In the beginning was the word and the word was “America.” The year was 1507, and the place, Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, in the northwest of today’s France. It first appeared in a book titled, in short form, Cosmographiae Introductio (the original title was forty-eight words long). The anonymous author set out to cover the known world, including new lands unknown to Ptolemy but later discovered by Amerigo Vespucci. Much of the book covered information familiar to early sixteenth-century readers, such as the knowledge that the moon, the sun, and the planets all revolved around the earth. The author also fit new information into familiar frames, explaining how discussion of Asia, Africa, and Europe must be updated now that they have “been more extensively explored.” But then he1 mentioned a little-known “fourth part [that] has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci.” He suggested, “inasmuch as both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I see no reason why anyone should justly object to calling this part Amerige, i.e., the land of Amerigo, or America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability.”2 Accompanying the book was a massive folded map—when opened, it measured four and a half by eight feet—showing familiar continents and, for the very first time, a new one: a narrow landmass, impressively long (roughly as long as Africa from north to south) with its manly appellation “America” on the southern half.
Figure 1.1 Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map of the world was the first to use the name “America” (found on the westernmost portion of the map). Detail, Universalis Cosmographia Secundum Ptholomaei Traditionem et Americi Vespucii Alioru[m]que Lustrationes, [St. Dié], Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British colonial thinkers do not appear to have been familiar with this obscure map, though they knew of Vespucci. But Vespucci’s significance faded for them as they sought to make sense of their history. When they viewed American history, they did so through the lens of empire in general, not by focusing on the explorers that empires sent out into the world. The medieval notion of translatio imperii (translation of empire)—a vision of a grand historical imperial line of succession from Alexander the Great to Rome, from the Romans to Charlemagne’s Franks, and so on—framed their views of America in the larger course of world history. From their vantage point, it seemed that America was what this line of succession was leading up to.
Early European Americans’ assessment of themselves as the beneficiaries of this grand historical imperial lineage required that they adopt a rather partisan perspective on history. This view omits the fact that for much of early America, Spain and France also had imperial claims on the continent—and in some areas an even stronger footing than Britain. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, all of the European powers’ colonial ventures in North America had slow and fitful beginnings. None of them came with any intention of establishing permanent colonies. After all, colonization was an expensive and risky venture. They simply wanted settlements to anchor their expeditions and to direct the flow of goods, and for the godly among them to find some souls for Christ along the way.
However, the allure of the idea of translatio imperii clearly overpowered the harsh reality of establishing the English (after 1707, British) Empire on the ground. The British were the last to this process of exploration and had some of its most difficult trials and spectacular failures, and though they were the first to establish a colony in Jamestown in 1607, that experiment did not get off to an auspicious start (with 440 of the estimated 500 colonists dying from disease and starvation). It was not until well after the French hunkered down in Quebec in 1608 and the Spanish in Santa Fe in 1610 that persecuted Puritans and Quakers in England looked to the New World as a place in which they might be able to live and worship as they pleased. They risked the hazards of transatlantic travel and confronted an uncertain future in a strange land not to spearhead the mission of British imperialism, but to escape religious persecution.
For the notion of translatio imperii to have any purchase, it had to work its way around not only the formidable Spanish and French imperial claims throughout large portions of North America but also—and more conspicuously—the fact that all the explorers on behalf of European empires arrived on a continent of sprawling indigenous empires, such as the Powhatan Confederacy in Virginia, the Iroquois Confederacy east of the Mississippi, and the Algonquian tribes’ alliances all around the Great Lakes. The leaders of these native empires likely knew nothing of the concept of translatio imperii, but they certainly had a stake in proving it wrong.
Thus, the presence of tens of millions of indigenous people whose ancestors had lived on the continent for ten thousand years suggests that the story of American intellectual history might require a very different beginning . . .
In the beginning there were words, likely thousands of them, perhaps tens of thousands, or even more. They were the words spoken by the estimated one thousand to two thousand distinct linguistic communities among the roughly fifty million (some scholars suggest a hundred million) indigenous people living in the Americas at the dawn of European colonization. The vast majority of these words are lost to history. What we do know with a high degree of certainty is that the word America prior to the arrival of European explorers and settlers was not one of them.
