Americanism:

The Genesis of a Civil Theology

by Juergen Gebhardt

 

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg.  He is the editor of the just released final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949.  We are featuring here Chapter 4 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It will appear in nine parts. It is reproduced here with permission.

1. Monumental History

The process by which the founders' consciousness created itself a social field in the new society and the authority of an ultimate source of order was accrued to them lasted half a century. This process was accelerated because it fit seamlessly into the traditional thought patterns of New En­gland speculation on history and heroes.

 

New England historiography,¹ formally an Anglo-Saxon variant of reformation historiography, has, since the end of the seventeenth century, dealt with "the wonders of the Christian religion, flying from the depri­vations of Europe to the American strand"² and thus dealt predomi­nantly with those "godly men" who were at once founders and fathers of the New England colonies: "particularly after 1676, a theme receives literary formulation which henceforth was to be a staple of the New En­gland mind: ancestor worship. Virtually every one who migrated as an adult before 1640 was gone; in order to lay the covenant of the golden age upon their descendants. . . , the spokesmen called for such a venera­tion of progenitors as is hardly to be matched outside China."

 

An im­pressive document for this attitude was the previously mentioned Magnalia Christi Americana of Cotton Mather, who, as the grandson of John Cotton and Richard Mather and the son of Increase Mather, was a le­gitimate prophet of the Founding Fathers' fame. The Magnalia was "under the guise of history, a sustained chant to the glory of might and already misty ancestral heroes."³ And "it is a monumental piece of an­cestor veneration, full to the brim of 'Heroes worthy to have their lives written."⁴ Perry Miller saw the cause of this phenomenon in that func­tional nexus of the cult of the founders with the ongoing controversy concerning the right order, which was later to become so important for all modern societies grounded in revolution and which had been anticipated in the New England of the early eighteenth century: "Soon empha­sis upon this theme was carried to such length of abjectness. . . , that we marvel how any Protestant culture could so abnegate its Christian liberty, until we remind ourselves that the preachers were fighting tooth and nail for what they considered survivival, that these gestures were not so much humble submissions to the past as a discharge of heavy artillery against their antagonists."⁵

 

The same period saw the beginning of the outward practices of the cult of the hero: in 1729 in Salem for the first time on the American continent a centennial celebration in memory of the Founding Fathers' landing was held, and numerous sermons in Massachusetts recalled the event. Shortly thereafter, Plymouth Rock emerged as a monument to be worshiped and a symbol of the colony's founding. The intensification of outward forms of hero worship does not occur until the prelude to revo­lution.⁶ In any case, at the end of the eighteenth century a "composite ideal called the Pilgrimfathers or the Puritans"⁷ emerges; in the years when the republic was being consolidated, this model fused into a unified national symbolism by merging with the more recent small and large, as well as regional and national, heroes, and the symbolism of the Revolution. In this symbolism the heroic fathers of the first founding served as Johannine heralds of the heroes of the Revolution: "The sons of the fa­thers became fathers themselves in the course of the Revolution." The patriots' "actions possessed warrant and metaphysical validity because they were patterned on the model that had existed from time immemo­rial: they in the present were secure because they were repeating an ex­emplary action from out of the past. Yet while still invoking their fathers, the patriots were finding in their actions a creative power without ref­erence to the models from the past. They began to function as self-constituting and self-commanding figures."⁸

 

The condition for this state was the general acceptance "of proposi­tions identifying the purposes of the original settlers with the cause for which the revolution was fought"⁹—a premise we have already encoun­tered in our examination of Adams' self-understanding. Although this view found its confirmation in the traditions of most colonies, it inevi­tably led to an overwhelming influence of the New England Puritan tra­dition on the new republic's understanding of history ^I0 (which found its analogy in politics and to a lesser extent in the social order, thanks to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787).

 

In the other colonies there was no cult of the fathers and of heroes that was as lavish, William Penn in Pennsylvania excepted;¹¹ and the New England historiography, from the chronicles of the first settlers to Thomas Hutchinson's masterwork, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (1764), stood alone at the top. Subsequent historiography contributions of the Smith clan for the middle colonies, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania descended directly from New England writings. In the South, historical consciousness overstepped the threshold of articulation only in three histories of Virginia, all written between 1705 and 1750.¹²

 

This supremacy of the New England tradition of history is not acci­dental; New England historiography was the explication of the City Upon the Hill, its origin and its crisis; it was expressed in an intense intellectualism, which radiated dynamically into the social reality, and this in turn was shaped along the concept of the "New England way of life" and established a self-confident political regime. As a jeremiad, created by an awareness of crisis, New England historiography always expressed an interest in the concrete beginnings and in the founders of the New England polities, in order to renew the original substance of society through revivals.

