Land and Loyalty: Literary Expressions of Agrarian Nationalism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

THE HISTORY OF IDEAS method has proved particularly fruitful in dealing with the first two centuries of American literature. It cannot be seriously contested that in most cases the value of this literature lies in the body of ideas it sets forth. Scholars, recognizing this fact, have dealt with the relationship between our early literature and the religious, economic, political, and scientific thought of the period. One significant notion that has not been adequately studied, however, is the idea of nationalism.' It is the purpose of the present paper to show how a particular manifestation of nationalism, agrarian in character, was incorporated into the promotion literature of the seventeenth century and the belleslettres of the eighteenth. Nationalism with an agrarian flavor is especially deserving of study, I believe, because the farm and the farmer were among the readiest stimulants to patriotism available to American writers. We shall see, then, in the course of this paper, how literature served national pride. We must begin with a definition of agrarian nationalism. The term will be used here to mean the expression of patriotic pride based on two factors: first, on the difference between the farmer, the land, and the conditions of farming in America and the farmer, the land, and farming conditions in the Old World; second, on the superiority of the New World in all these respects to the Old. This definition is oversimplified, of course. Yet it does describe that particular kind of nationalism, framed in an agrarian context, that set itself the double task of making America attractive to settlers in the seventeenth century and of searching out and fixing the national