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The Legacy of Puritanism
Emory Elliott
University Professor of University of California,
National Humanities Center
Introduction
The purpose of this essay is to trace the effects of
seventeenth-century New England Puritanism
upon the development of the United States of America. Many
scholars have argued that various
elements of Puritanism persisted in the culture and society of
the United States long after the
New England Puritanism discussed in the following pages was
recognizable. However, many of
the verbal formulations that the early Congregational and
Presbyterian clergy devised as ways to
imagine themselves as a special people on a sacred errand into
the wilderness of a New World
have been sustained in the social, political, economic, and
religious thinking of Americans even
to the present. Two leading literary and cultural scholars of
New England Puritanism and its
legacy, Harvard Professors Perry Miller in the 1940s and 50s
and, more recently, Sacvan
Bercovitch, the studied the rhetorical strategies of the New
England Puritans and demonstrated
the remarkable extent to which the leaders and clergy created a
rich American Christian
mythology to describe their Providential role as the new Chosen
People in world history. Passed
down through generations to our own time, many assumptions
regarding Gods promises to his chosen American People have
persisted through the American Revolution, the Civil War, and
all
periods of crisis down to our own time. Still visible in much
religious and political rhetoric in
United States are versions of the grand narrative of the
Reverend Cotton Mathers prose epic, Magnalia Christi Americana
(1702), where he proclaims: I WRITE the Wonders of the CHRISTIAN
RELIGION, flying from the Deprivation of Europe, to the American
Strand. This vision of a Christian American utopia was first
expressed by John Winthrop in his writings in the
1630s and remains alive in many religious and political forms in
the United States today. [For
more on the Puritans, see: Puritanism and Predestination.]
Seventeenth-Century Puritan New England
John Winthrop: In 1620, when William Bradford and his small
colony of one-hundred and three
Protestant separatists, later known as the Pilgrims arrived in
New England to found Plymouth
Plantation [see American Beginnings: 14921690], they were
seeking refuge from persecution in Europe. After severe hardships
during their first few years, the community of survivors became
so successful that beginning in 1630 John Winthrop led thirty
thousand more to establish the
Massachusetts Bay Colony in what became Boston. With Winthrop as
Governor, the Puritans, as
they were called by their enemies, established a government and
churches and initially
negotiated with the local tribes for land; later they would
decide that God had intended for the
land to be freely taken by the English. Winthrop thought of
himself as creating a Christian utopia
where they could practice their religion in peace with each
congregation having its own elected
minister and its own covenant with God. Because Winthrop and
most of his fellow Puritans had
previously experienced a religious conversion experience, they
were able to become church
members, vote, and own property. Their form of government had
elected leaders such as
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Winthrop himself who made decisions with the advice of
magistrates and the clergy. Some
scholars have called this form of government a theocracy.
To understand the Puritans and the nature of their society, it
is necessary to grasp some of the
theological principles of Calvinism. As a prominent theologian,
John Calvin adhered to a
dualistic, either/or logic, and believed that every person was
born sinful and depraved since they
have inherit Original Sin from Adam and Eve. He reasoned that
since God has infinite power and
knowledge He knows everything that has ever occurred in the
universe and everything that will
occur. Thus, since God knows what every human on earth has done
and will do, He already
knows who is predestined to receive His grace, have a conversion
experience, and spend eternity
in heaven. No person can change what is predestined so free will
plays no role in the process of
salvation. The clergy advised their church members that they
should pray, study the Bible, and
hope to receive grace, but they also must accept that if an
individual is not predestined to be
saved, there is nothing that he or she can do to save
themselves. When a person receives grace,
he or she is quiet aware of the powerful experience, and a
congregation is made up of those
joyful converted souls whom they call saints. Many may have
lived very virtuous lives, but if
they do not experience grace and conversion, they will not be
saved. While a large percentage of
the first arrivals were saints, many of their children were
not.
To be sure that the church leaders were not fooled into
admitting hypocrites who give false
testimony of their conversion, the clergy required applicants
for membership to give a detailed
personal narrative of their conversion experience before the
congregation and answer questions.
The clergy had list of specific elements of narratives of
conversion experience that they expected
to hear, and when the candidates narrative did not adhere to the
models, they were denied membership. Because many who did not
experience grace became discouraged, the clergy tried
to find ways to encourage good behavior even as they knew that
only the few were predestined
for salvation. This problem of controlling the disgruntled and
unconverted produced many
problems for the colony.
