PURITANISM's Rise as AMERICAL HEGEMONIC Philosophy:
According to Historian Francis Jennings, Puritan migration to America is "so-called settlement of America was resettlement, a reoccupation of land made waste by the diseases and demoralization introduced by the newcomers." However, the obliteration of ancient culture in the Modern World by recent settlers of the Old World just reveals, in part, the emergence of puritan as the hegemony of modern Puritanism.
The Puritans were highly self-conscious emigrants who made a habit of documenting their New World encounters even though they experienced the encounters. John Winthrop was definitely not the first Puritan to publish a journal describing storeys of his day-to-day exploits on distant shores. The ability to write was considered to be, however, the symbol of the European traveller's culture. Correspondingly (from a European point of view) the unlettered aboriginals, the Indians, and the slaves, the Africans brought in a little later as chattel labour, were either written in or written out of the Puritan histories. Consider, for example, the following account of a Puritan raid on a Pequot settlement, taken from Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford (written 1630-46; published 1857):
Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throu' with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and homble was the stincke and sente thereof, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemie.
Narrative of Bradford is no ordinary piece of fiction. Intended to be a memoir of his own American odyssey, this essay by the most prominent of Plymouth colony leaders quickly turns itself into modern New England literary propaganda.
Two motifs float through the text one with the other. The first reason is that America was utterly wild, the Puritans found it in the town. It was practically uninhabitable and uninhabited by definition. The second being that America had nothing to do with Britain, whatever it was and how it was to become. Which is to add, America had to become what the Puritans intended it to become.
Before the Puritans, Bradford writes, stood a wild wilderness like that which no civilised people had ever seen, and "if they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they passed and [which] was now a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world." Not only the ship lying on anchor confirms for the utter split,' as the captain wants to depart every day."May not and ought not the children of these fathers," Bradford instructs his first readers, who are but these ones, rightly say: "Our fathers were Englishmen, which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity."The Puritans definitely need the help of the Lord as their condition is greater than that of "the Apostle and his shipwrecked company" to whom "the barbarians showed... no small kindness in refreshing them."The savages whom the Puritans encountered "were readier to fill their sides full of arrows than otherwise." Bradford's chronicle distinguishes itself from other early American writings by portraying Indians fiercely hostile to the colonists.
For Plymouth Plantation, as Bradford's appeal to the fathers ' children makes clear, deliberately invents a pattern in memory. To quote Myra Jehlen, "It proposes some fundamental terms for organising the experience of colonisation."Redefinitions of the wilderness and society and the conflict between them are the most critical of these concepts. In the one side, without evidence of any agriculture, the forest is. On the other side, it is the site of the potentially extraordinary building, primarily because of its unchanged nature. Around the same moment, society acquires a curious paradox in the account of Bradford. There is no question that the world left forever by the Puritans is indicative of great accomplishments. Yet it is still a resting place of violent viciousness.
The final feeling that the book by Bradford leaves on the reader regarding the obvious polarities of society and nature is not one of contrast; the circumstances mimic each other strangely. These are not like antithetical emblems but like mirror images. When the Puritans venture into the New World to confront it in hospitality, they left behind not an antithetical good but the kind of bad of another; and the outrage that there were no New World cities, inns, or houses test their dilemma without a solution. The remedy is yet to be produced, and the rest of the book explains each undertaking as from scratch, whether it is constructing housing or enacting legislation.
All in all, the Puritan aristocracy consistently argued that their attempts to establish America, written in their various chronicles (such as Bradford's), combined with the absence of any equally orchestrated and detailed arguments by other communities who had already occupied America before or before the Puritanian arrival, made Puritanism appear as the hegemonic philosophy of America.
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