Historians lack knowledge not only of the words spoken by millions of indigenous Americans at the time of European contact but also of the ideas and worldviews they once expressed. There is a paucity of surviving historical sources, and those that do exist are either mute, inaudible, or unreliable as they were penned by missionaries and explorers, not the natives themselves. This is not to say that we know nothing of their ways of life and practices. Quite the opposite is true. For over a hundred years, archeologists and ethnologists have pieced together rich and in some cases very detailed information drawn from surviving pictographs, decorative beads, weapons carved from stone, ritual objects, and burial mounds. More recently, paleoethnobotanists (botanists who focus on findings at archeological sites) have studied petrified seeds and plant remains to develop a fuller picture of different native communities’ agriculture and diet, while epidemiologists have studied bones and teeth to learn what they can about diseases and mortality rates. In addition, a variety of scholars have used written records and oral traditions from later periods to fill in details from earlier periods. But none of this reveals much at all about how native people made sense of the arrival of Europeans, not to mention how they made sense of themselves and their worlds prior to contact.
If the conditions were more favorable for starting a brief history of American intellectual life from the vantage point of Native Americans, the tale of the ideas that made America would ideally commence with this alternative beginning, and it would start even earlier than with the arrival of Europeans. In this version, Native Americans would figure as historical subjects and not objects of Europeans’ analysis and scrutiny. But as intellectual history seeks to recover and interpret ideas, and preferably from reliable evidence whenever possible, this study will privilege the beginning for which there is much sturdier and more extensive documentation.
There is, nevertheless, a crucial insight to be drawn from this situation. It is that, throughout history, people’s ideas and ways of understanding sometimes lose their power or die out altogether, not because better ideas and ways of understanding proved them inadequate, but because they are silenced by means other than rational argument and reasoned debate. We may speak of a “war of ideas,” which may have truth to it, but only as metaphor. In the case of Native American ideas during the first century of contact with Europeans, it was actual physical warfare—violent, bloody warfare—as well as disease and loss of land, that drove their ways of understanding to fade from historical memory.
As different as these two beginnings of this history are, both demonstrate that any intellectual history of America must begin in this world of early modern empires. In doing so, they demonstrate that American intellectual life got its start as much within the minds of Europeans as in the external arena of fractious competing empires, each with its own history and uncertainty about its future along these jagged and shifting contact zones.
And yet to talk of something like an “American intellectual life” in this era is to talk rubbish. In the minds of the earliest settlers and colonizers they did not belong to “America” but rather to their home countries and to their local companions in their tiny enclaves, which they knew were surrounded—and dramatically outnumbered—by indigenous people whom they referred to as “Indians.” Just as they had no deep connection to something called “America,” they also had no shared set of ideas or beliefs, no shared loyalties, because they had no common nationality, religion, or historical memory. To the best of historians’ knowledge, their only common intellectual project was to draw new boundaries around their moral communities, and to cling to old identities and negotiate new ones in the face of such motley neighbors and an unpredictable future.
In the centuries after Waldseemüller’s map, letters, personal testimony, travel accounts, and cartographic information would help fill out the contours of Europeans’ image of America. But the dizzying plethora of information raised far more questions than it answered, and pressed European observers to rethink their intellectual conventions regarding the natural world, history, and God and his creation. The communications, reports, and promotional efforts of Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, and Richard Hakluyt the younger would help reveal a world both wondrous and terrifying. In time, their accounts would be followed by many more fantastical versions of strange people and exotic terrain, supplemented with curious specimens and illustrations, awakening an unquenchable curiosity among educated European laypeople and governmental administrators too powerful for church authorities to contain.
Europeans interpreted information from America to fit existing schema. But even those efforts at correspondence strained the familiar contours of political, social, religious, and scientific thought. While it was commonplace for European observers to see a continent full of heathens as an opportunity to further Christ’s mission, many felt pressed to reassess various aspects of Scripture and their classical heritage in light of those heathens.
