AMERICAN LITERATURE - COLONIAL AMERICA: 1607-1765 Before 1800, it must be remembered, America was still only a strip of seacoast lying between the Appalachian mountains and the ocean, rugged and infertile in the north, with abundant har bours and streams of vast potential horsepower; and widening into broad alluvial plains in the south, congenial to agriculture and adapted to the great staples of tobacco, rice, indigo and cotton. The north tended to become mercantile and seafaring ; the south developed a plantation life based on slavery; and the frontier from Maine to Georgia was agricultural, based on the small free hold tilled by the owner. The tone of polite society everywhere was markedly aristocratic, dominated by a merchant aristocracy in Boston and Philadelphia, and a landed aristocracy in New York and Virginia. The democratic spirit was of late growth, the prod uct of decentralization and frontier individualism, and not till the period of the French Revolution did it become militantly self conscious and set about the business of democratizing society and the national government—a movement that aroused the bitter hostility of the gentry, and gave rise to a considerable body of slashing satire.
Outside of New England the writings of the 17th century were largely occasional and the total output scanty. Literature in Vir ginia fittingly began with Captain John Smith, the picturesque Elizabethan adventurer, who wrote a number of travel books of great interest to antiquarians. They were: A True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Vir ginia since the first planting of that Collony (1608) ; The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) ; and, The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith (1630) . A veil of romance has been thrown about the sturdy Captain Smith by later writers an especially about the figure of Pocahontas the heroine of Jamestown—somewhat quaintly called an Indian princess—who married one of the Eng lish settlers, went to England on a triumphal visit, and speedily became a romantic Virginia tradition. Another early Virginia book was A True Reportory of the Wracke, and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight; upon and from the Ilands of the Ber mudas: his Comming to Virginia, and the Estate of that Colonie then, etc. (i6io)—a picturesque account of an expedition that suffering shipwreck near the "still-vexed Bermoothes," did not reach the colony till nearly a year after it set out. It was written by William Strachey, who for three years was secretary to the colony, and its vivid description of the storm is supposed to have found reflection in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Another official of the colony, George Sandys, completed in Virginia his transla tion of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1626). In 1656 John Hammond published Leah and Rachel, or, the Two Fruit f ull Sisters Virginia and Mary-Land, which like some of the works written about early New England was a song in praise of the opportunities offered by the New World to the poverty-stricken of the Old.
In those primitive early days conditions were little calculated to encourage the production of literature in Virginia, and not till the 18th century was well advanced was the output considerable. Some attempts at writing history were made, as The History of Virginia (17o5, 1722), by Robert Beverley, an excellent account by a native Virginian ; but more individual and racy were such homely works as The Sot-Weed Factor, or a Voyage into Mary land . . . By Eben. Cook, Gent. (I 7o8)—a satire by a reputed tobacco agent on the ways and institutions of the south, and espe cially on the sharp dealings of Quakers, done in Hudibrastic man ner; and the Westover Manuscripts of Colonel William Byrd (1674-1744), a wealthy planter who has been generally looked upon as embodying the early type of southern gentleman. He had travelled widely, was at home amongst the London Wits and wrote with something of Addisonian ease and grace. The History of the Dividing Line is an entertaining account of the slovenly southern frontier and a social document of considerable importance.
From the outset conditions in New England were more favour able than in Virginia to the writing and printing of books. The Puritans settled compactly in villages, each organized as a church congregation under the guidance of a minister; and this command ing authority of the ministry encouraged vigorous theological dis putation and the making of thorny treatises on church polity and doctrine. New England Congregationalism was a departure from English Presbyterianism that required justification to critical English Puritans, and the ways of the theocracy needed explana tion and defence. Caustic criticism of the Bible-Commonwealth was frequent, both in the old home and the new, and. the respon sible leaders were at pains to spread good reports of their great venture. Amongst the emigrant generation were numerous men who used their pens to good effect, and before they went to their graves they had produced a small library of Puritan documents. Of these much the most interesting and valuable are the journals and diaries that record informally the early history of the several plantations; amongst them are The History of Plymouth Planta tion, by Governor William Bradford (1588-1657), begun in 1630 and continued in the form of annals for nearly a score of years; and The History of New England, by Governor John Winthrop (1588-1649) , a journal that, beginning, as he records, on "Easter Monday, March 29, 1630. Riding at Cowes, near the Isle of Wight, in the `Arbella', a ship of 35o tons," just at the setting out of the "Great Migration," was continued to the year of his death— a vivid abstract and brief chronicle of the controversies and hap penings of the Boston settlement. Of all the writings of early New England these two—and in particular Bradford's History—are the most valuable historically and humanly, for in their homely pages is found much of the aspiration and adventure of those simple times.
comparison with the journals the abundant writings of the theologians—men like John Cotton (1585-1652), Thomas Shepard Thomas Hooker (1586-1647)—are so crabbed in style and so barren in present interest that few can read them to-day with sympathy or understanding. The most dramatic figure amongst the theologians, and the one original thinker in early New England, was Roger Williams (1603-84), who, exiled from Massachusetts Bay for his inconveniently logical views, withdrew to Rhode Island where he established the first democratic commonwealth in America, and elaborated a complete democratic philosophy which marks him as one of the great political thinkers of the Commonwealth period. Unfortunately his writings are a heavy tangle of Hebraic tropes and the meaning is hard to come at. Even his most celebrated work, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644) , may well be taken for granted. Far more readable is a little book written by Nathaniel Ward (1578? 1652?), bearing the title The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America, Willing to help 'mend his Native Country, lamentably tattered, both in the upper Leather and sole, with all the honest stitches he can take, etc.
