New Order of the Ages: Time, the Constitution, and the Making of Modern American Political Thought

by Michael Lienesch

Overview

Lienesch shows that what emerged from the period of change was an inconsistent combination of political theories. The mixture of classical republicanism and modern liberalism was institutionalized in the American Constitution and has continued—ambivalent, contradictory, and sometimes flatly paradoxical—to characterize American politics ever since.

Originally published in 1988.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691606354
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #921
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

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NEW ORDER OF THE AGES

Time, the Constitution, and the Making of Modern American Political Thought

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By MICHAEL LIENESCH

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07779-6

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CHAPTER 1

CREATION

Sacred and Secular History

IN 1783, twenty years of protest and war came suddenly to a close. With the signing of the Peace of Paris, the War of Independence was officially won. Americans greeted the news with celebration and thanksgiving. The army was demobilized swiftly and relatively surely, thanks largely to the firmness and generosity of General Washington, and enlisted men and officers alike set out for their farms and homes, many leading the horses that had pulled the cannon during the war. By April 1783, the army had been disbanded, in time for late spring planting.

Ending the war was easy, however, compared to beginning the peace. For having carried out the modern world's first anticolonial revolution, Americans turned with trepidation to the task of creating its first independent republic. Their situation was unique. But perhaps because it was so unprecedented, they seemed all the more determined to find precedents. Faced with the challenge of beginning anew, thinkers of the time could be found asking how their ancestors had begun this extraordinary experiment in the first place, how they had founded a new world, settled a new continent, and won independence for a new nation. Simply said, in creating the American republic, they began by considering how their ancestors had created America itself.

Americans looked to their history in 1783. As to what they found, there is considerable disagreement, because historians have been at odds for some time over the character of eighteenth-century conceptions of history. On the one hand, inspired in part by Perry Miller, religious historians such as Alan Heimert, Edmund Morgan, and Nathan Hatch have described the enduring influence of Puritan history, with its providential interpretation of the past. On the other hand, intellectual historians in the tradition of Trevor Colbourn have contended that eighteenth-century history was predominantly secular and legalistic, premised on Enlightenment principles and focusing on the English common law. Among relatively recent writers, John Berens has elaborated on the argument that providential history remained pervasive throughout the late eighteenth century, while Lester Cohen has contended, very much to the contrary, that a rationalist reading of the past became predominant in America at the time of the Revolution.

In fact, both interpretations miss the most important point, that in their reading of the past, many eighteenth-century Americans tended to combine the sacred and the secular. It is true that certain evangelicals would remain loyal to providential history, and that some secular thinkers would adhere to an almost exclusively rationalistic interpretation. But an even larger group, combining religion and rationality, would create a conception of American history in which piety and pragmatism were inextricably bound together. The result would be a paradoxical interpretation of the past, comprehensive but contradictory, inspiring feelings of enormous self-confidence and enormous self-doubt.

New World Israel

In the late eighteenth century, American evangelicals preferred a strictly sacred reading of the past. On the whole, their theory of history followed from their reading of the Bible and, in particular, the Old Testament. These early Protestants saw history commencing with the Creation of Genesis. Yet for them the beginning of the world seemed somehow very close. Although all may not have agreed with Archbishop Ussher's calculation that the world had come into being in 4004 B.C., they did see the creation of the world as a literal and relatively recent event.

The evangelical reading of history was cataclysmic, consisting of epochal events: Creation, the flood of Noah, the birth of Jesus. History seemed to leap from one of these great moments to the next; between these events, time, for all practical purposes, did not exist. Thus evangelicals could talk of ancient acts as if they had only just happened, and of Biblical figures as if they had been almost contemporaries. After all, as late as 1625, Samuel Purchas had begun his history of Virginia with a sketch of the lives of Adam and Eve. Throughout the seventeenth century, works like An Historical Treatise on the Travels of Noah in Europe had circulated. Even in the early eighteenth century, American Protestants could continue to speak of ancient Jerusalem in the same way that they described contemporary London or Paris.

Furthermore, evangelicals held a covenant theory of history, in which the past was seen as a process in which God periodically chose certain nations to play the role of his chosen people. According to the Bible, Abraham had passed this national covenant to his children, who comprised the nation of Israel. For centuries, Protestant theologians had argued that from Israel the covenant had been transferred to the first Christians, who in turn had passed it to the early modern Protestants of Europe and England. With the American Puritans, it had been carried to the New World. Thus eighteenth-century evangelicals tended to see themselves as descendants, literal or metaphorical, of the ancient Israelites. In 1783 it was still quite common to hear American Protestants describing themselves as the chosen people of God, what the Reverend Rozel Cook, pastor of a New London, Connecticut, church, would call the "American Israel."

