Puritans ManifestDestiny

Puritans and Manifest Destiny p. 1

The Legacy of Puritanism

Emory Elliott

University Professor of University of California,

National Humanities Center

Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to trace the effects of seventeenth-century New England Puritanism

upon the development of the United States of America. Many scholars have argued that various

elements of Puritanism persisted in the culture and society of the United States long after the

New England Puritanism discussed in the following pages was recognizable. However, many of

the verbal formulations that the early Congregational and Presbyterian clergy devised as ways to

imagine themselves as a special people on a sacred errand into the wilderness of a New World

have been sustained in the social, political, economic, and religious thinking of Americans even

to the present. Two leading literary and cultural scholars of New England Puritanism and its

legacy, Harvard Professors Perry Miller in the 1940s and 50s and, more recently, Sacvan

Bercovitch, the studied the rhetorical strategies of the New England Puritans and demonstrated

the remarkable extent to which the leaders and clergy created a rich American Christian

mythology to describe their Providential role as the new Chosen People in world history. Passed

down through generations to our own time, many assumptions regarding Gods promises to his chosen American People have persisted through the American Revolution, the Civil War, and all

periods of crisis down to our own time. Still visible in much religious and political rhetoric in

United States are versions of the grand narrative of the Reverend Cotton Mathers prose epic, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), where he proclaims: I WRITE the Wonders of the CHRISTIAN RELIGION, flying from the Deprivation of Europe, to the American Strand. This vision of a Christian American utopia was first expressed by John Winthrop in his writings in the

1630s and remains alive in many religious and political forms in the United States today. [For

more on the Puritans, see: Puritanism and Predestination.]

Seventeenth-Century Puritan New England

John Winthrop: In 1620, when William Bradford and his small colony of one-hundred and three

Protestant separatists, later known as the Pilgrims arrived in New England to found Plymouth

Plantation [see American Beginnings: 14921690], they were seeking refuge from persecution in Europe. After severe hardships during their first few years, the community of survivors became

so successful that beginning in 1630 John Winthrop led thirty thousand more to establish the

Massachusetts Bay Colony in what became Boston. With Winthrop as Governor, the Puritans, as

they were called by their enemies, established a government and churches and initially

negotiated with the local tribes for land; later they would decide that God had intended for the

land to be freely taken by the English. Winthrop thought of himself as creating a Christian utopia

where they could practice their religion in peace with each congregation having its own elected

minister and its own covenant with God. Because Winthrop and most of his fellow Puritans had

previously experienced a religious conversion experience, they were able to become church

members, vote, and own property. Their form of government had elected leaders such as

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Winthrop himself who made decisions with the advice of magistrates and the clergy. Some

scholars have called this form of government a theocracy.

To understand the Puritans and the nature of their society, it is necessary to grasp some of the

theological principles of Calvinism. As a prominent theologian, John Calvin adhered to a

dualistic, either/or logic, and believed that every person was born sinful and depraved since they

have inherit Original Sin from Adam and Eve. He reasoned that since God has infinite power and

knowledge He knows everything that has ever occurred in the universe and everything that will

occur. Thus, since God knows what every human on earth has done and will do, He already

knows who is predestined to receive His grace, have a conversion experience, and spend eternity

in heaven. No person can change what is predestined so free will plays no role in the process of

salvation. The clergy advised their church members that they should pray, study the Bible, and

hope to receive grace, but they also must accept that if an individual is not predestined to be

saved, there is nothing that he or she can do to save themselves. When a person receives grace,

he or she is quiet aware of the powerful experience, and a congregation is made up of those

joyful converted souls whom they call saints. Many may have lived very virtuous lives, but if

they do not experience grace and conversion, they will not be saved. While a large percentage of

the first arrivals were saints, many of their children were not.

To be sure that the church leaders were not fooled into admitting hypocrites who give false

testimony of their conversion, the clergy required applicants for membership to give a detailed

personal narrative of their conversion experience before the congregation and answer questions.

The clergy had list of specific elements of narratives of conversion experience that they expected

to hear, and when the candidates narrative did not adhere to the models, they were denied membership. Because many who did not experience grace became discouraged, the clergy tried

to find ways to encourage good behavior even as they knew that only the few were predestined

for salvation. This problem of controlling the disgruntled and unconverted produced many

problems for the colony.

