chapter two: the birth of a nation historical background “arminian” theology the enlightenment...

Chapter Two: The Birth of a Nation

Historical Background

“Arminian” Theology

The Enlightenment ----Deism & Liberalism & Individualism

Major Writers and Literary Works


The most memorable writing in 18th century America was done by the Founding Fathers, the men who led the revolution of 1775----1783 and who wrote the Constitution of 1789. None of them were writers of fiction. Rather, they were practical philosophers, and their most typical product was the political pamphlet. As we have seen, politics became the great subject to command the attention of the best minds. Freedom was won as much by the fiery rhetoric of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the eloquence of the Declaration of Independence as by the weapons of Washington or Lafayette. Without the writings of Thomas Paine, there might have been no army for Washington to lead; without the writings of Thomas Jefferson, France might never have aided the cause.


By the mid-eighteenth century, American colonies were no longer a group of scattered settlements. With rapidly expanding populations, the word “state”, which suggests as independent government, was beginning to replace “colony” in people’s mind. This is an important sign of the political trend.

The growth (especially the industrial growth) led to intense strain with England. Down to 1763, Great Britain had formulated no consistent policy for her colonial possessions. The guiding principle was the confirmed mercantilist view that colonies should supply the mother country with raw materials and not compete in manufacturing. But policy was poorly enforced, and the colonies had never thought of themselves as subservient. Rather, they considered themselves chiefly as commonwealths or states, much like England herself, having only a loose association with authorities in London. However, the British government hampered colonial economic development by requiring Americans to ship raw materials abroad and to import finished goods at prices higher than the cost of making them in this country, moreover, it forced dependence by ruling the colonies from overseas and by taxing the colonies without giving them representation in Parliament.

In the 1780s, the English colonies in North America rose in arms against their mother country. The Independent War lasted for eight years (1775----1783) and ended in the formation of a Federative bourgeois democratic republic----the United States of America. The hard-fought American Revolution against Britain was the first modern war of liberation against a colonial power. The triumph of American independence seemed to many at the time a divine sign that America and her people were destined for greatness. Military victory fanned nationalistic hopes for a great new literature. Yet with the exception of outstanding political writing, few works of note appeared during or soon after the Revolution.


Revolutionary writers, despite their genuine patriotism, were of necessity self-consciousness, and they could never find roots in their American sensibilities. Colonial writers of the revolutionary generation had been born English, had grown to maturity as English citizens, and had cultivated English modes of thought and English fashions in dress and behavior. Their parents and grandparents were English (or European), as were all their friends. Added to this, American awareness of literary fashion still lagged behind the English, and this time lag intensified American imitation.


Fifty years after their fame in England, English neoclassic writers such as Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Oliver Goldsmith, and Samuel Johnson were still eagerly imitated in America.

Moreover, the heady challenges of building a new nation attracted talented and educated people to politics, law, and diplomacy. These pursuits brought honor, glory, and financial security. Writing, on the other hand, did not pay. Early American writers, now separated from England, effectively had no modern publishers, no audience, and no adequate legal protection. Editorial assistance, distribution, and publicity were rudimentary.

Revolutionary writers both admired and were active in the European “Age of Reason” or “Enlightenment”. They shared the Enlightenment belief that human intelligence (or “reason”) could understand both nature and man. Unlike the Puritans----who saw man as a sinful failure----the Enlightenment thinkers were sure man could improve himself. They wanted to create a happy society based on justice and freedom.

Next


As we have seen, one of the “glues” that held American settlers together in the colonial period, was religion. We saw how Christianity knit together the fabric of medieval society and how bitterly it was debated and fought over in 17th century England. Although there was no such cohesive church-state connection anywhere in British North America (indeed, thousands had fled to the New World to avoid just such a connection) still, religion provided many, even most, Americans with a comprehensive and shared world-view.

