Ex Post Facto

While the European Enlightenment produced a number of outliers — including skeptics and materialists — this intellectual movement in American tended to be more moderate and coherent, at least insofar as it affected culture and politics. American philosophes, to be sure, varied in terms of their opinions regarding Christianity and their faith in the possibility of human progress, but they tended to share a general confidence in the ability of human reason to identify universal human values and rights and thereby to improve both personal and social life. The founding documents of the United States and its constituent republics embodied these Enlightenment values, and they also reflected the different levels of engagement with Christianity that characterized the American Enlightenment. (For instance, while the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 asserted the duty of everyone to worship the creator and empowered the legislature to support churches through taxation, the U.S. Constitution included no mention of a deity, and with the ratification of the first amendment forbade Congress from establishing religion.) In ways that the founders did not anticipate, however, the Enlightenment principles embedded in these documents generated conflict for later generations.

Although historians (including, most notably, Henry May) have identified multiple stages or versions of the Enlightenment in America, the movement generally accepted a creed that might be boiled down as follows: the rational and benevolent creator God (whether the Judeo-Christian Father or the less anthropomorphic “Nature’s God”) made an orderly, law-abiding universe, within which fairly rational and good-natured human beings might live freely and happily, if only they could organize their societies and governments to harmonize with the divine laws of nature. Such a vision was versatile: it could mix as easily with Christian millennialism as with market capitalism, and for many Americans it informed both.

Although Enlightenment modes of thought became pervasive in American culture, they did not by any means fully displace older Christian ways of thinking and seeing. Many Americans still believed in an interventionist God whose grace worked in their hearts and whose millennial plan for making earth into heaven was slowly unfolding. Those who did embrace Reason found that their idol often came up short. In politics, for instance, onetime democrat Orestes Brownson was stunned at how easily “the people” had been fooled during the election of 1840. In the realm of religion, a variety of ministers, former ministers, and writers, who became known as Transcendentalists, began to turn to the intuition (or “the heart”) for spiritual knowledge, rather than relying exclusively on the empirically observed world for information.

While the Enlightenment was doubtless liberating for some Americans, for others it had quite the opposite effect. As Herman Melville tried to show in his 1853 short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” to be reasonable could mean embracing one’s own oppression (see page 13, line 37). Thus, black and white abolitionists turned against the federal constitution that permitted slavery. Small numbers of women began to question the reasonableness of their exclusion from political privileges. And various reformers began to question the logic of the market revolution that seemed to enrich some while making others dependent or impoverished.

Writing in the early 1920s and sounding much like a latter-day Henry David Thoreau, D. H. Lawrence lashed out at the pretensions of the Enlightenment (symbolized for him by Benjamin Franklin):

We do all like to get things inside a barbed wire corral. Especially our fellow men. We love to round them up inside the barbed wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make ‘em work. “Work, you free jewel, WORK!” shouts the liberator, cracking his whip. Benjamin, I will not work. I do not choose to be a free democrat. I am absolutely a servant of my own Holy Ghost.

The Enlightenment made many promises. The question was whether or not they could or would be kept.

Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine were born about three decades and a few thousand miles apart. Neither came from especially privileged families, but both achieved international celebrity. While Franklin gained fame first as a scientist and then as an American patriot and revolutionary, Paine earned renown as the author of several revolutionary pamphlets, including Common Sense, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason, with the first two of these probably being the most widely read English-language pamphlets of the 18th century, and with the latter being popular but also fiercely attacked.

Franklin and Paine met briefly because of their common intellectual interests when Franklin was serving a diplomatic mission in England, and his letter of introduction helped Paine to land on his feet (after recovering from serious illness) when he arrived in Philadelphia in late 1774. While both Franklin and Paine supported republican revolution in the late 18th century, Paine took more radical positions, leading scholar Craig Nelson to describe him as “Benjamin Franklin unleashed.”

Franklin and Paine also both had religious upbringings: Franklin as a Presbyterian and Paine as an Anglican and Quaker. Neither, however, was inclined to accept the creed of any church, and each tried his hand at writing (and publishing) a personal statement of belief. (These credos are included in the assigned excerpts.) Ultimately, both men believed that religion was necessary to support public virtue — note the second paragraph of the Paine excerpt, for example — but while Franklin charitably supported multiple Christian churches, Paine launched a vociferous attack on revealed (Biblical) religion, which he considered to be both false and morally harmful. Franklin only leaned strongly towards the firm deism that Paine adamantly promoted.

Discussion Questions

1. How did Franklin and Paine, each in their own way, articulate Enlightenment principles in these writings?
2. How did Franklin’s and Paine’s views on religion (and Christianity) differ?
3. How do these two excerpts reflect the influence of Protestant thought?

For an irreverent, alternate view of Franklin, see D. H. Lawrence’s famous 1923 send-up.

