Understand America

The Beginning of Political Parties

2009-04-06T17:47:00.000-07:00

Nothing in Federal Constitution anticipated the emergence of political parties. James Madison had hoped that one of the chief strengths of the Constitution would be its tendency to break and control the violence of factions. Jefferson, in one of his characteristic moments of rhetorical windiness, declared that allegiance to a party was the last degradation of a free and moral agent, and that “if I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all”. Hamilton said: “We are attempting by this Constitution to abolish factions and to unite all parties for the general welfare”. This might well have worked, but for the fact that the ideological division between Hamilton on the one side, and Jefferson on the other, quickly became so great; and the animosity between the two men so visible, that the new republic was less than a decade old before American politics had sorted itself out along two parties: the Hamiltonians or Federalists, and the Jeffersonian or Democratic Republicans, or simply Republican party.

Hamilton’s Energetic Federal Government

Federalists and Republican clubs and newspapers sprang up, candidates began presenting themselves to the voters as Federalists or Republicans. In 1804, in the most shocking demonstration of how deeply the idea of party had seized hold of political life, Alexander Hamilton was wounded and killed in a duel fought with one of Jefferson’s disciples, Aaron Burr. Everyone deplored parties, and everyone joined them. Each blaming the other for starting the process, each blaming the other for making their own party organization necessary.

Hamilton observed, during the Confederation, how easily the jealous interests of land-holders and land-speculators in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Connecticut could paralyze the very breath of the republic. Everywhere in the States Hamilton found provincialism, small-mindedness, bad habits and oligarchy. That could only be eliminated, in Hamilton’s mind, by ruthlessly subordinating the State governments to a strong central government, or even reducing the States to administrative units of the Federal government. And valorizing an economy in which the worth of an achievement could be measured in the form which is the most indifferent to hierarchies of color or inheritance: cash money.

This won, for Hamilton and his Federalist allies, the approval of city merchants, workers and most of New England. It also won him the vituperation of Jefferson and his Republican followers. It also got Hamilton a reputation for cold-blooded authoritarianism. Jefferson convinced himself that the Federalists were nothing but an alliance of the old Loyalist refugees and Tories, and American merchants who had sold their souls to the British. They wished for everything which would approach the new government to a monarchy, said Jefferson.

This was a strange set of accusations in the ears of the Federalists. Hamilton left the government in 1796, refusing to use his insider information to speculate in Western land, even mocking himself as one of those public fools who sacrifice his private interest to public interest, at the certainty of ingratitude. The major Federalist political voices were all those lawyers with no independent family wealth, who often ruined themselves financially in civil service. If the new republic had any likely candidate for being a member of an aristocracy, clearly the best offer was Thomas Jefferson.

The chief offence of Hamilton’s liberal economic program was that a debt-compelled government is no remedy to men who have lands and Negroes. As a result, Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans cried “Liberty!”, but mean, as all party leaders do, “Power”.

Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800

Power was what they got. In 1800, the Federalist John Adams run for reelection to Presidency, but lost to Jefferson. Running with Aaron Burr as his Vice-President, Jefferson beat Adams and the Federalists by 73 to 65 votes in the electoral college. Fifty-three of Jefferson’s votes came from the South, which hardly made Jefferson the uniform favorite of the nation. But that did nothing to discourage Jefferson from looking upon his election as the “revolution of 1800”, a mandate to undo everything Hamilton and the Federalists had accomplished.

He pledged in his inaugural to look above party: “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Noble, generous sentiments, but privately Jefferson hoped to sink Federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection of it.

The Federalists’ economic policies that Hamilton had helped to cement into place were already too firm for Jefferson to dislodge them. The charter for Hamilton’s National Bank run until 1811, and Jefferson had to wait until the election of his hand-picked successor and Secretary of State, James Madison, for that charter to be cancelled. With the on-going war, as the French and the British threatened to put American shipping on the North Atlantic in the crosshairs of both warring navies, Jefferson thought he could solve the problem simply with an embargo of all American trade with them, and leaving off the products of virtuous American farmers.

Instead, Jefferson’s embargo triggered the first national economic collapse. Hamilton might have said “I told you so”. The Republicans blamed this on the evil machinations of Great Britain. There was just enough mean-spirited British encouragement given to British Canada to hostile Indian tribes on the frontier to give this a coating of credibility. Enough credibility, in fact, to send Jefferson’s successor, Madison, galloping after the British by declaring war in 1812, and expecting to annex Canada as a result.

The Disasters of the War

Without Hamilton’s National Bank, there was no money to fund an army or a navy, and so, the American army stumbled from one defeat to another, punctuated by a handful of victories in places where the victories got nothing. The American navy spent most of the war, apart from a few moral-lifting ship to ship combats, meekly bottled up in American ports by British ships-of-the-line. Without Federally funded manufacturing on the Hamiltonian model, there were no uniforms and weapons for the army, no national roads to assist them and get them from one place to another.

The war of 1812 cruelly revealed the inadequacies of Jeffersonian economic policy. “Our armies went to the frontier clothed in the fabrics of the enemy, ammunition of war was gathered as chance supplied them, and the whole struggle was marked by prodigality, waste and privation of a nation”, complained John Pendleton Kennedy.

It was this disaster of the war which Kennedy believed opened eyes to some important facts. Henry Clay, who represented Kentucky both in the House and the Senate, began his political life as an ardent Jeffersonian Democratic Republican. He helped engineer the defeat of the recharter of Hamilton’s Bank of the United States in 1811, and he was the most malevolent of the war hawks who agitated James Madison into declaring war on Britain in 1812.

Henry Clay’s Moderation and the Success of Andrew Jackson

The war left Clay a wiser Jeffersonian. In 1816, the repented Clay began singing a very different song, about the need for a National Bank, for government sponsored internal improvement projects, to build roads and canals, and for the erection of protective tariffs on imports in order to shield American manufacture from killer competition from abroad.

The embarrassments of the war of 1812 gave enough persuasiveness to this talk. Clay was able to navigate a bill for a second Bank of the United States through Congress. Madison’s successor in Presidency, James Monroe, gave a reluctant blessing to funding for a National Road, a federally financed highway. The result of this, however, was to split the old Democratic Republican party. A good deal of the split was related to the three-fifths clause.

Henry Clay himself was a slave owner. His State, Kentucky, legalized slavery. In the long run, Clay became, despite his slave holding, an ardent proponent of colonizing American slaves out of the United States, and gradually eliminating slavery from American law. Clay’s most famous disciple would be another Kentuckian who really did use the power of the national government to abolish slavery. His name was Abraham Lincoln.

For more than two decades after Jefferons’s “revolution of 1800”, the Constitution’s three-fifths clause guaranteed that the Presidency would go almost routinely to a Southerner, a Jeffersonian and a slave owner. By 1824, Jefferson’s old Democratic Republican party, with Clay at the head of one faction, had fractured so badly as a party that the presidential elections were no longer quite so predictable. John Quincy Adams, the Jeffersonian son of the last Federalist President, had served President James Monroe as Secretary of State, and that casted him as a presumptive to the Presidency in 1824.

Adams, however, was challenged by the ambitions of Henry Clay. In turn, Clay and Adams were challenged by a pure undiluted Jeffersonian, General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, a slave owner and the commanding general in the most important victory the United States had won in the war of 1812 at New Orleans. Jackson rose from out of nowhere to win the popular vote, but he failed to capture a majority in the electoral college. So, under the rules laid down in the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where Henry Clay was the speaker of the House.

Unable to sum up enough votes to win the Presidency for himself, Clay at least preferred to stop Andrew Jackson. Clay, through his support in the House of Representatives, elected Quincy Adams President. Adams hoped to pull down the remaining resistance to what Clay was now calling his American system of banking, internal improvements and tariffs. But rumors that Quincy Adams had stroked a corrupt bargain with Henry Clay for the election robbed him of the political momentum he needed.

In 1828, Andrew Jackson was swept into the Presidency on a wave of national enthusiasm and by the united votes provided by the three-fifths clause of the South. The two terms that Andrew Jackson spent in the White House were much more successful as a revolution that Jefferson’s in 1800.

The End of Moral Philosophy in America

2009-04-06T11:11:00.000-07:00

The common sense morality was the perfect prescription for a secular republic in which both Thomas Jefferson and John Witherspoon had to live together. It yielded moral laws without compelling people to embrace protestant Christian theology, but it allowed protestant Christians to slip the fundamentals of Christian morality into public affairs without having to name Edwarsean revivalism. Thus, it allowed a kind of low-level evangelism to operate on the republican masses.

The principle of analogy, in fact, worked so well, that sometimes it was hard to carry away with it. Through the intuitive response of a moral consciousness, Mark Hopkins rediscovered an intricate three-fold class of duties for which human beings had been created, including a moral obligation to obtain air, exercise, sleep and clothing. But also he discovered a right to property, which is graciously bestowed upon mankind for the purpose of stimulating them into action.

Union College students in the 1850’s found, through Lawrence Hickok, that they had natural and self-evident moral obligations to cleanliness of dress and person. Even more than that, Hickok believed that this common moral sense would teach people directly that they should privatize the post office, because State interference is oppressive to the public freedom. Like all tyranny, it should at once be abated.

All of these intuitive moral obligations climaxes in what Francis Wayland called the general obligation to the supreme love to God. This, for Wayland, led point by point to the cultivation of a devotional spirit, to prayer and even to good Sabbath keeping. As Wayland happily concluded: “as everything which we can know teaches a lesson concerning God, if we connect that lesson with everything which we learn, everything would be resplendent with the attributes of the deity”.

On the other hand, the fact that morality was supposed to be as real as physics did not mean that everyone naturally obeyed those moral laws the way inanimate nature obeys the laws of physics. After all, people had free will. They could choose to trump those laws if they wished. “Whether we can or cannot answer arguments against liberty, remarked the Presbyterian Archibald Alexander, we know that we are free”. Sort of an odd statement for a Presbyterian Calvinist to make. “Though we may not be able to understand or explain with precision this freedom, yet this ignorance of our nature should not disturb our minds.”

Free will was not the only culprit that kept people from realizing their moral duties. A consistent pattern of unwise choices would result in a permanent moral warpage of the soul.

The Status of the Moral Sense in the Human Mind

It is worth noting at this point that the 19th century moral philosophers were still talking about the human mind as a collection of faculties. Whatever else the Enlightenment had succeeded in questioning, it had not shaken people loose from the notion that the mind was an arrangement of mental departments. For the moral philosophers, the old warfare for supremacy between will and intellect had not ended. If anything, the Enlightenment’s suspicion of the way intellect could be perverted into wasting its energies on the creation of vast pyramids of theological nonsense, gave a new respectability to the legitimacy of the emotions or passions.

In Thomas Reid’s version of the Scottish common sense thinking, the mind’s faculties could be divided into three sections: the mechanical faculties, the animal faculties and the rational faculties, which were composed of the conscience and the intellect.

David Hume had dismissed morality as an animal faculty, just an emotion. But Reid upgraded the moral sense to the ranks of the rational faculties. So, the moral sense was above emotion. The moral sense was not ruled by the intellect, it ruled alongside it.

Too Much or Too Little Religion

Moral philosophy was a confident enterprise, but it also contained a number of important anxieties. The first of these anxieties concerned religion. Not whether moral philosophy had too much of it, but whether it might actually have too little. The college-based teachers of moral philosophy recorded their thinking and speculations in a lengthy collection of textbooks on ethics, many of which had very long lives and very high sales. Francis Wayland’s great “Elements of Moral Science”, which was first published in 1835, had sold 45000 copies by 1851, and 100000 copies by the end of the century.

These textbooks strained to present a semblance of uniformity on moral basis. Indeed they had to, because only uniformity would give a sense of verisimility to the claim that they were only reflecting the common sense of every conscious mind. However, the colleges where these moral philosophers taught were overwhelmingly church-related, and the faculties who taught in them were still overwhelmingly ordained clergy with specific, and sometimes very conflicting, denominational loyalties to serve.

Wayland was an ordained Baptist minister. Mark Hopkins was the grand nephew of Samuel Hopkins, and an ordained Congregationalist minister. Alexander was an old-school Presbyterian. It might prove highly inconvenient for a purely inductive and objective moral science to stumble across facts of human behavior, like free will, which might militate against their particular denominational identities, like Calvinism.

Worst still, it might be very embarrassing for these moral philosophers to find themselves in entire and uniform agreement in ethics with gentlemen who they were otherwise required by their denominations to anathematize. This was a particular problem for Calvinist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches and colleges. They could not had been happy at finding themselves allied in the cause of moral philosophy and the teaching of virtue alongside the wild fire of revivalism.

On the other hand, the moral philosophers may had been too loyal to their denominations. The very fact that they were mostly ordained clergy prevented them from setting up defensive national professional organization that other academic disciplines in America were already using to promote their own disciplinary interests, and the career of their members.

They all had to swear at the existence of a natural, and therefore common, Christian morality; but their conflicting denominational and theological identities prevented any of them from joining arms with each other in defense of either their discipline or morality. In the context of academic professionalization, that failure to organize any form of national professional association helped to deligitimize and undermine the whole moral philosophy endeavor.

So, they found themselves confused by the urge to remain loyal to their own denominational traditions, and paralyzed by the cynical suggestion that their denominational traditions really should mandate that they should never be seen together with these Revivalists.

The Failure of Moral Science

The second of moral philosophy’s anxieties touched on its claims to have a purely scientific non-partisan parentage. The moral philosophers liked to describe their inductive method of discovering universal moral principles out of the facts of consciousness as purely Baconian, after Sir Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum. In other words, as purely scientific, as an experiment in a laboratory.

To professional scientists, morality is not something you can measure in a test, or predict on an experimental basis. What was worst than the disapproval of the scientific professionals was the disapproval of the scientific amateurs. Already in the 1840’s, Americans were becoming fascinated by series of scientific enthusiasms which meant nothing good for the integrity of moral philosophy.

A similar threat emerged from a new interest in races, sparked in large measure by the hankering of Southern slave owners for a way of justifying the enslavement of African-Americans. Racism did this by ways of racial distinctions. Racism infused the identity of moral nature and moral characteristics with simple differences in human physical nature, without the need to consult the facts of consciousness or a moral sense.

But the greatest problem the moral philosophers encountered was the problem of overreach. Moral philosophy promised that it could discover a logical order, not just in physical nature, but in moral, economic and political nature as well. They found, over time, that the really serious ethical problems about virtue in the republic were so complicated and so ambiguous, that no absolute solution had any hope of appearing right to everyone’s moral sense.

The moral philosophers achieved consensus, but only on the issues that were so trivial that they mattered to no one but themselves. On the big ticket issues, like slavery, moral philosophers in the North and in the South arrived at solutions flatly contradictory to each other. So flatly, that it called into question the notion that everyone possesses some form of common moral sense that would always, like a scientific experiment, yield the same conclusion.

By the 1870’s, moral philosophy, attacked on one hand as too scientific to be religious; and attacked on the other hand as too religious to be scientific (both accusations sometimes coming from the same secular critics), had lost its intellectual legitimacy. The last great textbook in moral philosophy, “Our Moral Nature”, by Princeton’s James McCosh, was published after Mccosh’s retirement in 1888. By 1908, just 20 years later, when John Dewey collaborated with the production of a textbook on ethics for the American Science series, all mention of analogy and moral philosophy had been replaced by Pragmatism and Social Democracy.

Although the claims of the moral philosophers to scientific universality in ethics loosed legitimacy, it gave its heroes and readers an inescapable sense of their moral nature as human beings. With it, the need to order their lives on a plane considerably higher than the hedonism and indifference with which their successors, pragmatism and psychology, ended up with. Evolutionary humanism gave no joy, and less humanity to America than it had had at the hands of the moral philosophers.

The American Moral Philosophy

2009-04-06T09:22:00.000-07:00

Edwarsean revivalism was one way of solving the problem of how to generate and ensure virtue in the new American republic in the 18th century. It was not, however, the only way. The Enlightenment had won too many converts to deism, and there were too many routine ordinary protestants who were reluctant to embrace revivalism. However, there was an alternative, that laid remarkably close to the Scottish common sense philosophy, which we already saw how it influenced America before the Revolution at Princeton under John Witherspoon. It also had done so to a lesser degree at Yale, but it was really Witherspoon who gathered most of the credit for introducing Scottish thinking into America.

Using Scottish Epistemology

It hadn’t really been the purpose of the Scottish philosophy to engineer a republic. The real purpose of Scottish philosophy was to produce a realist epistemology that would reassure people about the reality of the external world, and the reliability of the mind’s perceptions of it. In so doing, rescue the Enlightenment from the death end of skepticism.

On the other hand, epistemology is never far removed from ethics. If you cannot be sure what or how you know something, then certainly you aren’t going to be sure about what you ought to do. And so, in short order, the chief labor of the common sense philosophy became the formation of a workable republican brand of ethics. This was not as easy as it sounds. Newtonian science taught to find in physical nature not the personal interventions of God, but repeatable and dependable laws of nature. What about human nature? Did human nature functioned the same way as physical nature?

The same reasoning that erased intelligence and purpose from physical nature, and reduced it all to laws, could just as easily erase intelligence and purpose from the human soul, and reduce everything we think of as unique to human behavior to some kind of psychological determinism. The effects of this kind of skepticism on science would be bewildering. On ethics, they will be fatal.

This did not necessarily troubled some of the American founders. Alexander Hamilton cheerfully accepted the notion that self-interest rather than virtue was the basic engine of human action. Little wonder that the Federalist Papers described the Constitution as a natural system that could work purely by checks and balances, rather than by virtue. But for many others, the disappearance of virtue was an intellectual disaster. It was the Scottish philosophy which became the second means of restoring virtue to public life.

In American colleges before the Civil War, just about every major collegiate intellectual was an enthusiastic disciple of Scottish common sense realism. Thomas Clap, Nathaniel William Taylor, Noah Porter; all preached to the undergraduates at Yale college.

These ethicists or moral philosophers were not content merely with using the Scottish philosophy to establish a certain epistemology, they wanted that epistemology to pay them the added dividend of articulating a public ethic that would serve as the foundation for public virtue and moral order in this new secular republic. They proposed to do this in three steps.

The Three Steps to Establish A New Moral Code

First of all, they proposed to establish a realist epistemology. An epistemology that would guarantee that human life was not passive, nor mistaken in its apprehension of a real external world. There was a real world exterior to the mind, filled with real objects, and the mind had real connections, real direct apprehensions of this world.

The second step was to erect, on that epistemological foundation, the proposition that purpose and intelligence in the universe also had to be real. If all the objects out there are real, and we have direct apprehensions of them, then we have to include perceptions of intelligence and purpose as real, because our perceptions of intelligence and purpose are the undeniable default position of human consciousness.

We look outside ourselves and see objects, the objects are really there and we have direct apprehensions of them. But we also look out at the external world and we see cause and effect. We don’t see cause and effect in the same way we might see a chair or a table, but nevertheless it is the default position of human consciousness, therefore cause and effect should be understood to be as real as those chairs. And not only we see cause and effect, when we see cause and effect, we also have to see a causer, and that means we have to see intelligence and purpose. When we see those things in such an elemental fashion, then we ought to understand that intelligence and purpose in the universe are qualities fully as real as all the other qualities that your mind perceives in things or objects exterior to yourself.

The third step comes when you invite the student to shift attention from physical nature to human nature. Ask whether the same intelligence and purpose cannot also be perceived in human nature as well as physical nature. Then you calculate form the nature of that intelligence and purpose what the contents of a real moral code ought to be. You do it not as though this moral code was based on religious doctrine or the product of religious teachings, but as an induction from the observed facts of human nature, fully as scientific in its method as Newtonian physics.

On that basis, such a code of ethics could be embraced by all the citizens of the republic: Christians, deists or otherwise; because it was simply a scientific realization of the moral facts hard-wired into human nature. Moral philosophy, will thus become what Yale’s Noah Porter called the science of duty. Was there a science of physics? Sure, because we have direct apprehensions of physical operations in the universe. Was there a science of duty? Sure, because we have direct apprehensions in human nature of intelligence and purpose.

The Moral Science

Fitting ethics and morality into the same clothes of science required that the moral philosophers produced a hermeneutical or interpretative principle, which would allow them to transfer the patterns of intelligence and purpose that they saw in physical nature to the human soul. That principle was the principle of analogy. Analogy worked like this: by the epistemological rules of the common sense realist philosophy, everybody experiences inescapable intuitions about the existence of facts. Facts are there. You cannot avoid coming to conclusions about facts. Facts are all around you. You have direct apprehensions of them. You can’t hide under the desk to get away from the reality that is all around you. The existence of facts is inescapable.

One of the most basic of those facts is that change operates in a law-like fashion. Certain things exist and certain changes are taking place in them, and this we know because we cannot avoid knowing them. But when we know it we also know that these changes don’t take place at random. Not only it is inescapable that you have intuitions about facts external to yourself, but you also know that those facts change and that the change follows a law-like pattern.

All laws can, according to the moral philosophers, be shown to have a single pattern. If they didn’t, then we couldn’t talk about a law at all, because every motion and every substance in the universe will then be a law by itself, and the result would be universal ruin.

If the mind could really know the exterior world, and knew it to be governed by laws, then one should expect the interior world of human consciousness to be governed by the same lawfulness. There should, in other words, be a striking ground of analogy between the laws of things, which command and put forth the force uniformly; and the laws of persons, which make certain ethical choices obligatory. “No man was ever known to exist who in any sense could be called a developed human being who did not recognize certain ethical distinctions as real and esteem them of supreme importance”, wrote Noah Porter. “We take them as we know them, whether civilized or savage”.

You see, morality or virtue is not merely a cultural accident. It is not merely a social convention. It is not just an illusion. It is a conscious component of the mind. Unlike the physical laws of science, it instructs people in the laws of character development, of social relationships, of politics, of economics and spiritual duties to God.

The Foundation for Public Virtue

This common sense morality was the perfect prescription for a secular republic in which both Thomas Jefferson and John Witherspoon had to live together. It yielded moral laws without compelling people to embrace protestant Christian theology, but it allowed protestant Christians to slip the fundamentals of Christian morality into public affairs without having to name Edwarsean revivalism. Thus, it allowed a kind of low-level evangelism to operate on the republican masses.

For instance, “the analogy of the human soul furnishes a decisive argument in favor of the conclusion that the Creator and Thinker is one being”. In saying that, Porter was not actually proselytizing anybody, he was simply making an inductive statement of ethical fact. But the result of that thinking would very likely be some form of Christian behavior. It was through this carefully scientized methodology that the moral philosophers were able to rebuild the structure of Christian public ethics in the half-century after the American Revolution, and offer it as a guide to national virtue without braking over Jefferson’s wall of separation, and without needing the furies of revivalism.

Edwardseanism and the Second Awakening

2009-04-04T17:57:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Edwards did not live long to put his theology into full play, but his two disciples, Samuel Hopkins from West Springfield, Massachusetts; and Joseph Bellamy of Bethlehem, Connecticut; they did. What both men generated first was not revival but controversy.

In 1766, Hokpins’ An Inquiry Concerning the Promises of the Gospel indicted the New England Churches for having watered down the depravity of original sin, and then turn conversion into a gentile embrace of polite morals, and thus ending up making God into an indulgent uncle rather than a righteous father. Given the profound moral warpage of human depravity, one might as easily expect a hand-less climber to scale a mountain as to expect a sinner to use the means of grace. Given God’s hostility to human sin, its ill effects could only be overcome when gives a new heart in regeneration. Only then, is a foundation laid in the mind for the discerning of the truth of the Gospel in its real beauty and excellency.

This meant that there could be no gradual wrapping up to a new heart. Instead, this change was worked by the spirit of God immediately and instantaneously. Nobody should fool himself into believing that there were promises of regenerating grace made to the exercises and doings of the unregenerate. There was only one option. Hopkins said that men are required to repent and turn to God on pain of eternal damnation, and are declared to be in a state of condemnation until they do so.

Established Congregational order in New England was defied by the prospect of the new divinity, which discounted all the efforts made under the use of means, and demanded the full use of their natural ability and immediately repent. They liked it still less when Hopkins and Bellamy began excommunicating those who didn’t repent at once. And when Hopkins began teaching that not only were people obliged to use all their natural ability to repent, but were also obligated to exercise, after repentance, a Christian and self-denying life.

Through Edwards’ juxtaposition of natural ability and moral necessity, Hopkins and Bellamy could preach the most extreme Calvinistic versions of absolute divine sovereignty.

They enraged some people by this. Hopkins, in fact, was forced out of his church in 1769, and moved to New Port, Rhode Island, where he enraged still more people by denouncing the slave trade as the ultimate sin against disinterested or impartial benevolence. Bellamy stayed as pastor of Bethlehem for 50 years. In the words of one of his followers, his preaching “made God so great”. Indeed it did.