In the 1740s, however, there were increasingly bitter arguments over religion. Such arguments, over the respective roles of reason and emotion in religion, were set aside temporarily during the American Revolution, but picked up again in the 1790s. By the early 19th century, religion had been fragmented into scores of different sects and denominations, authority loosened, and individual piety and local autonomy stressed above the leadership of an educated clergy.


These changes, which coincided with the formation of the new nation, were foreshadowed in the religious conflicts of the 1740s. Those conflicts, in turn, and the particular language they produced, cannot be understood without grasping the new role of reason and science in England and North America in the 18th century.

Since the end of the 16th century, notably in the work of theologian Richard Hooker, the Church of England had stressed an “Arminian” theology. That is, Anglicanism taught that the fall of humanity at the beginning of recorded time had marred but not devastated human rationality. While people needed an influx of divine grace to be saved, we were still able, through our natural reason, to appreciate the need for grace and to avail ourselves of the “means of grace”, like the sacraments, regular worship, and the moral teachings of the Church(1).


Technically, Arminianism means the ability of humans to refuse the offer of God’s grace, but quickly the term came to mean the “liberal” theological position that stressed the existence and importance of “free will”, the freely chosen participation of human beings in the divine plan of salvation. Arminianism, it should be obvious, was thoroughly despised by the Puritans(1).

In the late 17th century, the influence of Arminianism could be seen in the English religious scene. It was soon felt among the most educated folk in New England’s seacoast towns and quickly became the dominant view among Virginia’s planter elite. The Arminianism of this period differed from that of the 16th century in at least one crucial way, however, and that was the powerful presence of a scientific outlook.

The Enlightenment----Deism & Liberalism & Individualism

The work of Isaac Newton and John Locke, in physics and psychology, stands at the beginning of a period in western history called the Enlightenment. The physical world, Newton demonstrated, operated according to fixed and immutable laws; likewise, claimed Locke, the interior, psychological world proceeded in a law like fashion. Any claim that religion might make to explain and predict human behavior had to take account of the law bound nature of the cosmos.

This was the challenge that the “scientific revolution” of the late 17th and early 18th centuries laid on religious-minded people.John Locke (1632----1704) in particular contributed much to the shaping of the new thinking of the eighteenth century. Locke’s influence on American thinkers was so great that one American scholar has named him “America’s first philosopher” despite his English origins(1). In his “Treatise on Human Understanding” Locke argues that ideas are the products of sense impressions.


The human mind takes the data provided by the senses, and combines and recombines them into simple and then complex ideas. We were not born with any inherent ideas, Locke claims.

Rather we were blank slates. There is a law like relationship between sensory data and one’s ideas, Locke argues; the formation of our thoughts is neither mysterious nor miraculous. This emphasis on the material source of human thought, and on the law like nature of thought, corresponds with the works done at the end of the 17th century in physics and chemistry by Newton and Boyle. In all these cases, the subjects are seen as functioning according to predictable patterns, which humans can discover, understand, and use for the benefit of mankind.

It should be no surprise that elites, whether in England, Europe, or North America, should have found this worldview appealing.


For educated people already committed to social control and advancing their own prosperity, this emphasis on “demystification” moves power out of the hands of the old elites, the clergy, and into the hands of wealthy businessmen and planters.

Many English people, especially prominent merchants and professionals, were thoroughly bored with religious conflicts by the end of the 17 th century. Whether Anglican or Puritan (now called Dissenter), these English elites wanted a version of Christianity that they could all agree on, one that excluded “enthusiasm”, that is, passion or emotion.

Locke and Newton argued that people live in an orderly world that conforms to natural law. Therefore, Deists believed, the teachings of religion must also be reasonable and rational. Anything that is contrary to rationality must be superstition and not true religion.


To the Deist, the doctrine of the Trinity was just such a superstition; likewise the accounts of the miracles in the Bible. As for the English Deist writers, Christianity had an inglorious history, presided over by a priestly class who deceived rather than enlightened the people.