Although most of those who migrated to America in 1630 shared a
common Calvinist theology
and the experience of having been persecuted in England for
their faith, there was by no means
unanimity regarding how they would practice their religion. Each
congregation was autonomous
and followed the rules of its own written covenant, and each
minister had his own ideas on how
to apply the various doctrines of Calvinism. As the colony grew,
increasing numbers did not
embrace Calvinism at all or even Christianity. Different
dissenting groups and sects arose
including Quakers, Anabaptists, Millenarians, Baptists,
Familists, Enthusiasts, and Antinomians.
The Congregationalists sought to purge these other groups from
the colony, and they agreed with
Rev. Thomas Shepard that the spreading of the contagion of
corrupt opinions could destroy the colony. Such problems with
religious diversity only increased with time.
[]
In the two years leading up to the American Revolution, [see
Religion and the American
Revolution] in spite of British abuses such as the Stamp Act,
Boston Massacre, and the Boston
Tea Party, the Protestant clergy played a key role in arousing a
population in which many were
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uncertain about going a war with England. When Parliament passed
the Port bill, several
clergymen held a traditional Puritan fast day and preached
jeremiads invoking biblical images of
the British as a tool of Satan who has unleashed King George,
the great Whore of Babylon, to ride her great red dragon upon
America. Of this event, Thomas Jefferson declared: This day of
fasting and humiliation was like a shock of electricity throughout
the colonies, placing
every man erect. John Adams asked Abigail to urge their local
ministers to preach similar jeremiads. After the war, Tories like
Peter Oliver and Thomas Hutchinson attributed the success
of the Revolution to the black regiment of the clergy. In the
1770s and 1780s, the vision of the sacred destiny depicted in the
Puritan idiom became part of the political tracts and speeches
during and after the war and even in the writing of Thomas
Paine. During the Civil War in the
nineteenth century, clergy on both sides employed the jeremiad
again to inspire support for their
cause. In fact, in every war in which the United States has been
involved, sermons and speeches
about Americas manifest destiny and sacred errand and heritage
have been central to the discourses of the war.
For over two-hundred years, in State of the Union addresses and
Fourth of July orations,
American Presidents have preached similar jeremiads. They follow
familiar jeremiad formula:
we must beware of enemies who plot to destroy us; we must
acknowledge the gap between our
ideals and current realities; and we must reject corruption,
greed, and selfishness, and other sins;
and finally, we must work together to restore our superiority
among the worlds nations. With God on our side, we shall continue
the American Dream and fulfill our sacred Manifest Destiny.
Sacvan Bercovitch also argues, as did Max Weber in the
nineteenth-century, that the emphasis
within Puritan society upon working hard in ones earthly calling
while seeking spiritual salvation functions well with the spirit of
capitalism. From early on, the Puritans had difficulty
keeping Gods grace and business profits separated. Those who
appeared to be genuinely pious seemed to be the same people who
grew wealthy. One of Samuel Willards sermons entitled Heavenly
Merchandize; or the Purchasing of TRUTH Recommended and the Selling
of it Diswaded was aimed to appeal to the religious pragmatism of
his parishioners, members of what was known as the merchants
church. While the Puritans never read Weber or Bercovitch and would
have difficulty understanding their arguments, their behavior
reflected an unconscious
recognition of the ways that the spiritual calling and the
material calling, as they called them,
could yield earthy and heavenly rewards at the same time.
In the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, the jeremiad has
persisted because of its continued effectiveness in creating mythic
imagery that inspires ideal and motivates action. In his I Have a
Dream Speech, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. depicted the United
States as a great country with strong religious traditions that had
gone astray. He called for a return to the original ideals
of social equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence,
and he urged a reassertion of the
American Dream of freedom and equality for all men and women.
Many American writers of the
last hundred years adopted the jeremiad pattern to compose such
works as The Great Gatsby and
to examine the failures of the nation, symbolized in that novel
by the 1919 Chicago Black Sox
scandal in baseball. A list of American novels and plays from
Melville to Morrison that follow
the jeremiad form would be very long. Since the fall of the
World Trade Center, a host of non-
fiction books have appeared that critique the failures in
American society that led to the disaster
and seek answers for restoring the country to an earlier
stability and security. Many books on the
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environment also follow the formula of failure, blame, reform,
and projections of a future that
fulfill the original goals and ideals.
