Puritans and Manifest Destiny p.

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

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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 nonfiction 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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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 nation
though 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

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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.

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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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 ironclads 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!"

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