Although most of those who migrated to America in 1630 shared a common Calvinist theology

and the experience of having been persecuted in England for their faith, there was by no means

unanimity regarding how they would practice their religion. Each congregation was autonomous

and followed the rules of its own written covenant, and each minister had his own ideas on how

to apply the various doctrines of Calvinism. As the colony grew, increasing numbers did not

embrace Calvinism at all or even Christianity. Different dissenting groups and sects arose

including Quakers, Anabaptists, Millenarians, Baptists, Familists, Enthusiasts, and Antinomians.

The Congregationalists sought to purge these other groups from the colony, and they agreed with

Rev. Thomas Shepard that the spreading of the contagion of corrupt opinions could destroy the colony. Such problems with religious diversity only increased with time.

[]

In the two years leading up to the American Revolution, [see Religion and the American

Revolution] in spite of British abuses such as the Stamp Act, Boston Massacre, and the Boston

Tea Party, the Protestant clergy played a key role in arousing a population in which many were



uncertain about going a war with England. When Parliament passed the Port bill, several

clergymen held a traditional Puritan fast day and preached jeremiads invoking biblical images of

the British as a tool of Satan who has unleashed King George, the great Whore of Babylon, to ride her great red dragon upon America. Of this event, Thomas Jefferson declared: This day of fasting and humiliation was like a shock of electricity throughout the colonies, placing

every man erect. John Adams asked Abigail to urge their local ministers to preach similar jeremiads. After the war, Tories like Peter Oliver and Thomas Hutchinson attributed the success

of the Revolution to the black regiment of the clergy. In the 1770s and 1780s, the vision of the sacred destiny depicted in the Puritan idiom became part of the political tracts and speeches

during and after the war and even in the writing of Thomas Paine. During the Civil War in the

nineteenth century, clergy on both sides employed the jeremiad again to inspire support for their

cause. In fact, in every war in which the United States has been involved, sermons and speeches

about Americas manifest destiny and sacred errand and heritage have been central to the discourses of the war.

For over two-hundred years, in State of the Union addresses and Fourth of July orations,

American Presidents have preached similar jeremiads. They follow familiar jeremiad formula:

we must beware of enemies who plot to destroy us; we must acknowledge the gap between our

ideals and current realities; and we must reject corruption, greed, and selfishness, and other sins;

and finally, we must work together to restore our superiority among the worlds nations. With God on our side, we shall continue the American Dream and fulfill our sacred Manifest Destiny.

Sacvan Bercovitch also argues, as did Max Weber in the nineteenth-century, that the emphasis

within Puritan society upon working hard in ones earthly calling while seeking spiritual salvation functions well with the spirit of capitalism. From early on, the Puritans had difficulty

keeping Gods grace and business profits separated. Those who appeared to be genuinely pious seemed to be the same people who grew wealthy. One of Samuel Willards sermons entitled Heavenly Merchandize; or the Purchasing of TRUTH Recommended and the Selling of it Diswaded was aimed to appeal to the religious pragmatism of his parishioners, members of what was known as the merchants church. While the Puritans never read Weber or Bercovitch and would have difficulty understanding their arguments, their behavior reflected an unconscious

recognition of the ways that the spiritual calling and the material calling, as they called them,

could yield earthy and heavenly rewards at the same time.

In the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, the jeremiad has persisted because of its continued effectiveness in creating mythic imagery that inspires ideal and motivates action. In his I Have a Dream Speech, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. depicted the United States as a great country with strong religious traditions that had gone astray. He called for a return to the original ideals

of social equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and he urged a reassertion of the

American Dream of freedom and equality for all men and women. Many American writers of the

last hundred years adopted the jeremiad pattern to compose such works as The Great Gatsby and

to examine the failures of the nation, symbolized in that novel by the 1919 Chicago Black Sox

scandal in baseball. A list of American novels and plays from Melville to Morrison that follow

the jeremiad form would be very long. Since the fall of the World Trade Center, a host of non-

fiction books have appeared that critique the failures in American society that led to the disaster

and seek answers for restoring the country to an earlier stability and security. Many books on the



environment also follow the formula of failure, blame, reform, and projections of a future that

fulfill the original goals and ideals.