The Second Awakening

Restless and idealistic theological students, fresh from the tepid atmosphere of Yale and Harvard, flocked to Hopkins and Bellamy for ministerial apprenticeships. It was these next generation Edwarseans who really lit the bonfires of revival across New England, in what became generally known as the Second Great Awakening. By the 1790’s, Hopkins estimated that he and Bellamy had planted over 100 of their pupils and sympathizers in pulpits across Western Massachusetts and Western Connecticut. The revivals were sweeping more than 100 towns in New England, most of them under the preaching of this new divinity.

These preachers prided themselves with the passion with which they wrote and studied. Nathaniel Taylor devoted himself for 78 years, from ten to sixteen hours a day, in his study. Hopkins met with two of his students to talk theology through the day. They eventually noted a glow from a fire in the East. It was actually the sun coming up the next day.

Bellamy was even more determined to train new divinity missionaries for the New England churches. Upwards of 60 theological students passes through the barn he refurnished in Bethlehem as a one-man seminary. They became the most vivid and demanding voices for a consistent Calvinism, as they called it, in the post-Awakening and post-Revolutionary decades. They, in turn, trained ministerial students of their own.

The Father of Modern Revivalism

None of the new divinity ministers, however, cleared a wide path for himself in American culture as Charles Grandison Finney. Born in Western Connecticut, Finney moved to upstate New York, and originally trained as a lawyer. In 1821, Finney was dramatically converted, and embarked on a new career as a preacher of revivals. No one ever wielded the thunderbolts of the sinners’ moral ability, that need for immediate repentance and the requirement for a perfect disinterested benevolence, than Charles Finney.

He served as pastor of the Chatham Street Chapel and the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City. Eventually, he became one of the leading lights in founding Oberlin College. He denounced selfishness as the sin of sins, and the diametric opposite of disinterested benevolence. Under the heading of selfishness, Finney included everything from slave owning to overdressing.

Revivals of religion are not permanent states of affairs. With Finney, the violence of the new divinity reached its apex, and then diminished its intensity. His preaching dwelt so much on the sinners’ natural ability to repent, that people forgot (and accused him of forgetting), that he was, after all, a Calvinist. Disinterested benevolence, which shaped both the origins of the anti-slavery movement and the organization of missionary work, finally degenerated into a cheerless code of does and don'ts.

When Finney tried to illustrate just how much natural ability sinners had by installing an anxious bent near his pulpit, and inviting anxious sinners to come, sit there and be prayed with; even his fellow revival laborers began to dismiss him as a sensation-seeking embarrassment. Yet, these intellectual airs of Jonathan Edwards turned the Second Great Awakening into a great cultural force. In a secular republic, the revivalists wrenched control of the will of the republic, or at least of the republic’s culture, out of the hand of the deists, out of the hands of the secularists, and turned the ship that Jefferson and Madison had imagined would sail before secular winds, and set it to sail before God’s winds.

They showed by this that American religion did not need an official tax-supported, government-recognized base in American politics in order to have a decisive influence on American life. In almost the same way that Edwards had taught, that God rules human conduct not by force but by the presentation of motives, so the Edwarseans transformed all the protestant churches of America into presenters of motives to American culture, rather than tax collectors who were backed up and reinforced by civil statutes.

Unable to legislate, they organized independent societies for Bible distribution, for alcoholism reform, for observance of the Sabbath, for suppressing vice and immorality, and for the end of slavery. Specially for the end of slavery.

Edwardseans and the Anti-slavery Movement

Slavery described precisely the sort of natural inability and natural necessity which Edwards insisted was not the true notion of Calvinism. To the extent that slavery literally involved the repression of Christianity among the slaves by their masters, it was bound to arouse the animus of the new divinity. Oddly enough, Edwards himself had been a slave owner, although not on the dimensions of Thomas Jefferson. His slave ownership was limited to the purchase of an occasional domestic helper for the Edwards’ household in 1731 and 1736. But, as early as 1741, Edwards was already criticizing the New England slave trade. During Edwards’ pastorate in Northampton, six African slaves were admitted to full membership on an equal par with any other citizen of Northampton.

It was Hopkins who characteristically applied the full logic of Edwards to slavery. In 1771, he began his preaching against slave trade as a violation of the principle of disinterested benevolence. Two years after that, Hopkins began directly attacking not just slave trade, but slavery itself. He was joined in his protest by Edwards the younger, in New Haven. Radical opposition to slavery eventually became an independent issue on its own for the new divinity.

In 1859, the most radical blow yet struck against American slavery, would come from a man nurtured under a new divinity pastorate, John Brown. The power generated by the revivals, awakenings and the new divinity theology gave the now disestablished churches of New England everything they needed to accomplish the reforms that Jefferson’s wall of separation prevented them from imposing directly as organized churches.

When the French liberal Alexis de Toqueville took his celebrated tour of the United States in the 1830’s, he was amazed to find that in the United States religion had no influence on the laws or on political opinions, nevertheless it worked to regulate the State. If Edwarsean style of revivalism was an important means for firing up interest in religions and reform, the truth was that it was a less than happy instrument, less than successful instrument for sustaining that interest.

The demand for immediate repentance and for disinterested benevolence was supposed to infuse new virtue back into public life through renewed individuals. Well, unhappily, it might just as easily convince renewed individuals to have nothing further to do with public life, to disengage entirely from the sinfulness of their surrounding neighbors. So, Edwarsean revivalism was, at the end of the day, still a reflection of the old Puritan weakness for syncretism.

The revivals called people to repentance, but they also called them out of society, out of their normal relations, out of their everyday moral lives, to participate in an intensely demanding, but still very other-worldly version of protestant Christianity. The very fact that a revival was judged necessary at all was a judgement on the failures of the regular churches and on the impurities of conventional society. Its logical end was to turn people into come-outers of various sorts, and to inflate a radical individualism.

A new answer to the problem of religion’s role in leading American life will come from the 19th century academic moral philosophers, and from John Witherspoon’s Scottish philosophy of common sense.

Jonathan Edwards on Free Will

2009-04-03T15:41:00.000-07:00

A wall of separation between Church and State was not what the righteous Presbyterians and Congregationalists of America had gone into the Revolution for. It became a very good question what they would propose to do about it. The first answer came from the disciples of Jonathan Edwards.

Curiously, the intellectual fuel for these answers laid buried in the pages of Edwards’ great treatise on free will. It arose out of an important distinction Edwards wanted to make so that he could demonstrate that all human actions were divinely ordered by God (Calvinism), and yet hold people morally accountable for those actions. When God decreed a certain act, that act became necessary, it had to happen. But acts can become necessary in one of two very different ways.

God could actually arm wrestle someone into doing what he wants. All the while, the person is kicking and screaming in protest because he really wanted something else. That’s one way an act can become necessary. This is mostly the caricature of what people think about Edwards, Calvinism and unconditional election. On the other hand, though, an act can become necessary if you already have a certain psychological inclination toward that act. If you like chocolate, I can pretty well bet money that if I point out just the right chocolate or just the right amount of it, you’ll choose it. There is a certain measure of predictability in human behavior, we don’t live, act or behave randomly. The more intense a person’s inclination toward a certain behavior, the more likely it is that it will be acted upon.

Edwards called the necessity that involves force, the arm twisting version of necessity, natural necessity. He cheerfully admitted that anyone who is compelled to act under the force of natural necessity cannot be held morally accountable for what they do. If you force me at gun point to drive you to or from the scene of crime, I can’t be held as your accomplice, you violated my free will.

The other kind of necessity, which arises from our own inclinations and desires, Edwards called moral necessity. Because nobody is actually forcing us to do things by moral necessity, we can be held liable. In fact, the greater the force of an evil inclination in our actions, the more accountable we are, precisely because we have all the physical power we needed to do otherwise.

With that, Edwards hit everyone’s panic button. As sinners in the hands of an angry God, we possess a nature that inclines us to sin. In fact, it inclines us to sin all the time. We labor day by day under the force of moral necessity. That gives us a moral inability to do anything other that sin. None of this happens because God forces us to sin. That would be a natural necessity, and then we would have an excuse, we could say that we were made to do it that way, you can’t blame us.

The fact is, said Edwards, we actually possess all the natural ability we could ever want not to sin. Translated into practical terms, what this meant was that no one could shelter themselves from the call to repentance and conversion, as they had for generations in New England, behind such pious beliefs as the Half-Way Covenant, or the plead that they were gradually working their way through their depravity (almost like therapy), by using the means of grace, such as prayer or reading the Bible. You were, Edwards taught, deprived totally and there is nothing you could do about it, but you have arms, legs, lips and brains, and you could use them all to bow down in the dust and repent, and you could do it now without waiting for grace to get you around doing it.

So, you were liable. Even if you were totally deprived. If we were to look at this as a modern psychologist would, we would say that Edwards was creating a moment of mental crisis. He was confronting people simultaneously with their depravity, and then he was offering a release, by telling them that they were fully responsible to repent and believe.

Edwards himself did not live long to put this into full play, but his two disciples, Samuel Hopkins from West Springfield, Massachusetts; and Joseph Bellamy of Bethlehem, Connecticut; they did.

Jefferson’s Separation Between Church and State

2009-04-03T14:57:00.000-07:00

I’ve spent some time writing about Jonathan Edwards. I have to admit that I did live it dangling there, and you would be right to wonder what really happened to him after his self-exile to the Western Massachusetts Indian mission. Well, the answer is: not very much. Edwards hoped in his heart that the Great Awakening would lead to the Day of Judgement, and the thousand years reign of God directly on earth, when religion shall in every respect be uppermost in the world. But instead of the dawning of a general revival of the Christian Church, what Edwards got was the day to day routine of attending a mission to Indians whose language he did not speak, and an English congregation whose attention span was, in Edwards’ Judgement, not up to one of a kid.

His own attention soon went back to his early enchantment with philosophy. Between 1750 and 1757, he composed three great treatises in moral philosophy, on Original Sin, on Freedom of the Will, and the Nature of True Virtue; all awhile praying for a new Awakening, until the trustees of Princeton invited him to take up the presidency there in 1757. He goes there at the beginning of 1758, only to find that smallpox is in the neighborhood. He takes the inoculation, but the inoculation turns out to be more lethal than the smallpox. He dies of the complications.

What ultimately follows on the hills of the Great Awakening was not the new awakening Edwards hoped for, but a secular revolution. The leadership of the colonial Churches was not better prepared for the revolution than it had been for the Great Awakening. The vast majority of New England Congregationalists and Presbyterians supported the American cause. Even the Church of England, since it was legally a department of the English government, lost three quarters of its American clergy who exiled in England or Canada.

The Secular Revolution

For those Congregationalists and Presbyterians who joined the revolution, the war was seemed as a marvelous opportunity to condemn the corrupt commercialized society of Great Britain and any of its American partners and admirers. They also looked upon the Revolution as an opportunity to earn a special place of respect for Christianity in the construction of this new republic. This was, however, exactly what did not happen. The disruptions created by occupation, invasion and enlistments battered all of the Churches equally.

The Philadelphia's Baptist association saw its congregations decline from 42 to 26. Its membership dropped down by a fifth. Moreover, the revolutionary leadership was conformed by Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, Hamilton, James Madison. These all were men with little interest in Christian theology, and whose case against the British was fed by secular political theory. Instead of leading the Revolution, the clergy of the American Churches found themselves being used by it. When the Revolution was over, instead of having a new public role for the Churches of American society, they found that they had lost almost all the vestige of the public roles they once had.

New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware eliminated all public funding for Churches in 1776. New York followed in 1777. In Massachusetts, the new revolutionary Constitution of 1780 kept public tax support for the Congregational Churches enforced, but it did not allow tax payers to send their tax money to Churches of their own choosing.

Virginia suspended taxation for the support of the Church of England in 1776, and in an effort to nail exclusion down more securely, Thomas Jefferson wrote a statute for religious freedom, adopted by the Virginia Assembly in 1786, with the support of Madison. It confirmed that “no man should be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever”. Jefferson statute for religious freedom was only the most famous of the efforts that Jefferson and Madison made to force religion off the public square.

The Wall of Separation

Sitting in the Confederation Congress in 1785, Madison actually opposed a plan to reserve public lands for the support of religion. Jefferson preferred putting the most useful facts from Greek, Roman, European and American history into the hands of children rather than the Bible. His 1817 plan for a system of public education in Virginia decreed that “no religious reading, instruction or exercise shall be prescribed or practiced”.

The involvement of Jefferson and Madison in Virginia’s dismantling of public religion gave the final blow to the hopes of the churches that the Revolution and the Millennium could be had for the same price. Congress stipulated that the first amendment shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting their free exercise thereof. Now, although technically this no-establishment clause only addressed the Federal government, and left states like Massachusetts free to establish state churches or state funding; it clearly set a direction to public policy that was not friendly towards an official seat for religion on the public square.

“Religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god”, Jefferson wrote sympathetically to a group of unhappy Connecticut Baptists, who had to put up with paying state taxes for religion until 1817. “I contemplate, said Jefferson, with sovereign reverence, those Americans who declare that their legislatures should make no law respecting and establishing religion, or prohibiting their free exercise thereof. Thus, building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

A wall of separation between Church and State was not what the righteous Presbyterians and Congregationalists of America had gone into the Revolution for. It became a very good question what they would propose to do about it. The first answer came from the disciples of Jonathan Edwards.

Thomas Jefferson: The Indebted Yeoman Farmer

2009-04-03T06:10:00.000-07:00

No other figure in American history, except Washington and Lincoln, stands closer to the heart of American national identity than Thomas Jefferson. He was the author of the Declaration of Independence, and in that Declaration he defined the spirit of the American Revolution as an experiment in Enlightenment politics and philosophy. He was the second American, after Washington, to ascend to the level of the symbol of American liberty. His home in Virginia exists today as a kind of temple for that symbol. Even Abraham Lincoln, who privately deplored Jefferson’s example as a slave owner, felt compelled to genuflect publicly before Jefferson’s example as the most distinguished politician of our history.

The Intellectual

Jefferson was, in addition to being a politician, a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts and tastes. A man who liked to think of himself as simply an American version of the Enlightenment’s rational elite. Almost his entire life was lived in politics, yet he had little love for the practical day to day grind of vote-getting and administration. “Science is my passion, he briefly remarked, politics my duty”. He served as the third President of the United States from 1801 to 1809, but he served for more than twice as long as the President of the American Philosophical Society. He claimed in 1812: “when I was young, mathematics was the passion of my life”. And even as President of the United States he dubbed industriously in anthropology, mineralogy, religion and history.

It was Jefferson who sponsored the first great scientific expedition of the New Republic: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s journey from 1804 to 1806 to map the North American continent from the Mississippi river to the Pacific ocean.

When he was asked in 1771 to compose a list of basic books, Jefferson came up with 28 titles which spanned poetry, fiction, politics, history, philosophy and the classics. He recommended Locke on the conduct of the mind and the search for truth, Montesquieu, Franklin of electricity, Seneca, a heavy dose of the Scots, and even a textbook on physics and surgery. Forty years and a lifetime of book-collecting later, Jefferson’s collection of 6000 books became the core around which the Library of Congress was built.

Jefferson even had the mannerisms commonly associated with an intellectual. “Jefferson is a slender man”, wrote William Mclays, who sat in the Federal Congress and who had many opportunities to observe Jefferson at a close range. “He has rather the air of stiffness in is manner. His clothes seem too small for him. He sits in a lounging manner, on one hip commonly, and one of his shoulders elevated much more than the other. His face has a scroungy aspect. His whole figure has a shackling air.” He even added that Jefferson was a poor public speaker. His informal conversation was invariably a revelation. He scattered information wherever he went.

In the largest sense, although Jefferson wrote only one full-length book in 1781, his Notes on the State of Virginia, which appeared anonymously; Jefferson defined a Classical Republican political philosophy, which stood over against the Liberal Republicanism of Alexander Hamilton. It was a philosophy which defined the role of government in the Republic and addressed the question of religion in the Enlightenment political regime. Jefferson’s political philosophy was a force in his day and it remains one in ours.

The Practice of Law

Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, at the family plantation at Shadwell. Because a fire destroyed Shadwell in 1770 and most of the 27-years-old Jefferson’s papers lighted, painfully little survives of Jefferson’s intellectual coming of age. What we do know, however, is how much of that coming of age was connected to representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment. His first tutor, a Church of England clergyman named William Douglas, was a Scot and a graduate of Glasgow and Edinburg. When Jefferson arrived at William and Mary to begin his collegiate studies in 1760, the college was in the hands of another Scot, William Small, whom Jefferson described as “a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication, correct and gentlemanly manners and an enlarged and liberal mind”.

The most immediate contribution Small made was not philosophical, but legal. He introduced Jefferson to George Wythe. Jefferson proceeded to study law under Wythe tutoring at Williamsburg until he was admitted to the bar in 1767. Two years later, Jefferson is elected to the House of Burgesses. He scored a minor sensation with the publication of a anti-imperial pamphlet in 1774: A Summary View of the Rights of British America. In 1775, he found himself sent to Philadelphia to serve in the Second Continental Congress, a colonial lawyer among other colonial lawyers.

Up until the 18th century, law was hardly a profession at all. Administration of the law was in the hands of appointed magistrates, who only rarely had any formal education in law. Lawyers were, in general, not much more than gentlemen who happened to have an education in law. In fact, in 17th century England, professional lawyering was actually prohibited by statute. However, as the British empire awoke throughout the 18th century for the need to establish new useful laws and practices in the colonies, so did the need for professional lawyers and judges.

Even so, by 1775, there were only 45 practicing attorneys in Massachusetts. One reason for the comparatively small number of lawyers was that law was not terribly lucrative by itself. People who hoped to make money from law hoped really to do it through the opening law gave them to politics, and through politics to patronage and influence.

Another reason why lawyering did not take all at once in popularity was that, in practice, criminal law was largely a matter of punishment for moral or religious offences against the community. It was not terribly involved with the protection of property. The notion of institutional imprisonment for criminal violators will not result in the construction of an American prison until the 1790’s.

Civil law was not much more attractive as a pursuit, for it was preoccupied with matters of inheritance and debt, debt being the one thing which really could get you imprisoned. The laws these lawyers obeyed came from two sources. One was Statute Law, in other words, law created by the colonial legislatures. The other was British Common Law, that big mass of traditional procedure in British law, which judges and magistrates interpreted and applied by their own lights, without consultation with legislatures.

Up until the eve of the Revolution, it was Common Law procedures which governed most of colonial law. Judges and magistrates, not legislatures, decided what was law and what was punishment. The American Revolution changed this. Having thrown off British political rule, Americans wondered if their courts should continue to operate by British Common law or not. Revolutionaries saw no more wisdom in allowing a single man to rule by his own whim as king, than allowing magistrates and judges to rule by their whim in court. And it did not help the reputation of Common Law that the prevailing Common Law textbook of the day, Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which enjoyed a circulation of nearly 25000 copies in America by 1776; tried to base Common Law on the sovereignty of the king.

If in the new, revolutionary and republican climate, sovereignty resided in the people rather than in the king, then the place where law should be made was in the legislature, and casted in the form of legislative statutes. If Blackstone hoped to make old law into the king’s law, the Americans’ tendency was to limit all law to legislative statutes.

Jefferson never developed any significant law practice of his own. He was involved in only 941 cases over 7 years, and he stopped practicing law altogether by 1776. But the legal problems posed by Common Law, about sovereignty, inheritance, debt and slavery; became the central problems of his life. And no wonder. Jefferson was born into a well-to-do family, but his father died while he was in his teens. The terms of his father’s will put all the power of his inheritance into the hands of the will executors. Even permission to attend William and Mary had to be obtained from his guardian.

Migraines Caused by Debt

He married Martha Wayles in 1772, only to loose her to complications of child birth in 1782, and never remarry. Through his wife, Jefferson inherited some 11000 acres of land and 135 slaves, which added to the 5000 acres and 50 slaves that came to him after the death of his mother in 1773. This made Jefferson one of the biggest land owners in Virginia. By then, he was already well on his way to designing and building that great mountain top home that he dreamt off as his great sanctuary, Monticello.

The problem was that his father-in-law’s state had also arrived burdened with debt. The costs of building Monticello and the costs of the Virginia gentry lifestyle gradually turned from pleasures into inescapable burdens for Thomas Jefferson. Inflation during the Revolution rotted the value of his property. 22 of his slaves ran off to find freedom with the British. By the end of his life, he will be over 100000 dollars in debt.

Those debts enraged him. Indebtedness threatened him with loss of control, and fear of the loss of control triggered staggering bouts of migraine for Jefferson. He could not take the humiliation of constantly bowing the knee to creditors, to money lenders, to the merchants who supplied his books. In Jefferson’s mind, only a nation of those who own enough property to freely support themselves without dependence could create a Republic. When debt-ridden farmers in Western Massachusetts staged an uprising in 1786, Jefferson frankly sympathized with them. “Can history produce an instance where rebellion so honorably conducted?”, Jefferson asked. “God forbid, we should never be 20 years without such a rebellion. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Maybe also with the blood of creditors.

This resentment at the dependence imposed by debt took a more organized form in a letter Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1789, where Jefferson was still serving as the American minister to France. Jefferson had enjoyed a front row seat in Paris that summer for the outbreak of the French Revolution. The prospect of the French Revolution excited and appalled him. Clearly, in Jefferson’s mind, the violence of the French Revolution was due entirely to the way an elite of aristocratic families had reduced most of France’s population to debt and loss of land.

In Jefferson’s thinking, creditors could just as easily be bankers and merchants as aristocrats. No creditor, he wrote, can by Natural Right oblige the lands someone occupies, or the person who succeeded in that occupation to the payment of debts contracted by him. By performing a series of calculations, he informed Madison that, by rights, 19 years is the term beyond which neither the representatives of a nation nor even the whole nation itself assembled could stand a debt.

Perhaps it was only coincidental that the 19 years he allotted for the permissible run of debts was just one year shy at the 20 years he allotted for permissible revolutions and the bloody watering of the tree of liberty. It certainly blinded him to the follies of the French Revolution, as that revolution was blowing up around his ears in Paris in 1789.

What To Do With National Debt

The summer of the French Revolution began with Louis XVI yielding to the demand for calling of a national assembly, the Estates General. That in turn resulted in the swift capture of the Estates General’s leadership, by the seizure of the king and by the imposition of a somewhat constitutional monarchy. When the king attempted to escape, he was recaptured, and then trialled and executed. After his death, a reign of revolutionary terror, inspired by Maximilien Robespierre and his party, the Jacobins; swept over Paris and over France.

To all of the butcheries and the terrorism instituted by the Jacobins, Jefferson turned a resolutely blind eye. He praised the Jacobins for their resolution to set fire to the four corners of the kingdom and to perish rather than to relinquish from their plan of total change of government. When Jefferson returned to the United States in 1789 to became the first Secretary of State under President George Washington, his adulation for the French Revolution continued without pause. The Jacobins, he said, were the true revolution spirit of a whole nation. And he founded sickening that uncomprehending Americans, like Washington and Hamilton, called the French robbers and inhumans.

By 1793, Jefferson was compelled to admit a little bit more, that in the struggle which was necessary, many guilty persons fell without the form of trial, and with them also many innocent ones. But this was simply the collateral damage of revolution. “My own affections had been deeply wounded by some of the murders of this cause, but rather than seeing it fail I would better see the earth desolated.”

What the Jacobins accomplished in France, Jefferson hoped that Statute Law might accomplish peacefully in the United States. His political philosophy seems to have nothing more substantial to it than an expectation that virtuous citizens, by reason of their virtue, could make government almost unnecessary. But instead of the new constitution rendering government unnecessary, Jefferson was infuriated to discover that the old fiscal policies of indebtedness and collection were being reimposed through Statute as designed by the new Secretary of of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton.

At the end of the Revolution, the United States was catastrophically in debt. First to the French and then to the Dutch, but also to a lot of people. Many of the fiscal crisis during the Revolution had been adverted by individuals stepping forward to lend money to the Continental Congress. One quick way for the new United States to deal with these debts was to repudiate them, and to wish good luck to the Congress’ creditors. But Hamilton was convinced that a repudiation of the revolutionary debts would be a terrible decision.

For one thing, many of the Congress’ creditors were ordinary pensioners, they were patriot souls who now will be ruined if the government repudiated its debts. But at a largest scale, repudiation would be a signal to foreign nations that the United States was an unworthy debtor, and in that case, supplies of foreign credit would dry up. Without that foreign credit, it would be impossible for Americans to overcome a hundred years of economic restriction by the British that had prevented them from developing a commercial manufacturing base.

In a series of three great reports to Congress, Hamilton recommended, with as much persuasive power as he could muster, a commitment by Congress to pay off its revolutionary debts, to build up American manufacture, to establish a national bank to fund commercial development and, in a display of his belief that only the Federal Government could hold all of this off, the assumption by the Federal Government of all of the States’ Revolutionary War’s debts as well. All of this by statute.

