IT is hard now to imagine, but it is a matter of record that a mid-eighteenth-century mariner approaching the American strand could detect the fragrance of the pine trees about 60 leagues, or 180 nautical miles, from land. Before landfall he might thus be reminded, even after more than a century of white settlement, of the essential newness of the New World. On landing he could hardly escape fresh remembrances: he could see the trees themselves, arrayed in such formidable ranks that they were attacked and felled in careless numbers by settlers eager to get at the untilled soil beneath; he could see beaver pelts and deerskins brought to market, tokens of a teeming animal life in the interior; he might hear about the fish, spawning in such numbers and growing to such size in the rivers and offshore waters that the ease of catching them had become a legend and a joke. There were also conspicuous absences: there were few imposing buildings, public or domestic, and many roads were still mud hollows. Travelers and writers have said it often since: there were no monuments and no ruins; it was the scenes of nature, not edifices put up by man, that stood out to be admired by those who were not already too busy to admire them. In his own country an Englishman need not have gone far to be aware of Roman survivals, of ruined castles, and of tumbled monasteries and smashed faces of church idols, relics of religious furies that had now subsided. In Europe, in England, one could see all too easily the physical evidences of the decay of human institutions, the evanescence of human creeds and arrangements. America seemed to hum to the sound of some new beginning, free of the weight of the past, and impeded mainly by a great thicket of nature.
Perhaps it was a bit deceptive, for the new beginning that was so evident in America was itself an importation, a version only, of the new beginning upon which Europe had long since been launched. The English colonies of the North American mainland, the rude provinces that would in time form the nucleus of the United States, were the elements of the first post-feudal nation, the first nation in the world to be formed and to grow from its earliest days under the influence of Protestantism, nationalism, and modern capitalist enterprise. This was the transcendently important reality about this new country: its wholly post-Protestant, post-nationalist, post-capitalist history. In the modernization that was re-creating all Europe, England was rapidly taking the lead, and America, the offspring of the avant-garde nation, was a kind of distillation of certain aspects of the new European world.
To gain some perspective on this newness of old Europe, it will be useful for a moment to jump backward from the mid-eighteenth century, which is our focus of inquiry, to the year 1650, simply to mark out how much of the transformation of Europe had already taken place at a time when English settlements in North America were still very young. So many volumes have been written on the very earliest settlements that their bulk tends to conceal the important fact that the population in these settlements was negligible in number. These studies are necessary because there is much to tell: so many of the institutional foundations of the colonies had already been laid by 1650—the transit of parliamentary order, as shown in the town meeting and the House of Burgesses, the establishment of New England Congregationalism, the emergence of the tobacco plantation, of indentured servitude, and even, in most of its aspects, of slavery. But this institutional framework embraced a population consisting in 1650 of about 50,000 souls, most of them huddled in Massachusetts and Virginia, a population then not more significant than that of the tiny island of Barbados, or, to put it another way, than that of Bozeman, Montana, today. America was peopled almost entirely after that date; the great changes that swept the European and English world from the Reformation to the time of the Civil War in England and the Thirty Years’ War in Germany had all taken place before English settlers occupied anything more than a trifling bridgehead on the shaggy continent that confronted them.
Between the time of the Reformation and 1650, the effects of the Protestant upheaval had been naturalized in European politics and the place of Protestantism had been fought out and worked out. The national state system had emerged, and nationalism had elbowed religion aside as the controlling civic passion of Western man. The Commercial Revolution had broken down most of the remaining vestiges of localism in economic life, had moved the center of European trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic world, and had confirmed the global character of that trade. Mercantilism had put policies of state at the center of consideration, and had introduced the idea of a national economy and a national labor force, conceptions as new and important as the conception of gross national product has been in our time. Monetary inflation arising from the Spanish treasure of the New World had stimulated the European economy and had transformed the class structure of the Western nations. In Spanish America and the Caribbean extensive slave empires had been established, to which millions of blacks were being transported from Africa. In England the Civil War had already taken place, Charles I had been beheaded, and Cromwell was governing under the Commonwealth. But more to the point, despite the Cromwellian interregnum, England was rapidly accumulating and absorbing those experiences which would soon enable her to make large changes in parliamentary and monarchical government; and in the course of the Civil War certain ideas about popular rights had been aired with striking force and clarity, laying the foundation for modern Anglo-American democratic thought.
It has often been said that Protestantism enthroned the individual conscience. The prevalence of this idea suggests, if it suggests nothing else, that a good many Protestants have written histories. Of course, in the long run, anything that cracked the unified facade of Christendom and ended monopoly in the marketplace of creeds must have done something to ease and to advance the position of private conscience. But in the shorter run, which was long enough, one must be impressed by the numbers of persons who suffered grievously or died over questions of faith between 1517 and 1648. It had not been the intention of very many Protestants to unleash the individual conscience. What Protestantism did was to free kings and princes who had broken with Catholicism to enforce their own regal consciences on their subjects. This was the principle recognized and sanctified in the Peace of Augsburg which ended the religious wars of the sixteenth century: cuius regio, eius religio.
One of the most impressive things, in fact, about Protestantism is not what it did to foster the religious conscience of the common man but what it did to promote a secular mentality in heads of state. For a time Protestant loyalties were used, by such figures as William the Silent, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, and some of the German princes, to stir up the national militancy of their subjects and followers. But within a century Europe had passed from a condition in which religion had been a primary motive power in foreign wars and domestic upheavals to one in which religion was a marginal and occasional force. The Peace of Westphalia, closing the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, marked the end of wars fought in the name or for the interests of a creed. The essentially secular modern state system was gradually dispensing with religious convictions as a raison d’état, although it might from time to time make cynical efforts to mobilize them. The dream of a single realm and a single faith for Christendom had long since died with Philip II of Spain; what mattered now to monarchs and ministers was not the propagation of a faith but the manipulation of the balance of power. It is too little realized how important the half-secularized mentality of men of state in early modern Europe was for American development. With our eyes too firmly fixed on the Puritans, we fail to see that hundreds of thousands of immigrants were rounded up and persuaded to come to America by men moved by secular motives of empire and profit; and that so many of them came without firm religious attachments (or at least without seeking to reproduce them here) that the American colonies at the end of the eighteenth century were perhaps the most un-churched regions in all Christendom. Religious tolerance, and after it religious liberty, were the creations of a jumble of faiths too complex to force into any mold, and of a rising secularism too urbane to care to try. Puritanism, after all, was not America’s gift to the world but England’s; what America brought was the separation of church and state.
In these changes England was usually the leading agent, and from them she emerged as the foremost power. At an earlier date than the other nations, under the Tudors, she had reached a high degree of internal civic unity. Her monarchs had defied the authority of the Pope and had punctured the inflated dreams of Philip II. The price inflation set off by Spain’s American treasure in the sixteenth century, ruinous to some nations and troublesome to others, seems to have advanced considerably the state of England’s industry. The general crisis of the European economy in the seventeenth century, which strengthened absolutism in many countries, created in England a freer political order congenial to the growth of commercial and industrial capital, as Eric Hobsbawn has suggested.1 By mid-seventeenth century, having reckoned with the Spanish, the English were ready to begin taking commercial European supremacy away from the Dutch. But before that, in the 1640’s, England had made her boldest leap forward into the modern world, with the Puritan Revolution, the army debates over the rights of the common man, and the ultimate taming of monarchy within the framework of a parliamentary system.
1. “The Crisis of the 17th Century,” Part I: Past and Present 5 (May 1954), 33–53; Part II: Past and Present 6 (Nov. 1954), 44–65.