So powerful and enduring are these Puritan influences in American culture that they have

become part of American identity. Many people in other countries identify American as puritans,

and in spite of the high percentage of the population of the United States that has come from

abroad, many of them embrace the some of the puritan values such as long hours of hard work,

few vacation and days off, pride in not missing work, and they pass these values onto their

children. As the Puritan Founders understood, the meaning of America is a promise always

remaining to be fulfilled, and whether it was the promise of religious freedom or of economic

opportunity, it was a dream that made the dangers of the Atlantic and an unknown wilderness

worth risking. While works of American literature may often lament the failure of the American

dream and portions of the population may at times become disillusioned with its false promises,

parents, especially of recent immigrants, continue to teach their children to have faith in the

possibilities, to work hard, and to remain optimistic about the future because the dream may be

fulfilled for them. As long as such belief persists, the puritan rituals of national repentance,

reawakening, and renewal will continue.

The Religious Origins of Manifest Destiny

Donald M. Scott Professor of History Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York National Humanities Center

In 1845, an unsigned article in a popular American journal, a long standing Jacksonian publication, the Democratic Review, issued an unmistakable call for American expansionism. Focusing mainly on bringing the Republic of Texas into the union, it declared that expansion represented the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions. Thus a powerful American slogan was born. Manifest Destiny became first and foremost a call and justification for an American form of imperialism, and neatly summarized the goals of the Mexican War. It claimed that America had a destiny, manifest, i.e., self-evident, from God to occupy the North American continent south of Canada (it also claimed the right to the Oregon territory including the Canadian portion). Manifest Destiny was also clearly a racial doctrine of white supremacy that granted no native American or

nonwhite claims to any permanent possession of the lands on the North American continent and justified white American expropriation of Indian lands. (Manifest Destiny was also a key slogan deployed in the United States imperial ventures in the 1990s and early years of the twentieth century that led to U.S. possession or control of Hawaii and the Philippine Islands.)

But Manifest Destiny was not simply a cloak for American imperialism and a justification for Americas territorial ambitions. It also was firmly anchored in a long standing and deep sense of a special and unique American Destiny, the belief that in the words of historian Conrad Cherry, America is a nation called to a special destiny by God. The notion that there was some providential purpose to the European discovery and eventual conquest of the land masses discovered by Christopher Columbus was present from the beginning. Both the Spanish and the



French monarchs authorized and financed exploration of the New World because, among other

things, they considered it their divinely appointed mission to spread Christianity to the New World by converting the natives to Christianity. Coming later to the venture, the British and especially the New England Puritans carried with them a demanding sense of Providential purpose.

John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, gave the clearest and most far-reaching statement of the idea that God had charged the English settlers in New England with a special and unique Providential mission. On Boarde the Arrabella, on the Attlantick Ocean, Anno 1630, Winthrop delivered the blueprint for what Perry Miller has dubbed an errand into the wilderness which set the framework for most of the later versions of the idea that America had been providentially chosen for a special destiny. Winthrop delivered his lay sermon just before he and his fellow passengers disembarked on the shore of Boston harbor, the place, Winthrop proposed, to which God had called them to build up a model Bible commonwealth for Protestants in England and elsewhere to emulate. Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into Covenant with him for this work, we have taken out a commission, he declared, adding if the Lord shall please to hear us and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath he ratified this Covenant and sealed our Commission and will expect a strict performance of the Articles contained in it. He went on to specify more full what fidelity to this commission entailed: the people of New England must follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others necessities. But it is near the close of the speech that he coined the phrase that has been invoked again and again (most recently by President Ronald Reagan) to express the idea of Americas providential uniqueness and destiny. If we are faithful to our mission, we shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when tens of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and a glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the lord make it like New England, for we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us.

