Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

FOR WHAT AMERICA? TWO VISIONS

The land was ours before we were the land's.

ROBERT FROST, "THE GIFT OUTRIGHT"

Where do we find ourselves?

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "EXPERIENCE"

It was not precisely a myth that the Europeans who in the seventeenth century came in increasing numbers to the New World encountered "virgin land," land held to be not widely settled, and importantly not to have been improved by labor. Certainly they thought so. As John Locke wrote in the 1680s in his Second Treatise on Government:

I think it will be but a very modest computation to say, that of the products of the earth useful to the life of man nine tenths are the effects of labour: nay, if we will rightly estimate things as they come to our use, and cast up the several expences about them, what in them is purely owing to nature, and what to labour, we shall find, that in most of them ninety-nine hundredths are wholly to be put on the account of labour.

... There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing, than several nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in land, and poor in all the comforts of life; whom nature having furnished as liberally as any other people, with the materials of plenty, i.e. a fruitful soil, apt to produce in abundance, what might serve for food, raiment, and delight; yet for want of improving it by labour, have not one hundredth part of the conveniencies we enjoy: and a king of a large and fruitful territory there, feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-labourer in England.

According to Locke, value — he moves from estimating it at 9 percent to 99 percent to 999 percent (!) — comes from labor. To the degree that the natives occupying those lands appeared to need much more land than they might have needed had they but settled down and cultivated, they appeared to Europeans to lack all Protestant industriousness. (In point of fact, most tribes in the Northeast cultivated land for periods of several years, and their apparent nomadism was in most cases due to their displacement by whites). Nor was the sense of an empty land, there for the cultivating, entirely without basis: in many areas, the Europeans had (through expulsion, war, and disease) managed in the one hundred years after 1500 to eliminate close to 90 percent of the native population. The diseases brought by the invaders often raced ahead of the actual European incursions. To many Europeans, it could have seemed as if God had prepared the land for their taking. Cotton Mather spoke favorably of the epidemic of 1616 that cleared the land "of those pernicious creatures, to make room for better growth." Locke in fact argued explicitly that while God had given the world to men in common (which appeared to be still the case in the New World), "it would not be supposed that He intended to remain it so." To plow the fields, scatter seed on the land, and husband it to harvest was in fact to do God's work, and any natives present were simply interfering with a God-given task. Nor did Locke, whose thought was so influential on the generation of those who made the American Revolution, have any trouble with the existence of slavery.

The New World appeared not only there for Godly taking but also raised a complex set of questions about the human relation to the world. Thomas Hobbes was merely the culmination of a set of intellectual developments that called into question the rational ordering of the world supposedly dating from the days of Adam and the Garden of Eden. Indeed, Bishop Bramhall had found that Hobbes had "removed all ancient landmarks" of authority. Montaigne in "On Cannibals" had suggested that the inhabitants of the New World had essentially none of the qualities of what was known as civilization. This meant that the New World was different from what was known of places like China: Chinese were civilized and awaited only the coming of Christ's word. In the somewhat blinkered minds of the Europeans, the inhabitants of the New World had apparently no development at all. There apparently was (still) such a thing as the "state of nature." And initially (we are, after all, one to several generations before Hobbes's Leviathan), the new settlers thought the inhabitants of the New World apparently gentle, peaceful — just the sort one would expect in Eden. And the land was there to be used — there seemed to be no rules or sense of owned property. Columbus's first descriptions are of "naked ... very well made, very handsome bodies, and very good countenance." And indeed, initially, there was not much conflict: it was to come shortly.

The initial settlers arrived with little sense of hostility from the natives and a general sense that there was lots of land. Who were these people? It is the case that soon a large percentage — some estimates run as high as 75 percent by the time of the Revolutionary War — were indentured servants, imported (that is the only right word) for their labor. They were bound for a period of five to seven years, after which they could try to make it on their own. Some of them were criminals who had been offered deportation as an alternative to the gallows. These, however, were not the people who set the terms of citizenship. I am inevitably concerned at this beginning with those who were in positions of power — who were in effect the dominant groups in the New World. And the first place to look for the sense of what criteria had to be met for one to call oneself a citizen is in New England.

