Teaching the Article
I normally begin my lecture on the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century America by asking students if the idea of self-improvement is important to them and to Americans generally. Although the very act of sitting in a college lecture hall suggests that students are concerned about improving themselves (or at least looking to secure their credentials in the American middle class), they often do not know how to respond. Some students may take modern notions of improvement and progress for granted and may never have thought critically or historically about such ideas. The life and career of Philip Vickers Fithian, one of British America's most prolific diarists, can be used to help students locate the Enlightenment historically in a distinctively American place and to suggest to them that ideas about how to make a better self or a better life always arise in a historical context.
I begin by asking students to recall what they know about the Enlightenment. Someone will usually refer to the Age of Reason, and this will trigger others to begin rattling off a short list of the usual suspects--John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire. Discussion reveals that most students think about the Enlightenment as an elite, secular movement, dominated by a small circle of French philosophes who stressed rational thought over a religious world view and celebrated a cosmopolitan and cultured way of life over local attachments. What is missing is a sense that the movement drew strength from and informed everyday lives, dreams, and aspirations in colonial America.
To clarify the "high Enlightenment," I ask students to consider the practice of intellectual life and its social context. When pushed, many students have a sense of the environments in which the movement could or could not be lived. I want to get my students to confront stereotypes that suggest that all enlightened activity in early America took place in cosmopolitan and secular environments such as port cities and elite sites of sociability. Historians who describe the eighteenth-century countryside as backward or uncivilized reinforce such stereotypes.
Providing my students with excerpts from the introductory chapter of Charles Sellers's 1991 work, The Market Revolution, I ask them if its unflattering portrayal of the eighteenth-century countryside confirms their understanding of the relationship of rural life and enlightened ideas. I then ask students to discuss two sets of images that relate, directly or indirectly, to the social world of Philip Vickers Fithian. The first set includes classic high Enlightenment images--court sociability, educational institutions, and urban centers. The second set--countryside scenes and eighteenth-century churches--proves to be more problematic, and students tend to puzzle more. I use the images to introduce the possibility that large ideas can inhabit small places and that Enlightenment ideas were not excluded from rural life.
I use the life of Philip Vickers Fithian to give students a window onto the Enlightenment in America and its relationship to the American Revolution. Fithian's Enlightenment was indeed rational and cosmopolitan in nature, but it was also rooted in a particular rural place and a specific religious faith tradition. Several interrelated themes are essential to understanding how ordinary people lived the Enlightenment in revolutionary America. Students encounter the themes in an exercise that asks them to enter Fithian's mental world by reading portions of his writings.
The Enlightenment in America was grounded in the principles of early modern moral philosophy, particularly faculty psychology. Faculty psychology taught that all human beings possess several potentially discordant mental faculties, including the passions and reason. Those who were "enlightened," had trained and cultivated their minds to control the dangerous passions. Passions manifested themselves in a variety of ways, and Exercises II and III prompt students to think about some of Fithian's struggles with emotions. Here I try to think together with the students about the implications of faculty psychology for the eighteenth-century view that society and government should be entrusted to educated, enlightened, and virtuous men. I also ask students to explore what might be lost--passions, attachment to place, faith--if one were to pursue enlightened, modern ideals to their logical conclusions. For Fithian, the tension between the passions and reason was the moral issue that consumed his life.
The Enlightenment in America set out to produce citizens of the world. Homesickness was a dangerous passion. The truly enlightened individual needed to rid himself or herself of parochial passions. I ask students to consider Gordon Wood's assertion that "local feelings were common to peasants and backward people, but educated gentlemen were supposed to be home anywhere." {Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), 221} To be too wedded to local attachments was "a sympton of narrow-mindedness, and indeed of disease." How did Fithian experience this tension between world citizenship and love of home?
Exercises 4 and 5 challenge students to move beyond the stereotypes they wrestled with in exercise I and the principles of exercises 2 and 3 and to think about the ways in which Enlightenment ideas such as self-improvement, refined sociability, and revolutionary commitment could be linked to the earthy realities of faith, place, and community. Fithian's Enlightenment was lived out among circles of friends in everyday rural life and in the daily rituals of religious life in the Presbyterian community of Cohansey. It was practiced in what might be deemed "traditional," or even premodern, settings and communities. Fithian's life reveals the social world of what I call the "rural Enlightenment." Friendship circles, clubs, letters, and novel reading in a community closely connected to the Presbyterian churches and their clergymen were means by which Fithian could improve himself and connect with the cosmopolitan republic of letters. Fithian's writings inspire my attempt to collapse the much-celebrated theoretical distinction between the cosmopolitan and the local.
Fithian's local attachments also provided the starting point for his understanding of the American Revolution. Many Enlightenment thinkers, including John Witherspoon, the president of the College of New Jersey when Fithian studied there, believed that passions were actually a good thing when exercised in the cause of liberty. I have students read and reflect on my account of the Greenwich tea party, and I ask them to reconcile the "passionate" display of tea burning with the enlightened outlook of the Presbyterians who burned the tea. I hope my students will learn that Presbyterian ideas about enlightened moral improvement served as intellectual scaffolding for revolutionary activity and that Fithian's Presbyterian faith helped him make sense of the revolutionary cause. Indeed, Fithian was able to reconcile his local attachments with cosmopolitan revolutionary ideals.
In these ways, Fithian's life provides a case study to use in teaching the intellectual, social, and political history of the era between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution. It also reveals that the American fascination with progress and improvement emerged in particular historical settings and impacted people from different places in different ways.