In the decades following Winthrops speech most New England divines preached less about New Englands divine mission, than issue deep, lamentsJeremiads, subsequent historians have called themabout how far New Englanders had fallen from fulfilling the requirements of their Covenant with God and how all the woes and turmoil that had befallen themPrince Phillips war, the loss of New Englands charter, the witchcraft phenomenon, droughts and dreadful winters, etc.were the signs and result of Gods wrath over their failings. However, in the midst of what subsequently came to be referred to as the Great Awakening (but at the time was considered an extra-ordinary outpouring of Gods saving grace) that spread across New England and the other British colonies in the 1740s, the idea that God had chosen America for a special destiny was resurrected in a new form. In the midst of the Awakening, the great New England theologian and revivalist, Jonathan Edwards wrote that the latter day glory in short, the Millennium, the end times that would bring the second coming of Christ to earth and spread of the King of God across the world, would begin in America. It is not likely that this work of Gods spirit [the revivals] so extraordinary and wonderful, Edwards asserted, is the dawning, or at least a prelude of that glorious work of God, so often foretold in scripture, which in the progress and issue of it, shall renew the world of mankind.



Leading preachers of the Second Great Awakening that swept across the United States over much of the first half of the nineteenth century, such as Lyman Beecher (father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher) and Charles Grandison Finney, reasserted the claim that America would be the site of the millennium and that the Awakening was its sure sign. They, however, gave their idea of the millennium a particular American twist. Just as Winthrop tied the idea of New Englands

providential mission to the character of the Christian commonwealth they were charged to establish, so too did millennialists like Beecher describe the society that would bring forth the millennium as the American republic, thus conjoining the coming of the millennium with the spread and triumph of American liberty and democracy. In his 1832 tract, The Plea for the West, Beecher stated that at first he had thought Edwards prediction chimerical, but now thought that all providential developments since, and all the existing signs of the times, lend corroboration to it. But if it is by the march of revolution and civil liberty, that the way of the Lord is to be prepared, where shall the central energy be found, and from what nation shall the renovating power go forth? Beechers answer was clear: this nation is, in the providence of God, destined to lead the way in the moral and political emancipation of the world. The relation between God and nation, in this millennialist formulation, is both subtle and somewhat ambiguous. The fusion between Gods will and the nations democratic character gives divine sanction to the United States secular arrangements of liberty and democracy. At the same time, it makes the nation, itself, an instrument in the coming of the millennium. Moreover, especially in situations of conflict, the claim that God was on ones side often involved demonizing the enemy. For Beecher, the demonic enemy or other was a Roman Catholic conspiracy to spread Romanism across the American west.

It was the Mormons, however, who gave the fullest expression to the idea of America as the site of the millennium. The prophesies and Book of Mormon delivered to Joseph Smith and his subsequent organization of the Mormon Church marked the beginning of the end times as the formal name of the new religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, makes unmistakably clear. After violent persecution in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, Brigham Young led the Mormons into the wilderness of Utah and there established a new city upon a hill, a new Zion which as Conrad Cherry put it was the Holy City in the wilderness [that] was for Young the gathering place for the Saints from which they would radiate influences that would turn the entire American continent, and eventually the world into Gods Zion.

The idea that God had chosen the British colonies for a special destiny received a major reformulation with the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States as a new and unique, independent nation, a Novo Ordo Seclaruma new secular order. The clergy, especially the Calvinistic New England clergy, was very much a Patriot clergy that probably played a greater role in mobilizing support for the revolution than the innumerable anti-British pamphlets produced between 1765 and 1776. For the most part, their advocacy of the patriot cause was cast in familiar form of the Jeremiad: sermons insisted that God had visited the injustices and tyrannies Parliament and Crown employed to reduce the colonists to slavery, because of the awful sinfulness into which they had fallen. God required repentance and a new fidelity to the Sacred Cause of Liberty. By 1789, with the adoption of the Constitution and the inauguration of George Washington as president, the new nation itself was invested with a special meaning and mission. Americans did not consider their new nation to be simply another nation among nations, but a providentially blessed entity charged to develop and maintain itself as the beacon of liberty and democracy to the world.



