This week we take a step back in time, moving from the struggles of the Antebellum period and the Civil War to the Revolution and the birth of the New Republic. GIn the process, we step firmly into what is called the Age of Enlightenment and into a period where the Romanticism of Thoreau, Emerson, Jacobs, etc. didn't have a name and the philosophical thought which gave birth to it was distrusted, because the Enlightenment period--roughly 1688-1820--had learned to distrust the excesses of religious and emotional passion. It had good reasons to distrust how groups and individuals acted under the influence of high emotion.
The Age of Enlightenment period grew out of the best and the worst of the Renaissance. On the one hand, the Enlightenment inherited a world where old institutions were beginning to crumble and where a few, select individuals had the chance to gain social mobility. Captain John Smith is a good example of someone who didn't start from the nobility but was able to cobble together an extraordinary life from the social mobility allowed by the late Renaissance. The Enlightenment also grew out of an era where the printing press allowed classical texts once thought lost to be published and to begin gaining wide circulation. The presses allowed mathematical tables, pictures, and individual observations--the stuff of science--to find a wider audience and, hence, to tap into the interests of a wider pool of talent.
The Age of Enlightenment grew out of an era where Humanistic scholarship, with it's focus on figuring out what an author meant to say and on clear writing, was replacing the Scholastic movement, with it's focus on establish authorities, how the Roman and Greek Pagan Masters "fit" into the Christian world view, and on jargon.
The Enlightenment grew out of a period of exploration and discovery, which showed new ways of living in the Orient, Africa, and the New World, and--in the process--produced the largest English vocabulary in the history of the language. Why? Because society needed these new words to cover old concepts, those being introduced by the wider circulation of knowledge in Europe, and to cover introduced concepts from around the world. In short, the Enlightenment grew out of a period of change, more change than Europe had seen for almost a thousand years.
However, with change comes conflict; this is othe other hand. There's an a Chinese curse which goes, "May you live in interesting times." The Renaissance--the re-birth of European thought--was a period of international strife and struggle caused by the change inherent in incorporating so many new ideas, institutions, and changes into a short time.
Religious wars abounded in the Renaissance. The Protestant Revolution and the Reformation swept new ideas into being and challenged the old, Medieval social order. One reason new ideas could be thought is that the strangle hold of the Catholic Church on learning and literacy was challenged by Protestants trying to clarify their own beliefs in difference to what they perceived as the corruption of the Renaissance Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformation wanted to move closer to the perceived purity of the "original" church and a presbyterism, or universal priesthood, but to do so, they needed their own scholars to research and write about the original Christian church. In fact, the Reformation required each believer to become their own Biblical scholar, creating a wider audience for all published material.
The Reformation helped move publishing away from the shared church language of high Latin toward vernacular, national languages--like English and French--which everyone, not just those trained by and in the Church could read and understand. In the process, they helped to foster a sense of national idenity around a shared language. One of the ideals of the Protestant Revolution was to challenge the role of the Catholic Church and the priesthood as gatekeepers to heaven. As a result, Protestantism gave individuals (not just priests) the right and the responsibility to learn how to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. [Here think of the scene in Franklin's Autobiography where his grandfather hid the English Bible so the government couldn't find it and punish the family for reading the Bible for them selves.)
However, individual readers produced a range or interpretations, so Protestant literacy, in turn, ended up splintering the Protestant faith and set up a host of competing, sometimes warring sects, many of whom attempted to isolate them selves from the "polluting" effects of secular society, other Protestant sects, and the Catholic Church. Our own Puritans and Pilgrims were such sects, and there isn't anything like a months long sea voyage for isolation.
The end result was war, suspicion, superstition, and two centuries of highly personal, highly spiritual thinking with little inherent clarity for those who didn't happen to share the basic faith and belief in the assumptions of any one sect or nation. All the change caused by the Reformation, Age of Discovery, and the Renaissance, found a European society ill prepared to cope with so much change, as they had been relatively stagnate for centuries. The 100 Year's War, the 30 Year's War, and the Puritan Revolution were only a few of the results. The important point, however, is that our founding fathers, who grew up in the generations following so much change and chaos, grew up with an intense distrust of spiritualism and belief which waw based on anything which couldn't be shared, discussed, and debated in public.
Ironically, for a generation who was to foster the greatest Revolution in history, our founders were very, very tired of conflict. However, they also came into being alongside of a majority who had vested interests in religious independence, were used to having to debate their faith and beliefs in public, and wanted, more than anything else, social stability. What they ended up with was a nation which allowed debate and free speach but did away with religion forced by the state and tried to limit the physical force a state could apply.
