” united with that of
Pennsylvania and the Frame of Government
incorporated in the Great Law of the
province. In a series of treaties based
on mutual trust, he established good
relations with the Lenni Lenape Indians.
He also held an unsuccessful conference
with Lord Baltimore, the proprietor of
the neighbouring province of Maryland,
to negotiate a boundary between it and
Pennsylvania. When this effort proved
unsuccessful, Penn was obliged in 1684
to return to England to defend his
interests against Baltimore.
Before
his return, he published A Letter to the
Free Society of Traders (1683), which
contained his fullest description of
Pennsylvania and included a valuable
account of the Lenni Lenape based on
firsthand observation. With the
accession of his friend the duke of York
as James II in 1685, Penn found himself
in a position of great influence at
court, whereby he was able to have
hundreds of Quakers, as well as
political prisoners such as John Locke,
released from prison. Penn welcomed
James’s Declaration of Indulgence (1687)
but received some criticism for doing
so, since the declaration provided
religious toleration at the royal
pleasure rather than as a matter of
fundamental right. But the Act of
Toleration (1689), passed after James’s
abdication, finally established the
principle for which Penn had laboured so
long and faithfully.
Penn’s
close relations with James brought him
under a cloud when William and Mary came
to the throne, and for a time he was
forced to live virtually in hiding to
avoid arrest. He used this period of
forced retirement to write more books.
Among them were An Essay Towards the
Present and Future Peace of Europe
(1693), in which he proposed an
international organization to prevent
wars by arbitrating disputes, and A
Brief Account of the Rise and Progress
of the People Called Quakers (1694),
which was the earliest serious effort to
set down the history of the Quaker
movement. Penn also drafted (1696) the
first plan for a future union of the
American colonies, a document that
presaged the U.S. Constitution.
In
1696, his first wife having died in
1694, Penn married Hannah Callowhill, by
whom he had seven children, five of whom
lived to adulthood. Meanwhile, affairs
had been going badly in Pennsylvania.
For about two years (1692–94), while
Penn was under suspicion, the government
of the colony had been taken from him
and given to that of New York.
Afterwards, Pennsylvania’s Assembly
quarreled constantly with its Council
and with Penn’s deputy governors. The
“lower counties” were unhappy at being
unequally yoked with the larger province
of Pennsylvania. Relations with the home
government were strained by the Quakers’
conscientious refusal to provide
military defense. In 1699 Penn, his
wife, and his secretary, James Logan,
returned to the province. He settled
many of the outstanding difficulties,
though he was compelled to grant the
Pennsylvania Assembly preeminence in
1701 in a revised constitution known as
the Charter of Privileges. He also
allowed the lower counties to form their
own independent government. After less
than two years Penn’s affairs in England
demanded his presence, and he left the
province in 1701, never to see it again.
He confided his Pennsylvania interests
to the capable hands of James Logan, who
upheld them loyally for the next half
century.
Final years
Penn’s final years were unhappy. His
eldest son, William, Jr., turned out a
scapegrace. Penn’s own poor judgment in
choosing his subordinates (except for
the faithful Logan) recoiled upon him:
his deputy governors proved incompetent
or untrustworthy, and his steward,
Philip Ford, cheated him on such a
staggering scale that Penn was forced to
spend nine months in a debtors’ prison.
In 1712, discouraged at the outcome of
his “holy experiment,” Penn began
negotiations to surrender Pennsylvania
to the English crown. A paralytic
stroke, which seriously impaired his
memory and dulled his once-keen
intellect, prevented the consummation of
these negotiations. Penn lingered on,
virtually helpless, until 1718, his wife
undertaking to manage his proprietary
affairs. Penn’s collected works were
published in 1726.
Frederick B. Tolles
Ed.
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John Winthrop
John Winthrop, (b. Jan. 22 [Jan. 12, Old
Style], 1588, Edwardstone, Suffolk,
Eng.—d. April 5 [March 26], 1649,
Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony
[U.S.]), first governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, the chief
figure among the Puritan founders of New
England.
Background and early life.
Winthrop’s father was a newly risen
country gentleman whose 500-acre
(200-hectare) estate, Groton Manor, had
been bought from Henry VIII at the time
of the Reformation. Winthrop thus
belonged to a class—the gentry—that
became the dominant force in English
society between 1540 and 1640, and he
early assumed the habit of command
appropriate to a member of the ruling
class in a highly stratified society.