 

Beginnings and founders were, so to speak, on the record and original in the sense of a politically and intellectually autonomously engendered society, which represents itself. Only New England could lay claim to a founding out of a spirit of separatism, outside the British empire, which one had voluntarily joined, and in the realization of an apocalyptically inspired new order (although only Plymouth—but not Massachusetts Bay—had understood itself as a separatist community). Once the self-interpretation of the Revolution had engaged in a speculation on American origins up to illuminating their significance, it necessarily had to cling to the New England tradition.¹³

 

In spite of Captain John Smith, the beginnings of Virginia were visible only in blurred outline; historiography kept to the reform policy of the Virginia Company (1619 — 1624), or the transformation of Virginia into a Crown colony (1624); it further saw Virginia closely connected with the political quarrels between Parliament and king and with the opposi­tion to Cromwell—in short, in the imperial context.

 

Thomas Jefferson and Richard Bland, like Adams, claimed their po­litical and legal privileges as Englishmen in confrontation with Parlia­ment; but they did not invoke any American fathers. They followed the Whig view by transferring the origin of rights, liberties, and self-government to the old Anglo-Saxon order, which was already corrupted by the Norman invasion and was now to be destroyed once and for all in America.¹⁴ This conception was the Whig tradition common to both En­gland and America,¹⁵ but understandably it played a lesser role in New England (Adams thought little of the transfiguration of the old Saxons¹⁶). Similar difficulties arose concerning the beginnings of the other colonies: the proprietary colonies owed their origins to a feudal institution; Geor­gia was the failed result of a philanthropic entrepreneurial spirit that aimed to empty London's debtors' prisons; and Maryland was a Catholic island in a Protestant sea.

 

Massachusetts—which offered its sister colonies a self-confident tra­dition of solid beginnings, solid founders, and an aggregate of motives for self-assertion tested over a long period of time—was both instigator and driving force of the independence movement. Furthermore, the Mas­sachusetts of 1776 was no longer the City Upon the Hill of 1630; and the structure of the cult of the hero and of historiography, formally un­changed, contained a content whose sentiments, doctrines, and attitudes were, not least as a result of the Great Awakening, already shared throughout America to such an extent that they could be accepted by the comrades-in-arms in the other colonies.

 

These concepts included the he­roic element of the "errand into the wilderness"; the English elements of traditional rights, freedoms, and self-government; and the Protestant ele­ment of the freedom of religion and conscience. Thus the New England tradition of heroes and history substantially encompassed the entire American past: the forefathers came to America as free men paying their own way, took possession of the land by their own blood and sweat, and always proved their original freedom-loving cast of mind by resistance to every imperial encroachment on their privileges and their right to self-government.¹⁷

 

The process of becoming a nation is also heralded in the project of an American history. In 1774 Ebenezer Hazard wrote, "When civil states rise into importance, even their earliest history becomes the object of speculation." Since it was therefore important to make available materi­als "to lay the foundation of a good American history," Hazard proposed a collection of important documents under the title "American State Papers."¹⁸

 

But long before Hazard could realize his plans, George Chalmers, a Tory who had returned to England as early as 1775, had composed an American history, Political Annals of the Present United Colonies (1780). All the historians of the new Republic learned from this book, and it communicated to them three basic elements of the New England tradi­tion: (i) The beginnings of the colonies, unlike those of the European nations, are known and open to historical examination; (2) Puritan New England, though no bastion of religious freedom, always marched at the head of the colonial civilizational process, and since the transfer of the charter of its Bay Colony to America, it thought of independence within or outside the Empire; (3) The Revolution began and ended as a defense of existing rights and liberties.¹⁹

 

It is true that other strata and facets asserted themselves in the historical self-understanding of the Republic; but I am here dealing for the moment merely with the recurrent dominant symbolic pattern in which the New England dovetailing of the cult of the hero and historical thought was effective. In his History of the United States (1834-1876), George Bancroft laid down this conception, which was in force well into the twentieth century. Bancroft, a student of Heeren's in Göttingen, follower of Andrew Jackson, and "high priest of American nationality,"²⁰ located the American mission of a City Upon the Hill in a universal drama written by God and applying to all man­kind, whose climax is the realization of freedom in the organization of American society.²¹