The founding generations also came into being at a time when science was experiencing its first true successes; so, they built an ability to adapt to change and the right to pursue opportunity into our social contract. In the process, they created a nation based in reason, shared rationality, and hope. At the time the founders were growing up, people like Newton and Leibniz didn't think of them selves as scientists; they though of them selves as Natural Philosophers. Whatever they were called, however, those who focused humanc creativity on this world rather than the next discovered the Calculus, which allowed math to be used with an unprecedented degree of precision to describe the world everyone shared. This new degree of precise mathematical description allowed people to predict events in the world and to understand and explain many of the mechanical aspects of the world. In this quest they were aided by Newton's Laws of Motion. Kepler's courage in following the data rather than his spiritual belief had resulted in a new cosmology, one which challenged inherited religious doctrine.
Everyday seemed to bring new inventions, new ideas, and improved ways of living. A chancy vaccine was developed for small pox. One of Franklin's sons died of it; millions others lived who wouldn't have. Franklin made the first steps toward describing electricity. The list goes one, but the important point for you to grasp is that the founders lived in a time when present success of reason and shared observation warranted unprecedented optimism in humankind's ability to describe and control the world. We seemed on the verge of knowing everything. In fact, Sir Francis Bacon had argued for just a project in which humankind strove to uncover, index, and circulate universal knowledge; and, the Enlightenment would undertake this project, producing the first Encyclopedias, that is, universal collections of indexed human knowledge. Science, reason, and community debate had proven they could explain the world and allow man to use it and construct lives to best advantage.
The founders also lived in, as we have seen, a New World with wider opportunities for more of the population; they even lived longer that those who stayed in Europe. The English Colonies enjoyed an expanding economy based on slavery, trade, and the bounty of the frontier. Our founding fathers either were or lived alongside a growing middle class made up of the lower-classes of Europe, who had come to American and done the work necessary to owning land and making a personal fortune--acts which could not have been done under the old social order and established social institutions of Europe. In short, our founding generation lived in a time of relative plenty, hope, independence, and a justified belief that things can and do get better, that is, if people are given the time and independence to come together, understand the world, and to act on community shared wisdom. Here, think of de Creveceour's essay, "What is an American?" Hope, optimism, and pride in human accomplishment were a heady mix.
To understand the time period and the literature and thought it produced, you must also understand something which is difficult for us to get our heads around in anything but the abstract, namely, this sense of freedom, abundant opportunity, and justified belief that things are getting better; these were new, fragile beliefs. Just as a larger part of the population came to embrace these new ideas, there was always a larger part of the population whose wealth and lifestyle was either derived from the old institutions of the past or who couldn't bring them selves to believe that these old institutions could ever be challenged and that they would ever let go their power. In short, the majority of the population were scared and/or invested in preserving the old institutions, even if many in their heart of hearts wanted to hope.
Those invested in the past were those who supported the Crown in the Revolution, who sought legal solutions to the wrongs suffered under the Crown,, and who wouldn't send their children or go themselves to fight in the Revolution. To embrace the new nation was to risk, literally, everything. When the founders who signed the Declaration said they were pledging "Life, Liberty, and Sacred Honor," they were doing just this. It wasn't hyperbole. When John Hancock wrote his signature so large and so prominent, he was saying to the old order and to King George, "Up Yours!" Never underestimate the courage it took to take this stance and to risk everything on the fragile believe that debate and reason could produce a better world. Handcock and the signers of the Declaration had little reason to believe they could defy the King and the power of the British Empire. They did it because part of the era's thought argued that everyone has not just a duty to make them selves better but a civic duty, that is, a duty to help make society and their community better.
To understand this period, you must also understand how precarious the gamble of the Revolution was. There was little reason for the founders to believe they--a fragile, tentative collection of colonies--could take on and defeat a world super power, especially when being undermined from within by nay sayers and fifth colonists. If you read the history, you soon stumble on the many times when chance comes together to just save the Nation. In this year's first Inaugural Address, President Obama alludes to the Battle of Trenton, the battle Washington fought after crossing the Delaware. Without the Battle of Trenton, we would have lost the Revolution. As it was, it was a near won thing. The Battle of Trenton occurred after a string of defeats, British victories,and retreat after retreat on our part. Trenton occurred just days before the terms of volunteer, citizen armys were to run out, and in the midst of winter and loss afte loss, most of these volunteers planned to return home. Trenton took place in the height of winter. In fact, it took place after a forced march through snow and ice, with much of the American army without boots! And the Americans still managed to surprise and beat a better trained and more experienced group of Hessian mercenaries by catching them after an all night Christmas Eve party. Trenton revived hope and proved the American Army could win against the British.
