Notes on Contributors
COVER: Great Seal of the United
States. Engraving by James Trench­
ard. Columbian Magazine, I (1786).
KATHI AGUERO, formerly in the
Creative Writing program at Boston
University, currently teaches in the
Poets-in-the-Schools program in New
Hampshire. SAC VAN BERCOVITCH is
author of Puritan Origins of the
American Self and professor of Eng­
lish and Comparative literature at
Columbia University; the essay pub­
lished here is "dedicated with grati­
tude and affection to the fellows and
staff of the National Humanities In­
stitute (1975-76)" at Yale. w. H.
CHAPLIN'S publications include poems
and essays on Classical and Renais­
sance drama; he died in 1974 at the
age of 30. THOMAS J. COTTLE is
affiliated with the Children's Defense
Fund of the Washington Research
Project; his books include Black
Children, White Dreams and A Fam­
ily Album, while Life Time and
Barred From School are forthcoming.
JEANNINE DOBBS teaches writing at
Harvard; in addition to poetry she
also writes fiction and non-fiction.
SANDRA M. GILBERT teaches in litera­
ture and Women's Studies at the Uni­
versity of California at Davis; her
poetry, fiction, and reviews have ap­
peared in T he Nation, The New
Yorker, Poetry and other magazines.
EVERETT HOAGLAND is at Southeast­
ern Massachusetts University; his
work appears in New Black Voices
and other anthologies. RIMA KING has
a recently completed novel entitled
Alice in Racetrackland; Snodgrass 0';
Eliot is her first published fiction.
ARTHUR F. KINNEY is Editor of
English Literary Renaissance, and his
Sacvan Bercovitch
work in this field is widely known;
he is currently on a Fulbright Re­
search Grant at Oxford. RIKA LESSER'S
poems and translations have appeared How the Puritans Won
in A merican Review and Poetry as
well as in MR. JANE J. MANSBRIDGE the American Revolution
is a poli tical scientist and an Assistant
Professor at the University of Chi­
Philadelphia, July 4-President Ford came here from Valley Forge
cago. IFEANYI MENKITI teaches Phi­
to recall that first Fourth of July as "the beginning of a continuing
losophy at Wellesley College; Affir­
adventure," unfinished, unfulfilled, but still . . . "the most successful
mations, a book of his poems, ap­
peared with Third World Press realization of humanity's universal hope. The world mayor may not
(1971). follow, but we lead because our whole history says we must."
DAVID RIESMAN has long been a dis­ New York Times) July 5, 1976
tinguished observer of the American
scene and a dedicated teacher of And verily, yours is the best and happiest land under the sun. But not
American undergraduates. His forth­ wholly because you in your wisdom decreed it; your origin and your
coming book (with Gerald Grant) is geography necessitated it. Nor, in their germ, are all your blessings to
entitled The Volatile College: Edu­
be ascribed to the noble sires of rore who fought in your behalf, sover­
catio!tal Reform in America (Univer­
eign kings! Your nation enjoyed no little independence before your
sity of Chicago Press, 1977). GORDON
declaration declared it. Your ancient pilgrims fathered your liberty....
SHENTON has taught French literature
Melville, /I;fardi
at Harvard and Brown; he is pres­
ently living in France at Saint
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
Etienne. RON SLATE is a doctoral can­
the past.
didate at the University of Wiscon­
Fitzgerald, The Great Gat.rby
sin; his poems appear frequently in
little magazines. Viper lazz is JAMES
TATE'S latest book of poems (Wes­
leyan University Press, 1976); he is
T HE AMERICAN REVOLUTION plays a curious role in our
classic literature. Like Beckett's Godot, it is at once omni
a Guggenheim Fellow for 1976­ present and conspicuously absent. All contemporaneous accounts
1977 and is living in Spain. suggest that the Spirit of '76 was the muse of the American
JAMES WADE teaches high school Renaissance. Bronson Alcott tells us that Thoreau acted as
English part time and manages a
though he were the sole signer of the Declaration of Inde­
restaurant; he is a graduate of the
Writing Program at Indiana. TAMARA
pendence. Emerson's followers, taking their cue from the
WATSON studied at Juilliard and is Master, hailed his essays as the vindication of the Revolution­
currently in preparation for an oper­ ary War. Young America's call for intellectual liberation de­
atic debut. MARLA D. ZARROW is a liberately echoed the call to arms against the British. "America
feminist psychotherapist; her poems must be as independent in literature as in politics," went the
have previously appeared in Focus.
refrain. "Shall Nature's Freemen bow to Nature's Slaves?"
597
 T he Massachusetts Review
,\Thitman's response, in Leaves of Grass, was a revolutionary
poetics whose origins he located in the events that shaped our
"great radical republic." For as Melville put it, America was
bound to carry the Revolution into literature and all the arts.
Melville himself returned obsessively to the theme of revolu­
tion, or revolution repressed, as did Hawthorne, Cooper, and
Poe. Yet no more than a handful of their writings-a few
stories and minor novels-can be said to deal with the Ameri­
can Revolution, and even these do so obliquely, if not evasively.
The forgotten popular writers of the time responded avidly
to the clamor for romances, poems, plays, and epics about the
Revolution. Those writers through whom we have defined the
American imagination remained silent on the subject, or at
most ambivalent. Consider our prototypical Americans: the
hero of Franklin's Autobiography, whose adventures con­
spicuously exclude the Revolutionary vVar; or Irving's Rip
Van Winkle, who sleeps through the entire birth of the nation,
and awakens to find things much as they were before; or
Crevecoeur's American Farmer, who derides the Revolution,
in brief but vivid sketches, as democracy in riot, the snake in
New Eden. Consider, above all, the Revolutionary figures in
the fiction of the American Renaissance: Cooper's spies and
madmen; Melville's mock-heroic Israel Potter, who languishes
away the Revolution in English captivity; Hawthorne's Robin
Molineux, for whom independence takes the form of a
witches' sabbath. Our classic writers have given us splendid
American heroes representing a variety of historical periods,
including those of war and national upheaval. But none, ap­
parently, found the Revolution fit matter for his highest
themes. The great harvest of our literature-the self-styled
American literary revolution-yielded no "Lilacs" for vVash­
ington, no Pathfinder at Valley Forge, no Red Badge of Cour­
age for the patriot cause, no Yoknapatawpha County for
mourning Loyalists, not even a sentimental Whig's Farewell
to Arms.
We could write off this anomaly to temperament or chance,
were it not for a striking parallel in the culture at large. I re­
598
How the Puritans Won the American Revolution
i5.fer to our uneasy association of America with revolution. We
thonor the American Revolution as a shaping influence in our
rhistory, yet we shrink from acceptin?" revolution as ~ defining
, American characteristic; or more typically, we accept It by con­
.< .tra.sting the American Revolution with other modern revolu­
tions. It is as though the term A merican altered the very mean­
ing of revolution, while the term .revolution c?nferre~ some
'Pecial honorifi~ status on the me~lllng of Amenca. Aga~n, o~r
classic writers Illustrate the ambIvalence. To be Amencan IS
lor them ipso facto to be radical-to turn against the past, to
defy the status quo and become an agent of change-and at
the same time to be radical as an American is to transmute the
revolutionary impulse in some basic sense: by spiritualizing it
'{as in Walden), by diffusing or deflecting it (as in Leaves of
f;rass), or more generally by accommodating it to society (as
~ The Scarlet Letter). In every case, the work of art resolves
a conflict of values by redefining the conflict in terms of national
self-fulfillment. Directly or indirectly, that is, the writer con-;­
verts revolution into the service of society. I refer to broad
cultural impact, of course, rather than to intention or even to
immediate social impact. Often enough, the service to society
I speak of has been rendered posthumously, through a slow
process of cultural absorption. But that process, I would argue,
follows from, rather than belies, the content of the work. In
every case, the defiant act that might have posed fundamental
social alternatives becomes instead a fundamental force against
social change. Whether the writer focuses, like Thoreau, upon
the individual, or like Hawthorne upon history-whether he
denounces society, as Melville does, or like Emerson wavers
~etwe.en praise and blame, or like \Vhitman simply ingests so­
aety Into the self-the radical energies he celebrates serve to
sustain the culture, because the same ideal that releases those
energies transforms radicalism itself into a mode of cultural
cohesion and continuity.
