The Bible in the American Wilderness

The Puritans read the Bible as the story of the creation, fall, wanderings, and rescue of the human race. Within this long and complex narrative, each Puritan could see connections to events in his or her own life or to events in the life of the community. Thus, William Bradford compares the experiences of the Pilgrims to the experiences of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. Mary Rowlandson sees countless similarities between her captivity by the Indians and captivities recorded in the Old Testament.

The Puritans believed that the Bible was the literal word of God. Reading the Bible was a necessity for all Puritans, as was the ability to understand closely reasoned theological debates. For these reasons, the Puritans placed great emphasis on education.

But their interest in education was not confined to simple literacy. Many of the New England settlers had enjoyed the benefits of higher education in England, and they wanted the same for their children. Thus, Harvard College was founded in 1636, just six years alter the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established and only sixteen years after the first Pilgrims had landed.

Puritan Writings

The Bible was also the foundation upon which Puritan literature was built. In their religious services, Puritans rejected any ceremonies or adornments not

mentioned in the Bible. The same restrictions applied to literature. The Puritans did not object to figures of speech used to drive home a point, but they rejected mere "adornments" such as ornate figures of speech or witty plays on words. The ideal Puritan style was a plain style— strong, simple, and logical. It was a literary style that could make explanations of the scriptures accessible to everyone.

Their beliefs required the Puritans to keep a close watch on both the inner and outer events of their lives. This central aspect of the Puritan mind greatly affected their literature. Inner events, such as feelings of despair or great joy, were stages on the road to salvation; external events, like a snake entering a church, contained messages from God. And so diaries and histories were important forms of Puritan literature, because they were records of the workings of God.

Such concerns determined as well what incidents the Puritans chose to write about. They recorded forms of revelation. The Puritans believed that God revealed His purpose to humanity in three principal ways: through the Bible, through the natural world, and through Divine Providence, or God's direct intervention in human affairs. Thus the Puritans wrote on Biblical and devotional topics: the first American bestseller was Michael Wigglesworth's long poem on the Judgment Day, The Day of Doom (1662). They wrote about the spiritual truth they discovered in the natural world: Edward Taylor's poems are especially good examples, but you will find this theme in diaries and histories as well. And they wrote about moments of special Providence or events that contained great lessons, such as Anne Bradstreet's poem on the destruction of her house by fire.

The Puritans were not machines programmed for worship and nothing else, however. Although they cannot be separated from their religion, neither can they be fully contained by it. They were complex and complete human beings who took great joy in their lives and relationships, while facing hardships difficult to imagine today. Anne Bradstreet's poem on the burning of her house, for example, does not simply draw a dry lesson from the event. It records her moments of joy in the house and works through her grief to a spiritual solace. If there had been no complexity in her, no conflict between her love of things of this world and her conviction that the ultimate, value lay in the spiritual world, the poem would have been very different. At its best, Puritan literature records not merely the moments when the physical and the spiritual worlds cross but rather the moments when they seem to diverge— when love of things of this world threatens to push out love of eternity.

William Bradford (1590-1657)

William Bradford's life displayed a mixture of the commonplace and the extraordinary that was characteristic of the Puritan experience. Bradford was the son of a prosperous farmer in Yorkshire, England. His father died when William was a baby, and the child was raised by his grandparents and uncles. It was assumed that the young man would take over the family holdings when he came of age; in keeping with this expectation, he received no higher education but instead was taught the practical arts of farming. Despite his lack of formal training (or perhaps because of it), Bradford was to become a successful, longstanding Colonial governor in the New World, dealing out justice and settling disputes of all kinds. He would also write the first history that depicts America as a unique social experiment.

