THE COLONIAL PERIOD IN NEW ENGLAND

It is likely that no other colonists in the history of the world were as intellectual as
the Puritans. Between 1630 and 1690, there were as many university graduates in the
northeastern section of the United States, known as New England, as in the mother
country -- an astounding fact when one considers that most educated people of the
time were aristocrats who were unwilling to risk their lives in wilderness conditions.
The self-made and often self-educated Puritans were notable exceptions. They wanted
education to understand and execute God's will as they established their colonies
throughout New England.

The Puritan definition of good writing was that which brought home a full awareness
of the importance of worshipping God and of the spiritual dangers that the soul faced
on Earth. Puritan style varied enormously -- from complex metaphysical poetry to
homely journals and crushingly pedantic religious history. Whatever the style or
genre, certain themes remained constant. Life was seen as a test; failure led to eternal
damnation and hellfire, and success to heavenly bliss. This world was an arena of
constant battle between the forces of God and the forces of Satan, a formidable enemy
with many disguises. Many Puritans excitedly awaited the "millennium," when Jesus
would return to Earth, end human misery, and inaugurate 1,000 years of peace and
prosperity.

Scholars have long pointed out the link between Puritanism and capitalism: Both rest
on ambition, hard work, and an intense striving for success. Although individual
Puritans could not know, in strict theological terms, whether they were "saved" and
among the elect who would go to heaven, Puritans tended to feel that earthly success
was a sign of election. Wealth and status were sought not only for themselves, but as
welcome reassurances of spiritual health and promises of eternal life.

Moreover, the concept of stewardship encouraged success. The Puritans interpreted

all things and events as symbols with deeper spiritual meanings, and felt that in
advancing their own profit and their community's well-being, they were also
furthering God's plans. They did not draw lines of distinction between the secular and
religious spheres: All of life was an expression of the divine will -- a belief that later
resurfaces in Transcendentalism.

In recording ordinary events to reveal their spiritual meaning, Puritan authors

commonly cited the Bible, chapter and verse. History was a symbolic religious
panorama leading to the Puritan triumph over the New World and to God's kingdom
on Earth.

The first Puritan colonists who settled New England exemplified the seriousness of
Reformation Christianity. Known as the "Pilgrims," they were a small group of
believers who had migrated from England to Holland -- even then known for its
religious tolerance -- in 1608, during a time of persecutions.

Like most Puritans, they interpreted the Bible literally. They read and acted on the
text of the Second Book of Corinthians -- "Come out from among them and be ye
separate, saith the Lord." Despairing of purifying the Church of England from within,
"Separatists" formed underground "covenanted" churches that swore loyalty to the
group instead of the king. Seen as traitors to the king as well as heretics damned to
hell, they were often persecuted. Their separation took them ultimately to the New
World.

William Bradford (1590-1657)

William Bradford was elected governor of Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay
Colony shortly after the Separatists landed. He was a deeply pious, self-educated man
who had learned several languages, including Hebrew, in order to "see with his own
eyes the ancient oracles of God in their native beauty." His participation in the
migration to Holland and the Mayflower voyage to Plymouth, and his duties as
governor, made him ideally suited to be the first historian of his colony. His history,
Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), is a clear and compelling account of the colony's
beginning. His description of the first view of America is justly famous:

Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles...they had now no
friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten
bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor...savage
barbarians...were readier to fill their sides with arrows than otherwise. And for
the reason it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know
them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms...all stand
upon them with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods
and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue.

Bradford also recorded the first document of colonial self-governance in the English
New World, the "Mayflower Compact," drawn up while the Pilgrims were still on
board ship. The compact was a harbinger of the Declaration of Independence to come
a century and a half later.

Puritans disapproved of such secular amusements as dancing and card-playing, which

were associated with ungodly aristocrats and immoral living. Reading or writing
"light" books also fell into this category. Puritan minds poured their tremendous
energies into nonfiction and pious genres: poetry, sermons, theological tracts, and
histories. Their intimate diaries and meditations record the rich inner lives of this
introspective and intense people.

Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672)

The first published book of poems by an American was also the first American book
to be published by a woman -- Anne Bradstreet. It is not surprising that the book was
published in England, given the lack of printing presses in the early years of the first
American colonies. Born and educated in England, Anne Bradstreet was the daughter
of an earl's estate manager. She emigrated with her family when she was 18. Her
husband eventually became governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which later
grew into the great city of Boston. She preferred her long, religious poems on
conventional subjects such as the seasons, but contemporary readers most enjoy the
witty poems on subjects from daily life and her warm and loving poems to her
husband and children. She was inspired by English metaphysical poetry, and her book
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) shows the influence of Edmund
Spenser, Philip Sidney, and other English poets as well. She often uses elaborate
conceits or extended metaphors. "To My Dear and Loving Husband" (1678) uses the
oriental imagery, love theme, and idea of comparison popular in Europe at the time,
but gives these a pious meaning at the poem's conclusion:

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let s so persevere
That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Edward Taylor (c. 1644-1729)

Like Anne Bradstreet, and, in fact, all of New England's first writers, the intense,
brilliant poet and minister Edward Taylor was born in England. The son of a yeoman
farmer -- an independent farmer who owned his own land -- Taylor was a teacher who
sailed to New England in 1668 rather than take an oath of loyalty to the Church of
England. He studied at Harvard College, and, like most Harvard-trained ministers, he
knew Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. A selfless and pious man, Taylor acted as a
missionary to the settlers when he accepted his lifelong job as a minister in the
frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts, 160 kilometers into the thickly forested,
wild interior. Taylor was the best-educated man in the area, and he put his knowledge
to use, working as the town minister, doctor, and civic leader.

Modest, pious, and hard-working, Taylor never published his poetry, which was
discovered only in the 1930s. He would, no doubt, have seen his work's discovery as
divine providence; today's readers should be grateful to have his poems -- the finest
examples of 17th-century poetry in North America.

Taylor wrote a variety of verse: funeral elegies, lyrics, a medieval "debate," and a
500-page Metrical History of Christianity (mainly a history of martyrs). His best
works, according to modern critics, are the series of short Preparatory Meditations.

Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705)

Michael Wigglesworth, like Taylor an English-born, Harvard-educated Puritan
minister who practiced medicine, is the third New England colonial poet of note. He
continues the Puritan themes in his best-known work, The Day of Doom (1662). A
long narrative that often falls into doggerel, this terrifying popularization of
Calvinistic doctrine was the most popular poem of the colonial period. This first
American best-seller is an appalling portrait of damnation to hell in ballad meter.

It is terrible poetry -- but everybody loved it. It fused the fascination of a horror story
with the authority of John Calvin. For more than two centuries, people memorized
this long, dreadful monument to religious terror; children proudly recited it, and
elders quoted it in everyday speech. It is not such a leap from the terrible punishments
of this poem to the ghastly self-inflicted wound of Nathaniel Hawthorne's guilty
Puritan minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, in The Scarlet Letter (1850) or Herman
Melville s crippled Captain Ahab, a New England Faust whose quest for forbidden
knowledge sinks the ship of American humanity in Moby-Dick (1851). (Moby-Dick
was the favorite novel of 20th-century American novelist William Faulkner, whose
profound and disturbing works suggest that the dark, metaphysical vision of
Protestant America has not yet been exhausted.)

Like most colonial literature, the poems of early New England imitate the form and
technique of the mother country, though the religious passion and frequent biblical
references, as well as the new setting, give New England writing a special identity.
Isolated New World writers also lived before the advent of rapid transportation and
electronic communications. As a result, colonial writers were imitating writing that
was already out of date in England. Thus, Edward Taylor, the best American poet of
his day, wrote metaphysical poetry after it had become unfashionable in England. At
times, as in Taylor's poetry, rich works of striking originality grew out of colonial
isolation.

Colonial writers often seemed ignorant of such great English authors as Ben Jonson.
Some colonial writers rejected English poets who belonged to a different sect as well,
thereby cutting themselves off from the finest lyric and dramatic models the English
language had produced. In addition, many colonials remained ignorant due to the lack
of books.

The great model of writing, belief, and conduct was the Bible, in an authorized
English translation that was already outdated when it came out. The age of the Bible,
so much older than the Roman church, made it authoritative to Puritan eyes.

