{"id":20,"date":"2019-05-08T09:39:50","date_gmt":"2019-05-08T09:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engp05.epgpbooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/?post_type=chapter&p=20"},"modified":"2022-01-10T07:26:11","modified_gmt":"2022-01-10T07:26:11","slug":"history-of-american-literature-1700-1800","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/engp05\/chapter\/history-of-american-literature-1700-1800\/","title":{"rendered":"History of American Literature (1700-1800)"},"content":{"raw":"
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\r\n\r\nHow it began<\/strong>\r\n\r\n\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n

In Henry James\u2019 The American<\/em>, a character says of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) that \u2018He invented America: a very great man\u2019. Now Richard Gray writes in A History of American Literature <\/em>that \u2018Columbus, however, was following a prototype devised long before him and\u00a0surviving long after him, the idea of a new land outside and beyond history: \u201ca Virgin Countrey\u201d\u2019. Therefore, fundamental to this European encounter with the New World was the myth of Eden: Gray writes that \u2018European settlers were faced not so much with another culture as with nature, and not really encountering a possible future but, on the contrary, returning to an imagined past.\u2019 In this context, Columbus\u2019 observations of the natives are noteworthy: \u2018These people go naked\u2019; \u2018their manners are very decent\u2019. As Gray argues, \u2018he could see this only as a sign of their aboriginal innocence.\u2019 And, later, William Crashaw (1572-1626) and others went on to compare Virginia to the Promised Land and the immigrants to the Israelites.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Now, faced with the strangeness of the natives, Columbus advised his royal masters to \u2018adopt the resolution of converting them to Christianity.\u2019 And Gray writes: \u2018Conversion was one strategy [\u2026] for dealing with America and the Americans they encountered. Comparison was another: the New World could be understood, perhaps, by discovering likeness with the Old [\u2026] Naming was another ploy\u2019. Therefore, the narrative that was being forged in this way was a hybrid of the Old World and the New World.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

In the first half of the sixteenth century, many Europeans came to America in search of gold. Of course, they did not find it, but The Journey of Coronado 1540-1542 <\/em>(1904) reveals an encounter with what Gray puts as \u2018the vastness of America, the immense emptiness of the plains\u2019. Gray writes: \u2018If space is the central fact of American experience, as writers from\u00a0 Walt Whitman to Charles Olson have claimed, then this was the European discovery of it.\u2019<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Gray also tells us: \u2018Into that making, from its earliest stages, went not only the Spanish and the Portuguese, the French and the Native Americans, but also the English and their immediate neighbors in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. From the beginning, the story of America is a story neither of a monolith nor a melting pot but a mosaic: a multicultural\u00a0environment in which individuals negotiate an identity for themselves between the different traditions they encounter. And the tale of American literature has been one of pluralism: collision, conflict, and even congruence between different languages and literatures\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nPuritan narratives<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Between 1630 and 1651, William Bradford (1590-1657) wrote Of Plymouth Plantation <\/em>which was an unfinished account of the colony up to 1646. At the very beginning of the book, Bradford claimed that he would present \u2018the simple truth in all things\u2019; however, he came to develop the idea of the divine plan behind the civilizing mission of the European saints, the elect group of believers. Gray writes: \u2018Like so many great American stories, Of Plymouth Plantation <\/em>is a search for meaning. It has a narrator looking for what might lie behind the mask of the material event [\u2026] [T]his habit of interpreting events with the help of a providential vocabulary was to have a profound impact on American writing\u2014just as, for that matter, the moralizing tendency and the preference for fact rather than fiction, \u201cGod\u2019s truth\u201d over \u201cmen\u2019s lies,\u201d also were.\u2019 However, as the narrative proceeded, it grew more and more elegiac with the passing of the communitarian spirit of the first generation of immigrants whom Bradford called \u2018Pilgrims\u2019 and the second generation\u2019s search for better land and further prosperity.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Next, we can think about John Winthrop (1588-1649) who had called England \u2018this sinfull land\u2019 as early as 1622 and set out for New England with nearly four hundred other Congregationalist Puritans, ten years after Bradford\u2019s landing at Plymouth, to build there a good society.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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However, there were also various challenges to that Puritan discourse. Such challenges emerged from people like Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), Thomas Morton\u00a0 (1579?-1642?) and Roger Williams (1603?-1683). Morton\u2019s only literary output was New English Canaan <\/em>(1637) which was a satirical attack on Puritanism. In Gray\u2019s words, \u2018It sets out to show that New England is indeed a Canaan or Promised Land, a naturally abundant world inhabited by friendly and even noble savages [\u2026] A celebration of what he calls \u201cthe happy life of the savages,\u201d and their natural wisdom, occupies the first section, [\u2026] [I]n the third section [\u2026] Morton describes the general inhumanity of the Puritans\u2019. In The Bloody Tenent of Persecution <\/em>(1644), Williams argued for Christianity to be free from secular interests: he believed, as Gray points out, that \u2018the Massachusetts Bay Company charter itself was invalid because a Christian king had no right over heathen lands.\u2019<\/p>\r\n

The early 18th century<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Let us begin with Cotton Mather (1663-1728) who had more than four hundred publications during his life time: The Negro Christianized <\/em>(1706), Bonifacius; or, Essays to Do Good <\/em>(1710), The Christian Philosopher <\/em>(1720), India Christiana <\/em>(1721), to name a few of them. Now, as Gray points out, \u2018Mather\u2019s belief in the supreme importance of conversion led him, after all, to claim that a slave taught the true faith was far better off than a free black; and it sprang, in the first place, from a low opinion of both African and Native Americans, bordering on contempt [\u2026] Mather made no secret of his belief that \u201cthe natives of the country now possessed by New Englanders\u201d [\u2026] were \u201cmiserable savages,\u201d \u201cstupid and senseless,\u201d [\u2026] They had \u201cno arts<\/em>,\u201d [\u2026] \u201clittle, if any, tradition \u2026 worthy of \u2026 notice\u201d; reading and writing were \u201caltogether unknown to them\u201d and their religion consisted of no more than \u201cdiabolical rites,\u201d \u201cextravagant ridiculous devotions\u201d to \u201cmany gods.\u201d\u2019 To some\u00a0extent, it certainly reminds us of Columbus\u2019 observations: he could not make sense of their customs and found it either odd or abhorrent. Besides, Columbus also observes that the natives were \u2018without any religion that could be discovered\u2019. Therefore, while Columbus also desired their conversion, he still saw the natives as marked by the aboriginal innocence. But, Mather saw them as marked by savageness. And, therefore, for Mather, they had to be \u2018<\/span>civilized <\/em>ere they could be <\/span>Christianized<\/em>.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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For a brief discussion of his longest work, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, the Ecclesiastical History of New England <\/em>(1702), let us simply take a look at what Gray writes about it: \u2018It is also an American epic, one of the very first, in which the author sets about capturing in words what he sees as the promise of the nation [\u2026] The echo of the Aeneid <\/em>is an intimation of what Mather is after. He is hoping to link the story of his people to earlier epic migrations [\u2026] he is also suggesting a direct analogy with the journey of God\u2019s chosen people to the Promised Land. His subject is a matter of both history and belief\u2019.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Next, we can think about Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) who, Gray tells us, was \u2018living at a time when Puritanism no longer exerted the power it once did\u2019. He wrote a journal from 1673 to 1728, eventually published as The Diary of Samuel Sewall <\/em>(1973). In an entry for June 19, 1700, he writes that, following his conscience, he felt \u2018call\u2019d\u2019 to write against \u2018the Trade fetching Negroes from Guinea.\u2019 And just after five days, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial<\/em>, Sewall\u2019s attack on the practice of slavery, was published in Boston. In this book, he attacked slavery on the ground that it was a violation of biblical precept since \u2018all men, as they are the Sons of Adam<\/em>, are Coheirs; and have equal Right unto Liberty\u2019. However, as Gray writes, \u2018[h]is journals reveal the more private side of Puritanism: a daily search for the right path to follow in order to make the individual journey part of the divine plan [\u2026] [T]hat was to remain ingrained in American writing long after the Puritan hegemony had vanished.\u2019<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nGrowing secular<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Again, Gray writes at length: \u2018The power of Puritanism was, in fact, waning in New England well before the end of the eighteenth century. The number of \u201cunchurched\u201d colonists had been large to begin with, and they grew in number and power over the years [\u2026] and, by the end of the eighteenth century, more than 275,000 African slaves had been brought to America [\u2026] It certainly helped to promote the growing secular tendencies of the age. Religion was still strong; and it was, in fact, made stronger by a sweeping revivalist movement known as the Great Awakening, in the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century [\u2026] The Great Awakening, however, was itself a reaction against what was rightly felt to be the dominant trend: the growing tendency among colonists to accept and practice the ideas of the Enlightenment, albeit usually in popularized form. Those ideas emphasized the determining influence of reason and common sense and the imperatives of self-help, personal and social progress. According to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the universe was a rational, mechanical phenomenon which, as the English philosopher John Locke put it, ran rather like a self-winding watch. [\u2026] And man, using his reason and good sense, could ascertain the laws of this mechanism. He could then use those laws for his own profit, the betterment of society, and his own improvement [\u2026] It was an ethic with an obvious attraction for new generations of immigrants eager to stake their place and improve their lot in a new land with such abundant resources. And, even for those, the vast majority, who had never heard of the Enlightenment, the secular gospel of reason, common sense, use, profit, and progress became part of the American way.\u2019<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The increasingly secular tendencies of the period are to be found in the travel journals of Sarah Kemble Knight (1666-1727) and William Byrd of Westover (1674-1744). Like the\u00a0earlier European accounts, they didn\u2019t see the New World as either Eden or Wilderness. Although God is mentioned at times, there is no sense of being guided by the providence. As Gray tells us, Knight\u2019s \u2018writings reveal a lively, humorous, gossipy woman alert to the comedy and occasional beauty of life in early America [\u2026] She recalls, for instance, how moved she was by the sight of the woods lit up by the moon\u2019. On the other hand, Byrd tells us in a letter published in <\/span>The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds <\/em>(1977) that in America he lived \u2018like [\u2026] the patriarchs.\u2019 As the contemporary Robert Beverley II (1673- 1722) writes in <\/span>The History and Present State of Virginia <\/em>(1722), the majority of the immigrants were \u2018of low Circumstances [\u2026] such as were willing to seek their Fortunes in a Foreign Country.\u2019 There was already an anticipation of the later Southern argument in defense of slavery: slaves were seen as <\/span>children <\/em>who <\/span>needed <\/em>the guidance and support of a <\/span>benevolent <\/em>patriarch. What we see here in Byrd\u2014 \u2018the idea of the indolent, elegant aristocrat\u2019\u2014was \u2018an alternative to the ruminative Puritan or the industrious Northerner\u2019 (Gray).<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nSecularity in poetry<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