Hamilton’s plan captured everything. It was likely to bring one of Jefferson’s famous migraines. It made debt untouchable. It put manufacturing and the money lending that manufacturing required in the driver’s seat of the American economy. It guaranteed that independent farmers would increasingly find themselves forced to bear the burdens, not only of indebtedness enforced by statute, but of the taxes the Federal Government would levee to fund its own debts.

Jefferson and Slavery

Although Jefferson was anything but a typical yeoman farmer, he increasingly spoke as though he was one, and as though Hamilton was trying to create a cash-robbing aristocracy to bring back the British Empire. “Now look to a single and splendid government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and corporations under the guides of their favorite branches of manufacturers, commerce and navigation; ruling over the beggared yeomanry.“

This mistrust led to a massive fracture of the Revolutionary generation into two hostile political parties: the Federalists, who enlisted Washington, Hamilton and John Adams as their figure heads; and the Democratic Republicans, led by Jefferson and Madison. In time, this fracture would be more than political, it would come to violence. In 1804, one of Jefferson’s most prominent disciples, Aaron Burr Jr., would maneuver Hamilton into fighting in a duel and kill him.

Thomas Jefferson was elected President in 1800, partly because the Federalists had quarrelled and divided, but also partly because of slavery. Slavery has always been the dog in Thomas Jefferson’s manger, principally because the author of the proposition that all men are created equal held over human beings in a very unequal state of bondage. But also because, on closer inspection, he actually sold slaves to pay off debts, and conducted a long-term liaison with a female slave, Sally Hemings, who was herself the offspring of an illicit master-slave union, in this case Jefferson’s father-in-law. This actually means that Sally Hemings was Jefferson’s half-sister by blood. He never pretended that he had an excuse for keeping black slaves. In his Notes on the State of Virginia , in the 1780’s, Jefferson admitted that slaves were as fully entitled to liberty as anyone else. But at the same time, Jefferson’s own fragile independence rested squarely on the shoulders of his slaves.

They represented the capital he could liquidate when the creditors came knocking. And they produced the goods that paid the creditors at all other times. Nor, as it turned out, could he had been President without them either. In order to placate the Southern States, the Constitutional Convention in 1787 allowed the seven states to count three fifths of their slaves to work the calculation of their electoral votes. Without those extra electoral votes, Jefferson would have lost the election of 1800. With it, he not only won the Presidency, but installed a democratic Jeffersonian ascendancy which would dominate the American Presidency for the next 60 years.

Had he been more of a practical politician than a political philosopher, Jefferson might had been more successful in dismantling the structures of finance and manufacture created by Hamilton in the 1790’s. Well, it was not for lack of trying, but Hamilton had cannier political instincts, and he had built better than Jefferson could dismantle. Hamilton had as his great second the man who would become Jefferson’s next nemesis, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshal. The manufacturing economy Hamilton constructed was defended by Marshal with a series of major pro-commercial judicial decisions.

After Jefferson’s death, that occurred on the 4th of July 1826, fifty years from the adoption of his Declaration of Independence; Monticello was seized and sold to pay the debts that only Thomas Jefferson’s last breath released him from.

Hamilton’s New Constitution

2009-04-01T05:16:00.000-07:00

A nation of land owning young men might very well make for independence, but also it might very well make for stagnation. What Alexander Hamilton wanted most from life was not stagnation but mobility. Born in 1755 on the West Indian Island of Nevis, Hamilton was the illegitimate son of a Scot who abandoned the mother and the boy when he was 10 years of age.

Young Hamilton’s quickness and vividness made so great an impression on a local Presbyterian missionary, Hugh Knox, that he sent the boy to New York City for education. Hamilton entered King’s College, now of course Columbia University. Hamilton took the lead in student protest against Birtain in 1775, and was commisioned in 1776 as captain of an artillery company. He saw action in one Continental defeat after another, and suffered with the army through one humilating delay of supply after another caused by the quarreling among the States’ Continental Congress. He ended the war as one of George Wahington’s aides, and was permitted to practice law in New York in 1782.

The Lessons of War

The war taught Hamilton a number of lessons, the first of which was not to put too much trust in the virtue of people. It is not safe to trust the virtue of any people, Hamilton discovered, since the same stock of passions which generates a hatred of oppresion, can just as easily lead people to a contempt and disregard of all authority. It is not virue, said Hamilton, but power what motivates people. Men always loved power, Hamilton wrote. That might not be ideal, and, in fact, that might not be a compliment to Republicans.

The question in the Republic was not about identifying and protecting virtue, or about identifying and protecting that livelihood which automatically promotes virtue, but rather about identifying and blunting power.

Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton inherited no wealth and no land. Quite the opposite. His rise to fame began in commerce as a clerc, and continued that way as a New York City lawyer. Not surprisingly, he dimissed the Classical Republican’s paranoia about commerce, cities and manufacuring out of hand. The prosperity of commerce, Hamiton said, is not perceived and acknowledged to be the most useful, as well as the most productive source of national wealth.

The often agitated question, said Hamilton, between agriculture and commerce, has from indubitable experience received the decision which has silenced the rivalships. The decision of experience has proven, to the satisfaction of their friends, that their interests, the interest of agriculture and commerce, are intimatelly blended and interwoven. So, what if commerce did not produce virtue. Let’s face it, Hamilton said, neither really did agriculture.

The solution was not to be found in suppresing one or the other, but in harnessing them both to become a great national team. The trick, of course, was in the harnessing, because that implied a harnesser. The one thing which was clear was that the Confederation Government was incapable of harnessing together anything. On the other hand, a government strong enough to harness together agriculture and commerce appaled with Jeffersonians. That not only meant putting agriculture and commerce on the same plane, but it would require preciselly the kind and level of taxes which would corrupt the virtuous farmer.

However, to Hamilton, the mechanic and manufacturing arts furnished the materials of mercantile enterprise and industry. That, in turn, would arm the American Republic as a whole with the kind of economic power which would permit it to resist the encroachments of the English and the Spanish. For that reason, Hamilton belongs pretty firmly in the Liberal Republican current. And also for that reason, Jefferson and Hamilton became the ying and yang of the revolutionary generation.

If men were angels...

Between Jefferson and Hamilton stood James Madison. Born in 1751, Madison graduated from Princeton in 1771. Madison served in the Virginia legislature, and from 1780 to 1783 in the Continental Congress. Most of his early efforts were aimed at serving Virginia state interests, and he always remained uneasy at the prospect of a powerful national government. His hope was for a government of Classical Republican virtue. He was frank about his desire for a Constitution whose first aim would be to obtain rulers men who possess wisdom to discern and virtue to pursue the common good of society.

But Madison had learned enough at the hands of his Calvinist mentors at Presbyterian Princeton. He learned not to put too much trust in spontaneous appearence of virtue in politics. If men were angels, Madison remarked, no government would be necessary. But men were not angels, even if they were farmers. Next in importance to recruiting the virtuous to serve as rulers, a Constitution was needed to take the precautions for keeping them virtuous while they continue to hold the public trust. There is, Madison admitted, a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumpensction and mistrust.

Nowhere was the need for that mistrust more evident on display than in the Confederation Congres, where the States obstructed the taxes of even the most modest import duties and defeated treaties with foreign powers on little more than whims. Without being a Liberal Republican at heart, Madison had a Liberal Republican’s head; that head told him in the 1780’s that something drastic needed to be done about the articles of the Confederation, or else the American union would dissolve and it would not matter how virtuous American farmers might actually be.

Madison and Hamilton got their chance in 1786, when a convention called to settle disputes over river rights between Virginia and Maryland broke down and forced the commissioners, including, Madison and Hamilton, to blame the brake down on the articles of Confederation, and to call for a convention of the States to rewrite them. The convention, however, when it met in Philadelphia in May of 1787, took the bit in its teeth, and instead of rewriting the articles, junked them completely, in favor of writing an entirely new Constitution that transformed the articles of independent states into a federalized union.

The Constitution of 1787 is a remarkable political document for many reasons. The most important issue at stake was establishing a strong workable union that could arbitrate state conflicts and give a sense on united national identity to the republic. What was noticebly abscent, however, was any appeal in the document to the Classical Republican virtues. Instead, the Constitution of 1787 was a document filled with a series of extremely skeptical compromises whose chief purpose was to deal with the effects of power, not to offer sermons on virtue. They meant to create mechanisms that will place one kind of power in the new republic against another.

The government, for instance, was divided into three branches: executive, legislative and judicial. Each of which was set to watchdog the other. Within the legislative branch, power was divided between a house of representatives, elected by the people; and a senate, choosen by the state legislatures. While the chief executive officer, the president, was elected through a two stage process. First by a general election and then by an electoral college.

As Madison explaines, liberty was best served by contriving the interior structure of the government, so that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their propper places.

So, where virtue might fail to make people cooperate, self-interest would not. If the self-interest of the various parts, not only of the government, but of the republic as a whole, were set carefully against each other, then the interest devoted to promoting itself would prevent any single one of them from obtaining control over the others.

The New Government

There was an echo with this in the Constitution’s provisions for the economic life of the republic. Or rather, the almost complete absence of any provisions for regulating the economic life of the republic. The new Constitution did not, in fact, articulate any economic policies or preferences. It merely reserved to the new federal legislature, the Congress, the power to regulate comerce with other nations, levee taxes and tariffs, pass bankrupcy laws and borrow money. More importantly, it clearly restrained the states from establishing their own economic policies.

So far, in fact, was the Constitution from prescribing any particular form of public virtue, that it managed not only to say nothing about how the economy should be build, it managed to avoid even making any reference to God or to Christianity, unlike Jefferson’s declaration. If Jefferson had been a member of the Philadelphia Convention, he quite conceivably could had made a great deal of grief for Hamilton and Madison on all of these points. But Jefferson was not there. Jefferson was serving as American minister to France. And Hamilton and Madison both mounted an effective mediate campaign on behalf of the new constitution through a series of 85 brief articles they serialized in the New York Papers, which subsequently would be known as the Federalist Papers.

By June of 1788, the Constitution had been ratified by the necessary number of states and become the new law of the land. When Madison finally wrote to Jefferson in October of 1787 to describe the new Constitution, Jefferson was predictably anenthusiastic. I like much the general idea, Jefferson replied in December. But he was not a friend of a very energetic government. Well, energetic government was precisely what he was now to witness in action.

The American Republic of Virtue

2009-04-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

Looked up from a distance, the success of the American Revolution in throwing off the yoke of British rule must have seemed miraculous. So miraculous, in fact, that forever afterward, the leaders of the revolution, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin; were all seemed like demigods walking on water in the promised land of American Independence. Looked up more closely, what stands out about the revolution is how much of its success was lost in its failures.

As general and chief of the revolutionary army, Washington actually stumbled from one defeat to another from 1775 to 1780. His little army was often on the point of mutiny and disintegration. Even in victory, only his own personal example prevented his officers and men from attempting a coup d'état against their provisional and incompetent government, the Continental Congress. Had the French not intervened, first with financial credits and supplies, and then with troops and ships, it is entirely likely that the whole revolutionary affair would have gone up in smoke.

On the other hand, it was precisely the Continental Army’s multiple failures which robbed it of the confidence and prestige necessary to make a coup into a real threat. The Continental Congress may not have liked the prospect of its army, but those loses kept it too feeble to gather the strength it needed to turn and destroy its creator.

The Weak United Government

There were other failures, however, which did not have such silver linings. First, the independent mind and habits of the colonies, which led them to fight against imperial rule by Britain, also led them to fight against each other. Few of them had ever engaged as colonies in anything that looked like cooperation. If anything, by maintaining allegiance in London for lobby in their interests, the colonies had always seemed themselves in competition with each other for imperial favors.

The Continental Congress had been called into being in 1774 to act as a common front for the colonies’ grievances, but its effectiveness at getting them to work together was small. A number of the North American colonies, despite sharing those grievances, refused to sent any representatives at all to the Continental Congress. This at first included Georgia, but also and permanently, included the French-speaking Canadian provinces and the West Indian island colonies.

They would never had created a united government at all if the French had not refused to deal with the revolutionary movement that had no central government. The government that revolutionaries did create by adopting the articles of the Confederation in 1781 made the word “United” in United States sound hollow. Even then, the representatives of the States of the Confederation Congress frequently behaved as though Congress existed only for the promotion of their own interests, and wanted to make sure that the Confederation could never invade the sovereignty of the States the way British imperials did. The Confederation Congress had no power to impose national taxes or even to create a unified currency.

The Loyalists

Another failure that was not so thick with silver lining concerned the colonial Loyalists. Although Americans dearly prised the image of Washington’s Continentals suffering nobly, almost as many Americans took up arms in defence of the Crown; either in regiments of Loyalist organized by the British army or in Loyalist militias in the South. And they, not Washington’s Continentals, were the big losers at the end of the revolution. Their properties were confiscated, their leaders banished, and between 60 and 80 thousand of them actually left America entirely, starting their lives over again in Canada, the West Indies or Britain.

What this did in political terms was to dump the beginnings of an Anglicised elite in America and open up political leadership to what one unhappy Boston Loyalist described as “fellow who would had clean my shoes five years ago”. In New York, the proportion of farmers settling in State Legislature rose from 25% before the revolution to 42% afterwards. In Massachusetts, the percentage rose to 47%. In Georgia, voting rights were opened to all tax payers, not just, as had been the case in every colony, only those who own certain levels of property.

Americans, who had formerly based their claims to leadership on wealth or status, now either left America entirely or changed their tunes, and preferred to emphasize how humble their birth had been; a prime case of which was Benjamin Franklin, who was a social and intellectual climber par excellence. Franklin had been a Loyalist right up until 1775, at that point he prudently switched sides to join the revolutionaries. Afterwards, he composed an autobiography that relentlessly reminded his readers that he was, after all, a self-made man.

College education in the new United States also ceased to be the private privilege of gentlemen. Between 1776 and 1800, sixteen new colleges were founded, to exhibit to the world the perfection which the mind of man is capable of receiving from the combined operation of liberty and learning. Well, this satisfied those who thought it was fair that they should now claim the power to govern. It also meant the power now fell into the hands of people who had little experience at using it. And that was about to bring a surprise to those revolutionaries who supposed, on the basis of Whig political theory and on the example of Classical Republicanism, that once the rubbish of corrupt imperial rule has been swept aside a natural and virtuous leadership will step into place and rule the new republic as the ancient Roman Republic had been ruled by its noble and virtuous senate.

That, of course, was not what happened. The restless new state legislatures, complained New Jersey’s governor William Livingston, do not exhibit the virtue that is necessary to support the Republican government. Indeed they did not. They stripped Churches of public tax support and took over the powers which had once belonged to governors and judges for themselves; and these legislatures quarreled remorselessly with each other and within themselves.

Meanwhile, as a protest of the treatment given to loyalists, the British refused to send diplomatic representatives to the Confederation, and they privately financed the Indians of the North West to raid American settlements along the frontier. The Spanish closed the Mississippi river to American trade in an effort to strong-line the frontier counties of Kentucky and Tennessee. If the Confederation and the State legislatures insisted on the steady habit of fighting between each other, then the whole notion of an American republic might fall in on itself. That in turn would be a setback of colossal proportion, not only for the idea of Whig Republicanism, but for the Enlightenment’s fundamental notions about human nature.

The Virtuous Republic of Jefferson

Perhaps the great problem here was not that the Republican ideology had been overconfident about the possibilities of success of America, but that the wrong version of Republicanism had held the upper hand ideologically for so long. All English-speaking Whig Republicans in the 18th century shared certain Whig essentials. First of all, they repudiated tradition, hereditary monarchy and aristocracy as unnatural and unreasonable. Also, they were all suspicious of power, seeing it as the enemy of liberty. Third, all of these Whig Republicans believed fervently in the supremacy of reason, and within the realm of politics, the chief job of reason was the discernment of natural law.

In some cases, like the Deists, natural law was almost a replacement for religion, and not only natural law but the pursuit of natural rights, natural rights which they held to be fundamental and universal for all of humanity.

Then, lastly, all of these Whig Republicans found their chief inspiration in the example of Republican Rome. What divided them, however, was the split in Republican thinking between Classical and Liberal Republicans. Although that split was neither so wide or so absolute as it has sometimes been portrayed, it at least represented a profound difference of attitude between American Republicans. We can understand how this worked out in practical terms after the Revolution by considering the position of three of those American Republicans: Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.

Jefferson can be described very much as a classical Republican. For Jefferson, the necessary glue of a republican society was virtue, and virtue was related with the ownership of land. Land represented real wealth. Land was the place where work and soil combined produced tangible prosperity. The discipline required to create that prosperity, to work that land, was itself the best reinforcement of virtue.

“Those who work in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people”, Jefferson wrote in the 1780’s. Protecting the independence of land owners, of those who labored the earth, was, consequently, paramount to Jefferson. Dependence produces banality, suffocates virtue and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. Only those who own land, only those who work land could really escape the bonds of dependence, could only be genuinely independent.

Now, this dependence could take one of two forms. It could come as it had in 1776, from a corrupt government which levees taxes on virtuous farmers, and with those taxes force farmers into debt. Debt implied dependence. Or, dependence could come from a corrupt elite, who tempted the virtuous farmers to spend themselves into debt. Or they could come from an unholy alliance of both, to shift the centers of the Republic’s economy into manufacturing bubbles, therefore drawing farmers off the land and into the cities, and reducing them to cash robbers wagers who will be as dependent to their employers as the tax payers were to corrupt officials.

Commerce and manufacture, in Jefferson’s mind, dealt in treason, stratagems and spoils. It dealt in illusory forms of wealth; not land, but loans, interest, mortgages, credits, stock, cash; all of them unsubstantial, mere empty signs of wealth rather than the real thing, which was land.

So, said Jefferson, while we have land to labor then let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work bench. For those kinds of manufactured goods, let American exchange their agricultural abundance with Europe, and whatever was lost by the balance of trade will be made up in happiness and permanence of government. And let cities be merely the depot for those agricultural goods, rather than seeing cities turn into manufacture ant hills where wage laborers do as their masters tell them. When we get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, we should become corrupt as in Europe, then go eating one another as they do there.

However, this agricultural paradise of Jefferson had a dark side. It was this dark side which bothered Alexander Hamilton.

Benjamin Franklin and the American Philosophy

2009-03-26T09:37:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, on January 1706. Little more than two years younger than Jonathan Edwards, that may have been the only point on which he was close to Edwards. The youngest son among his father’s 17 children, Franklin was quick enough mentally, that Josiah Franklin paid to have the boy put to the grammar school at eight years of age, with the view towards devoting young Benjamin to the service of the Church. That lasted for only a year.

In 1718, young Benjamin was apprentice to his older brother James, a printer. Printers occupy an unusual place in the intellectual history of early America. If the clergy were the aristocrats of the mind, printers were its men of all work; since printers lived by publishing newspapers, almanacs and books. They were not supported by a salary paid by compulsory taxes the way the clergy were, they had to sell their own products. And in order to make a profit from that, they had to be well-read themselves, so that they could pick up from European book sellers things likely to sell in America, or publish works which they were confident will sell in their own shops.

Printers were a unique class, they had one foot in the world of tradesmen who worked with their hands and the other foot in the literate world of transatlantic books and periodicals.

The insider’s view of the world of the printers inclined them to skepticism, even when they even may had some profits from selling religious books. Into this world, Benjamin Franklin fit like a hand to a glove.

While working for his brother, he perpetrated the first of his many literary hoaxes by submitting a series of letters to Cotton Mather in particular and Harvard College in general. James Franklin unwillingly published these letters, and then, when he discovered that it was his brother who had actually written them, fired young Benjamin, who left the town. On October 6th 1723, he arrived to Philadelphia.

Franklin set up his own printing shop, and by the 1730’s, he began issuing a highly popular newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. He won very profitable printing contracts from the Pennsylvania assembly. He invested in a series of franchise print shops in Indianapolis, Savannah, Newcastle, New London and Boston. He issued a successful annual almanac, Poor Richard's Almanack. He even wangled the unofficial designation as George Whitefield’s printer of choice, thereby earning a fortune from the sales of Whitefield’s journals and other books.

Looking for a New Religion

At age 42, Benjamin Franklin was wealthy enough to commission the painting of his portrait and to turn the printing business to a partner, so that he could devote himself to the philosophical interests which had increasingly come to dominate his attention.

Benjamin Franklin always nursed something of the bitterness that often accompanies people who are aware of their intellectual talents, but who had been stopped by circumstances from cultivating them. The wealth he had earned in printing now gave him that chance. He was determined to show how much better he could manage on his own. He taught himself languages, he won appointments to political offices. He founded the club which became the American Philosophical Society, the library which became the Library Company, and the school which became the Academy of Philadelphia.

He tried to attend the city’s Presbyterian Church, as the closest thing to the Congregationalism in which he had been raised in Boston; but he had no time for the polemic arguments of the minister, Jedediah Andrews. What Franklin really wanted to hear was about moral principles, and so not hearing that from Jedediah Andrews, he stayed at home and devised his own version of rational Enlightened religion.

Benjamin the Scientist and Inventor

But what gained Franklin the international notice he really craved, were his experiments in electricity. Electricity was, so to speak, a mysterious force in the Enlightenment. Isaac Newton defined the motion of the universe as the action, not of qualities within substances or divine decrees, but of a force: gravity. It was a force that was impersonal, and which was capable of being computed mathematically. Electricity was a good candidate for a second such force, specially after Newton’s disciple, Francis Hauksbee, was able to generate electrical bursts by rubbing glass.

Unlike gravity, generating electricity by means of a friction machine was a lot more of fun. Franklin was captivated by electricity from the first time he saw one of these demonstrations in 1746. But his interests pointed beyond entertainment to real science. In 1747, Franklin sent a series of letters to the Royal Society in London, demonstrating that lighting was in fact a form of electricity. This was actually a pretty serious assertion, because lighting was regarded in this overwhelmingly agricultural society as a mysterious and capricious force at best, and even a sign of divine wrath.

Redefining lighting as electricity instantly downgraded it to the level of a natural force, and made it potentially as manipulable as gravity. Partly, this satisfied Franklin’s skeptical religious reflexes. It also gave him the satisfaction of having tumbled to a scientific insight almost as significant as Newton’s about gravity.

But the Royal Society ignored his letters and his pretensions to gentlemanly science. Franklin was forced to work around the Royal Society in order to get recognition, by publishing “Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin” in April 1751. The book eventually went through five editions, and translations into Italian, French and German. Nothing, said Joseph Priestley, was ever written upon the subject of electricity which was more generally read and admired in all parts of Europe than these letters.

Almost as an afterthought, in 1752, Franklin published an account of a further experiment with lightening and electricity, flying a kite with a key in a thunder storm, to demonstrate that lightening could be drawn naturally like any other form of electricity. There is no evidence that Franklin actually attempted this experiment himself, and with a good reason, because anyone who reflects for a moment such an experiment, would realize that this is a very direct way of getting oneself killed. In fact, the famous kite and key experiment may have merely been Franklin’s way of suggesting one of the various means by which the members of the Royal Society could all electrocute themselves.

Franklin and The American Philosophical Society

Franklin was not the only Philadelphian who founded the city’s love of science. He was not, in fact, even the most influential of them, largely because, after 1757, Franklin spent most of the next 20 years in England and Europe, acting as agent and representative for Pennsylvania and the other colonies in London. The real center of Philadelphia’s Enlightenment would be the American Philosophical Society, modeled on a private club Franklin had once organized, the Junto, and now revivified as a colonial scientific society. Twice a month, between October and May; and once a month during the summer, members of the American Philosophical Society, who totaled 251 by 1769, met in Philadelphia to hear scientific papers read, participate in discussions of scientific subjects, and to look over new books received for the Society’s library.

First among equals in the American Philosophical Society was Ebenezer Kinnersley, a one time Baptist minister who criticized the Awakening and its "preaching of terror" in favor of a religion of reason, and who became Franklin’s chief apprentice as a scientific and electrical experimenter. Francis Allison, take another case, was an anti-revivalist Presbyterian minister who “may stand against enthusiasm and wild disorders that are likely to destroy religion and even ruin our churches”.

Two prominent physicians also stood out from the membership of the APS, William Shippen and Benjamin Rush, both of whom were trained in the very epicenter of the Scottish Enlightenment, the University of Edimburg.

But the most talented of all Philadelphians was the shy mathematician and instrument maker, David Rittenhouse, who joined the APS in 1768; and who was theorist enough to solve the problem of determining from a few observations the orbit of a comet, and also mechanic enough to make with his own hands a telescope. There was a man after Benjamin Franklin’s own heart. When the APS joined, in the single greatest scientific experiment of the Enlightenment, the worldwide sighting of the sun’s transit of Venus in 1769, it was Rittenhouse who was commissioned to build the astronomical clock necessary to time the transit.

It has been easy to mistake Kinnersley and the others as mere extensions of Franklin’s interest, or to assume that like Rittenhouse, they were all dedicated to the enterprise of reducing the universe to mere clockwork. But in fact, there was a serious parting of the ways between Franklin and the rest of the Philadelphian Enlightenment. That parting of the ways occurred principally on the subject of religion.