New England Puritans clung to the tales of the Jews in the Old Testament, believing
that they, like the Jews, were persecuted for their faith, that they knew the one true
God, and that they were the chosen elect who would establish the New Jerusalem -- a
heaven on Earth. The Puritans were aware of the parallels between the ancient Jews of
the Old Testament and themselves. Moses led the Israelites out of captivity from
Egypt, parted the Red Sea through God's miraculous assistance so that his people
could escape, and received the divine law in the form of the Ten Commandments.
Like Moses, Puritan leaders felt they were rescuing their people from spiritual
corruption in England, passing miraculously over a wild sea with God's aid, and
fashioning new laws and new forms of government after God's wishes.

Colonial worlds tend to be archaic, and New England certainly was no exception.
New England Puritans were archaic by choice, conviction, and circumstance.

Samuel Sewall (1652-1730)

Easier to read than the highly religious poetry full of Biblical references are the
historical and secular accounts that recount real events using lively details. Governor
John Winthrop's Journal (1790) provides the best information on the early
Massachusetts Bay Colony and Puritan political theory.

Samuel Sewall's Diary, which records the years 1674 to 1729, is lively and engaging.
Sewall fits the pattern of early New England writers we have seen in Bradford and
Taylor. Born in England, Sewall was brought to the colonies at an early age. He made
his home in the Boston area, where he graduated from Harvard, and made a career of
legal, administrative, and religious work.

Sewall was born late enough to see the change from the early, strict religious life of
the Puritans to the later, more worldly Yankee period of mercantile wealth in the New
England colonies; his Diary, which is often compared to Samuel Pepys's English
diary of the same period, inadvertently records the transition.

Like Pepys's diary, Sewall's is a minute record of his daily life, reflecting his interest
in living piously and well. He notes little purchases of sweets for a woman he was
courting, and their disagreements over whether he should affect aristocratic and
expensive ways such as wearing a wig and using a coach.

Mary Rowlandson (c.1635-c.1678)

The earliest woman prose writer of note is Mary Rowlandson, a minister's wife who
gives a clear, moving account of her 11-week captivity by Indians during an Indian
massacre in 1676. The book undoubtedly fanned the flame of anti-Indian sentiment,
as did John Williams's The Redeemed Captive (1707), describing his two years in
captivity by French and Indians after a massacre. Such writings as women produced
are usually domestic accounts requiring no special education. It may be argued that
women's literature benefits from its homey realism and common-sense wit; certainly
works like Sarah Kemble Knight's lively Journal (published posthumously in 1825)
of a daring solo trip in 1704 from Boston to New York and back escapes the baroque
complexity of much Puritan writing.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728)

No account of New England colonial literature would be complete without
mentioning Cotton Mather, the master pedant. The third in the four-generation Mather
dynasty of Massachusetts Bay, he wrote at length of New England in over 500 books
and pamphlets. Mather's 1702 Magnalia Christi Americana (Ecclesiastical History of
New England), his most ambitious work, exhaustively chronicles the settlement of
New England through a series of biographies. The huge book presents the holy
Puritan errand into the wilderness to establish God s kingdom; its structure is a
narrative progression of representative American "Saints' Lives." His zeal somewhat
redeems his pompousness: "I write the wonders of the Christian religion, flying from
the deprivations of Europe to the American strand."

Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683)

As the 1600s wore on into the 1700s, religious dogmatism gradually dwindled,
despite sporadic, harsh Puritan efforts to stem the tide of tolerance. The minister
Roger Williams suffered for his own views on religion. An English-born son of a
tailor, he was banished from Massachusetts in the middle of New England's ferocious
winter in 1635. Secretly warned by Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts, he
survived only by living with Indians; in 1636, he established a new colony at Rhode
Island that would welcome persons of different religions.

A graduate of Cambridge University (England), he retained sympathy for working

people and diverse views. His ideas were ahead of his time. He was an early critic of
imperialism, insisting that European kings had no right to grant land charters because
American land belonged to the Indians. Williams also believed in the separation
between church and state -- still a fundamental principle in America today. He held
that the law courts should not have the power to punish people for religious reasons --
a stand that undermined the strict New England theocracies. A believer in equality
and democracy, he was a lifelong friend of the Indians. Williams's numerous books
include one of the first phrase books of Indian languages, A Key Into the Languages
of America (1643). The book also is an embryonic ethnography, giving bold
descriptions of Indian life based on the time he had lived among the tribes. Each
chapter is devoted to one topic -- for example, eating and mealtime. Indian words and
phrases pertaining to this topic are mixed with comments, anecdotes, and a
concluding poem. The end of the first chapter reads:

If nature's sons, both wild and tame,

Humane and courteous be,
How ill becomes it sons of God
To want humanity.

