New England

Colonial life began in New England with the landing of the Pilgrims at Cape Cod in 1620 and foundation of Plymouth Colony, the second permanent English settlement in America. For more than 100 years after the Pilgrim landing in 1620, life and writing in New England were dominated by the religious attitude known as Puritanism. To understand New England colonial life and literature it is essential to understand Puritanism, one of the major influences in American life[4].

New Englanders have always been industrious writers. Most of what they wrote in colonial times was prompted by their religious feeling, primarily Calvinistic. The quest for spiritual identity persuaded Puritans to write serious books devoid of entertainment value. In Puritan's view, good writing was one that made the reader fully aware of the importance of worshipping God and of the spiritual dangers that the soul faced on Earth.

Puritan writings varied greatly: from complex metaphysical poetry and pedantic religious histories to homely journals. The first generation of settlers wrote sermons, religious tracts, diaries, some poetry and histories of their undertakings, mainly stressing religious and didactic themes. In early New England fiction was considered sinful and even poetry discussed mainly religious and moral matters. Whatever the genre, certain themes remained constant. Life was seen as a test; failure led to eternal damnation and hellfire, and success to heavenly bliss. The world was an arena for constant battle between the forces of God and the forces of Satan.

Histories

The most interesting works of New England Puritan literature were histories, usually epic histories, based upon biblical past of Israelite heroes which was applied to the context of the New World. To the Puritans history developed according to God's plan. The Puritans recorded their own history out of a desire to communicate with fellow believers in England, to attract new colonists, and to justify their bold move to a new country. In their histories, the Puritans portrayed New England as the Promised Land of the Bible, their successes as evidence of God's favor and their hardships as signs of God's disapproval. A religious explanation for every event was eloquently provided together with quotations from the Bible.

A notable work in this vein is Of Plimoth Plantation by William Bradford, written in 1630–1651 and published in 1856. Bradford, one of the Pilgrim Fathers, the second governor of Plymouth Colony for 30 years, gave a moving account of the foundation of Plymouth and the early struggles of the colonists during the first winter, when half of the small colony died. Bradford tells of the long voyage of Pilgrim Fathers on board the Mayflower, safe arrival to Cape Cod and the establishment of Plymouth Colony. He describes the Mayflower Compact (1620) which was signed on board the ship and featured the legal foundations of the future colony and the Compact with the Indians (1621), which allowed the colony to survive. The book deals with everyday life of farmers and fishermen, the contacts with Indians. At the same time, Bradford's everyday history is deeply influenced by the belief that God direct everything that happens, and each episode is introduced with a phrase, ' It pleases God to… '

Though Bradford's History was written approximately at the same time when John Smith's books, they are very dissimilar. The works by both authors are utilitarian, but their purposes were different: while Smith advertised himself and his colony, Bradford gave a precise record of establishing the city of God. Besides, unlike the Elizabethan books by Capt. Smith written in the conventional decorous style of King James' Bible, Bradford tells his story in the documentary 'plain style', similar to the Geneva Bible, which the Puritans admired[5].

A similar history was written by John Winthrop (1588-1649), a jurist by education and a Puritan by faith, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded ten years after Plymouth. His journal (written in the same 'plain style' in 1630-1649), was published as the History of New England in 1853. It sympathetically tells of the attempt of Massachusetts Bay Colony to form a theocracy -- a state with God at its head and with its laws based upon the Bible. Winthrop's style is even more austere and biblical than Bradford's. Being a minister, Winthrop rarely shows shock or sadness, even when he describes scenes of great unhappiness. On board the Arabella he cautioned his listeners that they ' must be knit together in this work as one man ', so that they could ' find that the God of Israel ', was among them, making them ' a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the lord make it like that of New England '. The author was also far more conservative than Bradford inhis political views and openly defied the idea of people's sovereignty in the colony.