When the Protestant Reformation swept over Europe, it took a different form when it reached England. As is well known, King Henry VIII broke, somewhat reluctantly, with the Roman Catholic Church and founded the Church of England, of which he was the head (and the English monarch remains the head of that church to this day). There were several reasons for this Caesaro-papism. The most notorious was Henry's desire for a male heir and his expectation that Anne Boleyn would, if his wife, provide him with a legitimate one. Another reason, more materially salient because of the tendency of people to leave land and other donations to the (Roman Catholic) Church, was to help with England's finances. From the use of such gifts for the purchase of indulgences and such matters, approximately one-third of the English territory (there were 850 "religious houses") belonged to the Catholic Church — and paid no or only voluntary taxes. It did not take much to see the economic benefits to be gained from putting into political reality Luther's excoriation of the practice of indulgences.

If, however, the church could be established by human ordering — as it had just been in England — then the question of what it meant to be a member became salient in a way that it was not under universal Catholicism. How does one recognize a church member? How does one recognize oneself as a member? How should that person behave? And as this was a matter of one's eternal soul, the question was significant. Among those who sought to be pure (hence "Puritans"), a focus on the forms of external behavior as the outward and physical manifestation of an inward and spiritual grace became essential. We find this idea parodied already in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (1601–2) in the character of Malvolio, who is so "best persuaded of himself, so cramm'ed (as he thinks) with excellences, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him." When, under the reign of Charles I (who had a Catholic wife), Archbishop Laud sought to enforce universally on Protestants the king- and episcopacy-centric strictures of the Anglican church, he gave rise to more or less open rebellion on the part of those who were concerned for the purity of their behavior.

Some separated themselves from the English church. These were communitarians. They called themselves Pilgrims and often held all things in common, with collective decisions made by voting. They crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower and, upon arrival in what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts, collectively signed the Mayflower Compact to form a "civill body politic." While symbolically significant in what becomes American history, the Pilgrims in fact engaged in conflict with Native Americans, many died of disease, and, although eventually the remaining few founded a colony at Plymouth (of the "Rock" fame), they were over time absorbed into broader developments.

Pilgrims had wanted to separate themselves from the English state church. Puritans, on the other hand, wanted only to purify it. In England, the decrees and persecutions of Archbishop Laud were of such severity that the Puritans, like the Pilgrims, thought that moving to a new, and apparently empty, land was necessary. Accordingly, a group of eleven ships, led by John Winthrop aboard the Arbella, carried about seven hundred Puritans to New England during the summer of 1630. From the pressure of a wealthy group of fellow Puritans and sympathizers, they had obtained a royal charter to establish a colony in Massachusetts Bay — and it is likely that Charles I was happy to get rid of them. The charter gave them remarkable latitude. The Governor and other officials were to be "constituted, elected and chosen out of the Freemen of the saide Company, for the tyme being, in such Manner and Forme as hereafter in their Presents is expressed, which said Officers shall applie themselves to take Care for the best disposeing and ordering of the generall buysines and Affaires of, for, and concerning the said Landes and Premisses." The company elected Winthrop to be their governor. These Puritans did not think of themselves as breaking off from the English church, merely going to where they could do it better. They did, however, have unusual latitude in the question of self-governance.

As did Alexis de Tocqueville, it is to the Puritans that I look for a first picture of the requirements of citizenship in the New World, for much of what one finds in Puritan thought continues to inform American conceptions — note the plural — of citizenship to this day. Central to their understanding was that political authority was not established by social status or birth but by contract or covenant. Such a conception was important to Protestantism from early on, drawing on sources found as far back as Saint Augustine and more recently in John Calvin. Protestants held that there had been a covenant between Adam (Locke included Eve) and God — and it is because Adam and Eve broke that covenant that humans no longer live in Eden and now, knowing sin and morality, are mortal. Of importance and not so incidentally, for Puritans it is our knowledge of sin (from the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) that makes us mortal. (Hence God must keep Adam and Eve from eating of the Tree of Eternal Life, less they become like God and have no use for him). Mortality is acquired, not originally given. Its source is, however, a defining human trait ("In Adam's Fall, sinned we all"), and those who deny it deny their humanity. It follows that, for the Puritan, sin is a human fault and that being moral is what is required by our mortality. And, if our lot is consequent to the breaking of the original covenant with God, it is now meet and right to attempt a new covenant in order to, as far as possible, make up for the breaking of the first one.