In the chapter on words about entertainment, he comments that "it is a strange truth
that a man shall generally find more free entertainment and refreshing among these
barbarians, than amongst thousands that call themselves Christians."

Williams's life is uniquely inspiring. On a visit to England during the bloody Civil
War there, he drew upon his survival in frigid New England to organize firewood
deliveries to the poor of London during the winter, after their supply of coal had been
cut off. He wrote lively defenses of religious toleration not only for different Christian
sects, but also for non-Christians. "It is the will and command of God, that...a
permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and
worships, be granted to all men, in all nations...," he wrote in The Bloody Tenet of
Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644). The intercultural experience of living
among gracious and humane Indians undoubtedly accounts for much of his wisdom.

Influence was two-way in the colonies. For example, John Eliot translated the Bible
into Narragansett. Some Indians converted to Christianity. Even today, the Native
American church is a mixture of Christianity and Indian traditional belief.

The spirit of toleration and religious freedom that gradually grew in the American
colonies was first established in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, home of the
Quakers. The humane and tolerant Quakers, or "Friends," as they were known,
believed in the sacredness of the individual conscience as the fountainhead of social
order and morality. The fundamental Quaker belief in universal love and brotherhood
made them deeply democratic and opposed to dogmatic religious authority. Driven
out of strict Massachusetts, which feared their influence, they established a very
successful colony, Pennsylvania, under William Penn in 1681.

John Woolman (1720-1772)

The best-known Quaker work is the long Journal (1774) of John Woolman,
documenting his inner life in a pure, heartfelt style of great sweetness that has drawn
praise from many American and English writers. This remarkable man left his
comfortable home in town to sojourn with the Indians in the wild interior because he
thought he might learn from them and share their ideas. He writes simply of his desire
to "feel and understand their life, and the Spirit they live in." Woolman's justice-
loving spirit naturally turns to social criticism: "I perceived that many white People
do often sell Rum to the Indians, which, I believe, is a great Evil."

Woolman was also one of the first antislavery writers, publishing two essays, "Some
Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes," in 1754 and 1762. An ardent
humanitarian, he followed a path of "passive obedience" to authorities and laws he
found unjust, prefiguring Henry David Thoreau's celebrated essay, "Civil
Disobedience" (1849), by generations.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

The antithesis of John Woolman is Jonathan Edwards, who was born only 17 years
before the Quaker notable. Woolman had little formal schooling; Edwards was highly
educated. Woolman followed his inner light; Edwards was devoted to the law and
authority. Both men were fine writers, but they reveal opposite poles of the colonial
religious experience.

Edwards was molded by his extreme sense of duty and by the rigid Puritan
environment, which conspired to make him defend strict and gloomy Calvinism from
the forces of liberalism springing up around him. He is best known for his frightening,
powerful sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741):

[I]f God should let you go, you would immediately sink, and sinfully descend,
and plunge into the bottomless gulf....The God that holds you over the pit of
hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors
you, and is dreadfully provoked....he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else
but to be cast into the bottomless gulf.

Edwards's sermons had enormous impact, sending whole congregations into

hysterical fits of weeping. In the long run, though, their grotesque harshness alienated
people from the Calvinism that Edwards valiantly defended. Edwards's dogmatic,
medieval sermons no longer fit the experiences of relatively peaceful, prosperous
18th-century colonists. After Edwards, fresh, liberal currents of tolerance gathered
force.

LITERATURE IN THE SOUTHERN AND MIDDLE COLONIES

<Pre-revolutionary southern literature was aristocratic and secular, reflecting the

dominant social and economic systems of the southern plantations. Early English
immigrants were drawn to the southern colonies because of economic opportunity
rather than religious freedom.

Although many southerners were poor farmers or tradespeople living not much better
than slaves, the southern literate upper class was shaped by the classical, Old World
ideal of a noble landed gentry made possible by slavery. The institution released
wealthy southern whites from manual labor, afforded them leisure, and made the
dream of an aristocratic life in the American wilderness possible. The Puritan
emphasis on hard work, education and earnestness was rare -- instead we hear of such
pleasures as horseback riding and hunting. The church was the focus of a genteel
social life, not a forum for minute examinations of conscience.
William Byrd (1674-1744)
Southern culture naturally revolved around the ideal of the gentleman. A Renaissance
man equally good at managing a farm and reading classical Greek, he had the power
of a feudal lord.

