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AMERICAN LITERATURE BEGINNINGS TO 1820 PERIOD INTRODUCTION OVERVIEW

Questions of Identity

· European colonists such as John Smith justified their seizure of Native American lands with citations from the Bible. When Native Americans such as Sagoyewatha gained access to the sphere of print, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they questioned the relevance of Christianity to Native communities with their own religious traditions.

· J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and other early American writers characterized North America as a melting pot where individuals with diverse views could come together to form a new people. However, his best-known work, Letters from an American Farmer, also attests to the exploitation and exclusion of Native and African American peoples from this vision of unity.

· Similarly, Washington Irving wrote of the American Revolution in retrospect, questioning the efficacy of political change in transforming American culture from its British roots into a more equitable inclusive alternative.

Exploring Origins

· Most of the earliest surviving writings about the Americas are narratives of discovery. These narratives chronicle the processes of conflict and exchange that shaped interactions among European, Native American, and African peoples.

· The arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 led to the enslavement of the Taino and other Native peoples. Enslavement and the transmission of infectious diseases—especially smallpox—decimated indigenous communities.

· Natives were not merely victims, suffering decline. Many Native groups made strategic alliances both with European colonizers and with other Native groups to consolidate advantages. Many Natives were resourceful in resisting, transforming, and exploiting the cultures that Europeans were imposing on their original landscape.

· As enslaved Native laborers died in stunning numbers, the Spanish colonizers introduced African slavery to America. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Native population had been almost completely displaced by African slaves in some Spanish colonies. Thus, the destruction of one people was accompanied by the displacement and enslavement of another.

· Enslaved Africans brought their own cultures of origin with them across the Atlantic. Figures and language from these African cultures were preserved even as slaves converted to Christianity and used biblical tropes to advocate for freedom.

Literary Backgrounds and Consequences of 1492

· The printing press drove European expansion into the Americas, disseminating promotional tracts advertising the riches of New World landscapes.

· An enormous variety of languages were spoken and written first in Europe and then in North American settlements, including, among others, French, Dutch, Walloon, Spanish, Scandinavian, Portuguese, Gaelic, German, African languages, and, of course, Native American languages.

· Native Americans largely relied on memory, rather than print technologies, to preserve language and culture. But the knotted string of quipu, the shellwork of wampum belts, and painted animal hides could be read aloud in the same way that Europeans read printed sermons or sang broadside ballads.

· English eventually became the lingua franca of the United States, but French and Spanish explorers provide our earliest European accounts of life in North America.

Literary New England

· The English settlers who established Plymouth Plantation in 1620 (later known as the Pilgrims) and the English Puritans who established a settlement in Boston in 1630 shared a wish to purify Christian belief and practice. The Pilgrims advocated separating from the established Church of England, while the Puritans hoped to purify it from within. By 1691, the Pilgrims had been subsumed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the two groups merged.

· Puritans and Pilgrims accepted John Calvin's doctrine of election, holding that God had chosen, or "elected," before their birth those he would save and those he would damn eternally. While the doctrine of election can seem harsh, there was also joy in Puritan life, often as a result of meditations on Christ's redeeming power.

· In the seventeenth century, Puritan churches administered the sacrament of communion only to those who had become church members by standing before their minister and elders and giving an account of their conversion. This process contributed to the Puritans' sense of being a special, or chosen, few—a concept that John Winthrop gave voice to when he exhorted the immigrants to the Bay Colony to live as a shining example to all other peoples, "a city upon a hill."

· The stability of British America was threatened first by conflicts with Native peoples in the Pequot War of 1637 and King Philip's War of 1675, then by conflicts with New France during King William's War and the French and Indian War.

· The patriarchal religious culture of New England was challenged by Anne Hutchinson in 1637 and by female preachers from Rhode Island and Pennsylvania teaching Quaker doctrines in Massachusetts. The Salem witch trials of 1692 saw the execution of almost two dozen women accused of communing with the devil.

Enlightenment Ideals

· Enlightenment thought supplanted religious ideas with scientific and philosophical theories but did not lead to secularization. Instead, thinkers like John Locke and Isaac Newton sought to resolve conflicts among Christianity, science, and philosophy. Philosophers proposed that society should be held together by sympathy and sociability rather than religious authority.

· Eighteenth-century writers such as Sarah Kemble Knight, William Byrd, and Alexander Hamilton examined the natural world. Individuals who found evidence, in nature, for a supreme organizing force were known as Deists.

· The writing of Jonathan Edwards inspired a series of transatlantic religious revivals known as the Great Awakening. Edwards argued that the Calvinism of Puritan New England was compatible with the new ideas of the Enlightenment; his writings emphasize emotion and the creation of sympathy.

· African and Native American writers, including Samson Occom, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant embraced the Great Awakening, finding greater opportunity for spiritual participation in the new evangelical culture of the eighteenth century.

Pursuing Happiness

· British taxes led to colonial protests that culminated in the Declaration of Independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. Essays written by Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison helped persuade British colonists cum American citizens to work for independence and to accept the Constitution of the United States.

· Women writers, including Abigail Adams, Annis Boudinot Stockton, Judith Sargent Murray, Susanna Rowson, and Hannah Webster Foster argued for the rights of women in this new republic. The novel offered an opportunity to present social critiques under a veil of fiction.

· African and Native American writers protested that the new nation failed to live up to its ideals of freedom and an equality of opportunity. Slavery became increasingly important to the nation's economy, and Native Americans were systematically displaced from their traditional homelands.

· Benjamin Franklin came to be seen as the embodiment of the new nation and its values, an aspirational symbol of economic and cultural progress yet to come. By 1820, American literature had come to mean something more specific than the writings about a New World and new peoples sent back to Europe by explorers. American literature now meant poems, stories, novels, plays, essays, and orations produced by authors who lived or were born in the United States of America.