The Puritan Tradition in Revolutionary, Federalist, and Whig Political Theory: A Rhetoric of Origins

Church History, March, 2001 by Keith J. Hardman

The Puritan Tradition in Revolutionary, Federalist, and Whig Political Theory: A Rhetoric of Origins. By Dean Hammer. Major Concepts in Politics and Political Theory 13. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. xxvi 222 pp. $32.95 paper.

For several centuries the term "Puritan" was synonymous with democracy, enlightenment, rebellion against tyranny, freedom, and much else that was laudable. In the last century an entire reversal has occurred, making the term to mean repressive, hypocritical, censorious, prudish, and worse.

How did this reversal come about? Dean Hammer's careful and intriguing study avoids simplistic approaches to defining Puritanism, recognizing that "it does not mean one thing; it never did....It is a legacy that was constructed, transformed, and reformulated" (xiii) many times by many groups. Hammer's novel approach is to examine "specific invocations of the Puritans in public rhetoric," (xv) noting the problems of definition that were met after their landing in the New World and the reinterpretations that were made successively in the Great Awakening and the Revolutionary period and by the Federalists and the Whigs.

From 1620 to 1900 the great majority of commentators, including such non-Calvinists as Emerson, Thoreau, and Unitarians and liberals generally, expressed their profuse admiration of the Puritans, with numerous historiographers praising their "love of liberty, courage and self-denial, spirit of industry as they transformed a desert wilderness, and fortitude." There were occasional critics, such as Hawthorne and Catharine Sedgwick, but they were a distinct minority.

From the beginnings in America, however, a variety of images issued from various Puritan factions. There was the bifurcation between the insular individual and Puritan society: was the self, sinful as it was, more important than the state? And then there was the problem of external authority; Puritans had come from England to escape the regimens of repressive government and their dispute with the Anglican Church. But in America they became the established authority, and increasingly there was a need for a more hierarchical pattern of social relations, especially with the threats to leadership posed by Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Initially there was no preconceived plan for city structure; this had to be worked out as occasion arose, and it was complex because the political intersected with their theological base. While always acknowledging that depravity infected all humanity, their hope had been that a community of saints could avoid disputes and sin and rise above these, and they found that their hope was wrong.

Whatever their failures, well into the eighteenth century the Puritans retained dominance in the primary institutions of cultural transmission, and this demonstrated the dynamic and flexible nature of the movement and its adaptability to change. The Great Awakening was the answer to much of the spiritual declension of the times, with its multitude of conversions and founding of hundreds of churches. Like the Puritans of the previous century, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and all of the Awakening's preachers stressed inward conversion. A general return to true faith, Edwards taught, would bring about glorious millennial expectations and extend the image of the Puritan founders. The millennium would probably begin in New England, Edwards thought, and the Puritan migration to the wilderness might well have been the dawn of this new age of God's glory.

In the Revolutionary period, the philosophy of John Locke became influential, and surprisingly it was often blended with Puritan images. Many preachers, aware of the power of Locke's ideas, intermingled his political thought with their theology, and Hammer demonstrates that in the revolutionary era there is much emphasis., both in sermons and elsewhere, on a Puritan inheritance, "one that saw in the Puritan flight from Europe both a Lockean love of liberty and a government founded by compact" (101). Then, when the war had been won, there was another outpouring of admiration for the founders. John Adams, the second president, lauded the Puritans' "ardor for liberty and thirst for knowledge" and frequently praised them as the transmitters of glory and courage. "New England continued to provide a serviceable legend of America's ancestors, one propagated through churches, newspapers, pamphlets, printed sermons, word-of-mouth, schools and colleges, and books, including historical studies and school texts (which were written primarily by New Englanders)" (76).

There was a coalescing of an American Whig identity in the 1820s, Hammer finds, although the formation of the Whig party did not occur until 1834. The Whigs, like others before them, drew upon the Puritans to substantiate their own positions, although their interpretation was a fundamentally secular one. To the Whigs, the Puritans provided a beginning that endowed the United States with principles and institutions that would give the nation an identity unique in the world. In 1843 Rufus Choate praised the Puritans for the founding of "a truly strong, masculine, commanding character" that would allow liberty to endure. Edward Everett and Daniel Webster echoed similar sentiments in a number of speeches and writings.