The Material Basis of The American Enlightenment
The American Enlightenment, by the early 1700s two
distinct economic worlds had taken shape in the colonies, generally north and
south of Pennsylvania's southern border. One exported two crops, rice and
tobacco, to Europe, and was in the process of constructing all its ways of
living and thinking around a unique institution: chattel slavery. The other
consisted overwhelmingly of, not the big planters such as those who owned the
tobacco and rice plantations but, of small farmers free of feudal obligations
to anyone superior to them. These two societies were unlike anything in the
British Isles or in Europe as a whole.
The distinction between the southern and the northern
colonies gradually began to be erased with the expansion of agricultural
activities in the north to the extent that the colonies there started exporting
their produce, contrary to their earlier practice, to the colonies in the south
and beyond, to the West Indies. To facilitate this emerging commerce, by the
1720s a common-paper currency was floated, bringing with it prospects of profit
and riches. Soon, the placid colonies were living through a boom period. At the
hub of this boom was the new-look colonial city, no longer an extension of the
countryside that it once used to be. Immigrants were beginning to pour in from Germany
and Ireland in the 1720s, and thousands of slaves were being purchased in
Literature the South.
A high-rate of survival among American-born white children,
who were reared in far healthier surroundings than children in Europe--eight
live children in a family, as against four in Europe, was common--accelerated
the rise of population, as did a relatively low death rate. In 1700 there had
been approximately 250,000 people in the colonies. By 1775 there would be about
2,250,000 (and 5,300,000 by 1800) including people belonging to the indigenous
tribes. A modem, multicultural America was in the making.
Transatlantic trade flourished, and settlement slowly but
surely stretched beyond the limited coastal beach lands of the seventeenth
century into the fertile back country, soon reaching the Appalachian Mountains
and entering their long interior valleys. With mounting affluence and
influence, people, books and ideas moved back and forth across the Atlantic in
rising volume.
The American Enlightenment
American Enlightenment , One of the many fascinating imports
flowing into America from Europe after 1700 was a new way of thinking about
God, nature, and humanity: the American Enlightenment. Founded in the
scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and especially in the work of
towering English thinkers, like the physicist Isaac Newton (1642-1727), American
Enlightenment thought was consciously scientific, rational and this-worldly. As
such, Enlightenment thinking became for a small minority of educated Americans
a critique as well as a counter to classic, traditional Protestantism.
Henceforth, these two ways of thinking would inter-mingle in the American mind,
producing a curious and contradictory blend of theistic belief and sceptical
humanism.
In The American Enlightenment, The universe was not a space
of mysteries and uncertainties. It was, above all, a reasonable universe. John
Locke applied this way of thinking so pervasively in political and social and
human affairs that he became the preeminent philosophical influence in the
eighteenth century thought, especially in America. He was fascinated by the
power of reason, though he did not think it all-powerful. A moderate man in
everything, he held that some things could never be explained by humanity's
reasoning powers, that there were limits to what we could know on our own.
About God, for example, he said we could know little, other than that He is the
author of the universe and a pervasive influence in human life. People
therefore need the Bible, Locke said, for only in revelation from God could
they learn essential truths about the divine that reason, unaided, could never
reveal. However, he believed true Christianity consisted of only a few
essentials, and therefore he not only urged, but exemplified, a wide toleration
of all Protestant beliefs. An archetypal product of the American Enlightenment
was the figure of Benjamin Franklin (1706- 1790). Franklin represented the
essence of the Enlightenment--in his celebration of rationality, practical
conduct and materialism. A self-made man and a man of science, Franklin
characteristically expressed a preference for what his contemporaries called
"natural religion" or deism.
Benjamin Franklin
The West's Benjamin Franklin experimenting of American
Enlightenment with electricity has look of wizardry. "Reasonable"
method in religion, therefore, according to them, called for a simple procedure:
discover what things all people (that is, all "civilized" people)
believe in, American Enlightenment wherever they are. By this means, true
religion could be found. This came down to a belief in a supreme deity, God; in
a code of ethics divinely established, which tells us how to live; and a belief
that there is an afterlife in which people will receive their rewards and
punishments for their deeds in this world. Church, rituals and miracles were
simply local superstitions and wholly unnecessary. Some people were not ready
to go so far. They believed that Christ, the ultimate miracle, was an
expression, in some inexplicable way, of God's desires in this world. But they
rejected the concept of the Trinity ("God the Father, God the Son, and God
the Holy Ghost") as not only mathematically paradoxical, but also contrary
to natural law. Christ was a man, perhaps a divinely inspired one, but not God
Himself The American Enlightenment.