As is well known, not only was the United States remarkably diverse religiously, its new Constitution, with the first amendment of the Bill of Rights, also established a clear separation of church and state, expressly forbidding the institution of an established Church. It was formally a secular nationthough at the same time a deeply religious societysustained by Divine will, whose citizens were expected to subscribe to its founding principals with religious like devotion. In effect, what emerged was a sacralized notion of the new nation and the development of what various scholars have termed a powerful Civil Religion, a particular form of cultural nationalism to which all true

Americans, whether native or immigrant born and whatever their personal religious beliefs and affiliations, were expected to adhere. In this sense the United States can be considered a creedal society, unified less by geographical boundaries which continually shifted, and more by a set of specified doctrines inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, to which all citizens of the nation gave their allegiance. The new democratic republic, proclaimed as unique, had been ordained by God and endowed with a special mission to be the new city upon a hill to shine the beacon of liberty upon the worldand, at times if deemed necessary, to spread its form of democracy by force of arms to other parts of the world. Quickly were the revolutionary leaders, especially George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, elevated into Founding Fathers, and the Declaration and Constitution turned into almost sacred relics. Essential to the story, of course, was the apotheosis of the god-like Washington into an American Moses who led his people out of bondage into a land of liberty. Thus was the new nation and, to some extent, its people, chosen. While such familiar language as promised land and city upon a hill are only biblical allusions, as religious historian John Wilson has put it, the master image or figure which frames and sets their true content, is the type of Israel as Gods chosen people. Thus the apparently secularized expressions [of these phrases] have a deeper resonance which locates the origins of the American mission very precisely even when they are not explicitly elaborated.

Such are the basic outlines of the idea of Americas chosenness and providential destiny and mission that not only underlay the invocation of the nations Manifest Destiny as the rationale for the United States to extend its boundaries to the Pacific Ocean. It is also the constellation of ideas that has informed American nationalism and its actions at home and abroad to this day. As noted, it was explicitly used it to justify the Spanish American War and its accompanying imperialist goals. President Woodrow Wilson invoked it to call Americans to fight to make the world safe for democracy, as did President Franklin Roosevelt, when in World War II he rallied the American public behind the war against Fascist and Nazi Europeans and imperial Japan. It was also a mainstay of the Cold War: in fact, the phrase under God was only added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 at the height of the Cold War. The sense of American uniqueness and mission also underlay John F. Kennedys inaugural address. And President George W. Bush, considering himself to be an agent of divine will, has defended his policies in Iraq by invoking the idea that it is Americas duty and destiny to conquer terrorism and to secure democracy for Iraq and help spread it to other nations of the Middle East.

Not surprisingly, however, it remained for Abraham Lincoln to provide the most complex but nonetheless clear statement of the idea that America has a sacred duty to itself and to the world to preserve and protect liberty and democracy. In 1837, as a young man of 28, Lincoln gave an address to the Springfield, Illinois Lyceum. It was a time of great social and political turmoil. Illinois was riven with violence over the question of the abolition of slavery. In Alton, Illinois an anti-abolitionist mob recently had murdered the abolitionist editor, Elijah Lovejoy, destroyed his printing press and



burned his office and house. In this atmosphere of intense political strife, Lincoln used his Lyceum address to call his fellow Illinoisans (and Americans) to turn to the basic democratic and liberal tenets the American national creedthe American Civil Religionand embrace them and hold them as deeply as they held their private religious beliefs. Only such a common national faith, he argued, could provide the real and lasting foundation that would hold the sprawling, diverse, and conflict-ridden nation together.

During the Civil War Lincoln found these beliefs sharply challenged and at the same time gave them their most eloquent and powerful expression. Lincoln had always kept his questing and often skeptical spirituality closely guarded, but as the war ground relentlessly on, his beliefs and speeches took on not a sectarian but a deeply Old Testament tone. The cadence and words of his Gettysburg Address accentuate his message: the Union, the last best hope of earth, was fighting for the sacred cause of liberty. It is for the living, he declared, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before usthat from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last true measure of devotion . . . that this nation under God, shall have a new birth of freedom . . . and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

In his brief second inaugural address, delivered only six weeks before his assassination, Lincoln explored the relationship between American freedom and Divine Will. He knew that nations often, if not always, claimed God or the Gods for their side. So, acknowledging that neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained, Lincoln addressed the fact that both North and South invoked God as their partisan: Both read the same Bible and Pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. But he made it unmistakably clear that though he did not and could not really know Gods Will, he did know that God intended to end slavery, no matter what it took. Lincoln powerfully invoked a Jeremiad like vision of an all powerful and deeply offended God that would reign woe down upon those by peoples through whom the offense cometh. If we suppose that American slavery is one of those offences, he declared, which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, Lincoln continued, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsmans two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said, . . . so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. Here it all is: the idea that the United States represents the last best hope thatthe belief that an all powerful, not fully comprehendible God, governs the affairs of humankind, and that this God held the whole nation, not just the South, accountable for the existence of slavery in its midst, for the violation of its appointed mission. Finally, unlike most proponents of the idea that America is a nation called to a special destiny by God, he refrains from claiming God as the agent of Northern victory, even though as the second inaugural makes clear he had come to believe the Almighty was the ultimate agent of the mighty scourge of war that He had visited upon the nation for the sin of slavery.


