American Independence: Cr

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American Independence Crèvecoeur,Paine,
Jefferson

• American Literature
• Cecilia H.C. Liu
• 10/25/2004

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The Road to Independence

• America and the Enlightenment
• The French and Indian War 1756-1763
• Colonial Discontent
• 1768-1774

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America and the Enlightenment

• American Thinkers
• Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, 3d Pres.1801-1809)

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The French and Indian War 1756-1763

• Part of the world wide "Seven Years War".
• France vs. Britain.
• Only after Britain won did the colonists start to
  make a fuss about taxation.
• Death of Wolfe 1759

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(No Transcript)
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http//academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/core/pic
s/0253/img0026.htm
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Colonial Discontent

• Trade System/Navigation Acts
• Extent of Regulation - Benign neglect no more
• Relations with Parliament

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1768-1774

• Tea Acts
• Quebec Act
• Intolerable Acts
• Newspaper Headline The
• Stamp Act
• Paying the Exciseman

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• Crèvecoeur's life as a soldier, surveyor, farmer,
  and eventually writer and diplomat, and we will
  specifically consider the significance of his
  assumed identity as an "American farmer" in the
  context of colonial and revolutionary America.

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Crèvecoeur's "American" and the "birth" of the
United States Crèvecoeur, Letters from an
American Farmer, Letter III

1. In Letter III, what are the main contrasts
   between Europe and America, as James sees them?
   By the same token, how does he contrast the
   settled culture of middle-America with that of
   the wilderness and its "back settlers"?
2. From where does the citizen derive that freedom
   which, James says, is essential to American
   culture?

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Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer,
Letter III

1. In what ways, according to James in Letter III,
   are men "like plants" and what does he do with
   that metaphor in the subsequent Letters?
   Consider, in particular, how the citizen takes on
   characteristics of the geography he
   inhabits--Nantucket and Charlestown for example.
2. What specific contrasts does James develop, in
   Letter IX, between the culture of the
   slaveholding south, and that of his native
   Pennsylvania? http//www.hku.hk/english/courses2
   000/2089.htmtopics

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What then is the American, this new man?
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• Crèvecoeur's picture, although based on fact,
  idealizes American society in a way that excludes
  political struggle, making Crèvecoeur appear at
  once politically conservative and radically
  utopian.

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Paine

• From the very beginning of the conflict with
  England in the 1760s, the most insightful writers
  of columns, pamphlets and broadsides had moved
  well beyond the issues of taxation, legal rights,
  and abuses by English militiamen. Of much greater
  concern were questions such as the following

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Paine the rights of man

• Had America truly achieved the cohesion, and the
  independent wisdom, of a nation-state?
• What were both the benefits, and the dangers, of
  Empire and was the new nation destined to become
  imperial?
• What were the rights of man? In particular, were
  there indeed universal rights guaranteed by
  Nature, rather than being merely the transient
  expressions of this or that culture?

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Establishing the New Jerusalem

• In pursuing these issues, writers of the
  Revolutionary period completed the transformation
  of the colonies into a single, secular culture.
  It was as if the sermons and religious tracts of
  the Puritan period, with all their concern for
  establishing the New Jerusalem, had undergone
  this remarkable translation the Puritan quest
  for spiritual salvation was rewritten to mean a
  quest for liberty.

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the ideal

• The great writers of the Revolutionary period
  were concerned, like Franklin in The
  Autobiography, to find a via media, or "middle
  path" to balance reason with emotion, the rights
  of man with the needs of the state, the ideal of
  a central American government with the reality of
  thirteen distinct colonies, and the ideal of a
  literate and worldly civilization with the
  reality that 18th century America was still a
  predominantly rural and agrarian culture.

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Writings at this crucial stage

• All of these needs and potentials for balance and
  stability were on the minds of writers like
  Paine, Jefferson, and John and Abigail Adams.
• Their writings are rationalistic, and steeped in
  the tradition of Enlightenment philosophers such
  as John Locke. Yet their writings are also
  filled with passionate exclamation. Paine's
  simple, declarative sentences are nevertheless
  given over to possibilities for stylistic excess,
  when appropriate. In such tendencies of style and
  thought we begin to see the structures and the
  dimensions of American culture at this crucial
  stage.