The Revolution is full of such moments, moments when the nation almost didn't make it. Let me tell you about another, namely, the formation of the Order of Cincinnatus. Following the Revolution, Congress didn't make good on the many promises it made the troops, and there was a group of officers who got together to plan their own coup. We tend to associate military coups was third world nations, but we were once such a new Republic. These officers offered Washington the chance to be King of the nation they planned to set up, and he turned them down. In the process he told them the story of the Roman general Cincinnatus, and he got the officers to swear to the ideal of the citizen solider. The Order of Cincinnatus is still a mainstay in our military. However, consider for a moment how tempted Washington must of been, and how tempted you would be by such an offer. Now consider what it has meant to the history of the United States for there to be such a strong tradition of the military accepting a role as subordinate to the people and not a driver of the public's will. Few militaries can for so long resist the idea that they know better than the masses, but ours has and does. We own a lot to Washington for establishing this tradition and linking American military honor to a tradition of the Citizen Solider and to Service. This is a remarkable tradition, and it's another example of how the new, fragile nation managed to just survive and to to so on the strenght of self-sacrifice and selfless human action.
Over the next two weeks, as we turn from Romanticism to Enlightenment thought, we'll be moving back in time to late 1700 and early 1800s. We used Emerson and Thoreau as representative American Romantics, and by coming to know them and a little of their thinking, you came to know the Romantics of the Antebellum period. Romantics tended to be independent, observant, passionate, sensitive, intuitive, quick to jump to conclusions and dismissive of the "herd" mentality. In the same way, you need to develop a few touchstones and a feel for the 18th Century and the Age of Enlightenment. Through analogy, these touchstones--Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, and Paine--will help you understand the Colonial time period and the thinking which brought about the American Revolution. This week, you'll begin reading Benjamin's Autobiography, read about Jefferson, and read Madison explaining how the Constitution works to bring unitiy our Nation and heal party strief.
This week you'll also get a chance to research and read about how the Declaration of Independence and Ben Franklin's lives constructed. Both emphasize the role of drafting and revision. By the end of the week, you should know why we celebrate the Declaration, our Independence, and the Men and Women whose self-sacriface made it all possible. These foundation documents for the United Sates are all products--perhaps the finest products--of Enlightenment thinking. Enlightenment thinkers tended to value reason, shared observation, common sense, decorum, the rule of law, the worth of all individuals, natural rights, believe that progress is always possible. They valued education of the individual and society, the notion of growth, squarely facing facts, and a willingness to change their minds given sufficient reason. These ideas represent, to borrow an idea from this year's Inaugural Address, America's better self.
From a distance of two hundred and twenty-five plus years, we tend to think of the foundational documents of our Republic as always having existed, but they had to go through many of the same processes you go through when writing for the public. One of your reading assignments has you comparing various drafts of Jefferson and Franklin's Declaration, and realizing that their initial drafts were re-drafted, the wording argued over, sections were cut and added, and finally the document was published. The same was true with Madison and Franklin, et al's work on the Constitution, which you will read next week. Even once they were published, the contents of the Declaration and the Consitution had to be sold to the people. This is what the Federalist Papers--you'll be reading on of Madison's contributions to the Papers in next week's reading--were all about.
Franklin's life and Autobiography provides the best perspective on how the founders viewed politics, writing, and life as a process of revision and refinment. Franklin frames his Autobiography using a printer's term called "errata.' The word has the same root as "error." An errata list is a list of the mistakes which made their way through the writing, editing, and printing process into the published edition. Often, the errata list is published at the end of a printed edition, because making the changes at this point would prove too expensive. Franklin says he's had a good life, but--if he were able to live it again, he would want to perserve the right of any author putting together a new edition, and he would want the privilage of correcting the errata in the later edition. Franklin even applied this advice about getting it good enough, nor perfect to the Constitution; just look at the message he used to get the Constitutional Convention to finally approve the version they sent to the states for radification. Even here he says, "I think this is the best we can do. It may not be perfect, but later generations can always revise it."
This week, as you think about the Declaration, Jefferson, and Frankin, I want you to choose one or more of your blog posts, and I want you to re-read the comments you received, think about you post in the light of the reading you have done for the class sence writing it, and revise it to make it more nearly perfect. Like the founders, feel free to seek advice and proofreading from your peers. In the final analysis, foundational documents can't be static. In fact, alongside of the checks and balances built into the Constitution, it's genius lays in how the Constituitional Congress built in means for the Consitution to be altered by later generations. For example, can you imagine the United States without the protections of the Bill of Rights. These were early additions and revisions to the currecnt Constitution. The same genius lays in the American belief that we can rewrite out own lives.
Enjoy. As always, write with questions.
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