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American Enlightenment literature
The American Enlightenment is the intellectual thriving period in America in the mid-to-
late 18th century (1715-1789), especially as it relates to American Revolution on the one hand and
the European Enlightenment on the other. Influenced by the scientific revolution of the 17th century
and the humanist period during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment took scientific reasoning and
applied it to human nature, society and religion.
Politically, the age is distinguished by an emphasis upon liberty, democracy, republicanism
and religious tolerance – culminating in the drafting of the United States Declaration of
Independence and Constitution. Attempts to reconcile science and religion resulted in a rejection of
prophecy, miracle and revealed religion, often in preference for Deism. Historians have considered
how the ideas of John Locke and republicanism merged together to form republicanism in the
United States. The most important leaders of the American Enlightenment include Benjamin
Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705] – April 17, 1790) was one of
the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author,
printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist,
statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and
the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the
lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He formed
both the first public lending library in America and the first fire department in Pennsylvania.
Franklin earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable
campaigning for colonial unity; as an author and spokesman in London for several colonies, then as
the first United States Ambassador to France, he exemplified the emerging American nation.
[2]
Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical and
democratic values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and
opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of
the Enlightenment. In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, "In a Franklin could be
merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without
its heat." To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age and
the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."
Franklin, always proud of his working class roots, became a successful newspaper editor
and printer in Philadelphia, the leading city in the colonies. He was also partners with William
Goddard and Joseph Galloway the three of whom published the Pennsylvania Chronicle, a
newspaper that was known for its revolutionary sentiments and criticisms of the British monarchy
in the American colonies. He became wealthy publishing
Poor Richard's Almanack
and
The
Pennsylvania Gazette
. Franklin gained international renown as a scientist for his famous
experiments in electricity and for his many inventions, especially the lightning rod. He played a
major role in establishing the University of Pennsylvania and was elected the first president of the
American Philosophical Society. Franklin became a national hero in America when he spearheaded
the effort to have Parliament repeal the unpopular Stamp Act. An accomplished diplomat, he was
widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris and was a major figure in the
development of positive Franco-American relations. For many years he was the British postmaster
for the colonies, which enabled him to set up the first national communications network. He was
active in community affairs, colonial and state politics, as well as national and international affairs.
From 1785 to 1788, he served as governor of Pennsylvania. Toward the end of his life, he freed his
slaves and became one of the most prominent abolitionists.
The Whig canon and the neo-Harringtonians, John Milton, James Harrington and Sidney,
Trenchard, Gordon and Bolingbroke, together with the Greek, Roman, and Renaissance masters of
the tradition as far as Montesquieu, formed the authoritative literature of this culture; and its values
and concepts were those with which we have grown familiar: a civic and patriot ideal in which the
personality was founded in property, perfected in citizenship but perpetually threatened by
corruption; government figuring paradoxically as the principal source of corruption and operating
through such means as patronage, faction, standing armies (opposed to the ideal of the militia),
established churches (opposed to the Puritan and deist modes of American religion) and the
promotion of a monied interest — though the formulation of this last concept was somewhat
hindered by the keen desire for readily available paper credit common in colonies of settlement. A
neoclassical politics provided both the ethos of the elites and the rhetoric of the upwardly mobile,
and accounts for the singular cultural and intellectual homogeneity of the Founding Fathers and
their generation
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