This almost therapeutic effect recalls the trouhled mood of
the American Revolution. The overthrow of imperial power,
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 T he Massachusetts Review
we know, set loose a libertarian spirit that terrified moderate
and propertied democrats. Their terror is writ large in the
literature: in nervous satires of an egalitarian world-turned­
upside-down; in gothic novels, and tales of violated taboos
(parricide, incest, idolatry); and most explicitly, in the Fed­
eralist jeremiads, warning against "the people's inherent vio­
lence" and denouncing a long series of local insurrections, from
the Whiskey Rebellion to the Anti-Rent Wars, most of which
invoked the slogans and symbols of the American Revolution.
I need not dwell on how deeply the fear of democracy which
these writings convey affected the theory of representative
government. Clearly, the first aim of legislators after 1776
was to curb popular demands. They were bent on defusing an
explosive conflict, between the minority in power-the leading
merchants, lawyers, and landholders-and the majority they
«represented," now newly-emboldened by military success,
and by the rhetoric of independence, to challenge established
norms of control. To quote a leading authority on the subject,
the Constitution, which "rescued the Republic from chaos,"
expressed "a beautiful but ambiguous ideal," one that served
to mediate (rather than meet) the call for self-determination,
to curtail (without crushing) the surge of democratic individ­
ualism, and to insist on equality before the law while institut­
ing a minority "rule of the best," drawn from the propertied
and educated classes.
In retrospect, we can see how appropriate that ideal was for
a modern middle-class culture. It was beautiful, we might say,
because of its ambiguities. It managed both to advocate liberty
and to protect property, to inspire "the people" at large and to
mold their "universal rights" to the demands of a free-enter­
prise economy. Still, the ambiguities proved a shaky founda­
tion for a new social structure. Like all ambiguities, they had
a tendency to recoil upon themselves. If they allowed for
flexibility and manipulation, they also served to highlight con­
tradiction. Even as they encouraged compromise, they nour­
ished radical dissent by calling attention to the principles that
were being compromised. Alarmed at the "rage for innova­
600
How the Puritans Won the American Revolution
, tion" that swept the infant Republic, David Ramsay ended
his patriotic History of the Amer!can Revoluti.o,,! by su.m~on­
ing all "friends of order" to extIrpate "t~e VICIOUS pnnClples
and habits which have taken deep root dunng the late convul­
sions." The substitution of convulsions for revolution speaks
, for itself; and its meaning grew more ominous after the
f French Revolution. If prior to 1790 the unpropertied "rabble"
~, seemed hell-bent on usurping due authority, as one observer
charged, what would they not do under the intoxication of
Jacobin excess? George Washington, who recognized the link
between pre- and post-Revolutionary unrest, warned sternly
that "mob action, [though] necessary in monarchies, has no
place in America." But the Spiri t of '76 lingered, and by 1815,
a host of clerical, literary, and civic "friends of order" had
~rayed themselves against the threat. Revolution, as they now
employed the term, conjured up corruption, anarchy, atheism,.
Retooling the old anti-imperialist rhetoric to defend the status
quo, the aging firebrand Sam Adams turned his oratorical
cannons against the "boundless and insatiable ambition" of
((king mob." Timothy Dwight's epic previews of New Canaan
darkened into visions of "ignorant masses" infected by a "con­
tagion of liberty" become license. As we might expect, the
lament grew increasingly shrill in the Jacksonian era, with the
expansion of cities, technology, transportation-all the ele­
ments, in fact, of a flourishing capitalist economy-which
certain established groups within that economy misconstrued
as a collapse of order.
Misconstrued is too strong a word. Basically, these Jere­
miahs seem to have understood that the challenge came
from within the system and to have used their denunciations
t? keep things in hand. In any case, they refused to surrender
eIther the Republic or the Revolution to the Jacksonians. In­
st~ad, following an old native tradition, they turned their anxi­
eties about history into an affirmation of the ideal. The tradition
begins with the New England Puritans, who interpreted their
s~tbacks as tokens of God's correcti ve love. It continues, in
different forms corresponding to changing social and intellec­
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 T he Massachusetts Review
tual contexts, through the Great Awakening, the French and
Indian War, and the Revolution. New England's extremity,
argued Jonathan Edwards, is God's opportunity; our "mighty
struggles and confEcts" are the birth-pangs of the New vVorld
Jerusalem. On July 3, 1776, John Adams declared that
"America shall suffer Calamities still more ... dreadfull"-so
that we may show ourselves worthy of our mission. The anti­
Jacksonian J eremiahs adopted essentially the same strategy.
Far from disavowing the nationalism of the times, they
sought to encourage it by using threat and lamentation to re­
direct the country toward their version of the American Revo­
lution. In effect, they joined the leading J acksonians in an
effort to safeguard the future through a mythical reconstruc­
tion of the past.
It may be worth recalling the events that directly prompted
their effort. In 1826, with the death of Jefferson and John
Adams, the Revolution passed officially-that is, ideologically
as well as actually-into the possession of a new generation. It
was a troubled succession. According to anti-J acksonians, espe­
cially after they had witnessed the revolutions of 1830 in
France, Belgium, and Poland, and then two years later suf­
fered an unprecedented electoral defeat, the difference between
generations was nothing short of sinister: on one side, the
newly-consecrated fathers of the Revolution (vVashington,
Franklin, Jefferson, Adams); on the other side King Andrew,
the tyrant-demagogue, classical symptom of the breakdown of
democracy. Theirs was the minority opinion, of course. Jack­
sonians defended their president as the heir of \Vashington
and Jefferson. My point is that both parties perceived a crisis
in national identity, and that both parties, each from its own
perspective, proposed the same solution. Shifting attention
away from the problems of 1776, which had precipitated the
crisis in the first place, they redefined the meaning of the
Revolution by tracing it back to the "origins of the country."
By general consensus, at least so far as New England's influ­
ence reached, independence was not the spoils of violence, but
the harvest of Puritanism. It was not some sudden turbulent
602
How the Puritans Won the American Revolution
challenge to the system, provoking frustrations that threatened,
in their issue, to sweep away all local (along with foreign)
agencies of control, but the most remarkable in a series of up­
risings that began with the seventeenth-century Puritan
migration.
In this view, the very concept of uprising sets America apart
from other countries. Uprising in France meant the unleashing
of discordant national elements, the clash between mutually
exclusive French interests and ideologies. Uprising in America
meant the progress through revolution of "the people" at large.
It stood for a national consensus that rose above racial, eco­
nomic, or sectional divisions, and that revealed itsel f, with
rising clarity, in struggle against an oppressive Old \Vorld.
In the early nineteenth century, the Spanish American colonies
undertook a similar struggle, but it seemed plain to North
American observers that they were following the French model
of revolution. There, the uprising of New against Old \Vorld
Spaniards brought to light tangled antagonisms of race and
class, and if anything independence deepened the sense of in­
ternal conflict. The American Revolution, according to J ack­
sonians and anti-Jacksonians alike, proved that national
identity erased all such distinctions. It was simply, compre­
hensively, the flowering of the American spirit that first arose
in Puritan New England. From this perspective Emerson
argued in 1835, at the Concord bicentennial, that America's
future was secure in spite of Jacksonian barbarity. From this
perspective, in 1834, George Bancroft began his great defense
of Jacksonian democracy. His History of the United States
Was almost instantly acclaimed as definitive-Emerson himself
pronounced it a noble work, nobly done-and it retained its
popularity throughout the Jacksonian period. But in fact it is
neither a history (in any ordinary sense of the word) nor about
the United States. Instead, it transmutes the colonial past into
myth, and in epic form sets forth God's unfolding design for
America, the revolution of revolutions that was born aboard
the Mayflower and Arbella and matured in the struggles of
1776.
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 The Massachusetts Review
As the parallel with Emerson suggests, Bancroft did not in­
vent this view of America's rising glory. It has a long fore­
ground in colonial thought, and a direct source, perhaps, in the
Revolutionary historians like Gordon, Warren, and David
Ramsay. They, too, regarded the Revolution as a broad cul­
tural (as well as political) turning point; they too claimed that
independence was an extension of native rights, rather than a
break from the past; they too embraced the Enlightenment
belief that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God; and they
too looked back to the seventeenth century (in old and New
England) as the ideological seeding-time of the Republic. Ban­
croft differs from them in that he could reconstitute the facts
as legend and symbol. He was just far enough removed from
the Revolution to endorse the canonizing of its major figures
and events. He was responsive enough to the crisis of his times
to perceive the basic cultural ties between the Revolution
and the Jacksonian era. And he was rooted deeply enough in
New England tradition to seize upon the Puritan errand as
the underlying theme, the elan vital, of that continuity. The
Revolutionary historians, who inherited the same tradition,
used Puritan imagery as a metaphoric device to justify the
\Var of Independence; it was part of their moral and legal
self-vindication. They show us how ideology arises out of so­
cial conflict. Bancroft shows us how ideology may be invested
with the power of myth. Taking the vindication for granted,
he locates the "true" American Revolution in the link between
what for him (and many of his contemporaries) were the two
quintessential moments in the story of America-the twin
legends of the country's founding fathers-the Great Migra­
tion and the \Var of Independence. His purpose is to reveal
in that sacred movement the paradigmatic cultural event, the
symbolic drama of American nationhood.