If we take a look at Nathaniel Evans\u2019s (1742-1767) poetry, which were posthumously published as Poems on Several Occasions <\/em>(1772), we see that the poems were rarely religious: \u2018Hymn to May\u2019, \u2018To Benjamin Franklin, Occasioned by Hearing Him Play on the Harmonica<\/em>\u2019, \u2018Ode to the Memory of Mr. Thomas Godfrey\u2019 etc. Although he criticized the greed and immorality of the time, the criticism developed from a secular morality.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

We have also the female poets who introduced a female perspective to the familiar subjects and sometimes even focused on the issues specific to their own sex, like childbearing, for instance. They were also conscious of the difficulties of the women in the society: \u2018How\u00a0wretched is a woman\u2019s fate,\/\u2019 an anonymous poet wrote in \u2018Verses Written by a Young Lady, on Women Born to be controll\u2019d\u2019 (1743), \u2018Subject to man in every state. \/ How can she then be free from woes?\u2019 For another anonymous poet, the solution, as she put it in \u2018The Lady\u2019s Complaint\u2019 (1736), was in \u2018equal laws\u2019 that would \u2018neither sex oppress\u2019: it would \u2018More freedom give to womankind\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Annis Boudinot Stockton (1736-1801) wrote \u2018To Laura\u2019 (1757) addressing her friend Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson (1737-1801)\u2014pen name \u2018Laura\u2019\u2014 who was herself one of the most well known poets of the eighteenth century. Both of them wrote poems on married love, such as \u2018Epistle to Lucia\u2019 (1766) and \u2018An Ode Written on the Birthday of Mr. Henry Fergusson\u2019 (1774). Like Evans, Stockton also wrote on public figures\u2014for example, \u2018The Vision, an Ode to Washington\u2019 (1789). And in \u2018On a Beautiful Damask Rose, Emblematical of Love and Wedlock\u2019 (1789), Fergusson explored a philosophical issue like the transience of love. Gray writes about them that \u2018[w]hat is remarkable about many of these poems written by women is their sense of a shared suffering and dignity, sometimes associated with the core experience of childbirth.\u2019 Jane Colman Turell (1708-1735) wrote: \u2018Thrice in my womb I\u2019ve found the pleasing strife, \/ In the first struggles of my infant\u2019s life: \/ But O how soon by Heaven I\u2019m call\u2019d to mourn, \/ While from my womb a lifeless babe is born?\u2019 However, as Gray notes, \u2018[t]hat sense of shared suffering and dignity can also extend beyond the specifically female sphere\u2019: later, Sarah Wentworth Morton (1759-1846) became quite well- known for a strong antislavery poem, \u2018The African Chief\u2019 (1823).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

While, on the one hand, we have these educated white women poets, we have, on the other hand, Lucy Terry (1730-1821), an African slave who eventually became a free black: she wrote a poem called \u2018Bars Fight\u2019 (eventually published in 1855) that captured the experience of pain and a witness of courage during a battle between whites and Indians.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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\u2018To America, one schoolmaster is worth a dozen poets,\u2019 said Benjamin Franklin, because \u2018[n]othing is good or beautiful but in the measure that it is useful\u2019. However, many people still believed that poetry helped in the making of America: as Gray writes, \u2018[t]he full force of that reply had to wait until the Revolution, when writers and critics began to insist that the new American nation needed an American literature, and more specifically an American poetry, in order to announce and understand itself.\u2019 Even Cotton Mather, who had attacked poetry for its fictional aspect and sensuality, wrote a proto-epic called Magnalia Christi Americana<\/em>, celebrating the \u2018Wonders\u2019 of the New World. Towards the end of the century, Joel Barlow attempted a more specifically poetic epic in Vision of Columbus<\/em>, an enlarged and revised version of which appeared later as The Columbiad<\/em>. Ebenezer Cook (1667-1733) and Richard Lewis (1700?-1734) had already tried their hands at producing other forms of early eighteenth-century poetry than epic\u2014satire and pastoral. Cook\u2019s claim to fame rests on his satirical poem The Sot-weed Factor; or, a Voyage to Maryland<\/em>. In the form of the Hudibrastic verse, this piece is a satire on English snobbery and preciousness. As Gray writes, \u2018Cook has taken an English form and turned it to American advantage.\u2019 Lewis, on the other hand, wrote, among other things, pastoral that indicated at the superiority of American nature. When Lewis refers to \u2018the out-stretch\u2019d Land<\/em>\u2019, we immediately understand that it is that same encounter\u2014that we have seen before and which many other poets would experience\u2014with space<\/em>, the primary aspect of the American landscape. \u2018Lewis, however,\u2019 Gray notes, \u2018devotes more attention than his European predecessors tended to do to the ideas of patient toil rewarded, the value of self-subsistence, and the pleasures of abundance\u2019\u2014 things that are (to become) typically American.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Now, although there was a growing trend towards the secular in the eighteenth century America, religious influences did not entirely disappear. The most important figure in this context would be Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). He became what he was due to his deeply\u00a0religious upbringing\u2014both his father and grandfather were clergymen. He felt compelled not only \u2018to sit and view the moon [\u2026] the clouds and the sky,\u2019 \u2018to behold the sweet glory of God in these things,\u2019 but also, as Gray puts it, \u2018to review and discipline the conduct of his life.\u2019 Between 1722 and 1723, he composed seventy <\/span>Resolutions <\/em>with the aim of improving himself in the light of his faith. In 1734, he preached a few sermons which certainly had an effect on many of the congregation who apparently felt exactly the kind of conversion Edwards was preaching and had himself experienced. As an account of this awakening of faith in his community, Edwards wrote a book (developed from a pamphlet) called <\/span>A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God <\/em>(1737). In a way, as Gray suggests, this congregation anticipated \u2018the Great Awakening that was to sweep through many parts of the American colonies in the next few years\u2019. However, his embodiment of faith was a bit complicated, as Gray points out, insofar as \u2018Edwards wanted to harness reason in the service of faith and, if necessary, to defend mystery with logic [which] is nowhere better illustrated than in [\u2026] such works as <\/span>The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended <\/em>(1758)\u00a0 and <\/span>Two Dissertations <\/em>(1765)\u2019. What makes Edwards more complicated than others is his implicit philosophical dialogue with authorities like Descartes and Locke on the one hand, and his Puritan inheritance on the other hand.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nBenjamin Franklin (1706-1790)<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