Franklin’s Deism and the Religion of Philadelphia

Benjamin Franklin was, at best, a Deist. Deism was the Enlightenment’s shorthand way of describing someone who rejected traditional Christianity as irrational, but who retained belief in some sort of deity, who could be defined in reasonable terms and does not interfere with the operation of Isaac Newton’s laws. Franklin himself defined his own Deism in terms of five highly minimalistic principles.

That there is one god who made all things.

He governs the world by his providence.

He ought to be worshipped by adoration, prayer and thanksgiving; but that the most acceptable service of God is doing good to man.

The soul is immortal.

God will reward virtue and punish vice, either here or hereafter.

The Philadelphian Enlightenment, however, had a much more expansive view of religion than Benjamin Franklin. For Kinnersley, the purpose of science was to dispel superstition, but also to open the path to an accurate appreciation of God’s glory.

Francis Allison taught that God actively directed the nature, powers, orders, changes and connections of all things, and will never allow the universe to spiral down into the vortex of what Allison called blind chance.

Like the Scottish Enlightenment, Philadelphia’s religion was balanced between nature and grace. Natural law was held and understood to explain a great deal, but it did not explain everything; just as by the same token, the Bible, as God’s revelation of his purposes, explained a great deal but not with absolute certainty. Divine revelation and religious intuition formed the first principles of human knowledge, but a second step into scientific experiment and investigation was needed to confirm and expand upon that grace.

The Philadelphian Enlightenment embraced a mix of faith and skepticism, of nature and grace. Once again, this offers us the image of Puritanism and the Enlightenment stirring the intellectual history of America.

The Decline of Philadelphia

Philadelphia might had a better chance of making Philadelphia’s Enlightenment into America’s philosophy, had it not been for the battering Philadelphia received during the Revolution. Occupied by the British in 1777, and then trampled over by radical Revolution mobs in the 1780’s, many of the institution and individuals on which Philadelphia’s Enlightenment had rested, either disappeared or reappeared diminished.

Benjamin Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1775, but only to be sent a year later to France to bring the French to Revolutionary’s Americas aid. He did not return for a decade, and he died in 1790.

Rittenhouse died in 1796, having been passed over by the APS for the delivery of Franklin’s eulogy. Benjamin Rush died in 1813, after furiously trying to persuade Philadelphians that the recurring yellow fever epidemics were best cured by purging and bleeding. Somehow they never made the connection with those clouds of mosquitoes.

The APS itself met only intermittently during revolutionary crisis, and they stopped meeting altogether after 1776 for the duration of the war. The Academy of Philadelphia was shut down by the revolutionaries, and the university operated by the Pennsylvania legislature was erected in its place not until 1790. Philadelphia, which had functioned as the political center of America as its revolutionary capital, and then as its capital under the new Constitution from 1790 to 1800, lost that title and lost that central political position in American affairs to the new Federal District of Columbia. By 1800, Philadelphia’s Enlightenment, if not exactly over, was certainly moribund. The task of making the spirit of Puritanism and the Enlightenment work together now fell to other hands.

The Arising of Philadelphia as the Intellectual Capital of America

2009-03-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

If America had an intellectual capital before 1740, then it would had to have been Boston. The two major printers of books in the British colonies in the late 1600’s, Samuel Green and John Foster, were both headquartered in Boston or its neighboring towns. Boston led the way on the number of active book sellers, with as many as 15 by 1740. Having Harvard college as its near neighbor also guaranteed a certain critical intellectual mass to the Boston area. But Boston was also home to an equally critical artistic mass. As Boston’s merchants prospered, they celebrated their successes by commissioning portraits of themselves. By the mid 1700’s, Boston had developed, if not exactly a school of portraiture, then at least a self-conscious concentration of highly talented portrait artists: John Smybert, John Greenwood, Joseph Badger; and the finest painter colonial America would ever produce: John Singleton Copley.

Yet, all of these achievements somehow added up to less than the sum of the Bostonian parts. Copley was exasperated that his talents had to be changed to turning out likenesses of businessmen and merchants, and he yearned for the opportunity to turn his self-taught hand to classical history painting. Was it not for preserving the resemblance of particular persons, painting would not be known in this place, Copley complained. The people generally regarded it no more than any other useful trade like carpentry or shoemaker, nor as one of the most noble arts in the world, which is not a little mortifying to me.

When the political winds of the revolution began to blow in directions that Copley found congenial, he left for New York, and in 1774, for London, never to return to America.

The Quaker’s Pennsylvania

Whatever intellectual dominance Boston enjoyed before 1740, it came mainly by default rather than design. The prize, after 1740, of being an intellectual capital, increasingly belonged not to Boston but to Philadelphia. Founded in 1682 as the capital of William Penn’s Pennsylvania, Philadelphia enjoyed nothing like a promising beginning as an intellectual capital for America.

The Quakers, William Penn’s religious society of friends, as they preferred to call themselves, was the last and most radical of the radical sects spun by English Puritanism in the 17th century. Where the Puritans had questioned the authority of bishops, the Quakers questioned the authority of any clergy. Where the Puritans refused to accept anything but the text of scripture as their religious authority, the Quakers refused to accept even that, considering it too carnal and worldly. They looked to their own religious consciousness for the testimony of the light within. And where the Puritans understood that depravity was too deeply rooted in the human heart for any discipline to expect to succeed entirely, the Quakers fully expected that they could and should attain perfection for themselves and their neighbors.

These were not people with much use for theological, philosophical or classical learning. Penn’s goal for his colony and his city was a social uniformity that would made Boston look like Las Vegas. Untrustworthy of traditional cities, Penn laid out Philadelphia as a city with broad streets meeting at right angles, so that vice and misery might have no place to hide from the inspection of those perfected by the light within. He expected the countryside around Pennsylvania would be laid out for farmers and settlers in continuous townships, with Quaker meeting houses located serenely in the center, to give order and happiness to Quaker life. For, as Penn put it, the most convenient bringing up of youth.

A Varied Landscape

Well, there are no optimists more surely destined for disappointment than those who believe in human perfectibility. William Penn became a good lesson in that kind of disappointment. Penn’s fellow Quakers showed little disposition to join him in creating a Quaker paradise in Pennsylvania. They never numbered more than a fraction of the total population, and Penn could only sell land in Pennsylvania by offering it to a wide and dismaying variety of non-Quakers, even non-English. That rapidly turned Pennsylvania into a mixture of European nationalities, religions and languages. Specially religions.

Pennsylvania became the stopping point for Mennonites from Switzerland, Dunkers from the German principalities, German Lutherans, German Calvinists, Scot-Irish Presbyterians, English Baptists, Anglicans, Roman Catholics. Some of these immigrants were fully as radical and fully as suspicious of any learning that seemed to dump on the impulse of the spirit as the Quakers. But the Presbyterians, the Lutherans, the German Calvinists and the Anglicans, that together amounted to half of Pennsylvania’s population by the time of the revolution, came from traditions with long intellectual allegiances, and had a strong tendency for establishing schools to reinforce those allegiances.

When the pro-Whitefield Presbyterians split from the anti-revival Presbyterians during the Great Awakening, they had to find new ways of training pro-revival clergy. So, they ended up founding four separate theological academies, starting with the Log College. And instead of turning to finishing schools for renters, all of these academies quickly settled down to promoting learned languages, liberal arts, sciences and divinity. The Moravians, the Baptists, even the Quakers, all organized religious schools to nurture their offspring between 1720 and 1740. And anti-revival Church of England people were the leading hand behind the creation of the Academy of Philadelphia in 1751, which became the College of Philadelphia, and then the University of Pennsylvania.

By 1773, even the Lutherans in Pennsylvania had organized a German seminary. Certainly, one factor which made this proliferation of schools possible was Philadelphia’s rise to commercial power in the British colonies. From a population of 13000 in 1740, Philadelphia grew to 40000 in 1776. And its commerce down to Delaware Bay dominated the colonial coastal trade. Philadelphia’s wealth, combined with the need of its competing factions of self-justification and self-promotion, certainly provided a wide variety of forms for a good deal of self-justification and self-promotion, including 120 licenses to taverns, the American Philosophical Society, the College of Physicians and the Library Company of Philadelphia.

But Philadelphia’s richest intellectual assets laid in the remarkable cluster of Enlightenment thinkers who came to gather there between 1740 and 1790, to make Philadelphia not just America’s preeminent intellectual city, but the Enlightenment’s preeminent outpost in America. Among those thinkers, none enjoyed greatest standing, at home or abroad, than Benjamin Franklin.

The American Revolution

2009-03-18T05:10:00.000-07:00

More than merely signaling America’s political dissolution from the British empire, the Revolution pegged the republic Americans would create to the expectations and principles of the Enlightenment: to Locke, to the classical and liberal republicans, to Harrington and others. Thus Americans dissolved not only their political ties to Britain, but their intellectual ties to the long train of the traditional European past.

In this series of articles we are going to try to understand the intellectual background and the ideas behind the Revolution:

Common Sense and the American Mind: From the synthesis of Scottish common sense philosophy and moderate Calvinism would flower the first creative era of the American conversation about ideas between religion and the Enlightenment, between God and nature. A conversation that in many ways we still participate in.

The Beginnings of American Liberalism: By a process that few people in London understood, the rowdy lowlife who departed for the colonies a century before, had turned into competitors for economic dominance within the Empire. They had developed an anglicised elite who thought of themselves as the equals of their English cousins. And they created domestic legislatures exercising powers that were technically illegal, and elected by farmers who had an unpleasantly passion for independence. All the Americans lacked was a political philosophy to give it all coherence. In the 1760’s, the imperial government unwillingly provided them with it.

John Locke’s Political Theory and Its Influence on American Thinking: Locke is what we might call the prophet of Liberalism. I don’t mean liberal or liberalism in the party politics sense that we use it today. What I’m talking about is the classical Liberalism of the Enlightenment, which was concerned with abolishing the monarchy, making reason rather than tradition the guide of political life, and downplaying the role of inherited and non-rational factors like race, religion or language; and to look expectantly to the future for progress. It is in this sense that virtually all Americans, no matter what political party identification they might have, are classical Lockean liberals. This is because we identify ourselves as Americans by a loyalty to a series of what Abraham Lincoln called “propositions”. We identify ourselves by allegiance to these propositions, not by our identification with a certain ethnic group or religious denomination. We identify ourselves by certain propositions about liberty. We are, in that sense, all liberals; and America is the perfect example of a classic liberal regime.

Religious Radicalism as a Factor of the American Revolution: Even in laying the very foundations of the American republic, Puritanism and the Enlightenment, far from being at each other’s throats, were already stirring the American soup together.

A Close Look at the American Revolution: It only remained for Thomas Paine, in the revolution’s most sensational pamphlet, “Common Sense”, to conclude that a King had little more to do than to wage war and give away places, which in plain terms is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. However, old habits and sentimental attachments to the old country did not die quickly. It took ten years, from 1764 to 1774, for the mounting cycle of accusation and confrontation to turn into violent resistance on the part of the colonials in the infamous Boston tea party of December 1774. After that, though, the trajectory of violence turned sharply upwards.

The Age of Enlightenment

2009-03-14T20:00:00.000-07:00

Unlike wars, treatises, elections or epidemics; the Enlightenment is an intellectual event. That’s a warning sign that explanations, timelines and conflicts are going to be a lot more messy and confusing than when we are dealing with the usual stock and trade of history people: battles, kings, plagues, etc.

We can place at least its remote beginnings as early as 1543, when Nicholas Copernicus published his “Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies”. And the endings of the Enlightenment can be placed as late as 1850, with the defeat of Napoleon and the end of the French Revolution.

We could boil the Enlightenment down to two basic attitudes. The first would be the primacy of reason: the mind is not content with simply being told that something is true. It is not even content with admitting that someone else can be exactly be proved wrong. The mind has to be shown that something is true by standards of consistency and physical evidence which satisfy one’s own reason.

The second great aspect of the Enlightenment was its reverence for the testimony of nature. Because it was nature, newly measurable through scientific instruments as the telescope and the microscope, which afforded the raw materials upon which reason would operate. In nature, diligent experimenters would discover the real order of things, not the artificial one invented by Aristotle and the logic textbooks.

The Enlightenment made a lot of questions. But at the end of the day, its fundamental question was about epistemology, about how we know things.

In the midst of this Enlightenment there occurs a remarkably and utterly impressive reawakening of the most intense and “aggressive” forms of Evangelical Christianity.

In protestant Germany it appeared in the form of what became known as Pietism. In England it appeared in the Methodist revival of John Wesley. But in all of them, the most intense and passionate Christian piety was reawakened across Europe, in great number and force, which made the Enlightenment look shallow and inconsequential. Even though nothing could be more certain than the spiritual and intellectual gulf which separates these awakenings from the spirit of the Enlightenment, it is important to see that the Enlightenment and the Awakenings shared some important common ground.

There was, as it turned out, more than one way to have a revolution against Aristotle. In general, the awakenings shared with the Enlightenment the skepticism about the usefulness and virtue of the established churches in Europe, Protestant and Roman Catholic alike. They also shared the impulse to find a more authentic and natural kind of experience. The Enlightenment wanted to abandon Christianity almost entirely and uncover a more basic and authentic religion of nature. The Awakeners did not want to abandon Christianity, but they sought to recover a more basic and authentic religion as well. Not the religion of nature, but the religion of the heart. The true piety of primitive basic Christianity.

These Awakeners would read the new science, but use it to prove the impotence and limitations of the human reason before a universal system so vast and incomprehensible. It is at this point in the history of the American mind that the name of Jonathan Edwards springs almost automatically to the lips.

One of the gifts of the Great Awakening to British North America was the founding of new colleges: Princeton, Rhode Island College, which became Brown University; Queen’s College, founded by Dutch sympathizers with the Awakening in New Jersey; and Dartmouth College, which began as a missionary school for Indians, but it was moved by its founder to New Hampshire. These were only the colleges most directly nurtured by the awakening. Two others: the College of Philadelphia and King’s College in New York City, which was renamed Columbia after the American Revolution; also in varying degrees bore the footprint of the Awakening.

In this series of articles we will talk about the Age of Enlightenment and its effects in America, including the Great Awakening:

What was the Enlightenment: The Enlightenment is often thought of as an 18th century event. That is only partly true. We can place at least its remote beginnings as early as 1543, when Nicholas Copernicus published his “Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies”. And the endings of the Enlightenment can be placed as late as 1850, with the defeat of Napoleon and the end of the French Revolution.

The Enlightenment in America: Throughout the colonies, there was a self-conscious effort to Anglicize colonial life through the deliberate imitation of metropolitan institutions, values and cultures. They wanted, in other words, to think of themselves primarily as Britons rather than the descendants of convicts and religious oddballs.

Intellectual Problems in the Age of Enlightenment and the Arising of the Great Awakening: The Enlightenment, in Europe and in America, made a lot of questions. But at the end of the day, its fundamental question was about epistemology, about how we know things.

Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening: Jonathan Edwards was born on October 5, 1703. People who try to stay astride of conflicting intellectual movements, with one foot in one camp and one foot on another, or one foot in one answer and one foot in another; are usually destroyed by the conflict between the two. Edwards is that rare exception, who instead, turns conflicts into a creative intellectual fusion, in this case, of Enlightenment and piety.

The Colonial Colleges in America: One of the gifts of the Great Awakening to British North America was the founding of new colleges.

American Puritanism

2009-03-14T16:21:00.000-07:00

In 1517, the German monk Martin Luther raised the banner of theological rebellion against the authority of the Catholic Church in what has become universally known as the Protestant Reformation. In Switzerland, a French protestant named John Calvin reconstituted the organization of the Church. The Church had always been a hierarchy, with the bishop of dioceses at the top and the Pope in Rome as the bishop of the bishops; the priests below and the lay people underneath. Calvin refashioned this hierarchy, with priests now renamed as elders or presbyters ruling the churches jointly with lay leaders. Calvin also refined and expanded Luther’s theological protests, so that a uniquely Calvinist protestant theology eventually emerged.

King Henry VIII of England brought his kingdom into the Protestant column in the 1530’s guided strictly by a political desire to get the Pope’s meddling fingers out of his realm. Henry lived and died with the notion that he could deny the sovereignty of the Pope in England while retaining traditional Catholic theology and the structure of bishops, priests and people; only with himself rather than the Pope at the top of the hierarchy. Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth, who became Queen of England in 1558, settled matters down in pretty much the shape her father had expected.

Elizabeth made life exceptionally nasty for anyone who clung to the old Catholic ways. Any kind of affection for Catholicism was treated by Elizabeth in England as treason. But life could be as nasty for those English protestants who felt that Elizabeth had left entirely too many of the old Catholic ways in place. They considered Calvin as the model and solution for English Christianity. Elizabeth regarded them as been fully as much apart as the Catholics. These were the people who became known first as Precicians, because they wanted to be too precise about Church reformation. Then eventually as Puritans.

In this articles we will try to understand Puritan thinking, how they came to America looking for freedom of religion, and how they had a lasting impact in the American mind.

The Essence of Puritan Thinking and the Exodus to the Americas: Leaving 17th century England was a little like trying to leave the old Soviet Union. Unless you had a very plausible reason, the attempt was interpreted as an expression of dissatisfaction. They organized themselves as a commercial enterprise, the Massachusetts Bay Company, and they were all going to make their fortunes in America. Within ten years, the Massachusetts Bay Company welcomed several thousand Puritan refugees and set up a string of thriving towns stretching Westward from the principal settlement Boston.

The Influence of Separatism Over Harvard and the First Generation of Americans: Harvard was not a college similar to what we might think of colleges now. The principal source of truth was authority, not nature. The principal language was Latin, with the principal authority being Aristotle.

A Close Look at the American Revolution

2009-03-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

When in the 1660’s, the English Parliament began its first halting attempts at regulating the external commercial traffic of the colonies across the Atlantic, regulation of external commerce was not a new idea. Europeans governments had always kept a mistrustful grip on business. In societies where monarchs and land-owning noblemen were understood to have a heaven right to rule, merchants and entrepreneurs were regarded as a pretty suspicious, maybe even subversive lot. After all, the profit of merchants and entrepreneurs and businessmen were not based on land. They did not rise or fall according to the nobility or their forbears. In a world that praised stability, commerce and enterprise meant instability. So, kings regularly shackled it by handing out monopoly charters over large stretches of their economies.

But the Enlightenment put its faith in measurable realities. The most obvious measurable reality was that commerce could do the empire a whole lot more good if it was directed intelligently and with the due respect for the numbers rather than for some chicken-brained duke or earl. So, hand in hand with Isaac Newton’s effort to reduce motion in the universe to equations, Enlightenment’s imperial planners in London began fashioning regulatory legislation over the colonies and their transatlantic commerce, which would reap profits in taxes and duties for the empire. They were not particularly successful, at least at first. Regulation may generate revenue, but it also costs money to enforce. The Crown was pathologically reluctant to pay the kinds of troops and ships it needed for the proper enforcement of the regulation of transatlantic commerce.

The Cost of War and the New Taxation

Then began the great imperial wars with France, during seven years from 1755 to 1763. Britain emerged from those imperial wars as the victor over France and the world’s first super-power, but at a hideous cost in public borrowing to finance the wars. In casting its eyes around for potential sources of servicing its war-time debts, Parliament’s eyes fell on the American colonies. Regulation, up to this point, has after all only taxed the colonies’ external trade across the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing had been done about extending the hand of the taxman into the internal economies of the colonies to raise taxes, because taxation of the colonies’ domestic economies was something which was done by the colonial legislators. However, the Parliament was the legislature of the Empire, and the colonies were technically simply plantations. If Parliament had needed to raise funds to meet the costs it incurred defending those plantations, why not exercise Parliament’s lawful right to tax the internal colonial economies as well as their commerce over the high seas.

And so, in 1764 began that long and dreary procession of confrontations over tax bills; between the Parliament on one hand, which could not comprehend through its fury why the colonials thought they enjoyed some sort of immunity from taxation of their economies; and the colonies, who could not comprehend through their even greater fury why Parliament would think it could simply take the rights that their legislators had built up without any serious questioning over the course of more than a century.

To the party of the King in Parliament, the Tories, the answer to this conundrum was a simple, traditional and pre-Newtonian one: Americans were rebels by nature and needed to be subordinated to the will of their God-given master, the King. To the colonies, the answer was equally simple, a good deal of it was found in John Locke: societies emerge from the State of Nature, as individuals agree to sacrifice a part of their natural liberty in order to protect the remainder of their liberty and property, a process more than confirmed by the experience of their own settlements. They had never been plantations, for the very obvious reason that Britain had never treated them that way, or at least never bothered to offer the funding and support which would had made the claim that the colonies were only Parliamentary plantations believable.

So, the colonial legislators were in the mind of the colonists the one true creation of the people of the colonies for their own government. In the first great revolutionary tract, James Otis’ “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved” in 1764, Otis insisted that these supreme powers of legislation should be free and sacred in the hands where the community has once rightfully placed them. That meant the colonial legislators, and not Parliament.

All of this, as the Scottish common sense realist would have said, was open and self-evident to anyone with an unperverted moral sense. But the moral sense can, of course, become perverted if, as John Locke warned, sufficient corruption and degradation occur on the part of the government. Americans who read Whigs satire, or who had long-time beliefs that Anglican bishops were the emissaries of the Antichrist, or that who had to put up with snobs of blue-blood English officers and tax officials, not to mention those who knew the behavior of the average English soldier during his posting in the colonies during the French and Indian wars; did not require much convincing that the mother country was swiftly descending into the mother of whores, and that the whole controversy over taxation was a plot by what Mercy Otis Warren called the “intrigues of artful and ambitious men”.

The Beginnings of the Revolution

It only remained for Thomas Paine, in the revolution’s most sensational pamphlet, “Common Sense”, to conclude that a King had little more to do than to wage war and give away places, which in plain terms is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. However, old habits and sentimental attachments to the old country did not die quickly. It took ten years, from 1764 to 1774, for the mounting cycle of accusation and confrontation to turn into violent resistance on the part of the colonials in the infamous Boston tea party of December 1774. After that, though, the trajectory of violence turned sharply upwards.

In April, British troops stationed in Boston tried to seize arms and ammunition stored by the colonial militia at Lexington and Concord. They found themselves trapped in a full-scale firefight that became the first battle of the revolution against British authority. In July 1776, the representatives of 13 of the British North American colonies, called together as the Continental Congress, announced that their allegiance to Great Britain was at an end, and declared the formation of an independent league, known as the United States of America.

The American Revolution managed to carry along with it almost all the desperate streams of intellectual resistance that set the stage for it, whether or not those streams were like oil and water. Presbyterian preachers, who saw in the new imperial taxation schemes the entering path for an American-Anglican episcopate, turned out in such numbers for the continental army that the Chief Justice of Massachusetts referred to the dissenting clergy who took so active a part in the rebellion as Mr. Otis’ black regiment walking straight out of the days of Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan hosts.

Out of the other stream, John Adams, the most talented theorist of what are called Revolution Principles, rejoiced to see in the Revolution the dawning of Enlightenment politics.

The Secular Principles of America

For the time being, the principles of nature and eternal reason, not Puritanism, would have the upper hand in the shaping of the new American order. When the Continental Congress finally casted its vote for independence, it delegated the writing of a legal declaration to preface the independence motion. The independence motion read “that these united colonies are and ought to be free and independent states”. Congress delegated the writing of that declaration to Thomas Jefferson, who in less than two days produced a draft declaration which is one of the most memorable political documents in the English language and a monument of Lockean simplicity and Scottish moral sense philosophy.

One reason why Thomas Jefferson was delegated to write that declaration was that in one sense he had already done so. In 1774, Jefferson had made his first public mark in defense of American rights with a summary view of the rights of British America, which listed in detail the offences of which the imperial government was guilty. To compose a declaration for the independence motion really required little more of Jefferson than the crafting of a series of statements of those offences which justified independence. In fact, a list of 21 such offences forms the bulk of Jefferson’s declaration. The really memorable part of the declaration grew out of Jefferson’s decision to write a preamble to the list. That lifted this otherwise pedestrian document into the realm of Enlightenment political philosophy.

In one long sentence, Jefferson captured the core of the Lockean and Scottish critique of tradition and hierarchy, and made it the nuclear core of the American Revolution.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident”, self evident at least to anyone, as the Scots insisted, possessing an uncorrupted moral sense.

“That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. These, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, are what we find in the State of Nature, that is what people are born with naturally.

“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men”. In other words, in an environment of scarcity with lack of security, to preserve these rights, people create governments. Now, governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. They don’t come from God and heaven, they don’t come from history and tradition, they don’t come from the nobility or whoever your parents might have been. They come from the consent of the governed.

