Friday, March 5, 2010

Echoes

The American Puritan ideas, like being a chosen people and a "city on a hill," carried forward into later American thought.  These are just a couple of examples:

I shall need, too, the favor of the Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land, and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with his providence, and our riper years with his wisdom and power; and to whose goodness I ask you to join with me in supplications, that he will so enlighten the minds of your servants, guide their councils, and prosper their measures, that whatsoever they do, shall result in your good, and shall secure to you the peace, friendship, and approbation of all nations.

--Thomas Jefferson
"Second Inaugural Address" (Mar. 4, 1805)

And this is the Country, which the Disposer of events designs shall go forth as the cynosure of nations, to guide them to the light and blessedness of that day. To us is committed the grand, the responsible privilege, of exhibiting to the world, the beneficient influences of Christianity, when carried into every social, civil, and political institution; and, though we have, as yet, made such imperfect advances, already the light is streaming into the dark prison-house of despotic lands, while startled kings and sages, philosophers and statesmen, are watching us with that interest, which a career so illustrious, and so involving their own destiny, is calculated to excite."

--Catharine E. Beecher (sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher)
"A Treatise on Domestic Economy" (1841)

2 comments:

  1. Very interesting. Where did you come across these? Bercovitch would approve -- he sees the Puritan writing and thought influencing American culture into the nineteenth century (and beyond!). --lc

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  2. One of my courses this semester is "American Political Thought." We read a tremendous amount of primary sources, including the pieces above. The class has been invaluable as political background on the move from Puritan America to the young republic and beyond.

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