So powerful and enduring are these Puritan influences in
American culture that they have
become part of American identity. Many people in other countries
identify American as puritans,
and in spite of the high percentage of the population of the
United States that has come from
abroad, many of them embrace the some of the puritan values such
as long hours of hard work,
few vacation and days off, pride in not missing work, and they
pass these values onto their
children. As the Puritan Founders understood, the meaning of
America is a promise always
remaining to be fulfilled, and whether it was the promise of
religious freedom or of economic
opportunity, it was a dream that made the dangers of the
Atlantic and an unknown wilderness
worth risking. While works of American literature may often
lament the failure of the American
dream and portions of the population may at times become
disillusioned with its false promises,
parents, especially of recent immigrants, continue to teach
their children to have faith in the
possibilities, to work hard, and to remain optimistic about the
future because the dream may be
fulfilled for them. As long as such belief persists, the puritan
rituals of national repentance,
reawakening, and renewal will continue.
The Religious Origins of Manifest Destiny
Donald M. Scott Professor of History Queens College and the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York National
Humanities Center
In 1845, an unsigned article in a popular American journal, a
long standing Jacksonian publication, the Democratic Review, issued
an unmistakable call for American expansionism. Focusing mainly on
bringing the Republic of Texas into the union, it declared that
expansion represented the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to
overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free
development of our yearly multiplying millions. Thus a powerful
American slogan was born. Manifest Destiny became first and
foremost a call and justification for an American form of
imperialism, and neatly summarized the goals of the Mexican War. It
claimed that America had a destiny, manifest, i.e., self-evident,
from God to occupy the North American continent south of Canada (it
also claimed the right to the Oregon territory including the
Canadian portion). Manifest Destiny was also clearly a racial
doctrine of white supremacy that granted no native American or
nonwhite claims to any permanent possession of the lands on the
North American continent and justified white American expropriation
of Indian lands. (Manifest Destiny was also a key slogan deployed
in the United States imperial ventures in the 1990s and early years
of the twentieth century that led to U.S. possession or control of
Hawaii and the Philippine Islands.)
But Manifest Destiny was not simply a cloak for American
imperialism and a justification for Americas territorial ambitions.
It also was firmly anchored in a long standing and deep sense of a
special and unique American Destiny, the belief that in the words
of historian Conrad Cherry, America is a nation called to a special
destiny by God. The notion that there was some providential purpose
to the European discovery and eventual conquest of the land masses
discovered by Christopher Columbus was present from the beginning.
Both the Spanish and the
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French monarchs authorized and financed exploration of the New
World because, among other
things, they considered it their divinely appointed mission to
spread Christianity to the New World by converting the natives to
Christianity. Coming later to the venture, the British and
especially the New England Puritans carried with them a demanding
sense of Providential purpose.
John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, gave
the clearest and most far-reaching statement of the idea that God
had charged the English settlers in New England with a special and
unique Providential mission. On Boarde the Arrabella, on the
Attlantick Ocean, Anno 1630, Winthrop delivered the blueprint for
what Perry Miller has dubbed an errand into the wilderness which
set the framework for most of the later versions of the idea that
America had been providentially chosen for a special destiny.
Winthrop delivered his lay sermon just before he and his fellow
passengers disembarked on the shore of Boston harbor, the place,
Winthrop proposed, to which God had called them to build up a model
Bible commonwealth for Protestants in England and elsewhere to
emulate. Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered
into Covenant with him for this work, we have taken out a
commission, he declared, adding if the Lord shall please to hear us
and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath he ratified
this Covenant and sealed our Commission and will expect a strict
performance of the Articles contained in it. He went on to specify
more full what fidelity to this commission entailed: the people of
New England must follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love
mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit
together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in
brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our
superfluities for the supply of others necessities. But it is near
the close of the speech that he coined the phrase that has been
invoked again and again (most recently by President Ronald Reagan)
to express the idea of Americas providential uniqueness and
destiny. If we are faithful to our mission, we shall find that the
God of Israel is among us, when tens of us shall be able to resist
a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and a
glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the lord make
it like New England, for we must consider that we shall be as a
City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us.
In the decades following Winthrops speech most New England
divines preached less about New Englands divine mission, than issue
deep, lamentsJeremiads, subsequent historians have called themabout
how far New Englanders had fallen from fulfilling the requirements
of their Covenant with God and how all the woes and turmoil that
had befallen themPrince Phillips war, the loss of New Englands
charter, the witchcraft phenomenon, droughts and dreadful winters,
etc.were the signs and result of Gods wrath over their failings.
However, in the midst of what subsequently came to be referred to
as the Great Awakening (but at the time was considered an
extra-ordinary outpouring of Gods saving grace) that spread across
New England and the other British colonies in the 1740s, the idea
that God had chosen America for a special destiny was resurrected
in a new form. In the midst of the Awakening, the great New England
theologian and revivalist, Jonathan Edwards wrote that the latter
day glory in short, the Millennium, the end times that would bring
the second coming of Christ to earth and spread of the King of God
across the world, would begin in America. It is not likely that
this work of Gods spirit [the revivals] so extraordinary and
wonderful, Edwards asserted, is the dawning, or at least a prelude
of that glorious work of God, so often foretold in scripture, which
in the progress and issue of it, shall renew the world of
mankind.