I would like to center my discussion on Bancroft's work, not
so much for its intrinsic merits as for its representative quali­
ties, as the first full expression of the myth of American revo­
lution. Its major tenets may be briefly summarized. First, Ban­
croft adopts a humanized version of sacred history, or better
604
How the Puritans Won the American Revolution
still, a sacred version of human progress. He assumes that God
is working behind and through history, guiding mankind, step
by inevitable step, toward perfection. Revolution functions
here as a vehicle of providence. It takes the form of a mighty,
spontaneous turning forward, both regenerative and organic,
confirming the prophecies of scripture as well as the laws of
nature and history. So understood, revolution is diametrically
opposed to rebellion. Revolution fulfills the divine will. Re­
bellion is a primal act of disobedience, as Lucifer's was, or
Adam's. Rebels seek to negate, thwart, and destroy; revolu­
tionaries are agents of the predetermined course of human
progress.
This distinction underlies Bancroft's entire ten-volume work,
and confirms his theological bias. For historically considered,
revolution has two entirely different meanings, secular and
religious. In the secular tradition from Aristotle through the
Italian Renaissance, revolution means the violent overthrow
of government. It highlights discord, contradiction, and dis­
continuity, and has lent itself, in these terms, both to progres­
sive and to cyclical views of history. For radicals, it proved
that men could improve their conditions-that indeed, they
might found a new paradise of reason by overthrowing the in­
stitutions of the past. No doubt Mirabeau envisioned some­
thing like this when (according to legend) he replied to Louis
XVI's "Ceci est une revolte," "Non, sire, c'est une revolution."
Conservatives, of course, saw the matter differently. For them,
revolution proved the tragic consequences of the Fall. It re­
minded them of man's recurrent failures to perfect society,
and they found its moral emblem in the treacherous, repeti­
tive wheel of fortune. Eadem, sed aliter, in Schopenhauer's
famous comment on the French Revolution: despite its rhetoric
of progress, revolution brings the same old thing in new dress.
The religious meaning of revolution stems from the tradi­
tion of ecclesiastical or sacred history. It pertains both to the
individual believer and to mankind in general, and on both
leVels it is emphatically and unequivocally progressive. De­
spite the vanity of man's earthly efforts, he has a great spiritual
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 The Massachusetts Review
destiny. Individually, each believer has the promise of heaven,
through what Augustine termed the revolutio of the soul to­
ward God. Collectively, mankind is advancing toward New
Jerusalem in accordance with God's redemptive plan, through
a series of revolutionary upheavals. Thus the Anglican Thomas
Hooker spoke of "the revolution of Jesus Christ" against the
Hebraic Law; thus Reformers spoke of the revolution of the
true church against Papal Antichrist, the Beast of Rome; and
thus English Puritans anticipated the "mighty revolutions"
that would inaugurate the millennium. The New England
Puritans, who inherited this millennial-revolutionary outlook,
applied it directly to their own errand into the wilderness. In
effect, they fused secular and sacred history in the context of
American progress. They bequeathed their peculiar teleology
to the young Jonathan Edwards and, through him, to the lead­
ing patriot ministers of the \Var of Independence. Liberty,
democracy, and American nationhood, these Revolutionaries
explained, were not merely worldly goods; primarily, they
were spiritual goals, ordained by God and typed forth in scrip­
ture. Blending two traditionally distinct views of revolution,
they mystified secular change as divine progress. On this prem­
ise, Samuel Sherwood in 1776 justified the overthrow of
British power by speculating on the new heavens and new
earth emerging in the N ew World. On the same premise, John
Quincy Adams reviewed the American Revolution, sixty
years after the event, as part of "the progress of the gospel
dispensations" :
Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the
nation is indissolubly linked with that of the Saviour1 ... Is it not
that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social
compact on the foundation of the Redeemer's mission upon earth 1
That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first
precepts of Christianity, and gave to the world the first irrevocable
pledge of the fulfilment of the prophecies, announced directly
from Heaven at the birth of the Saviour and predicted by the
greatest of the Hebrew prophets six hundred years before 1
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How the Puritans Won the American Revolution
From this sacred-national standpoint, Bancroft contrasts the
American Revolution with the European rebellions (as he de­
scribes them) of 1642, 1789, and 1830. And following the
peculiar logic of his outlook, he patterns his concept of progress
upon the biblical exodus. A people is summoned to lead man­
kind, it rises up against its oppressors, and in the conflicts that
ensue it forges its corporate identity. This model of exodus, the
second major tenet of Bancroft's approach, enables him to
establish America's revolutionary ancestry: Israel, the apostolic
church, and the Reformation. Each one of these civic-religious
movements represents a revolution in itself; but unlike the
repetitive cycles of the wheel of fortune, each revolution is
linked to the others in an ascending spiral. Quoting Jonathan
Edwards, whom he acclaims his greatest precursor as historian,
Bancroft compares the spiral to the wheels of a chariot in mo­
tion. All revolutions tend harmoniously toward the same end,
and every revolution brings us closer to our destination. And
like Edwards, he declares the settlement of New England to
be the prime mover in the last and best of human revolutions.
Representing Protestantism as well as the Anglo-Saxon race,
at once re-enacting the drama of exodus and carrying it toward
completion, the New England planters, Bancroft tells us, "res­
cued from the Old World the truths that would renew human­
ity." Winthrop's charter was "a summons from Heaven" to
"the happy destiny of preparing for representative govern­
ment."
As Bancroft develops this theme, his revolutionary gene­
alogy dramatically reverses the Loyalists' rankling child­
parent metaphor. The Enlightenment radicals of an earlier
time had defended their separation from England by recourse
to Locke's contractual theory: the father-king's betrayal of
trust justified the children's disobedience. Bancroft shifts the
grounds of defense from provincial to national terms, and in
effect from political and legal terms to the realm of myth. If
the war for independence, he writes, really breached the fifth
commandment, then it was rebellion and indefensible. But in
fact it demonstrated the children's obedience. What the found­
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 The Massachusetts Review
ing fathers initiated, the Revolutionary sons fulfilled. The
Pilgrim compact foreshadowed the Declaration of Indepen­
dence; the Constitution realized the intentions of the A rbella
covenant; what theocracy truly meant was elective democracy.
Bancroft, we might say, solved the problem of Anglo-Ameri­
can relations by shifting responsibility for the Revolution back
to the Puritans. His revolutionary genealogy served to estab­
lish several other aspects of the myth. It enabled him to rep­
resent the Revolutionary leaders as a model of fraternal con­
sensus, to acclaim the organic necessity of their uprising, and to
marvel at the unprecedented pace of "national" progress. It
gave substance to his rhetoric about an American "people,"
providing as it did a substitute for what European nationalists
termed "folk culture." Not least important, his revolutionary
genealogy helped Bancroft project the movement from colony
to republic forward to the transition from Jeffersonian fathers
to Jacksonian sons, and later (in his final revisions) from
Jacksonian fathers to Civil War sons. With Emerson, he con­
gratulated the Union army for continuing the revolution be­
gun in New England over two hundred years before.
Struggle as unity, continuity as progress: Bancroft's myth
casts a warm, hazy glow over the events of 1776. It was not
so much the Revolution that mattered, he insinuates-not that
alarming eruption of popular violence so much as the pro­
cess which enveloped it, and directed it toward higher ends.
I don't mean to say that he minimizes the struggle and tension
of revolution. On the contrary: he increases these by extending
the revolution back through the eighteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and forward into the nineteenth. His emphasis on
process is the third major tenet of his approach, inseparable
from the concepts of exodus and preordained progress. Indeed,
Bancroft inverts the exodus motif to stress the process of ful­
fillment, rather than (as in the biblical story) the fulfillment
of process. The biblical story, though it details human actions,
centers upon the works of God. Bancroft supports his claims
by invoking God's promises, but his interest centers upon the
ongoing struggles of his nation. As he envisions it, the Revolu­
608
H ow the Puritans Won the American Revolution
tion opens into an indefinitely self-renewing rite of passage.