The Great Nation of Futurity (1839) John L. O'Sullivan

[This essay appeared in the Democratic Review and presents a theme eagerly taken up in Congress in the 1840s. It reflects a religious impulse as well as a nationalist onea sense that God, the republic, and democracy alike demanded that Americans press on west, to settle and civilize, republicanize and democratize. (Johnson, A History of the American People, 1997: 371). In a newspaper editorial about the annexation of Texas in 1845, O'Sullivan, a journalist, focused this religious-nationalist impulse in the memorable phrase Manifest Destiny. In the editorial he wrote of America's "manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our multiplying millions." The term was used throughout the second half of the 19th century as justification for the acquisition of territory all the way to the Pacific Ocean and beyond, including Alaska, Hawaii, and the Phillipines.]

The American people having derived their origin from many other nations, and the

Declaration of National Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human equality, these facts demonstrate at once our disconnected position as regards any other nation; that we have, in reality, but little connection with the past history of any of them, and still less with all antiquity, its glories, or its crimes. On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only; and so far as regards the entire development of the natural rights of man, in moral, political, and national life, we may confidently assume that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity.

It is so destined, because the principle upon which a nation is organized fixes its destiny, and that of equality is perfect, is universal. It presides in all the operations of the physical world, and it is also the conscious law of the soul -- the self-evident dictates of morality, which accurately defines the duty of man to man, and consequently man's rights as man. Besides, the truthful annals of any nation furnish abundant evidence, that its happiness, its greatness, its duration, were always proportionate to the democratic equality in its system of government. . . .

What friend of human liberty, civilization, and refinement, can cast his view over the past history of the monarchies and aristocracies of antiquity, and not deplore that they ever existed? What philanthropist can contemplate the oppressions, the cruelties, and injustice inflicted by them on the masses of mankind, and not turn with moral horror from the retrospect?

America is destined for better deeds. It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battle fields, but in defence of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement. Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dupes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes. We have had patriots to defend our homes, our liberties, but no aspirants to crowns or thrones; nor have the American people ever suffered themselves to be led on by wicked ambition to depopulate the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a human being might be placed on a seat of supremacy.

We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of avoidance of nearly all their examples. The expansive future is our arena, and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts, and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past. We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly power can. We point to the everlasting truth on the first page of our national declaration, and we proclaim to the


millions of other lands, that "the gates of hell" -- the powers of aristocracy and monarchy -- "shall not prevail against it."

The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High -- the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere -- its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregation an Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling, owning no man master, but governed by God's natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood -- of "peace and good will amongst men.". . .

Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement. Equality of rights is the cynosure of our union of States, the grand exemplar of the correlative equality of individuals; and while truth sheds its effulgence, we cannot retrograde, without dissolving the one and subverting the other. We must onward to the fulfilment of our mission -- to the entire development of the principle of our organization -- freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high destiny, and in nature's eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man -- the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field. Who, then, can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity?


Samuel Clemens (AKA Mark Twain)

PLYMOUTH ROCK AND THE PILGRIMS

ADDRESS AT THE FIRST ANNUAL DINNER, N. E. SOCIETY

PHILADELPHIA, DECEMBER 22, 1881

On calling upon Mr. Clemens to make response, President Rollins said:

"This sentiment has been assigned to one who was never exactly born in New England, nor, perhaps,

were any of his ancestors. He is not technically, therefore, of New England descent. Under the painful

circumstances in which he has found himself, however, he has done the best he could -- he has had all his

children born there, and has made of himself a New England ancestor. He is a self-made man. More than

this, and better even, in cheerful, hopeful, helpful literature he is of New England ascent. To ascend there

in anything that's reasonable is difficult, for -- confidentially, with the door shut -- we all know that they

are the brightest, ablest sons of that goodly land who never leave it, and it is among and above them that

Mr. Twain has made his brilliant and permanent ascent -- become a man of mark."