Bradford might have become the prosperous Yorkshire farmer he was prepared to become if he had not taken a radical step when he was twelve years old. Inspired by his reading of the Bible and by the sermons of a Puritan minister, he joined a small group of Nonconformists despite the vehement objections of his family and friends. The group could not worship publicly, so they met furtively in a private house in the nearby town of Scrooby. Seven years later, under increasing pressure of persecution and fearful that they would beimprisoned, the Scrooby group crossed the North Sea to Holland. There, Bradford set up a weaving business. He also married Dorothy May, a young woman who was a fellow emigrant from England, and the couple had a child. In 1620, after ten years in Holland, the group was aided by London profiteers and merchants, who lent them a ship and crew as an investment, and the Nonconformists sailed for the New World.

For Bradford, the hardships of the ocean voyage did not end with the landing at Plymouth. In December, while the Mayflower was anchored in Provincetown Bay, Bradford and other men took a small boat ashore to scout for a place to land and build shelter. When they returned, Bradford learned that his young wife had fallen or jumped from the ship and was drowned. The act may well have been suicide. Dorothy Bradford had been on the crowded ship for more than two months, and when land was finally sighted, she did not see the hoped-for green hills of an earthly paradise. Beyond the ship lay only the bleak sand dunes of Cape Cod. That bitter winter, half the settlers were to die of cold, disease, and malnutrition.

The following year, Bradford was elected governor of the plantation at the age of thirty-one. "Had he not been a person of more than ordinary piety, wisdom, and courage," the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather later recorded, "he must have sunk" under the difficulties of governing such a shaky settlement. But, Mather continued, Bradford had been "laying up a treasure of experience, and he had now occasion to use it." Bradford proved an exemplary leader, and he went on to be elected governor of the Colony no fewer than thirty times.

In 1630, Bradford began to write a history of the Plymouth Colony from its beginning. He continued writing an annual account of the settlement until 1647. His record, Of Plymouth Plantation, was not composed for immediate publication or to attract more colonists, like many other early Colonial accounts. It was written for posterity, although by the end of his life Bradford's dreams of that posterity had been shattered.

As the years passed, the plantation, at Plymouth prospered economically. Beaver pelts from the Indians brought good money in England, and eventually the plantation managed to pay off its debt. But as the group prospered and grew, it also became more diffuse and less pious. Despite Bradford's efforts to hold it together, the Plymouth Colony gradually disintegrated as a religious community. The ideal of the "city on the hill," the Pilgrims' dream of an ideal society founded on religious principles, gradually gave way to the realities of life in the New World. Bradford's record of this grand experiment ends in disappointment. When more fertile areas for settlement were found and when Boston became a more convenient port to England, Plymouth lost much of its population— especially its young people. "Thus was this poor church left," Bradford wrote in 1644, near the conclusion of his history, "like an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children. She that had made so many rich became herself poor."

The first nine chapters of Bradford's history were copied into the Plymouth church records, but the entire manuscript was later lost. Most likely it was carried back to England as a souvenir by a British soldier during the Revolutionary War. The soldier might have sold it for a few cents to a bookseller in London. It was almost a century later that Governor Bradford's vellum bound volume was discovered in the library of the Bishop of London. Of Plymouth Plantation was first published in 1856 by the Massachusetts Historical Society. After long negotiations, the manuscript was finally returned to the United States in 1897. It can be seen today in the State-house in Boston.

Mary Rowlandson (1636-1678)

From June 1675 to August 1676, the Wampanoag chief Metacomet, called King Philip by the colonists, carried out a series of bloody raids on Colonial settlements in what is now called King Philip's war. The Puritans thought of the war as a sign of God's punishment for the sins of the younger generation but such a conflict was probably inevitable. It was the natural result of growing encroachments by the settlers on tribal land and of the conflict between the two cultures. Despite careful attempts by Colonial leaders to regulate the buying of territory, the New England tribes had been forced into ever more restricted areas. And although the natives had sold the land, they rejected the condition that they could no longer hunt on it. To them, "selling" meant selling the right to share the land with the buyers, not selling its exclusive ownership.

