The American Spirit in Literature | Page 7

would have declared, with as much
emphasis as Francis Hopkinson a century later, "We of America are in
all respects Englishmen." Professor Edward Channing thinks that it
took a century of exposure to colonial conditions to force the English in
America away from the traditions and ideals of those who continued to
live in the old land. But the student of literature must keep constantly in
mind that these English colonizers represented no single type of the
national character. There were many men of many minds even within
the contracted cabin of the Mayflower. The "sifted wheat" was by no
means all of the same variety.
For Old England was never more torn by divergent thought and

subversive act than in the period between the death of Elizabeth in
1603 and the Revolution of 1688. In this distracted time who could say
what was really "English"? Was it James the First or Raleigh?
Archbishop Laud or John Cotton? Charles the First or Cromwell?
Charles the Second or William Penn? Was it Churchman, Presbyterian,
Independent, Separatist, Quaker? One is tempted to say that the title of
Ben Jonson's comedy "Every Man in his Humour" became the standard
of action for two whole generations of Englishmen, and that there is no
common denominator for emigrants of such varied pattern as Smith and
Sandys of Virginia, Morton of Merrymount, John Winthrop, "Sir"
Christopher Gardiner and Anne Hutchinson of Boston, and Roger
Williams of Providence. They seem as miscellaneous as "Kitchener's
Army."
It is true that we can make certain distinctions. Virginia, as has often
been said, was more like a continuation of English society, while New
England represented a digression from English society. There were
then, as now, "stand-patters" and "progressives." It was the second
class who, while retaining very conservative notions about property,
developed a fearless intellectual radicalism which has written itself into
the history of the United States. But to the student of early American
literature all such generalizations are of limited value. He is dealing
with individual men, not with "Cavalier" or "Roundhead" as such. He
has learned from recent historians to distrust any such facile
classification of the first colonists. He knows by this time that there
were aristocrats in Massachusetts and commoners in Virginia; that the
Pilgrims of Plymouth were more tolerant than the Puritans of Boston,
and that Rhode Island was more tolerant than either. Yet useful as these
general statements may be, the interpreter of men of letters must always
go back of the racial type or the social system to the individual person.
He recognizes, as a truth for him, that theory of creative evolution
which holds that in the ascending progress of the race each thinking
person becomes a species by himself.
While something is gained, then, by remembering that the racial
instincts and traditions of the first colonists were overwhelmingly
English, and that their political and ethical views were the product of a
turbulent and distraught time, it is even more important to note how the
physical situation of the colonists affected their intellectual and moral,

as well as their political problems. Among the emigrants from England,
as we have seen, there were great varieties of social status, religious
opinion, individual motive. But at least they all possessed the physical
courage and moral hardihood to risk the dangerous voyage, the fearful
hardships, and the vast uncertainties of the new life. To go out at all,
under the pressure of any motive, was to meet triumphantly a searching
test. It was in truth a "sifting," and though a few picturesque rascals had
the courage to go into exile while a few saints may have been deterred,
it is a truism to say that the pioneers were made up of brave men and
braver women.
It cannot be asserted that their courage was the result of any single,
dominating motive, equally operative in all of the colonies. Mrs.
Hemans's familiar line about seeking "freedom to worship God" was
measurably true of the Pilgrims of Plymouth, about whom she was
writing. But the far more important Puritan emigration to
Massachusetts under Winthrop aimed not so much at "freedom" as at
the establishment of a theocracy according to the Scriptures. These men
straightway denied freedom of worship, not only to newcomers who
sought to join them, but to those members of their own company who
developed independent ways of thinking. The list of motives for
emigration ran the whole gamut, from missionary fervor for converting
the savages, down through a commendable desire for gain, to the
perhaps no less praiseworthy wish to escape a debtor's prison or the
pillory. A few of the colonists were rich. Some were beggars or
indentured servants. Most of them belonged to the middle class. John
Harvard was the son of a butcher; Thomas