I RISE to protest. I have kept still for years, but really I think there is no sufficient justification

for this sort of thing. What do you want to celebrate those people for ?-those ancestors of yours

of 1620 -- the Mayflower tribe, I mean. What do you want to celebrate them for? Your pardon:

the gentleman at my left assures me that you are not celebrating the Pilgrims themselves, but the

landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock on the 22d of December. So you are celebrating their

landing. Why, the other pretext was thin enough, but this is thinner than ever; the other was

tissue, tinfoil, fish-bladder, but this is gold-leaf. Celebrating their landing! What was there

remarkable about it, I would like to know? What can you be thinking of? Why, those Pilgrims

had been at sea three or four months. It was the very middle of winter: it was as cold as death off

Cape Cod there. Why shouldn't they come ashore? If they hadn't landed there would be some

reason for celebrating the fact. It would have been a case of monumental leatherheadedness

which the world would not willingly let die. If it had been you, gentlemen, you probably

wouldn't have landed, but you have no shadow of right to be celebrating, in your ancestors, gifts

which they did not exercise, but only transmitted. Why, to be celebrating the mere landing of the

Pilgrims -- to be trying to make out that this most natural and simple and customary procedure

was an extraordinary circumstance -- a circumstance to be amazed at, and admired, aggrandized

and glorified, at orgies like this for two hundred and sixty years -- hang it, a horse would have

known enough to land; a horse -- Pardon again; the gentleman on my right assures me that it was

not merely the landing of the Pilgrims that we are celebrating, but the Pilgrims themselves. So

we have struck an inconsistency here one says it was the landing, the other says it was the

Pilgrims. It is an inconsistency characteristic of your intractable and disputatious tribe, for you

never agree about anything but Boston. Well, then, what do you want to celebrate those Pilgrims

for? They were a mighty hard lot -- you know it. I grant you, without the slightest unwillingness,

that they were a deal more gentle and merciful and just than were the people of Europe of that

day; I grant you that they are better than their predecessors. But what of that? -- that is nothing.

People always progress. You are better than your fathers and grandfathers were (this is the first

time I have ever aimed a measureless slander at the departed, for I consider such things

improper). Yes, those among you who have not been in the penitentiary, if such there be, are

better than your fathers and grandfathers were; but is that any sufficient reason for getting up

annual dinners and celebrating you? No, by no means -- by no means. Well, I repeat, those


Pilgrims were a hard lot. They took good care of themselves, but they abolished everybody else's

ancestors. I am a border-ruffian from the State of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee by

adoption. In me, you have Missouri morals, Connecticut culture; this, gentlemen, is the

combination which makes the perfect man. But where are my ancestors? Whom shall I

celebrate? Where shall I find the raw material?

My first American ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian -- an early Indian. Your ancestors

skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. Not one drop of my blood flows in that Indian's veins

today. I stand here, lone and forlorn, without an ancestor. They skinned him! I do not object to

that, if they needed his fur; but alive, gentlemen -- alive! They skinned him alive -- and before

company! That is what rankles. Think how he must have felt; for he was a sensitive person and

easily embarrassed. If he had been a bird, it would have been all right, and no violence done to

his feelings, because he would have been considered "dressed." But he was not a bird,

gentlemen, he was a man, and probably one of the most undressed men that ever was. I ask you

to put yourselves in his place. I ask it as a favor; I ask it as a tardy act of justice; I ask it in the

interest of fidelity to the traditions of your ancestors; I ask it that the world may contemplate,

with vision unobstructed by disguising swallow-tails and white cravats, the spectacle which the

true New England Society ought to present. Cease to come to these annual orgies in this hollow

modern mockery -- the surplusage of raiment. Come in character; come in the summer grace,

come in the unadorned simplicity, come in the free and joyous costume which your sainted

ancestors provided for mine.

Later ancestors of mine were the Quakers William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, et al.