There was only one God, they said: thus, these people were
called Unitarians. The Bible remained important to them as a book of
divine teachings about how we should live b with each other. Unitarians
believed each person must rely upon his or her own reasoning powers, keeping in
mind that there was little that could be certain in religious matters. They
believed that the individual is fundamentally good, and that if all persons
listened to the voice of conscience they would be listening to the voice of
God. Unitarianism circulated as a kind of underground faith in England in the
mid eighteenth century, prominent among scientists and intellectuals. It came
to America in the century's late years; most of America's Founding Fathers,
including Franklin, would have called themselves Unitarians. Another notable
figure of the American Enlightenment was S.t. Jean de Crevecouer (1735- 1813).
A friend of Benjamin Franklin and a truly Franklinian character, this French-born
emerge used his classic Letters From An
American Farmer (1782) to celebrate the "enlightened" practice of
democracy in America. The Franklinian aspect of Crevecouer's work is most
readily apparent in the "American Farmer's" enthusiastic approbation
of the values of individualism and industriousness which formed the basis of
the existence of a freeholder such as himself.
As the revival progressed, all colonials awaited New
England's reaction, for that region had long been recognised as America's
foremost "plantation of religion." It was the emergence of Jonathan
Edwards (1 703- 1748) at Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1734 and 1735 that
seemed too many to be the real beginning of the American revival. In New
England, where there was much anxiety about rising affluence, individualism,
and the breakup of old ways, the underlying tension exploded with especial
violence. Enthusiasm achieved unmatched heights, reaching near delirium in its
early stages.
Edwards Calvinism
Edwards utilized this enthusiasm and recast Calvinism
to align with revivalism, thus becoming the most important Puritan theologian
since John Calvin himself the joy of the Great Awakening, he said, was good and
proper. It was a delight that rushed in on people as their entire beings
reacted to the love of God and to the beauties He had created in this world.
But Edwards was a true Calvinist. God, in his mind, was still the blazing
awesome, all-powerful, and wholly majestic Being who willed all things and was
the centre of faith. Considering the perfection of God, Edwards said, people
could see in contrast how prideful, lustful, and selfish they were in their self-centred,
petty lives. Consider the universe that God had made, how harmonious and
perfect it was; consider the beauties of the natural creation, of all that was
of God. Astonished and overwhelmed by all this people would be drawn to God, as
in nature all things were drawn by gravitation to a common centre.
The American Woman of The 18th Century
The American Enlightenment, The irrationality of blatant race-oppression was matched by
the irrationality of subtle gender-discrimination in eighteenth century
America. The codes of gender discrimination, in fact, were inbuilt into the
structure of the colonial American family. The form of family which the
colonials brought with them from Britain was much like that familiar to modem
Americans: nuclear family, in which husband and wife and their children formed
a household. Land was generally granted to the head of the household--the
father. As the generations passed and the original tight village communities of
the early colonial phase broke apart, families tended to live in separate,
isolated homesteads.
By the 1750s, intermarriage between households in thousands
of small towns and villages in the northern colonies had built a strong network
of relationships which helped to make community life stronger than it had been.
Nonetheless, nuclear families remained the basic social units in colonial life.
Within the family, the need to be almost entirely self-sufficient made for a
close interdependence between husbands and wives. There was no question which
of the two was legally and morally superior. Male supremacy was the rule (which
is not the same as saying it was a law of nature).
This was expressed most dramatically in the possession of
land by men, not by women (unless they became widowed), since land was the
economic basis of almost all life. Women and men usually worked separately, the
one in the house and the kitchen garden, the other in the fields and with the
livestock, but the two activities flowed into a single economic unit. Broadly,
men's work centred around farming while women's work centred around
manufacturing, The American Enlightenment.
Women preserved the vegetables and salted the meats, brewed the beer and pressed the cider. In addition they wove cloth, made wool and sewed dresses. They also dipped candles, and cared for family health by preparing home remedies and soap. Preparing meals was but the last stage in the manufacturing process, and this was done in addition to the routine tasks of bearing and rearing children.
Women preserved the vegetables and salted the meats, brewed the beer and pressed the cider. In addition they wove cloth, made wool and sewed dresses. They also dipped candles, and cared for family health by preparing home remedies and soap. Preparing meals was but the last stage in the manufacturing process, and this was done in addition to the routine tasks of bearing and rearing children.
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