At age
15 he entered Trinity College,
Cambridge; at age 17 he married the
first of his four wives—Mary Forth,
daughter of an Essex squire—and the next
year the first of his 16 children was
born. Like many members of his class,
Winthrop studied law, served as justice
of the peace, and obtained a government
office; from 1627 to 1629 he was an
attorney at the Court of Wards and
Liveries. For more than 20 years
Winthrop was primarily a country squire
at Groton, with no discernible interest
in overseas colonization.
He was
an ardently religious person. From his
early teens Winthrop threw himself into
scriptural study and prayers, and
gradually he trained himself into a
full-fledged Puritan, convinced that God
had elected him to salvation, or in
Puritan terms to “sainthood.” His
religious experience reinforced his
elitist outlook, but it also made him a
social activist. Like other prominent
Puritans, Winthrop dedicated himself to
remaking, as far as possible, the wicked
world as he saw it, arguing that “the
life which is most exercised with
tryalls and temptations is the sweetest,
and will prove the safeste.”
During
the late 1620s, Winthrop felt
increasingly trapped by the economic
slump that reduced his landed income and
by Charles I’s belligerent anti-Puritan
policy, which cost him his court post in
1629. When, in 1629, the Massachusetts
Bay Company obtained a royal charter to
plant a colony in New England, Winthrop
joined the company, pledging to sell his
English estate and take his family to
Massachusetts if the company government
and charter were also transferred to
America. The other members agreed to
these terms and elected him governor
(October 20).
Journey to America.
As Winthrop sailed west on the Arbella
the spring of 1630, he composed a lay
sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,”
in which he pictured the Massachusetts
colonists in covenant with God and with
each other, divinely ordained to build
“a Citty upon a Hill” in New England.
Some critics have seen Winthrop as a
visionary utopian, while others have
seen him as a social reactionary; but
most obviously he was urging his fellow
colonists to adopt the combination of
group discipline and individual
responsibility that gave Massachusetts
such immediate and lasting success as a
social experiment.
For the
remaining 19 years of his life, Winthrop
lived in the New England wilderness, a
father figure among the colonists. In
the annual Massachusetts elections he
was chosen governor 12 times between
1631 and 1648, and during the
intervening years he sat on the court of
assistants or colony council. His
American career passed through three
distinct phases. On first arrival, in
the early 1630s, he did his most
creative work, guiding the colonists as
they laid out a network of tightly
organized towns, each with its church of
self-professed saints. Winthrop himself
settled at Boston, which quickly became
the capital and chief port of
Massachusetts. His new farm on the
Mystic River was much inferior to his
former estate at Groton, but Winthrop
never regretted the move because he was
free at last to build a godly
commonwealth.
Opposition against him built up after a
few years, however, as dissidents kept
challenging Winthrop’s system in the
mid- and late 1630s. He was nettled when
the freemen (voters) insisted in 1634 on
electing a representative assembly to
share in decision making. He found Roger
Williams’ criticism of church–state
relations intolerable, though he
secretly helped Williams to flee to
Rhode Island in 1636. And he took it as
a personal affront when numerous
colonists chose to migrate from
Massachusetts to Connecticut.
Conflict with Anne Hutchinson.
The greatest outrage to Winthrop by far,
however, came when Anne Hutchinson, a
mere woman, gained control of his Boston
church in 1636 and endeavoured to
convert the whole colony to a religious
position that Winthrop considered
blasphemous. It was he who led the
counterattack against her. His victory
was complete. Hutchinson was tried
before the general court—chiefly for
“traducing the ministers”—and was
sentenced to banishment. Later she was
tried before the Boston church and
formally excommunicated. She established
a settlement on Aquidneck Island (now
Rhode Island) in 1638 and four years
later, after the death of her husband,
settled on Long Island Sound. Winthrop
sanctimoniously noted her tragic
misfortunes—her deformed stillborn baby
and her murder by Indians—as proof of
God’s judgment against heretics.
By 1640
Winthrop had become the custodian of
Massachusetts orthodoxy, suspicious of
new ideas and influences and convinced
that God favoured his community above
all others. With the outbreak of the
English Civil War in 1642, many New
Englanders returned home to fight
against Charles I. Winthrop, however,
stayed on in America, and he criticized
the course of the Puritan Revolution.