Matters came to a head when Metacomet's former assistant, who had given information to the whites, was killed by his own people. His killers were tried and hanged by the Puritans. This was too much for Metacomet to bear, and two weeks later the most severe war in the history of New England began. Its tragic result was the virtual extinction of tribal life in the region.

Among the war's victims was Mary Rowlandson. Mrs. Rowlandson was the wife of the Congregational minister of Lancaster, a frontier town of about fifty families that was located thirty miles west of Boston. On a February morning, she and her three children were carried away by a raiding party that wanted to trade hostages for money. After eleven weeks and five days of captivity, her ransom was paid. She was to survive for only two more years.

Her captors, it is important to remember, were only slightly better off than their prisoners. Virtually without food, they were chased from camp to camp by Colonial soldiers. Their captives, they thought, were the only currency with which to buy supplies and food. In a graphic passage, Rowlandson describes the lengths to which the Indians were driven by their hunger: "They would pick up old bones," she wrote, "and cut them to pieces at the joints, and if they were full of worms and maggots, they would scald them over the fire to make the vermin come out, and then boil them, and drink up the liquor . . . They would eat horses' guts, and ears, and all sorts of wild birds which they could catch: also bear, venison, beaver, tortoise, frogs, squirrels, dogs, skunks, rattlesnakes; yea, the very bark of trees ... I can but stand in admiration," she concluded, "to see the wonderful power of God, in providing for such a vast number of our enemies in the wilderness, where there was nothing to be seen, but from hand to mouth."

Rowlandson's moving tale of survival shows us the ordinary Puritan mind at work in extraordinary circumstances. Through apt quotations from the Bible, she places her experiences in the context of ancient Biblical captivities, such as the enslavement of Moses and the Israelites by the Egyptians. The Puritans regarded such Biblical captivity narratives as allegories representing the Christian's liberation from sin through the intervention of God's grace. Rowlandson viewed her own experiences as a repetition of the same pattern.

Her narrative, then, not only presents a terrifying and moving tale of frontier life but also provides insight into how the Puritans viewed their lives with a characteristic double vision. For Rowlandson, events had both a physical and a spiritual significance. She did not want merely to record her horrifying experience; she wished to demonstrate how it revealed God's purpose. The full title of her narrative illustrates this intention: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.

Mary Rowlandson's Narrative was one of the most widely read prose works of the seventeenth century. It was especially popular in England, where people were eager for lurid, tales of the native inhabitants of the New World. The popularity of Rowlandson's story even gave rise to a mass of imitations that were often purely fictional. These "captivity" stories might have been entertaining, but they had a tragic side effect: They contributed to the further deterioration of relations between Native Americans and colonists.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

Jonathan Edwards is known today principally as the author of the great sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Despite his fire-and-brimstone imagery, Edwards was not merely a stern, zealous, preacher. He was a brilliant, thoughtful, and complicated man whose accomplishments and failures deserve our interest and study. Born eighty years after the Puritans landed in New England and only three years before the birth of Benjamin Franklin, Edwards stood between Puritan America and modern America. Tragically, he fit into neither world.

Edwards's grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, was pastor of the Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts. Stoddard was so powerful a figure in religious affairs that he was known as the "Pope of the Connecticut Valley." His grandson's abilities were recognized early; even in his teens Jonathan was being groomed to succeed his grandfather. The boy entered Yale in 1716, when he was only thirteen. A few years after his graduation, he was made senior tutor of the college—a significant achievement for one so young. In 1726, Jonathan became his grandfather's co-pastor. When Stoddard died three years later, his grandson succeeded him.

Edwards was a strong-willed and charismatic pastor. His formidable presence and brilliant sermons helped to bring about the religious revival known as the "Great Wakening." This revival began in Northampton in the 1730's and during the next fifteen years spread throughout the Eastern Seaboard.

The Great Awakening began at a time when enthusiasm for the old Puritan religion was declining. To offset the losses in their congregations, churches had been accepting increasing numbers of "unregenerate" Christians. These were people who accepted church doctrine and lived upright lives but who had not confessed they had been "born again" in God's grace. Thus they were not considered to be saved. In their sermons, Edwards and other pastors strove to make these "sinners" understand the precariousness of their situation by helping them actually to feel the horror of their sinful state.

