The Puritan and the Republican

Let us first consider the differences between the outlook of John Winthrop and those of both Benjamin Franklin and Abigail Adams, differences which are owed in part to the different centuries in which they lived, but which have none the less persisted in American history and culture down to the present day. John Winthrop, born in England at the time of the Spanish Armada, was an American by adoption rather than by birth. He was also, though born in the Elizabethan age, a creature essentially of the seventeenth century, which was to be the last century in which the politics and culture of the Western world were dominated primarily by religious concerns. We should thus not be surpri

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more profoundly, if subtly, subversive of genuine religious fervor than a belief that the value of religion lay simply in keeping psychological "tigers" safely chained up (p. 66). What is perhaps most striking about Franklin, however, is his achievement of becoming the first American intellectual and scientist of international repute. Some part of his reputation may have resulted from his origins; to an eighteenth-century European, the idea of a buckskin-wearing, Indian-fighting American (for such was very much the European stereotype of Americans at that time) being conversant in philosophy and science was no doubt both amusing and deeply intriguing. In the salons of pre-revolutionary France, Franklin (and other Americans like Jefferson) must have seemed like a confirmation in some ways of Rousseau's concept of the noble savage (p. 84). But Franklin's contributions to the theory of electricity--he identified the polarity of electrical potential, and coined the terms positive and negative--made him an important figure in the history of eighteenth-century science, entirely apart from his standing in American history. Franklin's political activities stemmed from the same Enlightenment values as his youthful plans for self-i
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Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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