A History of American LiteratureBoynton, Percy Holmes
History
A History of American Literature
Boynton, Percy Holmes
American literature -- History and criticism
Yet in this fallow soil the seeds of controversy had been steadily
taking root; and when Elizabeth was followed on the throne by the vain
and unregal James I, the crop turned out to be a harvest of dragons'
teeth. Puritan democrats and cavalier Royalists fought with each other
over the body of England till it was prostrate and helpless. What
followed was the rise of Puritan power, culminating with the execution
of Charles II and the establishment of the Commonwealth under the
Cromwells from 1649 to 1660, and the peaceful restoration of monarchy
at the latter date. It was during the mid-stages of these developments
that the first settlements were made in English America. Both factions
included large numbers of vigorous individuals of the pioneer type.
The Puritans were technically called "dissenters" and "nonconformists"
because of their attitude toward the established Church of England; but
the Royalists who came over to America were simply nonconformists of
another type who preferred doing things out on the frontier to living
conventional lives at home.
The Royalists, who settled in the South, came away, like other
travelers and explorers of their day, to settle new English territory
as a landed aristocracy. They were a mixed lot, but on the whole they
were not an irreligious lot. They believed in the established church
as they did in the established government, and they persecuted with a
good will those who tried to follow other forms of worship than their
own. They were, however, chiefly fortune hunters, just as were the
men who surged out to California in 1849 or those who went to Alaska
fifty years later; they hoped to make their money in the west and to
spend it back in the east, and they had little thought of literature,
either as a thing to enjoy or as a thing to create. When they wrote
they did so to give information about the country, the Indians, and the
new conditions of living, or to keep in touch with relatives, legal
authorities, or sources of money supply; and always they had in mind
the thought of attracting new settlers, for they needed labor more than
anything else. They made no attempt at general education, adopting
the now-abandoned aristocratic theory that too much knowledge would
be a dangerous source of discontent among the working people. Some
few individuals wrote accounts and descriptions that are interesting
to the modern reader, but these were not representative of the people
as a whole. They were Englishmen away from home, living temporarily
in _Virgin_-ia (the province of the virgin queen, Elizabeth), in
_James_-town, in the _Carolinas_ (from the Latin for Charles), in
_Mary_-land, and, even as late as 1722, in _George_-ia.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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