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Leading preachers of the Second Great Awakening that swept
across the United States over much of the first half of the
nineteenth century, such as Lyman Beecher (father of Harriet
Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher) and Charles Grandison Finney,
reasserted the claim that America would be the site of the
millennium and that the Awakening was its sure sign. They, however,
gave their idea of the millennium a particular American twist. Just
as Winthrop tied the idea of New Englands
providential mission to the character of the Christian
commonwealth they were charged to establish, so too did
millennialists like Beecher describe the society that would bring
forth the millennium as the American republic, thus conjoining the
coming of the millennium with the spread and triumph of American
liberty and democracy. In his 1832 tract, The Plea for the West,
Beecher stated that at first he had thought Edwards prediction
chimerical, but now thought that all providential developments
since, and all the existing signs of the times, lend corroboration
to it. But if it is by the march of revolution and civil liberty,
that the way of the Lord is to be prepared, where shall the central
energy be found, and from what nation shall the renovating power go
forth? Beechers answer was clear: this nation is, in the providence
of God, destined to lead the way in the moral and political
emancipation of the world. The relation between God and nation, in
this millennialist formulation, is both subtle and somewhat
ambiguous. The fusion between Gods will and the nations democratic
character gives divine sanction to the United States secular
arrangements of liberty and democracy. At the same time, it makes
the nation, itself, an instrument in the coming of the millennium.
Moreover, especially in situations of conflict, the claim that God
was on ones side often involved demonizing the enemy. For Beecher,
the demonic enemy or other was a Roman Catholic conspiracy to
spread Romanism across the American west.
It was the Mormons, however, who gave the fullest expression to
the idea of America as the site of the millennium. The prophesies
and Book of Mormon delivered to Joseph Smith and his subsequent
organization of the Mormon Church marked the beginning of the end
times as the formal name of the new religion, The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints, makes unmistakably clear. After
violent persecution in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, Brigham Young
led the Mormons into the wilderness of Utah and there established a
new city upon a hill, a new Zion which as Conrad Cherry put it was
the Holy City in the wilderness [that] was for Young the gathering
place for the Saints from which they would radiate influences that
would turn the entire American continent, and eventually the world
into Gods Zion.
The idea that God had chosen the British colonies for a special
destiny received a major reformulation with the American Revolution
and the establishment of the United States as a new and unique,
independent nation, a Novo Ordo Seclaruma new secular order. The
clergy, especially the Calvinistic New England clergy, was very
much a Patriot clergy that probably played a greater role in
mobilizing support for the revolution than the innumerable
anti-British pamphlets produced between 1765 and 1776. For the most
part, their advocacy of the patriot cause was cast in familiar form
of the Jeremiad: sermons insisted that God had visited the
injustices and tyrannies Parliament and Crown employed to reduce
the colonists to slavery, because of the awful sinfulness into
which they had fallen. God required repentance and a new fidelity
to the Sacred Cause of Liberty. By 1789, with the adoption of the
Constitution and the inauguration of George Washington as
president, the new nation itself was invested with a special
meaning and mission. Americans did not consider their new nation to
be simply another nation among nations, but a providentially
blessed entity charged to develop and maintain itself as the beacon
of liberty and democracy to the world.
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As is well known, not only was the United States remarkably
diverse religiously, its new Constitution, with the first amendment
of the Bill of Rights, also established a clear separation of
church and state, expressly forbidding the institution of an
established Church. It was formally a secular nationthough at the
same time a deeply religious societysustained by Divine will, whose
citizens were expected to subscribe to its founding principals with
religious like devotion. In effect, what emerged was a sacralized
notion of the new nation and the development of what various
scholars have termed a powerful Civil Religion, a particular form
of cultural nationalism to which all true
Americans, whether native or immigrant born and whatever their
personal religious beliefs and affiliations, were expected to
adhere. In this sense the United States can be considered a creedal
society, unified less by geographical boundaries which continually
shifted, and more by a set of specified doctrines inscribed in the
Declaration of Independence and Constitution, to which all citizens
of the nation gave their allegiance. The new democratic republic,
proclaimed as unique, had been ordained by God and endowed with a
special mission to be the new city upon a hill to shine the beacon
of liberty upon the worldand, at times if deemed necessary, to
spread its form of democracy by force of arms to other parts of the
world. Quickly were the revolutionary leaders, especially George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson, elevated into Founding Fathers,
and the Declaration and Constitution turned into almost sacred
relics. Essential to the story, of course, was the apotheosis of
the god-like Washington into an American Moses who led his people
out of bondage into a land of liberty. Thus was the new nation and,
to some extent, its people, chosen. While such familiar language as
promised land and city upon a hill are only biblical allusions, as
religious historian John Wilson has put it, the master image or
figure which frames and sets their true content, is the type of
Israel as Gods chosen people. Thus the apparently secularized
expressions [of these phrases] have a deeper resonance which
locates the origins of the American mission very precisely even
when they are not explicitly elaborated.