Your tribe chased them out of the country for their religion's sake; promised them death if they

came back; for your ancestors had forsaken the homes they loved, and braved the perils of the

sea, the implacable climate, and the savage wilderness, to acquire that highest and most precious

of boons, freedom for every man on this broad continent to worship according to the dictates of

his own conscience -- and they were not going to allow a lot of pestiferous Quakers to interfere

with it. Your ancestors broke forever the chains of political slavery, and gave the vote to every

man in this wide land, excluding none! -- none except those who did not belong to the orthodox

church. Your ancestors -- yes, they were a hard lot; but, nevertheless, they gave us religious

liberty to worship as they required us to worship, and political liberty to vote as the church

required; and so I the bereft one, I the forlorn one, am here to do my best to help you celebrate

them right.

The Quaker woman Elizabeth Hooton was an ancestress of mine. Your people were pretty

severe with her -- you will confess that. But, poor thing! I believe they changed her opinions

before she died, and took her into their fold; and so we have every reason to presume that when

she died she went to the same place which your ancestors went to. It is a great pity, for she was a

good woman. Roger Williams was an ancestor of mine. I don't really remember what your

people did with him. But they banished him to Rhode Island, anyway. And then, I believe,

recognizing that this was really carrying harshness to an unjustifiable extreme, they took pity on

him and burned him. They were a hard lot! All those Salem witches were ancestors of mine!

Your people made it tropical for them. Yes they did; by pressure and the gallows they made such

a clean deal with them that there hasn't been a witch and hardly a halter in our family from that

day to this, and that is one hundred and eighty-nine years. The first slave brought into New


England out of Africa by your progenitors was an ancestor of mine -- for I am of a mixed breed,

an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel. I'm not one of your sham meerschaums that you can

color in a week. No, my complexion is the patient art of eight generations. Well, in my own time,

I had acquired a lot of my kin -- by purchase, and swapping around, and one way and another --

and was getting along very well. Then, with the inborn perversity of your lineage, you got up a

war, and took them all away from me. And so, again am I bereft, again am I forlorn; no drop of

my blood flows in the veins of any living being who is marketable.

O my friends, hear me and reform! I seek your good, not mine. You have heard the speeches.

Disband these New England societies -- nurseries of a system of steadily augmenting laudation

and hosannaing, which, if persisted in uncurbed, may some day in the remote future beguile you

into prevaricating and bragging. Oh, stop, stop, while you are still temperate in your appreciation

of your ancestors! Hear me, I beseech you; get up an auction and sell Plymouth Rock! The

Pilgrims were a simple and ignorant race. They never had seen any good rocks before, or at least

any that were not watched, and so they were excusable for hopping ashore in frantic delight and

clapping an iron fence around this one. But you, gentlemen, are educated; you are enlightened;

you know that in the rich land of your nativity, opulent New England, overflowing with rocks,

this one isn't worth, at the outside, more than thirty-five cents. Therefore, sell it, before it is

injured by exposure, or at least throw it open to the patent-medicine advertisements, and let it

earn its taxes.

Yes, hear your true friend -- your only true friend -- list to his voice. Disband these societies,

hotbeds of vice, of moral decay -- perpetuators of ancestral superstition. Here on this board I see

water, I see milk, I see the wild and deadly lemonade. These are but steps upon the downward

path. Next we shall see tea, then chocolate, then coffee-hotel coffee. A few more years -- all too

few, I fear -- mark my words, we shall have cider! Gentlemen, pause ere it be too late. You are

on the broad road which leads to dissipation, physical ruin, moral decay, gory crime and the

gallows! I beseech you, I implore you, in the name of your anxious friends, in the name of your

suffering families, in the name of your impending widows and orphans, stop ere it be too late.

Disband these New England societies, renounce these soul-blistering saturnalia, cease from

varnishing the rusty reputations of your long-vanished ancestors -- the super-high-moral old iron-

clads of Cape Cod, the pious buccaneers of Plymouth Rock-go home, and try to learn to behave!

However, chaff and nonsense aside, I think I honor and appreciate your Pilgrim stock as much as

you do yourselves, perhaps; and I endorse and adopt a sentiment uttered by a grandfather of mine

once -- a man of sturdy opinions, of sincere make of mind, and not given to flattery. He said:

"People may talk as they like about that Pilgrim stock, but, after all's said and done, it would be

pretty hard to improve on those people; and, as for me, I don't mind coming out flatfooted and

saying there ain't any way to improve on them -- except having them born in Missouri!"


Puritans ManifestDestiny

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