(1647). Ward was a caustic Jacobean lawyer-theologian and wit, who served God for a time in Massachusetts Bay and then re turned to England to die. The Simple Cobbler was a contribu tion to the great debates then going forward on the settlement of England. Written in an old fashioned style, crammed with quaint conceits and affected crotchets, and fierce in condem nation of toleration—"He that is willing to tolerate any unsound opinion, that his own may also be tolerated, will for a need hang God's Bible at the Devil's girdle"—it is the brightest bit of Renaissance English penned in America and it still amply repays reading.
With the passing of the emigrant generation a deepening note of provincialism crept into the life of New England. A petty round of duties in an isolated village world laid a blight on the creative mind, and the abundant writing came to be restricted pretty much to theology and morality. The learning of the min isters became increasingly crabbed and a generous culture disap peared. In such an environment the politer forms of letters would find little sustenance. There were attempts at verse, to be sure, poems dressed in rude homespun and dealing with prosaic themes. The poet laureate of a barren world was Michael Wig glesworth (1631-1705), a pastor and physician at Malden, who offered for the delectation of all godly readers two poems, The Day of Doom (1662?) and Meat out of the Eater (1669). The former hit the taste of the generation to a nicety and achieved an immense popularity. It is a dramatization of the Last Judgment that offered a convenient excuse to versify Calvinistic theology, and its vigorous jingle is marked by a crude strength, a bald realism and an amazing naivete. It marks a great fall from an other work written before the provincialism of the settlement had wrought its full effect. The Tenth Muse lately Sprung up in America (165o), by Anne Dudley Bradstreet (1613-7 2 ), wife of Governor Simon Bradstreet and daughter of Governor Thomas Dudley, has been made much of by literary historians, and perhaps rightly, for in some of her lines are faint echoes of a great age and great poetry, before both were finally destroyed by a crabbed environment.
More characteristic of a world given over to theology was the work of the ministers who threshed over the old straw year after year, inditing heavy sermons, and publishing much for the glory of God and their own reputations. Of these ambitious writers, who laboured faithfully but never learned to write beautifully, the best known were Increase Mather 0639-1723), and his son Cotton (1663-1728). Stout defenders of the theocracy in the days of its decline, seeking to buttress the authority that was being undermined by a growing rationalism, they were arch conservatives who suffered the sting of eventual defeat. Not im portant figures in the larger history of America, they were never theless of considerable significance in the prim little world of the New England clergy and they took themselves with all priestly seriousness. Of their abundant written work perhaps only the Magnolia Christi Americana, or The Ecclesiastical History of New England (1702 ), by Cotton Mather, is of any other than anti quarian interest, and even that is a curious jumble of fact and fiction. Other ministers fond of their quills were John Wise (165 2-17 2 5) , a liberal who was greatly influential in determining the later form of Congregationalism; Thomas Prince (1687 1758), a painstaking historian and author of a Chronological His tory of New England; Jonathan Mayhew (17 20-66), a forerunner of the later Unitarian movement and deeply immersed in Revolu tionary politics; and Mather Byles (1707-88), a celebrated wit and admirer of Alexander Pope, who did much to encourage the domestication in New England of the English Augustan mode.
The most important book written in New England during the third generation was the Diary of Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), a Boston magistrate and money-lender who between the years 1674 and 1729 set down a plain account of what fell under his eye. Homely and often petty though the jottings are, they convey a feeling of authentic reality, and the mass of information about the daily life of Boston in the days of the transition from a theocracy to a royal colony is of very great value. Sewall is often called a New England Pepys, and despite the fact that the back grounds of Puritan Boston were somewhat bleak and prosaic in comparison with Restoration London, there is enough likeness be tween the two men to justify the comparison. Very different is the Journal of Mme. Sarah Knight, a quaint narrative of a horse back journey from Boston to New York in 1704, with crisp vignettes of odd figures and sharp comment on strange manners that came under her shrewd eyes. William Hubbard's Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians (1677), written in excellent plain English, is a modest classic amongst Indian tales ; as is also Mary Rowlandson's Narrative of the Captivity (168 2 ?) . To frontier settlers who any night might be wakened by the fierce war whoop, such authentic narratives came home with irresistible appeal and in their pages one still feels something of the anxieties of a generation living under the common fear.
From this petty world with its daily life turning on the axle of Calvinistic theology, the figure of Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) emerges with sharp angularity. The greatest of New England thinkers, he became the chief defender of Calvinism. The cardinal dogma on which that system rested was the dogma of predestina tion, which in turn rested on the principle of determinism ; and it was in defence of this crucial point that he wrote his celebrated Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of the Will which is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency (1754), seeking to establish that the will is unfree and in conse quence that the dogma of predestination is logically sound. Ed wards was an acute metaphysician, an idealist not unlike Bishop Berkeley, and if he had been content with philosophy he must have made a great name for himself. To modern readers his hell fire sermons, such as Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and The Justice of God displayed in the Endless Punishment of the Wicked, offer amusing sketches of the landscape of hell; but they are very far from an adequate measure of the intellectual powers of Edwards. He exerted a profound influence on the course of i8th-century theology, but even his great powers were inadequate to defend Calvinism against the inroads of Unitarian ism. After Edwards came such theologians as the rugged Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803), author of the Hopkinsian doctrine of will ing to be damned for the glory of God, and the rationalistic Ezra Stiles (17 2 7-9 5) , president of Yale college and a dabbler in science; and with them i8th-century theology came to an end.