Winthrop and Bradford were chronicle-writers rather than historians, but their works remain a major historical source, and present-day knowledge of Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims' dealings with Indians, and other experiences of the first settlers comes from these narratives of colonization. Such knowledge can be complimented with the information from notable historical narratives, such as A Brief History of the Pequot War by the English colonist John Mason (c. 1600–1672), edited in 1736 by the historian Thomas Prince (1687–1758).

Diaries

Much valuable historical information about colonial New England is also furnished by the diaries of the settlers, which remain a major literary form of the period. New England clergymen encouraged some people to keep personal diaries or journals, because Puritans' spiritual quests for salvation demanded continuous analysis of their souls, presented in diaries.

The most readable of these today is the diary of Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), which was published in 1878-1882. Samuel Sewall was born in England and brought to America at an early age. He made his home in Boston area, graduated from Harvard, and made a career of legal, administrative, and religious work. Sewall's diary shows his inner doubts about his worthiness to enter the church membership, to court Katherine Winthrop, his future wife, and other spiritual concerns. It also gives details of his everyday life, as the author notes down little purchases of sweets for the woman he was courting and their disagreements whether he should try aristocratic and expensive ways such as wearing a wig and using a coach. His diary is lively and often amusing, as when the author wrote of his courtship of Katherine Winthrop: ' Asked her to acquit me of rudeness if I drew off her glove. Enquiring the reason, I told her 'twas great odds between handling a dead goat and a living lady. '

The diary shows him not only a witty, but a courageous man. A judge during the witchcraft trials in 1692, Sewall concurred in the decision to hang 19 persons condemned as witches. After the hysteria had died down, however, he alone among the judges stood up in meeting and publicly asked ' to take the blame and shame ' for his part in the executions. He was also an early foe of slavery. His work Selling of Joseph (1700) was perhaps the earliest antislavery pamphlet in America. Sewall's diary also recorded social changes in colonial life. Though sincerely religious, he showed in daily records how commercial life in New England gradually replaced rigid Puritanism with more worldly attitudes.

Sarah Kemble Knight (1666-1727) was another noteworthy diarist of the period. She was born in America, became widow of a Boston merchant, and kept a school in Boston. In her Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York (published in 1825), she comically detailed a risky solo journey that she undertook from Boston to New York on horseback in 1704. She wrote vividly of what she saw and commented upon it from the standpoint of an orthodox believer, criticizing the plain custom and democratic lifestyle of the frontiersmen and farmers of Connecticut. Despite such disapproval, she objectively recognized that those common men were in no way intellectually inferior to Boston citizens. Especially interesting are also her observations about the early relations between white settlers and Afro-Americans.

Religious writings

The Puritans based their religion on the constant study of the Bible, which required much religious writing. The main genres of such writing were tracts about religious issues and sermons that began with a passage from the Bible, followed by an analysis of its meaning, and then its application to personal and community life.

The leading religious writers of New England were the Mathers. Richard Mather (1596-1669), the founder of the dynasty in America, was greatly admired as a typical Puritan minister. His way of preaching was described as very plain, studiously avoiding obscure terms. His main literary contribution is his co-authorship of the famous Bay Psalm Book (see the Poetry section below).

His son, Increase Mather, also a minister of the most powerful church in New England – North Church, president of Harvard for 18 years, continued his father's work. He was a leader of the New England theocracy until it began to fall apart in the late 17^th century and became famous for being one of the organizers of the infamous Salem trial, when 19 women were hanged for witchcraft. Increase Mather was author of about 100 theological writings. His best-known book, Remarkable Providences (1684), tells much about the psychological environment of the time, showing that to Mather and other New England Puritans, witchcraft and other forms of evil were an absolutely real part of everyday life.

