History of American Literature on World of Poets.com
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Early American and Colonial Period (Colonial Period to 1776)
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American literature begins with the orally transmitted myths, legends, tales, and lyrics
(always songs) of Indian cultures. There was no written literature among the more than 500
different Indian languages and tribal cultures that existed in North America before the first
Europeans arrived. As a result, Native American oral literature is quite diverse. Narratives
from quasi-nomadic hunting cultures like the Navajo are different from stories of settled
agricultural tribes such as the pueblo-dwelling Acoma; the stories of northern lakeside
dwellers such as the Ojibwa often differ radically from stories of desert tribes like the Hopi.
Tribes maintained their own religions -- worshipping gods, animals, plants, or sacred
persons. Systems of government ranged from democracies to councils of elders to
theocracies. These tribal variations enter into the oral literature as well.
Still, it is possible to make a few generalizations. Indian stories, for example, glow with
reverence for nature as a spiritual as well as physical mother. Nature is alive and endowed
with spiritual forces; main characters may be animals or plants, often totems associated with
a tribe, group, or individual. The closest to the Indian sense of holiness in later American
literature is Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendental "Over-Soul," which pervades all of life.
The Mexican tribes revered the divine Quetzalcoatl, a god of the Toltecs and Aztecs, and
some tales of a high god or culture were told elsewhere. However, there are no long,
standardized religious cycles about one supreme divinity. The closest equivalents to Old
World spiritual narratives are often accounts of shamans initiations and voyages. Apart from
these, there are stories about culture heroes such as the Ojibwa tribe's Manabozho or the
Navajo tribe's Coyote. These tricksters are treated with varying degrees of respect. In one
tale they may act like heroes, while in another they may seem selfish or foolish. Although
past authorities, such as the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, have deprecated trickster tales as
expressing the inferior, amoral side of the psyche, contemporary scholars -- some of them
Native Americans -- point out that Odysseus and Prometheus, the revered Greek heroes,
are essentially tricksters as well.
Examples of almost every oral genre can be found in American Indian literature: lyrics,
chants, myths, fairy tales, humorous anecdotes, incantations, riddles, proverbs, epics, and
legendary histories. Accounts of migrations and ancestors abound, as do vision or healing
songs and tricksters' tales. Certain creation stories are particularly popular. In one
well-known creation story, told with variations among many tribes, a turtle holds up the
world. In a Cheyenne version, the creator, Maheo, has four chances to fashion the world
from a watery universe. He sends four water birds diving to try to bring up earth from the
bottom. The snow goose, loon, and mallard soar high into the sky and sweep down in a dive,
but cannot reach bottom; but the little coot, who cannot fly, succeeds in bringing up some
mud in his bill. Only one creature, humble Grandmother Turtle, is the right shape to support
the mud world Maheo shapes on her shell -- hence the Indian name for America, "Turtle
Island."
The songs or poetry, like the narratives, range from the sacred to the light and humorous:
There are lullabies, war chants, love songs, and special songs for children's games,
gambling, various chores, magic, or dance ceremonials. Generally the songs are repetitive.
Short poem-songs given in dreams sometimes have the clear imagery and subtle mood
associated with Japanese haiku or Eastern-influenced imagistic poetry. A Chippewa song
runs:
A loon I thought it was
But it was
My love's
splashing oar.
Vision songs, often very short, are another distinctive form. Appearing in dreams or visions,
sometimes with no warning, they may be healing, hunting, or love songs. Often they are
personal, as in this Modoc song:
I
the song
I walk here.
Indian oral tradition and its relation to American literature as a whole is one of the richest
and least explored topics in American studies. The Indian contribution to America is greater
than is often believed. The hundreds of Indian words in everyday American English include
"canoe," "tobacco," "potato," "moccasin," "moose," "persimmon," "raccoon," "tomahawk,"
and "totem." Contemporary Native American writing, discussed in chapter 8, also contains
works of great beauty.
THE LITERATURE OF EXPLORATION
Had history taken a different turn, the United States easily could have been a part of the
great Spanish or French overseas empires. Its present inhabitants might speak Spanish and
form one nation with Mexico, or speak French and be joined with Canadian Francophone
Quebec and Montreal.