Our discussions of Puritanism have focused largely on their spiritual and social aspirations, but it’s important to note that Puritans also had economic motives for migrating to New England. One of the factors “pushing” Puritans to leave England was their anxiety about their own economic status. Puritans tended to come from what was known as the “middling” classes. They were not generally wealthy, but they enjoyed financial independence and relative security. Economic changes in England, however, threatened the future security of some Puritans, and some of them were thus moving to America in search of greater economic security. In early-17th century England, there was a swelling class of paupers and drifters, and some Puritans feared that they too might end up impoverished, given the direction of economic change.

Not surprisingly, Puritan anxieties about their economic status had spiritual reverberations. Because of their great uncertainty about the state of their souls (would they be saved?), Puritans tended to look for “signs” of God’s favor. The best sign of God’s grace, of course, was a new birth or conversion experience, confirmed by a virtuous mode of life. Part of living a good life was working hard. And if hard work led to some worldly measure of success, then that too was a good sign that one lived in God’s grace. Although economic success or failure could not be taken as a certain indicator of grace, it was nevertheless a sign. Hard-working Puritans thus lived in fear that they might be reduced to poverty and dependence if they remained in England.

Once in New England, furthermore, generations of Puritan families found that with hard work and discipline, they could prosper on the land — sometimes gained only after conflict with Indians. Although they seldom gained great wealth, they often managed to secure independence and competence for themselves and their families. Their religious culture and even some of their laws discouraged profiteering, greed, and lavish consumption, but they very much valued the prospect of making a decent living.

(Although I haven’t reviewed it in some time, I am drawing here in part on Alan Taylor’s excellent chapters on New England in American Colonies, which is available on reserve in the Cofrin Library.)

Reading: Karen Halttunen, “Early American Murder Narratives: The Birth of Horror,” in Richard W. Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Power of Culture” Critical Essays in American History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 66-101.

In this masterful essay, Karen Halttunen not only traces an important cultural change — from the Puritan execution drama to the 18th-century murder narrative — but she also provides a compelling analysis of the significance of “the birth of horror.”

This essay requires careful reading. As Halttunen moves forward in time from the 1600s to the late 1700s and early 1800s, her argument becomes increasingly sophisticated, until she pulls everything together in the final few pages. Be sure to read the entire essay.

To understand Halttunen’s argument fully, it’s important to know how she uses the words liberal and liberalism. She is not referring to our modern-day political distinction between liberal and conservative. Instead, she is using liberal to refer to a worldview developed during the 18th-century intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. According to the liberal vision, human beings were essentially good, and they were able to act with a large measure of freedom. (Note the contrast with the 17th-century Puritan worldview, in which humans were essentially sinful and therefore had limited ability or freedom to pursue the good.) I’m going to leave it to you to figure out the role of liberalism in Halttunen’s argument, but know that it does figure into her central conclusions.

Here are several questions to consider as you read:

1. Read the first two paragraphs of “Early American Murder Narrative” very closely. What change does Karen Halttunen say that she is exploring? What “historical significance” does she cite for her work?
2. According to this essay, what important social and cultural functions were played by the Puritan ministers and Puritan beliefs, within the context of the execution drama? Does Halttunen cast Puritanism in a favorable or unfavorable light?
3. How did post-1750 murder narratives differ from execution sermons? How did they explain evil?
4. What major shifts or transitions does Halttunen describe? (From X to Y.)
5. What’s the largest and most significant argument that Halttunen makes in this essay?

Note: If you found this article to be interesting, check out Halttunen’s book-length study of murder and horror, titled Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination.

Reading: Jim Cullen, “Dream of the Good Life (I): The Puritan Enterprise,” in The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), 11-34.

In the context of America, Puritanism refers to a joint religious and social movement, to an attempt on the part of thousands of reform-minded English Christians to establish Christian communities in New England in the early-to-mid 1600s. In the “Great Migration” of the 1630s, tens of thousands of Puritans crossed the Atlantic Ocean and undertook the difficult and often dangerous task of colonizing the “New England” region, substantially north of Virginia, an earlier British settlement. (Click for a map of early British settlements in North America.) While the Pilgrims (who founded Plymouth in 1620) had already given up on the established Church of England, the Puritans at least theoretically wanted to purify the church by stripping it down to its New Testament essentials. For all intents and purposes, though, when the Puritans forsook England for America, they were creating their own autonomous churches, which they hoped would be the center of their new towns. In leaving their homeland, then, they sought freedom, but it was a limited freedom, because they envisioned tight-knit and homogeneous communities.

In some cases, at least, they succeeded in creating such communities, even as they experienced their fair share of conflict. (Click here for a map of the New England colonies.) The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony featured an Indian and a plea to “come over and help us.”

By the mid-1600s, Puritans did actually make efforts to convert Indians to Christianity, but they also brutally fought Indians (such as the Pequots) who refused to surrender valuable land. They hung several Quakers, who seemed a civil and religious threat, and even as their vision of a Christian commonwealth fell victim to imperial demands for toleration in the 1690s, they executed nearly twenty alleged witches on the basis of highly problematic evidence.

