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

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all
equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty,
or possessions.
In other words, the individual is free to do what he wants as long as it does
not curtain the freedom of another; individual freedom must balance with group
freedom. Locke’s statement also references two other inuential concepts of the
period—natural law and the golden mean—which were borrowed from classical
Greek and Roman philosophy. The natural law concept argues that, to be just, laws
should be founded in the observable operations of nature. Particularly in ethical
arguments, this period also advocated for the desirability of nding the “golden
mean” in any action and charting a middle course between two extremes of excess
and paucity.
One might have supposed that the primacy of reason and an emphasis on
the equality of all human beings would have vanquished prejudice against those
who were not white males, but this period also illustrates that rationality is not
invulnerable to bias. For some Americans such as Benjamin Franklin, it seemed
obvious that one cannot both declare that all men are created equal and also support
slavery. However, American slaveholders like Thomas Jeerson managed to
rationalize the cognitive dissonance, arguing the paternalist position that Africans
were not as fully developed as European descendants and needed to be controlled
by the latter until they had moved further along on the continuum of civilization.
Similar arguments were made about Native Americans, and the evidence of their
advanced civilization was ignored or explained away. For example, it was a widely
held belief that Native American burial mounds had been constructed by some
earlier civilization that the Native Americans had overrun. Women, too, were
excluded from the protections of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and were
erased by the practice of coverture, which asserted that women’s legal rights were
“covered” by those of her father or husband; women did not have a separate legal
existence from their male relatives. Some white women were oered a limited
ticket to participate in Enlightenment ideals through the concept of Republican
Motherhood. This concept argued that women needed to be educated, to have
some level of nancial security, and to have knowledge of the political system so
that they could raise sons who would be good American citizens. While Republican
Motherhood increased access to education for a small group of women, their rights
were still subsumed by the priorities of white men.
Though science and philosophy had increased inuence on eighteenth century
American culture, religion had not vanished from the scene. However, the
hegemony of Calvinist theology was challenged by non-denominational groups as
well as by a segment within the one of its major denomination. Some American
intellectuals who identied with Enlightenment principles embraced deism, often
called “natural religion” in reference to natural law. More a philosophy than an
organized religion, deism had little in the way of dogma and no institutional
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