One big problem concerned how to reckon time and space. For theologian Isaac LaPeyrère, a French Marrano, information about native populations in the New World sufficiently challenged the accuracy of Genesis. This information helped him to conclude in his Prae-Adamitae (1655) that the presence of human life halfway across the globe must have meant that men existed before Adam. For the Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella, Columbus’s reports made clear that hell must not be on the other side of the globe, so he deferred to Augustine’s view that it must lie at the center of the earth. Joseph Justus Scaliger, the famous late sixteenth-century Italian scholar who had devised the Julian period, which reconciled the discrepancies among the solar, lunar, and Indiction cycles and reset Christ’s birth at 4713 bc, incorporated knowledge about indigenous American temporalities gleaned from explorers in his 1583 Opus de emendatione temporum. And Jesuit explorer José de Acosta had to “laugh” at the inaccuracy of Aristotle’s Meteorology, which was then still taught in European colleges. When he and his crew crossed the equator en route to the “Indies” (South America), instead of experiencing “violent heat” per Aristotle’s theories, they were chilled to the bone.3
Another problem was how knowledge about Native Americans would affect the Europeans’ conceptions of human nature. The most common strategy for them was to use Native Americans as evidence of the superiority of their God, culture, language, and physical attributes. But that strategy did not work for everyone, as a few holdouts, acknowledging the diversity of native peoples and cultures, demanded that settled truths become unsettled, and that skepticism and even a little relativism were the only appropriate responses.
No early modern philosopher was more intent on using reports about natives to critically appraise his own society than the French philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne. Having never traveled to the New World, he learned about it by talking with some natives taken to France by a royal expedition, as well as his manservant, who had spent ten years in Brazil. With the help of these informants, Montaigne formulated some of the earliest ideas of the “noble savage.” His “Apology for Raymond Sebond” highlighted the diversity of moral perspectives and cultural practices of indigenous Americans, paving the way for “On Cannibals” (1580), an essay that excoriated Europeans for their ethnocentrism. For Montaigne, the New World’s rumored cannibalism seemed more understandable than the daily barbarisms of the Old, where corrupt Europeans, driven by material acquisitions, waged war to steal lands they neither needed nor deserved. He thus employed indigenous peoples to challenge the limits and chauvinism of European culture while stressing the need to understand other people’s beauty and dignity.
Across the English Channel, Thomas Hobbes had a much less favorable view of the natives, but he used them similarly to appraise the problems of early modern European notions of government. In his classic, Leviathan (1651), Hobbes employed the symbol of the Indian to establish the dangers of a society founded on the “ill condition [of] meer Nature.” In such circumstances, he warned, “there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation . . . no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters . . . the life of man [is] solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” For European readers who were skeptical that such a society ever existed, Hobbes recommended that they consider the American Indian: “For the savage people in many places of America, . . . have no government at all.” He emphasized that this disturbing picture of society is not a thing of the past because American savages “live at this day in that brutish manner.”4
Figure 1.3 Visual renderings had the power to shape Europeans’ imaginations about the New World’s inhabitants, but they were susceptible to mistranslation and adaptation. The English artist John White had sustained contact with the Secotan Indians during his two-year stay in what would become North Carolina and tried to document them faithfully in “A Festive Dance” (ca. 1585, left). However, when his representation of a peaceful Indian feast arrived in England, it was reimagined by the English engraver Robert Vaughan as a warlike procession around the captured John Smith in his illustration “Their Triumph about Him” for Smith’s The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1627, right). Library of Congress, F229.S59 1907; British Museum, 1906, 0509.1.10
The traffic of information about the fauna of the New World similarly encouraged European natural philosophers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to revise significant portions of their biological classifications, some inherited from antiquity. Eyewitness accounts and drawings of vegetation, even by those with no credentials as natural philosophers, forced established authorities to cede some credit for scientific advancement to New World intellectual novices. But early modern European philosophers and theologians had more to worry about than their own intellectual authority. They had to overcome feeling besieged by the torrent of new information and figure out how to keep pace. (One measure of the new findings’ scope is that the number of known plants multiplied fortyfold from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth.) In the case of the New World’s botanical bounty, they felt the urge to account for these new findings not just because the plants were beautiful, tasty, or promised therapeutic benefits, but because they held clues to the entire schema of knowledge about the natural world and man’s place in it.