“That whenever any form of government becomes disruptive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

These words of Jefferson are so familiar that we are no longer shocked by their frankly secular tone, or by the ease with which Jefferson folded so much of the territory of Enlightenment and Whig thinking into one single sentence. Nor are we shocked any longer at the sheer audacity with which the Declaration of Independence propelled American revolutionaries into the front rank of the Enlightenment’s experiment in rewriting the foundations of human society. More than merely signaling America’s political dissolution from the British empire, these words pegged the republic Americans would create to the expectations and principles of the Enlightenment: to Locke, to the classical and liberal republicans, to Harrington and others. Thus Americans dissolved not only their political ties to Britain, but their intellectual ties to the long train of the traditional European past.

Religious Radicalism as a Factor of the American Revolution

2009-03-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

Forty years after the beginning of the American Revolution, the two most famous theorists of the Revolution, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, exchanged opinions on how the American colonies could have thrown off British rule so completely, and then on top of that, institute in their new government so complete a repudiation of the British example of government. Adams, gently reminded Jefferson that the change was not nearly so dramatic as he thought. The Revolution, said Adams, was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 to 1775 in the course of 15 years before a drop of blood was shed.

Adams was not only right but probably more right than he thought, in the sense that ideas which paved the rout to American independence had been there for much longer, even more than 15 years.

One source was John Locke. Thomas Jefferson, who preferred to see himself as an original thinker, did not like being told that the Declaration of Independence he was delegated to write in 1776 sounded like it was copied from Locke’s treatises on government. But even Jefferson admitted that Locke’s little book on government is perfect as far as it goes. Still, Locke was hardly the only figure on the horizon of American minds before 1776. The Enlightenment as a whole contributed a general resistance to the notion that traditional authorities, including kings and parliaments, had to be deferred to; while the Scottish common sense philosophy offered a particular source of alternative authority in the shared natural sense of truth and right which everyone was supposed to possess, whether they were princes or peasants.

Above all, in the most hard-headed sense, it was the penny-pinching attitude of the imperial government that led the colonies to put the necessity of self-government in the first place. The colonies were astounded at the prospect of parliament trying to change those rules, so to speak, in midstream.

In 1843, when one of the last survivors of the Revolution’s first fight at Lexington was interviewed about the reasons for taking up arms against the British, he was quizzed about whether he had been reading Harrington and Locke about the eternal principle of liberty. I’ve never heard of these men, answered Levi Preston. The questioner, Mellen Chamberlain, then asked: Well, then, what was the matter? Young man, Preston replied, what we meant in going for those red-coats was this: we always had governed ourselves and we always meant to, they didn’t mean we should.

Religious Rebellion in New York

Let’s not underestimate another source of resistance, the religious radicalism that went into founding so many of the colonies, not only the Puritans of New England, but the Quakers of Pennsylvania and the Baptists of Rhode Island had their roots in dissent from an established State Church. And even other immigrant religious groups, like Scot-Irish Presbyterians in Pennsylvania, Dutch Calvinists in New York, German Lutherans and Roman Catholics, all of them acted outside the circle of the protestant Church of England culture; and that could lead to political dissent the moment this sense of alienation and being on the margin attached itself to political grievances.

In 1746, the New York assembly decided to establish a college in New York city on a par with Yale, Harvard and the other colonial colleges. As a Crown colony, however, the assembly assumed that the New York college, like Oxford and Cambridge, would have to be a Church of England's college. In other words, its faculty would have to be communicants of the Church of England, the required worship and religious instruction would have to be Church of England’s, and most likely, its students would have at least to publicly conform to the Church of England. But New York had originally been founded by the Dutch, and when the English seized the city in 1664, part of the settlement that allowed for peaceful transition was in agreement not to force the Church of England down Calvinist throats. The result was that New York became a mixed multitude of Dutch reformed Churches, Presbyterians, Quakers, Jews, Baptists; while the actual Anglican communicants of the colony numbered no more than 20% of the population.

For non-Anglicans, the notion that public revenues were going to fund an Anglican college looked like picking their pockets to create a machine whose graduates would proselytize and undermine their Churches. And their dim view of things was not helped by the selection of the Connecticut apostate, Samuel Johnson, as the first president.

In the summer of 1753, shortly before the new King’s College was opened, a terrific pamphlet war broke out in New York, led by the wealthy Presbyterian William Livingston. This was significant for what was to follow. Livingston bases his religious suspicions of the King’s College project on an appeal to Locke’s notion of government. Rulers and magistrates, argued Livingston, occupy their places as men above the rest dependent upon the free exercise of the will of the later for the good of the whole. That obligated the magistrates to the pursuit of the welfare of the community, not to the exercise of favoritism toward one part of it. The transformation of King’s College from a publicly funded college into what Samuel Johnson unwisely called an Anglican seminary was precisely such a perversion. At that moment, Livingston argued, people may consider themselves as in the State of Nature, which authorized resistance and the formation of a new government.

In the end, Livingston campaign failed. King’s College opened its doors in the springs of 1754 with Samuel Johnson at its head. But Johnson was forced to back off on restricting the college only to Anglican communicants. And in 1763, the trustees forced Johnson into retirement and began a process of making King’s into a professional school for New York’s wealthy upper classes.

This is only what happened in places like New York, where the Presbyterianism of William Livingston was still comparatively mild stuff. Among those touched by the Great Awakening, the scorch of revival tended to re-arouse all the anti-authoritarian intellectual habits that a century of occupation and settling down had tended to obscure. Whitefield’s come back with the “Old Lights”, the disruption of Yale by David Brainerd, and Jonathan Edwards’ dismissal from Northampton in 1750 were only the best-known examples of the ease with which religion could rouse the spirit of Puritan contention.

The Religion of Virginia

The Great Awakening came later to Virginia than anywhere else in British North America, since Virginia was complacently Church of England’s and commercial in spirit. But Virginia soon acquired a radical tradition. Through the 1750’s and 1760’s, Scot-Irish Presbyterian migrants from Pennsylvania came to the Shenandoah Valley carrying with them much of Presbyterianism’s Calvinistic fervor. Poor Virginia whites flocked after Scot-Irish evangelical preachings. By 1772, as many as 10% of the whites had joined the most wildly individualistic and self-assertive of all of the Awakening’s churches, the Baptists.

This posed a challenge to the Anglican ascendancy in Virginia, not only because the Baptists increasingly resisted paying taxes to support the Church of England in Virginia, but also because the strict moralism of these evangelical Baptists called the hedonistic life styles of the great planters into question. A Virginian great planter shook his head in despair over this development. The indisposition to our people, he said, proves that we are verging fast towards Republicanism and Puritanism, this to me seems sufficient reason for the King sending a bishop among us, who I hope would in some measure contribute to track a spirit so adverse to our present happy form of government.

He could wish as much like, because there would be no bishop sent to Virginia. One reason being the old problem of the British empire’s reluctance to spend its own cash for anything in America. Instead, the American colonies were treated as an ecclesiastical extension of the Church of England’s dioceses of London. No Bishop of London ever took the trouble to visit America. Instead, the Bishop appointed a commissary to represent his interests there. The Bishop’s commissaries proved to be very skilled at staying out of trouble.

But the more compelling reason why there would be no Bishop was that the colonies, plainly, would not stand for it. Too many of them had left the established Church behind them in coming to America to welcome it catching up with them. Too many of them had acquired too much experience in running their own church affairs to want some Anglican running them. Even the most unpuritanical certainly did not want to be taxed for the benefit of an Anglican Bishop.

It took no great difficulty for any of this people to treat efforts by the imperial government to extend its secular powers over the colonies in precisely the same way. Even in laying the very foundations of the American republic, Puritanism and the Enlightenment, far from being at each other’s throats, were already stirring the American soup together.

John Locke’s Political Theory and Its Influence on American Thinking

2009-03-10T18:51:00.000-07:00

We’ve met the multifacetic John Locke before as a philosopher. But he was not less controversial and not less talented as a political theorist. In his two Treatises on Government, Locke went straight to the bedrock of politics as he had in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in epistemology.

In the Treatises on Government, Locke asked for what we might call a thought experiment. In order to understand the nature of government, let’s imagine ourselves back at a point in human history before governments existed. Now, some people might have wanted to argue this was impossible, that humanity has a natural bent to social organization, and that social organization was there from the start. The people who made this argument in Locke’s day were usually arguing that God had created kings from the beginning with full divinely ordained powers to rule, and only the most ultra-monarchist in Locke’s England wanted to make that argument in 1688. Besides, the Bible, which was still the most influential book on all European society, saw government as a gradual and undirected growth. The European explorations of North America seemed to offer plenty of evidence of Indian societies without any elaborate system of government. So, this objection lost a good deal of force.

Back to Mr. Locke, we begin our thought experiment at a point when human beings are simply there in the landscape. This is what Locke called the State of Nature. In that state, just like in any deserted island or isolated colony, the first priority was survival. Locke’s State of Nature is a state dominated by scarcity, or at least scarcity of things that you might readily eat or wear. To survive, you must delve in the earth, you must pick the food from the trees or you must plant the trees in the first place. Now, two things happen as a result of all this. First of all, you survive. And then, by mixing your labor with the natural materials at hand to create food, cloth and shelter; you create property.

Now, the problem with property is that it is not you. It can be detached from you. And there are plenty of other people out there in the State of Nature who might be happy indeed to save themselves the efforts and solve the problem of scarcity by taking your property from you. And it is at this moment, Locke hypothesises, that the idea of government is born. The reason why men entered society, Locke wrote, is the preservation of their property.

In other words, they sacrifice the total freedom they had in the State of Nature, and by giving up a little of that freedom and joining others in a protective arrangement, they preserve the balance of that freedom and their property in safety. For instance, they agreed to chip in a part of their property, maybe in the form of taxes, for the hiring and the equipping of a security patrol. They agreed to create a board to administer security. Some may not want to give any of their hard-won property to this supervisory board, but they reason that is better to loose little for a good purpose and save the rest, than to loose it all to raiders or burglars.

From this primal beginning, Locke said, all known governments have developed. There are three things we should notice about this.

The Reason for Government

First of all, for Locke, the fundamental problems of life are scarcity and security. Governments’ principal reason for existing is to provide security for the solutions we provide for scarcity. It is in fact, the only reason government exists. Man in the State of Nature, says Locke, is the absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest and subject to nobody. But in the State of Nature, the enjoyment of those possessions, said Locke, is very uncertain and constantly exposed to the invasion of others. This leads us to the second point.

The Creation of Government

Government is an invention of the people. It is not handed down from heaven. Kings are not chosen by God and ready to rule over the rest of us. Nor it is anybody born with any inherent status, like Duke or Earl, in the State of Nature. In the State of Nature, everyone is born equally poor and equally empty-handed. And we invent kings and dukes to serve as protectors of people’s property.

The Limitations of Government

Third, if a government or a king, or duke or earl, are not doing the job they were invented to perform, the people who made them have the authority to find another useful way of protecting their property. For instance, said Locke, the moment you catch them governing without settled standing laws, that is a sure sign that change is needed. No matter how much they may rage and plead some form of divine right for what they do, no one has ever left the State of Nature and put themselves under the rule, were it not to preserve their lives, liberties and fortunes; and by stated rules of right and property, to secure their peace. Or, said Locke, when you see this supreme executor of the government going about to set up his own arbitrary will in the place of law; or when that executor corrupts the rest of the government by solicitations, threats, promises; at that moment, such an executor cannot any longer be trusted.

All Americans are Liberals

Locke is what we might call the prophet of Liberalism. I don’t mean liberal or liberalism in the party politics sense that we use it today. What I’m talking about is the classical Liberalism of the Enlightenment, which was concerned with abolishing the monarchy, making reason rather than tradition the guide of political life, and downplaying the role of inherited and non-rational factors like race, religion or language; and to look expectantly to the future for progress. Liberalism was, you might say, the political equivalent of the Enlightenment’s new epistemology. The later sought to undermine the authority of Aristotle and Theology. The former sought to undermine the authority of kings and tradition.

It is in this sense that virtually all Americans, no matter what political party identification they might have, are classical Lockean liberals. This is because we identify ourselves as Americans by a loyalty to a series of what Abraham Lincoln called “propositions”. We identify ourselves by allegiance to these propositions, not by our identification with a certain ethnic group or religious denomination. We identify ourselves by certain propositions about liberty. We are, in that sense, all liberals; and America is the perfect example of a classic liberal regime.

The Whig Republicans

Locke was only the most celebrated and the most English of the Whig liberals. He was joined on the Whig platform by other Enlightenment political writers: Voltaire, Montesquieu and others. And Locke was more than matched in popularity by the political satirists, which English Whiggism seemed to have a talent for attracting: Joseph Addison and his celebrated magazine “The Spectator”, and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in their sensational “The Independent Whig” and “Cato’s Letters”.

If anything, what Locke represented was actually Whiggism’s middle path. Locke insisted that the three-part model of English government after the Glorious Revolution was the best realization of a government that protected property through the rule of law. On the left flank of Whiggism, however, were people who, much more radical than Locke, were outright Republicans or Common Wealth men; like Harrington, who suspected that the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 had been a big mistake, and that the Glorious Revolution in 1688 had been a missed opportunity to get rid of the entire institution of monarchy.

Many of these Whig republicans drew their inspiration from the well-known universal reading in Greek and Roman history. From this reading and from their own aversion to the corruption of the Royal Courts, these Whig republicans imagined an earlier and better form of government than monarchy. A form of government that dispensed with kings and glorified the rule exercised not by nobility, but by noble and self-denying men over the “Roman Republic”. That was the model.

Trenchard and Gordon’s “Cato’s Letters” were given that title precisely to call to mind that most relentlessly self-righteous of all Roman republicans, Cato the Younger.

Like the Whigs in general, republicans thought of property as land labored by oneself. Property owners lived lives of virtuous simplicity and came to form governments of only the most minimal size, eliminating the possibility of corruption and oppression by invoking a civic public spirit that served the public good rather than private interests. The emphasis of the classical republicans was, therefore, on the achievement of the public good.

Other Whig republicans, however, thought this was taking ancient Rome a little too far and a little too seriously. I mean, admirable as civic virtue and dedication to the public good are, classical republicans were probably expecting too much from human nature if they thought that wicked kings and nobles were the only thing holding nations back from embracing republics.

The Liberal Republicans

Republics imposing or demanding virtue might become tyrannical as monarchies demanding taxes and obedience. So, the alternative embraced by liberal republicans, as opposed to the classical republicans, was to take government out of the virtue business entirely; and allow the free competition of people mixing labor and land to produce as much property as they could.

Liberal Republicanism sometimes requires an optimism almost as sweeping as the optimism of the classical republicans. It assumed that on a low average basis, the marriage of self-preservation and self-interest would produce the best results all around for everyone. At least, the liberal republicans had this on their favor, because they had no preconceived template for what their society should look like; unlike the classical republicans who had Greek and Roman models to tell them how a society should look like. Liberal republicans had no outcomes to force on anyone.

Where the classical republicans liked to think in terms of the public good, the liberal republicans preferred to think of private or individual rights.

Locke and the Whigs in America

To most English readers of Locke, Harrington and the others; Whiggism was a carefully calculated descent, rather than a program for action, if only because no one in England could seriously imagine the origins of English society really being what Locke described as the State of Nature.

In America, however, it was different. Locke’s State of Nature seemed to describe perfectly the conditions under which the North American colonies had been founded. The creation of government to protect property seemed to be exactly what called those colonial legislators into their clandestine existence. And minimal government intervention looked what exactly the colonies had experienced as normal state affairs, both from an uninterested far away imperial government and from the royal governors sent out to oversee them.

John Adams, musing over Locke, Harrington and Milton, in colonial Massachusetts in 1776, admitted that the condition of this country had frequently reminded him of their principles and reasons. And so, Locke and the other Whigs came to be read not as political Utopians, not as people just drawing out blueprints for ideal societies; instead, Locke and the Whigs were read as confirmations of what Americans had all along known as reality.

This also meant that as Americans accepted Locke’s theory of political revolution, they also accepted Locke’s warnings about the process of political degeneration. There is an element of anxiety running through Locke, since the step out of the State of Nature, necessary as it is, is also thought with the dangers that the governments people create will decay and corrupt, that they will set aside the rule of law, that they will grab more and more power, and leave less and less liberty available. And to the extent that Americans read Locke or the State of Nature as a reality, they began looking for confirmations that Locke’s warnings were realities as well.

In the 1760’s, they began to find all the confirmation they needed. The empire they had known as home, and the king they had known as monarch, were gone all disastrously astray.

The Beginnings of American Liberalism

2009-03-10T17:54:00.000-07:00

The North American colonies established by the Spanish and the French in the 1500’s and 1600’s were State enterprises, which means that although many of them were offspring of the daring doing of “conquistadors” and missionaries, the conquests were property of the King, and the King made or unmade the governors who ruled them afterwards. The English and the Dutch were a different story, because in their cases, colonial enterprises were strictly franchised operations in which the State preferred to have as little involvement as possible. This did not turn out to be a very effective way of undertaking colonization. Whether from mismanagement in America, or from undercapitalization by investors and organizers in Europe; not one of the corporations that set up money-making operations in America were still in business a century later.

Only two parties came out the winners in this sorry process. One of them was the imperial government in London, which acquired title to vast stretches of the North American coastline, with settlements and settlers, without having to maintain troops in North America. That was up to the colonials.

The other set of winners were the actual colonials themselves. When the corporations they worked for collapsed, as they did in Virginia in 1622, this left the Virginia settlers pretty much to their own devices. Even before the complete removal of the Virginia company in 1624, representatives from every Virginia settlement were assembling as a House of Burgesses, to tie the hands of a royal governor and create a series of incentives for new immigrants to New England to refresh the population. London got an empire with pretty much no cost, and the Virginians got more freedom from control than any English subjects at home have ever enjoyed before.

A Different Kind of Government

The problem with this was that an assembly like the House of Burgesses was illegal, or at least it had not legal standing. There was only one recognized legislative assembly for the English. That was the Parliament in London. But from the colonists’ point of view, London was 3000 miles away. There was no one there in position to act well or wisely on Virginia’s affairs. And for London’s point of view, this arrangement cost London no money. In fact, it saved London the cost of paying attention to Virginia. So, the imperial government turned what later would appear to be a blind eye to American affairs.

This turning of the eye was easy to do because the House of Burgesses and the other colonial assemblies, which sprang after it, did not look much like any legislative assembly the English had ever seen. Parliament was a legislature, but it was far from being representative. Parliament was controlled by the nobility, the Church and the landed gentry. In its two houses, the House of Lords and the House of Commons; the bishops, the dukes and the earls dominated the first; and the wealthy elite dominated the second. This aristocracy in England was actually less heavy than its counterparts elsewhere in Europe, but it was heavy enough by contrast to America.

In England, 40% of the wealth of the kingdom was owned by the top 1% of the population. A wealth based largely on the fact that they owned 70% of the land. Most of the English population was composed of renters. They had neither voice nor stake in England’s political life. In America, however, the cheapness and the availability of land inverted those proportions almost exactly. Almost two thirds of the white population in the British colonies owned sixty percent of the land. The would-be gentry in America actually controlled only about 30%. This meant that colonial elites might enjoy a position and power which make them look and feel like gentry, but they were critically dependent on the good-will of the vast array of independent farmers all around them.

The Royal governors labored under the same constraints. On paper, the powers of the Royal governor in the colonies were substantial. They could appoint judges, they could control appointments to other offices, they had a power of veto. In fact, the number of appointments they could make was small. Their actions were restricted. Moments when those restrictions were not observed produced outbursts of crowd action. In 1736, unhappy Bostonians gathered at midnight and demolished the town marketplace as a protest against the construction of the marketplace as a means of regulating public food sales.

In 1763, a mob of Scot-Irish immigrants from Paxton, Lancaster County; filled with fury against the Indians and against the Quakers in the Pennsylvania assembly who refused to give money for their defense, took out their frustrations on a defenseless band of Indians, killing six of them. Fourteen more Indians were locked up for their own protection, pursued by the Paxton boys and murdered. 250 of the Paxton boys then marched on Philadelphia, and only when governor John Penn sent Benjamin Franklin and a persuasive delegation to meet them, did the Paxton boys turn and headed home.

American elites could imagine that they filled the place of the English gentry, but only if they did not stepped to heavily on popular toes. So, by a process that few people in London understood, the rowdy lowlife who departed for the colonies a century before, had turned into competitors for economic dominance within the Empire. They had developed an anglicised elite who thought of themselves as the equals of their English cousins. And they created domestic legislatures exercising powers that were technically illegal, and elected by farmers who had an unpleasantly passion for independence.

All the Americans lacked was a political philosophy to give it all coherence. In the 1760’s, the imperial government unwillingly provided them with it.

The Glorious Revolution and the Whigs

England was a monarchy, but it had never been a happy monarchy. The vice of the French, it was said, was letchery, but the vice of the English was treachery. The English overturned dynasties with the regularity that appalled the rest of Europe. The Plantagenet kings were overthrown by the Tudors, the Tudors led to the Stuarts, the Stuarts were overthrown not once but twice in 1642 and again in 1688 in the Glorious Revolution, after that, Parliament tied the hands of the kings and queens so securely, that when a new ruling house from Hanover, Germany, in 1714; government in England was already being described not in terms of a King and a Throne, but in a three-way system of checks and balances. King, lords and commons.

The people who were most apt to use this three-part way of describing English politics had been known, since the 1670’s, as Whigs. The term Whig came into use from Whiggamore, which was a way of describing people from the countryside. And indeed, the Whigs liked to think of themselves as the sturdy sons of the countryside, characterized by a simple protestantism and a concern with the promotion of the good of their communities. If Whiggery could be distilled to four political propositions, they would be that:

1. Liberty is natural. Because is natural, it cannot be the gift of a monarch.

2. Liberty can be destroyed, normally by a corrupted elite who strives to concentrate power in themselves and to corrupt others.

3. Liberty, therefore, requires allegiance with virtue for protection from corruption and power. Whether in the form of the natural virtues, like modesty, productive work or self-restraint; or religious ones, such as would be found in strict protestant moralism.

4. Because Whigs prefer virtue to power, they are often found outside the centers of powers. Hence, their identity with the countryside, rather than with the corrupted royal courts at the empire center.

Not surprisingly, Whiggery had long roots in Puritanism. And it had strong associations with parliament. And it was parliaments Whigs who had been the chief engineers of the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Some of the most radical of the Whigs argued for abolishing the monarchy entirely, and erecting a republic. Even the mainstream of Whig opinion wanted monarchy severely curtailed. And to rationalize this curtailment and to rationalize the Glorious Revolution, they turned to John Locke.

Common Sense and the American Mind

2009-03-07T07:25:00.000-08:00

Many of the tutors at Princeton were Edwardsians. Witherspoon, as the new president, promptly drew them out. It was not just revivalism that made Witherspoon suspicious of the Edwardsians, he had little truck either with Edwards’ appropriation of Bishop Berkeley’s immaterialism, and to understand the importance of that, we have to understand what Scotland meant to the Enlightenment in Witherspoon’s day.

Until the 18th century, Scotland was regarded as a cultural backwater. But when the English finally shut off all access to the universities to non Church of England people, they inadvertently handed the minor Scottish universities, at Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Glasgow; an enormous gift. While Oxford and Cambridge, the official Church of England’s universities, sunk into contented conformity, the brightest minds of Britain’s non-conformists headed to the only universities open to them, the Scottish ones. With them, almost by default, came the Enlightenment, as Scottish universities blossomed after the 1720’s, with solutions to English philosophies’ unsolved problems.

The Problem with Locke and Berkeley’s Unsatisfactory Answer

One of these problems came directly from John Locke. Remember that Locke did not believe that we actually could know the object of our ideas directly. He believed that we know only our ideas of the objects, so that ideas represent objects to us, rather than having the object presented directly to our consciousness. But he was confident that we could rely on those ideas to tell our minds what is a true, or at least a probable story about the objects we were sensing. An assumption for which Bishop Berkeley pointed out that Locke had absolutely no worthwhile evidence.

Berkeley, as it turned out, was not the only one who saw problems with Locke’s representational realism. Francis Hutchinson, of the University of Glasgow, objected that Locke’s description of how we know was empoverished and “unrealistic”. First, because it made minds perfectly passive in the knowing process; and second, because Locke’s description failed to account for why minds have ideas about things which mere sensations cannot account for. For example, someone gazing at a painting actually senses only oil and chemists. Yet that same person perceives beauty, something far beyond what lies in colors and shapes. In the same way, a virtuous act is perceived by a mind not just as an act, but as something which is beautiful; and it moves the perceiver to a response of moral approval.

This implied, for Hutchinson, the existence of a power, of a capacity, which he called the moral sense; which moves everyone to recognize beauty and virtue for what they are, and which ensures that morality is not just a fluctuating experience which varies according to our sensations or situations. No matter how varied are individual situations or experiences, the moral sense, that we are all equipped with, enables us to sort through the mass of sensations we receive; and to perceive what is true, right and beautiful. Thomas Reid would be who gives this moral sense epistemology the enormous influence it would achieve in the 18th century.