His hero is a people in transition, advancing generation by
generation through severe trials of character, toward a con­
summation that remains forever beyond its grasp. There is
something in this of the Whig view of history, but Bancroft
(unlike, say, Macaulay) makes revolution, not evolution, the
principle of "organic" growth, moral, political, and economic.
And there is something here, too, of the Sturm und Drang of
Romantic Striving, but it is emphatically not Promethean self­
assertion. Prometheus, like Cain, Satan, and other romantic
heroes, was a rebel, an individualist who defied providence
and the paternal gods. Bancroft turns self-assertion into an
affirmation of order. If the condition of progress for him is
continuing revolution, the condition of continuity is control of
the revolutionary impulse. The social norms, as he conceives
them, encourage revolution, but his definition of revolution
reinforces authority.
Bancroft's differences from Whig history on the one hand
and romantic Prometheanism on the other carry broad social
implications. The vVhig metaphor of organic evolution, we
know, reflected the needs of early nineteenth-century Eng­
land, a society deeply at odds with itself, trying uneasily to
accommodate to middle-class forms the outmoded but still­
potent traditions of aristocracy, church, and crown. vVe know
further that romantic Prometheanism represented a dangerous
extreme of individualism, proclaiming the superiority of the
autonomous heroic self to the law, whether civic or moral;
and in Protestant European countries this form of extremism
fed upon middle-class ideology, even as it threatened the struc­
tures of middle-class society. Bancroft's myth of revolution
precludes both social complexity and extreme individualism.
It reflects a relatively homogeneous society, unencumbered by
competing traditions, without a towering feudal structure to
be overthrown, as in France-a New England so committed
to middle-class forms (or to forms so adaptable to middle­
class enterprise) that the Revolution itself could assume a con­
servative spirit. This is not to belittle the commitment to prog­
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ress. By and large Americans associated middle-class with all
the exuberant spiritual as well as material values of a rising
capitalist democracy. As European travellers were startled to
learn, they regarded middle class not as a relative position in
the state but as an absolute state of mind. It meant not bour­
geois but aspiring; not ill-educated but self-taught; not un­
aristocratic but ttnshackled by tradition; not uprooted or de­
classed, but authentic and independent; not engaged in various
occupations but mobile, adaptable, and self-reliant. Middle­
class in America indicated a moral outlook, rather than a cer­
tain income; it displayed itself less in certain manners and
mannerisms than in a set of virtues that opened into a program
for self-perfection. Significantly, the European pejoratives of
parvenu and nouveau riche never took hold in this country.
Our equivalent was the euphoric catchall Americanism, sel/­
made.
\Vhat I'm suggesting is that capitalism meant far more in
America than an economic system. Elsewhere, capitalism had
to compete with a variety of earlier cultural patterns, and often
the most deeply rooted of them-those that most fully ex­
pressed the sources of social cohesion-were also the most hos­
tile to middle-class values. The United States developed
steadily if not quite harmoniously into a middle-class culture.
The contrast deserves further emphasis. In virtually all other
'f.. countries (including Latin and French f(Canaeia eaFJy, 8.g.)]
America no less than Europe), the structures of middle-class
society conflicted with persisting pre-capitalist modes of cul­
tural identity. In the brave new world of the United States
those structures from the start provided the dominant mode of
American identity. The South, of course, drew on different
sources as well, but insofar as its Cavalier myths challenged
middle-class values they denied the very terms of Republican
society. The plantation system was undermined not only by its
economic "backwardness" but by the contradictions it posed, in
the South itself, between national culture and regional ideology.
Significantly, the Virginian David Ramsay was the first Revolu­
tionary historian to point out that the Vlar was won by "self­
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How the Puritans Won the American Revolution
made, industrious men. Those who, by their own exertions had
established or laid a foundation for establishing personal inde­
pendence, [and so] were most successfully employed in estab­
lishing that of their country." Half a century later, writing
about the genius of America in a period of spectacular national
growth (in the North and \Vest), Emerson boasted that "All
great men come out of the middle classes." The correspondence
this implies between individual and society extends beyond
politics or economics. It signifies a concept of independence that
fuses social structure, personal aspirati on, and national ideal,
a laissez-faire rationale become cultural norm.
Bancroft is the epic historian of that development. iV1iddle­
class in his history means of the people) individualism, liberty
and equality, what \Vhitman was to call "the divine average,"
Aristotle's Golden Nlean translated into the language of nine­
teenth-century capitalism, in a newly-independent state blos­
soming in power and self-confIdence-and determined at all
cost to secure its still shaky institutions. \Vith all that determi­
nation, and with all that exuberance, Bancroft charts America's
rise from its Puritan beginnings to nationhood. And on the
whole his outline is remarkably accurate. I think here not only
of the Protestant ethic (epitomized in Tocqueville's note of
1834 that Americans are at once "a puritanical people and a
commercial nation"), but in particular of the social patterns of
early Massachusetts. Surely, Bancroft is right to insist that,
despite their penchant for hierarchy, the Puritans set up a fluid
economy, that they devalued aristocracy, denounced beggary,
and opened opportunity to a wide variety of "freemen," that
their educational and political system made power accessible
to What he proudly calls the "self-made commercial classes,"
and that, summarily, their "middle way" applied to social no
less than to religious affairs. Surely, too, Bancroft is right to
aSsert the continuity, in this context, between sevcnteenth- and
eighteenth-century New England.
I stress these points to pay tribute to the historian no less
than to the myth-maker. For ultimately the effectiveness of
myth derives from its capacity to help men act in history.
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Myth may clothe facts in metaphor, but the metaphor gathers
its force and persuasiveness from its functional relationship to
facts; and the force of Bancroft's myth, fantastic contrivance
though it is, lies in its beautifully ambiguous expression of a
middle-class culture-a culture, let me repeat, founded on the
belief in open competition, upward mobility, and unlimited
prospects, and therefore endangered by the very energies it
elicited. That danger was never more glaringly in evidence
than during the Jacksonian era, and Bancroft addresses himself
to it in every major tenet of his approach: progress divinely
assured, the model of exodus, the emphasis on process, the very
use of revolution as a controlling metaphor for national iden­
tity. Earlier thinkers had addressed themselves to the same
danger. John Locke urged voluntary submission to authority
in order to safeguard rights of property, including the property
of the self. Adam Smith in 1776 offered a rationale for self­
interest that stressed the "wealth of nations," the mutuality of
independence and interdependence. Bancroft repeatedly in­
vokes these concepts to support his myth. In fact, he expressly
conflates the growth of capitalism with the growth of the coun­
try. As he explains it, the exodus of the "commercial classes"
from mercantile bondage begins with their discovery of the
New World; their rise to power parallels that of New Eng­
land; their struggle for liberty and property culminates in the
Revolutionary War. This "revolution in the commercial policy
of the world," he writes-again, with fine historical insight­
"taugh t our fathers union, [and] prepared for our country the
opportunity of independence. . . . Our soil was the destined
battleground of the grand conflict" for free enterprise.
Bancroft's persistent association of "American" with "middle
class" is a main theme of his narrative. It suggests to me that
in some sense he understood the social function of myth and
that he designed his history accordingly. He meant the work,
after all, to transcend Jacksonian polemic. As national epic,
it was to bridge Boston and the \Vest, reveal the unity of
Brahmin and Jacksonian values, establish the common middle
ground of high and low culture, and so educate generations to
612
H ow the Puritans Won the American Revolution
come in the American Way. To this end, Bancroft could hardly
have done better than to choose the Puritans for the role
of revolutionary forefathers. Not, be it noted, the English
Puritans, whose rebellious individualism exploded in civil war,
but the American Puritans, whose defiance took the form of
exodus, who channeled their radical energies into the creation
of a prosperous state, who institutionalized the saint's revolutio
toward God, who invoked the fifth commandment (concerning
the obedience due to parents and rulers) against the extremists
in their midst, and whose social covenant fused the terms of
material, moral, and religious progress. In their insulated
"wilderness-condition" they succeeded, as no European Puri­
tan society could have hoped to do, in disciplining revolution
into the service of tribal order. Their city on a hill was a model
of controlled progressivism, a closely regulated church-state
which never lost sight, Bancroft exults, of its role at the van­
guard of the revolution that would make America the seat of
New Jerusalem.
American destiny is the point of it all, of course. Our land
was the "altar of freedom," the "hallowed shrine," "the gift
of Heaven to our Fathers," "consecrated by Divine Provi­
dence" for the Revolution, the "holy ground, reserved from
eternity for the great combat": on such assertions, repeated ad
tedium, Bancroft's argument ultimately rests; this vision of
America as sacred place shapes the various influences he ab­
sorbed (Hegelian, scientific, Whig, Unitarian, Romantic, provi­
dential) into a coherent national epic. It is the most inclusive
and most daring aspect of his myth of American revolution.