Wealthy Europeans devised a way to handle the bumper crop of treasures by curating in their homes curiosity cabinets packed with exotic seedlings and petrified flowers (as well as speckled shells, framed insects, and unidentified teeth). But Europeans’ vogue for exhibiting American oddities did not constitute a long-term strategy for mastering the new details of their known world or reassure them that the existence of the strange new world from which these curiosities came had no implications for their understanding of themselves in the cosmic scheme.
Throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, “America” represented more of an intellectual problem to be solved than a term that evoked stability, affinity, or affection. While colonists made proprietary claims on the land, many of them—even those whose families had been in America for generations—expressed abiding feelings of being existentially unmoored in a foreign land. While direct and sustained contact with Native Americans had the power to unsettle European settlers, it also promised them the knowledge necessary for making their way in their new worlds.
Europeans’ interest in native languages and cultural practices was often instrumental and self-serving, but colonists recognized them as crucial portals to knowledge about their adopted homeland. As precious for the colonists as squash seeds, beaver pelts, or nuggets of gold were, it was the information about where to find them, how to extract them, and the uses to which they could be put that was most valuable to them. The missionaries and clergy among them understood that these prosaic matters were also windows onto the natives’ moral worlds. Knowing their beliefs could help them to find the right fulcrum for converting them to Christianity. And getting them to convert to Christianity would not only save their souls but also help turn potential enemies into allies.
Unlike Spanish Franciscan and French Jesuit missionaries, who went to Indian country in search of souls to convert, Puritans tried to bring the natives to them. The differences lay, in part, in their different conceptions of belonging to the faith. For Catholics, participating in the sacraments, daily prayer, and deferring to the authority and guidance of the clergy were of prime importance, but the ability to read the Bible was not. For non-Anglican Protestants, the ability to read the Bible and receive the Word directly was the alpha and omega of belonging, and so teaching natives how to read was their means for conversion.
The most prominent example of this strategy can be found in Puritan minister John Eliot’s effort to establish the first “praying town” where local Algonquian Indians were expected to check their own customs at the gate of entry and, once inside, model their lives on their Christian neighbors’. Eliot held the view, not uncommon for the time, that Native Americans were part of the ten lost tribes of Israel who made their way to the New World. (He later changed his mind about this as he learned more of the Natick language and culture.) Eliot believed that the only way to bring them back to God was to train them to read the Bible for themselves. He thus alphabetized the Algonquian language in order to translate the Bible and eventually other religious texts into prospective converts’ native tongue. Many of his fellow Puritan divines greeted this with skepticism as they believed the Word of God—though universal—could not be rendered in so primitive a language. With the help of two Native American teachers and a printer, he undertook the task of translating the Bible into Massachusett, which they completed in 1663. This was the first bible printed in America.
Because the Bible signified a Logos unto itself, a specific mindset was needed to get one’s words right. To train the natives to have well-ordered minds, Eliot followed up his translation with The Logick Primer (1672), the first work of philosophy composed in the New World. Written in English and interlined with Massachusett to teach the Algonquian Indians how to align their thinking with Northern European notions and styles of reason, it promised “Logick” (or “Anomayag” as it was referred to in Massachusett), “the Rule, where by every thing, every Speech is composed, analysed, or opened to be known.” Eliot’s focus on translating the Bible in order to bring indigenous ways of reasoning closer to his reflects the Puritans’ persistent concern about disorderly speech. Because for the Puritans the Word was their only portal to spiritual knowledge, written and spoken language had to follow strict rules or else risk wreaking havoc on the community. They were less concerned about sticks and stones breaking bones and worried instead with how words could hurt them. A common Puritan saying was “the Tongue breaketh the Bone.”