Bishop Berkeley had helped cripple what he thought were the atheistic tendencies in Locke, by showing purely in Locke’s own terms, that we could not have assurance that our ideas correspond to anything in the outside world. This is what allowed Berkeley to step in and assert the need for God. And God guaranties such a connection between our ideas and what exists in the outer world by both giving minds their ideas and by upholding the external reality they represent.

But all this seemed to suggest to another Scotsman, David Hume, complete intellectual skepticism. Granted that Berkeley was right about our inability to know for sure whether our ideas correspond to anything in the external world, why should we then assume that God makes the connection for us? Why assume that there are any connections? We perceive this connections and even dignify them with names: cause and effect. But that is likely merely a prejudice or a mental habit. Berkeley could invoke God as he likes, Hume said, but even God must be just another mental habit.

Reid’s Appealing Response

In his Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Reid observed that there was a practical common consensus among everyone. That there is a reality which exists outside the mind and its ideas. Without trying to explain how this worked, or implying that one could know how it worked, the fact was there was a common sense which attested to the real existence of objects outside the mind. And it was so elemental, that denying it or questioning it was absurd.

This appeal to common sense not only threw Hume’s skepticism back into his face, but it permitted Reid to object to Locke’s representationalism and insist that not only does the external world exists, but we may know it directly, without mediating ideas blurring it. Objects are, therefore, presented immediately to our consciousness; and to deny their reality is tantamount idiocy, according to Reid.

One of the great attractions of Reid’s common sense philosophy was the neatness with which it intercepted with traditional scholastic appeals to natural law, and with what was becoming a new political science of natural rights, something which was also pioneered by Locke. Strictly speaking, this was a good distance removed from orthodox Calvinism. Calvinists of the stricter sort wondered where Reid planned to explain how sin entered into this picture of natural perceptions of virtue and reality, or what capacity sinners had to understand natural law, if it existed at all outside scripture. But it was not wholly beyond the grasp of moderate Calvinists, who preferred some form of accommodation with the Enlightenment. And within that circle of moderates, that John Witherspoon was located.

The common sense philosophy had a number of intellectual gifts to bestow. First of all, the common sense philosophy taught that minds not only perceive the world directly as it is, they also simultaneously render a judgement about the certainty of that world, which no honest mind can avoid making. Therefore, Witherspoon offered what we have to call an intellectualistic kind of human psychology, not a voluntaristic one like Edwards. Because minds are incapable of denying the judgements which common sense makes. Will simply does not enter into it.

Secondly, just as common sense dictates our perception of the reality of the external world, it also reveals certain fundamental moral principles within us. Everyone possesses a moral sense, which causes them to see and approve virtue and beauty. And it does so in so immediate fashion that these truths may even be said to be self-evident. Self-evident in that they do not require explanation, they do not require divine illumination; you see something which is beautiful and immediately you respond by recognizing it as beautiful. The reason for that cannot be limited strictly to the mind as it responds to material subjects or material objects, rather, when the mind responds to beauty, it can only be because there is operating, within the human consciousness itself, a factor which stimulates you to recognize the thing which is beautiful.

Conclusion

Reid worked backwards or inductively, from the fact that all minds intuitively understand the objective reality of the world; rather than as Locke and Edwards, analyzing the mind and then deciding whether it can know such reality. So, all truths about consciousness, the world or god must be built up using the same method, by strict induction from facts.

Of course, this Scottish common sense philosophy also had some serious dangers. But in the 1770’s, those dangers were more than compensated by the way that common sense thinking allowed moderate Calvinists, in fact, allowed almost any English protestant, to have a rational epistemology without needing to resort to the radical immaterialism of Edwards or the anti-intellectual enthusiasm of the Awakeners.

From this synthesis of Scottish common sense philosophy and moderate Calvinism, represented by John Witherspoon, would flower the first creative era of the American conversation about ideas between religion and the Enlightenment, between God and nature. A conversation that in many ways we still participate in.

The Colonial Colleges in America

2009-03-07T03:18:00.000-08:00

One of the gifts of the Great Awakening to British North America was the founding of new colleges: Princeton, Rhode Island College, which became Brown University; Queen’s College, founded by Dutch sympathizers with the Awakening in New Jersey; and Dartmouth College, which began as a missionary school for Indians, but it was moved by its founder to New Hampshire. These were only the colleges most directly nurtured by the awakening. Two others: the College of Philadelphia and King’s College in New York City, which was renamed Columbia after the American Revolution; also in varying degrees bore the footprint of the Awakening.

The College of Philadelphia was organized as an academy in a meeting hall in Philadelphia originally built to accommodate that grand itinerant George Whitefield on his many preaching tours. The academy organizers quickly ensured that both the academy and the college that superseded it were kept safe from Whitefield’s evangelical enthusiasm. And King’s College, which opened its doors in 1754, was deliberately designed to draw enthusiasm for the Church of England, which was struggling for representatives in the colonies. Its first president, Samuel Johnson, had actually been one of the Yale apostates from Congregationalism back in 1722.

Whitefield and the Colleges

That the Awakeners were interested in founding colleges at all may seem unusual, given the cold shoulder that Harvard and then Yale turned to the Great Awakening. George Whitefield had visited Harvard during his first great preaching tour in New England in 1740, and he found Harvard “scarcely as big as one of our least colleges at Oxford”. After all, Harvard had only one president, four tutors and about one hundred students. But worst still, “it was not far superior to our universities in piety”. This is a judgement that Whitefield did not intend as a compliment. “At Harvard, bad books are becoming fashionable among the tutors and students”.

When Whitefield journals were published, Harvard’s old-like president, Edward Holyoke, was not amused, and in December 1744, Holyoke and the Harvard faculty went to publish “The Testimony of Harvard College Against George Whitefield”, accusing Whitefield of enthusiasm and delusive management of the money he had been raising for his orphanage, and just accusing him of a general spirit of anti-intellectualism.

None of this gave Whitefield much pause because the “new-lights”, like their pious counterparts in England, Germany and in Netherlands; had an entirely different notion of how human psychology worked. The Enlightenment’s glorification of reason and nature was all well and good, argued the pious, but only when we don’t forget the limits placed upon the operation of reason by the countervailing power of the other faculties, specially the will. The celebrated German pietist, August Hermann Francke, confesses that as a theology student in Lutheran Germany, he had originally understood Christianity only in “my reason and in my thought”, it wasn’t until he had experienced repentance that “all sadness and unrest of my heart was taken all at once and I was immediately overwhelmed by a stream of joy, and gave praise to whom had shown so great grace.”

This is not necessarily an anti-intellectual stance. It was, in fact, little more than an updating of scholastic-style voluntarism. And it was shared, without any dimming of intellectual energy, by Blaise Pascal, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards. But it could easily sound anti-intellectual. Nor was Whitefield, as an Oxford graduate, an intellectual slouch; but when he warned Holyoke that “learning without piety will only render you more capable of promoting the kingdom of the devil”, Whitefield was leaving the Awakening open to abuse, as much as Harvard’s embrace of reason had left it vulnerable to the blandishments of religion.

The Awakening in Yale

The dimensions of that abuse showed up not at Harvard, but in Yale, in 1741. Thomas Clap had taken over as rector of Yale in April of 1740. He was determined to overhaul the students and the curriculum to move Yale from a good state to a perfect one. And mistaking Whitefield with a vehicle for accomplishing that, Clap unwisely invited Whitefield to preach to the students on 1740. Whitefield was even less impressed by Yale than he had been by Harvard. “It has one rector, three tutors and about one hundred students, and with no remarkable concern among them concerning religion”.

But in Yale’s case, things did not stay that way. Over the next three months, the spiritual life of Yale College was quickened. The students in general became serious, Jonathan Edwards recorded, much engaged in the concerns of their eternal welfare. But they also became tumultuous and rebellious against what Whitefield had darkly described as an unconverted ministry.

James Davenport, a Yale graduate of 1732 and then Whitefield wannabe, showed up in Connecticut claiming direct inspiration from God and sponsoring a bonfire of books, principally on divinity. While the books where in the flames, Davenport cried out “thus the souls of the authors of those books, those of them who are dead are rusting in the flames of hell; the fate of those surviving will be the same unless speedy repentance prevent it.”

Clap tried to appease the uproar by inviting Jonathan Edwards to deliver the commencement address. But by the beginning of the next school year in September of 1741, the trustees of Yale were forced to pass a resolution threatening that “any student at this college who directly or indirectly says that the rector, either the trustees or tutors are hypocrites or unconverted men, he shall for the first offence make a public confession in the hall; and for the second offence be expelled.

And to show just how much they meant it, when a junior student, David Brainerd, snorted that one of the tutors had no more grace than a chair, rector Clap expelled him. If Clap thought he was serving an example, he was wrong. Brainerd left Yale to become a missionary to the Indians. He left in Edwards’ hands his melodramatic diary, which Edwards later published as a memorial to Brainerd’s integrity and Yale’s stinginess of heart. Brainerd’s journal went on to become one of the great religious best-sellers of the next century.

The Founding of Princeton and the Arrival of Witherspoon

Given this kind of reception, no one could be surprised if the awakeners decided to take their interests elsewhere, and begin the string of colleges that I mentioned at the beginning. But again, the result turned out to be a very mixed bag. This is because colleges founded around a valorization of the will, rather than the intellect, had a hard time justifying their existence. Usually either they disappear when the will grows weary, or allow themselves to be transformed into holes of reason just like the others, simply to justify their existence.

The College of New Jersey, Princeton, became something of a marker of how difficult it was to sustain the will for revival within the tight structure of 18th century college education. Founded through the initiative of Whitefield’s Presbyterian admirers, Jonathan Dickinson and Aaron Burr. the new college was generally perceived as a statement of protest by New Lights against Yale’s treatment of David Brainerd. If it had not been for the treatment received by Mr. Brainerd at Yale, Aaron Burr remarked, New Jersey College would never have been erected.

On the other hand, the college had trouble trying to keep going the same way that Brainerd did. The first of the presidents of the college of New Jersey, Jonathan Dickinson, was a Yale graduate class of 1706, who had been minister to a community of New England migrants in Elizabeth town, New Jersey. Within a year of founding the college, Dickinson was dead. So, leadership of the college was transferred to Aaron Burr, who’s principle credential for the job was that he happened to be Jonathan Edwards’ son-in-law. Burr moved the college in 1733 to land contributed to the college trustees by the town fathers of the village of Princeton. It delighted Esther Edwards Burr, the wife of Aaron Burr, to find a considerable awakening in the college. By February of 1757 it looked to her exactly like God’s descending into the temple in a cloud of glory. But Aaron Burr died of malaria that fall, and when the trustees brought Jonathan Edwards to Princeton as his son-in-law successor, Edwards died as well.

For the next decade, election as president of Princeton came increasingly to look like the kiss of death. Samuel Davies succeeded Edwards but collapsed and died on the strain of the work in February 1761. Davies was followed by Samuel Finley, who actually survived for five years in office before death removed him too in July of 1766. By this point, the fires of controversy over the Great Awakening had cooled considerably, and in 1758, the quarreling factions among the Presbyterians had worked a reconciliation, which they hoped to crown by recruiting as the next president of Princeton a Presbyterian, who, if not exactly the first choice of anyone, was at least the least objectionable choice in everyone’s mind: John Witherspoon. He was neither identified with the pro-awakening or anti-awakening factions, largely because he was a Scotsman and never been in America.

The arrival of John Witherspoon in Princeton in 1768 has always been regarded as something of a watershed in American intellectual life. And with good reason. For one thing, he actually lived long enough in Princeton, until 1794, to make a difference as the college’s president. Long enough, in fact, to serve in the continental congress as one of New Jersey’s representatives, and to sign the Declaration of Independence, the only clergyman to do so. For another thing, Witherspoon was successful in making moderation into an aggressive quality rather than just an exercise in appeasement. Witherspoon carried with him the old-worldish sense of the Church’s place within society and the theory of the sacramental educational religion. Not the separatism, not the voluntarism, and not the wild fire conversion enthusiasm of the Awakening.

Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening

2009-03-05T01:03:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Edwards was born on October 5, 1703. The son of Timothy Edwards, a Congregationalist pastor in East Windsor, Connecticut; and of Esther Stoddard, who’s father Solomon Stoddard was the pastor of the church of Northampton, Massachusetts, and the most powerful ecclesiastical figure in Western New England. From both sides of his family, Jonathan Edwards inherited a distrust of what was going on in Boston and at Harvard.

His grandfather Stoddard had decided as early as 1660 that restricted Church membership only to those who could make a public confession of receiving God’s grace was a recipe for marginalizing the Church’s impact on society. Only a few in Northampton would ever come forward with claims so staggering, Stoddard argued. The rest will drift off to the sidelines of the Church, where the opportunity to experience that grace might never happen.

Stoddard not only threw down the barriers the first generation of Puritans in New England had put in place, but threw even the half-way covenant which had been invented as a partial membership system to the winds, and invited every member of the town to Baptism and communion. As for Harvard, the churches and the settlements of the Connecticut River Valley had long suspicions about the weak theological leaders that governed intellectual affairs in Cambridge. That is why Connecticut Puritans decided to found their own college in 1701: Yale.

Education

The young Edwards, just under the age of 13, was sent to Yale, even though the college had not yet even worked out a permanent location. It finally settled in New Haven. His education rested on the English and Dutch protestant scholastics. But whether anyone was particularly noticing it or not, Yale’s rector, Timothy Cutler, also assigned William Brattle’s Cartesian New Logic to the students, as well as the study of John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton. Edwards applied himself to these innovations in the curriculum reluctantly. Not because he lacked a taste for philosophy, but because he greatly preferred the old logic. Yet that did not prevented him from arising to the top of his class intellectually. When he graduated from Yale, the choice for giving the valedictory fell to Edwards.

Despite his loyalty to the “old logic”, Edwards could not keep his curiosity from wandering to the new philosophy. By the time he graduated, he began dabbling in two scientific essays, on insects and on spiders. He began keeping commonplace books with his own speculations on epistemology and natural science. Once outside of Yale, he briefly server as pastor to a small congregation in New York City, but in June 1724, he accepted an invitation from Yale to return as a tutor. He spent the next three years working out more deeply his explorations into epistemology, pursuing a more clear and immediate view of God, concerning his operation with matter and bodies. And rather than embracing an outright naturalism (that all substance is material), or dualism (that material and spiritual substances coexist), Edwards was gradually pulled to an immaterialism similar to that of Bishop Berkeley; in which that which is truly the substance of all bodies is the infinite, exact, precise and perfectly stable idea in God’s mind.

As Pastor of Northampton

There was, however, little professional future for junior tutors at Yale. In November 1726, the Northampton church called Edwards to become his grandfather’s Stoddart assistant pastor. Edwards was ordained by the Northampton church on February 1727, and in 1729, after his grandfather’s death, Edwards became pastor of the town. The notations in his philosophical notebooks trailed off, as the demands of a busy pastor were over him. But from time to time they surfaced again in Edwards’ sermons, where it became clear that for Edwards, immaterialism had become an effective weapon for the defense of traditional Calvinism. Invited in 1731 to deliver a public lecture at Boston, Edwards warned against the tendency of man to depend on his own power and goodness, which was good Calvinist theology. The reasoning behind this is strongly influenced by the new philosophical immaterialism: God acts in immaterialist fashion as an extrinsic occasional agent on the mind. Whatever ideas we have are the products not of sensation, nor of the mind as a machine, but of the direct action of God.

Echoing the European Awakeners, Edwards was careful not to make this action simply a matter of God presenting ideas directly to the mind and leaving the mind to do with it what it pleased. God’s action works not upon the reason or ratiocination, but upon a sense of the heart, which immediately perceives a beauty, a divine and transcendent glory in God. Edwards thus made immaterialist philosophy serve the interest of Calvinist piety.

The Awakenings

The promotion of piety became Edwards’ particular burden in the 1730’s. Specially when in 1734 a very remarkable blessing of heaven fell on Northampton. In the Puritan path, the experience of religious conversion had been largely a matter of individual spiritual renewal, under the careful direction of pastors and family elders. The novelty introduced by the Awakeners of the 18th century was to turn the experience of grace into a communal experience, a group revival of religion that could involve whole towns, sometimes entire regions. Solomon Stoddart, with his eye always on the improvement of his parish, had welcomed several small revivals like these in Northampton; and so had Edwards’ father, Timothy Edwards, in their home parish in East Windsor. But this revival, which occurred in 1735, saw, as Edwards described it, more than three hundred souls saved and brought home to Christ in his town.

Not only the numbers, but the character of the revival was, as Edwards said, unprecedented. It involved not only males and females alike, but children as young as four years old. An outburst of enthusiasm and worship, some, he said, weeping with sorrow and distress, others with joy and love, other with pity and concern for the souls of their neighbors. Edwards struggled both to defend and analyze this eruption in “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God”, which was published in England in 1737.

Edwards had hardly digested the lessons of the 1734 revival before a second wave of awakenings came to Northampton in 1740, on the shoulders of the celebrated English preacher George Whitefield. Whitefield had emerged as one of the princes of the European Awakeners. A preacher of fabulous talent, dramatic intensity and superb self-confidence. In 1737, he dedicated himself to establishing an orphanage in the new American colony of Georgia, and undertook a fundraising-preaching tour of the colonies, which quickly turned into a riot of awakenings. What had been mere awakenings now became the Great Awakening in British North America. Whitefield came to Northampton to preach and to recognize Edwards as a fellow laborer. The outbreak of revivals consumed not only Edwards’ Northampton, but much of Western New England.

Whifield’s preaching also generated angry criticism from both the Boston elite, who spurned revivals as raw enthusiasm; and from nervous country persons who feared the destabilizing effect of mass revivals on the peace of their folks. By 1742, the New England clergy had become polarized into an old-like faction, which condemned the revivals; and a new-like faction which encouraged them and which found in Edwards its principal theorist of revivals and religious experience.

Edwards not only participated fully as a preacher in promoting revivals, but he also published three important defenses of “revivalism”: “Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God”, “Some thoughts concerning the present revival in New England”, and “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections”. Of all the three, the religious affections was Edwards’ most profound effort, laying out in 12 signs, as he put it, the distinction between true and false religion, and the right place of the emotions or affections (to avoid the pejorative term passions) in religious experience. Both, “Some thoughts concerning the present revival” and “The religious affections”, however, show signs of stress in Edwards, since the aftermath of the Greak Awakening in Northampton proved to be a severe disappointment for Edwards, as many of the awakened gradually subsided into religious indifference.

In 1744, in an ill-considered effort to stimulate genuine conversions, Edwards reimposed the test of a public confession of grace on new members of the Church, which had been abandoned by Solomon Stoddart. The Northampton Church turned with resentment on Edwards. In 1750, Edwards was forced to resign.

The Mission and the Later Philosophical Works

Thrown upon the wide ocean of the world, as he put it, Edwards accepted the offer of the Boston commissioners of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England to take charge of the Indian mission at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 60 miles West of Northampton. He was an indifferent missionary, but the mission worked giving time to turn back to his philosophical notebooks. Between 1751 and 1757, Edwards produced two manuscript dissertations, as he called them, on ontology and ethics. The first of them, concerning the end for which God created the world; and the other on the nature of true virtue. These, plus two major treatises on Freedom of the Will, in 1754, and Original Sin in 1758.

Freedom of the Will was the greatest piece of philosophical speculation pined by an American in the 18th century, and the only one which managed to command any serious European readership. But its real intent, as in much of Edwards’ work, was not so much to articulate philosophy or embrace the Enlightenment, but rather to justify in the most enlightened vocabulary and method available the ways of God to man. Edwards had noticed how the threat of Hobbes and his bleak materialism had frightened the religious thinkers in the Enlightenment. He also noticed how Hobbes’ denial of free will caused panic even among Calvinists, who began defending human free will. This affirmation of free will is contradictory to Calvinism’s teaching that God, and not human free will, determines the outcome of all events.

Calvinists, and for that matter anyone who believes in God as more than a well-intentioned mumbler, could not run away from the fact that a God who is really God determines everything. Edwards’ great achievement was to try to demonstrate, in one logical sweep after another, how God’s determination of the will does not deprive anyone of freedom, much less force anyone over the cliff into materialism. And it was a logical sweep.

Defenses of Calvinist theology before the Great Awakening had stiffen unimaginatively into the style and rhetoric of the catechism, with certain theological axioms laid out scholastic-style, and then adorned with scriptural proof texts as if all that was needed to halt the Enlightenment’s incoming tide was a biblical quotation.

What has continuously surprised readers of Edward’s Freedom of the Will was how very unlike the catechism model his writing was. Freedom of the Will reads much more like a treatise on psychology than like an apology for Calvinism. This was because the Enlightenment was simultaneously Jonathan Edwards’ friend and enemy. His serene confidence in traditional Calvinism made him hostile to the Enlightenment’s pretensions to base human behavior on reason and nature; and it made him receptive to the notion that true spiritual harmony was possible only by overcoming the superficial allure of reason and nature. Yet, he believed just as firmly, that reason, once it was sanctified by conversion of the heart, was an instrument to be well used in examining nature. Edwards’ intellectual life was rooted in one of the Enlightenment’s principal questions about epistemology.

People who try to stay astride of conflicting intellectual movements, with one foot in one camp and one foot on another, or one foot in one answer and one foot in another; are usually destroyed by the conflict between the two. Edwards is that rare exception, who instead, turns conflicts into a creative intellectual fusion, in this case, of Enlightenment and piety. In so doing, Edwards fashioned a new Evangelical form of piety, a form which would become one of the two great long-term forces in the history of American ideas.

Intellectual Problems in the Age of Enlightenment and Arising of the Great Awakening

2009-03-04T04:05:00.000-08:00

The Enlightenment, in Europe and in America, made a lot of questions. But at the end of the day, its fundamental question was about epistemology, about how we know things. For instance, when we have an idea in our minds, what causes it? If we have an idea of a chair, what is the relationship between the idea of the chair that we have and the chair itself? Does the chair cause the idea to be formed in our minds? If we press that question, it strongly implies that our minds are passive, simply waiting for things like chairs to cause them. If so, is the physical process which communicates information about the chair (our five senses) reliable? When we have an idea, is that idea presented to a mind, which is to say, a spiritual non-material consciousness that can deliberate and exercise free will about how to respond to the idea; or simply is received by a brain, which is to say an electrically charged assembly of gray matter that responds to certain kinds of simulations. In the later case free will is an illusion, and the notion that we have a conscious soul is just another religious deception.

The Enlightenment invented three basic responses to the question of how we know things. The first of which was simply materialism, in other words, human beings are composed entirely of material substance. In fact, the universe itself is composed only of material substance. And those substances obey the same scientific laws that all other substances obey. Minds, therefore, are only brains. Ideas, only responses to stimulus. Likewise, freedom of will, a charming illusion. Religion, little more than a human device for coping with fear and curiosity.

Materialism and Immaterialism

This position first was stated out in the English-speaking world by Thomas Hobbes, the skeptical and atheistic political philosopher; but its most successful popularization came in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690. Like Hobbes, Locke located the source of human ideas in physical sensation, and although his analysis of the mind’s operation was a lot more sophisticated than Hobbes’, the basic result was the same: human thought was a process explainable as the result of physical sensation. According to Locke, ideas were not spiritual entities or beings prepackaged in our minds at birth or communicated by God through divine illumination. Ideas are nothing more than the object of the mind’s attention at any given moment. Locke was careful to deny that this made him an atheist like Hobbes, but he was repeatedly accused of being Hobbes’ Trojan horse.

This materialism, however, provoked an equal but opposite reaction. That reaction was contained in the immaterialism of Bishop George Berkeley. Berkeley attacked Locke’s analysis of ideas by pointing out that Locke had unwillingly painted himself into a corner on this one critical point: how did the mind actually know that the information that it was receiving from the senses was reliable. Locke had to admit that our ideas can only represent objects, the objects themselves only make impressions on the senses, and the senses convey impulses to the mind, where an idea of the object is assembled. But the mind never comes into direct contact with the objects themselves, our sensations are all that our minds ever have direct contact with. Knowledge is really only accumulated from the representations made by the senses.

So, Locke was a realist, in other words, knowledge is based on our sensations of real objects, which have real existence outside our thoughts. Locke was a representational realist, because the mind never gets into actual contact with those objects, only with their representations in the form of ideas. But Bishop Berkeley observed on that basis that we have no guarantee whatsoever that our ideas represent anything, or that they arise from sensation of objects outside our consciousness. If we have no knowledge except about our ideas, then we have no way to get around those ideas and start talking about a world that exists beyond our ideas. That, in turn, raised the question of where our ideas actually come from. Ideas do not possess wills of their own with which to cause their own existence. They are not like pop-ups in a computer screen. Berkeley’s answer was the other end antithesis of Hobbes’ and Locke’: God causes all our ideas.

Everything which we know is in fact a creation of God directly on our minds. The real source of our ideas is not in objects, but in the perception of objects. And the only perception of objects are ideas formed in our minds by God.