 

The American understanding of heroes and history may be summed up in Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of "monumental history." According to Nietzsche, it is motivated by faith in humanity, with the basic idea that states that "the great moments in the individual battle form a chain, a highroad for humanity through the ages, and the highest points of those vanished moments are yet great and living for men."²² And Nietzsche further articulates precisely the theme that gave rise to the New England cult of the hero and historiography: "If the man who will produce some­thing great has need of the past, he makes himself its master by means of monumental history."²³

 

But Bancroft's monumental history was sufficiently leavened with hu­manism to keep the national chosenness and apocalyptic structure from overwhelming man entirely, debasing him to the other-determined object of collective-libidinous processes, to which monumental history of the nation-state kind was only too easily inclined at the time. Bancroft's popularity, the product of a style indebted to the romantic aesthetic, cor­rected the success of such tendencies in America, which appeared in the form of Darwinian historiography of the late nineteenth century.

 

The nexus of hero and history, implied in the concept of monumental history, is expressly turned into the content of history by Emerson: "There is properly no history, only biography."²⁴ It is also preserved when, as in the democratic cult of the genius celebrated by the Jacksonians, the common man becomes the hero; this variant of hero worship already occurs in the works of Thomas Carlyle. In contrast to Europe, however, America did not furnish any speculative undertaking transcending self-interpretation, such as the work of an American Machiavelli or Carlyle. The few attempts at a theorization of this complex made use of Euro­pean categories: Emerson reproduced Carlyle; Alexander Everett fell back on Victor Cousin.²⁵ This did not change until the twentieth century, when American self-understanding became the object of examination; Dixon Wecter, Merrill D. Peterson, Seymour Martin Lipset, Wesley Frank Craven, Daniel Boorstin, all study the figure and role of the hero in America.

 

I believe that two factors are responsible for this situation. One is the understandable intellectual parochialism of the new nation at the outer­most limits of the western inhabited world; the other is the extraordinary functional significance of the cult of the hero.

 

Beyond this basic difference, Boorstin, though he ignored the New England heroic tradition and the specifically modern European cult of the hero, points out that "in America the compression of time and the extension of space transformed the whole problem." Boorstin compared the rapid exaltation of historical figures through democratic mass litera­ture at the moment of becoming a nation with the long process in which the heroes of the early European period (Achilles, Beowulf, Romulus, King Arthur) gradually changed through oral transmission into figures of a high literature written for a small upper class and eventually became a component in the national cult of the hero. But this is an unacceptable restriction of European phenomena; and correct as the observation of "chronological abridgment" and trivialization through subliterature in a completely literate society may be, it nevertheless seems to me true for all new nation states. A result of American conditions is surely the re­gional "superman," most often admixed with folkloristic comedy ele­ments, whom Boorstin also differentiates from the consciously con­structed national heroes in the manner of George Washington.²⁶

 

John Adams was not alone in harboring a lifelong mistrust of Wash­ington's "apotheosis." For the skeptics Washington was, beyond his real merits as commander in chief and statesman, exclusively the exponent and symbol of the nation; but he was not its creator. Even during the war Adams still vehemently disputed the idea that if outstanding leaders of the revolution were lost by death or corruption, the course of the Revo­lution could be changed in some way. He included Washington in his judgment, for only the people's "sentiments" were determining.²⁷

 

Washington was merely "the creature of a principle, and that principle was the union of the colonies,"²⁸ and Washington's character was to be praised only as an "exemplification of the American character."²⁹ In the same way, when Adams was president, his eulogy for Washington in 1799 recalled the greatness of this man from the aspect of an exemplary found­er's virtue, an element important to pass on to posterity. "His example is now complete, and it will teach wisdom and virtue to magistrates, citi­zens, and men, not only in the present age but in future generations as long as our history shall be read."³⁰ Death freed Washington the hero from an awkward situation. For toward the end of his life he had strayed into the tense field of partisan confrontations and had been seen by many as a tool of the Federalists. In 1798, Adams, a victim of Hamilton's po­litical tactics, had named the old general commander in chief of a de facto Federalist army, with Hamilton as inspector general. This measure had given new nourishment to the widespread fears of a military putsch, with Hamilton as dictator. But Washington's death immediately restored him to his status as pater patriae, the Cincinnatus of Mount Vernon, and the Moses of his chosen people in the New World.³¹     