Such are the basic outlines of the idea of Americas chosenness
and providential destiny and mission that not only underlay the
invocation of the nations Manifest Destiny as the rationale for the
United States to extend its boundaries to the Pacific Ocean. It is
also the constellation of ideas that has informed American
nationalism and its actions at home and abroad to this day. As
noted, it was explicitly used it to justify the Spanish American
War and its accompanying imperialist goals. President Woodrow
Wilson invoked it to call Americans to fight to make the world safe
for democracy, as did President Franklin Roosevelt, when in World
War II he rallied the American public behind the war against
Fascist and Nazi Europeans and imperial Japan. It was also a
mainstay of the Cold War: in fact, the phrase under God was only
added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 at the height of the Cold
War. The sense of American uniqueness and mission also underlay
John F. Kennedys inaugural address. And President George W. Bush,
considering himself to be an agent of divine will, has defended his
policies in Iraq by invoking the idea that it is Americas duty and
destiny to conquer terrorism and to secure democracy for Iraq and
help spread it to other nations of the Middle East.
Not surprisingly, however, it remained for Abraham Lincoln to
provide the most complex but nonetheless clear statement of the
idea that America has a sacred duty to itself and to the world to
preserve and protect liberty and democracy. In 1837, as a young man
of 28, Lincoln gave an address to the Springfield, Illinois Lyceum.
It was a time of great social and political turmoil. Illinois was
riven with violence over the question of the abolition of slavery.
In Alton, Illinois an anti-abolitionist mob recently had murdered
the abolitionist editor, Elijah Lovejoy, destroyed his printing
press and
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burned his office and house. In this atmosphere of intense
political strife, Lincoln used his Lyceum address to call his
fellow Illinoisans (and Americans) to turn to the basic democratic
and liberal tenets the American national creedthe American Civil
Religionand embrace them and hold them as deeply as they held their
private religious beliefs. Only such a common national faith, he
argued, could provide the real and lasting foundation that would
hold the sprawling, diverse, and conflict-ridden nation
together.
During the Civil War Lincoln found these beliefs sharply
challenged and at the same time gave them their most eloquent and
powerful expression. Lincoln had always kept his questing and often
skeptical spirituality closely guarded, but as the war ground
relentlessly on, his beliefs and speeches took on not a sectarian
but a deeply Old Testament tone. The cadence and words of his
Gettysburg Address accentuate his message: the Union, the last best
hope of earth, was fighting for the sacred cause of liberty. It is
for the living, he declared, to be here dedicated to the great task
remaining before usthat from these honored dead we take increased
devotion to that cause for which they gave the last true measure of
devotion . . . that this nation under God, shall have a new birth
of freedom . . . and that government of the people, by the people,
and for the people shall not perish from the earth.
In his brief second inaugural address, delivered only six weeks
before his assassination, Lincoln explored the relationship between
American freedom and Divine Will. He knew that nations often, if
not always, claimed God or the Gods for their side. So,
acknowledging that neither party expected for the war the magnitude
or the duration which it has already attained, Lincoln addressed
the fact that both North and South invoked God as their partisan:
Both read the same Bible and Pray to the same God, and each invokes
His aid against the other. But he made it unmistakably clear that
though he did not and could not really know Gods Will, he did know
that God intended to end slavery, no matter what it took. Lincoln
powerfully invoked a Jeremiad like vision of an all powerful and
deeply offended God that would reign woe down upon those by peoples
through whom the offense cometh. If we suppose that American
slavery is one of those offences, he declared, which, in the
providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued
through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He
gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to
those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any
departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a
living God ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray,
Lincoln continued, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily
pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth
piled up by the bondsmans two hundred and fifty years of unrequited
toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the
lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said, .