Yet the earliest explorers of America were not English, Spanish, or French. The first
European record of exploration in America is in a Scandinavian language. The Old Norse
Vinland Saga recounts how the adventurous Leif Eriksson and a band of wandering
Norsemen settled briefly somewhere on the northeast coast of America -- probably Nova
Scotia, in Canada -- in the first decade of the 11th century, almost 400 years before the
next recorded European discovery of the New World.
The first known and sustained contact between the Americas and the rest of the world,
however, began with the famous voyage of an Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus,
funded by the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus's journal in his "Epistola,"
printed in 1493, recounts the trip's drama -- the terror of the men, who feared monsters and
thought they might fall off the edge of the world; the near-mutiny; how Columbus faked the
ships' logs so the men would not know how much farther they had travelled than anyone had
gone before; and the first sighting of land as they neared America.
Bartolomé de las Casas is the richest source of information about the early contact between
American Indians and Europeans. As a young priest he helped conquer Cuba. He transcribed
Columbus's journal, and late in life wrote a long, vivid History of the Indians criticizing their
enslavement by the Spanish.
Initial English attempts at colonization were disasters. The first colony was set up in 1585 at
Roanoke, off the coast of North Carolina; all its colonists disappeared, and to this day
legends are told about blue-eyed Croatan Indians of the area. The second colony was more
permanent: Jamestown, established in 1607. It endured starvation, brutality, and misrule.
However, the literature of the period paints America in glowing colors as the land of riches
and opportunity. Accounts of the colonizations became world-renowned. The exploration of
Roanoke was carefully recorded by Thomas Hariot in A Briefe and True Report of the
New-Found Land of Virginia (1588). Hariot's book was quickly translated into Latin, French,
and German; the text and pictures were made into engravings and widely republished for
over 200 years.
The Jamestown colony's main record, the writings of Captain John Smith, one of its leaders,
is the exact opposite of Hariot's accurate, scientific account. Smith was an incurable
romantic, and he seems to have embroidered his adventures. To him we owe the famous
story of the Indian maiden, Pocahontas. Whether fact or fiction, the tale is ingrained in the
American historical imagination. The story recounts how Pocahontas, favorite daughter of
Chief Powhatan, saved Captain Smith's life when he was a prisoner of the chief. Later, when
the English persuaded Powhatan to give Pocahontas to them as a hostage, her gentleness,
intelligence, and beauty impressed the English, and, in 1614, she married John Rolfe, an
English gentleman. The marriage initiated an eight-year peace between the colonists and the
Indians, ensuring the survival of the struggling new colony.
In the 17th century, pirates, adventurers, and explorers opened the way to a second wave
of permanent colonists, bringing their wives, children, farm implements, and craftsmen's
tools. The early literature of exploration, made up of diaries, letters, travel journals, ships'
logs, and reports to the explorers' financial backers -- European rulers or, in mercantile
England and Holland, joint stock companies -- gradually was supplanted by records of the
settled colonies. Because England eventually took possession of the North American
colonies, the best-known and most-anthologized colonial literature is English. As American
minority literature continues to flower in the 20th century and American life becomes
increasingly multicultural, scholars are rediscovering the importance of the continent's mixed
ethnic heritage. Although the story of literature now turns to the English accounts, it is
important to recognize its richly cosmopolitan beginnings.
THE COLONIAL PERIOD IN NEW ENGLAND
It is likely that no other colonists in the history of the world were as intellectual as the
Puritans. Between 1630 and 1690, there were as many university graduates in the
northeastern section of the United States, known as New England, as in the mother country
-- an astounding fact when one considers that most educated people of the time were
aristocrats who were unwilling to risk their lives in wilderness conditions. The self-made and
often self-educated Puritans were notable exceptions. They wanted education to understand
and execute God's will as they established their colonies throughout New England.
The Puritan definition of good writing was that which brought home a full awareness of the
importance of worshipping God and of the spiritual dangers that the soul faced on Earth.