As Gray writes, \u2018Franklin embodied the new spirit of America, emerging in part out of Puritanism and in part out of the Enlightenment, that was coming to dominate the culture.\u2019 However, it does not make him similar to Edwards. In his Autobiography<\/em>\u2014 which he worked on in 1771, 1784, 1788, 1788-89 and of which although an American edition was published in 1818, the first complete edition came out only in 1867\u2014Franklin presents himself as an exemplary figure. The first section of his Autobiography <\/em>holds a detailed account of his \u2018first\u00a0entry\u2019 into the city of Philadelphiain in 1723. As Gray notes, \u2018what he emphasizes [here] is his sorry appearance and poverty.\u2019 The second section reveals his conception of \u2018the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.\u2019 Gray writes: \u2018Springing from a fundamental belief that the individual could change, improve, and even recreate himself with the help of reason, common sense, and hard work, Franklin\u2019s program for himself was one of the first great formulations of the American dream.\u2019 By 1748, he had, indeed, made quite a lot of money and also become quite famous. Thus, Franklin gave birth to the notion which Gray puts as that of \u2018the self-made man as hero, on his first appearance, poor and unknown and unprotected, entering a world that he then proceeds to conquer.\u2019 His <\/span>The Way to Wealth <\/em>(1758), which brought together many of his proverbs embodying his philosophy, was a nationwide bestseller and reprinted several hundred times.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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The dream of the self-made man could be realized only in America, where, as Franklin says in \u2018Information to Those Who Would Remove to America\u2019 (1784), \u2018people do not inquire concerning a Stranger, What is he<\/em>? But, What can he do<\/em>?\u2019 All \u2018Hearty young Labouring Men\u2019 could \u2018easily establish themselves\u2019 in this \u2018Land of Labour\u2019, which is why \u2018a general happy Mediocrity prevails\u2019, here, in America.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Gray writes that \u2018throughout his life, Franklin was not only an inventor of proverbial wisdom but a masterly essayist\u2019. In his \u2018Silence Dogood\u2019 papers, as Gray informs us, he \u2018satirize[d] follies and vices ranging from poor poetry to prostitution.\u2019 He also attacked violence against Native Americans in A Narrative of the Late Massacres <\/em>(1764) and the superstition leading to the accusation of witchcraft on women in \u2018A Witch Trial at Mount Holly\u2019 (1730), and satirized the slave trade in \u2018On the Slave Trade\u2019 (1790) and British imperialism in \u2018An Edict by the King of Prussia\u2019 (1773). Thus, he shaped his persona of \u2018the friend of all good men\u2019. He was also a member of that committee which went onto draft the Declaration of Independence. He was also one of the three American signatories to the treaty\u00a0that ended the Revolutionary war. And he became a member of the convention which drafted the Constitution of the United Sates. Gray writes that \u2018Franklin was, in short, at the heart of the American Revolution from its origins to its conclusion. And he shows, more clearly than any other figure of the time, just how much that Revolution owed to the principles of the Enlightenment.\u2019\u00a0<\/span>And others: towards the Revolution.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\n\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n

In Letters from an American Farmer <\/em>(1782), J. Hector St. Jean de Cr\u00e8vecoeur (1735-1813) says that \u2018the American is a new man, who acts upon new principles\u2019. Gray tells us that \u2018[t]hat was a common theme in the literature surrounding the American Revolution. As the American colonies became a new nation, the United States of America, writers and many others applied themselves to the task of announcing just what this new nation represented\u2019. What is typically American about Cr\u00e8vecoeur\u2019s narrative is the amalgamation of fiction and autobiography. In this text, we find his belief in the superiority of the American nature in comparison to the European culture. Secondly, he says that America is \u2018not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and a herd of people who have nothing\u2019; the American owes nothing to \u2018a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord.\u2019 And, thirdly, he also says that \u2018here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.\u2019 However, as Gray notes, \u2018[t]ravelling to South Carolina, James is reminded of the obscenity and injustice of slavery [\u2026] [which] leads James to reflect on a terrible exception to the American norm of just laws and useful toil rewarded.\u2019<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was another writer from this period. Gray writes that \u2018[u]nlike Cr\u00e8vecoeur, however, Paine was unambiguously enthusiastic about the Revolution.\u2019 In Common Sense <\/em>(1776), he argued in the typically Enlightenment spirit\u2014with emphasis on\u00a0\u2018simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense\u2019\u2014 for the independence of America and the formation of a republican government. With the defeat of Washington and the retreat at the end of 1776, Paine tried to rouse the nation for further resistance in first of the <\/span>Crisis <\/em>papers. After returning to England in 1787, he wrote <\/span>The Rights of Man <\/em>(1791-1792) as a kind of reply to Edmund Burke\u2019s <\/span>Reflections on the Revolution in France <\/em>(1790). Although it was very popular, nevertheless, for his arguments against a hereditary monarchy, he was charged with sedition and forced to flee to France. Again, for his protest against the execution of Louis XVI he was imprisoned in France. Still, in <\/span>The Age of Reason <\/em>(1794-1795), he attacked religion for its irrationality.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Next, we have Thomas Jefferson (1724-1826), who was, as Gray writes, \u2018[a] person of eclectic interests\u2014and, in that, the inheritor of a tradition previously best illustrated by Wiliam Byrd of Westover\u2019. He played a pivotal role in the formation of the American nation. In A Summary View of the Rights of British America <\/em>(1774), he argued for America\u2019s freedom from British control on the ground of \u2018a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them.\u2019 In 1776, he became a member of the committee which would draft the Declaration of Independence. Gray writes that \u2018if any one person can be called the author of that Declaration, it is undoubtedly Jefferson.\u2019 However, Gray also notes that \u2018[l]ike Cr\u00e8vecoeur, Jefferson also felt compelled to confront the challenge to his idyllic vision of America posed by the indelible fact of slavery.\u2019 He condemned slavery and argued for emancipation in Notes on the State of Virginia <\/em>(1787). However, he was of the opinion that the freed slaves should be sent somewhere else where they would stand as \u2018free and independent people\u2019.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

John Adams (1735-1826), first vice president and second president, had a very sceptical mind: Jefferson\u2019s idealism stood in opposition to Adams\u2019 pessimism. If Jefferson thought that \u2018a natural aristocracy\u2019 of \u2018virtue and talents\u2019 could replace \u2018an artificial aristocracy founded\u00a0on wealth and birth,\u2019 Adams though that \u2018[b]oth artificial aristocracy, and Monarchy have grown out of the natural Aristocracy of \u201cvirtue and talents.\u201d\u2019<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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What about the women?<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Abigail Adams (1744-1818), wife of John Adams, consistently raised the question of freedom and equality for women. In 1776, she wrote to her husband that \u2018in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies\u2019; \u2018Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands\u2019; \u2018Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.\u2019 If the new laws are not \u2018more generous and favourable\u2019 to women than the old laws had been, she warned, \u2018we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.\u2019 And, Gray notes: \u2018\u201dAll men are created equal,\u201d the Declaration of Independence announced. That explicitly excluded women. Implicitly, it also excluded \u201cIndians\u201d and \u201cNegroes,\u201d since what it meant, of course, was all white <\/em>men.\u2019<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Among the leading voices, Thomas Paine was someone who also raised the question of the rights of women: \u2018If we take a survey of ages and countries,\u2019 Paine wrote in \u2018An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex\u2019 (1775), \u2018we shall find the women, almost\u2014without exception\u2014at all times and in all places, adored and oppressed.\u2019 Judith Sargent Murray\u2019s (1751-1820) 1790 piece, \u2018On the Equality of the Sexes\u2019, makes her, arguably, one of the first American feminists. In this piece, she argued, as Gray summarizes, \u2018that the capacities of memory and imagination are equal in women and men and that, if women are deficient as far as the two other faculties of the mind, reason and judgment, are concerned, it is because of a difference in education.\u2019 In her 1784 essay, \u2018Desultory Thoughts upon the Utility of encouraging a\u00a0degree of Self-Complacency especially in Female Bosoms\u2019, she said that a young woman should be considered \u2018as a rational being\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Other voices<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Although Hendrick Aupaumut (?-1830), a Mahican Indian, tried, in A Short Narration of my Last Journey to the Western Country <\/em>(written about 1794 and published only in 1827), to convince his people that the American republic would extend its rights to the Native Americans as well, Samson Occom (1723-1792) was a Native American who did not quite believe it. As Gray informs, \u2018Quite the contrary, during the Revolutionary War Occom urged the tribes to remain neutral\u2019. For him, as for many others, the solution of their problems was in separation. His Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs <\/em>(1774) was the first Indian bestseller.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833), an evangelical minister, was one who articulated the rage of the African-Americans at the huge gap between the promise of the Revolution and their reality. As gray writes, \u2018Haynes, along with Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley, helped to produce the first significant body of African-American writing\u2019. In \u2018Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping\u2019 (written early in the career but unpublished till 1983), he makes use of the Declaration of Independence, the founding documents of the nation, and the Bible, to develop a vigorous argument against slavery. In a petition, Prince Hall (1735?-1807) too asks for the emancipation of \u2018great number of Negroes who are detained in a state of Slavery in the Bowels of a free & Christian country.\u2019<\/p>\r\n \r\n