Figure 1.4
Figure 1.5 To train New World natives to believe and think like Old World Puritans, missionary John Eliot translated the Bible into Massachusett in 1663 (left) and then wrote The Logick Primer (1672, above; figure from 1904 reprint) in Massachusett interlined with English. Though Eliot sought to win souls for Christ, not subjects for Mother England, his translations demonstrate how language was a crucial instrument of European imperialism. AC6 Eℓ452 663m, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Bible Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, 6796462
Eliot was not interested only in passing along the Puritans’ beliefs; he was interested in—and sought to put on the historical record—the natives’ views as well. However, he took up this task only after they had converted. In The Dying Speeches of Several Indians (1685), Eliot recorded a dying man by the name of Piambohou as uttering: “I beleive Gods promise, that he will forever save all that belive in Jesus Christ. Oh Lord Jesus helpe me, deliver me and save my soul from Hell, by thine own bloud, which thou hast shed for me.” He also recorded the words of a young man named Nehemiah, who lay dying after being attacked by his hunting partner: “Now I desire patiently to take up my crosse and misery. . . . Oh Christ Jesus help me, thou are my Redeemer, my Saviour, and my deliverer: I confesse my selfe a sinner.”5 If these reflect New England Indians’ Weltanschauungen, then it was only after they had been refashioned to pipe through the Puritans’ thought worlds.
Eventually others would try to duplicate Eliot’s efforts at mutual understanding and conversion, but the extraordinary linguistic diversity on the continent presented an enormous barrier to doing so. Given the existence of an estimated one thousand to two thousand different indigenous languages, it is no wonder that European observers felt that they were confronted by a most imposing, unscalable Tower of Babel. This was a constant source of exasperation, even for French Jesuits, who (like their brethren around the world) made much greater efforts than their Protestant counterparts to learn the natives’ tongues. Frustrated by his failed attempt to communicate with a group of Indians in Illinois country, one Jesuit missionary complained to his superiors, “I spoke to them in six different Languages, of which they understood none.”6 British Protestant settlers did not make a similar effort to learn native languages, and this surely contributed to their chronic fear of being surrounded by chaos. The scale and nature of the linguistic barriers were contributing factors to European encounters with natives ending in violent warfare rather than temperate debate.
However, the difficulties arising from the cacophony of indigenous tongues went far deeper than impeding conversation. Rather, they posed deep and troubling intellectual problems about human nature and natural law for European thinkers. For millennia, the biblical explanation provided in Genesis 11:1 had sufficiently dispelled the mystery about different languages of the globe. The descendants of Noah spoke a common language until they excited the wrath of God with their hubris, and he punished them by depriving them of their shared tongue and leaving them to scatter the earth in their mutually incomprehensible languages. But the enormous scale of linguistic diversity in the New World strained the credulity of the Genesis account, encouraging thinkers to chart new theories about the origins and implications of differences in human languages.
In his “Dissertation on the Origin of the Native Races of America” (1642, Eng. trans. 1884), Hugo Grotius, the Dutch philosopher and inventor of natural law theory, speculated that “men of different races were mingled together,” but without a “common government,” they broke into linguistic “families [which] framed a vocabulary specially for themselves.”7 Such a view reflected Grotius’s search for natural laws that accounted for diversity while revealing a unifying, underlying set of causes. Puritan dissenter Roger Williams had the advantage of living among the Narragansett Indians when he drafted A Key to the Language of America (1643). Having been banished from the Massachusetts Bay colony eight years earlier, and having made a home among the natives of Narragansett Bay, Williams was not interested in developing a universal scheme for language or for generalizing about the human condition. Rather, he was interested in what the natives’ language could reveal to him about these particular people, at that particular time, in that particular place. Williams’s compendia provided an early ethnography of the Narragansetts’ daily life, customs, social organization, ethics, and what he described as their natural grace. Given that he was treated with more warmth and compassion among the natives than among his fellow Puritans, the question of which culture was more “civilized” coursed through the book.