It is also the most telling proof of his debt to the Puritan
fathers, and I would like to digress a moment at this point to
set their achievement in perspective.
The Puritan view of history has its source in the familiar
patristic reading of the Bible. \Vhen the early Christians
adapted the Old Testament to their purposes, they spiritualized
its sacred places. The holy land became for them the king­
dom of heaven; its milk and honey, sustenance for the re­
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deemed soul. With the growth of the church, however, the
emphasis on sacred place reappeared. Medieval Catholicism
found its own equivalents for Canaan-the Papal Seat, the
Holy Roman Empire-which churchmen judaically invested
with sweeping spiritual authority. So at least the Protestant
Reformers charged. Directing their protest precisely against
this mode of sacralization-this granting of holy significance
to temporal, worldly places-they demanded an unmediated
relation between man and God. In sum, they rejected sacred
place for an exclusive concern with what we might call sacred
time, the interior realm of the spirit and last things. As opposed
to external, terrestrial appearances, they sought the reality of
the soul. Eventually they came to value institutions more
highly, but they never revoked their anathema against sacred
place. Until the Second Coming, they maintained, the only
Canaan in this world was the kingdom within, accessible by a
radical inward turning of the will from self to Christ, from
secular to sacred time.
The emigrant Puritans, as Puritans, were extremists in this
cause. No Protestant sect insisted more adamantly than they
did on the un mediated relation between man and God. But
they were also extremists in another, antithetical cause. As emi­
grants, they declared the New \Vorld another promised land,
counterpart of Canaan of old but greater, because God had
designated it for the New Israel that was to usher in the mil­
lennium. They documented their claim with scriptural prophe­
cies, the facts of sacred (not secular) history, as befit a chosen
people. Other communities had to base their claims on common
antiquity, the legends and chronicles of the race. Not Luther's
Germany, not even Foxe's or Cromwell's England could find
exemption from this process. Common sense, if nothing else,
compelled European Protestants to ground their rhetoric of
"national election" in the national past. The New England
Puritans felt no such scruples. They justified their errand by
unveiling the divine past and future of their locale. "Know
that this is the place," wrote their first historian, Edward John­
son, "the place where the Lord will create a new Heaven and
614
How the Puritans Won the American Revolution
a new Earth." For him and his fellow exiles, the meaning of
the new continent lay not in its Indian antiquities-not in the
acts and monuments of its native inhabitants-but in the pro­
phetic figures of Psalms, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Revelation. In effect,
the New England Puritans delivered sacred place back to Prot­
estantism with a vengeance, in the form of America.
I have tried elsewhere to explain their strategy in some de­
tail. Here I wish to draw out its implications for the theory o±
revolution. Let me begin with two very broad premises, both
of them well known to students of myth and religion. First,
the sacred defines itself in radical conflict against the profane.
Its very meaning therefore presupposes both the persistence of
the profane and a persisting state of conflict. The significance
of "holy land" depends on other lands not being holy; the
chosenness of the chosen people implies their antagonism to
the goyim,) the profane "nations of the earth." Second, sacred
history means the gradual conquest of the profane by the
sacred. The believer cultivates the inner wilderness in pre­
scribed stages of spiritual growth; the church as a whole wins
the world back from Satan in a series of increasingly terrifying
and triumphant wars of the Lord. Continuous conflict, then,
and gradual fulfillment become mutually sustaining concepts;
and so considered, they lend themselves powerfully to the con­
cept of revolution I've been discussing, which defines the rev­
olutionary act as a vehicle of order and organic process. In­
deed, it seems evident that the American Puritans had some­
thing much like this in mind when they stressed the profane
nature of the wilderness, the Indians, the Old \Vorld, and the
local heretics or transgressors who were impeding the progress
of their holy commonwealth.
In any case, their view of America was an astounding tour­
de-force. For by all tradition, the conflict between the sacred
and the profane accentuates the unbridgeable, qualitative dif­
ference between the two realms. They confront each other not
as greater and lesser antagonists but as diametrically opposite
ways of action and perception. Eden is forever the garden of
our innocence through our willing suspension of geography.
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 T he Massachusetts Review
Jerusalem is the "holy city" insofar as we dissociate it from
the cities of the earth. In short, sacred meaning is fixed, im­
pervious to the vicissitudes of the profane; and part of that
meaning is progressive, leading upwards from Eden to New
Jerusalem. The Protestant Reformers, we have seen confined
their concept of progress to sacred time-to the individual be­
liever, and, by extension, to the universal invisible church, the
totality of believers in all countries and ages. This remained
their legacy to European Protestants through the nineteenth
century. Thus the nationalist Hegel, who reformulated sacred
history as the dialectics of the World-Spirit, found his chief
metaphor for progress in the self-perfecting consciousness. And
thus Marx and his followers inverted Hegel's World-Spirit
into the dialectics of international class-struggle. Even for the
chauvinists among them, national revolution could serve the
cause only (as it were) by coincidence, by a happy temporary
conjunction of essentially different goals. Both Hegel and
Marx may be said to have humanized sacred history, but each
of them in his way endorsed the Protestant rejection of sacred
place for sacred time.
Only in America did nationalism carry with it the Christian
meaning of the sacred. Only America) of all national designa­
tions, took on the combined force of eschatology and chauvin­
ism. Many other societies have defended the status quo by
reference to revolutions past; many forms of nationalism have
laid claim to a world-redeeming promise; many Christian sects
have sought, in open or secret heresy, to find the sacred in the
profane, and many European defenders of middle class democ­
racy have tried to link order and progress. But only the Ameri­
can Way, of all modern ideologies, managed to circumvent the
paradoxes inherent in these approaches. Of all symbols of iden­
tity, only American united nationality and universality, civic
and spiritual selfhood, sacred and profane history, the coun­
try's past and paradise to be. in a single transcendent ideal.
This was the Puritan legacy to the Revolutionary generation
-to David Austin, for one, who explained in 1794 that
America had in fact experienced "TWO GREAT REVOLU­
616
How the Puritans Won the American Revolution
TIONS . . . the first outward and political; the second in­
ward and spiritual"; and these, he continued, linking the seal
of the United States to the emblems in Revelation, are the
wings of the eagle that is to carry mankind into the millennium.
This was the Puritan legacy to the Jacksonian generation­
among others, to Bronson Alcott, who explained in 1834 that
the Revolution had made plain that Americans possessed "the
best of time and space, ... on a vantage ground to which no
people have ever ascended before." That same year, from that
sacred vantage ground, Bancroft began his epic history. Within
that unique tradition-unique both in the extravagance of its
fantasy and in its faithfulness to social needs-he elaborated
the concept of A merican revolution into a myth that reconciled
his contradictions of middle-class culture.
Some of the contradictions I have already mentioned: pri­
vate versus corporate enterprise, the need to release radical
energies in the individual versus the need to curb social radical­
ism, national interest versus international beneficence in a world
of free trade ("America cannot be charitable to herself with­
out giving alms to the world" is a sentiment that joins Ban­
croft with Emerson and the young Melville). I might also
mention, however briefly, the conflict between gradualism and
radical change. This has a long history in Europe, of course
--characteristically, in the opposition between reformers, who
worked within the system, and utopians or millenarians, who
often challenged the system in basic ways. In nineteenth-cen­
tury America, the emphasis on progress made the opposition
particularly acute. And the myth of American revolution, ac­
cordingly, served a crucial mediating function. It posited an
intrinsically utopian status quo, a millennialism nourished on
the persistence of social norms. "This country," explained
Jacksonian patriots, "which, with such an emphasis of grateful
significance, we may call our own) is still not our own. God
owns it all. And it is ours only in the covenant of his gracious
Providence [with our Puritan forefathers] that it may be
beautified." How can a man "be an American, even if he is not
a Christian, and not catch something of God's purpose as to
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[the continuing revolution in] this great land?" Thus by its
very emphasis on progress, the myth of American revolution
confined social action to the options of A merican or un-A meri­
can, where American meant revolution as consensus and prog­
ress, and un-"1 merican, rebellion as anarchy and regression.
So stated, the opposition between American and un-Ameri­
can casts a new light on Bancroft's view of process. Clearly,
his myth of revolution is a means of sustaining tension; the
consensus he speaks of provides the framework within which a
certain form of conflict continues. But it is a form of conflict
that presupposes consensus. Far from revealing weaknesses in
the social structure, it centers our attention on the symbol of
America, and in effect substitutes symbolic for social analysis.
