Puritans/Puritanism as Ideograph

James Jasinski

Dean Hammer. The Puritan Tradition in Revolutionary, Federalist, and Whig Political Theory: A Rhetoric of Origins. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 1998. xi + 218. Notes and index. $32.95.

The January 1840 edition of William Cullen Bryant’s New York Review published a lengthy review of James L. Kingsley’s April 1838 oration to the citizens of New Haven on the two hundredth anniversary of the settlement of Connecticut and the Rev. Leonard Bacon’s 1839 publication Thirteen Historical Discourses, on the Completion of Two Hundred Years, from the Beginning of the First Church entitled “The Politics of the Puritans.” The anonymous reviewer sought to expose the “historico-optical illusion” that led New Englander’s such as Kingsley and Bacon to venerate New England’s puritan past. Suffering under this illusion, New Englanders “have come to bestow upon them [the Puritan founders] the honor of inventions they never produced—of discoveries they never made; we have attributed to them acts they never performed, and opinions they never held.” Acknowledging what twentieth-century scholars would come to call the politics of memory, the reviewer remarked that figures such as Kingsley and Bacon “hope to sanctify so much of the prejudice or bigotry, so much of the intolerance and persecution of the Puritans, as may by possibility, as work to their own present advantage.”

The New York Review’s assault on the character of the Puritans did not go unchallenged. In its April 1840 issue, the Whiggish North American Review responded with its own anonymous review. The North American reviewer acknowledged that the Puritan’s reputation has become a recurrent object of controversy. “The main points on each side of the controversy” are, the reviewers wrote, “so hackneyed by this time, that we are sure our readers will excuse our disinclination even to approach them.” But even while noting the contested nature of the Puritan heritage, the North American reviewer confidently boasted that the Puritan’s “agency” for “the civil and religious rights which every citizen of New England now enjoys” was common knowledge along the lines of “ascribing the doctrine of gravitation to Newton, or the overthrow of the infallibility of Rome to Luther.”

Dean Hammer does not discuss this particular exchange in his The Puritan Tradition in Revolutionary, Federalist, and Whig Political Theory. Nor does Hammer attempt to intervene in the over three hundred year struggle to specify the nature of Puritanism in America. The 1840 journal exchange and twentieth century early American historiography are linked, Hammer maintains, by the quest to locate a “Puritan essence” whose legacy can be assessed (xi-xii). Hammer rejects the essentialist project in favor of what he describes as “a more hermeneutic understanding of Puritanism.” “Puritanism,” Hammer writes, “does not mean one thing; it never did. It does not even mean one consistent set of things, however we want to define those things. Instead, it is a legacy that itself was constructed, transformed, and reformulated by subsequent individuals and groups, a struggle to identify the meaning of this legacy that had begun before the passing of the first generation of Puritan settlers.” The meaning of Puritanism is to be found, Hammer asserts, “in its use” (xiii).

In Hammer’s analysis, Puritanism becomes a “rhetorical image” (2) whose career must be traced in American “public rhetoric” (xv). Describing it as a rhetorical or “cultural image” (54), Hammer transforms Puritanism into what Michael McGee refers to as an “ideograph.” Because it appears to have a more concrete and stable reference, Puritanism differs from ideographs such as <equality> or <liberty>. But “Puritanism” nevertheless serves, in McGee’s terms, as a one-term summary of a political orientation with considerable normative power. More importantly, it functions as a site of discursive conflict and struggle: American public advocates routinely tried to articulate their particular interests to a cherished Puritan past just as other advocates sought to discredit or dismantle that cultural legacy.

Given his anti-essentialist framework, Hammer has to confront the brute reality of Puritan practices. While it may not have an essence, Puritanism in America was nevertheless enacted through a series of widely recognized public performances, such as Winthrop’s Arabella sermon, Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, the trials of Anne Hutchinson, as well as the ephemeral routines and practices of daily life. Hammer does not attempt “to provide some definitive statement about the nature of Puritanism” but rather seeks to uncover “an irresolution in two critical aspects of their own self-definition” (xvi). The tension between “individual insularity and hierarchy . . . [,] both essential and largely incompatible aspects of Puritan life” (6), generates a discursive space, a contested field of practices, “in which the Puritans oriented themselves” (2). Their “inability to resolve” this central tension “served to shape the space of discourse in the Puritans’ struggle to define themselves” (2). Hammer in effect constructs an anti-essentialist Puritan essence: Puritanism is an unstable yet bounded space or field of tension. Only this way of engaging Puritanism, Hammer suggests, will allow us to grasp its constitutive significance in American culture.