Unbiased study of nature would lead to a belief in God and natural morality. The rest of religion----doctrines, rituals, traditions----seemed to them mere baggage unworthy of an enlightened age.

The Deist position was virtually non-existent in the colonies before the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary years. Some notable people were Deists; Tomas Paine, the master revolutionary propagandist; Ethan Allen, Revolutionary leader from Vermont; Benjamin Franklin, at least briefly. But the Deists offended Americans by their witty and often bitter attacks on the Bible and the clergy. Religious liberalism in British North America is firmly within the limits of Protestant orthodoxy, at least until the 1790s.


The development of religious liberalism was subtle and hard to discern in the years before the great revivals of the 1740s, when liberalism was labeled the enemy, but in general liberalism has to do in part with the gradual extension of the “Arminian” point of view.

Gradually, clergy in New England, the middle colonies, and the South began to preach to their congregations that humanity has an active role in the work of salvation. There was something, even quite a bit that humans could do to participate with God in that mighty work.

But it is not easy to fully understand the spread of more “liberal” thinking and discourse unless people understand something else. Throughout the 18th century there was gradually spreading among some colonists, particularly the more prosperous sense of individualism. Liberalism in religion and liberalism in politics went hand in hand in the 1700s, and together encouraged a new emphasis on the power and potential of the self.


Although challenged by the discourses of revival religion, Lockean individualism gradually emerged as a vigorous ideology in 18th century America, and formed a central discourse for politics, economics, and at least one brand of religion, particularly during the second half of the century.

Douglas Sturm, an historian of religion, has summarized this “liberal vision” this way: according to this outlook, which its advocates see as corresponding to “nature” or “the way things are”, we are born as individuals, with distinctive needs and desires; we are driven to gratify these desires, which we can only do by gaining mastery over others who are also trying to satisfy their needs and desires; a scarcity of resources and the essential competitiveness of this way of life could result in general chaos, so governments are established(1).

Major Writers and Literary Works

Benjamin Franklin

Thomas Paine

Thomas Jefferson

Philip Freneau

Benjamin Franklin (1706----1790)

Benjamin Franklin, whom the Scottish philosopher David Hume called America's "first great man of letters,” (1) embodied the Enlightenment ideal of humane rationality. Practical yet idealistic, hard working and enormously successful, Franklin recorded his early life in his famous Autobiography. Writer, printer, publisher, scientist, philanthropist, and diplomat, he was the most famous and respected private figure of his time. He was the first great self-made man in America, a poor democrat born in an aristocratic age that his fine example helped to liberalize.

Franklin was a second-generation immigrant. His Puritan father, a chandler (candle-maker), came to Boston, Massachusetts, from England in 1683. In many ways Franklin's life illustrates the impact of the Enlightenment on a gifted individual. Self-educated but well-read in John Locke, Lord Shaftsbury, Joseph Addison, and other Enlightenment writers, Franklin learned from them to apply reason to his own life and to break with tradition----in particular the old-fashioned Puritan tradition----when it threatened to smother his ideals.

While a youth, Franklin taught himself languages, read widely, and practiced writing for the public. When he moved from Boston to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Franklin already had the kind of education associated with the upper classes. He also had the Puritan capacity for hard, careful work, constant self- scrutiny, and the desire to better himself. These qualities steadily propelled him to wealth, respectability, and honor. Never selfish, Franklin tried to help other ordinary people become successful by sharing his insights and initiating a characteristically American

genre----the self-help book.

Benjamin Franklin

Successful in business, Renowned in science, this most modern-spirited man of early Americans also served his nation brilliantly. He developed and improved the postal system, making it run at a profit after years of losses. As a representative of the Colonies, he tried in vain to counsel the British toward policies that would let America grow and flourish in association with England. When this aim became hopeless, he supported the cause of independence, served in the Continental Congress, and aided Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence.

