United States

Mrs. Richard Yates, oil painting by Gilbert Stuart, 1793–94; in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Andrew Mellon Collection

The Southern colonies, particularly Charleston, seemed to be more interested in providing good theatre for their residents than did other regions, but in no colony did the theatre approach the excellence of that of Europe. In New England, Puritan influence was an obstacle to the performance of plays, and even in cosmopolitan Philadelphia the Quakers for a long time discouraged the development of the dramatic arts.

William and Mary College, engraved copperplate, c. 1740. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Nassau Hall, built in 1756, was the first and the largest building at King's College (later Columbia University).Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.If Americans in the colonial period did not excel in achieving a high level of traditional cultural attainment, they did manage at least to disseminate what culture they had in a manner slightly more equitable than that of most countries of the world. Newspapers and almanacs, though hardly on the same intellectual level as the Encyclopédie produced by the European philosophes, probably had a wider audience than any European cultural medium. The New England colonies, although they did not always manage to keep pace with population growth, pioneered in the field of public education. Outside New England, education remained the preserve of those who could afford to send their children to private schools, although the existence of privately supported but tuition-free charity schools and of relatively inexpensive “academies” made it possible for the children of the American middle class to receive at least some education. The principal institutions of higher learning—Harvard (1636), William and Mary (1693), Yale (1701), Princeton (1747), Pennsylvania (a college since 1755), King’s College (1754, now Columbia University), Rhode Island College (1764, now Brown University), Queen’s College (1766, now Rutgers University), and Dartmouth (1769)—served the upper class almost exclusively; and most of them had a close relationship with a particular religious point of view (e.g., Harvard was a training ground for Congregational ministers, and Princeton was closely associated with Presbyterianism).

Richard R. Beeman

From a city on a hill to the Great Awakening

The part played by religion in the shaping of the American mind, while sometimes overstated, remains crucial. Over the first century and a half of colonial life, the strong religious impulses present in the original settlements—particularly those in New England—were somewhat secularized and democratized but kept much of their original power.

When the Pilgrim Fathers signed the Mayflower Compact in 1620, resolving themselves into a “civil body politic,” they were explicitly making religious fellowship the basis of a political community. But even from the start, there were nonmembers of the Leiden Separatist congregation on the passenger list—the “strangers” among the “saints”—and they sought steady expansion of their rights in Plymouth colony until its absorption into Massachusetts in 1691.

The Puritans were even more determined that their community be, as John Winthrop called it in his founding sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” a “city on a hill,” to which all humankind should look for an example of heaven on earth. This theme, in various guises, resounds in every corner of American history. The traditional image of Massachusetts Puritanism is one of repressive authority, but what is overlooked is the consensus among Winthrop and his followers that they should be bound together by love and shared faith, an expectation that left them “free” to do voluntarily what they all agreed was right. It was a kind of elective theocracy for the insiders.