Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
nationhood that a new plan was needed.
When the delegates to the Constitutional Convention met in 1787, they all
agreed to the rule of secrecy—no details of the new Constitution would be leaked
until the draft was complete and oered to the states for ratication. It was only
when the draft was released in 1789 that the national debate about its principles
began in earnest. Two major positions quickly coalesced. The Federalists, who
included George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, supported the Constitution
as written, favoring a strong central government composed of executive and judicial
branches added to the legislative branch and relatively weaker state governments.
Anti-Federalists like Patrick Henry were leery of the consolidation of power
by a federal government headed by a President, arguing that the Constitution
replicated a system like the one from which they had just separated. They wanted
strong state governments because they thought states would be more likely to
protect individual freedoms. Anti-federalists ultimately inuenced the new form
of the federal government by the addition of the Bill of Rights, designed to protect
individual rights from the power of the federal government. The Constitution and
the Bill of Rights containing ten amendments were nally ratied by the last state
in 1790.
The Enlightenment was the major cultural inuence on eighteenth century
America, and through it, the early colonial worldview dominated by Puritan theology
shifted into a world view inuenced by science and philosophy. There was an
explosion of improved scientic technologies during the seventeenth century, and
as a result, scientists were able to collect more precise data and challenge previously
held ideas about how the world functioned. To illustrate the eect that scientic
discoveries and theories had on the time period, consider Isaac Newton’s law of
universal gravitation. If one had previously been told, as the seventeenth century
Puritans had, that the workings of nature were actuated by God’s inscrutable will
and were beyond humanity’s ability to understand, the discovery of a formula that
could predict one of those workings of nature with accuracy every time (so long as
the mass of the objects and the distance between them were known) would cause a
seismic change in one’s perceptions. The existence of laws like Newton’s asserted
that the universe was ordered on rational principles that man could understand
using reason. As a result, the use of reason gained greater respect echoed in the era’s
other name, the Age of Reason, and human ability was held in much higher regard.
In the eighteenth century, science and philosophy were not considered distinct
elds of knowledge, and so it is not surprising that some philosophers too prioritized
reason in examining the nature of humanity. English philosopher John Locke and
his articulation of Empiricism show not only the supremacy of what is now called
the scientic method but also a view of human nature that diered considerably
from that of the Puritans. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689),
Locke asserts that “all ideas come from sensation or reection.” In other words, all
human knowledge is founded in sensory information—what we see, hear, smell,
taste, or feel—and inferences that can be logically drawn from that information. It
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