The ideological advantages are not far to seek. Social analysis
opens the prospect of revolution in the secular sense; it may
lead us to consider alternatives that would undermine (or
overthrow) the social conditions from which the analysis arose.
Symbolic analysis, on the contrary, confines us to the tensions
generated by the symbol itself. It may suggest unexpected
meanings, but only within a fixed, bi-polar system. Since every
symbol unites opposites, or represents them as the same thing,
we can understand what is being represented only by measuring
it against its opposite, or by placing it within a series of com­
parable and related oppositions. The search for meaning is
therefore at once endless and self-enclosed. Any possibility we
propose invites a host of different possibilities, all of them in­
herent in the symbol. Any resolution of opposites we discover
is implicit in the dualisms with which we began.
Through this endless, self-enclosed process, the sacred re­
veals itself by contrast with the profane, and 11 merican by con­
trast with what is un-/lJnerican. Only their functional implica­
tions separate the two processes; but the differences in function
are crucial. The revelation of the sacred serves to diminish,
and ultimately to deny, the values of secular society. The rev­
elation of A merica serves to blight, and ultimately to pre­
clude, the possibility of fundamental social change. To con­
demn the profane is to commit ourselves to a spiritual ideal.
618
H ow the Puritans Won the American Revolution
To condemn the un-American as profane is to express our faith
in a national ideology. A priori, any term blessed by the adjec­
tive American is a positive good; but necessarily, by the very
logic of the symbolic mode, not everything in America is so
blessed. Natty Bumppo represents the Am,erican spirit to us
insofar as we deny that spirit to the no less representative
Yankee woodchoppers. Both Huck Finn and Ragged Dick are
self-made, in the grand American style, but each has to reject
the values of the other in order to "make it"; they are bound
together, as it were, in a heroics of symbiotic antagonism. The
state of tension that ensues has proved an inexhaustible (be­
cause self-generating) source both of exultation and of
lament-or rather, of exultation through lament. It is no acci­
dent that Thoreau describes his life at \Valden through a series
of opposites: Concord's American Puritan settlers versus its
present profane inhabitants; America's pioneer "economy"
versus Franklin's secular \Vay to \Vealth; the true American,
Henry David Thoreau, versus John Field, the emigrant bog­
hoer living in the Old \\Todd style, Thoreau writes scornfully,
in this new country. Nor is it an accident that Melville in
White-Jacket praises the "messianic" American ship-of-state by
contrast with actual violations of the Constitution, or that
Emerson and \Vhi tman define the A merican poet by contrast
with poetry in America. In his history, Bancroft uses this mode
of symbolic antithesis to launch a jeremiad against a broad
range of national evils, from Boston snobbism to Southern
slavery. Like Civil Rights leaders a century later, he charges,
by reference to the Revolution, that such discrimination is un­
American.
I don't mean by these examples to blur the differences be­
tween Bancroft and our classic writers, and between the writers
themselves. Much less do I mean to obscure the fact that the
symbolic outlook they shared also lent itself to some of our
most sinister (and most prominent) forms of Americanism:
progressivist arguments for eradicating the Indians; benevolent
societies for deporting the blacks; the obsession with "foreign
conspiracies," like the Catholic migration of 1834 which (ac­
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 The Massachusetts Review
cording to Samuel Morse) Satan had organized "for the over­
throw of America." On the contrary, I wish to suggest that the
symbol of America could accommodate an endless diversity of
interpretations. More than that, it encouraged controversy­
provided only that the disputants kept within the terms of the
symbol. They were free to criticize from virtually any stand­
point, from Walden to Washington, provided that they con­
ceived their criticism as part of a continuing investigation of
un-American activities. So conceived, and so circumscribed, the
very intensity of their jeremiads confirmed the norms of the
culture. What higher defense could one offer for middle-class
society than an American TVay that sui generis evoked this free
competition of ideas?-and what could make this freedom
safer for society than to define it within a self-enclosed A meri­
can Way?
Herein lies the special efficacy of Bancroft's approach, con­
sidered both in its own right and as a connective between Puri­
tan, Enlightened, and Romantic America. His myth of revolu­
tion provokes a relentless search for national shortcomings, and,
in the same breath, it confines the debate to the symbolic mean­
ing of America. In short, it turns what might have been a
search for social alternatives into a call for symbolic revitaliza­
tion. This strategy characterizes the American jeremiad from
the seventeenth century on, and always for the same purpose:
to berate the present generation for deviating from the past,
so as to prod it forward along the open (if sometimes slippery)
road toward the American City of God. The pattern is so
familiar as to seem a category of the national mind. In fact, it
constitutes a ritual designed to perpetuate the culture. I use
the term ritual deliberately, for its anthropological connota­
tions. V.,That I would suggest is that the process of anxiety is a
means of inculcating a special symbolic habit of mind. The
process stems from Christian tradition-from the conversion
rite, for example, which instills fear and trembling in order
~o direct the initiate toward a new vision, and to re-train him
In a vocabulary (regarding selfhood, community, time, and
place) that inverts the meanings of secular discourse. The
620
How the Puritans Won the American Revolution
puritans developed this into a social conversion rite. Their jere­
miads seek to direct the rising generation toward the New
England Way, and to re-train it, through fear and trembling,
in a vocabulary that inverts traditional Christian meanings for
special tribal and secular ends. Their heirs adapted this mode
in turn as a ritual passage into the sacred meaning of America.
Indeed, for Bancroft the rite of generational rededication be­
comes a main theme of national history, an assertion of con­
sensus through self-criticism that he makes synonymous with
uprising, exodus, progress, and revolution.
I am not arguing that this was always a conscious strategy.
Let us say that by Bancroft's time it amounted to something
like a cultural reflex, that Bancroft to some extent understood
its social import, and that it provided a ritual form uniquely
geared, through its very emphasis on symbolic tension, to sus­
tain the culture. For it is not secularity that distinguishes Ban­
croft's approach, nor even, in itself, his focus on revolution.
These are common to many modern cultures, and may actually
inhere in the process of modernization. Bancroft's contribu­
tion, or rather that of the culture he represents, is to translate
the process of symbolic self-definition into a national rite of
passage. Characteristically, of course, the rite of passage is a
limited, "suspended" period of acculturation, intended to pre­
pare the initiate for his prescribed role in the social hierarchy.
But this describes "traditionalist" societies. Bancroft fits the
ritual to his own middle-class ideals: free enterprise, self-deter­
mination, equal and open opportunity. The facts, I need hardly
say, present a different image of Jacksonian America. They
speak of the constraints of specialization and class, the power of
inherited wealth, the psychic strains of alienation, the heavy
social cost of economic individualism. It would seem that Ban­
croft designed his concept of national transition precisely to
bridge this gap between fact and ideal. The rite of passage he
outlines-linking exodus, uprising, and redemptive-organic
growth-is not merely a transition into society, but the very
substance of society. As the process of American revolution, it
embodies the system he celebrates, a system founded upon the
621

The l'v[ assachusetts Review
mutuality of dissatisfaction and compliance-upon the indi­
vidual's capacity simultaneously to conform to and to deny the
status quo, since the lure of conformity is constant progress and
the condition of progress, Bancroft would persuade us, is in­
stant conformity to an America in transition.
Bancroft's use of transition as cultural norm has a still more
important function. Recent anthropologists have observed that
the rite of passage, despite its ideological intent, may pose
enormous dangers to society. By freeing the initiate (however
briefly) from traditional structures, it directs him toward a
state of C011I177Unitas) a sort of cultural no-man's-land, like the
heath in King Lear) whose values negate all social forms what­
ever. Communitarian values appeal to humanity at large rather
than to particular communities: they speak of one-ness as op­
posed to political or even sexual division; equality, as opposed
to hierarchy; universality as opposed to tribal or national ex­
clusiveness. Many societies have paid homage to such values,
and as a rule ideology seeks to justify social structures by inte­
grating them, through symbol and myth, with the deeper
human structures of ritual C01l147lunitas. J'\onetheless, it seems
evident that the experience of communitas has often led
individuals and groups to challenge their societies in basic ways.