Benjamin Franklin

When Franklin died in 1790, at the age of eighty-four, he was an honored figure, mourned by many nations. One of his fellow Americans said, “His shadow lies heavier than any other man’s on this young nation.”(1)

As an author, Franklin’s style is quite modern, and even today his works are a joy to read. Although he strongly disagreed with the opinions of the Puritans, his works show a return to their “plain style”. At the same time, there is something “anti-literary” about Franklin. He had no liking for poetry and felt that writing should always have a practical purpose. In the language of his writing, Franklin admirably reflects both Locke’s psychology and Locke’s political theory, and influences other writers in their choices of language, subject matter and worldview.

Inventor

Printer

statesman

Librarian

Benjamin Franklin - PrinterAs a child, He loved to read, write, and collect books; so when it came time to choose a trade, his father wanted him to become a printer. At the age of twelve, he started as an apprentice with his older brother James. At the age of twenty-two, he opened his own printing shop. His newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette became very popular and profitable. A few years later, Poor Richard’s Almanack was released and soon became the best selling book in the colonies, selling over 10,000 copies a year. Soon, he became the most active printer in the colonies and was appointed the official printer of Pennsylvania.

His duties included printing money, laws, and documents for the colony. He then became the public printer for Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland. He also helped establish newspapers in New York, Connecticut, and two islands in the West Indies.

Benjamin Franklin - Librarian

Books were very expensive during his time and therefore not everyone was able to afford them. Some fellow printers and Benjamin Franklin , known as the Leather Apron Club (because most of us wore leather aprons) discussed ways they could help the community. Through his suggestion, they started a lending library that was open to everyone. They would pool their money and buy books, which people could borrow.

So, in 1731, the first lending library in America opened. Soon, other towns began to imitate the library, until reading became fashionable even among the less educated.

Benjamin Franklin - Inventor

At the age of forty-two, Benjamin Franklin retired from printing to explore his other interests. He devoted this time to inventing. During his life, he had invented many things, including:

Swim fins, bifocals, a glass armonica, watertight bulkheads for ships, the lightning rod, an odometer, and the wood stove (called the Franklin stove).

In addition to inventing, he enjoyed experimenting. One thing that always fascinated his was electricity. So, one stormy night Franklin and his son William were experimenting with lightning. He attached a pointed metal piece on the top of his kite and a metal key to the base of the string. Lightning struck the kite and traveled down the kite string to the key. When he touched the key with his knuckle, there was a spark! It's a good thing he didn't electrocute himself ,but he did prove that lightning is electricity! Afterwards, he invented the lightning rod to protect buildings and ships from lightning damage.

Benjamin Franklin - Statesman

When Franklin was born, America was made up of thirteen colonies that were ruled by England. Trouble between England and the thirteen colonies started to unfold following the French and Indian War. The imposition of the Stamp, Townshend, and Intolerable Acts angered the colonists to rebel against Mother England. On April 19, 1775, the colonists went to war for their freedom.During the fight for independence, he was sent to Europe to represent the colonies. In 1776, he signed the Declaration of Independence and, in 1778, the Treaty of Alliance with France. In addition, he negotiated with the French to help the colonists and became the first United States minister to France. he helped secure guns, ammunition, and other provisions for the army as well as volunteer troops. When the colonists won their independence in 1781, Franklin helped negotiate the peace with England and signed what ultimately became known as Treaty of Peace with Great Britain (1782).

This work gives similar advice. Almanacs, containing much useful information for farmers and sailors (about the next year’s weather, sea, tides, etc.) were a popular form of practical literature. Together with the Bible and the newspaper, they were the only reading matter in most Colonial households. Franklin made his Almanac interesting by creating the character “Poor Richard”. Each new edition continued a simple but realistic story about Richard, his wife and family. He also included many “sayings” about saving money and working hard. Some of these are known to most Americans today:

God helps them who help themselves.

In 1757, Franklin collected together the best of his sayings, making them into an essay called The Way to Wealth. This little book became one of the best sellers of the Western world and was translated into many languages. In The Way to Wealth, there are also many famous sayings. For example, “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” “One today is worth two tomorrow” “Diligence is the mother of good luck”(1) etc.