. . so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord are true and
righteous altogether. Here it all is: the idea that the United
States represents the last best hope thatthe belief that an all
powerful, not fully comprehendible God, governs the affairs of
humankind, and that this God held the whole nation, not just the
South, accountable for the existence of slavery in its midst, for
the violation of its appointed mission. Finally, unlike most
proponents of the idea that America is a nation called to a special
destiny by God, he refrains from claiming God as the agent of
Northern victory, even though as the second inaugural makes clear
he had come to believe the Almighty was the ultimate agent of the
mighty scourge of war that He had visited upon the nation for the
sin of slavery.
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The Great Nation of Futurity (1839) John L. O'Sullivan
[This essay appeared in the Democratic Review and presents a
theme eagerly taken up in Congress in the 1840s. It reflects a
religious impulse as well as a nationalist onea sense that God, the
republic, and democracy alike demanded that Americans press on
west, to settle and civilize, republicanize and democratize.
(Johnson, A History of the American People, 1997: 371). In a
newspaper editorial about the annexation of Texas in 1845,
O'Sullivan, a journalist, focused this religious-nationalist
impulse in the memorable phrase Manifest Destiny. In the editorial
he wrote of America's "manifest destiny to overspread the continent
allotted by Providence for the free development of our multiplying
millions." The term was used throughout the second half of the 19th
century as justification for the acquisition of territory all the
way to the Pacific Ocean and beyond, including Alaska, Hawaii, and
the Phillipines.]
The American people having derived their origin from many other
nations, and the
Declaration of National Independence being entirely based on the
great principle of human equality, these facts demonstrate at once
our disconnected position as regards any other nation; that we
have, in reality, but little connection with the past history of
any of them, and still less with all antiquity, its glories, or its
crimes. On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a
new history, the formation and progress of an untried political
system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the
future only; and so far as regards the entire development of the
natural rights of man, in moral, political, and national life, we
may confidently assume that our country is destined to be the great
nation of futurity.
It is so destined, because the principle upon which a nation is
organized fixes its destiny, and that of equality is perfect, is
universal. It presides in all the operations of the physical world,
and it is also the conscious law of the soul -- the self-evident
dictates of morality, which accurately defines the duty of man to
man, and consequently man's rights as man. Besides, the truthful
annals of any nation furnish abundant evidence, that its happiness,
its greatness, its duration, were always proportionate to the
democratic equality in its system of government. . . .
What friend of human liberty, civilization, and refinement, can
cast his view over the past history of the monarchies and
aristocracies of antiquity, and not deplore that they ever existed?
What philanthropist can contemplate the oppressions, the cruelties,
and injustice inflicted by them on the masses of mankind, and not
turn with moral horror from the retrospect?
America is destined for better deeds. It is our unparalleled
glory that we have no reminiscences of battle fields, but in
defence of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights
of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement. Our annals
describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by
hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dupes and victims to
emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes. We
have had patriots to defend our homes, our liberties, but no
aspirants to crowns or thrones; nor have the American people ever
suffered themselves to be led on by wicked ambition to depopulate
the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a human being
might be placed on a seat of supremacy.
We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons
of avoidance of nearly all their examples. The expansive future is
our arena, and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden
space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in
our hearts, and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past. We
are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set
limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly
power can. We point to the everlasting truth on the first page of
our national declaration, and we proclaim to the
Puritans and Manifest Destiny Page 9
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millions of other lands, that "the gates of hell" -- the powers
of aristocracy and monarchy -- "shall not prevail against it."
The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of
American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time,
the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the
excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest
temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High -- the Sacred
and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere -- its roof the
firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregation an
Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions,
calling, owning no man master, but governed by God's natural and
moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood -- of "peace and good
will amongst men.". . .
Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of
universal enfranchisement. Equality of rights is the cynosure of
our union of States, the grand exemplar of the correlative equality
of individuals; and while truth sheds its effulgence, we cannot
retrograde, without dissolving the one and subverting the other. We
must onward to the fulfilment of our mission -- to the entire
development of the principle of our organization -- freedom of
conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business
pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high
destiny, and in nature's eternal, inevitable decree of cause and
effect we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history,
to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man -- the
immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to
the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving
light of truth, has America been chosen; and her high example shall
smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs,
and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now
endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of
the field. Who, then, can doubt that our country is destined to be
the great nation of futurity?
