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

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
among them, and in each family; except when disturbed by that accursed spirit
given them by the wood rangers in exchange for their furs. If my children learn
nothing of geometrical rules, the use of the compass, or of the Latin tongue, they
will learn and practise sobriety, for rum can no longer be sent to these people;
they will learn that modesty and didence for which the young Indians are so
remarkable; they will consider labour as the most essential qualication; hunting
as the second. They will prepare themselves in the prosecution of our small rural
schemes, carried on for the benet of our little community, to extend them
further when each shall receive his inheritance. Their tender minds will cease to
be agitated by perpetual alarms; to be made cowards by continual terrors: if they
acquire in the village of—-, such an awkwardness of deportment and appearance
as would render them ridiculous in our gay capitals, they will imbibe, I hope, a
conrmed taste for that simplicity, which so well becomes the cultivators of the
land. If I cannot teach them any of those professions which sometimes embellish
and support our society, I will show them how to hew wood, how to construct
their own ploughs; and with a few tools how to supply themselves with every
necessary implement, both in the house and in the eld. If they are hereafter
obliged to confess, that they belong to no one particular church, I shall have
the consolation of teaching them that great, that primary worship which is the
foundation of all others. If they do not fear God according to the tenets of any
one seminary, they shall learn to worship him upon the broad scale of nature.
The Supreme Being does not reside in peculiar churches or communities; he is
equally the great Manitou of the woods and of the plains; and even in the gloom,
the obscurity of those very woods, his justice may be as well understood and felt
as in the most sumptuous temples. Each worship with us, hath, you know, its
peculiar political tendency; there it has none but to inspire gratitude and truth:
their tender minds shall receive no other idea of the Supreme Being, than that of
the father of all men, who requires nothing more of us than what tends to make
each other happy. We shall say with them, Soungwaneha, esa caurounkyawga,
nughwonshauza neattewek, nesalanga.—Our father, be thy will done in earth as
it is in great heaven.
Perhaps my imagination gilds too strongly this distant prospect; yet it appears
founded on so few, and simple principles, that there is not the same probability
of adverse incidents as in more complex schemes. These vague rambling
contemplations which I here faithfully retrace, carry me sometimes to a great
distance; I am lost in the anticipation of the various circumstances attending this
proposed metamorphosis! Many unforeseen accidents may doubtless arise. Alas! it
is easier for me in all the glow of paternal anxiety, reclined on my bed, to form the
theory of my future conduct, than to reduce my schemes into practice. But when
once secluded from the great society to which we now belong, we shall unite closer
together; and there will be less room for jealousies or contentions. As I intend my
children neither for the law nor the church, but for the cultivation of the land, I
wish them no literary accomplishments; I pray heaven that they may be one day
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