William Byrd describes the gracious way of life at his plantation, Westover, in his
famous letter of 1726 to his English friend Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery:

Besides the advantages of pure air, we abound in all kinds of provisions

without expense (I mean we who have plantations). I have a large family of
my own, and my doors are open to everybody, yet I have no bills to pay, and
half- a-crown will rest undisturbed in my pockets for many moons altogether.

Like one of the patriarchs, I have my flock and herds, my bondmen and
bondwomen, and every sort of trade amongst my own servants, so that I live
in a kind of independence on everyone but Providence...

William Byrd epitomizes the spirit of the southern colonial gentry. The heir to 1,040
hectares, which he enlarged to 7,160 hectares, he was a merchant, trader, and planter.
His library of 3,600 books was the largest in the South. He was born with a lively
intelligence that his father augmented by sending him to excellent schools in England
and Holland. He visited the French Court, became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and
was friendly with some of the leading English writers of his day, particularly William
Wycherley and William Congreve. His London diaries are the opposite of those of the
New England Puritans, full of fancy dinners, glittering parties, and womanizing, with
little introspective soul-searching.

Byrd is best known today for his lively History of the Dividing Line, a diary of a 1729
trip of some weeks and 960 kilometers into the interior to survey the line dividing the
neighboring colonies of Virginia and North Carolina. The quick impressions that vast
wilderness, Indians, half-savage whites, wild beasts, and every sort of difficulty made
on this civilized gentleman form a uniquely American and very southern book. He
ridicules the first Virginia colonists, "about a hundred men, most of them reprobates
of good families," and jokes that at Jamestown, "like true Englishmen, they built a
church that cost no more than fifty pounds, and a tavern that cost five hundred."
Byrd's writings are fine examples of the keen interest Southerners took in the material
world: the land, Indians, plants, animals, and settlers.

Robert Beverley (c. 1673-1722)

Robert Beverley, another wealthy planter and author of The History and Present State
of Virginia (1705, 1722) records the history of the Virginia colony in a humane and
vigorous style. Like Byrd, he admired the Indians and remarked on the strange
European superstitions about Virginia -- for example, the belief "that the country
turns all people black who go there." He noted the great hospitality of southerners, a
trait maintained today.

Humorous satire -- a literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through
irony, derision, or wit -- appears frequently in the colonial South. A group of irritated
settlers lampooned Georgia's philanthropic founder, General James Oglethorpe, in a
tract entitled A True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia (1741). They
pretended to praise him for keeping them so poor and overworked that they had to
develop "the valuable virtue of humility" and shun "the anxieties of any further
ambition."

The rowdy, satirical poem "The Sotweed Factor" satirizes the colony of Maryland,
where the author, an Englishman named Ebenezer Cook, had unsuccessfully tried his
hand as a tobacco merchant. Cook exposed the crude ways of the colony with high-
spirited humor, and accused the colonists of cheating him. The poem concludes with
an exaggerated curse: "May wrath divine then lay those regions waste / Where no
man's faithful nor a woman chaste."

In general, the colonial South may fairly be linked with a light, worldly, informative,
and realistic literary tradition. Imitative of English literary fashions, the southerners
attained imaginative heights in witty, precise observations of distinctive New World
conditions.

Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) (c. 1745-c. 1797)

Important black writers like Olaudah Equiano and Jupiter Hammon emerged during
the colonial period. Equiano, an Ibo from Niger (West Africa), was the first black in
America to write an autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). In the book - - an early example of
the slave narrative genre -- Equiano gives an account of his native land and the
horrors and cruelties of his captivity and enslavement in the West Indies. Equiano,
who converted to Christianity, movingly laments his cruel "un-Christian" treatment
by Christians -- a sentiment many African-Americans would voice in centuries to
come.

Jupiter Hammon (c. 1720-c. 1800)

The black American poet Jupiter Hammon, a slave on Long Island, New York, is
remembered for his religious poems as well as for An Address to the Negroes of the
State of New York (1787), in which he advocated freeing children of slaves instead of
condemning them to hereditary slavery. His poem "An Evening Thought" was the
first poem published by a black male in America.