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Samuel Clemens (AKA Mark Twain)
PLYMOUTH ROCK AND THE PILGRIMS
ADDRESS AT THE FIRST ANNUAL DINNER, N. E. SOCIETY
PHILADELPHIA, DECEMBER 22, 1881
On calling upon Mr. Clemens to make response, President Rollins
said:
"This sentiment has been assigned to one who was never exactly
born in New England, nor, perhaps,
were any of his ancestors. He is not technically, therefore, of
New England descent. Under the painful
circumstances in which he has found himself, however, he has
done the best he could -- he has had all his
children born there, and has made of himself a New England
ancestor. He is a self-made man. More than
this, and better even, in cheerful, hopeful, helpful literature
he is of New England ascent. To ascend there
in anything that's reasonable is difficult, for --
confidentially, with the door shut -- we all know that they
are the brightest, ablest sons of that goodly land who never
leave it, and it is among and above them that
Mr. Twain has made his brilliant and permanent ascent -- become
a man of mark."
I RISE to protest. I have kept still for years, but really I
think there is no sufficient justification
for this sort of thing. What do you want to celebrate those
people for ?-those ancestors of yours
of 1620 -- the Mayflower tribe, I mean. What do you want to
celebrate them for? Your pardon:
the gentleman at my left assures me that you are not celebrating
the Pilgrims themselves, but the
landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock on the 22d of December.
So you are celebrating their
landing. Why, the other pretext was thin enough, but this is
thinner than ever; the other was
tissue, tinfoil, fish-bladder, but this is gold-leaf.
Celebrating their landing! What was there
remarkable about it, I would like to know? What can you be
thinking of? Why, those Pilgrims
had been at sea three or four months. It was the very middle of
winter: it was as cold as death off
Cape Cod there. Why shouldn't they come ashore? If they hadn't
landed there would be some
reason for celebrating the fact. It would have been a case of
monumental leatherheadedness
which the world would not willingly let die. If it had been you,
gentlemen, you probably
wouldn't have landed, but you have no shadow of right to be
celebrating, in your ancestors, gifts
which they did not exercise, but only transmitted. Why, to be
celebrating the mere landing of the
Pilgrims -- to be trying to make out that this most natural and
simple and customary procedure
was an extraordinary circumstance -- a circumstance to be amazed
at, and admired, aggrandized
and glorified, at orgies like this for two hundred and sixty
years -- hang it, a horse would have
known enough to land; a horse -- Pardon again; the gentleman on
my right assures me that it was
not merely the landing of the Pilgrims that we are celebrating,
but the Pilgrims themselves. So
we have struck an inconsistency here one says it was the
landing, the other says it was the
Pilgrims. It is an inconsistency characteristic of your
intractable and disputatious tribe, for you
never agree about anything but Boston. Well, then, what do you
want to celebrate those Pilgrims
for? They were a mighty hard lot -- you know it. I grant you,
without the slightest unwillingness,
that they were a deal more gentle and merciful and just than
were the people of Europe of that
day; I grant you that they are better than their predecessors.
But what of that? -- that is nothing.
People always progress. You are better than your fathers and
grandfathers were (this is the first
time I have ever aimed a measureless slander at the departed,
for I consider such things
improper). Yes, those among you who have not been in the
penitentiary, if such there be, are
better than your fathers and grandfathers were; but is that any
sufficient reason for getting up
annual dinners and celebrating you? No, by no means -- by no
means. Well, I repeat, those
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Pilgrims were a hard lot. They took good care of themselves, but
they abolished everybody else's
ancestors. I am a border-ruffian from the State of Missouri. I
am a Connecticut Yankee by
adoption. In me, you have Missouri morals, Connecticut culture;
this, gentlemen, is the
combination which makes the perfect man. But where are my
ancestors? Whom shall I
celebrate? Where shall I find the raw material?
My first American ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian -- an early
Indian. Your ancestors
skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. Not one drop of my blood
flows in that Indian's veins
today. I stand here, lone and forlorn, without an ancestor. They
skinned him! I do not object to
that, if they needed his fur; but alive, gentlemen -- alive!
They skinned him alive -- and before
company! That is what rankles. Think how he must have felt; for
he was a sensitive person and
easily embarrassed. If he had been a bird, it would have been
all right, and no violence done to
his feelings, because he would have been considered "dressed."
But he was not a bird,
gentlemen, he was a man, and probably one of the most undressed
men that ever was. I ask you
to put yourselves in his place. I ask it as a favor; I ask it as
a tardy act of justice; I ask it in the
interest of fidelity to the traditions of your ancestors; I ask
it that the world may contemplate,
with vision unobstructed by disguising swallow-tails and white
cravats, the spectacle which the
true New England Society ought to present. Cease to come to
these annual orgies in this hollow
modern mockery -- the surplusage of raiment. Come in character;
come in the summer grace,
come in the unadorned simplicity, come in the free and joyous
costume which your sainted
ancestors provided for mine.
Later ancestors of mine were the Quakers William Robinson,
Marmaduke Stevenson, et al.
