A History of American Literature. Percy Holmes Boynton
Vol. LXXXVIII, No. 40. Oct. 3, 1903.
Benjamin Franklin. There are eleven editions of Franklin’s collected works in English, French, and German, dating from 1773 to 1905. The best of these is the one compiled and edited by John Bigelow. 1889. 10 vols. Poor Richard Improved, 1757. This was later issued as Father Abraham’s Speech, over 150 editions and reprints of which are recorded. Autobiography. First issued in Paris, 1791. Best recent editions: John Bigelow, editor, 1874; H. E. Scudder, editor, Riverside Literature Series, 1886; William MacDonald, editor, Temple Autobiography Series, 1905; William MacDonald, editor, Everyman’s Library, 1908.
History and Biography
Bruce, W. C. Benjamin Franklin Self-Revealed: A Biographical and Critical Study based mainly on his own Writings. 1918. 2 vols.
Ford, P. L. The Many-Sided Franklin. 1899.
Hale, E. E. and E. E., Jr. Franklin in France; from original documents most of which are now published for the first time. 1887–1888. 2 vols.
McMaster, J. B. Benjamin Franklin (A.M.L. Series). 1887.
McMaster, J. B. Franklin in France. Atlantic Monthly, Vol. LX. September, 1887.
Sherman, Stuart P. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, chap. vi.
Swift, Lindsay. Catalogue of works relating to Benjamin Franklin in the Boston Public Library. 1883.
Colonial Almanacs
Kittredge, G. L. The Old Farmer and his Almanack. 1904.
Colonial Journalism
Cook, E. C. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, chap. vii.
Hudson, F. Journalism in the United States, 1690–1872. 1873.
Thomas, I. History of Printing in America. 1871.
Literary Treatment of the Period
Fiction
Cooper, J. F. Satanstoe.
Cooper, J. F. The Chainbearer.
Cooper, J. F. The Deerslayer.
Cooper, J. F. The Redskins.
Thackeray, W. M. The Virginians.
Poetry
Poems of American History (edited by B. E. Stevenson), pp. 99–125
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Few modern readers can regard the sermons of Jonathan Edwards as anything but documents of historical interest. It is quite worth study to read at first-hand one or two sermons about which so many careless generalizations have been made. The chief points of interest are the theology as it stands in his own living words, and his rhetorical method, which is an admirable exercise of forensic discourse.
Read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “The Minister’s Wooing” and “Oldtown Folks” (especially chap. ) for a faithful portrait of one of Edwards’s chief successors (see pp. 305–308).
Read Franklin’s “Autobiography” for its revelation of personal characteristics: his continued emphasis on usefulness; his refusal to allow his emotions to carry him away (whether anger, love, religious fervor, or desire for revenge); his willingness to act unscrupulously for what he felt was a good end; his self-analysis (in other places than the passage on the virtues); his public spirit.
Read Franklin’s “Autobiography” for its literary characteristics: his emulation of Addison’s style (compare passages of this and the Spectator); his respect for Pope and his likeness in use of apothegms; his similarity to Chesterfield in point of view and use of homely detail. Contrast Franklin’s style with Irving’s or Cooper’s.
CHAPTER V
CRÈVECŒUR, THE “AMERICAN FARMER”
By 1750 the thirteen colonies had all been long established, and the straggling community on the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Georgia had an individuality of its own. The America-to-be was at once young and old. There were old towns, old churches, old homes, old families. There was an aristocracy with memories that went back to England, but with roots firmly planted in American soil. Yet, withal, the country was so vast and the people on it so few that there was unlimited chance for the energetic man of real ability. It was a new land of untold opportunities; all its apparent maturity was the maturity of a well-born young gentleman who has just become of age and whose real career is all before him. The old age of the Old World was something very different, for it was based chiefly on the control of the land—of the actual soil and stream and forest. Edmund Burke in 1775 said in his “Speech on Conciliation of the American Colonies” that if the attempt were made to restrict the population of the colonies the people could swarm over the mountain ranges and resettle there in a vast plain five hundred miles square. However fair the estimate was to the land in actual English possession, that statement was about as far as the imagination of an Englishman accustomed to smaller dimensions could then go, or as big a figure as he could dare to hope his fellow-members of Parliament would believe; for in those days, as to-day, there were not in England or France five square miles of land out of ownership, and very little that was not in the possession of a few great proprietors. As the control of government was largely in the same hands, the great mass of the people could neither freely enjoy the fruits of their own labor, which were pitilessly reduced by rents and taxes, nor make any effective peaceful protest in behalf of political change. The American Revolution was the voice of the colonies protesting against the possible repetition of such conditions on this side the water, and the French Revolution was the harsh voice of a downtrodden people calling for redress.
No man could better appreciate the promise of life in America than one who had felt the oppression of the old conditions and had then enjoyed the freedom of the new ones. In the same years when the wiser leaders in the colonies were viewing with alarm the aggressive and mistaken policies of George III and his ministers, a young Frenchman, educated in England, came over to this country, settled and prospered on his own land, and was so delighted with his life as a farmer and a citizen that he could not refrain from making a record of his happy circumstances. This was Michel Guillaume St. John de Crèvecœur, and his book was the “Letters from an American Farmer,” published in London in 1782, though written almost entirely before the outbreak of the Revolution. It is made up of twelve so-called letters addressed to an imaginary English friend. Two of these are about his direct experience on his own acres in the middle colonies; five are on the people and the country in northern colonies, as he found them in Marthas Vineyard, Nantucket, and Cape Cod; one is drawn from observations in South Carolina; and the other four are less related to definite places, three being on nature themes, and one—the most important of all—on the ever-new question, “What is an American?”
With industry and frugality hardly less than Franklin’s, Crèvecœur had also a certain power of poetic imagination and fresh enthusiasm. He was writing from a kind of earthly paradise. Seen against the background of unhappy France, the rights to own, to earn, and to have a voice in governing himself seemed almost too good to be true. He had no misconceptions about the hard labor which was necessary to make a farm productive; but he enjoyed work because he knew that he could enjoy the fruits of it, and he enjoyed it all the more because he knew that in making an ear of corn grow where none had grown before he was the best kind of pioneer. To his sorrow he knew much about the ugliness of an old civilization; it was with the zest of a youthful lover that he wrote about the beauty of this new country’s inexperience.
He felt a perfect satisfaction in his own state of mind and body. Although he was a newcomer, he had a sense of