Puritan New England has alternately been conceived as a cradle of American democracy and a cauldron of American intolerance. Jim Cullen documents these ambiguities regarding Puritan New England, but he also finds something admirable in the “Puritan Enterprise,” — namely their “faith in reform” (15), which he sees as a fundamental component of the American Dream.

They sought to reform not only the church, but also society in general. Cullen doesn’t go into much detail about how they structured their society, but it’s worth noting that local congregations and town meetings lay at the heart of their social and political organization. Massachusetts Bay Colony was not a theocracy — the ministers did not rule. But the religious system did overlap with the political system. Each town taxed its residents to support the local church, which everyone was expected to attend. Up to the 1690s, in order to have the right to vote in colony-level elections, Massachusetts men (only men could vote) had to be full members of their local congregation, which is to say that they had to experience a spiritual conversion and satisfy their peers that they were good Christians. (Because of their “new birth” experiences and their history of upright behavior, the full church members were called “visible saints.”) Although Cullen doesn’t mention it, most towns had more inclusive policies for their town meetings, where all independent men could generally participate, regardless of their status in the church. (On this point, see Michael Zuckerman’s work on New England towns.)

Although some New England towns managed to sustain cohesive, Christian communities for a generation or so, as time went on, a variety of pressures damaged the enterprise. The growing white population of New England led to dispersion and also provoked intense and disruptive conflicts with the Indian inhabitants of the region. By the end of the century, too, the empire intervened and imposed toleration and severed the connection between church membership and voting. Puritanism was by no means dead, but during the 1700s it began to evolve in different directions, as David Hall suggests in his essay from the Companion to American Thought.

Questions for Discussion

1. What core theological beliefs did Puritans share?
2. Why did Puritan beliefs tend to cause them anxiety? What strategies did they develop for dealing with that anxiety?
3. How did Puritans tend to define the good life?
4. What problems undermined the Puritan experiment?
5. What enduring influences might Puritanism have had on American culture?

[If you are looking for a copy of “Bartleby” for the “Great Books” discussion to be held at the Brown County Library (Downtown Green Bay) on Oct. 9, 2007, at 6:30 PM, you can click here to download the pdf file. –DV]

Herman Melville, known today for his novel Moby Dick, published “Bartleby the Scrivener” in 1853. The narrator of the story, an elderly lawyer, recounts his relationship with the “unaccountable” and “inscrutable” Bartleby, a copyist who briefly worked in the lawyer’s office. As the story is set primarily at a place of business — the lawyer’s office — it is relevant to note the historical economic context within which Melville wrote.

During the early-to-mid 1800s, the United States was deep into the midst of what historians call the “market revolution.” Not only were market activities and capitalistic logic becoming more widespread, but capitalist values affected social relationships as well. Business owners seeking to maximize efficiency and profits were replacing skilled laborers with machinery (operated by cheap, unskilled labor) wherever feasible. As a result, fewer and fewer manual laborers could hope to achieve economic independence, a goal long cherished by American farmers and workers alike.

Master craftsman had once trained journeyman to be masters themselves, but industrial capitalism increasingly displaced this sort of small-scale production by skilled, independent artisans. Employers gradually became mere “bosses,” thus shedding responsibility for overseeing and training workers. Unlike the master, the boss had no obligations to his workers. To be sure, the industrial system improved productivity and fed economic development, but it did not do so without fundamentally altering social relationships, for better or for worse. (Orestes Brownson offered an insightful analysis of these problems in an 1842 essay, which is available here.)

In “Bartleby,” the lawyer’s employees are in many ways like human copying machines. (They get paid by the page.) Like industrial workers, furthermore, Nippers, Turkey, Ginger Nut, and Bartleby seem to have few prospects for improving their lots in life. The lawyer does not seem especially aware of their plights, but the arrival of Bartleby, as he explains, threw his entire office into disarray.

It might be argued that Bartelby refused to play by the rules of the capitalist, wage-labor system, and he thus forced the lawyer to confront the tensions buried within his vision of himself as a benevolent man.

As we discuss this story, there are several questions that we might consider:

1. How does the narrator present himself at the beginning of the story?
2. What kind of fellow does he seem to be?
3. Why might Melville have made the narrator dwell on the characters of Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut?  What do these characters reveal? How might these characters been seen as examples of bad living?
4. How would you describe Bartleby’s behavior?
5. Why didn’t the narrator deal more harshly with Bartleby?
6. Why was the narrator concerned about the contagion of the word “prefer”?
7. What is the central conflict of this story?
8. What value systems does the lawyer employ to try to resolve his dilemma?
9. How would you evaluate the narrator’s moral character by the end of the story?
10. How else might the lawyer have handled the Bartleby dilemma?
11. To what extent might the narrator be said to be living a “good life”?