Increase's son, Cotton Mather (1663-1723), was the most famous Mather. A prolific writer, he created more than 450 works on many subjects, including a defense of the witchcraft trials of the 1690's in Salem, Mass. Whenever something happened to him, he wrote a religious book. When his first wife died, he published a long sermon Death Made Easy and Happy. When his little daughter died, he write The Best Way of Living, Which is to Die Daily. Most of these works are of little literary interest today. Nevertheless, Mather managed to achieve the Puritan literary ideal of that time in his gargantuan ecclesiastical history Magnalia Christi Americana (Christ's Great Achievements in America) (1702), a religious history of New England that upholds traditional Puritan beliefs. The huge book presents the holy Puritan effort to establish God's kingdom in the wilderness and is organized as a narrative progression of biographies of representative American religious leaders – New England saints. The style of the book, which Mather was proud of and called ' a cloth of gold ', is complicated, filled with strange Latin words and is hard to grasp. But in spite of its awkward style and didacticism for that time the book was a masterpiece of religious scholarship and thought.

Despite the efforts of the Mathers family, the greatest Puritan preacher and theologian was Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), a minister, who all his life made heroic efforts to keep Puritanism alive. Edwards believed that in the 18^th century people became too matter-of-fact about religion. To change the attitude he preached many emotional sermons that produced a wave of religious revivals. He was a brilliant theologian and philosopher, and wrote learned essays defending traditional Calvinist doctrines. Edwards' most important books are metaphysical A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), one of the first books on psychology of religion, and Freedom of Will (1754), defending the doctrine of predestination in the vein of John Lock's philosophy. All his books are famous for brilliant reasoning and clear and often beautiful prose.

Nevertheless, Edwards became known first of all for what is probably the most famous sermon condemning sinful human nature ever preached, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741). It was so powerful that it made its listeners scream and cry:

God should let you go, you would immediately sink, and sinfully descend, and plunge into the bottomless gulf… The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked… he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the bottomless gulf.

But the most readable work by J. Edwards is his Personal Narrative (c. 1740), which honestly and movingly tells the story of his youthful experience of religious conversion. This work, one of the last spiritual autobiographies, was written in accord with the Puritan temperament and other existing models, like Thomas Shepard 's The Sincere Convert (1640) which was one of the first.

Religious controversy

The Puritans were not very democratic. Puritan society was a theocracy, in which the laws of society and the laws of religion were the same. Those who broke the laws were punished severely.

One of the first defenders of theocracy was John Cotton (1584-1652) with his Way of the Churches of Christ in New England (1645). Born in England and educated at Cambridge, he came to Plymouth in 1633. There he became the head of the Boston Church and was one of the creators of the concept of New England theocracy – the Church government as God sovereignty, which later resulted in intolerance towards other sects.

Theocracy was defended also by Nathaniel Ward (1578-1652) of Massachusetts Bay in The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America (1647). Ward came to New England as an adult and later returned to Great Britain. He amusingly criticized colonists who supported newfangled ideas and called for religious intolerance towards other religious groups.

But Puritanism could not maintain its authority forever. As the seaboard settlements grew and people became prosperous, as more political power was given to the people, and as a more scientific attitude challenged the old religious way of thinking, men and women in New England became more worldly. Such secularization started a controversy between groups of the settlers in New England.

Even in the early days, some writers were struggling hard against the Puritan theocracy. A countervoice to traditional religious views was that of Thomas Morton (c. 1590 – c. 1647), an English adventurer in America, who in The New English Canaan (1637), a discourse based upon classical satire, gave the point of view of an early rebel against Puritanism. Telling of his mistreatments at the hand of the too-serious Separatists, he offered his own version of the Puritan past, and even Bradford's banishment could not silence him.

A leading religious controversialist was Roger Williams (1603-1683), who strove for a freer religious environment. An English-born son of a tailor, a Cambridge graduate, he immigrated to Massachusetts in 1631 in search for religious freedom, which was a very important issue for Williams. In a series of pamphlets, he advocated the separation of church and state, still a fundamental principle in America today, and the prohibition for courts to punish people for religious reasons. His work The Bloody Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644) became a famous statement for the case of religious freedom, which he saw as a necessary condition for ' growth and development of the soul '. In it he demands religious tolerance for all kinds of faith: ' It is the will and command of God that … a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men, in all nations…'

Williams was even more progressive in his views on colonization. He criticized the colonial policy towards Native Americans who were forced to leave their lands and to accept Christianity. A life-long friend of Native Americans, he wrote one of the first phrase books of their languages, A Key into the Language of America (1643). This book is based upon Williams' experience of living with the tribes, and besides being a language textbook, gives amusing ethnographic details of the life of Native Americans of the Atlantic Coast.