Your tribe chased them out of the country for their religion's
sake; promised them death if they
came back; for your ancestors had forsaken the homes they loved,
and braved the perils of the
sea, the implacable climate, and the savage wilderness, to
acquire that highest and most precious
of boons, freedom for every man on this broad continent to
worship according to the dictates of
his own conscience -- and they were not going to allow a lot of
pestiferous Quakers to interfere
with it. Your ancestors broke forever the chains of political
slavery, and gave the vote to every
man in this wide land, excluding none! -- none except those who
did not belong to the orthodox
church. Your ancestors -- yes, they were a hard lot; but,
nevertheless, they gave us religious
liberty to worship as they required us to worship, and political
liberty to vote as the church
required; and so I the bereft one, I the forlorn one, am here to
do my best to help you celebrate
them right.
The Quaker woman Elizabeth Hooton was an ancestress of mine.
Your people were pretty
severe with her -- you will confess that. But, poor thing! I
believe they changed her opinions
before she died, and took her into their fold; and so we have
every reason to presume that when
she died she went to the same place which your ancestors went
to. It is a great pity, for she was a
good woman. Roger Williams was an ancestor of mine. I don't
really remember what your
people did with him. But they banished him to Rhode Island,
anyway. And then, I believe,
recognizing that this was really carrying harshness to an
unjustifiable extreme, they took pity on
him and burned him. They were a hard lot! All those Salem
witches were ancestors of mine!
Your people made it tropical for them. Yes they did; by pressure
and the gallows they made such
a clean deal with them that there hasn't been a witch and hardly
a halter in our family from that
day to this, and that is one hundred and eighty-nine years. The
first slave brought into New
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England out of Africa by your progenitors was an ancestor of
mine -- for I am of a mixed breed,
an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel. I'm not one of your
sham meerschaums that you can
color in a week. No, my complexion is the patient art of eight
generations. Well, in my own time,
I had acquired a lot of my kin -- by purchase, and swapping
around, and one way and another --
and was getting along very well. Then, with the inborn
perversity of your lineage, you got up a
war, and took them all away from me. And so, again am I bereft,
again am I forlorn; no drop of
my blood flows in the veins of any living being who is
marketable.
O my friends, hear me and reform! I seek your good, not mine.
You have heard the speeches.
Disband these New England societies -- nurseries of a system of
steadily augmenting laudation
and hosannaing, which, if persisted in uncurbed, may some day in
the remote future beguile you
into prevaricating and bragging. Oh, stop, stop, while you are
still temperate in your appreciation
of your ancestors! Hear me, I beseech you; get up an auction and
sell Plymouth Rock! The
Pilgrims were a simple and ignorant race. They never had seen
any good rocks before, or at least
any that were not watched, and so they were excusable for
hopping ashore in frantic delight and
clapping an iron fence around this one. But you, gentlemen, are
educated; you are enlightened;
you know that in the rich land of your nativity, opulent New
England, overflowing with rocks,
this one isn't worth, at the outside, more than thirty-five
cents. Therefore, sell it, before it is
injured by exposure, or at least throw it open to the
patent-medicine advertisements, and let it
earn its taxes.
Yes, hear your true friend -- your only true friend -- list to
his voice. Disband these societies,
hotbeds of vice, of moral decay -- perpetuators of ancestral
superstition. Here on this board I see
water, I see milk, I see the wild and deadly lemonade. These are
but steps upon the downward
path. Next we shall see tea, then chocolate, then coffee-hotel
coffee. A few more years -- all too
few, I fear -- mark my words, we shall have cider! Gentlemen,
pause ere it be too late. You are
on the broad road which leads to dissipation, physical ruin,
moral decay, gory crime and the
gallows! I beseech you, I implore you, in the name of your
anxious friends, in the name of your
suffering families, in the name of your impending widows and
orphans, stop ere it be too late.
Disband these New England societies, renounce these
soul-blistering saturnalia, cease from
varnishing the rusty reputations of your long-vanished ancestors
-- the super-high-moral old iron-
clads of Cape Cod, the pious buccaneers of Plymouth Rock-go
home, and try to learn to behave!
However, chaff and nonsense aside, I think I honor and
appreciate your Pilgrim stock as much as
you do yourselves, perhaps; and I endorse and adopt a sentiment
uttered by a grandfather of mine
once -- a man of sturdy opinions, of sincere make of mind, and
not given to flattery. He said:
"People may talk as they like about that Pilgrim stock, but,
after all's said and done, it would be
pretty hard to improve on those people; and, as for me, I don't
mind coming out flatfooted and
saying there ain't any way to improve on them -- except having
them born in Missouri!"
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