We also have Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797), whose autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Valla, the African, Written by Himself <\/em>(1787), in Gray\u2019s words, \u2018established the form of the slave narrative and so, indirectly or\u00a0otherwise [\u2026] has influenced American writing \u2013 and African-American writing in particular\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0to the present day.\u2019 In this work, he viewed Africa as the Eden, the prelapsarian world. And, in many ways, he turned the typical European charges upside down: he was frightened of the white people and thought that he would be eaten; later, he was convinced that his white masters were \u2018savages\u2019. However, he also befriended \u2018a [white] young lad.\u2019 Gray writes that \u2018[t]heir close friendship [\u2026] serves as an illustration of the superficiality of racial barriers [\u2026] and, besides, anticipates a powerful theme in later American writing \u2013 of interracial and often homoerotic intimacy.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Poetry, drama and fiction<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Although Lucy Terry came before with her poem \u2018Bars fight,\u2019 Jupiter Hammon (1711-1806?) was the first African-American poet who got his work published: Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, With Penitential Cries <\/em>(1760), a series of 22 quatrains, and Address to the Negroe: In the State of New York <\/em>(1787), a prose work. In the prose work, he argues for the reconciliation between the black people and slavery. His works are prefaced by an acknowledgement of the white people he served. Gray writes: \u2018That anticipated a common pattern in African-American writing. Slave narratives, for instance, were commonly prefaced by a note or essay from a white notable, mediating the narrative for what was, after all, an almost entirely white audience \u2013 and giving it a white seal of approval. And it has to be borne in mind when reading what Hammon has to say about slavery: which, in essence, takes up a defense of the peculiar institution\u2019.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), with the help of the woman who bought her from a slave market, got her Poems <\/em>(1773) published in London. Her poetry, notes Gray, \u2018paints a less\u00a0than flattering picture of Africa\u2019. She writes in \u2018To the University of Cambridge, in New England\u2019 (1773): \u2018\u2019Twas not long since I left my native shore \/ The land of errors, and <\/span>Egyptian <\/em>gloom: \/ Father of mercy, \u2019twas thy gracious hand \/ Brought me in safety from\u00a0 those dark abodes.\u2019 However, sometimes an Edenic or idyllic image of Africa\u2014of Equiano\u2019s type\u2014can also be found in Wheatley.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n

Among the white poets of the time, we have Philip Freneau (1752-1832), Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), and Joel Barlow (1754-1826). Interestingly, Freneau\u2019s long poem (written together with his college friend Hugh Brackenridge), The Rising glory of America <\/em>(written in 1771, published in 1772 and revised in 1786), Gray notes, \u2018tends to confirm the power of the mother country even while Freneau and Brackenridge struggle to deny it.\u2019 In his \u2018Literary Importation\u2019 (1788), he writes: \u2018Can we never be thought to have learning or grace \/ Unless it be brought from that damnable place.\u2019 This \u2018damnable place\u2019 is certainly a reference to Britain. And Gray writes that \u2018[i]n some of his poetry, at least, Freneau was working toward a form of literary emancipation\u2019. In \u2018To an Author\u2019 (1788), he also focuses on the difficulty of writing poetry in a certain historical context \u2018Where rigid Reason reigns alone, \/ Where lovely Fancy has no sway, \/ Nor magic forms about us play\u2019. He further adds: \u2018An age employed in edging steel \/ Can no poetic raptures feel.\u2019<\/p>\r\n \r\n

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Dwight\u2019s most ambitious work, Greenfield Hill: A Poem in Seven Parts <\/em>(1794), written in imitation of the pastoral and elegiac modes of British writers, portrays an idyllic life in the American countryside where \u2018every farmer reigns a little king\u2019. It also attacks slavery. However, as Gray observes, \u2018despite Dwight\u2019s references to \u201cIndian woes,\u201d his basic\u00a0 message is that their removal was a necessary step in the march of progress.\u2019<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Royall Tyler (1756-1826), who wrote seven plays, gave birth to the American tradition in drama. He is best known for his play The Contrast <\/em>(written in 1787, produced in 1790 and published in 1792). Written after watching a performance of R. B. Sheridan\u2019s The School for\u00a0<\/em>Scandal <\/em>and clearly influenced by the English eighteenth century comedies, this was the first comedy by an American writer to earn a professional production. The theme is typically American since, as Gray summarizes, \u2018the contrast of the title is between [\u2026] European affectation [\u2026] [and] American straightforwardness and republican honesty.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Among the first American novels, we have The Power of Sympathy <\/em>(1789) by William Hill Brown (1765-1793), Charlotte Temple <\/em>(1794) by Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762-1824), and The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton <\/em>(1797) by Hannah Webster Foster (1758- 1840). The Power of Sympathy <\/em>is a romance that deals with a contemporary scandal of incest and suicide in the Morton family. Its didactic purpose is clearly visible in the preface: \u2018To Expose the dangerous Consequences of Seduction\u2019 and to reveal \u2018the Advantages of Female Education.\u2019 Gray writes: \u2018Hardly distinguished in itself, the book nevertheless establishes a currency common to all three of these early American novels: a clear basis in fact, actuality (so anticipating and meeting any possible objections to fiction, imaginative self-indulgence, or daydreaming), an even clearer moral purpose (so anticipating and meeting any possible objections from puritans or utilitarians), and a narrative that flirts with sensation and indulges in sentiment (so encouraging the reader to read on). Even more specifically, The Power of Sympathy <\/em>shares the same currency as the books by Rowson and Webster in the sense that it places a young woman and her fate at the center of the narrative, and addresses other young women as the intended recipients of its message.\u2019 In the preface to Charlotte Temple<\/em>, the first American bestseller, Rowson writes that her novel is \u2018not merely the effusion of Fancy, but [\u2026] a reality\u2019 as the basic facts were related to her by \u2018an old lady who had personally known Charlotte.\u2019 She says, \u2018I have thrown over the whole a slight veil of fiction\u2019. And she also insists on the moral purpose of her writing: \u2018For the perusal of the young and thoughtless of the fair sex, this Tale of Truth is designed\u2019. What follows this preface is a tale of seduction of\u00a0a young girl and her suffering. Judith Sargent Murray\u2019s <\/span>The Story of Margaretta <\/em>(1798) and Foster\u2019s <\/span>The Coquette <\/em>still revolve around the theme of seduction.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

None of these writers took writing as profession; the first person who earned the title of a professional writer is Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810). (However, it is now believed that there were definitely many other writers who tried to earn their living through writing during this time.) Influenced by William Godwin, Brown wrote a treatise on the rights of women, Alcuin: A Dialogue <\/em>(1798). After that, within two years, he wrote four other novels: Wieland; or, The Transformation <\/em>(1798), Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 <\/em>(1799-1800), Ormond; or, The Secret Witness <\/em>(1799), and Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker <\/em>(1799). Gray writes that \u2018Brown was \u2018one of the first American writers to discover the uses of the unreliable narrator.\u2019 However, he was, like others, careful to point\u00a0 out that his fictions were based on facts: for example, he wrote in the preface to his first novel that there had been \u2018an authentic case, remarkably similar to Wieland.\u2019 Gray writes: \u2018he anticipates so much of what was to happen in American fiction in the nineteenth century. His fascination with aberrant psychology, deviations in human thought and behavior, foreshadows the work of Edgar Allan Poe; so, for that matter, does his use of slippery narrators. His use of symbolism, and his transformation of Gothic into a strange, surreal mix of the extraordinary and the everyday, prepares the way for the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.\u2019<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
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How it began<\/strong><\/p>\n