The views of Roger Williams were much ahead of his time and seriously undermined Massachusetts theocracy. In 1635 he was banished from Massachusetts for his just criticism and escaped to Rhode Island where he founded the town of Providence, known for its democratic principles of government and tolerance to all faiths. There he was eventually joined by another dissenter, Anne Marbury Hutchinson (1590-1643), who brought even greater challenge to Massachusetts Bay authorities. She argued that the elect could directly communicate with God, and by this threatened the very idea of the institutional church and ministers. She was a midwife and gained much support from women who gathered in her house to study the Bible. In 1637 she was accused by John Winthrop and expelled from Massachusetts Bay for assuming the role of a traditional priest.

With time even New England ministers such as John Wise (1652-1725) moved toward a less rigid religion. John Wise was son of an indentured servant, graduated from Harvard and became minister in one of the towns of Massachusetts. He was a political activist and in his books The Discussion of the Churches (1710)and The Defence of the Church Administration in New England (1717) he appealed to people's "natural right" and claimed democracy to be the best form of government.

The religious controversy and the contributors have brought about visible changes in the life of New England. As the 1600s wore on into the 1700s, religious dogmatism gradually dwindled. In fact, by the beginning of the 1700s, these newer Puritan ideas were becoming important to the development of democracy.

Poetry

The Puritans wrote little imaginative literature. There were few achievements in drama or fiction, since there was a widespread prejudice against these forms. Their only imaginative literature was poetry; and that, like everything else in Puritan life, was prompted by religion and written mostly for oneself or for friends and relatives. Thus New England poetry was also, in a way, utilitarian.

The first book printed in the colonies, in fact, was a hymnal[6], The Whole Book of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre (1640), better known as the Bay Psalm Book. This was the work of three New England clergymen, Richard Mather, John Eliot, and Thomas Weld, published by Stephen Daye in Cambridge, Mass, in 1640. The book contained bad, but popular translations of the Biblical psalms, written in plain language and regular meter, like Psalm XXIII, which begins as follows:

The Lord to me a shepherd is,

want therefore shall not I.

He in the folds of tender-grass

doth cause me down to lie

The Bay Psalm Book used colonists' memories of popular songs and ballads from England, and proved to be a very useful and convenient means for teaching the basic religious concepts.

A similar poetic device was used in Puritan schools to teach reading: The New England Primer, America's first textbook. Clearly, the rhymed lines of this immensely popular and widely read book were strictly utilitarian and cannot be referred to as real poetry.

Another example of bad but popular poetry was Michael Wigglesworth 's (1631-1705) The Day of Doom (1662). It also used familiar rhythms and was a 224-doggerel verse account of Calvinist belief, the Last Judgment, and sin, recounted in ballad meter. It was intended to frighten the readers with a picture of the day when God will judge mankind, and was a doleful, but easily memorized version of Puritan doctrine. A copy of this long poem stood on almost all Puritan bookshelves along with the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress by the English author John Bunyan. Many Puritans, both the young and the old, committed The Day of Doom to memory and made it the most popular poem of colonial times. But the poem's jingling meter and threatening theme seem odd today, though some of its images are really powerful:

The stubborn He in pieces brake,

Like vessels made of clay:

And those who sought his peoples hurt

He turned to decay.

Most Puritans were thoroughly familiar with these three volumes of poetry, which served as a means for cultural formation. All three offered Puritan doctrine and social lessons in forms that could be easily memorized and, it was hoped, practiced.