From their earliest contacts in the seventeenth century and well into the sustained—if strained—relations in the eighteenth century, European settlers and Native Americans had to find ways to draw information from one another and about one another to ensure their own survival. But one of the most dramatic intellectual consequences of these exchanges was that European settlers came to understand themselves in their new surroundings as a people distinct from the natives. For them, insofar as they saw themselves as “Americans,” it was an identity more oppositional than substantial. Their slow and fitful process of becoming Americans meant knowing who they were not long before formulating any clear idea of who they were.
The sheer diversity of cultures and local conditions among seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century colonists prevented them from inhabiting a shared intellectual framework. For one thing, they did not come as part of a unified religious group, but as Puritans, Quakers, Huguenots, Catholics, Anglicans, Dutch Reformed, and a variety of other religious dissenters. African slaves brought with them the faith traditions particular to their region of origin: some were polytheists, others believed in a supreme force, while others were animists and pagans, in addition to those who came as Muslim and Christian converts. The extraordinary number and variety of native tribes on the East Coast meant that Protestants and Catholics had more beliefs in common than did the different tribes with each other. For the European transplants, their country of origin was as important as their religious tradition; they identified either as English, Scottish, Dutch, German, or French, when they were not attached to even smaller regional distinctions back home. Add to that the different climates and conditions among the colonies up and down the eastern coastline, each requiring a localized knowledge particular to the area. The demographics varied dramatically too, as seventeenth-century New England towns were populated by families, whereas Virginia and the Lower South were dominated by single men. Schooling and literacy were all over the spectrum, with most Native Americans, indentured servants, African slaves, and even some of their white overseers unable or scarcely able to read and write, while Puritans were some of the most literate—and textually prolific—people on planet Earth.
If they shared one thing, however, it was a profound and steadfast longing to redraw the boundaries of their moral communities in the New World of empires. For European colonists, living in remote outposts of their mother cultures meant that they adopted multifocal habits of attention. They looked eastward across the Atlantic for intellectual products and cultural wares, focused on the demands and expectations of their local communities in the colonies, and scouted the ways of indigenous populations or slaves (or both) to mark differences between themselves and others, all the while reconfiguring their mental and moral coordinates to understand themselves and love their God in light of these claims on their imaginations. For the Native Americans living in close proximity to European colonials, that meant dealing with the psychic rupture brought on by the presence of hostile invaders, their strange customs and tongues and continuous warfare, and the invisible forces unleashing illness, pestilence, and death on their communities. And for African slaves, that meant toggling between metaphysical questions about why the cosmos had delivered them to such a fate and daily pragmatic ones about the hidden rules for survival.
Every one of these communities left some records of these mental and moral struggles. However, none churned out the variety and volume of challenging texts (histories, poems, and jeremiads), founded institutions (such as Harvard College, the colonies’ first institution of higher learning, established in 1636), and produced what today would be called “intellectuals” to the degree that Puritan New England did. The list of thinkers with their daunting records of mind is humbling, and includes John Cotton, Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Anne Hutchinson. Their textual and recorded oral claims were invariably theological because their faith structured everything they thought. This was true even in the case of Hutchinson, who insisted that her “own judgement” and “conscience” were forged “by an immediate revelation. . . . By the voice of his own spirit to my soul.”8
The Puritans were not “puritanical” as this adjective has come to be deployed to refer to prudish, austere, finger-wagging sourpusses. In fact, this meaning of “puritanical” is an early twentieth-century invention dreamed up by literary intellectuals in search of a language to criticize the lingering Victorianism they saw as a threat to their intellectual experimentation. But given documents like Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon of 1741, it is easy to see how they might have gotten that impression:
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; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.9
And yet considering the ravishing power of Edwards’s language and imagery, it is hard to see how those young intellectuals could not recognize that in him they had a dazzling literary exemplar.