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In Henry James\u2019 The American<\/em>, a character says of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) that \u2018He invented America: a very great man\u2019. Now Richard Gray writes in A History of American Literature <\/em>that \u2018Columbus, however, was following a prototype devised long before him and\u00a0surviving long after him, the idea of a new land outside and beyond history: \u201ca Virgin Countrey\u201d\u2019. Therefore, fundamental to this European encounter with the New World was the myth of Eden: Gray writes that \u2018European settlers were faced not so much with another culture as with nature, and not really encountering a possible future but, on the contrary, returning to an imagined past.\u2019 In this context, Columbus\u2019 observations of the natives are noteworthy: \u2018These people go naked\u2019; \u2018their manners are very decent\u2019. As Gray argues, \u2018he could see this only as a sign of their aboriginal innocence.\u2019 And, later, William Crashaw (1572-1626) and others went on to compare Virginia to the Promised Land and the immigrants to the Israelites.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Now, faced with the strangeness of the natives, Columbus advised his royal masters to \u2018adopt the resolution of converting them to Christianity.\u2019 And Gray writes: \u2018Conversion was one strategy [\u2026] for dealing with America and the Americans they encountered. Comparison was another: the New World could be understood, perhaps, by discovering likeness with the Old [\u2026] Naming was another ploy\u2019. Therefore, the narrative that was being forged in this way was a hybrid of the Old World and the New World.<\/p>\n

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In the first half of the sixteenth century, many Europeans came to America in search of gold. Of course, they did not find it, but The Journey of Coronado 1540-1542 <\/em>(1904) reveals an encounter with what Gray puts as \u2018the vastness of America, the immense emptiness of the plains\u2019. Gray writes: \u2018If space is the central fact of American experience, as writers from\u00a0 Walt Whitman to Charles Olson have claimed, then this was the European discovery of it.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Gray also tells us: \u2018Into that making, from its earliest stages, went not only the Spanish and the Portuguese, the French and the Native Americans, but also the English and their immediate neighbors in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. From the beginning, the story of America is a story neither of a monolith nor a melting pot but a mosaic: a multicultural\u00a0environment in which individuals negotiate an identity for themselves between the different traditions they encounter. And the tale of American literature has been one of pluralism: collision, conflict, and even congruence between different languages and literatures\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Puritan narratives<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Between 1630 and 1651, William Bradford (1590-1657) wrote Of Plymouth Plantation <\/em>which was an unfinished account of the colony up to 1646. At the very beginning of the book, Bradford claimed that he would present \u2018the simple truth in all things\u2019; however, he came to develop the idea of the divine plan behind the civilizing mission of the European saints, the elect group of believers. Gray writes: \u2018Like so many great American stories, Of Plymouth Plantation <\/em>is a search for meaning. It has a narrator looking for what might lie behind the mask of the material event [\u2026] [T]his habit of interpreting events with the help of a providential vocabulary was to have a profound impact on American writing\u2014just as, for that matter, the moralizing tendency and the preference for fact rather than fiction, \u201cGod\u2019s truth\u201d over \u201cmen\u2019s lies,\u201d also were.\u2019 However, as the narrative proceeded, it grew more and more elegiac with the passing of the communitarian spirit of the first generation of immigrants whom Bradford called \u2018Pilgrims\u2019 and the second generation\u2019s search for better land and further prosperity.<\/p>\n

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Next, we can think about John Winthrop (1588-1649) who had called England \u2018this sinfull land\u2019 as early as 1622 and set out for New England with nearly four hundred other Congregationalist Puritans, ten years after Bradford\u2019s landing at Plymouth, to build there a good society.<\/p>\n

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However, there were also various challenges to that Puritan discourse. Such challenges emerged from people like Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), Thomas Morton\u00a0 (1579?-1642?) and Roger Williams (1603?-1683). Morton\u2019s only literary output was New English Canaan <\/em>(1637) which was a satirical attack on Puritanism. In Gray\u2019s words, \u2018It sets out to show that New England is indeed a Canaan or Promised Land, a naturally abundant world inhabited by friendly and even noble savages [\u2026] A celebration of what he calls \u201cthe happy life of the savages,\u201d and their natural wisdom, occupies the first section, [\u2026] [I]n the third section [\u2026] Morton describes the general inhumanity of the Puritans\u2019. In The Bloody Tenent of Persecution <\/em>(1644), Williams argued for Christianity to be free from secular interests: he believed, as Gray points out, that \u2018the Massachusetts Bay Company charter itself was invalid because a Christian king had no right over heathen lands.\u2019<\/p>\n

The early 18th century<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Let us begin with Cotton Mather (1663-1728) who had more than four hundred publications during his life time: The Negro Christianized <\/em>(1706), Bonifacius; or, Essays to Do Good <\/em>(1710), The Christian Philosopher <\/em>(1720), India Christiana <\/em>(1721), to name a few of them. Now, as Gray points out, \u2018Mather\u2019s belief in the supreme importance of conversion led him, after all, to claim that a slave taught the true faith was far better off than a free black; and it sprang, in the first place, from a low opinion of both African and Native Americans, bordering on contempt [\u2026] Mather made no secret of his belief that \u201cthe natives of the country now possessed by New Englanders\u201d [\u2026] were \u201cmiserable savages,\u201d \u201cstupid and senseless,\u201d [\u2026] They had \u201cno arts<\/em>,\u201d [\u2026] \u201clittle, if any, tradition \u2026 worthy of \u2026 notice\u201d; reading and writing were \u201caltogether unknown to them\u201d and their religion consisted of no more than \u201cdiabolical rites,\u201d \u201cextravagant ridiculous devotions\u201d to \u201cmany gods.\u201d\u2019 To some\u00a0extent, it certainly reminds us of Columbus\u2019 observations: he could not make sense of their customs and found it either odd or abhorrent. Besides, Columbus also observes that the natives were \u2018without any religion that could be discovered\u2019. Therefore, while Columbus also desired their conversion, he still saw the natives as marked by the aboriginal innocence. But, Mather saw them as marked by savageness. And, therefore, for Mather, they had to be \u2018<\/span>civilized <\/em>ere they could be <\/span>Christianized<\/em>.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

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For a brief discussion of his longest work, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, the Ecclesiastical History of New England <\/em>(1702), let us simply take a look at what Gray writes about it: \u2018It is also an American epic, one of the very first, in which the author sets about capturing in words what he sees as the promise of the nation [\u2026] The echo of the Aeneid <\/em>is an intimation of what Mather is after. He is hoping to link the story of his people to earlier epic migrations [\u2026] he is also suggesting a direct analogy with the journey of God\u2019s chosen people to the Promised Land. His subject is a matter of both history and belief\u2019.<\/p>\n

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Next, we can think about Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) who, Gray tells us, was \u2018living at a time when Puritanism no longer exerted the power it once did\u2019. He wrote a journal from 1673 to 1728, eventually published as The Diary of Samuel Sewall <\/em>(1973). In an entry for June 19, 1700, he writes that, following his conscience, he felt \u2018call\u2019d\u2019 to write against \u2018the Trade fetching Negroes from Guinea.\u2019 And just after five days, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial<\/em>, Sewall\u2019s attack on the practice of slavery, was published in Boston. In this book, he attacked slavery on the ground that it was a violation of biblical precept since \u2018all men, as they are the Sons of Adam<\/em>, are Coheirs; and have equal Right unto Liberty\u2019. However, as Gray writes, \u2018[h]is journals reveal the more private side of Puritanism: a daily search for the right path to follow in order to make the individual journey part of the divine plan [\u2026] [T]hat was to remain ingrained in American writing long after the Puritan hegemony had vanished.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Growing secular<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Again, Gray writes at length: \u2018The power of Puritanism was, in fact, waning in New England well before the end of the eighteenth century. The number of \u201cunchurched\u201d colonists had been large to begin with, and they grew in number and power over the years [\u2026] and, by the end of the eighteenth century, more than 275,000 African slaves had been brought to America [\u2026] It certainly helped to promote the growing secular tendencies of the age. Religion was still strong; and it was, in fact, made stronger by a sweeping revivalist movement known as the Great Awakening, in the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century [\u2026] The Great Awakening, however, was itself a reaction against what was rightly felt to be the dominant trend: the growing tendency among colonists to accept and practice the ideas of the Enlightenment, albeit usually in popularized form. Those ideas emphasized the determining influence of reason and common sense and the imperatives of self-help, personal and social progress. According to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the universe was a rational, mechanical phenomenon which, as the English philosopher John Locke put it, ran rather like a self-winding watch. [\u2026] And man, using his reason and good sense, could ascertain the laws of this mechanism. He could then use those laws for his own profit, the betterment of society, and his own improvement [\u2026] It was an ethic with an obvious attraction for new generations of immigrants eager to stake their place and improve their lot in a new land with such abundant resources. And, even for those, the vast majority, who had never heard of the Enlightenment, the secular gospel of reason, common sense, use, profit, and progress became part of the American way.\u2019<\/p>\n