"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is the greatest and best-known example of these sermons. Edwards's methods in the sermon were influenced by the work of the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). Locke believed that everything we know comes from experience, and he emphasized that understanding and feeling were two distinct kinds of knowledge. (To Edwards, the difference between these two kinds of knowledge was like the difference between reading the word fire and actually being burned.) Edwards preached his famous sermon in Enfield, Massachusetts, in July of 1741. Although he read it in his usual straightforward, unemotional manner, it had such a powerful effect on the congregation that the minister had to pause several times to ask for quiet.

Intellectually, Edwards straddled two ages: the modern, secular world exemplified by such men as Benjamin Franklin, and the religious world of his zealous Puritan ancestors. Edwards could draw on the ideas of philosophers such as John Locke, but he used those ideas to achieve a vision compatible with that of older Puritans such as William Bradford. Science, reason, and observation of the physical world only confirmed Edwards's vision of a universe filled with the presence of God. As he explained in his autobiography, his sense of God was formed not only by his reading of the Bible but also by his close examination of nature.

Edwards became known for his extremism as a pastor. In his sermons, he didn't hesitate to accuse prominent church members, by name, of relapsing into sin. He was also unbending in his refusal to accept the "unregenerate" into his church. Such attitudes eventually lost him the support of his congregation. In 1750, he was voted out of his prestigious position in Northampton and sent to the then remote and raw Mohican Indian community of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. After eight years of missionary work in this lonely exile, Edwards was "rescued" and named president of the College of New Jersey (which later became Princeton University). Three months after assuming his position, he died of a smallpox inoculation.

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

One of the most notable characteristics of American literature is the distinction of its women writers, particularly in poetry. The first accomplished poet on American soil, of either sex, was Anne Bradstreet.

Educated by tutors in her native England, she was immersed in the Bible. She also had access to the large library of the Earl of Lincoln, who employed her father. Thomas Dudley, as his estate manager. Shakespeare was still alive when Anne was born and, like many budding poets, she found in Shakespeare, and in other great poets of England, sources of inspiration and technique that would one day run like threads of gold through the fabric of her own work.

However, what most determined the course of her life was not a poetic influence but a religious one. Anne Bradstreet was born into a family of Puritans. Accepting their reformist views as naturally as most children accept the religious teachings of a parent, Anne married, at the age of sixteen, a well-educated and zealous young Puritan by the name of Simon Bradstreet. Two years later, in 1630, Simon brought his wife across the Atlantic to the part of New England around Salem that would become known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There, while her husband rose to prominence (he became a governor of the colony), Anne Bradstreet kept house in Cambridgeport and Ipswich. She raised four boys and four girls and, without seeking an audience or publication, found the time to write poems. These might never have come to light had it not been for John Woodbridge, her brother-in-law and a minister in Andover. He went to England in 1647 and there, in 1650, without consulting the author herself, published her poems under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America * * * By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts.

In one stroke, an obscure housewife from the meadows of New England was placed among the nine Muses of art and learning sacred to the ancient Greeks. In itself, this was embarrassing enough. But in the middle of the seventeenth century, the real arrogance was that a woman would aspire to a place among the august company of established male poets. Conscious of the boldness she might be charged with, Bradstreet was resigned to criticism. But The Tenth Muse fared better with critics and the public than she expected, and she felt encouraged to write for the rest of her life.

Today, Anne Bradstreet is remembered not for her elaborate earlier poems but for a few simple lyrics about the birth of children, the death of grandchildren, her love for her husband, her son's sailing to England, her own illnesses.

Literature of the South. In addition to the Puritans of New England, there was another literary tradition in the New World. This literature came from the Southern planters, a group of people whose background and. social views varied considerably from those of the Puritans.

