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.