The Puritans also were the first colonists to develop philosophy as a formal practice of systematic thought in early America. Although suffused in supernatural understandings of the world, the Puritans did not believe that there was an insoluble tension between their religious worldview and scientific investigation. Indeed, it is because the Puritan religious imagination envisioned humanity as completely enveloped by the towering presence of an omniscient, all-powerful deity that their theology could stress the duty to acquire knowledge. Logic, mathematics, and natural philosophy all helped access the manifestations of God’s will in the world around them. They believed that salvation required a heart informed by a well-ordered mind, which was the precondition for receiving biblical truths. The commitment to a “covenant” theology, which reconciled divine rule and human reason, was evident in the intellectual preoccupations of Increase Mather and his son, Cotton. In Catechismus Logicus (1675), the elder Mather reveals the role of logic and rhetoric in ministerial training at Harvard College; his son’s The Christian Philosopher (1721) a half century later shows the persistent effort of Puritan divines to enlist logic and science in the worship of the supernatural order of the world.
Jonathan Edwards brought philosophy to a whole new level, incorporating ontology, epistemology, and ethics to create the most comprehensive and formidable intellectual system of prerevolutionary America. As his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon shows, his reputation as a fire-and-brimstone New Lights leader of the First Great Awakening who took delight in terrorizing unregenerate Calvinists may be warranted. But he was also an exacting Platonist who exerted a deep and lasting influence on American speculative thought. Edwards was greatly influenced by Isaac Newton and John Locke. He drew from Newton’s Principia (1687) an empirical natural theology he could bring to bear on Calvinist theology; from Opticks (1704) a conception of God as radiating light, the Invisible making things visible; and from John Locke’s notion of sense experience in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) a new mode of spiritual cognizance, which Edwards referred to as a “sense of the heart.” Ever struggling between heart and head, Edwards envisioned a balance of power in sanctified reason.
Of all the Puritan texts whose luminous phrasing is well remembered but subtle argument long forgotten, John Winthrop’s “Modell of Christian Charity” sermon has no rival. As Winthrop told his fellow Puritan refugees in 1630:
For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of god and all professours for Gods sake; wee shall shame the faces of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land whether wee are goeing.10
It is not wrong to read this as a statement of the Puritans’ sense of moral mission and exceptionalism as they embarked on new lives in a new land. It is, however, problematic to read it as a statement about America’s moral mission and exceptionalism (which has become the conventional interpretation since Ronald Reagan popularized it with his exaltation of America as a “ shining city on a hill” in the 1980s). Winthrop did not write this text as an American, but as a Puritan. Any exceptionalism he intimated was that the stakes of their venture were so exceptionally high that if they blew it, he and his fellow Puritan émigrés would be made a shameful “story and a byword through the world,” and would see their “prayers to be turned into Cursses upon us.” And any exceptionalism he articulated was based on his vision of a community founded on “meekenes, gentlenes, patience and liberallity.” Such a community was to be “knitt more nearly together” in everything they did, every law they enacted, every economic arrangement they hammered out.11 Winthrop envisioned a form of social organization that valued goodness over greatness, and community over individuality.
More than two hundred years passed before Winthrop’s conception of the Puritans’ special charge would become refashioned as American exceptionalism. However, other early thinkers stepped in with formulations that helped British Americans carve out an identity for themselves in a land distant from their country of origin, with uncertain futures, as they were pawns and players in the jockeying for supremacy and survival between the worlds of empire. Cotton Mather employed a version of America’s special mission as he drafted his magisterial Magnalia Christi Americana: or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from Its First Planting in the Year 1620, until the Year of Our Lord 1698 (1702), which offered America up to world history as a refuge from the degeneracies of Christianity in Europe, and a chance to start anew. It is the image rattling around in Thomas Paine’s consciousness as he drafted Common Sense in 1776 to awaken revolutionary-era Americans to the possibility that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”12 All are variations on a theme that would reappear time and again in developments in American thought: the struggle for moral identification in America, as Americans, that bridges the gulfs of its diversity while also providing a view of itself in the wider world.
British subjects in early America often had a difficult time distinguishing between the aspirational and the actual dimensions of the world-historic nature of their new land. They often wrestled with the symbolic America they carried with them from home and the realities they encountered in their daily lives. And yet, while they often failed to mark boundaries between their ideas and first-hand experiences of the New World, they were remarkably successful in drawing other kinds of intellectual distinctions between the New World and Old World, between the promise of regeneration and the threat of degeneration, and between God’s Word and the babel of “savages.”