Many reasons can be suggested for the differences. One factor may have been climate. The Southern climate was kinder; it was warm and soft and the land was enormously fertile. The Northern climate was harsh: springs and summers were brief and winters were long and cold. Even the land in New England was hard; its outcroppings of granite and bedrock broke plows and made farming difficult.

But economic and religious factors were even more important the land holdings in New England were small for the most part, many colonists were small farmers or tradesmen who lived in villages and owned very little land. But the Southern planter was an aristocrat and the virtual ruler of a huge territory. He maintained this area by keeping a large number of slaves (though there were slaves in New England in those days too).

In religion, most Southerners belonged to the Church of England. In general, they were much more interested in the outside world—in literature, music, art, politics, and the world of nature— than they were in the scrupulous examination of their own souls. But the Puritans, who had rejected the established church, were constantly looking inward and questioning themselves. Where the Southerner saw the world as something to be conquered and enjoyed, the Puritan—who loved the world as much as anyone else did—feared that its beauties were lures and sources of temptation.

The Southern planters shared the world view of the English Renaissance, with its emphasis on classical literature and the growing spirit of scientific inquiry. Thus, when the Southerners wrote about the New World, they were apt to write about it in traditional ways. Characteristically, the first purely literary work of the South was a translation of a Latin classic, Ovid's collection of myths called the Metamorphoses. Even a work as original as The Sotweed Factor (1708), Ebenezer Cooke's humorous tale of a tobacco merchant, was written in bouncy couplets, the popular form for satirical verse in England.

In many ways, William Byrd is a representative figure for the Southern writers of the Colonial Period. Born in Virginia more than fifty years after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth, Byrd was truly a Renaissance man in the New World. He translated Greek and Latin works, composed original poetry (mostly satiric verse), and wrote about mathematics and medicine.

William Byrd (1674-1744)

William Byrd, a man of exceptional intellect and accomplishments, was a thorough Cavalier—worldly, sophisticated, and gentlemanly. Byrd was born in Virginia, the son of a wealthy landowner and merchant, but he was educated in England, where he spent half his life. In London, he acquired a passion for the theater, which the Puritans had once outlawed as immoral. Byrd had many scientific interests: He was even a member of the Royal Society, that pillar of the British scientific establishment.

Byrd alternated between living in England and Virginia. He preferred London, with its elegant homes, witty conversation, and gambling tables. During his visits to Westover, his 26,000-acre home in Virginia, he tried to keep alive both his social and intellectual life. Westover's gardens are still renowned, and its library of 3,600 volumes was rivaled in Byrd's time only by Cotton Mather's library in New England.

Byrd had little in common with the New Englanders. The contrasts between Byrd and the Puritans are instructive. For example, Byrd kept a diary, as many Puritans did. But the Puritans' diaries are primarily records of spiritual examination. Byrd's diary records the pleasures and practical concerns of a man of the world. Dinners, flirtations with women, literature, and natural science were of greater interest to him than matters of the spirit.

In 1728, Byrd joined a survey expedition of the disputed boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina. The History of The Dividing Line is far more than a simple record of that expedition. Witty and elegantly written, it is filled with philosophical observations and barbed comments on American Colonial life.

Native American Myths and Ritual Songs

Native American cultures were complex and diverse and encompassed a variety of arts. Their literary arts were oral. Generations of storytellers recited stories and poems over and over again, seldom in exactly the same way twice. For Native Americans, as for any culture, these stories served many purposes—to entertain, surely, but also to educate the young and to communicate the values of the culture.

The two most popular figures in Native American narratives are Grandmother Spider and Coyote, who are often portrayed as tricksters. Stories about these complex characters mix humor and seriousness, earthiness and abstract thought.

These figures, however, are not meant to be cartoon characters. They are believed in, since they represent a mythology and a set of religious beliefs carried forward from the past into present.

Figures representing nature, such as the sun, moon or earth, not only appear in Native American stories, but are directly invoked in multitude of rituals.