There was some poetry, at least, of a higher order. The first original American poet in colonial times was a woman. This fact should not surprise modern readers, for the Puritans believed in educating women and in giving them a say in important matters, a revolutionary concept at the time. Although life of a settler was hard, Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612 – 1672) who had 8 children found time to write poetry, chiefly for her father and husband, both of whom in their time were governors of Massachusetts. Her brother-in-law had her work printed in London as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650), the first volume of American poetry ever published. The collection movingly conveyed her feelings concerning religion and her family, with a less stern, Puritan emphasis. The resulting publicity made Bradstreet more conscious of her craftsmanship. She began experimenting with meter, imagery, structure, and theme. Several Poems (1678), a revised second edition, was published after her death. In it she refuses ' to sing of Wars, of Captains, and of Kings ', instead giving a glimpse into her own inner world. The volume includes her best poem, Contemplations, a nature poem on the briefness of human life.

More interesting, because it is better poetry, are the religious verses of Edward Taylor (1642-1729), an English-born minister who lived in Boston and in frontier Westfield, Massachusetts. His poems, not intended for publication by their author, were discovered in 1937 and first published in 1939. Most critics today rate Edward Taylor as the best of the Puritan poets. Like Cotton Mather, Taylor hoped for a rebirth of the Puritan way. But while Mather wanted stronger leaders for the society, Taylor was more concerned with the spiritual life. A clergyman, Taylor composed a series of meditative poems on Scripture readings. He intended the poems to prepare his mind to preach and to celebrate Communion. His verse followed the learned style of the English metaphysical poets of the 1600's. Like them, he mingled everyday words and incidents with Biblical language and complex metaphors. He created rich, unusual images to help the reader ' see, hear, taste and feel religious doctrine '. In one poem, describing truly religious people he says that they are as rare ' As Black Swans that in milkwhite Rivers are '. Taylor was a devout clergyman, but his poems are not harsh and gloomy. Instead, they express his feeling of joy and delight in the Christian belief and his awe at the grandeur of Creation:

Upon what base was fixed the lathe wherein

He turned this globe and rigolled it so trim?

Who blew the bellows of His furnace vast?

Or held the mold wherein the world was cast? […]

Who spread its canopy? Or curtains spun?

Who in this bowling alley bowled the sun? [7]

So, despite the strict Puritan customs, the settlers were conversant with the Renaissance culture. It is especially evident in their poetry, which deploys the devices common in European continental literature[8]. Common Renaissance poetic genres – meditations, lyrics, elegies – all contribute to the canon of the earliest American literature.

Colonial worlds tend to be retrospective, and Colonial America was no exception: it was retrospective by choice, conviction and circumstance. Like most colonial literatures, American literature imitates the form and the technique of the mother country. All 17th-century Americanwritings were in the manner of British writings of the same period. John Smith wrote in the tradition of geographic literature, William Bradford echoed the cadences of the King James Bible, while the Mathers wrote bejeweled prose typical of the day. Anne Bradstreet's poetic style derived from a long line of British poets, including Spencer and Sidney, while Edward Taylor was in the tradition of such Metaphysical poets as George Herbert and John Donne. Both the content and form of the literature of this first century in America were thus markedly English.

At the same time, early American writers often seemed ignorant of such great English authors as Ben Jonson and were imitating writing that was already out of date in England. Some Puritans rejected English writers and poets who belonged to a different religious group, thereby cutting themselves off from the finest fiction and lyric models the English language had produced. The Bible remained the greatest model of writing, belief and conduct.

The early colonists were aware of the parallels between the ancient Jews of the Old Testament and themselves. Like Moses, Puritan leaders felt they were rescuing their people from spiritual corruption in England, passing miraculously over a wild sea with God's aid, and fashioning new laws and new forms of government after God's wishes. So American colonial literature widely uses Europeanized biblical metaphors to encourage readers' interest and to conform to the expectations of the authors themselves.

Nevertheless, it is best to describe American literature not as one continuously testing itself until it found a voice against the literature of England, but as genuinely American from the start[9]. Although dominated by Puritan-Calvinistic doctrine, early American literature gives the history of exceptional individuals who rose above the physically difficult and spiritually demanding environment of the New World. These early colonial writers set the tone and the rhetoric and foreshadowed the major concerns of later writing.

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