Hammer’s opening chapter maps the contours of this discursive space. Subsequent chapters explore how a Puritan image was invented and (re)constituted as subsequent generations engaged the founding tension while crafting their communal identity. In the second chapter, Hammer traces “the emergence of the Puritans as a cultural image.” This image became “such a prominent part of an American cultural vocabulary” because, Hammer argues, seventeenth-century Puritans dominated “the primary institutions of cultural transmission” in New England: “the educational system and churches,” the public sphere organized around “printed material,” the colonial governments (54). While originally centered in New England, the Puritan cultural image was not confined to this region. Drawing on a wide variety discursive practices, Hammer uncovers the constitutive impact of the Puritan founding on the nascent nation’s cultural imagination, “Testimony to the power of the Puritan legacy could be seen,” Hammer maintains, “in how other colonies appropriated, as their own, images of the New England founding” (73). In the middle colonies as well as the South, “New England continued to provide a serviceable legend of America’s ancestors, one propagated through churches, newspapers, pamphlets, printed sermons, word-of-mouth, schools and colleges, and books, including historical studies and school texts” (76). “Puritanism survived,” Hammer notes in the conclusion to chapter 2, “because it had become a strong institutional force.” But it would continue to exert cultural influence, it would become “usable,” “because it provided an adaptive discursive space for articulating the concerns of subsequent generations” (80).

In chapters 3 through 5, Hammer demonstrates a Bakhtinian sensibility for linguistic mutation as he describes how this “space” intersected with other vocabularies and idioms circulating in colonial America. For example, Hammer argues that a “revolutionary discursive space” could emerge in the 1760s only because of “a synthesis of Lockean ideas with Puritan images.” Examining “the language that surrounds this [revolutionary] invocation of the Puritans” reveals “a mingling of a Lockean notion that gave civic meaning to the Puritan insular self with a republican notion of organic community” (98-99). On the one hand, “we find in the political rhetoric of the revolutionary era . . . the elaboration of a Puritan inheritance, one that saw in the Puritan flight from Europe both a Lockean love of liberty and a government founded by compact” (101). On the other hand, “[w]e see the rhetorical invocation of a Puritan past used to make communally culpable a revolutionary generation that had become corrupt.” During the revolutionary struggle, the Puritan image was used to represent “republican virtues of simplicity and frugality that were besieged by a corrupt and corrupting force” (110).

But this mingling of idioms in the revolutionary era provides Hammer with a way to explain the “ambivalence in revolutionary rhetoric toward the nature of authority” (98). “[W]e see this ambivalence in revolutionary rhetoric,” Hammer writes, “as a Puritan past provided a rhetorical space in which a Lockean language of rights was placed alongside a republican language of a civic body” (115). “It is,” he continues, “perhaps not coincidentally a similar ambivalence that we saw emerge in the early Puritan communities as they sought to reconcile the claims of the insular individual with those of the hierarchic community” (116). Not surprisingly, Hammer will find “an ambivalence to authority” to be a central issue “in the ensuing decades of American political discourse” (121).

In chapter 4 Hammer examines the way Federalists at the end of the eighteenth and dawn of the nineteenth centuries appropriated the Puritan image as a way to contain or domesticate the radicalism of the revolution. Hammer describes at length how Federalist orators appropriated the emerging Fourth of July rituals in order to articulate their experience of anxiety. “Federalist anxiety,” Hammer writes, “found its expression in the form of a jeremiad.” The jeremiad “gave form to [Federalist] anxiety, lending to political rhetoric a sense of the new nation as teetering perilously on the precipice, with damnation or salvation depending on the actions of the current generation” (149, 139). Hammer’s careful reconstruction of Federalist practice allows us to position abolitionist jeremiads such as William Lloyd Garrison’s 1829 Fourth of July oration “The Dangers of the Nation” within this performative tradition.