All this may be philosophically fun, but the fact was that Berkeley’s immaterialism was almost as unacceptable to the majority of European thinkers as an explanation of how we know things as Hobbes’ atheism. Immaterialism never amounted to more than a minority report in the Enlightenment. The majority report was, as usual, left to a compromise position. This is why the Cartesian method won so many converts. Descartes could doubt the existence of everything, except the operations of his own mind. But since the mind was capable of discovering and proving its own existence, that showed that the mind had an existence independent of matter. So, spiritual substances (minds), and material substances (bodies and objects), could coexist in the universe.

The best illustration of this coexistence was Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. Gravity was nothing if not the ideal way of showing how spirit, in this case God, could operate upon matter without needing to directly move or alter it beyond the laws of physics. Just as planets move effortlessly through empty space in their own unsupported orbits, so the entire universe could function just as effortlessly. Both Descartes and Newton opened up a way to have the new philosophy and still have God. But it was clear that the God who emerged from their debates was no longer the God of the Bible or the God of the Reformation, but a God defined by what the natural order would allow them to say about spiritual substance. This may have satisfied Descartes and Newton, but not the broad spectrum of European opinion in the Enlightenment, which is why in the midst of this Enlightenment there occurs a remarkably and utterly impressive reawakening of the most intense and “aggressive” forms of Evangelical Christianity.

The Great Awakening

In protestant Germany it appeared in the form of what became known as Pietism. In England it appeared in the Methodist revival of John Wesley. But in all of them, the most intense and passionate Christian piety was reawakened across Europe, in great number and force, which made the Enlightenment look shallow and inconsequential. Even though nothing could be more certain than the spiritual and intellectual gulf which separates these awakenings from the spirit of the Enlightenment, it is important to see that the Enlightenment and the Awakenings shared some important common ground.

There was, as it turned out, more than one way to have a revolution against Aristotle. In general, the awakenings shared with the Enlightenment the skepticism about the usefulness and virtue of the established churches in Europe, Protestant and Roman Catholic alike. They also shared the impulse to find a more authentic and natural kind of experience. The Enlightenment wanted to abandon Christianity almost entirely and uncover a more basic and authentic religion of nature. The Awakeners did not want to abandon Christianity, but they sought to recover a more basic and authentic religion as well. Not the religion of nature, but the religion of the heart. The true piety of primitive basic Christianity.

These Awakeners would read the new science, but use it to prove the impotence and limitations of the human reason before a universal system so vast and incomprehensible. It is at this point in the history of the American mind that the name of Jonathan Edwards springs almost automatically to the lips.

The Enlightenment in America

2009-03-02T11:52:00.000-08:00

Harvard was not the only place in America which had to face the challenges of a new philosophy. The English colony of Virginia had been founded more than two decades before Massachusetts Bay, but its settlers had no guiding religious vision and no incentive to found colleges. In fact, not much incentive to do anything else than hunger after quick fortunes in America’s first commodity: tobacco. Like Massachusetts, Virginia had been founded as a private corporate enterprise by the Virginia company in 1607. The Virginia company never paid a single dividend to stockholders and went bankrupt in 1622. At that point, the Crown might had decided to retrieve the unhappy employees in Virginia and give up on licensing fruitless commercial ventures in America. But the Crown wanted no responsibility for American enterprises, whether starting or ending them. Instead, the royal government in London left the employees of the Virginia company in Virginia to organize their affairs there as best as they could, sending a governor or two to give some semblance of English authority to matters. Until 1685, the Crown’s interest in America never moved much beyond that.

The Crown handed out ridiculous awards of land in America to Court favorites. For the most part, the government allowed the colonies to develop their own ad hoc assemblies and behave almost as they were little sovereignities of their own. With 3000 ocean miles between England and America, no one on either side was much inclined to complain. At least not until the end of the 1600’s. Then the attitudes of the imperial planners in London began to change for an unexpected reason.

So long as colony planning in America looked like digging a bottomless money pit, the royal government in London wanted nothing to do with any responsibility for colonial affairs. By the end of the 1600’s, however, the colonies had managed to invert this proposition completely. America had proven so fertile, and the religiously eccentrics England had sent there so unpredictably resourceful; that the mother country was beginning to sustain an unfavorable balance of trade with America. What was more; England’s great rivals, the French, had begun to awaken to the importance of waging imperial war on England through its own American colonies. Between 1690 and 1763 France and England became entangled in a series of wars in America that forced the British Crown to pour vital military resources into the protection of its North American colonies.

In process, the British could not help noticing several things in passing. First of all, they noticed that the Americans were quite happy to have the British carrying the burden of imperial expenses. Secondly, they noticed that the Americans were surprisingly prosperous, unregulated by British law. And many colonials assumed that they were good Englishmen as one could find in Britain. The more prosperous the Americans became, the more they wanted to wear the newest English style, read the newest English literature, become members of English learned societies, and in general, to behave as though they were decent Englishmen; and not the Robinson Crusoes the earlier generation had been.

Throughout the colonies, there was a self-conscious effort to Anglicize colonial life through the deliberate imitation of metropolitan institutions, values and cultures. They wanted, in other words, to think of themselves primarily as Britons rather than the descendants of convicts and religious oddballs.

The Empire surely understood how they should be treating them. From the 1690’s onwards, Britain began gradually reaching for more and more of the control it had once claimed to be too expensive. By the same turn, fewer and fewer Americans seemed to object to it. This included the intellectual life of the colonies.

As much as France is routinely thought of as the national capital of the Enlightenment, both the French and the rest of Europe thought of England as the nation of Enlightenment par excellence. England had a government with a Parliament far more powerful, and a monarch far less arbitrary than any other in Europe. It possessed a commercial culture that gave no automatic economic point to noblemen over merchants. It had an established protestant church, but by the end of the 1600’s and the beginnings of the 1700’s, that Church was no longer in the business of persecuting other religions. Even the bishops of the Church prided themselves over their broad-mindedness.

With the lapsing of the censorship laws in England in the 1690’s, Englishmen had the most unrestricted and free willing press and book culture in the world. The dawn of the 1700’s became the dawn of an age of literature: of Alexander Pope, of Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson. It also became the dawn of an era or political radicalism and religious ease.

The Expansion of the Enlightenment to other Colleges

When at the end of the 1600’s the British government concluded that it would be a good idea to harness the American horse more securely to the British carriage; it began to do so by imposing new taxes, by sending out new administrators and by building in the colonies more and more English institutions. When King William and Queen Mary sent Francis Nicholson to Virginia as the new Royal Governor in 1691, he not only imposed a new political regime in Virginia, but he presented the colonial assembly with a bill to organize a college, a college to be appropriately named for the English monarchs themselves: William and Mary.

It was intended to be a perpetual college of divinity, philosophy, languages and other good arts and sciences; which sounds very much like a good replay of the Harvard curriculum from the 1640’s. But William and Mary’s first president, James Blair, was a great admirer of John Locke, and by the 1720’s the library of William and Mary was full of the unusual array of books by Bacon, Locke and Newton. By the time the young Thomas Jefferson arrived to William and Mary in 1760 to begin his education, its tutors were already renowned as men of the Enlightenment.

Something similar happened in Pennsylvania. The charter which the King gave to William Penn to organize a settlement North of Maryland in 1682 contained no references to religious eccentricity. But Penn had in 1663 turned Quaker. He envisioned his new colony as a refuge for his fellow Quakers. Over time his colony emerged as one of the most commercially thriving in British North America. Its chief city, Philadelphia, became British America’s de facto capital. Despite Penn’s efforts, Pennsylvania joined the rush to anglicize. Even Penn’s own sons eventually abandoned Quakerism and joined the Church of England.

The residual hostility of Pennsylvania Quakers to formal education prevented Pennsylvania from developing a Harvard or a William and Mary until 1740, and the founding in that year of the Academy of Philadelphia, which then became the college of Philadelphia and then the University of Pennsylvania. But the college of Philadelphia quickly established itself as a center of Enlightenment reading. Philadelphia became home, by the time of the Revolution, to a group of Enlightenment intellectuals: Benjamin Rush, William and John Bartram, Benjamin Franklin, Francis Addison and Samuel Stanhope Smith. All of whom accomplished America’s best reconciliation of the demands of Newtonian science with natural religion. The Enlightenment, remarked Thomas Jefferson, was never so advantageously taught anywhere else in America than in Philadelphia.

In the end, not even the conservatives who founded Yale college in 1701 were immune to the “threat” of the English-speaking Enlightenment. Although the Yale curriculum was built around the authors that Harvard had once prescribed, it also allowed the use of William Brattle’s logic textbook. By 1718, one of the Yale tutors, Samuel Johnson, was introducing Yale undergraduate students to the reading of John Locke. If to prove how corrosive the attraction of anglization and the new philosophy might be, in 1722, the rector of the college, Timothy Cutler, and four of the tutors, publicly renounced Congregationalism and took ship to England to be ordained as priests of the Church of England.

The Enlightenment apparently had won over the colonies. And the colonies had shown themselves over too happy to be won over. If that is the conclusion that we draw from these reviews of facts, we are committing a big mistake, because the dissatisfied energies of religious revival were about to erupt.

What was the Enlightenment

2009-03-02T05:48:00.000-08:00

What was the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is often thought of as being an antireligious event, overturning the credibility of Christian explanations of the universe based on the Bible with scientific ones based on careful observation and experimentation. This too is only partly true. What Enlightenment science challenged was the principle of automatic authority: whether was the authority of the Bible, of Aristotle or of logic itself. A good deal of the Enlightenment was composed of clergymen and other religious thinkers who had no trouble finding that the Bible was more or less right after all, and that Christianity was a good thing.

Maybe the most fundamental misperception of the Enlightenment is that it was a movement about skepticism and criticism. It certainly liked to maintain a fashionable flippancy toward conventional ways of thinking, but the Enlightenment was also a very optimistic movement. Its fundamental aim was not to entertain skepticism, but to banish it, and to find in science and in scientific methods a better basis for certainty and for balanced living than in Aristotle or Cicero.

We could boil the Enlightenment down to two basic attitudes. The first would be the primacy of reason: the mind is not content with simply being told that something is true. It is not even content with admitting that someone else can be exactly be proved wrong. The mind has to be shown that something is true by standards of consistency and physical evidence which satisfy one’s own reason. The alternatives to this is either:

a) a submission to dogmatic authority, which never really uncovers anything useful, it just invites someone to be clever with the words and the arrangement of terms, or:

b) skepticism, nothing can ever be known for sure.

The first of these alternatives had been the chief operating notion of European thinkers since the Middle ages. It was this notion which Copernicus began to undermine in 1543, by suggesting that the conventional Aristotelian understanding of the Solar System, which puts the Earth at the center and has the Sun and the planets revolving in circles around it, lies in error; and that the Sun is at the center of the Solar System. However, the turmoil of the great religious wars of the 1500’s and the 1600’s, as well as some severe problems within Copernicus’ own theory, kept all of this in the realm of hypothesis until the invention of the telescope and its use in 1610 by Galileo Galilei, who’s direct observation of the Moon and the planets wrecked the authority of Aristotle for good.

Ten years later, Sir Francis Bacon published his Novum Organum, which called upon his contemporaries to toss aside Aristotle and the teachers of scholastic logic, and form an acquaintance with things. The best demonstration, said Bacon, by far, is experience. It is time for people to use their reason to put together the lessons of experience into a new scheme of knowledge which describes nature, rather than putting their reason to the service of the cobweb world of scholastics, said Bacon.

The second great aspect of the Enlightenment was its reverence for the testimony of nature. Because it was nature, newly measurable through scientific instruments as the telescope and the microscope, which afforded the raw materials upon which reason would operate. In nature, diligent experimenters would discover the real order of things, not the artificial one invented by Aristotle and the logic textbooks.

Isaac Newton, one of the most gifted mathematicians of his age and probably of subsequent ages, relentlessly reduced the motions of physical bodies to the laws of attraction at a distance, or gravity. John Locke, with equal relentlessness, reduced the human mind to a passive receiver of sensations from the body. And Charles de Montesquieu, turning to politics and society, found government shaped not according to a single model handed down from heaven on a platter; but by the individual histories, events, accidents, preferences and religions of each nation. Nature came first, then analysis.

This is often why people so often concludes that the enemy of the Enlightenment was religion. In Italy, the Catholic Church tried to silence Galileo; while in England Newton had to keep his own very unorthodox religious opinions very much to himself. Locke was even indicted for heresy. But the Enlightenment thought that its real enemy was skepticism, by which I mean the attitude that nothing can be known for sure about anything.

Skepticism was no small threat in the 1600’s. Beginning in 1521, protestant Europe and catholic Europe commenced a bloodbath of religious warfare, which lasted until 1648. Despite each side’s claim to be representing the truth of God, both catholics and protestants had to settle at the treaty of Westphalia, for no better result than an exhausted agreement to leave each other alone. Not surprisingly, more than a few Europeans decided that if you couldn’t be sure whether God was a catholic or a protestant, then there was no reason to be sure of anything.

Men do not recognize the natural informity of the mind, complained the French skeptic Michel de Montaigne, it does nothing but search, contriving and entangling in its own work. This skepticism, much more than any malevolent church court, threatened all hope of reaching a real understanding of why catholics and protestants behaved the way they did; and why the universe followed the pattern it did.

Scholastic logic had worked for so many centuries because it assumed the validity of its own foundations, starting with certain accepted truths and arranging them in patterns that supported its conclusions. But both science and religious wars made that foundation unstable. So, the greatest work of the Enlightenment had to be done at the very beginning by showing that something could be known at all. That was the work that fell to Rene Descartes.

A New Foundation for Knowledge

The contribution of Descartes was to show how something could be known with certainty. The method he devised for this was unlike the scholastics’: to begin with doubt. One could, said Descartes, doubt everything; or almost everything, since the one thing that you could not doubt was the fact that you were doubting. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. From that single certainty Descartes worked back to certainty about God, about existence and so forth. What we have to bear in mind is that the way Descartes walked from doubt to certainty still indisputably led back to God and Christianity. That was what made Descartes and the Cartesian method so appealing to Harvard, which by the 1680’s did not enjoy much stability or certainty.

In 1654, President Dunster announced that he had gone full length into separatism and adopted the views of Baptists, who were a group within English Puritanism who repudiated the baptism of children altogether. Dunster resigned the presidency of Harvard under pressure from the Massachusetts General Court.

The finances of the college were just as unstable. Even with the income of John Harvard’s legacy and the contributions from the Massachusetts’ treasury, the entire budget of Harvard amounted to no more than 250 pounds per year. From there, matters got only worse. Dunster was followed in the presidency by a clergyman, Charles Chauncy; Leonard Hoar, and another clergyman, Urian Oakes. A succession of weak presidents that were so unprepared to run the college that the “ungoverned youths” of Harvard drove one of them nearly to suicide.

Finally, 1684 Harvard got its first real star President: Increase Mather, the pastor of the old church in Boston and the most famous minister of Boston in New England’s second generation. It was Mather who successfully solved the problem of royal threat to assert direct control of Harvard. He also obtained the right of the Massachusetts General Court to set the college up as an independent corporation. It was Mather who brought to Harvard two of the most influential teachers: John Leverett and William Brattle.

Brattle is the embodiment of the cautious Enlightenment. The logic textbook Brattle wrote in 1687: “A Compendium of Logic According to the Modern Philosophy”, is the first Cartesian logic work produced in America. It adopts the Cartesian tactic of starting from doubt. Again, starting not from authority as with the traditional scholastic philosophy; rather, Bratlle began with doubt and from doubt working to attain certainty. But plainly, the purpose Brattle had in view was to undercut skepticism, not to call into question truth itself. What he wanted to do was to dig a new epistemological foundation for Calvinist orthodoxy.

To doubt of things and suppose them to be all false, only for the obtaining of more full and direct knowledge, is a laudable method. That was the view of Brattle. Because doubt, he said, was what showed the way to prove a truth and demonstrate it to others.

He was careful to limit the application of the Cartesian method to philosophical questions, not theological ones, in a manner similar to that of William Ames. And like Ames, he considered that unbelief was not a fault of theology, but grew instead out of the perverted will of the skeptic. This is very much a cautious approach and embracement of Enlightenment thinking.

The New Philosophy in Harvard

John Leverett, on the other hand, seemed not to have use for caution at all. Born to the habits of the New England’ merchant aristocracy, the grand son of an early governor, a layman and eventually representative in the Massachusetts General Court; Leverett assumed the presidency of Harvard in 1708. Leverett was not a particularly great thinker, but he was a great admirer of Descartes and the new philosophy. Even more significantly, he discouraged Calvinist dogmatism in favor of what he called “more generous principles”. Leverett would, in other words, talk more about virtue than about redemption. He put his entire support behind the organization of a new church in Boston, who’s manifesto in 1699 proclaimed the church congregational, not by reason of scripture, but by the light of nature.

Too late, old Increase Mather tried to block Leverett’s ascension to Harvard’s presidency. Even when the game was lost, Mather’s precocious son, Cotton Mather, mounted his own campaign against Leverett. He was wasting his time. Eventually, with some bitterness, the Mathers realized that Harvard had become an outpost of these “generous principles” rather than Calvinistic ones.

When the unhappy Calvinist congregation and ministers decided that Leverett had gone too far into Cartesian method and the new philosophy, organized a new college of their own in New Haven, with the generosity of another wealthy patron of learning: Elihu Yale.

Continues in: The Enlightenment in America

The Influence of Separatism Over Harvard and the First Generation of Americans

2009-02-26T03:33:00.000-08:00

One place where the mix of separatist inclination and traditional establishment was dramatically highlighted was a across the Charles river from Boston, in the town of Cambridge, where in 1636, a college was founded and named after its first major benefactor: John Harvard. Harvard was not a college similar to what we might think of colleges now. The universities of Europe still moved in the 1600’s in the circle established by scholastic theology in the Middle Ages, which is to say that the chief tool of learning was logic, not the laboratory experiment. The principal source of truth was authority, not nature. The principal language was Latin, with the principal authority being Aristotle.

17th century thinkers aspired to the creation of a summary of all knowledge. A framework that William Ames, the greatest of English Puritan academics, called tecnologia, which would, they hoped, perfect the whole man. They emphasized chiefly what we today would call classical learning. The six arts of logic, theology, grammar, rhetoric, mathematics and physics. They included virtually nothing that we would call professional of vocational studies, including nothing that we might call practical.

The Art of Argumentation

Logic was the art of discoursing well. It concentrated on the arrangement of arguments in sharp-like fashion from the general to the specific. An arrangement which would assure victory in argument and a full exploration of the terms of the argument. That explains why the New Englanders were so intent on college-building so quickly. The culture of Puritanism was built upon logical argument. It was built on the exposition of Biblical texts. Calvinism itself was very much an exercise in the arrangement of logical and interrelated theological axioms. To preach well was a department of discoursing well, so you needed an institution which trained people in discoursing well.

Puritan preaching, in fact, developed a rigorous methodology that was patterned after university logic, in which the preacher was expected to follow a stated three-part formulae. First would come the doctrine: a particular biblical verse or biblical verses would be read out and then they would be taken apart, term by term, for the exposition of every possible meaning. The next part of the sermon would be the uses: those various meanings would be reassembled in a series of linked and persuasive theological propositions. Then the preacher would turn to the application. These applications or uses would be turned into a series of practical, everyday rules for living or self examination, or maybe just for pious mediation.

Pious meditation. It was on that last point that a question was bound to be presented. If the purpose of Harvard college was the raising of a ministry who could pose practical questions, who could create an atmosphere of pious meditation, then why was that the education that fitted them for this was based on what everybody admitted to be an education in pagan classical authors: Aristotle, Cicero and so forth.

Using the Ancient Pagans and the Source of Knowledge

Medieval universities had coped with this by asserting that the study of these pagans could be redeemed by understanding that God actually used them to announce the truth, or that the truths that pagans articulated had somehow been borrowed from the Bible. Or that all truth is God’s truth, even if that are the pagans that discovered it first. But if Protestantism was supposed to involve a comprehensive renovation of Christianity, then it was going to be difficult to stop that renovation short of questioning such rationalizations. That questioning settled principally on two issues, the logic curriculum and the structure of human psychology.

Logic, in both the medieval and Protestant uses of the term, referred to both the origins of knowledge (epistemology, how we know things), and the arrangement of that knowledge to yield truth statements or axioms. The Puritans were realists, which is to say that they understood that the senses convey real information about the world around us. The measure of one’s intellectual insight laid in how one arranged the data one encountered into orderly relationship. This order was an entirely logical one, not an experimental one. But it did assume that there was order in the nature of things, imposed by the God who created things. Discerning that order was very much a matter of getting propositions about God and nature that illuminated the inner essence of things and the hidden will and plan of God.

Unfortunately for the aspiring Harvardian in the 17th century, protestant scholastic textbooks all united in offering different ways of arranging these propositions about God and nature. The question for the pious New England student turned on who’s system yielded the more theologically orthodox protestant conclusions. On that point there was very little agreement.

William Ames, representing the more radical approach to intellectual system building, was critical of using the ancients as the foundation for moral reason. For instance, Ames believed that ethics should not stand as an independent study on its own, with its teachings hammered out by logical connections between moral axioms. Ames believed that ethics should be studied only as a department of theology, which is a shorthand way of saying that there was no moral truth or theory of moral truth worth studying apart from Calvinistic Protestant Christianity. The highest kind of life for a human being, wrote Ames, is that which approaches most closely the living and life-giving God. So, any attempt to study ethics, apart from what God had revealed about the topic, was pointless. Why go to Aristotle? Why go to Cicero? God’s revelation of this truth in the Bible was the only material from which to lift a logical system of moral philosophy.

Ames was skeptical that the classical pagans could convey moral truth purely by the efforts of unassisted reason. Ames did not object to the notion that knowledge was the fruit of logic, that it resulted from linking correct propositions to correct propositions; but he was unconvinced that ethics could be based on the same data or the same premises as natural philosophy. This had direct implications for the study of human psychology (although the scholastics had no idea of the social science discipline called psychology). I’m saying this precisely because ethics, according to Ames, could not be rightly understood as a function of unassisted reason. This is the way scholastics understood human physique.

Human Nature and Belief in God

From the very beginnings of European universities in the 1100’s, the inner life of human beings had been pictured as a series of faculties: will, understanding, judgement and so for. Right reason was dependent on adequate comprehension of how these faculties operate. There was, unhappily, no consensus on how the faculties were to be appropriately arranged. The greatest of the scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, was an intellectualist, which is to say that he believed the intellect to be the queen of the faculties.

A number of important protestants, including Calvin, agreed. But there was also one tradition in medieval thought, going all the way back to Augustine, which found human behavior too much unpredictable to be the result of the governing intellect. Instead, these Voluntarists, including Ames, gave to the will the place of greatest power. True Christian faith, wrote Ames, has a place in the understanding, but it cannot be received without genuine turning of the will towards God. Belief involved understanding, but understanding alone did not define belief. The will, said Ames, must be moved and rechartered to embrace the good.

Harvard Curriculum and the New Structure of Society

The Harvard curriculum swayed steadily between the competing demands of these theories. And with good reason. Intellectualism implied one sort of relationship between Church and society, and Voluntarism implied a very different one. A church order like the one in England could claim the allegiance of all the people of Massachusetts if what was necessary was only an intellectual ascent to theological propositions. If what Massachusetts Bay wanted most was the creation of a somewhat modified, somewhat more pious and purified version of the Church of England; such an intellectual ascent was all that was needed to induct everyone in that society into the church. So, it only made sense to teach at Harvard that the intellect was indeed the queen of the faculties.

But if, as Ames insisted, it was the will the true queen; then God could be served by nothing less than the full conscious embrace of those propositions as an active love. And that only by divine grace. If the voluntarists were right, then the corresponding notion of the church and society had to be that of the separatists, who denied admission to the church to all but those who could made a conscious willing profession of divine grace.

Of course, to embrace voluntarism meant surrendering the pretence that Puritanism was only about rehabilitating the Church of England. It meant revolutionizing any basis for establishing a puritanized version of a national church in Massachusetts. But if that happened, then Massachusetts’ society would become completely detached from the Church, it would, even worse, become exactly the sort of pagan society described by the classical authorities that the Puritans were so suspicious about.

The Harvard curriculum, at first, shifted uncomfortably in the shadow of William Ames. Ames, who died in the Netherlands in 1633 as yet another Puritan exile from English religious oppression, was the most dearly loved of all Puritan theologians. The high personal standing he enjoyed in the Puritan churches made it difficult to keep Ames from being put at the center of the Harvard curriculum.

The founders of Harvard were of Puritan beliefs by conviction and of scholastic tradition by habit. And habit meant that Ethics should be taught at Harvard as a stand-apart subject, starting with Aristotle. And Massachusetts went on its way, trying to think of itself as an integrated Christian society, just as in the Middle Ages it had been. The problem was that between 1630 and 1660 subtly it became much harder to keep the old intellectual habits at Harvard. Part of this arose from an unpleasant and unanticipated development in the history of New England. The Puritans had children who did not necessarily wanted to be Puritans, or not at least in the way their parents had been. It was the first instance of what would be a common experience among immigrants to the New World.