European novels like Dickens' Great Expectations and Balzac's
Lost Illusions show how the rite of passage may issue in a
sweeping criticism of middle-class dreams, not only in their
deviance from the facts but in their own right, as cultural
ideals. Or to choose another example pertinent to Jacksonian
America: Christianity, which has been used to support ITlany
kinds of social ideology, has also led (through the conversion
ritual) to many forms of social conflict, involving the dual
meaning of selfhood (civic versus spiritual), or the contradic­
tions between patriotism and community of souls, or again,
especially in Protestant countries, the incompatible claims of
secular place and sacred time.
The symbol of America reflects a vast cultural effort to ob­
viate these conflicts, in any form. And it finds its consummate
expression in the myth of revolution as a national rite of pas­
622
H ow the Puritans Won the American Revolution
sage. Clearly, this works to increase the tension of transition.
One need only think of the peculiarly adolescent concerns of
our classic writers, their emphasis on freedom from prescribed
roles, on confrontations with the absolute, on the disparity be­
tween social and "ultimate" values, even while they return
insistently to the meaning of America. But in context the insis­
tence upon America suggests that, in this case, to increase ten­
sion is to further the process of acculturation. In European
literature, even those works that espouse middle class society
tend to expose the limitations of middle class ideals. Our
classic writers tend to uphold those ideals even when they most
bitterly assail the middle class. I think now not only of the
jeremiad form they adopted-denouncing the nation to re­
affirm the national dream-but of its bi-polar opposite, what
we might call the jeremiad against jeremiads, to which some
of them were equally attracted, and which equally foreclosed
the prospect of basic social change: the denunciation of all
ideals, sacred and secular, on the grounds that the failure of
American revolution proved the failure of history itself. My
point is that both approaches reversed the radical potential of
communitas-the one, by absorbing communitarian ideals into
the process of national self-fulfillment; the other, by reading
into that process the futility and fraud of communitarian ideals.
Both Emerson's "American Scholar" and Melville's Con­
fidence Man assume an American teleology; they differ only
about whether it means progress toward millennium or regress
toward doomsday. And predictably enough, the sheer extremity
of the choice, the utter bleakness of the doomsday view, has
worked in favor of socialization. No doubt this is a very minor
variation on the theme of American revolution. By and large,
the belief in national transition was perpetuated by optimists
like Bancroft. But it seems a telling sign of cultural hegemony
that even our prophets of doom have played a part. In spite
of themselves, they too helped transform what might have
been a social threat-the experience of communitas issuing in
alternative models of society-into a mode of social cohesion.
They, too, helped make us feel, if only out of desperation,
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 The Massachusetts Review
that the distance between what is and what ought to be de­
mands our rededication, in practical or in visionary terms, as
conformists or as individualists, to a nation that is by definition
in revolutionary passage toward utopia.
From this perspective, Bancroft described the Great Migra­
tion, the Revolution, and the Civil War in identical phrases,
as a crusade to clear God's Country of the profane once and for
all. From this perspective, evading the problems raised by the
Revolution itself, he and his compatriots hailed the continu­
ing revolution in nineteenth-century American life: for ex­
ample, the continuing march Westward across Indian territories
(a "march of revolution," Lyman Beecher explained in 1835,
to prepare "the way of the Lord"); or the continuing pleas for
revival and reform (in America, thundered Albert Barnes in
1834, "every drunkard opposes the millennium"); or the con­
tinuing migrations of settlers, like the Mormons ("the whole
of America," wrote Joseph Smith, shortly before his murder,
"is Zion itself from north to south"); or for that matter, the
continuing migrations of maverick explorers, like the bearded
old visionary Timothy Flint met, "descending the Mississippi,
as he said, to the real Jerusalem"; or again, the continuing
summons for a revolutionary art that would convey, as Fred­
erick Church hoped to do in painting Niagara, the millennial
effusions of the American landscape; or once more, the devel­
oping battle for women's rights-for "American women,"
Catherine Beecher stressed, "more than any others on earth,"
since they in particular must shape "the intellectual and moral
character" of the people now leading the "irresistible," uni­
versal "social revolution." "This is the Country," she explained,
"which the Disposer of events designs shall go forth as the
cynosure of nations," and therefore "to American women ...
is committed the exalted privilege of extending over the world
those blessed influences, which are to renovate degraded man."
.In every form revolution meant, interchangeably, to make
thmgs sacred, to make them transitional, and to make them
American. And in every form it claimed the old Puritan pre­
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How the Puritans Won the American Revolution
rogative of integrating sacred place and sacred time. ~Whether
the rite of passage pertained to the national errand or to the
exodus within, its significance as revolution lay in the unfold­
ing destiny of the New World. Thus Horatio Alger makes
his heroes representative of the American spirit of indepen­
dence. Thus itinerant revivalists promised that "\Vhen you
make your decision, it is America through you making its de­
cision," and God through America making His. Thus, too, our
nineteenth-century imitations of Pilgrim's Progress center not
on some generalized Tender Conscience or Good Intent (as
in England), but on national destiny, as in Joseph Benton's
California Pilgrim, the story of a 'Western "Glad Land" that
surpasses Solomon's Jerusalem in holiness and wealth. And
upon this premise Emerson's Scholar completes the revolution
toward self-reliance by revealing himself the exemplary Ameri­
can. From this perspective Thoreau seeks to radicalize Concord
through a conversion narrative that represents, in his words,
"the only true America." The common assumptions are all the
more telling for the enormous differences in mind and imagi­
nation. In its own way, each one of these instances confirms
Bancroft's myth. \\Thether its implications are personal or col­
lective, spiritual or social, whether it reveals the individual as
self-made or self-transcendent, the purpose of revolution re­
mains locked within the sacred meaning of America.
For Bancroft, the sacralizing of America was the key to
domestication of revolt. For the leaders of the Second Great
Awakening, it was a means of linking religion with American
institutions and social values. For early feminists, it was an
argument for making women the "protectors of [American]
morals." For politicians, it was proof that "our government,"
as a July Fourth orator put it, "approaches so near perfection,
that there can be little doubt but a change ... would be for
the worse." For our classic writers, the sacred meaning of
America functioned as an ancestral taboo, barring them from
paths that led beyond the limits of middle-class culture. It
was not that they lacked courage or radical commitment, but
that they had invested these in a vision dedicated to the con­
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 T he Massachusetts Review
tainment of revolution. I mean containment in its double sense)
as sustenance and restriction. The vision set free titanic crea­
tive energies in our classic writers) and it confined their asser­
tion to the terms of the American myth. The dream that in­
spired them to defy the profane compelled them to speak their
defiance as keepers of the dream. It is true that the assumed
unity of sacred place and sacred time allowed them to arrogate
America to themselves-to transplant the entire national enter­
prise) en masse, into what Thoreau calls the sainte terre of the
American soul. It is equally true that the same assumption en­
listed individualism itself) rhetorically and mythically) into the
service of a national ideology. Except for Emerson) no Ameri­
can made larger claims for the individual than Whitman did)
none more vividly denounced corruption in America, and none
more passionately upheld the metaphysics of the American sys­
tem. This "extreme business energy," Whitman wrote, in what
is perhaps our greatest jeremiad, inheres in "the vast revolu­
tionary arch thrown by the United States over the centuries";
our "almost maniacal appetite for wealth" is "part of ameliora­
tion and progress, indispensably needed to produce the ... re­
sults I demand. My theory includes riches, and the getting of
riches, and the amplest products.... Upon them) as upon sub­
strata) I raise the edifice [of revolution]) ... the new and orbic
traits waiting to be launched forth in the firmament that is, and
is to be) America."
Needless to say, this in no way lessens ·Whitman's achieve­
ment) or Emerson's. Nor does it in the least suggest that our
classic writers were middle-class apologists) as Bancroft was)
or that their writings reduce in any sense to ideology. All of
them (to varying degrees) labored against the myth as well
as within it. All of them felt, privately at least) as oppressed
by Americanism as liberated by it. And all of them, however
captivated by the national symbol, also used the symbol, as
Bancroft could not, to reach beyond the categories of their cul­
ture. If I have over-emphasized their limitations of time and
place-limitations which after all apply to all great art-it is
because our literary critics have tended conspicuously to ignore
626
H ow the Puritans Won the American Revolution
these) or else to translate them into quasi-mystical terms, as
though the "American Renaissance" were not the expression
of a particular culture, but the incarnation of some indigenous
New World spirit. Clearly, such terms have their source in the
rhetoric of American time and place, and just as clearly, I
think) they reflect our uneasy association of America with revo­
lution-which is to say, our tendency in times of crisis to reach
back to national origins, as Bancroft did, in order to rededicate
ourselves to a myth. For in our secular revolutionary age, the
secular meaning of revolution has all but submerged the sacred;
and that meaning, we recall, whether progressive or conserva­
tive) stands for everything that is different from "1 ;nerica as
symbol. It speaks of contradiction, of transition periods that
subvert (rather than revitalize) social norms, of ideologies
springing from mundane and partial interests. It suggests, for
example, that the higher laws of Walden, though they aspire
to communitarian one-ness, are rooted in free-enterprise values.