Puritan style varied enormously -- from complex metaphysical poetry to homely journals
and crushingly pedantic religious history. Whatever the style or genre, certain themes
remained constant. Life was seen as a test; failure led to eternal damnation and hellfire, and
success to heavenly bliss. This world was an arena of constant battle between the forces of
God and the forces of Satan, a formidable enemy with many disguises. Many Puritans
excitedly awaited the "millennium," when Jesus would return to Earth, end human misery,
and inaugurate 1,000 years of peace and prosperity.
Scholars have long pointed out the link between Puritanism and capitalism: Both rest on
ambition, hard work, and an intense striving for success. Although individual Puritans could
not know, in strict theological terms, whether they were "saved" and among the elect who
would go to heaven, Puritans tended to feel that earthly success was a sign of election.
Wealth and status were sought not only for themselves, but as welcome reassurances of
spiritual health and promises of eternal life.
Moreover, the concept of stewardship encouraged success. The Puritans interpreted all
things and events as symbols with deeper spiritual meanings, and felt that in advancing their
own profit and their community's well-being, they were also furthering God's plans. They did
not draw lines of distinction between the secular and religious spheres: All of life was an
expression of the divine will -- a belief that later resurfaces in Transcendentalism.
In recording ordinary events to reveal their spiritual meaning, Puritan authors commonly
cited the Bible, chapter and verse. History was a symbolic religious panorama leading to the
Puritan triumph over the New World and to God's kingdom on Earth.
The first Puritan colonists who settled New England exemplified the seriousness of
Reformation Christianity. Known as the "Pilgrims," they were a small group of believers who
had migrated from England to Holland -- even then known for its religious tolerance -- in
1608, during a time of persecutions.
Like most Puritans, they interpreted the Bible literally. They read and acted on the text of
the Second Book of Corinthians -- "Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith
the Lord." Despairing of purifying the Church of England from within, "Separatists" formed
underground "covenanted" churches that swore loyalty to the group instead of the king.
Seen as traitors to the king as well as heretics damned to hell, they were often persecuted.
Their separation took them ultimately to the New World.
William Bradford (1590-1657)
William Bradford was elected governor of Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony shortly
after the Separatists landed. He was a deeply pious, self-educated man who had learned
several languages, including Hebrew, in order to "see with his own eyes the ancient oracles
of God in their native beauty." His participation in the migration to Holland and the Mayflower
voyage to Plymouth, and his duties as governor, made him ideally suited to be the first
historian of his colony. His history, Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), is a clear and compelling
account of the colony's beginning. His description of the first view of America is justly
famous:
Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles...they had now no friends to
welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or
much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor...savage barbarians...were readier to fill
their sides with arrows than otherwise. And for the reason it was winter, and they that know
the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and
fierce storms...all stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of
woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue. Bradford also recorded the first
document of colonial self-governance in the English New World, the "Mayflower Compact,"
drawn up while the Pilgrims were still on board ship. The compact was a harbinger of the
Declaration of Independence to come a century and a half later.
Puritans disapproved of such secular amusements as dancing and card-playing, which were
associated with ungodly aristocrats and immoral living. Reading or writing "light" books also
fell into this category. Puritan minds poured their tremendous energies into nonfiction and
pious genres: poetry, sermons, theological tracts, and histories. Their intimate diaries and
meditations record the rich inner lives of this introspective and intense people.
Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672)
The first published book of poems by an American was also the first American book to be
published by a woman -- Anne Bradstreet. It is not surprising that the book was published in
England, given the lack of printing presses in the early years of the first American colonies.
Born and educated in England, Anne Bradstreet was the daughter of an earl's estate
manager. She emigrated with her family when she was 18. Her husband eventually became
governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which later grew into the great city of Boston.
She preferred her long, religious poems on conventional subjects such as the seasons, but
contemporary readers most enjoy the witty poems on subjects from daily life and her warm
and loving poems to her husband and children. She was inspired by English metaphysical
poetry, and her book The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) shows the
influence of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and other English poets as well. She often uses
elaborate conceits or extended metaphors. "To My Dear and Loving Husband" (1678) uses
the oriental imagery, love theme, and idea of comparison popular in Europe at the time, but
gives these a pious meaning at the poem's conclusion:
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let s so persevere
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
Edward Taylor (c. 1644-1729)
Like Anne Bradstreet, and, in fact, all of New England's first writers, the intense, brilliant poet
and minister Edward Taylor was born in England. The son of a yeoman farmer -- an
independent farmer who owned his own land -- Taylor was a teacher who sailed to New
England in 1668 rather than take an oath of loyalty to the Church of England. He studied at
Harvard College, and, like most Harvard-trained ministers, he knew Greek, Latin, and
Hebrew. A selfless and pious man, Taylor acted as a missionary to the settlers when he
accepted his lifelong job as a minister in the frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts, 160
kilometers into the thickly forested, wild interior. Taylor was the best-educated man in the
area, and he put his knowledge to use, working as the town minister, doctor, and civic
leader.