Separationism and the New Generation

The generation born in America enjoyed all the blessings of the environment that the immigrant generation had helped to build in America and probably took them for granted. At worst, it actually experienced a sense of embarrassment among the enthusiasm and sacrifices that brought their parents to leave the old country in the first place.

In this case, a new generation was born in New England which felt none of the urgency of piety that took their parents to abandon England for the New World. And far worst than merely feeling embarrassed, the new generation found itself entangled in a web which their parents had spun as they thought for their own good and for the greater glory of God.

What New England’s second generation discovered was the downside of the separatist impulse to exclude all but the gracious from the church. They had never known the oppression of the crown. With that, they lacked the passion and determination to find grace in their own souls. Since grace, and not birth, was what qualified New Englanders for membership in the churches, the separatist impulse in Puritanism left them on the outside of the churches starring in. As it did so, the claim of Massachusetts to be a godly society began to weaken. After all, how can a society consider itself godly when its children are outside the discipline of the church and cannot confess enough faith to join it.

Linked to that challenge from inside, was a second challenge from the outside. By 1687, the English government finely reached out to impose control over Massachusetts’ affairs. Revoking the original Massachusetts Bay Company charter, introducing Church of England worship into Boston, and even restructuring Harvard. There was yet a third challenge to the godly New England by the 1680’s. This came from entirely intellectual rather than political sources. That was a spectacular revolution in thought, called the Enlightenment.

This article is part of the series on American Puritanism

The Essence of Puritan Thinking and the Exodus to the Americas

2009-02-25T04:01:00.000-08:00

There is one sense in which those who argue for the non-existence or irrelevance of the American mind are right. America is not the creation of someone’s ideas. Its discovery by Europeans at the end of 1400’s emerged from no particular plan or blueprint. It was the offspring of a handful of relentlessly practical entrepreneurs who were looking for shorter and more direct paths for trade with the Orient than the tedious way Eastward around Africa. The fact that they discovered not a direct rout to China but two enormous land masses on the Americas was not an occasion for joy. Once it became apparent that these land masses could not be easily gotten around, most Europeans lost interest in America. Those who remained interested turned their attention to extracting by the readiest means available whatever articles of commercial wealth the American continents possessed.

After most of the treasures have been lifted by murderous European hands from the poorly armed and poorly defended native American owners, the curiosity of most of those Europeans, mainly the Spanish, focused on the preservation of a few colonial posts and the exploitation of some commodities, like fur, timber and fish.

The result was that a century after Columbus realized that there was not quick sea rout Westward to Asia, Europe’s total investment in America was limited to a thinly spread collection of soldiers, missionaries and freebooters. That sums up, in not too flattering terms, what the original European settlement of the American continent was all about. All of which provides absolutely no precedent for the appearance in 1630 on the coast of New England of what looked for all the world like a fleet of university professors and their students. They were called Puritans. And a very great deal of what we call American intellectual history flows downstream from them.

The Beginning of Calvinism and Puritan Theology

In 1517, the German monk Martin Luther raised the banner of theological rebellion against the authority of the Catholic Church in what has become universally known as the Protestant Reformation. The specific issue which triggered the reformation was theological, but that issue implicated a host of others, and in short order, Luther’s followers had begun to remodel other features of traditional Catholic belief.

In Switzerland, a French protestant named John Calvin reconstituted the organization of the Church. The Church had always been a hierarchy, with the bishop of dioceses at the top and the Pope in Rome as the bishop of the bishops; the priests below and the lay people underneath. Calvin refashioned this hierarchy, with priests now renamed as elders or presbyters ruling the churches jointly with lay leaders. Calvin also refined and expanded Luther’s theological protests, so that a uniquely Calvinist protestant theology eventually emerged based on five fundamental points.

The first of these points was total depravity. In other words, all human beings are born sinners and the of God’s grace if they expect to live their lives here and enjoy eternal life in the hereafter. Secondly, unconditional election; since human beings are born sinful, they don’t have any prospect of pulling themselves up by their own ethical efforts, they have to hope for God’s grace and his initiative. The third point was limited atonement. The thing which justifies God in bestowing grace on sinners is the redemption made by the self-offering and death of Jesus Christ. However, this atonement is not free for all, it would apply and it is limited to only those whom God elects to receive grace. Next point is irresistible grace: when God does choose someone to receive this grace, there is no resistance in it; given the fact that is God who is doing the choosing, it is hard to think how they could. The last point in Calvin’s thinking is known as perseverance of the saints: God never lets any of his elects fall away.

These five points were not actually formulated as a system until a century later after Calvin’s death, and they had to compete with several others forms of protestant theology. But Calvinism was certainly the most logical, and in England, the most dangerous of Protestant theologies. Dangerous, but not because England was more pious than the rest of Europe.

The Church of England

King Henry VIII of England brought his kingdom into the Protestant column in the 1530’s guided strictly by a political desire to get the Pope’s meddling fingers out of his realm. Henry lived and died with the notion that he could deny the sovereignty of the Pope in England while retaining traditional Catholic theology and the structure of bishops, priests and people; only with himself rather than the Pope at the top of the hierarchy.

England was so conservative in his religious ways that Henry was much more successful pulling this off than it seems possible. Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth, who became Queen of England in 1558, settled matters down in pretty much the shape her father had expected. Under Elizabeth, the English Church would be independent of Rome, and probably a good deal more protestant in its theology than Henry may have wanted. But its structure would be national. Every English subject would automatically belong to the Church of England, be baptized into it at birth and would support it with compulsory taxes. Its hierarchy would be traditional. There would continue to be bishops, priests and people. And its worship would be liturgical, out of a national manual known as the Book of Common Prayer.

Elizabeth made life exceptionally nasty for anyone who clung to the old Catholic ways. Any kind of affection for Catholicism was treated by Elizabeth in England as treason. But life could be as nasty for those English protestants who felt that Elizabeth had left entirely too many of the old Catholic ways in place. They considered Calvin as the model and solution for English Christianity. Elizabeth regarded them as been fully as much apart as the Catholics. These were the people who became known first as Precicians, because they wanted to be too precise about Church reformation. Then eventually as Puritans.

Puritans in Different Shapes and Colors

For the first two decades of her reign, Elizabeth had more to deal with from the Catholics at home and abroad than from the Puritans. Puritans of various shapes won lodgements at many levels in the English Church, the English Universities and even in the Queen’s government. A number of Elizabeth’s bishops, like Edmund Grindal, who served as the senior archbishop of the Church of England; and entire colleges within the universities had sympathy with Calvinist ideas.

This could happen because many of these Puritans were interested in little more than some mild tweaking. These represented the mildest challenge to the Queen’s dictate. Other Puritans, shifting a bit more towards the radical end of the spectrum, wanted more than just a tweaking of the Church of England. These Puritans wanted the Crown to mandate the adoption of the Calvinist system of presbyterian organization.

There were other Puritans yet for whom Calvin was only a starting point on the road to reform, not the goal. People who were impatient with the bishops ruling over the churches were often not better pleased with Calvin’s committee of ministers doing the same thing. These Puritans, known as Independents and later as Congregationalists, demanded that each congregation be given sole right to rule its own affairs.

Still other Puritans, more radical still, were the Separatists. They wanted membership to Church limited only to those who give testimony and evidence of having received God’s grace, even if that meant separating such congregations of the elect from the rest of England’s presumably impure society.

After 1588, the year when Spain’s “Armada Invencible” failed in its effort of reconquering England for Catholicism, Elizabeth’s attention turned increasingly and uncomfortably to the Puritan dissidents of her realm. Efforts to whip the Puritans into line with Elizabeth’s Church settlement began in earnest. When Elizabeth died in 1603, the Puritans hoped for sympathy from her successor, James of Scotland, who had been raised as a Calvinist.

James came to England to become King precisely because he was sick of Calvinism and he persecuted the Puritans with even greater vigor. When James died in 1625, his son Charles I proved to be even more severe. English Puritans began to look for a way out.

A New Exodus

Handfuls of the separatists left first, abandoning England for the Calvinist Netherlands; and then in 1620 as pilgrims to the English grand land in America known as New England. Nine years later a major exodus of some 400 Puritans followed them to New England and set up the colony they called Massachusetts Bay. Not for gold, not for glory; but for the first time in America, in pursuit of an idea.

Leaving 17th century England was a little like trying to leave the old Soviet Union. Unless you had a very plausible reason, the attempt was interpreted as an expression of dissatisfaction. The Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay produced what they thought were very plausible reasons. They organized themselves as a commercial enterprise, the Massachusetts Bay Company, and they were all going to make their fortunes in America. That the leaders of the Company were all Puritans was purely accidental, and the Puritan clergymen who happened to be emigrating with them promised that any experiments in reformation that they might be inclined to were only the better part of Church reformation, whatever that meant. It turned out to mean almost anything.

Within ten years, the Massachusetts Bay Company welcomed several thousand Puritan refugees and set up a string of thriving towns stretching Westward from the principal settlement Boston. These towns looked like nothing anyone could have found in old England. In the first place, there was no bishop. Each town established its own church and each church called whomever it wished as the town minister. There was also no prayer book, instead there was plenty of highly Calvinistic preaching. In a number of these churches, merely being born of English parents on English soil was no adequate qualification for church membership. Instead, ministers and elders began asking for testimonies of grace before meeting people to membership.

If this looks like Puritanism sliding to Congregationalism and ready to slide some more into outright Separatism, still, the Puritans of Massachusetts also struggled with some of the older notions of English established national church order. Every town was required to establish a church. Everyone in the town was required to attend. Ministers no longer functioned as officers of the realm, as they did in England. Even marriages had to be performed by a magistrate, just to keep church apart. Still the opinion of ministers in civic affairs were eagerly sought after and they were part of almost every civil event in Massachusetts.

One place where this mix of separatist inclination and traditional establishment was dramatically highlighted was a across the Charles river from Boston, in the town of Cambridge, where the first University in the American continent was founded: Harvard.

This article is part of the series on American Puritanism

The Great Convention of American Intellectual History

2009-02-23T02:26:00.000-08:00

Whenever a brave soul ventures to teach a course on American intellectual history or the American mind, the result is very curious. Your usual course of study follows what I call the “Great Convention” of American intellectual history, and a conventional listing of the authors who should be read in such a course. It looks something like this:

The Puritans

First of all begin with the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay in the 1630’s. If you really want to be daring, begin with America before the Puritans actually arrived and built the town of Boston, just to emphasize the enormous emptiness of the American landscape and the work that would require to reclaim it from the wilderness. This will show how much work had to be done that could not spare time for thinking by these Puritans. But touch, if you like, on the fact that these Puritans possessed a university trained leadership and organized themselves around a university trained clergy, sunk deeply in theology and medieval scholasticism. Note simply passing that the Puritans founded Harvard only sixty years after settling the town of Boston.

The First “thinker”: Jonathan Edwards

Move, as quickly as decency permits, to Jonathan Edwards. Not that Edwards is all that interesting as a thinker, but treat him undoubtedly as the last example of whatever thinking the Puritans did. Dwell at length at his role as a hell fire preacher during the Great Awakening of the 1740’s, but even more, dwell on the fact that the Awakening died out, that Edwards was fired from his job as pastor of a church, and that died just as he was assuming the Presidency of Princeton in 1758. Let Edwards stand as a sign of how badly America treats its thinkers, but somehow simultaneously make him out to be not much of a thinker after all.

Franklin as the Model American

This will get you by the third week of class to Benjamin Franklin. Here you will rhapsodize on Franklin’s famous autobiography and how it introduces us to the model American: practical, commonsensical, businesslike, born with an eye to the main chance.

You can, if there is time, talk a little bit about the ideology of American Revolutionaries. Jefferson, the Declaration and all that; but don’t forget to keep Benjamin Franklin in the front of the stage.

Transcendentalism and Pragmatism

From Franklin, to Ralph Waldo Emerson and the transcendentalists. Read a few New England novelists and then get ready to jump again to William James, John Dewey and the triumph of pragmatism as the first true and only American philosophy, precisely because it is a philosophy which sees no intrinsic use for ideas, but uses them only as instruments for obtaining results.

The rest of the course can be spent studying the works of John Dewey, on results-oriented social commentary and the New Left of the 1960’s. With that, your work of the semester is done. In addition to hitting all the conventional highlights, this kind of course makes it clear that American intellectual history has only two real messages: how we escape the influence of religion and why all American intellectual roads lead to pragmatism. That is the Great Convention.

The Problems with the Convention

There is, however, a difficulty with this great convention of American ideas. Rather, there are actually three difficulties. The first is that the more you look at this, the more apples and oranges get mixed together. Notice that there are very few systematic thinkers here, apart from Edwards and Dewey. Notice also that these writers are different and incompatible. Emerson, for instance, never wrote a book longer than 45 pages. He was an essayist who specialized in the miniature, at a time when writing miniatures for literary reviews paid very handsomely. He earned most of his celebrity as a thinker as a popular lecturer. Dewey, by contrast, was a lifelong academic, a terrible speaker and an intolerably dense writer who nevertheless managed to become an American intellectual idol by the time of his death in the 1950’s. That’s one problem.

The second problem is that most of this convention is suspiciously concentrated around one location: Boston. That is a product, I suspect, of the dominance among American intellectual historians of Harvard and Harvard trained academics. It’s true, Harvard has played a great role in American intellectual life, but it is not the only place.

The third and the most serious problem of the Great Convention is that it presents this succession of thinkers as though they composed a linked chain, like one of those charts showing the development of the Homo Sapiens from a monkey to an upright man. Like those charts, however, the great convention ignores a number of missing links.

Between the day the Puritans founded Harvard and the day Jonathan Edwards began preaching stretches an entire century. New Englanders wrestled mightily with the impact on the world of scholasticism by Cartesian epistemology and Newtonian science. Far from acting as the coda to the Puritan era, Edwards shaped the creation of two generations of independent preachers and theological thinkers who applied Edwards’ creative adaptations of New England's’ struggle with Newton, questions of personal identity and religion.

Nor can it be said that Benjamin Franklin represented some great new departure in American ideas. Franklin was an amateur, an entrepreneur of ideas. Whether he had any significant intellectual impact on anyone in America is not clear. There were Edwarseans for a hundred years after the death of Jonathan Edwards, but I’ve never yet heard anyone tagged as a Franklinian. Franklin’s own adopted home of Philadelphia belonged, at least intellectually, not to Franklin, but to the 18th century Enlightenment as a whole.

The Enlightenment and the Romantics

There are various ways of defining the Enlightenment, both in Europe and America. And we have to say that even Jonathan Edwards belongs to the Enlightenment, to the same Enlightenment of Benjamin Franklin. In the simplest terms, the Enlightenment was the attempt to create, out of criticism and skepticism, a new objective and universal understanding of the world. Rather than standing aloof from the religious concerns of the evangelical awakeners like Jonathan Edwards, the Enlightenment actually incorporated those concerns and produced a generous flowering of what came to be called moral philosophy, with its headquarters in Philadelphia.

The Enlightenment also produced a counterpart in political theory, in the ideology of the American Whig party, represented principally by Abraham Lincoln. By contrast with these heavy Whigs, Emerson and the transcendentalists were romantics. I mean romantic in a very specific sense. Puritanism and its renewal by Jonathan Edwards in the 1740’s opposed many of the things the Enlightenment stood for. Puritans and Edwardsians were people of religious faith. They accepted certain truths about their God and the world as they were described in the Bible. Many of those truths were sorted out and shaped by the theology of John Calvin and by the experience of religious individualism and moral rigor laid down by the first Puritan generation.

But Puritanism was more complex than we often think. Even Edwards had an overlap with the Enlightenment in his respect for reason and universal moral principles. Puritanism and the Enlightenment represent what I also called the two cooks of American intellectual history. We ought to call them the two souls of American intellectual history. It is interesting that Puritanism and the Enlightenment were souls that could inhabit the same American body without necessarily inducing schizophrenia.

In order to switch the analogies back, the two cooks didn’t always fight over what the soup tasted like. Romanticism, however, was another matter. The Enlightenment’s dedication to reason, nature and science paled after a while on succeeding European generations. During that long century that stretches between the French Revolution and the First World War, a massive pilgrim movement against the Enlightenment appeared, which denounced reason as stale and dubious, and which exalted feeling. This movement didn’t seek to control nature but to adore it.

The Enlightenment believed that all real questions have real answers, and that these answers were knowable and universally compatible with one another. The romantics disagreed. Reason was a limited and broken tool. It did not reveal a half of what it claimed to reveal about the world. The romantics believed that people needed to be guided by passion, rather than reason; and that what appeared true to some people was not necessarily true for others or for other cultures.

Consequently, Ralph Waldo Emerson should not be at all linked to Benjamin Franklin, but to the European romantics.

The Beginnings of Pragmatism

The great convention is right on at least one thing. That is the revolutionary outburst of pragmatism at Harvard after the civil war. But even here the great convention often fails us. By trying to see the first generation of the pragmatists, people like William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Sanders Peirce; the great convention frequently presents them as forming part of a full-blown movement waiting to pop out of the American soil. This ignores how very much Pragmatism’s origins were tied to specific historical events: to the catastrophe and disillusion of the civil war, to the adoption of Charles William Eliot’s curriculum reforms at Harvard in 1869, and to the increasing role played by corporate cash and federal regulation in driving out religion from the universities.

The great convention also downplays how different John Dewey’s brand of Pragmatism was from William James’. Or how much it grew out the soil of Transcendentalism. Or how vainly Josiah Royce struggled to substitute a rival version of Pragmatism for James’. Above all, the great convention misses the boat entirely on two developments in the 20th century which none of the pragmatists could have foreseen. The first of this was the rise of a neo-orthodox religious critic and the persistence with which Theology continued as an intellectual enterprise in America.

The second of these developments was a massive wave of European immigrate intellectuals and the emergence from their context, in violent fashion, of a new left in the 1960’s and the new conservatism of the 1980’s and 1990’s. My aim is to lay out for you an entirely different map of the American mind from the one that is laid out by the great convention.

A New Way of Presenting American History

I want to begin, like the others, with the Puritans, but I want you to see them as participants in a larger transatlantic realm of philosophical work, with living connections to the Cartesian and Newtonian revolutions of thought. And I want to see Edwards and his awakeners, and the Enlightenment and its reasoners as those two souls within the American body. Conflicting but not cancelling each other out. I want us to understand the genuinely revolutionary implications of American Romanticism and to understand, in the case of Pragmatism, how historical context shaped ideas.

In the case of Abraham Lincoln and the Whigs, I want us to see how ideas can just as easily shape those historical contexts. I want us to understand American Pragmatism, and to understand why there are as many as 13 different brands of Pragmatism and why Josiah Royce’s dissent is important for us today. Finally, we will talk about what Pragmatism could not account for: the new left, the old left and the new conservatives.

Rather than a great convention that declares winners and losers, what I think we have in American life is more like an ongoing conversation, in which the personalities change but the fundamental positions and the fundamental attitudes do not. I also have a more basic aim at this moment. That is to convince you that Americans really do have a mind. The American Republic was, after all, founded on the idea that all men are created equal. For that reason if for no other, it’s about time for us to get acquainted with our own mind.

Introduction to the History of American Ideas

2009-02-21T05:01:00.001-08:00

There are many ways in which you can study American history. You can study the social history of America, or the political or economic history of America. In so doing you may sometimes feel that these three ways of studying America almost present three entirely different Americas to our gaze. Sometimes it seems as though one didn’t happen in the same place as the other. What ties all the various kinds of history together, however, is how we think about them and how we think, as a nation, about America. This is what we call intellectual history.

As a discipline, intellectual history can cover a broad territory: a little bit of philosophy, a little bit of popular culture, social criticism, literature, political ideas, and all of it stirred by two cooks from which we inherit our most fundamental assumptions: the Puritan cook of New England and the secular cook of the eighteen century’s Enlightenment. Naturally, as the saying goes, the more cooks, the more liable you are to spoil the soup, and the more liable you are to see the two cooks end up beating each other over the head. That’s what makes the study of American ideas so interesting.

The Psalmist said: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he”. That expresses for me how central the history of ideas is to American history.

Is there an American Mind?

I must admit that there are large numbers of people for whom the very proposition that there is an American mind is a puzzlement. By far, the largest segment of that population of skeptics are those who believe that the great defining characteristic of Americans, as opposed to the Germans or the French or the Chinese, is precisely that we don’t labour under the burden of a national mind. American are doers, not thinkers; or at least we are more inclined to “can do” than “think about”. We expect knowledge and education but only to the extent that it helps us solve problems or make sales.

Part of the reason for this is that we are comparatively new among the nations of the Earth, and we had the job of developing an entire continent on our hands for the last two hundred and some more years. This kept us busy to pay much attention to how we think.

Another reason is the fear we have of what ideas can do to people if they become to preoccupy with them. We have the example of the last century in Europe to remind us of what furies people are capable of unleashing in the name of ideas, whether those ideas go by the name of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or the “final solution”.

We are people of moderation in ideas. We are of the political center. Sometimes we even congratulate ourselves on not possessing an American mind at all. In his famous address on the American Scholar in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson jeered at the book-learned class, who valued books as such but not as related to nature and the human constitution. Emerson believed that character is higher than intellect, and he hailed the coming of a democratic paradise in which the single person made up his own mind on everything without the dictate of others.

Doers not Thinkers

The great American historian and librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin summed this up when he described early Americans as a people who focused on immediate, changing and unpredictable needs. They did not pursue the absolute nor spent their thinking on doctrinal things. In every aspect of American life, Boorstin said, ideology was displaced by organization. Sharp distinctions of thought and purpose were overshadowed by the need to get together on common purposes. Even American lawyers, said Boorstin, proceeded undogmatically from case to case, rich in the prudence of individual cases but poor in theoretical principles.

The Effect of Democracy

European observers, however, were not so confident that this was a good thing. The French political observer Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a famous commentary on American democracy based on his travels through the United States in the early 1830’s. He dismayed to find that there is no country in the civilized world where they are less occupied with philosophy than the United States. And not only philosophy, less occupied with theology, with political theory, with fewer great artists, illustrious poets and celebrated writers.

This had occurred, according to de Tocqueville, not as one of the virtues or strengths of democracy, not as something to be boasted about; rather, de Tocqueville treated this as one of the effects of democracy. De Tocqueville would have agreed with Emerson. In a democracy everyone is permitted and even encouraged to think for themselves. The problem is that maybe that wouldn’t always take us in encouraging directions.

Each, said de Tocqueville, withdraws into himself and claims to judge the world from there. A man who undertakes to examine everything by himself would give little time and attention to each thing. And so, in democracies, de Tocqueville concluded, people have only the shallowest of ideas and tend to be tightly chained to the will of the greatest number. In other words, democracy has gave us a thoughtless heart.

No one, however, has been harder on American mindlessness than American themselves. James Fenimore Cooper complained in 1838: “In America the popular press scrutinizes over public men, letters, the arts, the stage and even over private life”. In 1842, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story blamed the vast predominance of the taste for light reading and amusing compositions over that for solid learning and severe and suggestive studies. He took that as a sign of American intellectual decrepitude. The consequence is, said Joseph Story, that many of our best minds devout all their thoughts and time to labours of this sort.

The psychologist Granville Stanley Hall, writing in 1879 said that the college curriculum should not be controlled by the churches and denominations that founded them. There are, Hall wrote, less than half a dozen colleges or universities in the United States where metaphysical thought is entirely free from reference to theological formulae. And the faculties, Hall said, were composed of professors who did nothing but parrot what their teachers had taught them.

If so many Americans and Europeans agree that there was no intellectual life worthy of a historical survey, what am I doing here talking about it?

I want to talk about the American Mind as a historian, not as a philosopher. The preoccupation of professional history people ever since history became an independent discipline in the 1800’s, is to look for historical change and historical explanation in purely material rather than intellectual causes. A model for this has always been Carl Marx, who effortlessly reduced all human events to a struggle, to a dialectic between different economic classes. Marx was neither unique nor original in this, but his reduction of everything to purely material causes carried virtually every other history practitioner along with him.

The result has been the triumph of either social and economic history; or cultural history, which tends to treat all intellectual activity as a front for the real causes: political or economic power, whether this comes in the form of the so-called Annales School, or more recently in the clothing of the so-called New Historicism. It’s what people owned, or ate, or manipulated that counts; rather than what they thought. It is not, in another words, that Americans lack a mind, it’s that in the minds of many historians is the “minds” that don’t matter.

Whenever a brave soul does venture to teach a course on American intellectual history or the American mind, the result is very curious. Your usual course of study follows what I call the “Great Convention” of American intellectual history. I will talk about this convention in the following article: The Great Convention of American Intellectual History.