There is a profound implication here for the conception of authority. As God was to Man so are men (the status of women remains ambiguous) to the Ruler. Politically speaking, humans (as citizens, not rulers) are analogous to God. From this, it would follow that if a ruler breaks the covenant by which he was bound, he should be punished by men, just as God had punished Adam and through him the human race. Charles I, who in the 1649 Articles of Impeachment was held by Parliament to be "trusted with a limited power to govern by and according to the laws of the land, and not otherwise," was to find this out shortly, less than twenty-five years after the arrival of the Puritans in the New World. The model of the political covenant is thus taken from that of the religious covenant, and it notably attributes potentially total authority to the covenanter who has not broken faith. As John Winthrop argued in a "Speech to the General Court," "It is yourselves [the people] who have called us to this office and being called by you we have our authority from God." The expression of the people transmits the will of God. (It is no accident that some people have proclaimed the 2016 election of Donald Trump to be "the will of God"— not necessarily because God directly chose him but because, in their view, the people did).

If sin is a human fault, then the cure for sin could involve the collectivity. Others are with us to help us on the path the righteousness and remind us when we stray. The Puritans were thus very careful to distinguish two types of liberty. Tocqueville cites this passage from Winthrop's "Speech to the General Court" as a "beautiful definition of liberty." Winthrop is laying out an understanding of "independence," Tocqueville cites him:

There is in fact a corrupt sort of liberty ... which consists in doing whatever [men] like. This liberty is the enemy of all authority; it is impatient with all rules. With it, we become inferior to ourselves. ... But there is a civil and moral liberty that finds its strength in union and which it is the mission of power itself to protect: this is the liberty to do what is just and good without fear. This sacred liberty we must defend in all circumstances and if necessary risk our life for it.

That when following the corrupt sort of liberty, we "become inferior to ourselves," entails that each of us has a higher nature to which we should aspire. This higher nature is of such importance that we should be willing to die for it. Thus the willingness to risk mortality is a sign of our ability to keep our covenant with God. There is a kind of individual perfectionism in Puritanism, albeit within the confines of its church. In this view, "civil and moral" liberty consist in freely doing what is right; it is the role of the authorities to help each person on his or her way to such righteous action. As with all forms of perfectionism, this is both positive and negative liberty, to recall and overcome the distinction made famous by Isaiah Berlin. We are not constrained by anything, hence it is negative; but we are required to freely do what is right for our self, which is positive. (That our freedom carries a categorical imperative — thus a compulsion — will be established philosophically by Immanuel Kant, one hundred years later). The role of government was to enable people to choose freely what is right. It was not that government was itself the source of what was morally right but that it made possible the pursuit of that right, something that could only be achieved in concert one with the other.

Highly individualistic, Puritanism was also highly communal. Anyone holding these views will of necessity spend a great deal of time figuring out what is right. We know, for instance, that it was a common practice for families to come together to discuss the Sunday sermon at some length. Alan Heimert caught this concept well. The conflict between the first version of liberty and the second, he writes, "was not as generally assumed simply a token of the unwillingness of the latter to confess itself an anachronism in an age of reason and science." Rather, Puritanism "embodied a radical and ever democratic challenge to the standing order of colonial America." And in many parts of that America, it was originally the standing order.

Central to the Puritans' sense of government was that they were on a God-given mission, in the way of which no one had the right to stand. America was, so to speak, the new Israel, and all the efforts of government were to be directed toward empowering this task. John Cotton, who had fled from Lincolnshire to Boston in 1633 and was promptly chosen the leader of the Boston church, set out the "limitations of government": magistrates should never "affect more liberty and authority than will do them good, and the people good. ... Power should therefore be limited." But the reason that government should be limited is so that citizens make use of that limitation for themselves, and, by themselves, do what is right. It was not up to the government to coerce people into doing what is right but to make it possible or likely that they should to do it. The role of the government was, should they err, to remind them of the right way and, should they continue in their faulty ways, to punish them. Cotton remarked that the basic truths are so small in number that if they be well expounded, no one could fail to believe them. Only if a person persisted in error after being admonished twice can he or she be punished, Cotton explained, as now this person is "sinning against his [or her] conscience." The role of government is to get the citizen to live up to what being a citizen means.

---

Excerpted from "Learning One's Native Tongue"
by .
Copyright © 2019 The University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---