Modest, pious, and hard-working, Taylor never published his poetry, which was discovered
only in the 1930s. He would, no doubt, have seen his work's discovery as divine providence;
today's readers should be grateful to have his poems -- the finest examples of 17th-century
poetry in North America.
Taylor wrote a variety of verse: funeral elegies, lyrics, a medieval "debate," and a 500-page
Metrical History of Christianity (mainly a history of martyrs). His best works, according to
modern critics, are the series of short Preparatory Meditations.
Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705)
Michael Wigglesworth, like Taylor an English-born, Harvard-educated Puritan minister who
practiced medicine, is the third New England colonial poet of note. He continues the Puritan
themes in his best-known work, The Day of Doom (1662). A long narrative that often falls
into doggerel, this terrifying popularization of Calvinistic doctrine was the most popular poem
of the colonial period. This first American best-seller is an appalling portrait of damnation to
hell in ballad meter.
It is terrible poetry -- but everybody loved it. It fused the fascination of a horror story with
the authority of John Calvin. For more than two centuries, people memorized this long,
dreadful monument to religious terror; children proudly recited it, and elders quoted it in
everyday speech. It is not such a leap from the terrible punishments of this poem to the
ghastly self-inflicted wound of Nathaniel Hawthorne's guilty Puritan minister, Arthur
Dimmesdale, in The Scarlet Letter (1850) or Herman Melville's crippled Captain Ahab, a New
England Faust whose quest for forbidden knowledge sinks the ship of American humanity in
Moby-Dick (1851). (Moby-Dick was the favorite novel of 20th-century American novelist
William Faulkner, whose profound and disturbing works suggest that the dark, metaphysical
vision of Protestant America has not yet been exhausted.)
Like most colonial literature, the poems of early New England imitate the form and technique
of the mother country, though the religious passion and frequent biblical references, as well
as the new setting, give New England writing a special identity. Isolated New World writers
also lived before the advent of rapid transportation and electronic communications. As a
result, colonial writers were imitating writing that was already out of date in England. Thus,
Edward Taylor, the best American poet of his day, wrote metaphysical poetry after it had
become unfashionable in England. At times, as in Taylor's poetry, rich works of striking
originality grew out of colonial isolation.
Colonial writers often seemed ignorant of such great English authors as Ben Jonson. Some
colonial writers rejected English poets who belonged to a different sect as well, thereby
cutting themselves off from the finest lyric and dramatic models the English language had
produced. In addition, many colonials remained ignorant due to the lack of books.
The great model of writing, belief, and conduct was the Bible, in an authorized English
translation that was already outdated when it came out. The age of the Bible, so much older
than the Roman church, made it authoritative to Puritan eyes.
New England Puritans clung to the tales of the Jews in the Old Testament, believing that
they, like the Jews, were persecuted for their faith, that they knew the one true God, and
that they were the chosen elect who would establish the New Jerusalem -- a heaven on
Earth. The Puritans were aware of the parallels between the ancient Jews of the Old
Testament and themselves. Moses led the Israelites out of captivity from Egypt, parted the
Red Sea through God's miraculous assistance so that his people could escape, and received
the divine law in the form of the Ten Commandments. Like Moses, Puritan leaders felt they
were rescuing their people from spiritual corruption in England, passing miraculously over a
wild sea with God's aid, and fashioning new laws and new forms of government after God's
wishes.
Colonial worlds tend to be archaic, and New England certainly was no exception. New
England Puritans were archaic by choice, conviction, and circumstance.