Thoreau's conversion summons us towards what Bancroft
called "the bright morning star [of] ... American indepen­
dence"; his "life in the woods" essentially follows the pattern
of the celebrated Homo Economicus of mid-nineteenth-cen­
tury America. He, too (as Leggett, Lieber, Nicols, Rantoul,
and other Jacksonian economists describe him), is a simple and
simplifying man, mobile, self-employed, living by "seasonal
rhythm" and the "order of nature," his "independence dis­
cipled by virtue" and sustained by antipathy to government
controls. He, too, denounces the "wicked spending," "soap­
bubble business," and "wasteful acquisition," the "appall­
ing . . . tugging, trying scheming to advance," that charac­
terizes un-American life. He, too, finally, exemplifies the
American method for self-perfection: "true value of riches,"
~sually learned in a "purifying" state of poverty; "free exer­
CIse of confidence between man and man," based on a "natural
system in politics"; and "useful toil" toward the "highest ex­
cellences, physical, intellectual, and above all, moral."
This is not the hero of Walden, but it is enough like him to
indicate Thoreau's debt to his society. The parallels further
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 The Massachusetts Review
remind us, or ought to, that Thoreau does not consider the
evils around him to be a defect of the American \Vay. He sees
them rather as an aberration, like the back sliding of a de facto
saint or the stiff-necked recalcitrance of a chosen people. That
is why his outrage is so vehement, his rejections so absolute,
his ironies so didactic, and so resonant with biblical allusion.
Thoreau speaks as Emerson's Scholar does, under the aspect
of America. He denounces Concord not to advocate a different
social order-as Engels, for example, denounced mid-nine­
teenth-century Manchester-but to redirect his neighbors to­
ward the sacred, so that they might demonstrate at last what
seemed to him the governing fact of modern progress, that
America "is the Great Western Pioneer whom all the nations
follow." Shortly before Walden was written, Emerson made
a similar inventory of evils in America, in order (as he also
put it) to wake his neighbors up. The "Faults ... in our sys­
tem," he reminded them, "suggest their own remedies. . . .
Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. . . . The
only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of supply
and demand, the only true basis of political economy is non­
interference." And these principles are A merican: "Here is
practical democracy; ... mankind in its shirt-sleeves ... tak­
ing off its coat to hard work, when labor is sure to pay." A
decade earlier, in 1838, Cooper had personified the American
middle class as Aristabulus Bragg, the "regular mover" who
supports democracy because, for all its failings, it obviates his­
tory, along with every impediment to industry, enterprise, and
self-fulfillment. "A nation is much to be pitied that is weighed
down by the past," Bragg explains to a visitor from the Old
World. "America may, indeed, be termed a happy and a free
country ... in this, as well as in other things.... I am for the
end of the road at least," and for all "onward impulses." Cer­
tainly, this is not Emerson speaking; but again, the obvious
contrasts make the rhetoric they share all the more remarkable.
Aristabulus marches to a different drummer from that of the
American Scholar, but along the same happy, free, endless
and self-enclosed American Way, where "every man," Emer­
628
H ow the Puritans Won the American Revolution
son brags, "takes care of himself" and thereby combines with
his fellow-Americans in a "revolution" that will "beat all the
[rebellious] insurgents, be they never so determined and
po1·,
ltlC. "
Thoreau is another pilgrim on that national journey. The
faults he perceives in America, far from proving the failure of
the system, form part of his appeal to a special nation to com­
ply with the terms of its destiny. And I believe we may say
much the same about Moby-Dick. The revolution that never
surfaces on the Pequod obliquely affirms the values that Emer­
son and Bancroft endorsed; its center is an unmistakably Ameri­
can hero, Ishmael, a "regular mover" who becomes the exem­
plum of shirt-sleeve democracy. To be sure, Melville makes
it clear that Nantucket is something other than the Great So­
ciety. Yet he focuses his criticism on an individual extremist,
an antinomian romantic turned tyrant, mogul, czar, sultan; and
insofar as he identifies with Ahab's fiery quest, Melville shifts
the conflict from the social to the metaphysical realm. Ahab's
quarrel is not with ship-owners and share-holders, nor with any
middle-class frustrations to self-fulfillment (as in contempo­
raneous French, English, German, and Russian literature), but
with God. Thus the novel tends to divide our sympathies be­
tween two modes of individualism, American and un-American.
And in Ishmael's revolutionary gestures toward fulfilling the
federal covenant, it offers us a cultural rite of passage-a beau­
tifully ambiguous American \Vay to exorcise the rebellious
Ahab in our souls. Blasphemy may enchant when it takes the
form of monomania. As a social alternative it can only argue
the need for the containment of revolution.
Perhaps the fullest description of the revolutionary act, so
contained, appears in Hawthorne's fiction-in The House of
the Seven Gables, for instance, where an incipient anarchist,
Holgrave, learns from a daughter of the Puritans to redirect
his social outrage into suburban self-improvement; or more
strikingly, in The Scarlet Letter, which details the education
of an antinomian into an American heroine. Hester Prynne's
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 T he Massachusetts Review
adultery does indeed have a consecration of its own) as she
cries out in the famous forest scene, but Puritan society has
the consecration of the Lord of time, place, and history. The
"An fulfills its sacralizing function when she turns rebellion
into revolution, by molding her dream of love into an indefi­
nite transition ritual that confirms the myth of American prog­
ress. I am not forgetting the endless ironies that permeate
these scenes. What I would suggest is that those ironies are
part of a distinctive, self-perpetuating and self-contained sym­
bolic outlook. At any rate, Hester's return to the Boston of our
fathers-her coming home to America-returns us once more
to the problem, of revolution as a mode of national self-defini­
tion. The Scarlet Letter, we recall, opens with a long, acerbic,
and very troubled preface about Jacksonian America, and it
closes with Hester's anticipation of the New World Eden
to be. Linking present, past, and future, shaping the course of
progress from theocracy to democracy, providing the very
terms of Hester's vision, yet never once so much as mentioned,
is the American Revolution. The omission, in this greatest of
our historical romances, speaks eloquently to the paradox with
which I began. It may serve summarily as a mute symbol, like
Beckett's Godot, for the power of Bancroft's myth, and in
general for the process by which the Puritans won the Ameri­
can Revolution.
[This essay is dedicated with gratitude and affection to the
Fellows ({nd Staff of the National Humanities Institute
(1975-1976)) New Haven) Connecticut.]
630
Jane J Mansbridge
Conflict in a New England
Town Meeting
town meeting is this nation's purest
T
by
HE NEW ENGLAND
ideal of democracy put into practice. In a town governed
a town meeting, the townspeople themselves discuss and
decide the laws, regulations, general policies, and taxes of the
town. In the assembly which decides these matters, each regis­
tered voter in the town has an equal right to attend, speak and
vote. Any registered voter, resident of the town, who walks
through the meeting-hall door on town meeting day thus auto­
matically becomes an equal member of the town legislature.
More than a thousand towns in New England still practice
town meeting democracy. Although in the last hundred years,
many of these have grown too large to make direct democracy
meaningful, Vermont still has seventy-two towns of fewer than
500 people.' And although most state governments in the
United States have drastically restricted town powers, Vermont
still retains a tradition of local control. It was to a Vermont
town of 500, then, that I went to find citizens still directly
controlling important decisions that affected their lives.
'Indeed, more than half of Vermont's towns and crtres have populations
below 1,000 (Vermon t Department of Budget and JI,Ianagement, Vermont
Facts and Figures rMontpelier, Vt., 1973]), and a larger percentage of
Vermonters live in these \"en" sma]] towns than in anv other state in New
England. (United States B~reau of the Census, C e~lJltS of Govern menls
(Washington, D"C.: Government Printing Office, 1972].) The size of the
total citizenry is crucial to the proper functioning of a direct democrac)".
Athens in the century before Aristotle had 4-3,000 adult male citizens, but
feWer than 6,000 of these genera]]y attended the Assembly meetings. See
~arren Breed and Sa]]y M. Seaman, "Indirect Democracy and Social Process
III Periclean Athens," 52 Social Science Quarterly 631 (1971) and Robert
A. Dahl and Edward R. Tufte, Size and Democracy (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1973), pp. 4--8.
631