Overview: 1700 - 1820

Notes

During the eighteenth century, the religious, intellectual, and economic horizons of the thirteen English colonies expanded, challenging the dominance of Puritan culture with Enlightenment thought and uniting the different regions behind common national interests. »full text
The Enlightenment involved the uneasy mixture of new scientific and philosophical investigations into the nature of the universe with traditional responses to scripture. »full text
In response to the Enlightenment’s intellectual rigor and call to ethical sentiment, the “Great Awakening” of 1735–50 encouraged a return to Calvinist zeal by stressing an intense emotional commitment and a complete surrender to faith. »full text
Imperial politics and the American Revolution of 1775–83 dominated the writings of the late eighteenth century. »full text
Lasting effects of the Enlightenment include a greater social mobility, cultural acceptance of ideals such as reason and equality, and the assumption of an innate moral sense in all Americans. »full text

Full Text

During the eighteenth century, the religious, intellectual, and economic horizons of the thirteen English colonies expanded, challenging the dominance of Puritan culture with Enlightenment thought and uniting the different regions behind common national interests. The death of the minister and author Cotton Mather in 1728 symbolizes the waning influence of Puritan theocentrism. The scientific and philosophical writings of Isaac Newton and John Locke argued in favor of a worldview that accepted the ability of individuals to puzzle through and understand the universe and placed a premium on mutual sympathy, or “sentiment,” to guide moral action rather than religious grace alone. The Enlightenment emphasis on sentiment helped guide Americans to accept rapid population expansion due to European immigrants, lured overseas by tales of healthier, less crowded communities and merit-based opportunities, and economic expansion, especially in industries relating to agriculture and shipping. The boom in these industries resulted in cosmopolitan comforts, wealth and prosperity, and trade linkages between the colonies and the other ports and countries of the Atlantic Rim. But it also caused suffering for exploited indentured laborers and the African slaves who were brought to work on plantations. And the two populations who had met each other when the Pilgrims landed in 1620 found their numbers and influence dwindling: many communities of New England Indians disappeared entirely due to urban expansion, and from the same cause many of the small-town Puritan settlements lost families due to religious dissension and a search for better farmlands. The same prosperity and security that led colonists to rely less on their neighbors for their physical safety allowed them to think less of what separated them from communities in other colonies (or from those descended from other ethnicities) than of their common social and cultural experiences—potentially national interests that would lead directly to the Revolution.

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The Enlightenment involved the uneasy mixture of new scientific and philosophical investigations into the nature of the universe with traditional responses to scripture. Some of these questioners were “deists,” who believed in a comprehensible universe ordered by a supreme being who was rational and benevolent. Their empirical studies replaced the Puritans’ habit of looking past reality for emblems of spiritual grace with an emphasis on the stable, observable world. People became more interested in how their actions related to the social well-being of their neighbors than their own spiritual progress; similarly, readers were more eager to read the accounts of ordinary individuals as they thoughtfully responded to the feelings and experiences of others, such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, than the metaphysical introspections of divines like Cotton Mather popular in the preceding generations. Enlightenment thought drove many to reject the innate depravity of human beings in favor of the assumption that people were basically good, and therefore capable of living together in sympathy and understanding with their fellow citizens.

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In response to the Enlightenment’s intellectual rigor and call to ethical sentiment, the “Great Awakening” of 1735–50 encouraged a return to Calvinist zeal by stressing an intense emotional commitment and complete surrender to faith. Itinerant ministers like the Methodist George Whitefield traveled the countrysides of England and America, preaching to thousands of new converts with appeals designed to register with the cult of feeling John Locke’s philosophy had sponsored. Jonathan Edwards’s preaching in New England was the most successful integration of Enlightenment thought and Puritanic zeal during the Great Awakening. His ministry rejuvenated the Calvinist doctrine of election in spite of its irrationality by stressing the rational delights to be gained by surrendering to God’s sovereignty and how spiritually moving true religious feeling could be. Edwards went too far when he demanded early signs of personal conversion; his Northampton congregation dismissed him from his ministry in 1749.

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Imperial politics and the American Revolution dominated the writings of the late eighteenth century. After the British began imposing punitive and damaging laws on the colonies to punish dissent and repay debts from a recent war with France, the Second Continental Congress pushed through a Declaration of Independence authored by Thomas Jefferson. What had started as a meeting to oppose overseas taxation policies quickly led to open revolt once the common interests of the delegates were made clear. Revolutionary writings by Thomas Paine, most notably Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis, used Enlightenment ideals and the antimonarchy language of the British Whig Party to spur public support for the fledgling rebellion. The success of Paine’s writings underscores the growing importance of American newspapers, the first of which appeared in 1704, and whose number had grown to about fifty by the Revolution. Significant political writings like those by Hamilton and Jay and Madison’s Federalist Papers (1787–88), which successfully argued for adoption of the U.S. Constitution, appeared mainly in New York newspapers, and after the war, poets and satirists like Philip Freneau continued to use periodicals to engage in partisan attacks on political positions. Some successful women writers, most notably Judith Sargent Murray and Sarah Wentworth Morton, used pseudonymous publications in periodicals to claim their right as women to engage in the political sphere traditionally reserved for men. And some women novelists like Susannah Rowson and Hannah Webster Foster capitalized on the increased appetite for women’s writing to publish novels they hoped would sell enough to stay in print.

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Lasting effects of the Enlightenment include a greater social mobility, cultural acceptance of ideals such as reason and equality, and the assumption of an innate moral sense in all Americans. Whereas John Winthrop had assumed in his Model of Christian Charity (1630) that both privileged and poor had a stable place in society, by 1800, President John Adams would remark on the American lack of an aristocracy and therefore the possibilities for social mobility unheard of in Europe, at least for white men. Others were less fortunate: African Americans were enslaved, and even the Founding Fathers turned a blind eye to such hypocrisy; and white women, despite their privileges, could neither vote, nor own property, nor earn wages for themselves. Native Americans, too, found their lot unacceptable: they had supported the British in the Revolution and now faced reprisals from greedy and vengeful Americans. But by and large, the preeminent mood of the period was one that supported the ultimate “perfectability of man,” and the Enlightenment principles that had led to the Revolution would eventually be extended to those groups that had not won liberty and equality. For many, Benjamin Franklin’s example proves most representative for this period: ambitious, self-educated, and constantly curious, self-improving, introspective, and civic-minded. Franklin’s influence and direct involvement are evident in many of the important documents and treaties of the Revolutionary period. His idealistic assumption that all people shared a common sense of right and wrong was shared by many Enlightenment thinkers and represents a fundamental tenet of American democracy.

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See Overview: Beginning to 1700