His own political philosophy was best
summed up in a speech of 1645, in which
he defined the magistrates’ authority
very broadly and the people’s liberty
very narrowly. But Winthrop was never a
petty tyrant; the colonists respected
and loved him to the end. His tender
side is best revealed by the loving
letters he exchanged with his third
wife, Margaret, who was his helpmate
from 1618 to 1647. The most notable of
his sons, John Winthrop the Younger
(1606–76), was a talented scientist and
governor of Connecticut. Later
descendants have figured prominently in
American politics, science, and
business.
After
struggling six weeks with “a feverish
distemper,” he died, age 61, in the
spring of 1649. By force of character
Winthrop had persuaded the colonists to
adopt many—though by no means all—of his
pet social and political ideas. The
detailed journal that he kept during his
years in America is a prime source for
the early history of Massachusetts, and
his copious file of correspondence and
memoranda gives an exceptionally full
impression of his activities and
personality.
Richard S. Dunn
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Michael Wigglesworth
Michael Wigglesworth, (b. Oct. 18, 1631,
Yorkshire?, Eng.—d. June 10, 1705,
Malden, Mass. [U.S.]), British-American
clergyman, physician, and author of
rhymed treatises expounding Puritan
doctrines.
Wigglesworth emigrated to America in
1638 with his family and settled in New
Haven. In 1651 he graduated from Harvard
College, where he was a tutor and a
fellow from 1652 to 1654 and again from
1697 to 1705. He preached at
Charlestown, Mass., in 1653–54 and was
pastor at Malden from 1656 until his
death. In addition to his clerical
duties, Wigglesworth practiced medicine
and wrote numerous poems, including “A
Short Discourse on Eternity,” “Vanity of
Vanities,” and God’s Controversy with
New England (published 1871). The first
two were appended to The Day of Doom: or
a Poetical Description of the Great and
Last Judgment (1662), a long poem in
ballad measure using horrific imagery to
describe the Last Judgment. Intended to
edify Puritan readers, this work sold
1,800 copies within a year, an unusually
high number in its time. Once the most
widely read poet of early New England,
Wigglesworth declined in popularity
together with Puritanism and has since
been considered a writer of doggerel
verse. A modern edition of The Day of
Doom prepared by Kenneth B. Murdock was
published in 1929.
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Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet, née Anne Dudley (b. c.
1612, Northampton, Northamptonshire?,
England—d. September 16, 1672, Andover,
Massachusetts Bay Colony [U.S.]), one of
the first poets to write English verse
in the American colonies. Long
considered primarily of historical
interest, she won critical acceptance in
the 20th century as a writer of enduring
verse, particularly for her sequence of
religious poems, “Contemplations,”
written for her family and not published
until the mid-19th century.
Anne
Dudley was the daughter of Thomas
Dudley, chief steward to Theophilus
Clinton, the Puritan Earl of Lincoln.
She married Simon Bradstreet, another
protégé of the earl’s, when she was 16,
and two years later she, her husband,
and her parents sailed with other
Puritans to settle on Massachusetts Bay.
She
wrote her poems while rearing eight
children, functioning as a hostess, and
performing other domestic duties. The
Bradstreets moved frequently in the
Massachusetts colony, first to
Cambridge, then to Ipswich, and then to
Andover, which became their permanent
home. Bradstreet’s brother-in-law,
without her knowledge, took her poems to
England, where they were published as
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in
America (1650). The first American
edition of The Tenth Muse was published
in revised and expanded form as Several
Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit
and Learning (1678).
Most of
the poems in the first edition are long
and rather dully imitative works based
on the standard poetic conventions of
the time, but the last two poems—“Of the
Vanity of All Worldly Creatures” and
“David’s Lamentation for Saul and
Jonathan”—are individual and genuine in
their recapitulation of her own
feelings.
Her
later poems, written for her family,
show her spiritual growth as she came
fully to accept the Puritan creed. She
also wrote more personal poems of
considerable beauty, treating in them
such subjects as her thoughts before
childbirth and her response to the death
of a grandchild. These shorter poems
benefit from their lack of imitation and
didacticism. Her prose works include
“Meditations,” a collection of succinct
and pithy aphorisms. A scholarly edition
of her work was edited by John Harvard
Ellis in 1867. In 1956 the poet John
Berryman paid tribute to her in Homage
to Mistress Bradstreet, a long poem that
incorporates many phrases from her
writings.