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The increasingly secular tendencies of the period are to be found in the travel journals of Sarah Kemble Knight (1666-1727) and William Byrd of Westover (1674-1744). Like the\u00a0earlier European accounts, they didn\u2019t see the New World as either Eden or Wilderness. Although God is mentioned at times, there is no sense of being guided by the providence. As Gray tells us, Knight\u2019s \u2018writings reveal a lively, humorous, gossipy woman alert to the comedy and occasional beauty of life in early America [\u2026] She recalls, for instance, how moved she was by the sight of the woods lit up by the moon\u2019. On the other hand, Byrd tells us in a letter published in <\/span>The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds <\/em>(1977) that in America he lived \u2018like [\u2026] the patriarchs.\u2019 As the contemporary Robert Beverley II (1673- 1722) writes in <\/span>The History and Present State of Virginia <\/em>(1722), the majority of the immigrants were \u2018of low Circumstances [\u2026] such as were willing to seek their Fortunes in a Foreign Country.\u2019 There was already an anticipation of the later Southern argument in defense of slavery: slaves were seen as <\/span>children <\/em>who <\/span>needed <\/em>the guidance and support of a <\/span>benevolent <\/em>patriarch. What we see here in Byrd\u2014 \u2018the idea of the indolent, elegant aristocrat\u2019\u2014was \u2018an alternative to the ruminative Puritan or the industrious Northerner\u2019 (Gray).<\/span><\/p>\n

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Secularity in poetry<\/strong><\/p>\n

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If we take a look at Nathaniel Evans\u2019s (1742-1767) poetry, which were posthumously published as Poems on Several Occasions <\/em>(1772), we see that the poems were rarely religious: \u2018Hymn to May\u2019, \u2018To Benjamin Franklin, Occasioned by Hearing Him Play on the Harmonica<\/em>\u2019, \u2018Ode to the Memory of Mr. Thomas Godfrey\u2019 etc. Although he criticized the greed and immorality of the time, the criticism developed from a secular morality.<\/p>\n

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We have also the female poets who introduced a female perspective to the familiar subjects and sometimes even focused on the issues specific to their own sex, like childbearing, for instance. They were also conscious of the difficulties of the women in the society: \u2018How\u00a0wretched is a woman\u2019s fate,\/\u2019 an anonymous poet wrote in \u2018Verses Written by a Young Lady, on Women Born to be controll\u2019d\u2019 (1743), \u2018Subject to man in every state. \/ How can she then be free from woes?\u2019 For another anonymous poet, the solution, as she put it in \u2018The Lady\u2019s Complaint\u2019 (1736), was in \u2018equal laws\u2019 that would \u2018neither sex oppress\u2019: it would \u2018More freedom give to womankind\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Annis Boudinot Stockton (1736-1801) wrote \u2018To Laura\u2019 (1757) addressing her friend Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson (1737-1801)\u2014pen name \u2018Laura\u2019\u2014 who was herself one of the most well known poets of the eighteenth century. Both of them wrote poems on married love, such as \u2018Epistle to Lucia\u2019 (1766) and \u2018An Ode Written on the Birthday of Mr. Henry Fergusson\u2019 (1774). Like Evans, Stockton also wrote on public figures\u2014for example, \u2018The Vision, an Ode to Washington\u2019 (1789). And in \u2018On a Beautiful Damask Rose, Emblematical of Love and Wedlock\u2019 (1789), Fergusson explored a philosophical issue like the transience of love. Gray writes about them that \u2018[w]hat is remarkable about many of these poems written by women is their sense of a shared suffering and dignity, sometimes associated with the core experience of childbirth.\u2019 Jane Colman Turell (1708-1735) wrote: \u2018Thrice in my womb I\u2019ve found the pleasing strife, \/ In the first struggles of my infant\u2019s life: \/ But O how soon by Heaven I\u2019m call\u2019d to mourn, \/ While from my womb a lifeless babe is born?\u2019 However, as Gray notes, \u2018[t]hat sense of shared suffering and dignity can also extend beyond the specifically female sphere\u2019: later, Sarah Wentworth Morton (1759-1846) became quite well- known for a strong antislavery poem, \u2018The African Chief\u2019 (1823).<\/p>\n

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While, on the one hand, we have these educated white women poets, we have, on the other hand, Lucy Terry (1730-1821), an African slave who eventually became a free black: she wrote a poem called \u2018Bars Fight\u2019 (eventually published in 1855) that captured the experience of pain and a witness of courage during a battle between whites and Indians.<\/p>\n

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\u2018To America, one schoolmaster is worth a dozen poets,\u2019 said Benjamin Franklin, because \u2018[n]othing is good or beautiful but in the measure that it is useful\u2019. However, many people still believed that poetry helped in the making of America: as Gray writes, \u2018[t]he full force of that reply had to wait until the Revolution, when writers and critics began to insist that the new American nation needed an American literature, and more specifically an American poetry, in order to announce and understand itself.\u2019 Even Cotton Mather, who had attacked poetry for its fictional aspect and sensuality, wrote a proto-epic called Magnalia Christi Americana<\/em>, celebrating the \u2018Wonders\u2019 of the New World. Towards the end of the century, Joel Barlow attempted a more specifically poetic epic in Vision of Columbus<\/em>, an enlarged and revised version of which appeared later as The Columbiad<\/em>. Ebenezer Cook (1667-1733) and Richard Lewis (1700?-1734) had already tried their hands at producing other forms of early eighteenth-century poetry than epic\u2014satire and pastoral. Cook\u2019s claim to fame rests on his satirical poem The Sot-weed Factor; or, a Voyage to Maryland<\/em>. In the form of the Hudibrastic verse, this piece is a satire on English snobbery and preciousness. As Gray writes, \u2018Cook has taken an English form and turned it to American advantage.\u2019 Lewis, on the other hand, wrote, among other things, pastoral that indicated at the superiority of American nature. When Lewis refers to \u2018the out-stretch\u2019d Land<\/em>\u2019, we immediately understand that it is that same encounter\u2014that we have seen before and which many other poets would experience\u2014with space<\/em>, the primary aspect of the American landscape. \u2018Lewis, however,\u2019 Gray notes, \u2018devotes more attention than his European predecessors tended to do to the ideas of patient toil rewarded, the value of self-subsistence, and the pleasures of abundance\u2019\u2014 things that are (to become) typically American.<\/p>\n

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Now, although there was a growing trend towards the secular in the eighteenth century America, religious influences did not entirely disappear. The most important figure in this context would be Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). He became what he was due to his deeply\u00a0religious upbringing\u2014both his father and grandfather were clergymen. He felt compelled not only \u2018to sit and view the moon [\u2026] the clouds and the sky,\u2019 \u2018to behold the sweet glory of God in these things,\u2019 but also, as Gray puts it, \u2018to review and discipline the conduct of his life.\u2019 Between 1722 and 1723, he composed seventy <\/span>Resolutions <\/em>with the aim of improving himself in the light of his faith. In 1734, he preached a few sermons which certainly had an effect on many of the congregation who apparently felt exactly the kind of conversion Edwards was preaching and had himself experienced. As an account of this awakening of faith in his community, Edwards wrote a book (developed from a pamphlet) called <\/span>A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God <\/em>(1737). In a way, as Gray suggests, this congregation anticipated \u2018the Great Awakening that was to sweep through many parts of the American colonies in the next few years\u2019. However, his embodiment of faith was a bit complicated, as Gray points out, insofar as \u2018Edwards wanted to harness reason in the service of faith and, if necessary, to defend mystery with logic [which] is nowhere better illustrated than in [\u2026] such works as <\/span>The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended <\/em>(1758)\u00a0 and <\/span>Two Dissertations <\/em>(1765)\u2019. What makes Edwards more complicated than others is his implicit philosophical dialogue with authorities like Descartes and Locke on the one hand, and his Puritan inheritance on the other hand.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)<\/strong><\/p>\n