But Hammer is not interested in tracing the constitutive significance of Federalist jeremiads. He concentrates on the instrumental capacity of Federalist discourse, focusing on how Federalist oratory “invoke[d] the Puritans as both a force of moderation and a model of a civic body” (142). Hammer reconstructs a basic Federalist exigence: “How . . . does one affirm the values of the Revolution and celebrate the revolutionary figures without, at the same time, justifying the passions that drove the Revolution?” The Federalists responded to this challenge through the strategy of domestication; they “recast the revolutionaries as heirs of Puritan moderation” (143). Hammer quotes an 1805 Fourth of July oration by John Church in which Church maintained that the Revolution “was not a spirit of opposition to government, as such, but a conscientious regard to our invaluable rights, which led us to oppose their arbitrary measures.” Church applauded the Revolutionary generation for the “order and regularity which prevailed in the commencement of our revolution.” Orations such as Church’s allow Hammer to argue that Federalists “claim[ed] that the revolutionaries acted consistently with [the] Puritan [spirit] of moderation” (144). Federalist jeremiads sought to construct, in Hammer’s words, “a politics of purity” that tried to save the national body by purging it of corruption (153).

Whigs and Democrats fought over the direction of American society during what Charles Sellars describes as “the market revolution.” Whether Americans liked it or not, a new world was emerging and each major antebellum political party sought an appropriate response. Hammer argues that New England Whigs such as Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, and Rufus Choate “drew upon the Puritans to explain and authorize their vision of a future economic and political order. . . . [I]n the hands of Whig orators, the Puritans . . . were made into a founding legend that demonstrated how the commercialization of the economy and the central role of government in promoting this development could invigorate a sense of community and restore order to a fragmented American population” (172). In order to promote commercial development, Whigs had to confront the traditional republican ambivalence toward commerce and manufacturing given their potential to undermine communal stability. The key Whig innovation, Hammer suggests, was the way they deployed the Puritan image to link “commerce and manufacturing in the service of community” (175). Whig orators such as Everett transformed commercial development. Everett, Hammer writes, “merged two seemingly incompatible motives into the actions of the Puritans: a desire for commerce on the one hand and a republican concern with the public good on the other. . . . Commerce, in this formulation, became less a private endeavor and more an action consistent with civic responsibility” (177). Hammer’s analysis of the Whig’s appropriation of the Puritans provides evidence for a rather unusual conclusion: the emphasis on group economic development found in much contemporary African-American advocacy (and attacked by other African-American advocates such as Shelby Steele) is a rearticulation of the Whig’s neo-Puritan vision of commerce and community.

In his final chapter, Hammer steps backs from the postmodern anti-essentialist logic that guides his inquiry. He does so not to endorse a specific Puritan essence but to criticize what he refers to as “a rhetoric of suspicion in which we seek to expose how each word is used to advance a particular agenda or disguise our hegemonic desires” (201). Drawing on diverse sources (debates over pornography, the Republican Contract with America), Hammer argues that in the late twentieth century Americans “are using the Puritans to cast suspicion on anything that binds us, whether the nature of the binding is external . . . or internal” (208). But Hammer wants us to judge this appropriation of the Puritan image defective, not because it fails to reflect the “real” Puritan essence, but because it ignores the traditions that make our current practices intelligible and meaningful. Hammer argues that we need “a language of tradition . . . that emerges from, and to that extent shows, the possibility of defining a life together” (208).

Rhetorical scholars will appreciate the attention Hammer gives to oratory and public discourse. His book is one more example of the linguistic or rhetorical turn occurring in the fields of political science and history. While specific conceptual innovations such as “discursive space” may not prove useful for critics long accustomed to spatial metaphors, Hammer’s analysis of the Puritan image reveals how attention to a text’s instrumentality, how it negotiates particular historical challenges, can be combined with an interest in its constitutive potential or how it functions to, as Hammer describes Whig oratory, “construct an identity” (168). The book also makes an important contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on public memory. Hammer illustrates in unusual detail the way advocates draw on and (re)construct public memory in the process of negotiating the constraints and exigencies of their historical situation. The Puritan Tradition should prove to be extremely valuable for its insights into eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discursive practices as well as for the way it orchestrates instrumental and constitutive inquiry and thematizes the rhetorical politics of public memory.

James Jasinski is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts at the University of Puget Sound.

Works Cited

McGee, Michael Calvin. “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link between Rhetoric and Ideology.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 1-16.

New York Review 6 (January 1840): 48-73.

North American Review 50 (April 1840): 432-461.

Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.