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Edward Taylor
Edward Taylor, (b. 1645?, in or near
Coventry, Warwickshire, Eng.—d. June 24,
1729, Westfield, Mass. [U.S.]), one of
the foremost poets in colonial British
North America.
Unwilling to subscribe to the required
oath of conformity because of his
staunch adherence to Congregational
principles, Taylor gave up
schoolteaching in England, emigrated to
New England, and was immediately
admitted as a sophomore by the president
of Harvard College, Increase Mather.
After his graduation in 1671, he became
minister in the frontier village of
Westfield, Mass., where he remained
until his death. He married twice and
became the father of 13 children, most
of whom he outlived.
Taylor’s 400-page quarto manuscript,
Poetical Works, was not published by his
heirs at Taylor’s request. It came into
the possession of Yale University in
1883 by the gift of a descendant, and
the best of his verse was published in
1939. The important poems fall into two
broad divisions. “God’s Determinations
Touching His Elect” is an extended verse
sequence thematically setting forth the
grace and majesty of God as a drama of
sin and redemption. The “Sacramental
Meditations,” about 200 in number, were
described by Taylor as “Preparatory
Meditations Before My Approach to the
Lord’s Supper.”
Central
to all his poems is the typical
Metaphysical mode: the extravagant
figure of speech and the association of
image and idea intended by its tension
to strike poetic sparks. The Poetical
Works of Edward Taylor (1939), edited by
T.H. Johnson, is a selection of poems, a
biographical sketch, critical
introduction, and notes. The Poems of
Edward Taylor (1960), edited by Donald
E. Stanford, is a comprehensive edition,
including the complete text of the
“Meditations.”
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The 18th century
In America in the early years of the 18th century,
some writers, such as Cotton Mather, carried on the
older traditions. His huge history and biography of
Puritan New England, Magnalia Christi Americana, in
1702, and his vigorous Manuductio ad Ministerium, or
introduction to the ministry, in 1726, were defenses
of ancient Puritan convictions. Jonathan Edwards,
initiator of the Great Awakening, a religious
revival that stirred the eastern seacoast for many
years, eloquently defended his burning belief in
Calvinistic doctrine—of the concept that man, born
totally depraved, could attain virtue and salvation
only through God’s grace—in his powerful sermons and
most notably in the philosophical treatise Freedom
of Will (1754). He supported his claims by relating
them to a complex metaphysical system and by
reasoning brilliantly in clear and often beautiful
prose.
But Mather and
Edwards were defending a doomed
cause. Liberal New England ministers such as John
Wise and Jonathan Mayhew moved toward a less rigid
religion. Samuel Sewall heralded other changes in
his amusing Diary, covering the years 1673–1729.
Though sincerely religious, he showed in daily
records how commercial life in New England replaced
rigid Puritanism with more worldly attitudes. The
Journal of Mme Sara Kemble Knight comically detailed
a journey that lady took to New York in 1704. She
wrote vividly of what she saw and commented upon it
from the standpoint of an orthodox believer, but a
quality of levity in her witty writings showed that
she was much less fervent than the Pilgrim founders
had been. In the South, William Byrd of Virginia, an
aristocratic plantation owner, contrasted sharply
with gloomier predecessors. His record of a
surveying trip in 1728, The History of the Dividing
Line, and his account of a visit to his frontier
properties in 1733, A Journey to the Land of Eden,
were his chief works. Years in England, on the
Continent, and among the gentry of the South had
created gaiety and grace of expression, and,
although a devout Anglican, Byrd was as playful as
the Restoration wits whose works he clearly admired.
The wrench of the American Revolution emphasized
differences that had been growing between American
and British political concepts. As the colonists
moved to the belief that rebellion was inevitable,
fought the bitter war, and worked to found the new
nation’s government, they were influenced by a
number of very effective political writers, such as
Samuel Adams and John Dickinson, both of whom
favoured the colonists, and loyalist Joseph
Galloway. But two figures loomed above
these—Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.
Franklin, born in 1706, had started to publish
his writings in his brother’s newspaper, the New
England Courant, as early as 1722. This newspaper
championed the cause of the “Leather Apron” man and
the farmer and appealed by using easily understood
language and practical arguments. The idea that
common sense was a good guide was clear in both the
popular Poor Richard’s almanac, which Franklin
edited between 1732 and 1757 and filled with prudent
and witty aphorisms purportedly written by
uneducated but experienced Richard Saunders, and in
the author’s Autobiography, written between 1771 and
1788, a record of his rise from humble circumstances
that offered worldly wise suggestions for future
success.