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As Gray writes, \u2018Franklin embodied the new spirit of America, emerging in part out of Puritanism and in part out of the Enlightenment, that was coming to dominate the culture.\u2019 However, it does not make him similar to Edwards. In his Autobiography<\/em>\u2014 which he worked on in 1771, 1784, 1788, 1788-89 and of which although an American edition was published in 1818, the first complete edition came out only in 1867\u2014Franklin presents himself as an exemplary figure. The first section of his Autobiography <\/em>holds a detailed account of his \u2018first\u00a0entry\u2019 into the city of Philadelphiain in 1723. As Gray notes, \u2018what he emphasizes [here] is his sorry appearance and poverty.\u2019 The second section reveals his conception of \u2018the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.\u2019 Gray writes: \u2018Springing from a fundamental belief that the individual could change, improve, and even recreate himself with the help of reason, common sense, and hard work, Franklin\u2019s program for himself was one of the first great formulations of the American dream.\u2019 By 1748, he had, indeed, made quite a lot of money and also become quite famous. Thus, Franklin gave birth to the notion which Gray puts as that of \u2018the self-made man as hero, on his first appearance, poor and unknown and unprotected, entering a world that he then proceeds to conquer.\u2019 His <\/span>The Way to Wealth <\/em>(1758), which brought together many of his proverbs embodying his philosophy, was a nationwide bestseller and reprinted several hundred times.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The dream of the self-made man could be realized only in America, where, as Franklin says in \u2018Information to Those Who Would Remove to America\u2019 (1784), \u2018people do not inquire concerning a Stranger, What is he<\/em>? But, What can he do<\/em>?\u2019 All \u2018Hearty young Labouring Men\u2019 could \u2018easily establish themselves\u2019 in this \u2018Land of Labour\u2019, which is why \u2018a general happy Mediocrity prevails\u2019, here, in America.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Gray writes that \u2018throughout his life, Franklin was not only an inventor of proverbial wisdom but a masterly essayist\u2019. In his \u2018Silence Dogood\u2019 papers, as Gray informs us, he \u2018satirize[d] follies and vices ranging from poor poetry to prostitution.\u2019 He also attacked violence against Native Americans in A Narrative of the Late Massacres <\/em>(1764) and the superstition leading to the accusation of witchcraft on women in \u2018A Witch Trial at Mount Holly\u2019 (1730), and satirized the slave trade in \u2018On the Slave Trade\u2019 (1790) and British imperialism in \u2018An Edict by the King of Prussia\u2019 (1773). Thus, he shaped his persona of \u2018the friend of all good men\u2019. He was also a member of that committee which went onto draft the Declaration of Independence. He was also one of the three American signatories to the treaty\u00a0that ended the Revolutionary war. And he became a member of the convention which drafted the Constitution of the United Sates. Gray writes that \u2018Franklin was, in short, at the heart of the American Revolution from its origins to its conclusion. And he shows, more clearly than any other figure of the time, just how much that Revolution owed to the principles of the Enlightenment.\u2019\u00a0<\/span>And others: towards the Revolution.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Letters from an American Farmer <\/em>(1782), J. Hector St. Jean de Cr\u00e8vecoeur (1735-1813) says that \u2018the American is a new man, who acts upon new principles\u2019. Gray tells us that \u2018[t]hat was a common theme in the literature surrounding the American Revolution. As the American colonies became a new nation, the United States of America, writers and many others applied themselves to the task of announcing just what this new nation represented\u2019. What is typically American about Cr\u00e8vecoeur\u2019s narrative is the amalgamation of fiction and autobiography. In this text, we find his belief in the superiority of the American nature in comparison to the European culture. Secondly, he says that America is \u2018not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and a herd of people who have nothing\u2019; the American owes nothing to \u2018a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord.\u2019 And, thirdly, he also says that \u2018here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.\u2019 However, as Gray notes, \u2018[t]ravelling to South Carolina, James is reminded of the obscenity and injustice of slavery [\u2026] [which] leads James to reflect on a terrible exception to the American norm of just laws and useful toil rewarded.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was another writer from this period. Gray writes that \u2018[u]nlike Cr\u00e8vecoeur, however, Paine was unambiguously enthusiastic about the Revolution.\u2019 In Common Sense <\/em>(1776), he argued in the typically Enlightenment spirit\u2014with emphasis on\u00a0\u2018simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense\u2019\u2014 for the independence of America and the formation of a republican government. With the defeat of Washington and the retreat at the end of 1776, Paine tried to rouse the nation for further resistance in first of the <\/span>Crisis <\/em>papers. After returning to England in 1787, he wrote <\/span>The Rights of Man <\/em>(1791-1792) as a kind of reply to Edmund Burke\u2019s <\/span>Reflections on the Revolution in France <\/em>(1790). Although it was very popular, nevertheless, for his arguments against a hereditary monarchy, he was charged with sedition and forced to flee to France. Again, for his protest against the execution of Louis XVI he was imprisoned in France. Still, in <\/span>The Age of Reason <\/em>(1794-1795), he attacked religion for its irrationality.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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 <\/p>\n

Next, we have Thomas Jefferson (1724-1826), who was, as Gray writes, \u2018[a] person of eclectic interests\u2014and, in that, the inheritor of a tradition previously best illustrated by Wiliam Byrd of Westover\u2019. He played a pivotal role in the formation of the American nation. In A Summary View of the Rights of British America <\/em>(1774), he argued for America\u2019s freedom from British control on the ground of \u2018a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them.\u2019 In 1776, he became a member of the committee which would draft the Declaration of Independence. Gray writes that \u2018if any one person can be called the author of that Declaration, it is undoubtedly Jefferson.\u2019 However, Gray also notes that \u2018[l]ike Cr\u00e8vecoeur, Jefferson also felt compelled to confront the challenge to his idyllic vision of America posed by the indelible fact of slavery.\u2019 He condemned slavery and argued for emancipation in Notes on the State of Virginia <\/em>(1787). However, he was of the opinion that the freed slaves should be sent somewhere else where they would stand as \u2018free and independent people\u2019.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

John Adams (1735-1826), first vice president and second president, had a very sceptical mind: Jefferson\u2019s idealism stood in opposition to Adams\u2019 pessimism. If Jefferson thought that \u2018a natural aristocracy\u2019 of \u2018virtue and talents\u2019 could replace \u2018an artificial aristocracy founded\u00a0on wealth and birth,\u2019 Adams though that \u2018[b]oth artificial aristocracy, and Monarchy have grown out of the natural Aristocracy of \u201cvirtue and talents.\u201d\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