Poor Richard’s Almanac

Autobiography

The capstone of Franklin’s achievement as a writer is his Autobiography. Although Franklin worked on the Autobiography at four different times (1771,1784, 1788, and 1788----1789) and revised the completed portions extensively, it remained unfinished at his death. Still Franklin gave the work a rough structural unity, dividing it into three sections. The first section is an entertaining description of his life up to early manhood. This earlier part dealt with his boyhood, his difficulties in finding an appropriate vocation, his conflicts with his brother, his employers, his friends and with his unreliable patrons. Through the eyes of a tolerant elderly narrator, the reader watches the young Franklin learn through experience the necessity of virtue, work, and shrewdness in dealing with the world. The young Franklin possesses numerous faults, but he eventually succeeds because of his talent, industry, and capacity for learning from error. This protagonist is contrasted with foil characters who fail to learn from experience, and his arrogance is softened by the narrator’s ironic humor.

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AutobiographyThe second part is the controversial art of virtue, which recounts Franklin’s youthful attempt to achieve moral perfection. The ambiguous irony here creates uncertainty about its targets, but the structural significance of the section is clear. A bridge between Franklin’s youth and his adulthood, the section codifies the principles that Franklin learned through experience were necessary for happiness and success, but it also satirizes the young Franklin’s naive arrogance and rationalization. Franklin now realizes the part he has played in American history and writes about himself “for the improvement of others”(1).

The third and last section portrays the adult Franklin’s use of the principles of conduct that he discovered in the first section and enumerated in the second. Franklin focuses on his rise to prosperity, his scientific studies, and especially on his work as philanthropist and politician. Franklin occasionally steps back to view his behavior with an ironic eye, reminding his reader that human folly is never eradicated, but for the most part the gap between the narrator and protagonist has vanished, as the naive protagonist has become the experienced narrator.

This section describes his scientific scheme of self-improvement. Franklin lists 13 virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. He elaborates on each with a maxim; for example, the temperance maxim is "Eat not to Dullness. Drink not to Elevation." (1)A pragmatic scientist, Franklin put the idea of perfectibility to the test, using himself as the experimental subject.

To establish good habits, Franklin invented a reusable calendrical record book in which he worked on one virtue each week, recording each lapse with a black spot. His theory prefigures psychological behaviorism, while his systematic method of notation anticipates modern behavior modification. The project of self-improvement blends the Enlightenment belief in perfectibility with the Puritan habit of moral self-scrutiny.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autography is perhaps the most frequently translated literary work of non-fiction that has come from the United States. For readers of many nations it defines the American self and culture. For those who live in the nation that its author helped create and in the culture that his writings helped shape, it is an inescapable text.

“These are the times that try men's souls.”(1) This simple quotation from Thomas Paine's The Crisis not only describes the beginnings of the American Revolution, but also the life of Paine himself. Throughout most of his life, he was a failure, living off the gratitude and generosity of others, but his writings helped inspire a nation. He communicated the ideas of the Revolution to common farmers as easily as to intellectuals, creating prose that stirred the hearts of the fledgling United States. He had a grand vision for society: he was staunchly anti-slavery, and he was one of the first to advocate a world peace organization and social security for the poor and elderly. But his radical views on religion would destroy his success, and by the end of his life, only a handful of people attended his funeral.

Thomas Paine

Brief Biography

On a January day in 1737, Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, England. His father, a corseter, had grand visions for his son, but by the age of 12, Thomas had failed out of school. The young Paine began apprenticing for his father, but again, he failed. So, now age 19, Paine went to sea. This adventure didn't last too long, and by 1768 he found himself as an excise (tax) officer in England. Thomas didn't exactly excel at the role, getting discharged from his post twice in four years, but as an inkling of what was to come, he published The Case of the Officers of Excise (1772), arguing for a pay raise for officers. In 1774, by happenstance, he met Benjamin Franklin in London, who helped him emigrate to Philadelphia.

