The American Spirit in Literature | Page 8

Shepard, the son of a grocer;
Roger Williams, the son of a tailor. But all three were university bred
and were natural leaders of men.
Once arrived in the wilderness, the pioneer life common to all of the
colonists began instantly to exert its slow, irresistible pressure upon
their minds and to mould them into certain ways of thinking and feeling.
Without some perception of these modes of thought and emotion a
knowledge of the spirit of our literature is impossible. Take, for
instance, the mere physical situation of the first colonists, encamped on
the very beach of the wide ocean with an illimitable forest in their rear.
Their provisions were scanty. They grew watchful of the strange soil,
of the new skies, of the unknown climate. Even upon the voyage over,

John Winthrop thought that "the declination of the pole star was much,
even to the view, beneath that it is in England," and that "the new moon,
when it first appeared, was much smaller than at any time he had seen it
in England." Here was a man evidently using his eyes with a new
interest in natural phenomena. Under these changed skies the mind
began gradually to change also.
At first the colonists felt themselves an outpost of Europe, a forlorn
hope of the Protestant Reformation. "We shall be as a city upon a hill,"
said Winthrop. "The eyes of all people are upon us." Their creed was
Calvinism, then in its third generation of dominion and a European
doctrine which was not merely theological but social and political. The
emigrant Englishmen were soon to discover that it contained a doctrine
of human rights based upon human needs. At the beginning of their
novel experience they were doubtless unaware of any alteration in their
theories. But they were facing a new situation, and that new situation
became an immense factor in their unconscious growth. Their
intellectual and moral problems shifted, as a boat shifts her ballast
when the wind blows from a new quarter. The John Cotton preaching
in a shed in the new Boston had come to "suffer a sea-change" from the
John Cotton who had been rector of St. Botolph's splendid church in
Lincolnshire. The "church without a bishop" and the "state without a
king" became a different church and state from the old, however loyally
the ancient forms and phrases were retained.
If the political problems of equality which were latent in Calvinism
now began to take on a different meaning under the democratic
conditions of pioneer life, the inner, spiritual problems of that amazing
creed were intensified. "Fallen" human nature remained the same,
whether in the crowded cosmopolitan streets of Holland and London,
or upon the desolate shores of Cape Cod. But the moral strain of the old
insoluble conflict between "fixed fate" and "free will" was heightened
by the physical loneliness of the colonists. Each soul must fight its own
unaided, unending battle. In that moral solitude, as in the physical
solitude of the settlers upon the far northwestern prairies of a later
epoch, many a mind snapped. Unnatural tension was succeeded by
unnatural crimes. But for the stronger intellects New England
Calvinism became a potent spiritual gymnastic, where, as in the
Swedish system of bodily training, one lifts imaginary and

ever-increasing weights with imaginary and ever-increasing effort,
flexor and extensor muscles pulling against one another, driven by the
will. Calvinism bred athletes as well as maniacs.
The new situation, again, turned many of the theoretical speculations of
the colonists into practical issues. Here, for example, was the Indian.
Was he truly a child of God, possessing a soul, and, if so, had he
partaken of the sin of Adam? These questions perplexed the saintly
Eliot and the generous Roger Williams. But before many years the
query as to whether a Pequot warrior had a soul became suddenly less
important than the practical question as to whether the Pequot should
be allowed any further chances of taking the white man's scalp. On this
last issue the colonists were unanimous in the negative.
It would be easy to multiply such instances of a gradual change of view.
But beneath all the changes and all the varieties of individual behavior
in the various colonies that began to dot the seaboard, certain qualities
demanded by the new surroundings are felt in colonial life and in
colonial writings. One of these is the instinct for order, or at least that
degree of order essential to the existence of a camp. It was not in vain
that John Smith sought to correct the early laxness at Jamestown by the
stern edict: "He that will not work, neither shall he eat." Dutch and
Quaker colonies taught the same inexorable maxim of thrift. Soon there
was work enough for all, at