Franklin’s self-attained culture, deep and wide,
gave substance and skill to varied articles,
pamphlets, and reports that he wrote concerning the
dispute with Great Britain, many of them extremely
effective in stating and shaping the colonists’
cause.
Thomas Paine went from his native England to
Philadelphia and became a magazine editor and then,
about 14 months later, the most effective
propagandist for the colonial cause. His pamphlet
Common Sense (January 1776) did much to influence
the colonists to declare their independence. The
American Crisis papers (December 1776–December 1783)
spurred Americans to fight on through the blackest
years of the war. Based upon Paine’s simple deistic
beliefs, they showed the conflict as a stirring
melodrama with the angelic colonists against the
forces of evil. Such white and black picturings were
highly effective propaganda. Another reason for
Paine’s success was his poetic fervour, which found
expression in impassioned words and phrases long to
be remembered and quoted.
The new nation
In the postwar period some of these
eloquent men were no longer able to win a hearing.
Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams lacked the
constructive ideas that appealed to those interested
in forming a new government. Others fared better—for
example, Franklin, whose tolerance and sense showed
in addresses to the constitutional convention. A
different group of authors, however, became leaders
in the new period—Thomas Jefferson and the talented
writers of The Federalist papers, a series of 85
essays published in 1787 and 1788 urging the virtues
of the proposed new constitution. They were written
by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and
John Jay.
More distinguished for insight into problems of
government and cool logic than for eloquence, these
works became a classic statement of American
governmental, and more generally of republican,
theory. At the time they were highly effective in
influencing legislators who voted on the new
constitution. Hamilton, who wrote perhaps 51 of the
Federalist papers, became a leader of the Federalist
Party and, as first secretary of the treasury
(1789–95), wrote messages that were influential in
increasing the power of national government at the
expense of the state governments.
Thomas Jefferson was an influential political
writer during and after the war. The merits of his
great summary, the Declaration of Independence,
consisted, as Madison pointed out, “in a lucid
communication of human rights … in a style and tone
appropriate to the great occasion, and to the spirit
of the American people.” After the war he formulated
the exact tenets of his faith in various papers but
most richly in his letters and inaugural addresses,
in which he urged individual freedom and local
autonomy—a theory of decentralization differing from
Hamilton’s belief in strong federal government.
Though he held that all men are created equal,
Jefferson thought that “a natural aristocracy” of
“virtues and talents” should hold high governmental
positions.
Notable works of the periodPoets and poetry
Poetry became a weapon during the American
Revolution, with both loyalists and Continentals
urging their forces on, stating their arguments, and
celebrating their heroes in verse and songs such as
Yankee Doodle, Nathan Hale, and The Epilogue, mostly
set to popular British melodies and in manner
resembling other British poems of the period.
The most memorable American poet of the period
was Philip Freneau, whose first well-known poems,
Revolutionary War satires, served as effective
propaganda; later he turned to various aspects of
the American scene. Although he wrote much in the
stilted manner of the Neoclassicists, such poems as
The Indian Burying Ground, The Wild Honey Suckle, To
a Caty-did, and On a Honey Bee were romantic lyrics
of real grace and feeling that were forerunners of a
literary movement destined to be important in the
19th century.
Drama and the novel
In the years toward the close of the 18th century,
both dramas and novels of some historical importance
were produced. Though theatrical groups had long
been active in America, the first American comedy
presented professionally was Royall Tyler’s Contrast
(1787). This drama was full of echoes of Goldsmith
and Sheridan, but it contained a Yankee character
(the predecessor of many such in years to follow)
who brought something native to the stage.
William Hill Brown wrote the first American
novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789), which showed
authors how to overcome ancient prejudices against
this form by following the sentimental novel form
invented by Samuel Richardson. A flood of
sentimental novels followed to the end of the 19th
century. Hugh Henry Brackenridge succeeded
Cervantes’s Don Quixote and
Henry Fielding with some
popular success in Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), an
amusing satire on democracy and an interesting
portrayal of frontier life. Gothic thrillers were to
some extent nationalized in Charles Brockden Brown’s
Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800), and
Edgar Huntly (1799).
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