His career turned to journalism while in Philadelphia, and suddenly, Thomas Paine became very important. In 1776, he published Common Sense, a strong defense of American Independence from England. He joined the Continental Army and wasn't a success as a soldier, but he produced The Crisis (1776-83), which helped inspire the Army.

This pamphlet was so popular that as a percentage of the population, it was read by more people than today watch the Superbowl.

But, instead of continuing to help the Revolutionary cause, he returned to Europe and pursued other ventures, including working on a smokeless candle and an iron bridge. In 1791-92, he wrote The Rights of Man in response to criticism of the French Revolution. This work caused Paine to be labeled an outlaw in England for his anti-monarchist views. He would have been arrested, but he fled for France to join the National Convention.

By 1793, he was imprisoned in France for not endorsing the execution of Louis XVI. During his imprisonment, he wrote and distributed the first part of what was to become his most famous work at the time, the deist-atheist text, The Age of Reason (1794-96). He was freed in 1794 (narrowly escaping execution) thanks to the efforts of James Monroe, then U.S. Minister to France. Paine remained in France until 1802 when he returned to America on an invitation from Thomas Jefferson. He died in 1809 in New York City, a drunk and a pauper.

Published in 1776, Common Sense challenged the authority of the British government and the royal monarchy. The plain language that Paine used spoke to the common people of America and was the first work to openly ask for independence from Great Britian.

On the Origin and Design of Government in General, with Concise Remarks on the English Constitution

Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession

Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs

Of the Present Ability of America: with some Miscellaneous Reflections

The Crisis is a collection of articles written by Thomas Paine during the American Revolutionary War. In 1776 Paine wrote Common Sense, an extremely popular and successful pamphlet arguing for Independence from England. The essays collected here constitute Paine's on-going support for an independent and self-governing America through the many severe crises of the revolutionary war.

General Washington ordered that the first essay be read to the troops at Valley Forge, on Christmas eve, shortly before the crossing of the Delaware.

(1)This work contains the most famous passage in all of Paine’s writings: “These are the times that try men’s souls.The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country… Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered.”

In defense of the French Revolution and as a response to Burke, who had promptly condemned the French rebellion, Paine wrote and published The Rights of Man (1791). Part I appeared in early 1791, and Part II in February 1792. Guided by his ideals, Paine declared that the government which exists to guard the natural rights of the individuals is unable to ensure their rights without government's help. Four key rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

TO MY FELLOW-CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:

I PUT the following work under your protection. It contains my opinions upon Religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own

opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present

opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason.

I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.

Your affectionate friend and fellow-citizen, THOMAS PAINE

Thomas Jefferson (1743----1826)

Thomas Jefferson-political philosopher, architect, musician, book collector, scientist, horticulturist, diplomat, inventor, and third President of the United States-looms large in any discussion of what Americans are as a people. Jefferson left to the future not only ideas but also a great body of practical achievements. President John F. Kennedy recognized Jefferson's accomplishments when he told a gathering of American Nobel Prize winners that they were the greatest assemblage of talent in the White House since Jefferson had dinner there alone. With his strong beliefs in the

rights of man and a government derived from the people, in freedom of religion and the separation between church and state, and in education available to all. Thomas Jefferson struck a chord for human liberty 200 years ago that resounds through the decades. But in the end, Jefferson's own appraisal of his life, and the one that he wrote for use on his own tombstone, suffices: "Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia."

Declaration of Independence

Notes on the State of Virginia

Thomas Jefferson (1743----1826)

Drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776, the Declaration of Independence is at once the nation's most cherished symbol of liberty and Jefferson's most enduring monument. Here, in exalted and unforgettable phrases, Jefferson expressed the convictions in the minds and hearts of the American people. The political philosophy of the Declaration was not new; its ideals of individual liberty had already been expressed by John Locke and the Continental philosophers. What Jefferson did was to summarize this philosophy and set forth a list of grievances against the King in order to justify before the world the breaking of ties between the colonies and the mother country.