Samuel Sewall (1652-1730)
Easier to read than the highly religious poetry full of Biblical references are the historical and
secular accounts that recount real events using lively details. Governor John Winthrop's
Journal (1790) provides the best information on the early Massachusetts Bay Colony and
Puritan political theory.
Samuel Sewall's Diary, which records the years 1674 to 1729, is lively and engaging. Sewall
fits the pattern of early New England writers we have seen in Bradford and Taylor. Born in
England, Sewall was brought to the colonies at an early age. He made his home in the
Boston area, where he graduated from Harvard, and made a career of legal, administrative,
and religious work.
Sewall was born late enough to see the change from the early, strict religious life of the
Puritans to the later, more worldly Yankee period of mercantile wealth in the New England
colonies; his Diary, which is often compared to Samuel Pepys's English diary of the same
period, inadvertently records the transition.
Like Pepys's diary, Sewall's is a minute record of his daily life, reflecting his interest in living
piously and well. He notes little purchases of sweets for a woman he was courting, and their
disagreements over whether he should affect aristocratic and expensive ways such as
wearing a wig and using a coach.
Mary Rowlandson (c.1635-c.1678)
The earliest woman prose writer of note is Mary Rowlandson, a minister's wife who gives a
clear, moving account of her 11-week captivity by Indians during an Indian massacre in
1676. The book undoubtedly fanned the flame of anti-Indian sentiment, as did John
Williams's The Redeemed Captive (1707), describing his two years in captivity by French and
Indians after a massacre. Such writings as women produced are usually domestic accounts
requiring no special education. It may be argued that women's literature benefits from its
homey realism and common-sense wit; certainly works like Sarah Kemble Knight's lively
Journal (published posthumously in 1825) of a daring solo trip in 1704 from Boston to New
York and back escapes the baroque complexity of much Puritan writing.
Cotton Mather (1663-1728)
No account of New England colonial literature would be complete without mentioning Cotton
Mather, the master pedant. The third in the four-generation Mather dynasty of Massachusetts
Bay, he wrote at length of New England in over 500 books and pamphlets. Mather's 1702
Magnalia Christi Americana (Ecclesiastical History of New England), his most ambitious work,
exhaustively chronicles the settlement of New England through a series of biographies. The
huge book presents the holy Puritan errand into the wilderness to establish God s kingdom;
its structure is a narrative progression of representative American "Saints' Lives." His zeal
somewhat redeems his pompousness: "I write the wonders of the Christian religion, flying
from the deprivations of Europe to the American strand."
Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683)
As the 1600s wore on into the 1700s, religious dogmatism gradually dwindled, despite
sporadic, harsh Puritan efforts to stem the tide of tolerance. The minister Roger Williams
suffered for his own views on religion. An English-born son of a tailor, he was banished from
Massachusetts in the middle of New England's ferocious winter in 1635. Secretly warned by
Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts, he survived only by living with Indians; in 1636,
he established a new colony at Rhode Island that would welcome persons of different
religions.
A graduate of Cambridge University (England), he retained sympathy for working people
and diverse views. His ideas were ahead of his time. He was an early critic of imperialism,
insisting that European kings had no right to grant land charters because American land
belonged to the Indians. Williams also believed in the separation between church and state
-- still a fundamental principle in America today. He held that the law courts should not have
the power to punish people for religious reasons -- a stand that undermined the strict New
England theocracies. A believer in equality and democracy, he was a lifelong friend of the
Indians. Williams's numerous books include one of the first phrase books of Indian
languages, A Key Into the Languages of America (1643). The book also is an embryonic
ethnography, giving bold descriptions of Indian life based on the time he had lived among
the tribes. Each chapter is devoted to one topic -- for example, eating and mealtime. Indian
words and phrases pertaining to this topic are mixed with comments, anecdotes, and a
concluding poem. The end of the first chapter reads:
If nature's sons, both wild and tame,
Humane and courteous be,
How ill becomes it sons of God
To want humanity.
In the chapter on words about entertainment, he comments that "it is a strange truth that a
man shall generally find more free entertainment and refreshing among these barbarians,
than amongst thousands that call themselves Christians."
