The Typology of America's Mission

Abstract

THE PURITANS INVENTED THE SACRED HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND; THE eighteenth-century clergy established the concept of America's mission. In this essay I want to suggest the nature of that development, with special emphasis on the role of the Edwardsean revivals. I use the word suggest to stress the limits of my subject. My perspective is a very partial one: partial in its view of Edwards, of Puritanism, of the Great Awakening, and above all, of the social and ideological factors that carried the colonies from revival to revolution. I try to indicate something of the larger picture in the course of my analysis, but mainly I focus on questions of rhetoric. My assumption is that (after due allowance is made for all the complexities involved) American culture may be said to have grown in a more or less coherent way toward a modern free enterprise economy, that that growth finds expression in the quasi-figural outlook we have come to associate with manifest destiny and the dream, and therefore that to describe that outlook is (by implication at least) to illuminate some of the controversial connections between Puritan, Yankee, and Revolutionary America. The connections have been controversial for many reasons. In the interests of clarity, I center my discussion on the rhetoric of millennialism, and specifically Edwardsean post-millennialism: first, in its relation to New England Puritanism; and second, in its relation to what has recently been termed civil millennialism. In both cases, historians have emphasized a radical shift in approach. Without denying the fact of change, I hope to demonstrate the ways in which the persistence of language and vision constitutes an underlying unity of design. I need hardly add that to demonstrate is not the same as to endorse.