By the eighteenth century, however, certain rationalists had begun to discover an alternative reading of history. To these less self-consciously religious writers, the past seemed to be primarily the product of secular events. Specifically, their reading of history consisted of the story of the rise and fall of the classical civilizations. In a 1783 oration, the Boston lawyer John Gardiner described the outlines of the theory. Ironically, he began with ancient Israel, which he described as the earliest example of a civilized nation. With their emphasis on education, along with their respect for the individual, the Israelites had begun the process that would culminate in modern secular society. From Israel the germ of civilization had been passed to Greece, where, as the classically educated Gardiner put it, "the human mind expanded freely, and reached the sublimest heights of elevation." With the Greeks, civilization had come into its full glory, with labor and learning combining to create an almost perfect civilized state, a model for ages to come, providing, in Gardiner's words, "infinite satisfaction, entertainment, and instruction to the modern world."

Nevertheless, this secular history was neither continuous nor cumulative. Instead, it remained cataclysmic, with reason leaping from one civilization to the next, the light of learning suddenly blazing forth from darkness. Between these sudden bursts of illumination, ignorance continued to cast its pall over a benighted world. Gardiner described the passage of civilization from Greece to Rome, where, following the fall of the Alexandrian empire, the spirit of the liberal arts and sciences had risen again. Over time, however, the love of learning was lost, and Roman republicans grew slothful and profligate. A series of despots proceeded further to sap the spirit of the Roman people, and eventually, as Gardiner observed, "cast a deep gloom upon everything liberal, great, and noble." By the fourth century, Roman civilization had grown too corrupt to defend itself from the barbarian invaders who struck the final blow to classical civilization. "Dark thick clouds of Gothick night soon obscured the face of science," Gardiner described this cataclysmic age, "and enveloped every trace of the polite arts, and the European world sunk gradually into ignorance, stupidity, and superstition."

Yet rationalist historians made it clear that ultimately reason always triumphed over ignorance. For though cataclysmic and discontinuous, their history was cumulative and at least implicitly progressive. Eighteenth-century republicans of all kinds showed a peculiar fascination with the Dark Ages, which they viewed as a long night of ecclesiastical and feudal tyranny that had followed the fall of Rome. At the same time, they were equally fascinated with the coming of modern times. Evangelicals saw the catalyst as the Reformation, which put a violent end to spiritual ignorance and church tyranny. Rationalist writers, by contrast, attributed the coming of modern times more to the Renaissance. Thus, starting about the eleventh century, as Gardiner saw it, "gleams of scientific light began to beam through the Gothick clouds." The progress of knowledge was slow until the fourteenth century. Then, "in this remarkable century, literature suddenly diffused itself through most parts of Europe, gun-powder, the art of printing, and the mariner's compass were invented." These advances in the liberal arts and sciences, however, were only preparatory to the most significant development of early modern times, the discovery of the New World. America had been discovered and explored through the aid of scientific inventions. It had been colonized and settled by educated, rational people. In other words, to these secular historians, America symbolized the rebirth of civilization: "For times of greater freedom," Gardiner concluded, "of nobler improvement, and of more perfect knowledge was reserved the particular discovery of this happy land, the place of our nativity."

For all their differences, these competing versions of sacred and secular history were surprisingly complementary. After all, for centuries modern scholars had been combining Biblical description with secular chronology, showing how the prophet Jeremiah had taught the philosopher Plato, or how Moses had predated Bacchus, or that Egypt was not as old as Israel. This attempt to reconcile theology with science had created a half-skeptical, half-credulous form of early modern history in which the fantastic combined spectacularly with the mundane. The English scientist William Whiston had dedicated himself to showing how the flood of Noah had been caused by a comet passing near the earth; Sir Isaac Newton had apparently believed that Chiron the Centaur was responsible for the first astronomical calculations; Sir Edward Coke had thought that Aeneas's grandson had discovered the British Isles. In the eighteenth century, this reconciliation of the mythic and the mundane past continued, so that by the end of the century an elaborate synthesis had been developed. Brought to the New World, this synthetic history allowed Americans to assume that their nation was descended from both ancient Israel and the classical civilizations: In effect, America had both a sacred and a secular heritage. Dr. Benjamin Rush, appropriately enough a founder of both the American Bible Society and the American Philosophical Society, may have put it best when he referred to the new United States as "the Kingdom of Christ and the empire of reason and science."

Following the Revolution, preachers and popular speakers in large numbers began to draw on both evangelical and rationalist legacies to interpret Independence. In their sermons and orations celebrating the peace, they emphasized the theme of American uniqueness. Many recalled the circumstances surrounding the discovery and first founding of America: its miraculous appearance on the stage of history, its unique New World character, its primordial innocence. These same features, the ministers and orators argued, were also characteristic of their own times. Independence, like founding, was described as an act of providential creation, an American Genesis. In their thanksgiving sermons of 1783 and 1784, the ministers spoke often on this theme of creation, turning frequently for their sermon topic to the passage from Isaiah, "Shall the earth be made to bring forth in a day? Shall a nation be brought forth at once?"