What about the women?<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Abigail Adams (1744-1818), wife of John Adams, consistently raised the question of freedom and equality for women. In 1776, she wrote to her husband that \u2018in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies\u2019; \u2018Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands\u2019; \u2018Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.\u2019 If the new laws are not \u2018more generous and favourable\u2019 to women than the old laws had been, she warned, \u2018we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.\u2019 And, Gray notes: \u2018\u201dAll men are created equal,\u201d the Declaration of Independence announced. That explicitly excluded women. Implicitly, it also excluded \u201cIndians\u201d and \u201cNegroes,\u201d since what it meant, of course, was all white <\/em>men.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Among the leading voices, Thomas Paine was someone who also raised the question of the rights of women: \u2018If we take a survey of ages and countries,\u2019 Paine wrote in \u2018An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex\u2019 (1775), \u2018we shall find the women, almost\u2014without exception\u2014at all times and in all places, adored and oppressed.\u2019 Judith Sargent Murray\u2019s (1751-1820) 1790 piece, \u2018On the Equality of the Sexes\u2019, makes her, arguably, one of the first American feminists. In this piece, she argued, as Gray summarizes, \u2018that the capacities of memory and imagination are equal in women and men and that, if women are deficient as far as the two other faculties of the mind, reason and judgment, are concerned, it is because of a difference in education.\u2019 In her 1784 essay, \u2018Desultory Thoughts upon the Utility of encouraging a\u00a0degree of Self-Complacency especially in Female Bosoms\u2019, she said that a young woman should be considered \u2018as a rational being\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Other voices<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Although Hendrick Aupaumut (?-1830), a Mahican Indian, tried, in A Short Narration of my Last Journey to the Western Country <\/em>(written about 1794 and published only in 1827), to convince his people that the American republic would extend its rights to the Native Americans as well, Samson Occom (1723-1792) was a Native American who did not quite believe it. As Gray informs, \u2018Quite the contrary, during the Revolutionary War Occom urged the tribes to remain neutral\u2019. For him, as for many others, the solution of their problems was in separation. His Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs <\/em>(1774) was the first Indian bestseller.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833), an evangelical minister, was one who articulated the rage of the African-Americans at the huge gap between the promise of the Revolution and their reality. As gray writes, \u2018Haynes, along with Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley, helped to produce the first significant body of African-American writing\u2019. In \u2018Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping\u2019 (written early in the career but unpublished till 1983), he makes use of the Declaration of Independence, the founding documents of the nation, and the Bible, to develop a vigorous argument against slavery. In a petition, Prince Hall (1735?-1807) too asks for the emancipation of \u2018great number of Negroes who are detained in a state of Slavery in the Bowels of a free & Christian country.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We also have Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797), whose autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Valla, the African, Written by Himself <\/em>(1787), in Gray\u2019s words, \u2018established the form of the slave narrative and so, indirectly or\u00a0otherwise [\u2026] has influenced American writing \u2013 and African-American writing in particular\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0to the present day.\u2019 In this work, he viewed Africa as the Eden, the prelapsarian world. And, in many ways, he turned the typical European charges upside down: he was frightened of the white people and thought that he would be eaten; later, he was convinced that his white masters were \u2018savages\u2019. However, he also befriended \u2018a [white] young lad.\u2019 Gray writes that \u2018[t]heir close friendship [\u2026] serves as an illustration of the superficiality of racial barriers [\u2026] and, besides, anticipates a powerful theme in later American writing \u2013 of interracial and often homoerotic intimacy.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Poetry, drama and fiction<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Although Lucy Terry came before with her poem \u2018Bars fight,\u2019 Jupiter Hammon (1711-1806?) was the first African-American poet who got his work published: Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, With Penitential Cries <\/em>(1760), a series of 22 quatrains, and Address to the Negroe: In the State of New York <\/em>(1787), a prose work. In the prose work, he argues for the reconciliation between the black people and slavery. His works are prefaced by an acknowledgement of the white people he served. Gray writes: \u2018That anticipated a common pattern in African-American writing. Slave narratives, for instance, were commonly prefaced by a note or essay from a white notable, mediating the narrative for what was, after all, an almost entirely white audience \u2013 and giving it a white seal of approval. And it has to be borne in mind when reading what Hammon has to say about slavery: which, in essence, takes up a defense of the peculiar institution\u2019.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), with the help of the woman who bought her from a slave market, got her Poems <\/em>(1773) published in London. Her poetry, notes Gray, \u2018paints a less\u00a0than flattering picture of Africa\u2019. She writes in \u2018To the University of Cambridge, in New England\u2019 (1773): \u2018\u2019Twas not long since I left my native shore \/ The land of errors, and <\/span>Egyptian <\/em>gloom: \/ Father of mercy, \u2019twas thy gracious hand \/ Brought me in safety from\u00a0 those dark abodes.\u2019 However, sometimes an Edenic or idyllic image of Africa\u2014of Equiano\u2019s type\u2014can also be found in Wheatley.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Among the white poets of the time, we have Philip Freneau (1752-1832), Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), and Joel Barlow (1754-1826). Interestingly, Freneau\u2019s long poem (written together with his college friend Hugh Brackenridge), The Rising glory of America <\/em>(written in 1771, published in 1772 and revised in 1786), Gray notes, \u2018tends to confirm the power of the mother country even while Freneau and Brackenridge struggle to deny it.\u2019 In his \u2018Literary Importation\u2019 (1788), he writes: \u2018Can we never be thought to have learning or grace \/ Unless it be brought from that damnable place.\u2019 This \u2018damnable place\u2019 is certainly a reference to Britain. And Gray writes that \u2018[i]n some of his poetry, at least, Freneau was working toward a form of literary emancipation\u2019. In \u2018To an Author\u2019 (1788), he also focuses on the difficulty of writing poetry in a certain historical context \u2018Where rigid Reason reigns alone, \/ Where lovely Fancy has no sway, \/ Nor magic forms about us play\u2019. He further adds: \u2018An age employed in edging steel \/ Can no poetic raptures feel.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Dwight\u2019s most ambitious work, Greenfield Hill: A Poem in Seven Parts <\/em>(1794), written in imitation of the pastoral and elegiac modes of British writers, portrays an idyllic life in the American countryside where \u2018every farmer reigns a little king\u2019. It also attacks slavery. However, as Gray observes, \u2018despite Dwight\u2019s references to \u201cIndian woes,\u201d his basic\u00a0 message is that their removal was a necessary step in the march of progress.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Royall Tyler (1756-1826), who wrote seven plays, gave birth to the American tradition in drama. He is best known for his play The Contrast <\/em>(written in 1787, produced in 1790 and published in 1792). Written after watching a performance of R. B. Sheridan\u2019s The School for\u00a0<\/em>Scandal <\/em>and clearly influenced by the English eighteenth century comedies, this was the first comedy by an American writer to earn a professional production. The theme is typically American since, as Gray summarizes, \u2018the contrast of the title is between [\u2026] European affectation [\u2026] [and] American straightforwardness and republican honesty.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Among the first American novels, we have The Power of Sympathy <\/em>(1789) by William Hill Brown (1765-1793), Charlotte Temple <\/em>(1794) by Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762-1824), and The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton <\/em>(1797) by Hannah Webster Foster (1758- 1840). The Power of Sympathy <\/em>is a romance that deals with a contemporary scandal of incest and suicide in the Morton family. Its didactic purpose is clearly visible in the preface: \u2018To Expose the dangerous Consequences of Seduction\u2019 and to reveal \u2018the Advantages of Female Education.\u2019 Gray writes: \u2018Hardly distinguished in itself, the book nevertheless establishes a currency common to all three of these early American novels: a clear basis in fact, actuality (so anticipating and meeting any possible objections to fiction, imaginative self-indulgence, or daydreaming), an even clearer moral purpose (so anticipating and meeting any possible objections from puritans or utilitarians), and a narrative that flirts with sensation and indulges in sentiment (so encouraging the reader to read on). Even more specifically, The Power of Sympathy <\/em>shares the same currency as the books by Rowson and Webster in the sense that it places a young woman and her fate at the center of the narrative, and addresses other young women as the intended recipients of its message.\u2019 In the preface to Charlotte Temple<\/em>, the first American bestseller, Rowson writes that her novel is \u2018not merely the effusion of Fancy, but [\u2026] a reality\u2019 as the basic facts were related to her by \u2018an old lady who had personally known Charlotte.\u2019 She says, \u2018I have thrown over the whole a slight veil of fiction\u2019. And she also insists on the moral purpose of her writing: \u2018For the perusal of the young and thoughtless of the fair sex, this Tale of Truth is designed\u2019. What follows this preface is a tale of seduction of\u00a0a young girl and her suffering. Judith Sargent Murray\u2019s <\/span>The Story of Margaretta <\/em>(1798) and Foster\u2019s <\/span>The Coquette <\/em>still revolve around the theme of seduction.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

None of these writers took writing as profession; the first person who earned the title of a professional writer is Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810). (However, it is now believed that there were definitely many other writers who tried to earn their living through writing during this time.) Influenced by William Godwin, Brown wrote a treatise on the rights of women, Alcuin: A Dialogue <\/em>(1798). After that, within two years, he wrote four other novels: Wieland; or, The Transformation <\/em>(1798), Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 <\/em>(1799-1800), Ormond; or, The Secret Witness <\/em>(1799), and Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker <\/em>(1799). Gray writes that \u2018Brown was \u2018one of the first American writers to discover the uses of the unreliable narrator.\u2019 However, he was, like others, careful to point\u00a0 out that his fictions were based on facts: for example, he wrote in the preface to his first novel that there had been \u2018an authentic case, remarkably similar to Wieland.\u2019 Gray writes: \u2018he anticipates so much of what was to happen in American fiction in the nineteenth century. His fascination with aberrant psychology, deviations in human thought and behavior, foreshadows the work of Edgar Allan Poe; so, for that matter, does his use of slippery narrators. His use of symbolism, and his transformation of Gothic into a strange, surreal mix of the extraordinary and the everyday, prepares the way for the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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