Williams's life is uniquely inspiring. On a visit to England during the bloody Civil War there,
he drew upon his survival in frigid New England to organize firewood deliveries to the poor of
London during the winter, after their supply of coal had been cut off. He wrote lively
defenses of religious toleration not only for different Christian sects, but also for
non-Christians. "It is the will and command of God, that...a permission of the most Paganish,
Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men, in all
nations...," he wrote in The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644).
The intercultural experience of living among gracious and humane Indians undoubtedly
accounts for much of his wisdom.
Influence was two-way in the colonies. For example, John Eliot translated the Bible into
Narragansett. Some Indians converted to Christianity. Even today, the Native American
church is a mixture of Christianity and Indian traditional belief.
The spirit of toleration and religious freedom that gradually grew in the American colonies
was first established in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, home of the Quakers. The humane
and tolerant Quakers, or "Friends," as they were known, believed in the sacredness of the
individual conscience as the fountainhead of social order and morality. The fundamental
Quaker belief in universal love and brotherhood made them deeply democratic and opposed
to dogmatic religious authority. Driven out of strict Massachusetts, which feared their
influence, they established a very successful colony, Pennsylvania, under William Penn in
1681.
John Woolman (1720-1772)
The best-known Quaker work is the long Journal (1774) of John Woolman, documenting his
inner life in a pure, heartfelt style of great sweetness that has drawn praise from many
American and English writers. This remarkable man left his comfortable home in town to
sojourn with the Indians in the wild interior because he thought he might learn from them
and share their ideas. He writes simply of his desire to "feel and understand their life, and
the Spirit they live in." Woolman's justice-loving spirit naturally turns to social criticism: "I
perceived that many white People do often sell Rum to the Indians, which, I believe, is a
great Evil."
Woolman was also one of the first antislavery writers, publishing two essays, "Some
Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes," in 1754 and 1762. An ardent humanitarian, he
followed a path of "passive obedience" to authorities and laws he found unjust, prefiguring
Henry David Thoreau's celebrated essay, "Civil Disobedience" (1849), by generations.
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
The antithesis of John Woolman is Jonathan Edwards, who was born only 17 years before the
Quaker notable. Woolman had little formal schooling; Edwards was highly educated.
Woolman followed his inner light; Edwards was devoted to the law and authority. Both men
were fine writers, but they reveal opposite poles of the colonial religious experience.
Edwards was molded by his extreme sense of duty and by the rigid Puritan environment,
which conspired to make him defend strict and gloomy Calvinism from the forces of
liberalism springing up around him. He is best known for his frightening, powerful sermon,
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741):
[I]f God should let you go, you would immediately sink, and sinfully descend, and plunge
into the bottomless gulf....The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a
spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked....he
looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the bottomless gulf.
Edwards's sermons had enormous impact, sending whole congregations into hysterical fits of
weeping. In the long run, though, their grotesque harshness alienated people from the
Calvinism that Edwards valiantly defended. Edwards's dogmatic, medieval sermons no
longer fit the experiences of relatively peaceful, prosperous 18th-century colonists. After
Edwards, fresh, liberal currents of tolerance gathered force.
LITERATURE IN THE SOUTHERN AND MIDDLE COLONIES
Pre-revolutionary southern literature was aristocratic and secular, reflecting the dominant
social and economic systems of the southern plantations. Early English immigrants were
drawn to the southern colonies because of economic opportunity rather than religious
freedom.
Although many southerners were poor farmers or tradespeople living not much better than
slaves, the southern literate upper class was shaped by the classical, Old World ideal of a
noble landed gentry made possible by slavery. The institution released wealthy southern
whites from manual labor, afforded them leisure, and made the dream of an aristocratic life
in the American wilderness possible. The Puritan emphasis on hard work, education and
earnestness was rare -- instead we hear of such pleasures as horseback riding and hunting.
The church was the focus of a genteel social life, not a forum for minute examinations of
conscience.
William Byrd (1674-1744)
Southern culture naturally revolved around the ideal of the gentleman. A Renaissance man
equally good at managing a farm and reading classical Greek, he had the power of a feudal
lord.
