Week Eight. Looking Back and Looking Forward. The Literature of the Late Colonial and Early Republic.

Overview:

This week, we enter both the final quarter of Early American Literature and the final month of the course.  

We are looking at the literature surrounding the founding of the United States of America, and--this week--we’ll begin to discuss the literature surrounding the British Colonies.  The reading you began two weeks ago, that is, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography laid the groundwork for understanding the literature of the founders and much about the later British colonial period.

Let’s take a moment and reflect on What You Have Learned from Reading Franklin about the Late Colonial and Early Republic periods:

1.  The British colonies brought together in the United States were very different places.  They had different currencies, different assumptions about how religion should be practiced, and even different ideas about what bread should be produced as a staple.

Remember Franklin entering Philadelphia?  He found himself unable to buy the bread he was used to buying in Boston; he ends up asking for a penny’s worth of bread, and he finds that his money will go much further in Pennsylvania--which has more extensive grain production--than it had in Boston.  He ends up with three large loaves of bread and has to give two away--all because things as common as types of bread and money worked differently in Philadelphia than in Boston.  Today, we can drive between Boston and Philadelphia in six hours, but for Franklin and other colonials moving from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the Colony of Pennsylvania took up to a week and it meant to adjusting to a very different culture.  

2.  The second lesson you can pick up from Franklin is that the colonies needed each other, and they needed some means of coming together and supporting one another.  You might remember that Franklin was responsible for producing the first plan for bringing the colonies together for common defense.  In the process, he published one of the first political cartoons in the British Colonies.  Chances are, you remember this cartoon.

Often, we associate the cartoon, “Join or Die,” with the American Revolution, but Franklin produced it twenty years prior to the Revolution.  He published the cartoon in 1757 in response to an earlier war--The French and Indian War.  The American Revolution wouldn’t begin until the early 1770s.

During the French and Indian War, each colony has its own military.  The point of the cartoon was to remind everyone from the individual colonies that, despite all our differences, we needed each other.  Individually, a superpower--like France--combined with a coalition of Native Nations might easily defeat any one colony fighting alone.  

In fact, the only way that the combination of the French and Indians were finally defeated was when Britain sent troops over to defend the British colonies, who refused--at the time--to adopt Franklin’s plan to come together for mutual defense.  From Early AMerican History, you might remember that George Washington’s first major job was in the French and Indian War.  He led a group of Virginia militia, and the Virginians were soundly defeated.  Trying to stand alone, the Colony of Virginia was not strong enough to fight an European superpower.  

Of course, those living in England resented their taxes being raised to protect far away colonies in America, and those from England lobbied Parliament to tax the colonies for defense.  Eventually, this taxation of the British American Colonies without allowing the colonists representation in Parliament became another stepping stone toward the British Colonies declaring independence and imagining their self as a nation.  

The late colonial period and early Republic were a time of change.  In less than twenty years, France would become the America’s major European allie and the superpower who helped defend the emerging United States, and Britain, who had once defended the disunited colonies against the French, would became the enemy.

3.  The social mobility demonstrated by Franklin was possible and usual only in late colonial America.  You might have noticed that Franklin began his Autobiography by saying his people (his ancestors) were all dyers, that is, craftsmen who produced dye and dyed fabric.  In England and on the Continent, a young man usually entered into the family trade.  In America, things were different, and Franklin goes from being a craftsman--a printer--to being wealthy, to being an inventor, to being a statesman.  

The key insight here is that in late colonial America there was constant demand for workers.  The economy was constantly expanding, so almost any individual could gain relative wealth, that is, if he or she had industry, a certain degree of luck, and was willing to save and work.  Here, you might hear echos of Franklin’s essay, “The Way to Wealth” and from the Autobiography.  Quite literally, Franklin used writing for others and writing about himself to share a new vision of the life of the individual--what we speak about as the American Dream, and this vision was radically different from that practiced for centuries in Europe.  These changes would make many very nervous, and they would look to the stability offered by religion to help them deal with the stress of social change the new world represented.   Others, like Franklin, embraced changes wholeheartedly, and argued even more radical changes were needed to almost every aspect of life, including religion.  Hence, Franklin will argue that the individual could use reason to form a plan to cultivate their own virtue, just as they could cultivate other paths to wealth and happiness.  

This mix of people worried about the pace of change with some wanting to speed it up and others wanting to slow it down was volatile.  Once it was accepted that it was allright for people to read, converse and think for their self, a new tradition began.  People shared reason and followed reasonable “Common Sense.”  Each needed to be convinced that radical social change was good idea, and the literature of late colonial period is one of arguments from visions of how to restore the social order of the mother country to proposing ever greater change based on reason.