Yet the creation of the American nation, like the discovery of the New World, was an unprecedented human event as well, one of those moments, according to no less a figure than General George Washington, that "have seldom, if ever, taken place on the stage of human action; nor can they ever happen again." As such, the significance of American Independence was both sacred and secular, a turning point in both providential and human history. When combined, as they often were, these interpretations rendered Independence an event of unique significance, "unexampled," suggested Philadelphia's Reverend George Duffield, a leader of the patriot clergy, "in the records of time." As to the post-Revolutionary period, the ministers and orators described it as the beginning of a new historical era. America was the first postcolonial power, the first truly "new" nation. With its birth, a new age had begun: "a new world has started in existence," the Reverend Thomas Brockaway told his Lebanon, Connecticut, congregation, "the day is new—the circumstances are new."

In the same manner, the celebrants suggested that America was specially favored by its peculiar place as the prototypical modern nation. For centuries, thinkers had argued that the discovery of the New World had announced the symbolic end of the Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century, for example, Puritans had described America as a Reformation land, spared from ecclesiastical and feudal tyranny to create a religious republic. As late as 1765, in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, John Adams could continue to recite this Reformation theme. Yet to postwar thinkers, America was the New World embodiment of both the Reformation and the European Enlightenment. "The foundation of our empire," Washington wrote at the end of the war in his famous Circular Letter to the state governors, "was not laid in the gloomy age of ignorance and superstition." Instead, it had been placed aside to be founded in an age of enlightened reason. As a result, its citizens could call upon the "treasures of knowledge, acquired by the labors of philosophers, sages, and legislators." With this store of learning laid open for their use, Washington concluded, Americans had a "fairer opportunity for political happiness, than any other nation has ever been favoured with."

In the sermons and popular orations of the early postwar period, Washington's letter was cited repeatedly, as ministers and orators described America as an empire of both religion and rationality. In essence, God and reason had combined to bring forth America at this most propitious modern moment. "Empire, learning and religion have in past ages, been travelling from east to west, and this continent is their last western state," announced the Reverend Brockaway. "Here then is God erecting a stage on which to exhibit the great things of his kingdom."

Above all, the new nation was an example for the rest of the world. From the time of the first founding, American Puritans had seen themselves as having the divine responsibility to make themselves a model for others to follow. As John Winthrop had said so eloquently in A Model of Christian Charity—his famous shipboard sermon delivered in 1630, shortly before he and his fellow Congregationalists landed at Massachusetts Bay—"For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us." With the Revolution, the mission had been extended from Protestant religion to republican politics, and America became, in the eyes of Revolutionary republicans, a beacon of liberty. In 1783, however, the successful break with the colonial past allowed Americans to consider themselves also a model of modern civilization. The new republic, by allowing free thought and open expression, had already become a leader in the arts and sciences. Its example would surely provide inspiration to the world. The cumulative lessons of the past, Yale's President Ezra Stiles stated, had been "brought home and treasured up in America, and being there digested and carried to the highest perfection, may reblaze back from America to Europe, Asia, and Africa, and illuminate the world with truth and liberty." For better or worse, post-Revolutionary Americans were eager to offer their religion, politics, and culture to the rest of the world. Typical was the Presbyterian clergyman John Rodgers, who, returning from the war to find his New York City church in ruins, could still confidently predict that the Revolution would prove nothing less than "a new era in the history of mankind."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from NEW ORDER OF THE AGES by MICHAEL LIENESCH. Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• Introduction, pg. 3
• CREATION. Sacred and Secular History, pg. 17
• CHANGE. Themes of Decline and Progress, pg. 38
• REFORM. Cyclical Theory and the Idea of Imbalance, pg. 63
• DEVELOPMENT. The Economics of Expansionism, pg. 82
• EXPERIENCE. Examples, Precepts, and Theorems, pg. 119
• FOUNDING. Audacity, Ambition, Adaptability, pg. 138
• POSTERITY. Creating Constitutional Character, pg. 159
• DESTINY. Prophecy and the Prophets of Progress, pg. 184
• Epilogue, pg. 204
• Bibliography, pg. 215
• Index, pg. 229

Editorial Reviews

"Lienesch has written an impressive study of the transition from classical republicanism to the beginnings of modern liberalism in America between the early 1780s and 1800. . . . This book will quickly achieve the stature of the most prominent republican and liberal readings of the ideological bases of the American founding . . . and will stand . . . as a major contribution toward bridging the gap between these partially contradictory analytic traditions."

Choice

"[Lienesch's] special interest is with concepts of change, decay, reform and destiny. . . . His treatment of religion as a formative influence on [American political thought] is original and important, and especially his emphasis on the millenarianism that was so surprisingly popular in the late eighteenth century."—-William Brock, The Times Literary Supplement

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