A request in 1780 by the French legation to the United States to learn more about the newly formed thirteen states of America stimulated in Jefferson, as he later described it, a "mysterious obligation for making me much better acquainted with my own country than I ever was before.“(1) Written during his first term as governor of Virginia, Notes on the State of Virginia is at once a scientific discourse, an attempt to define America, and an examination of the idea of freedom. With the same genius and clear, flexible prose style that informs the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson chronicles Virginia's natural, social, and political history. In his introduction to this annotated edition, which discusses the work's origins and composition, Frank Shuffelton focuses particularly on Jefferson's response to contemporary scientific writings on "New World degeneracy," his differing treatment of blacks and Native Americans, and his influential role in creating a mythicized American self-image.

Philip Freneau (1752----1832)

Born in New York City, 1752; died near Monmouth, New Jersey, 1832. The earliest of American poets to display a lyric gift capable of sustained exercise, Philip Freneau left a body of poetic work important for its formative influence upon his immediate successors and notable in itself, when considered from the period which produced it. Freneau's work was chiefly done prior to the Romantic Movement in England, before lyric poetry had received the great impetus and liberation which came with that movement and before poetic form had been released from its classic restraints. There was no poetic school in America, no master to emulate, no atmosphere to stimulate a young poet. Freneau was a pioneer, and one is surprised at the fresh note which still gives a modern touch to some of his lyrics. For several years Freneau followed the sea, making voyages to the West Indies and other ports, often in command of merchant vessels. In 1780 his ship was captured and all on board were taken prisoners. Freneau has recorded the adventure in a poem of four cantos, "The British Prison Ship." After leaving sea life Freneau became a journalist.

Freneau as Leader of 18th Century Naturalism

1. Fresh interest in nature.

2. The belief that nature is a revelation of God.

3. Humanitarian sympathy for the humble and oppressed.

4. The faith that people are naturally good.

5. That they lived idyllic and benevolent lives in a primitive past before the advent of civilization.

6. The radical doctrine that the golden age will dawn

again when social institutions are modified, since they

are responsible for existing evil

Aspects of Freneau

Poet of American Independence: Freneau provides incentive and inspiration to the revolution by writing such poems as "The Rising Glory of America" and "The Wild Honey Suckle ."

Journalist: Freneau was editor and contributor of The Freeman's Journal (Philadelphia) from 1781-1784. In his writings, he advocated the essence of what is known as Jeffersonian democracy - decentralization of government, equality for the masses, etc.

Frenean’s Religion: Frenean is described as a deist-a believer in nature and humanity but not a pantheist. In deism, religion becomes an attitude of intellectual belief, not a matter of emotional of spiritual ecstasy.

Freneau as Father of American Poetry: His major themes are death, nature, transition, and the human in nature. All of these themes become important in 19th century writing.

THE WILD HONEYSUCKLE

AIR flower, that dost so comely grow,

Hid in this silent, dull retreat,

Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,

Unseen thy little branches greet:

No roving foot shall crush thee here,

No busy hand provoke a tear.

By Nature’s self in white arrayed,

She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,

And planted here the guardian shade,

And sent soft waters murmuring by;

Thus quietly thy summer goes,

Thy days declining to repose.

Smit with those charms, that must decay,

I grieve to see your future doom;

They died--nor were those flowers more gay,

The flowers that did in Eden bloom;

Unpitying frosts and Autumn’s power

Shall leave no vestige of this flower.

From morning suns and evening dews

At first thy little being came;

If nothing once, you nothing lose,

For when you die you are the same;

The space between is but an hour,

The frail duration of flower. Exit

chapter two: the birth of a nation historical background “arminian” theology the enlightenment...

Documents

american colonies

colonial writers

english colonies

north america

great britain

colonial power

colonial possessions

writers of fiction