William Byrd describes the gracious way of life at his plantation, Westover, in his famous
letter of 1726 to his English friend Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery:
Besides the advantages of pure air, we abound in all kinds of provisions without expense (I
mean we who have plantations). I have a large family of my own, and my doors are open to
everybody, yet I have no bills to pay, and half-a-crown will rest undisturbed in my pockets
for many moons altogether.
Like one of the patriarchs, I have my flock and herds, my bondmen and bondwomen, and
every sort of trade amongst my own servants, so that I live in a kind of independence on
everyone but Providence...
William Byrd epitomizes the spirit of the southern colonial gentry. The heir to 1,040 hectares,
which he enlarged to 7,160 hectares, he was a merchant, trader, and planter. His library of
3,600 books was the largest in the South. He was born with a lively intelligence that his
father augmented by sending him to excellent schools in England and Holland. He visited the
French Court, became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was friendly with some of the
leading English writers of his day, particularly William Wycherley and William Congreve. His
London diaries are the opposite of those of the New England Puritans, full of fancy dinners,
glittering parties, and womanizing, with little introspective soul-searching.
Byrd is best known today for his lively History of the Dividing Line, a diary of a 1729 trip of
some weeks and 960 kilometers into the interior to survey the line dividing the neighboring
colonies of Virginia and North Carolina. The quick impressions that vast wilderness, Indians,
half-savage whites, wild beasts, and every sort of difficulty made on this civilized gentleman
form a uniquely American and very southern book. He ridicules the first Virginia colonists,
"about a hundred men, most of them reprobates of good families," and jokes that at
Jamestown, "like true Englishmen, they built a church that cost no more than fifty pounds,
and a tavern that cost five hundred." Byrd's writings are fine examples of the keen interest
Southerners took in the material world: the land, Indians, plants, animals, and settlers.
Robert Beverley (c. 1673-1722)
Robert Beverley, another wealthy planter and author of The History and Present State of
Virginia (1705, 1722) records the history of the Virginia colony in a humane and vigorous
style. Like Byrd, he admired the Indians and remarked on the strange European
superstitions about Virginia -- for example, the belief "that the country turns all people black
who go there." He noted the great hospitality of southerners, a trait maintained today.
Humorous satire -- a literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony,
derision, or wit -- appears frequently in the colonial South. A group of irritated settlers
lampooned Georgia's philanthropic founder, General James Oglethorpe, in a tract entitled A
True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia (1741). They pretended to praise him
for keeping them so poor and overworked that they had to develop "the valuable virtue of
humility" and shun "the anxieties of any further ambition."
The rowdy, satirical poem "The Sotweed Factor" satirizes the colony of Maryland, where the
author, an Englishman named Ebenezer Cook, had unsuccessfully tried his hand as a
tobacco merchant. Cook exposed the crude ways of the colony with high-spirited humor, and
accused the colonists of cheating him. The poem concludes with an exaggerated curse: "May
wrath divine then lay those regions waste / Where no man's faithful nor a woman chaste."
In general, the colonial South may fairly be linked with a light, worldly, informative, and
realistic literary tradition. Imitative of English literary fashions, the southerners attained
imaginative heights in witty, precise observations of distinctive New World conditions.
Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) (c. 1745-c. 1797)
Important black writers like Olaudah Equiano and Jupiter Hammon emerged during the
colonial period. Equiano, an Ibo from Niger (West Africa), was the first black in America to
write an autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). In the book -- an early example of the slave narrative
genre -- Equiano gives an account of his native land and the horrors and cruelties of his
captivity and enslavement in the West Indies. Equiano, who converted to Christianity,
movingly laments his cruel "un-Christian" treatment by Christians -- a sentiment many
African-Americans would voice in centuries to come.
Jupiter Hammon (c. 1720-c. 1800)
The black American poet Jupiter Hammon, a slave on Long Island, New York, is remembered
for his religious poems as well as for An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York
(1787), in which he advocated freeing children of slaves instead of condemning them to
hereditary slavery. His poem "An Evening Thought" was the first poem published by a black
male in America.
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1585-1776
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1776-1820
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1820-1860: Poetry
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1820-1860: Fiction
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1860-1914
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1914-1945
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1945-1990: Poetry
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1945-1990: Prose
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1990-Modern: Poetry
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1990-Modern: Prose
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Glossary
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