8/8/2019 How the Puritans Won the American Revolution - Sacvan Bercovitch

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Notes on ContributorsCOVER: Great Seal of the UnitedStates. Engraving by James Trenchard. Columbian Magazine, I (1786).

KATHI AGUERO, formerly in theCreative Writing program at BostonUniversity, currently teaches in thePoets-in-the-Schools program in NewHampshire. SAC VAN BERCOVITCH isauthor of Puritan Origins of theAmerican Self and professor of English and Comparative literature atColumbia University; the essay published here is "dedicated with gratitude and affection to the fellows andstaff of the National Humanities Institute (1975-76)" at Yale. w. H.CHAPLIN'S publications include poemsand essays on Classical and Renaissance drama; he died in 1974 at theage of 30. THOMAS J . COTTLE isaffiliated with the Children's DefenseFund of the Washington ResearchProject; his books include BlackChildren, White Dreams and A Fam-ily Album, while Life Time andBarred From School are forthcoming.

JEANNINE DOBBS teaches writing atHarvard; in addition to poetry shealso writes fiction and non-fiction.SANDRA M. GILBERT teaches in literature and Women's Studies at the University of California at Davis; herpoetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in T he Nation, The NewYorker, Poetry and other magazines.EVERETT HOAGLAND is at Southeastern Massachusetts University; hiswork appears in New Black Voicesand other anthologies. RIMA KING hasa recently completed novel entitledAlice in Racetrackland; Snodgrass 0';Eliot is her first published fiction.

ARTHUR F. KINNEY is Editor ofEnglish Literary Renaissance, and hiswork in this field is widely known;he is currently on a Fulbright Research Grant at Oxford. RIKA LESSER'Spoems and translations have appearedin American Review and Poetry aswell as in MR. JANE J . MANSBRIDGEis a political scientist and an AssistantProfessor at the University of Chicago. IFEANYI MENKITI teaches Philosophy at Wellesley College; Affir-mations, a book of his poems, appeared with Third World Press(1971).

DAVID RIESMAN has long been a distinguished observer of the Americanscene and a dedicated teacher ofAmerican undergraduates. His forthcoming book (with Gerald Grant) isentitled The Volatile College: Edu-catio!tal Reform in America (University of Chicago Press, 1977). GORDONSHENTON has taught French literatureat Harvard and Brown; he is presently living in France at SaintEtienne. RON SLATE is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin; his poems appear frequently inlittle magazines. Viper lazz is JAMESTATE'S latest book of poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1976); he isa Guggenheim Fellow for 19761977 and is living in Spain.JAMES WADE teaches high schoolEnglish part time and manages arestaurant; he is a graduate of theWriting Program at Indiana. TAMARAWATSON studied at Juilliard and iscurrently in preparation for an operatic debut. MARLA D. ZARROW is afeminist psychotherapist; her poemshave previously appeared in Focus.

Sacvan BercovitchHow the Puritans Won

the American RevolutionPhiladelphia, July 4-President Ford came here from Valley Forge

to recall that first Fourth of July as "the beginning of a continuingadventure," unfinished, unfulfilled, but still .. . "the most successfulrealization of humanity's universal hope. Th e world mayor may notfollow, but we lead because our whole history says we must."

New York Times) July 5, 1976And verily, yours is the best and happiest land under the sun. But notwholly because you in your wisdom decreed it; your origin and yourgeography necessitated it. Nor, in their germ, are all your blessings tobe ascribed to the noble sires of rore who fought in your behalf, sovereign kings! Your nation enjoyed no little independence before yourdeclaration declared it. Your ancient pilgrims fathered your liberty....

Melville, /I;fardiSo we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly intothe past. Fitzgerald, Th e Great Gat.rby

T HE AMERICAN REVOLUTION plays a curious role in ourclassic literature. Like Beckett's Godot, it is at once omnipresent and conspicuously absent. All contemporaneous accountssuggest that the Spirit of '76 was the muse of the AmericanRenaissance. Bronson Alcott tells us that Thoreau acted asthough he were the sole signer of the Declaration of Independence. Emerson's followers, taking their cue from theMaster, hailed his essays as the vindication of the Revolutionary War. Young America's call for intellectual liberation deliberately echoed the call to arms against the British. "Americamust be as independent in literature as in politics," went therefrain. "Shall Nature's Freemen bow to Nature's Slaves?"

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T he Massachusetts Review,\Thitman's response, in Leaves of Grass, was a revolutionarypoetics whose origins he located in the events that shaped our"great radical republic." For as Melville put it, America wasbound to carry the Revolution into literature and all the arts.Melville himself returned obsessively to the theme of revolution, or revolution repressed, as did Hawthorne, Cooper, andPoe. Yet no more than a handful of their writings-a fewstories and minor novels-can be said to deal with the American Revolution , and even these do so obliquely, if not evasively.

Th e forgotten popular writers of the time responded avidlyto the clamor for romances, poems, plays, and epics about theRevolution. Those writers through whom we have defined theAmerican imagination remained silent on the subject, or atmost ambivalent. Consider our prototypical Americans: thehero of Franklin's Autobiography, whose adventures conspicuously exclude the Revolutionary vVar; or Irving's RipVan Winkle, who sleeps through the entire birth of the nation,and awakens to find things much as they were before; orCrevecoeur's American Farmer, who derides the Revolution,in brief but vivid sketches, as democracy in riot, the snake inNew Eden. Consider, above all, the Revolutionary figures inthe fiction of the American Renaissance: Cooper's spies andmadmen; Melville's mock-heroic Israe l Potter, who languishesaway the Revolution in English captivity; Hawthorne's RobinMolineux, for whom independence takes the form of awitches' sabbath. Ou r classic writers have given us splendidAmerican heroes representing a variety of historical periods,including those of war and national upheaval. But none, apparently, found the Revolution fit matter for his highestthemes. Th e great harvest of our literature-the self-styledAmerican literary revolution-yielded no "Lilacs" for vVashington, no Pathfinder at Valley Forge, no Re d Badge of Cour-age for the patriot cause, no Yoknapatawpha County formourning Loyalists, not even a sentimental Whig's Farewellto Arms.

We could write off this anomaly to temperament or chance,were it not fo r a striking parallel in the culture at large. I re

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