[Part 2 will appear next week]

NOTES  

1. Compare Dunn, "Seventeenth Century English Historians of America," in Seven­teenth Century America, ed. J. M. Smith (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 195-225. On Ameri­can historiography, see M. Kraus, The Writing of American History (Norman, Okla., 1953); E. N. Saveth, ed., Understanding the American Past (Boston, 1954); D. D. van Tassel, Recording America's Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Stud­ies in America, 1607-1884 (Chicago, 1960); H. Wish, The American Historian (New York, 1960). For general discussions of the problem of American historical apocalypse, see C. I. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise (Urbana, Ill.); M. Eliade, "Paradis et utopie: Géogra­phie mythique et Eschatologie," in Vom Sinn der Utopie (Zurich, 1964); H. R. Niebuhr, The Kingdom of Cod in America (New York, 1959); M. Holloway, Heavens on Earth (New York, 1966); Tuveson, Redeemer Nation.

2. Miller and Johnson, eds., Puritans, I, 163.

3. P. Miller, New England Mind, II, 135; compare also Craven, Legend of the Founding Fathers, 9-20.

4. P. Miller, New England Mind, II, 189.

5. Ibid., 135.

6. Wector, Hero in America, 42.

7. Ibid.

8. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers, 46; compare P. Shaw, American Patriots and the Ritu­als of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). 9). Craven, Legend of the Founding Fathers, 3.

10. Ibid., 5; see also Colbourn, Lamp of Experience; J. T. Kerens, Providence and Pa­ triotism (Charlottesville, Va., 1978).

11. Craven, Legend of the Founding Fathers, 47-48.

12. Dunn, "Seventeenth-Century English Historians of America," in Seventeenth-Century America, ed. Smith; Craven, Legend of the Founding Fathers, 6-12, 46ff.

13. The self-consciousness of regional history rejected this tendency well into the nine­teenth century.

14. T. Jefferson, "A Summary View," in Papers, ed. J. P. Boyd (Princeton, 1950), I, 121-22, especially on the role of the "Saxon ancestors." See also Bland, Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, 7.

15. Colbourn, Lamp of Experience; B. Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revo­lution (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), I, 52ff. For a general discussion of the Saxon origins of the British constitution, see Pocock, Ancient Constitution; D. C. Douglas, English Scholars, 1660—1730 (London, 1951); S. Kliger, The Goths in England (Cambridge, Mass., 1952.); J. E. C. Hill, "Norman Yoke," in Puritanism and Revolution (New York, 1964).

16. J. Adams, Works, III, 543.

17. Craven, Legend of the Founding Fathers, 57 and passim.

18. Ebenezer Hazard to Thomas Jefferson, August 23, 1774, in Jefferson, Papers, I, 144.

19. Craven, Legend of the Founding Fathers, 60-65; Boorstin, The Americans, II, 368; F. Somkin, Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815 to 1860 (New York, 1967), 184-106.

20. Boorstin, The Americans, II, 369-73.

21. G. Bancroft, History of the United States (Boston, 1934-74), III, 4-11; G. Ban­croft, "The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race," in Literary and Historical Miscellanies (New York, 1855). Compare also H. Kohn, American Nationalism (New York, 1957), 2.8-32.; Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, especially 137ff.; Somkin, Unquiet Eagle, 68-80, 184-106.

22. F. Nietzsche, Werke, ed. K. Schlechta (Darmstadt, 1966), I, 220 (English from Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. A. Collins [New York, 1949], 13).

23. Nietzsche, Werke, 225 (English from Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History, 17).

24. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "History," in The Complete Works (Boston, 1903 — 1904), I, 8.

25. Everett, Origin and Character of the Old Parties. Compare Peterson, Jefferson Im­age, 86.

26. Boorstin, The Americans, II, 327—37, 482.

27. J. Adams, Works, VII, 281-82.

28. John Adams to Lloyd, April 24, 1815, in J. Adams, Works, X, 164.

29. John Adams to Webb, September 10, 1885, in J. Adams, Works, IX, 541.

30. Quoted in P. Smith, John Adams, II, 1022.

31. D. S. Freeman, George Washington (New York, 1948 —57); VII, 648-653; G.Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (Garden City, N.Y., 1984), 23, 31-35.