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Paine, The Crisis, No.1

• 1. Aside from these rather more abstract,
  metaphorical reasons for Independence, covered
  above in 1, what are the concrete, practical
  reasons Paine advances on behalf of the cause, in
  both Common Sense and The Crisis?

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Paine, The Crisis, No.1

• 2. In The Crisis, Paine claims There are cases
  which cannot be overdone by language, and this is
  one. Certainly one of his goals was to ask his
  reader to let his reason and his feelings to
  determine for themselves, thus to synthesize
  intellect and passion. Now, looking back through
  his writings, ask When does
• Paine overdo the language somewhat, giving
  powerful expression of his feelings? That is,
  when and how does his style become most
  impassioned?

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Jefferson The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson

• In 1821, at the age of seventy-seven, Thomas
  Jefferson decided to "state some recollections of
  dates and facts concerning myself."
• His ancestors came to America from Wales in the
  early seventeenth century and settled in the
  Virginia colony.
• Jefferson's father, although uneducated,
  possessed a "strong mind and sound judgement" and
  raised his family in the far western frontier of
  the colony, an experience that contributed to his
  son's eventual staunch defense of individual and
  state rights.

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Jefferson The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson

• Complementing the other major autobiography of
  the period, Benjamin Franklin's, The
  Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson gives us a
  glimpse into the private life and associations of
  one of America's most influential personalities.
• Alongside Jefferson's absorbing narrative of how
  compromises were achieved at the Continental
  Congress are comments about his own health and
  day-to-day life that allow the reader to picture
  him more fully as a human being.

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Declaration of Independence

• The Declaration of Independence proposed a
  republican government founded in the collective
  rights of the people, based on their authority
  alone, and beholden to them.
• Account of a Declaration is an exploration of
  that splendid act in 1776, an act that severed
  the political ties of America from the Monarchies
  of the old world. An act that inaugurated a bold
  political experiment in the new.

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• It is in this rigorous environment that a group
  of intelligent and basically honorable men
  decided to take a stand. Though the foundation
  that they fought from was tenuous, there might
  never be a better opportunity. They would
  attempt to take a principle born of the
  Enlightenment, Natural Rights, and apply it to
  the real world.

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Phillis Wheatley America's first black poet

• Phillis Wheatley's poem, "On Being Brought
  from Africa to America" makes effective use of
  irony to drive home a point about the potential
  for "redemption." Detail how that irony works,
  noting for instance the potential for ambiguous
  meaning in the word "refined," in line 8.

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Divine providence

• Phillis Wheatley attributes to the
• operations of Divine providence all the
  blessings of her life in captivity, bondage, and
  then limited freedom.
• Wheatley also implicitly affirms the power of
  European culture by writing in the conventional
  forms of English verse (in heroic couplets, for
  example) and throughout her work she seems to
  insist on Christian orthodoxy as a key factor in
  uplifting the slave from bondage.

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• Only rarely does she express any resentment, seen
  for example in her "On Being Brought from Africa
  to America." Otherwise she pays homage to
  American institutions, and prays--naively,
  perhaps--that the Revolution will be an occasion
  for releasing all American slaves from their
  chains.

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References

• American Literature Crèvecoeur Madison
  http//www.uky.edu/AS/English/courses/online/eng25
  1/assignment12.html
• Paine http//www.uky.edu/AS/English/courses/onlin
  e/eng251/assignment11.html
• The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson
  http//libertyonline.hypermall.com/Jefferson/Autob
  iography.html
• Account of a Declaration Introduction
  http//www.leftjustified.com/leftjust/lib/sc/ht/de
  cl/home.html
• Olaudah Equiano Phillis Wheatleyhttp//www.fore
  runner.com/forerunner/X0214_Phillis_Wheatley.html
• http//earlyamerica.com/review/winter96/wheatley.h
  tml
• http//www.uky.edu/AS/English/courses/online/
  eng251/assignment13.html